There were enough reasoned things said about the engineer tweaks.
I’m not entirely happy with the vigor related changes, but the new way how modified ammunition works seems to fix that since it gives more reason for playing kit-builds.
However, there is one thing that annoys me to this day with the engineer.
No Autohit for the grenade-kit on land.
It doesn’t really matter for PvE, since the path-finding of NPC’s is kinda predictable. But when you face situations where you must be aware of the opponents active boons, dodge their attacks and manage to survive, the grenade pack complicates the whole damage-dealing process up to a point where it’s basically useless for the engineer.
Examples for such situations are zerg-fights in wvw, or encounters with multiple players in sPVP. Engineers should be able to fire-and-forget at least skill 1 of this kit so engi-players can focus on more important input, like map-awareness in PVP and the actual movement of the WvW-zerg they’re running with.
It is awesome for water-fights as it is, but the fact that you must place every single shot manually (regardless which settings you use) on land, decreases their usability down to the point of being basically worthless.
I was hoping that the latest introduction of the new aoe-targeting would introduce automatic aoe-placement under the selected targets feet, but since that never happened, and anet tries to increase the variety of engineer-builds that use kits, the introduction of an skill 1 – autohit for grenade-kits seems absolutely necessary for me.
In addition to this I have actually concerns about the tweak, regarding getting rid of perma-vigor.
Basically “Invigorating Speed” still works the same, and can get triggered every 5 seconds, while lasting for at least 5.5s (10% boon-duration increase from the Alchemy tree)
Tough you have eliminated the option to trigger this with kit-swapping permanently, it’s still possible to constantly trigger vigor with “infused precision” from the firearms tree, which has kitten cooldown as well.
I’ve seen quite a lot rifle-engineers which didn’t used a kit at all, that had this boon constantly active in sPvP, and as far as I understand the engineer class it’s meant to have superior mobility and endurance on the battlefield.
So I don’t think that this tweak actually solves the issue anet has with perma-vigor, since the core of it – “Invigorating Speed” – still works the same.
So instead of giving kit builds a hard time to recover swiftness once this boon got nulled, stolen or otherwise deactivated, you should focus on nerfing “Invigorating Speed” directly.
My suggestion would be to set the cooldown of this trait up to 10s. This solves the issue in the same intended way, but doesn’t touches the kit-using engineers’ mobility while in combat.
Engineer is love, Engineer is life.
There were enough reasoned things said about the engineer tweaks.
I’m not entirely happy with the vigor related changes, but the new way how modified ammunition works seems to fix that since it gives more reason for playing kit-builds.
However, there is one thing that annoys me to this day with the engineer.
No Autohit for the grenade-kit on land.
It doesn’t really matter for PvE, since the path-finding of NPC’s is kinda predictable. But when you face situations where you must be aware of the opponents active boons, dodge their attacks and manage to survive, the grenade pack complicates the whole damage-dealing process up to a point where it’s basically useless for the engineer.
Examples for such situations are zerg-fights in wvw, or encounters with multiple players in sPVP. Engineers should be able to fire-and-forget at least skill 1 of this kit so engi-players can focus on more important input, like map-awareness in PVP and the actual movement of the WvW-zerg they’re running with.
It is awesome for water-fights as it is, but the fact that you must place every single shot manually (regardless which settings you use) on land, decreases their usability down to the point of being basically worthless.
I was hoping that the latest introduction of the new aoe-targeting would introduce automatic aoe-placement under the selected targets feet, but since that never happened, and anet tries to increase the variety of engineer-builds that use kits, the introduction of an skill 1 – autohit for grenade-kits seems absolutely necessary for me.
Engineer is love, Engineer is life.