Guild Wars 2

thieves are still the class with most access to evades& teleports. They will be fine. When we first got analyze and sic em’, everybody was screaming doomsday in the thieves subforum. history has told us that they can adept just fine to reveal, especially if they trait for revealed training and dps the offender to death.

Pretty much everything you said is either completely false, over-exaggerated or plain QQ about your favored build being gone.

Do we care?
Nope.

But because you’ll continue ranting about people disregarding you right away without even responding, I gonna debunk / explain your points to you.

1. Speedy kits is still there, with a nerfed uptime of 50%. Is that a nerf to engineers mobility? Nope, we still have heavy armor exploit for frequent perma-swiftness & vulnerability in-combat + mecha legs as 25% movement speed / 33%reduced duration on chill/cripple/immob
Is that a nerf to our vigor uptime?
Nope. currently you just get 50% uptime anyways, and by choosing heavy armor exploit you get 100% uptime.

2. Protection Injection & invigorating speed were always in the same tier, they just compete with each other now, so are exclusive. is that a huge issue? Looking into tools, we get a automated stunbreak and over-shield in inventions (the “garbage-line” that looks better than current alchemy) will give you decent protection uptime anyways. And just in case you didn’t heard the news, elixir R has a even shorter cd now, so you may as well pick that if you need the dodges & immob clear and bring some free rezzing as well. In regards to the “garbage” grandmasters, have you even looked up what stimulant does for you? fury and condi-clear, on a 10sec cd, along with the fury on crit from firearms, also on a 10sec cd. Speak after me: P-E-R-M-A—F-U-R-Y.

3. one does not replace the other, they can be picked together, and appart from the range-nerf, nades got buffed beyond awesomeness since it now delivers its full potential without even the need to trait it anymore. and IF you trait it, you’ll land your nades so easy now that you seriously can’t have a reason to complain.
Even for WvW wall-bombing, only nades #4 was viable since it could reach every siege, regardless how far placed behind. This is now possible with orbital strike, which can hit double-times, and still can be picked on the SAME time as nades. Get your kitten together. Nades were always bad on range, and while you were throwing poison nades on nodes in PvP previously, you’ll now do that with mortar #2. No utility is lost, and both come with gread synergy, be it on condi or power-builds.

4. You live under a rock, or never have played engi if you don’t see the synergy in inventions for us. That section of your post right there is hilarious comedy-material. What the kitten is even the point? you still can pick both leg-mods and power-wrench, if you so desire

5. Because they are not core anymore. Grenadier? core-trait before, now baseline and free’d up its slot for double orbital strickes, blast-finishers on dodge or even more bleed/cripple-spam. Bunker down, far better than backpack-regenerator and elixir infused bombs together. ICP? placed neatly in our condi-line, along with traits that buff pistols, our crits, our bleeds and even give us more crits. And its former place got overtaaken by a seeker-missile, that works exactly like ICP but does power-dmg instead.

6. For months people were complaining about the map-control of thieves in WvW and PvP. At this point I’m certain you’ve lived under a rock, or try to make your points more valid by false claims. Lock on looks awesome. Do I personally have asked for it? Nope. Do I welcome the change? Hell yes.

tl;dr: I know casuals who suck meta-battles balls and can’t come up with reasonable builds themselves. That is fine. No one is expecting you to learn the class you play. I mean, that would be hilarious. I’d recommend you to sit back, shut up and wait for the next meta-battle build to pop up, so you can run around and tell people how awesome the meta is, while face-rolling over your keyboard. Your recent posts in pre-announcement threads made clear that you don’t do much else…

Who cares?
armor exploit is awesome for builds that also go into explosives & alchemy.
Mecha-legs are awesome for all builds that go into inventions, since it comes together with leg-mods.
And inventions itself brings much needed survivability for all builds, so it’s not even hurtful, but profitable to go into it.

Yes, mecha-legs competes with soothing detonation, but we still can combo our waterfields directly with all the blasts we get, and bunker-down will still provide you with all the heal you need.
And even if you look into the adept-tier traits in inventions, there is a reasonable pick for all kinds of builds.

condi p/s?
take overshield

wanna use A.E.D or healing turret?
pick automated medical response

you wanna get some crazy blind-spam and already have picked explosives?
Pick automated bomb dispenser

Mechalegs are awesome.
The new inventions-line is awesome.
A mayority of our traits now comes with great synergy and even the ones that were garbage before are either gone, made baseline, or got put together with other traits to make them useful in a bundle.

Yes, kit-refinement is a huge let-down, but nothing we couldn’t overcome easily.
All classes are changing. That means tabula rasa for the meta. enjoy that opportunity to experience a complete new play-style for your beloved classes and the ones you never gave a kitten about. Who knows, maybe you’ll be the one who makes some lucky choices and defines the new meta.

Don’t worry, they will come back as shop-skins I suppose.
Having the EG backpack together with scientific weapons and scientific outfit would definitively look awesome.^^

Finally engis can choose their backpack skins freely, and for those who really miss it, a-net would be missing a profit-chance if they don’t put them into the store, even if it’s just for nostalgia reasons.
I personally will enjoy my spinal blades backpack together with Predator for a while now^^

keep in mind that projectile-finishers + lightfield aoe-cleanse only when they connect, and only around the target.
so you need to be close to your target to profit from the cleanse (360 range if I remember correctly).

err, no.
rifled barrels was (and currently still is) the range increase to 1.2k for rifle and 1.05k for pistol
Hair-trigger was (and currently still is) the cd-reduction trait for both rifle and pistol for 20%.
and rifle mod was the plain 10% dmg increase.

to repeat myself clearly:
“skilled marksman” == “rifle mod” + “hair trigger”
but instead of flat 10% more dmg that we’re used from rifle mod, we now get a 10% faster animation for all skills, which means faster executions of all our rifle-skills and a flat 10% dmg-increase to the AA.
pistol does not profit frm this, but got coated bullets and rifled barrels as baseline. also the pistol aa is considered an explosion once the patch hits. that’s a confirmed fact.

Yea, sadly.
I guess for PvP bunker down will be the obvious pick, but luckily it’s already more powerful than the current elixir infused bombs, so in total we still get a decent heal-boost from these changes.

Rifle mod is there, but renamed into “skilled marksman”:
“You attack 10% faster with rifle or harpoon gun and those skills recharge 20% faster.”
Basically it’s hair-trigger and rifle-mod combined, but instead of a plain dmg-boost, will suffer more from retal.

Also, pistol is no longer able to profit from reduced cd’s, but its applied condis will last 50% longer. Since the AA is technically a explosion now, and pierces per default, we have to see how that turns out.

Crits are awesome now.
from picking explosives, inventions and tools crits :
- have a 33% chance to trigger a guided missile every 10sec
- drop a bomb on your location and a medkit every 2sec
- drop a bomb on the enemy every 10 sec

And since they themselves can crit again, the ride never ends…
I don’t really miss ICP in explosives

Yea, the trigger needs rework.
For other classes they already said that it’d be counter-intuitive to severely kitten yourself in order to get a artificial advantage.
From what it looked like, they are still discussing and changing things around, so nothing is final. If we’re lucky it’s already fixed before the patch goes live.

don’t forget to mention june 23rd as confirmed release-date for this patch.

Welp, they just closed the stream due to technical difficulties, and promised to upload the rest of the content asap on youtube.

Also grouch confirmed june 23rd as release-date for this patch.

Hey kenti, can’t wait to moa you.
<3

jupp, therefore we will run mecha-legs… so I guess explosions/inventions/ tools or firearms/inventions/tools will be the new meta for us… lockdown will almost always be picked for engineers.

Hey, just wanted to drop by and send greetings from my flamethrower.

I’d rather have them remove all restrictions now and see how it goes, with the option to nerf / rebalance the kit later, instead of doing it the other way around, since A-net takes ages to go back to already implemented concepts to buff them up, but will respond in reasonable time if the QQ gets loud enough.

Would people please read the full thread before commenting on old posts?

Whatever.
The video has a stop-function. Use it to see each step individually. The article also explained many combos directly. Step by step, word by word.
What do you expect from this board?

No one can make you win since no-one can know what opponents you face, so the “openings” that you request could actually bring you in trouble in certain situations since you wasted key-cd’s, that you’d not have needed elsewhere.

If you want to become better, play other classes, learn to read them so you know what’s going on on their side. Then you can lean back, understand the situation and react to it appropriately.
That’s literally how engineers works. Reading your opponents and exploiting their weaknesses, because brute-forcing your rotas and set-in-stone combos will just bring you into downstate.

If you don’t like that, you may as well re-roll now, so you don’t regret playing engineer later. If you ask me, this class is awesome, but I’m well aware that it’s not everyones taste, and the learning-curve is steep and brutal. No way around that.

Accountzeroone.7291:

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

Accountzeroone.7291:

There’s no question about whether or not the dungeon community is atrocious, it goes without saying; everyone I talked to in the game, when on the subject of dungeons, says they avoid them because of the community…

I only do dungeons. I pug 99% of the time, on an engineer. I have no problems, and people are nice. The dungeon community provides helping guilds, guides, community record keeping, other advice when needed.

Everyone I talk to in game says they love dungeons because of the community. There’s no question about whether or not the dungeon community is awesome, it goes without saying.

Begging your pardon Nevets, but your personal experience isn’t going to magically invalidate the 100 threads about how elitist and generally crappy the dungeon community is. How long has it been since you had a 0 acheivements newb in the dungeons?

0 points?
so he is lvl 2 and just done with his tutorial?

Anyways, whenever I meet people with low AP I ask them if they know whats up. If they don’t I explain stuff. I only kick if they don’t listen or come with silly builds they insist on (having bad gear is fine, since everyone has to start at some point).
And as a matter of fact, I know a metric kittenton of people who behave exactly like that as well. So unless my Server is a magical micro-cosmos, completely dispatched from the rest of the community, I can not explain how you get kicked so often IF you tell the truth.

And that’s exactly the point I doubt. You didn’t read the lfg properly, came with too low AP to a group that was searching for higher, and since you keep doing this quite regularly, you get kicked quite regularly.

The solution: only join groups that don’t have AP requirements or “exp [expirienced]” in their description. Also, join a guild. People without a guild (and therefore no expirienced players around, who could train them) and low AP is usually the best combination for impending kitten-ups and delays, hence people rather kick right away and search for a more promising member.

Sorry, but your request is not what you need.
Combos and rotations are fluid on engineer and basically we respond to the situation at hand, which means that fixed skill-combos and rotations will lead into dead ends more often than not.
The meta-battle article already shows you most of the possible combos, but when it comes to using them in the right moment, and how to combo what, the only thing that will help you is training, training and more training.
good luck.

sorrychief.2563:

Also I’ve never said an engineer could stack 25 might during a fight in any of posts. Where are you guys getting this from?

see

sorrychief.2563:

Most players don’t even know engi has higher dps than most classes besides ele in pve.

I hope people don’t believe that, “jack of all trades master of none” thing. Engi can stack 25 might, 25 vuln, cleanse condis, stealth, dps, projectile reflect/destruction, solo dungeons like arah.

Please don’t additionally start to lie.
This thread is already a mess without that happening.

Anyways, I’m out.
I can not see this going into any sort of productive outcome anymore.

sorrychief.2563:

I claim only what I write. There are just some people who can’t read. 100% uptime on reflects? I never wrote anything like that too. :P

Yea, and what you write changes from post to post, looking on the top of the thread you said engi can stack 25 might, then you get told that this is impossible for engineer during a fight. Then you show a [admittedly impressive] vid where someone prestacks 24 stacks of might with mechanics that are impossible to execute mid-combat, after which -again- people point out that this is impossible to keep up in a fight. Your final post is “we can stack might as well as any other class”, and people again tell you “yes, we can, but there are classes who do it more easily and with less sacrifices to their dps”, which you then simply ignore and keep pretending you are right, with zero proof or evidence.
This is what people perceive as trolling. This is why you receive so much resistance at most places that you go [source: your post-history]. If you have nothing to contribute but your reality-dispatched imagination, based on something you’ve seen in a showcase vid in LA, I’d kindly ask you to stop posting here, so this forum can continue to be helpful to people who are new on the class, or have specific questions to certain class-related mechanics.
Ty.

^ this
/15scharrs

Admittedly, I had never seen that before. point on you.
Anyways, he was swaping to shield&back to rifle, switched to kit-refinement and back, and aligned his inventory and trait-window perfectly to hover with his mouse close between them and his utility-bar to swap even faster…

So I guess the reason I’ve never seen that before is that I never tried this hard to pre-stack might for the next 20sec…
Yes, it’s possible, but is it viable in terms of cost/gain? oO
I guess that is a matter of personal taste.

Anyways, you can stop the baseless assumptions now. I’m very well aware of what the engineer is capable of, and my initial comment to your initial post still remains the same: Engineer is the jack of all trades and master of none, unless you show me how to keep up 25 stacks of might&vulnerability in combat on your own, while still doing the max-dps rota…

Please explain how you stack 25 might (9 blast in a row, in less then 10 seconds) with nothing but kits, toss elixir B and HT, because the throw mine and turrets in general go on cd’s when blown up so you can’t swap them before your might has run out again…

Again, you make up completely impossible claims, and we both know that engi is not capable of doing this.
Unless you post a full 9-blast combo with nothing but HT and kits in under 10sec (duration of napalm) I assume you’re just trolling at this point and therefore I’ll end the conversation here.

Keep in mind that all decent engi builds come with high APM-requirements, but nothing a gaming-wouse couldn’t fix instantly for you.

Here are a couple of niche builds (exotic) that work for various situations.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUlUUpErtdx8KseNSbBNqwA6TMi2+5CEgjC-TRSBwAFV6FRJoUlBDV/h4+Do0Bgw8HgLAQ+HAApAiYoF-e
A simple nade-spammer that keeps vuln on 25 stacks and comes with a wall of reflection. Decent compensation for a lacking guardian. If a guardian is in the group, wait until his wall of reflection has timed out before you try with toss elixir U. Keep in mind that you should keep blunderbus and jumpshot on cd as well.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUlUUpPrtdxLLseNSbBNqwA6TMiW/5FEgkC-TRSBwAFV6FRJoUlBDV/h4+Do0Bgw8HgLAQ+HAApAiYoF-e
A simple bombkit build with bunker down and automated bomb dispenser. Awesome blind uptime, defiance/boon rip and might stacking. While bunker down is useless against static (or properly stacked) bosses, subject alpha in CoE will trigger all mines quite regularly when spawning his grubs, so this build features one of the highest dps you can get against him on engi. throw mine should be used when the boss has no defiance and be thrown outside of the stack to push the boss into the wall, so you can continue using BoB without fearing of breaking the stack.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUlUUpkrtdxmKseNSeBN6kclpA6Asgq+p6B-TRSBwAFV6FRJoUlBDV/h4+Do0Bgw8HgLAQ+HAApAiYoF-e
A PvE-viable s/d variant that should solve your issue with mobile bosses. The dmg increases if there are multiple targets for s/d to bounce from, else it delivers above average, but reliable dps.

The reason of the low guard dps in the sheet is that
a) this was their dps in a 30sec time-span and their biggest bursts are on 10 seconds or more cd. if it were not for the strong sword AA to gap these long cd’s, their dps would be even lower.
b) they were tested in a vacuum / with banners / with spotter / both.
That means guards had to rely on their own might-stacking and vulnerability-stacking, both of which are poorly.
In decent groups with 25 might&vuln all their +dmg% modifiers bolster their dps dramatically, making them becoming the dps powerhouse that you observed them as.

If you look into ele, they have much higher average might-stacks, and engi comes with the biggest vuln-uptime. The reason for that is that they bring it themselves, hence their personal dps is higher.

also no, engi can’t maintain (or even burst-stack)25 stacks of might, with builds that still do decent dps. We still can blast often, so we contribute to keeping 25 stacks of might in the group, but when you look at engi on his own, he’s not able to do so.

then fun part about reflecting nades is that the reflected nades are broken in a way that they won’t
a) blow up in a aoe-explosion upon hitting you back
b) apply their effects only when hitting you directly
c) usually have a really strange firing arc that goes a good bit above your character, so miss more often than not (usually 1 of 3 nades hits you back)

unless their fix that, I won’t start to worry about walls of reflection too much. And since the new nade trait will also increase the impact-size of them, just throw them next to a dome / wall or swirling winds, and you’ll most likely still hit your target. From elevated positions you easily can throw them over walls as well.

sorrychief.2563:

Arantheal.7396:

sorrychief.2563:

Necro lowest dps? Funny wall of text.

here are the dps-tests for the classes’ respective meta-builds from last year.
note that necro has not received any mayor buffs to their dps since then.

http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/13987449-dps-estimates-for-each-professions-in-30s-battles
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bAcpwAdwB24CxK_Ziy8ygISUHCkQepLfRMh2_PtP52o/edit?pli=1#gid=1883199869
As you clearly can see in the spreadsheet, necro has the single lowest dps in a vacuum without warri or ranger in a group, and even together with them never excels past the 7th rank

Please consider to inform yourself before you disregard any arguments in the future.
And besides that, this wall of text is still waiting for a reasonable rebuttal from you or anyone else.
Have a nice day.

For someone that likes to write alot you sure can’t read.

This is not a contest, so using ad-hominem as some kind of immature come-back is entirely unnecessary.
I guess we’re done here, then.
Thx for the laugh anyways.

sorrychief.2563:

Necro lowest dps? Funny wall of text.

here are the dps-tests for the classes’ respective meta-builds from last year.
note that necro has not received any mayor buffs to their dps since then.

http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/13987449-dps-estimates-for-each-professions-in-30s-battles
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bAcpwAdwB24CxK_Ziy8ygISUHCkQepLfRMh2_PtP52o/edit?pli=1#gid=1883199869
As you clearly can see in the spreadsheet, necro has the single lowest dps in a vacuum without warri or ranger in a group, and even together with them never excels past the 7th rank

Please consider to inform yourself before you disregard any arguments in the future.
And besides that, this wall of text is still waiting for a reasonable rebuttal from you or anyone else.
Have a nice day.

rocket boots are still good to escape rings, lines of warding and rockwalls (potentially also good to escape the DH elite trap and reapers)…
but yea, the nerf hurts.

sorry chief, but don’t over-exagerate things.
keeping vuln. up on 25 stacks requires continually spamming nades, nade barrage and jumpshot. the acid bomb / napalm tick helps with vuln., but when you then start on blasting napalm all the time with HT, Acid Bomb and FT #2, you start rotating so often that you overall vuln.-output goes way below 20 stacks, while you’ll never be able to blast more than 15-18 stacks might continually, not to mention that you’ll still need to do dps with keeping nades #2 + #4 & blunderbus on cd, so while trying to do everything at once, you start lacking performance in all aspects.
DPS + vuln works.
DPS + might-stacking (and some drive-by vuln.) works.
Vuln. + might stacking (and some drive-by dps) works.
Trying to achieve all three together in a stable rotation results in being mediocre in all of them.

Yes, we are very versatile, and can combo a few roles together in a single build, but we’re not able to do everything you listed on the same time, and looking specifically into each and every single one of these jobs, other classes will excel there…

thief brings highest boss-dps, ele brings highest dps in general.
2 Phalanx warris cap might with GS easily for the group
Guardians will cleanse more condis more often
thiefs are superior when it comes to stealth-skips
projectile reflect is more welcomed than destruction, and guardian has a way shorter cd on his reflects than us, along with a 100% reliability (unless you count fortified turrets, which tends to bug out lately, especially for rifle-turret, and forces you to go 6 into inventions, therefore either giving up on grenadier or mod. ammunition)
The only thing engi is best in is vuln. stacking, and if necro wouldn’t suffer from the lowest dps, they’d excel us in the aspects windup-time and reliability in upkeep.

I don’t like it.
The reasons are distributed wildly all over this thread.
-1

deadly mixtures will most likely become baseline or become one of the TBD’s in alchemy.
Juggernaut will still stack might, but now competes with ICP & napalm specialist, Also fireforged trigger is not mentioned, but maybe the EG trait in alchemy will cover both EG & FT (basically combination of deadly mixtures + fireforged trigger)

depending on how robolegs, the grandmaster shrapnel and the EG trait turn out, FT can be made viable by going into firearms, alchemy and explosives. Also FT has a 6sec base-cd on a blast-finisher, which will make it a viable pick for supportive builds that go into inventions.

1st of, yes 2k Ap is low and people tend to not trust low AP players.
2nd, FT brings you in combat since you need 2 ticks to kill a flower, hence you move slower. Guardian staff kills them with 1 hit, therefore he doesn’t get tagged into combat and the group can run full speed instead of crawling behind you.
3rd, engi can stealth and quite for long, but has way longer cd’s than thief and is horrible when it comes to applying stealth while running full speed, hence a thief performs better.

Yes, engineer can perform all necessary tasks in a group and compensate for missing classes, but -as of now- never excels in any role. So if there is a thief, let him do the stealthing (help out with additional blasts on smoke-screen), rely on guardian staff if there is one, let the guardian drop his wall first and go for our 50% chance with elixir U once it times out, let thiefs do the solo part in CM if there are any, because they have a easier time and are faster than engis.

Our class is awesome since we are the jack of all trades, but master of none. Lean back and let others do the work they are better in and collect your gold at the end. If you let things happen in their natural flow you’ll earn way more gg’s and hero-moments than with trying to be the special snowflake of every party.
Be assured that most players with 6k AP or more are well aware of what engineers are capable of or not. You don’t need to prove anyone what you can do or not. Most people will thank you more for tagging along and allowing a quick and event-less run.

Syrpharon.7491:

Eolirin.1830:

Syrpharon.7491:

Cecilia.5179:

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Keep in mind that the meta is player-made and exists for 2 reasons:
A) Because the AI reacts as it does.
B) People will always look out for the way with the least resistance.

The zerker meta exists because no other equip-choice is viable for the 2 roles that actually exist in the meta: Pure dps & support.
- Healing skills scale horribly with healing power.
- Toughness & vitality do not protect from 1-hit kills (which high-lvl fractals and arah along with other dungeons are full of).
- boon duration can only be achieved with runes and trait-choices
Hence even support builds are shunned into choosing zerk/assassin since there is literally no gain from other stat-combos in PVE (except for world-bosses that can’t be crited, where the meta is Soldier equip)

And stacking is the most viable way since it ensures that every aoe hits the target for its full dmg, defensive aoe-skills reach all party-members and dmg from many bosses can be distributed more easily since many of them have a 3-target cap.
This is why stacking is the most effective way, hence uncontrollably AI that draws aggro, and therefore breaks the stack is the worst thing possible.

Even if A-net decides to upgrade their AI so it runs away from pilled up players, this will just lead to moving stacks of players that will run after the boss, until he’s cornered and then position in a narrow half-circle to keep him in place and proceed with aoe-stacking and aoe-support.

And other games are no different.
When it comes to raid content, the most popular (and arguably best) realization is WoW, and even there players develop the optimal positioning withing weeks after content-release to find the best tanking spot, the best spot for the healer-camp and the best spot for the dps-camp. And the only times they move is if these camps are subject to heavy incoming dps or if a phase-change requires new permanent positions.
While other games will have 2, 3 or maybe even 4 camps for certain bosses, we usually just have 1, which is not better, nor worse. It’s simply the most efficient way to handle the encounters in Gw2.

AI messes with that. Just imagine what would happen in WoW if a warlock or hunter pet were able to draw aggro frequently from the tank. The responsible player would be asked to despawn / change his pet, or simply get kicked from the raid.
The exact same thing happens to players in Gw2 if they refuse to listen to the will of the majority of their fellow party-members, hence they behave egoistical and deserve the kick.
It’s no-ones fault to be new, and I always ask politely if someone needs a explanation for the dungeon when they have low AP. This noob protection is off for me personally when a guy has more than 1.5k AP, because I refuse to waste time with a special snowflake, when I could have finished the dungeon in the time it would have took to make him listening.
Hence I kick AI-builds and move on. When you’ve done dungeons for the 200th time (and more) they’ve lost all their entertaining value, and are nothing but a quick and easy gold-grind, so if I meet people who mess up intentionally by bringing stupid builds to pug-dungeons, all I can say is time is gold, and they’re wasting mine.

When it comes to equip, I really don’t care if they run zerker or not since I usually can carry any group and solo bosses if necessary, I myself f.e. run defender runes since they come with awesome synergy to all the guardians you meet, so I don’t usually run pure meta-builds.
And most groups I’ve met rarely if ever get anal if a boss is not melting within seconds, so the “meta” [In the gaming world. The meta is what is in RIGHT NOW. What are the best strategies, plays, options.. Things of that nature. Often referred to as “Meta-Game”] in Gw2 is much friendlier as in WoW and similar games, where gearchecks, dps-tests and whatnot are widely distributed things and the common standard that every player has to pass before they are allowed in organized raids.

The difference between being a bit more tanky than necessary and AI builds is the following: one slows down the group a bit, the other kittens it up.

And with the upcoming specialization we maybe get some viable frontliner and tank builds as well…
It all depends on us getting stability or not (finger crossed for a defiance bar^^).

Our melee/midrange dps is fine where it is (bombs, nades, rifle), but we lack the sustain.
All we can do currently is run in, burst & jump out again.
Rezzing/stomping people under fire (while still having decent condi/power dps) is almost impossible without Elixir S or R, and both suffer from high cd’s.

If you enjoy hit’n’run gameplay in wvw and PvP, engi will greatly reward you, and when it comes to PvE we have both the most-chilled farming builds & most supportive dungeon builds. Our PvE dps is only slightly behind ele on the 3rd place, and we have a plethora of viable setups, so you can choose between having a average setup that works everywhere, APM-heavy meta-builds for max dps, or niche-builds that are specialized individually for each dungeon.

SE f.e. always rewards you when running elixir U, and certain bosses become braindead dps-spam when you switch to elixir C. For CoE on the other hand, Bombs with bunker down & throw mine brings you max dps & utility, since Subject alpha triggers all your mines quite frequently. In Arah Elixir C is too good to be passed on against the avatar of lyssa, and elixir U will allow you to burst lupi just like a guardian would do (with a 50% wipe chance^^). in cof mobility and stealth are key for the lava field, so rocketboots and elixir S will allow you to solo it easily. In TA gearshield allows you to block all the flowers on the way and go into the insta-kill bubbles in fwd, while the FT allows you to clear flowers just like a guardian would do.

Generally spoken, once you master the class, there is no real need to play any other anymore, since you’re able to fulfill every role there is to a satisfying or even outstanding extend, even frontlining and bunkering in PvP, if you have the reflexes to predict & avoid stunlocks along with the biggest bursts…

Enjoy your Engi.
I certainly do.^^

The issues with underwater combat are the following:

- no exotic headpiece for underwater combat.
- a vast amount of skills behaves different underwater, has different cast-times and animations (how they look is unimportant, but they have altered after-casts, which makes using them iffy and usually destroys any combos you may have in your muscle-memory)
- skills tend to have different effects underwater
- a good load of skills is not even possible to be slotted for underwater combat, messing with a mayor load of builds, which brings us to the last, and most important point:
- due to skills not behaving exactly as their land version and the requirement to wield other weapons, most of your traits will be sub-par, badly-optimized or simply ineffective when jumping into underwater combat, therefore you will always end up in situations where your build suddenly is not behaving as intended anymore.

However, one of the 6 dragons is the deep sea dragon, so once his expansion hits you can be sure that we get many underwater biomes and maybe even underwater WvW borders…

I hate it already.

There are no pros or cons, since they don’t compete with each other…

Depending on your chosen traits/gear/utilities, you pick rifle for power/hybrid builds, P/P for offensive condi-builds and p/s for defensive condi/hybrid builds.

F.e. if you have toolkit in your bar, you have less reasons to run p/s since you already have a block, and therefore are not forced into shield anymore. Ofc it would still be a defensive advantage to still run p/s but as long as you have Toolkit, p/p will work fine as well.

Rifle is there to bring cc and dps for power-oriented builds, along with the option to effectively harass beyond 600~900 range (where nades and bombs are effectively useless)

So yea, there is no pros or cons to run any of them, unless your original question was how effective various build-types towards each other are…

Answer: They are all effectively useless for you, unless you find a (couple of) spec(s) that are really fun for you to play, so you have the motivation to master them.

So the counter-question is: what builds have you tried so far, and what was the most fun for you?

Zenith.7301:

Arantheal.7396:

Zenith.7301:

Arantheal.7396:

Zenith.7301:

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One baseless assumption after another.
1st: I play all game modes, WvW, Pve and sPvP. When you want to quote me, do it correctly. I wrote "Who cares about PvE anyways when it comes to discussing AI?
2nd: I don’t particularly care about warrior, nor guardian, nor ele. My main is engineer, and seeing turreteers in dungeons lets me cringe as hard as meeting spirit rangers there.
3rd: It doesn’t matter how good or bad spirits/turrets/minions/spirit-weapons are, they are targetable AI, hence mobs will eventually go after them, therefore they are terribad when you want to stack
4th: Rangers can set their pet on passive while stacking (and should do so) / Mesmers can spawn their clones inside the stack, therefore it’s not necessary to shun them out of Dungeons. Now if clones would run all over the place and pets would always be aggressive, that would be exactly the moment when I’d insta-kick both classes right away.

Banners don’t draw aggro.
Spirits do.
Hence spirits will always be useless in PvE, regardless how over-buffed they get.
Period.

To change that, a-net would need to completely redesign spirits, to become intargetable, unable to do direct dmg (which also includes applying condis, debuffing, interfering with foes in any manner), OR update their NPC-AI to not attack player-spawned AI per default, which would also open gates for AI builds in dungeons (even tho they’d perform horrible and then get hated for that when que’ing up, but w/e)

Why has this thread 2 pages?
You know that taste, intentions and accomplishments are subjective, right?

Why is everybody arguing about OP’s preferences so hard?
I hope you are aware that you’ll never reach a universal satisfying conclusion about these topics.

Or poison gets nerfed and only blocks 1% or 2% of incoming heals per stack, now THAT would make me lol.

repost from another thread:

Have you looked into the canges to engineers inventions and explosives line?
Our bomb-on-dodge will get a trait to become a blast-finisher.
Our elite kit (mortar) potentially has blast-finisher as auto-attacks. (and the mortar itself already comes with a healing field)
In inventions we get a trait that allows ALL our blast-finishers to heal allies. (master in inventions)
We will clear 1 condi by default when using a healing skill (+the 2 from healing turret itself). (minor in inventions)
We will stack regen (not that we didn’t already had perma-regen) for each cleared condi on us and allies, (minor in inventions)
and here comes the overkill:
We get a trait that heals allies for a fixed percentage of ALL heals we receive. (grandmaster in inventions)
Run this with sigils of water & benevolence + monk runes in cleric or settlers gear and you have one hell of of a healing powerhouse…
Wouldn’t surprise me if they tweak the numbers to make bloodmagic necros a thing as well, since they already announced the implementation of vampiric aura anyways.

@Belenwyn:
Have you looked into the canges to engineers inventions and explosives line?

Our bomb-on-dodge will get a trait to become a blast-finisher.
Our elite kit (mortar) potentially has blast-finisher as auto-attacks. (and the mortar itself already comes with a healing field)
In inventions we get a trait that allows ALL our blast-finishers to heal allies. (master in inventions)
We will clear 1 condi by default when using a healing skill (+the 2 from healing turret itself). (minor in inventions)
We will stack regen (not that we didn’t already had perma-regen) for each cleared condi on us and allies, (minor in inventions)
and here comes the overkill:
We get a trait that heals allies for a fixed percentage of ALL heals we receive. (grandmaster in inventions)

Run this with sigils of water & benevolence + monk runes in cleric or settlers gear and you have one hell of of a healing powerhouse…

Wouldn’t surprise me if they tweak the numbers to make bloodmagic necros a thing as well, since they already announced the implementation of vampiric aura anyways.

And then there is taunt, the ultimate tank-tool…
And the new break-bars, making cc-spammers viable options in boss-fights…

Smells like raids.
C’mon a-net, it this point we all know that we’re getting instanced content for 10 players or more. Just announce it already.

Zenith.7301:

Arantheal.7396:

Zenith.7301:

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Who cares about PvE anyways when it comes to discussing AI?
PvE is solely dominated by the zerker meta, and no AI has a spot there since it potentially breaks the stack. This is why people in general rahter not have rangers in their group, since you always have the chance to meet a dumb one that can’t set his pet on passive and therefore kittens up the whole run constantly.
Banners are not AI, as in they don’t decide what to target / where to move to. They don’t break a stack, they don’t pull unintended, they are entirely passive. If banners would do this, they would be gone from the warri PvE meta in no time, but not replaced by spirits or other AI, since AI in general is the last thing you want to have in dungeons.

- So, buff spirits equally to or beyond banners?
Wouldn’t change the fact that no one will like them in PvE, and just make them OP in PvP – again.

- Make them invulnerable?
Since when are permanently invulnerable, player-created objects allowed to damage players? Also Banners have better buffs.

- Do both?
Why? we already have banners. Why not give banners to all classes then?

It doesn’t matter how you twist and turn, you compare apples with bananas.
Spirits are AI – therefore a PvP only thing – and in a reasonable spot as such.
Banners are not AI, but AoE buffs, and in a quite powerful (since monopole) position as such. Btw, have you ever seen any warri that was running any banner beyond war-banner in PvP? or in WvW? There banners are as non-viable as AI in general is in PvE.
And spirits were in the meta not long ago, and still are a resonable, but weak, option to take, despite their passive nature and falsely perceived parallels to the seemingly far more powerful banners.

Again, banners and spirits have nothing in comparison, not even the game-modes they are viable or welcome in.

Zenith.7301:

Meanwhile, ranger spirits are still the only supportive totem skill with ample vulnerability to all kinds of attacks and zergs.

I hope that and the pet policy gets revised…..real soon. It’d be nice for them to not be totally kitten in any serious content.

you compare apples with bananas.
The only invulnerable “totems” in this game are banners, and they grant nothing but stat-boosts or dmg (90 sec cd) / rezz (240sec cd) on impact

turrets buff players as well, but attack on the same time – damageable.
minions don’t buff players, but can heal their owner and attack on the same time – damageable.
spirit-weapons can either attack or cc and heal allies on the same time -damageable.
clones and phantasms can attack players, and be shattered to trigger other offensive effects – damageable.
thiefs guild – damageable.
elementals – damagable

and now spirits: grant offensive or defensive, unique boons and can attack players directly via command abilitys – damagable. After the patch they will not be able to move anymore, still they have direct offensive capabilities.
banners do not. They can’t move on their own, they must be picked up.
ventaries tablet also does not. It also can’t move on its own, but must be commanded to follow the player, and will even despawn if people run off.

Spirits do work as intended. Deal with it.

- Implementing ingame-voicechat that you can activate and deactivate on will, so pug commanders at least have a chance to commune with their pugs (who decided to activate it), especially the casual ones who don’t join the Server community’s TS. Also it would help pug-groups in PvP.

- Higher / more interesting / unique rewards for playing WvW, because nothing else will make Pugs stick to it. Also, Veteran players are being drained from their gold anyways, since siege is expensive, and the rewards for WvW are minuscule. The removal of the upgrade-costs is a step in the right direction, but definitively not enough. Give us reward tracks and access to some shine WvW skins that we can unlock, beyond the mistforged weapons (which are inaccessible atm, since A-net apparently decided to not hold WvW tournamnets anymore, hence tickets are not available anymore).

- Make scouting easier. Pugs have a tendency to run around like headless chicken, without any idea what to do. And if they – by accident – stumble over a zerg they usually don’t even report it and let it take objectives close to a teams spawn or other WP’s. To take away their responsibility to press enter and type “zerg at []”, enemy players should be visible for all players on the map if they run into a 1.2k range threshold of team-members and don’t have stealth.
You know the little green dots that indicate team-members nearby? Give us little red ones that show up if enemies are really close, and make them visible to the whole team. A player who has joined the map then can press m, look out for red dots and run to help those who are currently besieged or engaged in combat.
Ofc someone should tell them that places like south of sm, the swamp next to golanta and the windmill in homeborder most likely will be friendly duels, but beyond that, this would improve the life of all players by a great margin and turn pugs automatically into useful scouts, if they decide to not follow the bagel.

One option would be to alter all TB skills to have drastically reduced cd’s, but need energy in turn, if we take this elite spec. Maybe the same could be done for our weapon-skills.

And if our skills are activated while the energy threshold was too low, they go on a regular cd. The balance will be that we can’t maintain our upkeep skills if we spam other skills, so smart energy-management is required if we don’t want to loose our advantage.

+1
/ +15 charrs as well…