Guild Wars 2

They could make Toss Elixir B less clunky for some reliable stability. The new Engie changes may help as well.

Well, I fundamentally disagree with real life problems not having to do with fantasy. Obviously fantasy is an escape but it’s hard to create situations and characters that are meaningful to a human audience. That’s why I thought a lot of the personal story aside from those few good parts lacked a reason on why I should care. Everything feels so tidy and without consequence. The destruction of Lion’s Arch held meaning because sometimes disaster can strike places where we’ve had so many experiences with each other. On the other hand the Belinda situation feels contrived because she feels like a throwaway character and there just is no connect.

On the other hand I don’t find Taimi’s character forced at all. She is a character of her own will that isn’t defined by any particular stereotype. Why can’t she have a disability anyways?

A fantasy includes dreams and hopes. Even idealized characters in fiction have their own struggles to fight that may coincide with the real world. There is no such thing is false hope.

If nobody dared to dream and hope for more in their own mind just because their goal doesn’t exist right now, then humanity wouldn’t have gotten too far. To me, idealizations exist in fiction so we may hope for more in reality. We talk about great heroes with immense displays of bravery, strength, kindness and cunning so we can encourage ourselves to try and chase these ideals and ultimately better ourselves by moving a step closer to these virtues even if reality isn’t so clean cut. And likewise, why not support a fantasy world that is more tolerant as something to work for?

So it’s fine to not allow a world of intolerance into fantasy. In the end fantasy can be more than just an escape from reality, it can be a place where the ideals of reality can be challenged far more than it typically is.

Second, the random instances, short matchups, and no long-term colour affiliation mean there is no “community spirit”. Nobody cares if you win or lose. You don’t feel a responsibility to do the best for your team and help each other out, because your team will very soon be gone, maybe never seen again.
However, is this not the same in sPvP? In soloQ and tPvP you are randomly matched up with people who you might never see again, and you are only allied with them for a few short minutes. Yet, in tPvP people feel an obligation to try and win the match and help their team.
So why does it work in PvP and not EoTM? Is it because there is no reward for winning an EoTM matchup, whereas winning in PvP awards rank points, leaderboard positions, and other rewards? But how could that be applied to EoTM without bringing back the original problem of population-imbalance meaning rewards are more about transferring to the right team, rather than actual skill and effort?

Well, pvp is designed to be more competitive. At least when I play it, I seek to defeat the other team and/or improve my skill. Chances are you are more likely to encounter someone in it that also shares such an attitude and perhaps you could friend them and work on getting better. Rarely are you going to find a friend that wants to work on karma training harder. So it gets taken a bit more seriously than wvw. The nature of wvw is more uneven, and I view it as a more casual activity where you hang out with your server mates and work together to get stuff done.

So when it comes to EOTM, winning or losing has no real value to me. We’re just here to train. In fact, it’s more efficient for everyone to avoid each other and maybe blob into each other at the very end just for kicks. Victory is often decided by who has the larger train, and I guess one could improve by doing it faster, but it’s not particularly engaging. So yes, while karma training occurs in wvw, at least there are familiar faces where you can have better conversations with while you continue to press 1.

The terrain to EOTM doesn’t help either. It’s too large, filled with narrow passageways.

In the end, it carries no long lasting effects. At least in wvw you can have rivalries between servers. But nobody cares about the rivalry between frostreach and overgrowth because it keeps changing. In PvP you can brag about skill. And so no amount of rewards will change this. In fact, the better rewards of EOTM compared to wvw make it even less likely to be taken seriously— it’s more of a glorified pve than anything else now. This is just your stop to level uplevels and collect funds to do something else. I don’t think it’s really a bad thing since the ex-queensdale folks need a place to congregate casually, but it certainly feels lacking.

Also, it really sucks to zone into an empty map. That seems to happen a lot as blue. Or maybe red. I can’t be bothered to care.

Do not bother with clerics with AH. It scales extremely badly with it unless you’re playing wvw and you want to use sigil of water/renewal.

As for the rest it really depends on what you do. If it’s not wvw, zerker is the best bet.

Zeal— Better to list the traits I actually use: Fiery Wraith, rarely shattered aegis, zealous blade, and scepter power.

Radiance— Healer’s Retribution, Shimmering Defense, Perfect Inscriptions, A Fire Inside, Radiant Retaliation

Valor— Defender’s Flame, Strength of the Fallen, Glacial Heart,
Honor— Wrathful Spirit, Protective Reviver, Resolute Healer, Battle Presence
Virtues— Everything except Master of Consecrations, Unscathed Contender, Indomitable Courage, Absolute Resolution, Vengeance.

One is NOT entitled to everything in the game just by owning it. I haven’t completed more than a single dungeon in this game (lol cof) and thus will never see any dungeon skins besides that. There are certain runes I’ll never have.

It’s just another skin to me which provides very little if any concrete benefit. This isn’t about elitism. Elitism would be like true gear gates where entire swaths of content is only accessible to the top level of players and non-l33t people aren’t allowed; kinda like elitist speedruns but actively enforced by the game itself. Vertical progression and the endless gear treadmill, for example, is something that materially affects gameplay, and thus worthy of discussion and concern.

Hell, and I’m the type that would rather be no levels at all, yet I sort of have to deal with the fact that most endgame content requires level 80 and thus locks you out effectively if not. I would consider myself not liking elitism or exclusion very much. So deal with it.

You want it, you go for it. If you don’t go for it, then you don’t want it.

Take your time and kill the scouts because their blinds will ruin you, then if you’re in trouble, run off and grab a breather. The scouts will chase you far; the others won’t. As long as you take out the scouts, nothing else is a problem.

If you still have trouble, just use a range weapon to take out the scouts.

As a side note, you may want to go for more dps, since this is basically pve and you are alone. If you’re going in a really tanky spec, it’s possible that you’re just taking too long to take the guards out so they either respawn too fast or other players can come and stop you. That’s not fun or efficient by any means.

Well, the melandru vendor sells magi which makes them effectively worthless; I mean originally you could assemble half a decent wvw armor set but nope.

I suppose you could find the gates of arah guy for ptv gear and put some crap runes in it though; remember you can’t salvage them!

On the good side Grenth is now berserker, balthazar is rampager and dwayna is clerics. I guess it could be worse. The melandru thing makes me sad though.

I don’t mind the idea of skill-based exclusive items.

However, don’t hold the 1st decent medium skirts hostage like that! =p

It’s mostly just to proc nature’s voice though it’s annoyingly hampered by that cast time.

Err… they’re already improving the base utility of the longbow itself. So I think these traits are less mandatory because longbow isn’t garbage by default, not to mention Signet of the Beastmaster is no longer needed which resulted in the Marksmanship conundrum that always kittened me off. This is no longer true.

I think Eagle Eye and Piercing Arrows need to be merged personally as I find spotter too valuable to ever ditch, but I don’t see that as critical anymore given the improvements.

The rangers and engineer changes are great for once and addressed many complaints and concerns from the community, so I think they’re on the ball this time at least. Not to mention either class most likely considers guardians complaining about first world problems.

They should make the first 3 trait lines offer more utility, particularly group utility, as these lines tend to be pretty selfish. Well, radiance not as much.

Med kit removes immobilize… and that toolkit buff.

Guess I’m happy.

Wow, I never expected that. The signet change is great. Now rangers can have emergency buttons without having to waste 6 pts and longbow is actually not too bad— you might even rapid fire instead of just autoattacking. And those beastmaster traits may be worth using.

In b4 people cry over mass cripple/immobo, lol.

I spent 10 gold once and decided this is a horrific way to spend my time; even if I were to get the precursor like this eventually; I could be doing more than staring at a toilet for so long. The thing is that there’s no in between. You just get screwed or occasionally end up with an okay exotic that doesn’t sell enough to make up for the waste of time.

Those rare weapons are worth a bit because people like to gamble with em. I think it would be more efficient to sell these to the gambling addicts and I’ll probably simply have enough gold just to outright buy one. >.>

The sword autoattack I do find annoying but that could just use minor tweaks, the other 2 skills are nice. I’ve had minimal issues with the pet as of late but it could be better.

I do find all the rooting to be needlessly frustrating though. LB2 and 5 could use some real help since often you’re better off just autoattacking. Right now I mostly use 2 if they get up close but then channeling when they’re close to you might not be a good idea.

Prysin.8542:

Actually, for warrior to make shouts worthwhile you need 6 points. They are quite lackluster, and even if you invest 8 points to get adren on shout, you still do not measure up to ranger shouts.

Its sad but look at it this way;
Max warrior shout heal (AOE) is ~9400 ish. To accomplish this the warrior needs to have AT LEAST 1200 healing power, and it needs the Lung Capacity Trait, Shake it Off trait and Invigorating Shouts trait. Thats 6 trait points. Now you are speccin into a fairly “passive” line, so you want to regain some DPS. Easiest way to do that is use Inspiring Shouts to allow rapid buildup of adrenaline for near instant bursts. While not a requirement, i will list “Inspiring shouts” as a “Very Valuable Trait” in relations to shouts.

The shouts themselves produce a very long lasting 3 stacks of might, which can reach 6 stacks cuz of duration vs skill CD. It also cleanses 1 (2 if trait trigger) AOE condition cleanses removing 1 condi pr shout activation and 10 stacks of vulnerability on the enemy.
The cost of this “utility/support” is 3x utility slots and 8 trait points.

Compare this with rangers that only need 6 points to gain a AOE regen of 310 hp/s @ ~1400 healing power. Stats that are easily avaliable to the ranger even with a clerics build.
Now, at the same time, the ranger can take Vigorous Spirits and Spirits Unbound. Allowing the ranger to also bring AOE Protection and AOE 10% damage.
This sounds all well, but we know that clerics is the “downfall of DPS”. Fear not. If the ranger bothers to, it can go 6 into beastmastery to get lower cooldowns on shouts (technically 4 points needed, but the shout heal is a GM so 8 points investment needed to unlock it), it can also get AOE vigor and AOE healing. The GM minor in BM line return 10% of healing power as raw power. Meaning 140 to the power stat.
In addition to this, a massive increase in pet DPS will further balance out the loss of DPS from using a supportive gear. Pulling the rangers DPS far beyond that of the warrior.

So in all regards, warrior shouts are underpowered… they require massive investments and even then, comparing them to rangers, they gain ~190 hp/s more healing (over a 20 second timeframe) But at the cost of 2 utility slots and a huge amount of damage.

In addition to this, nobody with their sanity intact will say ranger shouts are actually in a good spot. They got 2.5 decent shouts that has ZERO group value when not traited (sic’em is the 0.5 only cuz of revealed and DPS increase, but its a pain to use and CD is too long. Search and Rescue is a wasted utility slot after the overzealous nerf).

And yes, i do happen to run a shoutheal built warrior. It’s just sad to see the stark contrast between the two professions (ranger hitting for 6-800 + 1.3-2.6k pet AA vs warrior doing max 4k evis and 1200-1900 axe aa)

That’s some valuable insight there. Ranger shouts benefit from being in a decent tree with various ways to make up for lack of dps and it’s not necessary to clog up your utility slots since “guard” by itself is almost enough to ensure perma regen and swiftness for the group while maintaining good damage and it can still be useful without investing that much into healing power (though they could still go all out healing for obnoxiously high group regen.) and this doesn’t exclude apoth builds.

But yea, ranger shouts could be better as they have the same issue as some other ranger things— they’re awesome when traited but then untraited they’re really bad and selfish. Still, I suppose with those things at least you at least get your trait points worth, as opposed to warrior shoutheals as you described.

Guardian shouts for example such as hold the line or stand your ground are still very useful by themselves though they can be traited to provide additional utility so that avoids this unpleasant kind of pigeonholing.

Guardians are not the beloved ones; in fact, we’re one of the stagnant ones that get the occasional nerf because “we’re in a good place” and Anet thinks that condition guardians/boonbots are the way to go. The only reason why this class receives favor is because it wasn’t terribly designed to begin with.

Necros are sorta like what was described. And rangers are usually told they’re adopted.

That I can definitely see. For example, on my engineer facing warriors, it’s often up to the warrior to successfully land his bursts and use this momentum to finish me off. If he blows his stances or doesn’t land enough damage on me, I often will just recover to full and he’s pretty much a sitting duck and will never clean all my conditions off. Warriors do seem to have to take advantage their window very well and if anything they seem to be the one that has to take initiative.

Perhaps it’s because there’s more warriors wandering around so there’s a lot more poor ones that I end up fighting, but I wouldn’t be worried about them as a thief that can just troll you forever or a mesmer than seems to be able to absorb a crap ton of damage. Sure, I’ve been destroyed by warriors, but every well played class has proven capable of that so…

Lots and lots of stability, and cleanses.

The key here is opportunity cost. People feel that warriors don’t need to sacrifice as much to gain something. I can’t talk about warriors or confirm this due to lack of experience, but I’ll just take your engineer example. Engineers CAN indeed clear conditions very well and certainly they can beat necros with a 409 build, but Guild Wars 2 is almost never about just 1v1 situations and I would think a hgh/409 build is significantly weaker in other matchups because you lose out on so much kit utility that is one of the strength of the engineer— some would argue you could just play another class at that point. You’re at the very least putting 4-6 in alchemy and sacrificing traits like backpack regen, invigorating speed, or protection injection. I doubt the expert engineers have simply ignored this choice.

If we compare to other classes that are worse off, we can see rangers that need to spend about 6 points just to have longbow not be useless, 6 to have signets actually work, and about 8 to have shouts be usable. Well, that’s not completely accurate at times, but if we look at what doesn’t work, such as rangers, you can see classes give up a lot to accomplish anything. A DPS guardian is made of glass and a bunker guardian pretty much has to invest almost everything in the lower 3 trees.

So I think that’s what people are complaining about that certain other classes have to pigeonhole themselves into something or more like many of the other classes are just badly designed.

Then again, I sometimes wonder in general if people have even played the class they complain about that much.

Spectral Wall also grants people protection. I’d trade line of warding for Spec Wall easy.

Mace/shield is not a good frontliner; hammer is indeed a superior choice. A lot of people will tell you mace/shield isn’t good for anything in wvw , but I think it has its place as a mid-line healing build where your symbol of faith won’t screw with people’s water fields and you can heal the true frontliners with your autos.

Mace/shield cannot compare with the hammer’s easy blast finisher, or the immobolize or the ring of warding. All you have going for you is the shield knockback which is better than banish but that’s going to be nulled by stability too often and turns you into a sitting duck. It is inferior for AH to hammer. It lacks the mobility of greatsword. It just doesn’t have what it takes. to pin people down and absorb damage. It’s nice in more static fights, but in mobile zerg fights, it just loses out.

Anyhow, with that out of the way, I am on SBI, so I guess I have a vested interest. :p

Regardless, I do think that healing power is not that good on an AH build. Your AH healing is at 77 with 844 healing power, and the base is 69! You do have very high dodge heals. (they heal already for 973 heal a piece), so how about a sigil of energy? I don’t know if the heal sigils benefit from that much healing power though.

I do think this sort of condition removal is better than trooper/POV. Your argument against it is becoming true and more true every day I play— and why I ditched my trooper runes long ago. When you blow multiple cooldowns just to remove conditions, you’re not exactly using the shouts to their full potential at all not to mention futile in this day and age of conditions flying everywhere. I’m not just talking about enemy condition builds, necros and engineers regardless of builds could easily overwhelm you with tons of junk conditions that would waste your shouts.

Not to mention SY! isn’t particularly good with it due to it drawing conditions, and taking retreat is just silly. Popping stand your ground to remove a condition is just… not smart. The only complaint about purging flames is the cast time which aren’t instant like shouts are, but if you can manage it it should be fine.

I do see Signet of Judgement over SY! to be another good idea due to it being the lowest stunbreak cooldown not called SYG, but yea, using SY! to provide oomph as well as pushing conditions onto your large health pool is pretty sound.

Andddd this is why you can’t take most balance threads around here seriously.

— Assumes people only play one game mode
— Info is outdated meta
— Implicit confusion between meta and viable, assuming people want to even speedrun content. To what end is speedrunning? It means the faster acquiral of gold and other materials, which is a valid goal if you’re trying to get something, but not necessarily a goal for all players. It is not like the vertical progression in this game is particularly steep and doing it faster doesn’t really open up any new content excluding fractals. Heck, some would argue for this, the “tp meta” is better, and why bother rolling any class then? Or maybe even the “credit card” meta.

Basically “attempted” elitism passing off as fact.

It’s not a bug. It’s intended— a badly designed and neglected feature, not unlike a lot of ranger things.

Well, I’m afraid this intention isn’t satisfactory enough.

So, that was the point of Scarlet’s shennigans.

She awakened the Super SaiyaCharrs.

Hmm, 2012 called. They want their thread back.

I think OPs ideas are sound.

As for Anet’s concept, well I don’t think it meshes well with reality at all, because of how combat resets and as long as they cling to it, the game will just be as it is. The necromancer is built around “attrition” and also not allowed to escape and while it’s great in a 1v1 situation it proves to be trouble when one gets focused. I think they’ll have to move away from such hardline concepts because the game doesn’t always play out the way as it is intended; we already see extreme examples in pve.

But in a good spot….

Yea, I think this will become accepted over time out of necessity, and I may one day get more characters but considering I have to get gems for a new slot at this point, it’s just discouraging though I will finish my thief (5th slot).

It could definitely be worse but I just feel the changes did make the game first, and the silence on the issue along with other things may not cause the game to collapse and we’ll live with it, but it does cause the game to sink lower, and enough of this will cause the game to sink into mediocrity, it’s just that it’s been accepted and a lot of people in this thread wouldn’t accept what they perceive as mediocre.

The game is still fine though, but I do feel it’s squandered so much potential by aggressively imposing their own ideas with disregard to what their player base thinks. Sure, if one doesn’t like it, leave, right? Sure, but I find the situation shouldn’t have been reached in the first place.

Personally, I’m at a crossroads here. The April patch has overall dealt a huge blow to my confidence in the game. Before that, I was pretty optimistic and always encouraged people to play the game while overlooking its flaws, but honestly, it’s getting harder and harder to encourage people . I talk about the cool stuff like wvw special events, and world bosses and skins but people just get bored because they have to get to 80 via content that can be seen as patronizing to people who’ve played a lot.

The one question was “well, why do I have to put all this effort into all this busy work when they could fire up another game that doesn’t gate them like that?” And this is with the previous system which I thought was dull but a necessary evil, though when I look at the new system and its costs that are unreasonable for new players, I can no longer recommend the game to people as much.

Honestly, if it weren’t for community and guild interaction, I would have quit the game a while back. Of course, Anet doesn’t care about that, as proven by their megaservers, so it is distressing that they’re willing to casually toss one of the few reasons for me to play the game in trash. That’s left me retreated to wvw and the occasional guild/server boss raid. And wvw itself is in a terrible shape, stupid, and stagnant as all crap but it still remains the only content that I can still enjoy. Which doesn’t really speak well of what I think elsewhere right?

Anyhow, i’d love to support the game and spend a few bucks in gems if they make a deserving game. Our money is for the taking for years to come. Just be careful and less stubborn it’ll happen.

Lheimroo.2947:

It is incomprehensible how Anet has said nothing – flat out zilch, nothing, about this yet. The dev post tracker is full of tech tickets resolutions, but .. lack of commentary on a seriously pressing issue, for literal months, over and above and past the time they once kidded to us that they were listening?

I am tired of this. Seriously freaking tired.

Agreed. How can you make such a big change with so little care?

Anyhow, the system fails because it does nothing but slow down progression, and that naturally is bad for people who’ve already done it a few times. It makes it more clear that your character is nothing until they hate 80.

If they really wanted to make leveling more engaging, they should have increased the difficulty of mid-level zones and drastically increased the difficulty of higher level zones, as well as boosting the rewards accordingly. This way, people that don’t want to care about leveling can just sandbag away in the faceroll easy low zones, when people that actually want a little challenge, can, you know, be actually forced to understand the character’s mechanics. I don’t really get how adding more restrictions and having less freedom to “play the way you want” makes content more meaningful. It just stratifies the game too much to what the creators want.

Right now it does nothing but make people do more easy content and actually pve in a lot of places is easier, making the gap between the open world and instanced content even bigger and thus becomes even more worthless as a learning tool, unless you want to learn to zerg I guess. Others just buy the way their past through it, rendering the system moot.

As played IMO they should auto unlock all current adept and master traits, possibly refund people that wasted if possible, and introduce more unlockable traits in those tiers. This allows the presence of unlockable content that becomes an option, but does not cripple the player should they choose to not partake in it or at most just suffer a mild inconvenience in buying it. Such a endeavor actually requires effort, of course so if they fear balance issues to not allow them in pvp possibly.

I roam, I zerg, I havoc, and I once in a while even tower siegemonkey and all that gross PPT stuff. I just do it because it’s what wvw is atm, like it or not. When in Rome…

To a lesser degree, I would say all things listed in the OP apply when I zerg, except the last because wvw and rewards don’t really mix as it seems like in these game modes the more you contribute the less you get unless you want to EOTM, when I play there, all of these apply. It is correct that I don’t care to always make decision making and just tag along to help others accomplish something. On the other hand, it’s also clear smaller zergs can wipe larger zergs, so clearly there could be improvements as individuals even in zergs.

When I want to relax with the community and/or help them out, I zerg or when I feel that things simply can’t be accomplished alone. You can capture a keep with a few people but that takes so long and time is limited.

If I want to put more effort into my gameplay, I may go off on my own, but that really depends on mood. I assume pvp would be better for that kind of thing.

1978 hours over 683 days so about an average of 2 hours 53 minutes per day.

The thing about Shattered Aegis is that it’s a pretty small radius so if you really want to knock people out you’re going to have to stack tightly onto yourselves to get overlap and the enemy to really hurt them. I don’t think it’s worth it in small scale; though you may have one or two guys getting those aegis out for more blocks and Pure of Heart heals; don’t bother with shattered aegis. It’s just too easy to get hit and it comes out prematurely. That brings out the other problem with the build— the 20 second cooldown and difficulty of control over when you block.

In bigger fights though, with large clusters of players; shattered+ communal can cause a lot of damage if you do it together. If the 5 of you were to join up on a zerg and burst people down with it, it’s actually quite spectacular and you can blow up small crowds. (I’ve only done it on my own and the damage is nifty).

Be careful of retaliation though. Don’t do it when the enemy is stacking together, or you might just explode yourselves.

Edit: Oh you’re talking about pvp; this post was in a wvw context.

That build seems fine, although you definitely want Stand Your Ground and its cooldown trait. I’d ditch hallowed ground personally.

I’d go with energy sigils in both weapons to get more dodges (and thus more healing and damage mitigation), and put bloodlust in the staff, instead of gs, but that doesn’t matter.

Anyhow it’s a pretty good stat spread though I am worried about your ability to sustain the health pool. I also recommend poultry soup for the -condition duration but you may find conditions not mattering to you.

Heh, I couldn’t but notice in the most recent Living Story

The aspects weren’t that bad except the fact they expire so fast. Usually you can take your time in most jumping in this game, but here you have to do swaths in one fell swoop.

How effective is defender’s flame anyways? I can see it has no cooldown so it’d burn everyone that hits you when you block though the burn is kinda short and it’s a very common condition that flies around.

What are the armor skins anyways?

How can a class without water fields be a “healing” class?

What do guardians even have for group heals? Battle Presence is the big one I can think of, and the occasional regen, dodge heal, and mace heal, but it’s pretty niche if you ask me.

Tome of courage just comes across as the main one, but that’s a long cooldown elite.

They should remove the limit, or up it to 3 a day or something. I was going to craft celestial exotic on my engineer a while back but seeing how much of a waste of time that would be, I just didn’t bother and would wait until ascended gear… in the far, far future.

Just nerf the + condition duration food, as well as the – condition duration to compensate.

Currently the food is so overpowered that it outpaces other food for condi users, and if they don’t take it, they’ll get overrun by people with – condi food who have to take it because they’ll get overrun by people with + condi food. A vicious circle.

Hey pokemon’s pretty awesome yo.

I don’t really get it myself. Grenade tossing engineers are almost as devastating to my pushing in as necro wells/marks are.

Rangers, I can at least see, have many derailing flaws that make them weak large scale because most of their power comes from single target and self/pet buffs. But personally I find it disdainful that people ignore tower defense and just talk about open field blobbing all the time. Rangers and Engis pew pewing from higher ground is a bit underrated I say and have caused sieges to fail. Just keep blasting their rams with your nades/elite and if their rams go down, then they’re forced to pvd or waste supply, and most importantly time. You don’t even need that many people to accomplish this.

Engineers don’t really lack in support do they? Fumigate removes condis just as well as guardian shouts could and it also damages the enemy too. Your low cooldown heal is a water field that can blast itself and you have another low duration water field to go with it.

Grenades have 1500 range, do a lot of damage, and I do believe they can violate the 5 AOE limit. Yes it isn’t as flashy as the ele meteor storms, but grenades can be spammed and you do have a right to not spam them when you see them stacking up and retaling yourself to death. The most damage I’ve taken from retal is about half my life, and I’m a pretty mindless spammer. This is no different from me having to avoid the temptation of whirling wrathing into a tighly stacked group.

They do lack in stability and group stunbreaks though. They have a really good block with gear shield but it can be bypassed and elixir S is nice but you can’t really blow it for pushing. So yea, they do lack that when charging in, but backline doesn’t seem to be that bad of an idea. In this regards they do need guardians to carry them. But then again guardians carry everyone anyways. :p That’s why they are first in GWEN.

Not really. I find engineers, playing as them, and against them to be fairly survivable in small scale.

I usually get focused most on my necro, due to their difficulty of handling CC unless you take a very expensive stability trait. Death shroud is good in 1v1s and maybe even 2 but honestly it doesn’t really last that long under focus fire because they have to facetank mostly everything. Necros also don’t really have any blocks or invuls; the best they can do is plague form which is on a long cooldown. They are also slow and have almost no ability to disengage. Engineers at least have more vigor and gear shield blocks, as well as various leaps to disengage though of course nothing to the level of guardians or warriors.

If you really want to paint a target on yourself, be a ranger and use a bow. Though it reminds me of this funny incident where my friend and I won a ~3v5 when my engineer was still an uplevel. They kept chasing me due to being an uplevel, but due to elixir S/Rocket boots could never finish me off, while my friend, which was a bearbow just shot them all down. This might be the only case in gw2 where the bearbow was the greater threat. (well, there was this other random pug that was helping us but I’m not really sure what they did besides die)

Drakent.9605:

Why are you having a hard time cleansing condition ?

engineering has 4 other ways to remove condition beside elixir c,

1) elixir gun – super elixir, remove 1 condition every 20 sec

2)med pack- antidote, remove 1 condition every 15 sec

3) 3 pts in alchemy – transmute, turn 1 condition into a boon every 15 sec

4) 4 pts in alchemy- Cleaning Formula 409, remove a condition when using a elixir.

Cleaning Formula 409 has to be the strongest cleansing ability in the game since you can use 8 elixir at the same time if you wanted too

Also the reason why elixir c has a high cd and can be reduce by 20% is b/c it doesn’t cleanse condition but converts it into a boon

1.) Is probably the most reliable one thus far. The heal also counteracts a lot of the health you lose from conditions but beware of overwriting people’s fields.

2.) Another good choice, but immobilize is a problem. You’re also sacrificing the water fields for group play.

3.) This trait is okay, but not really that good. The thing is that it only applies to incoming conditions and not ones already on you. While it’s good at handling condition pressure, it’s pretty useless when they burst you with a bunch of long lasting conditions.

4.) Strong, but the problem with this is that it competes with a lot of other traits in the alchemy tree— not to mention they were silly enough to put 4 elixir traits in the same tree! So this option is really good with condition removal, but then it makes you only good at condition removal— you lose either invigorating speed, backpack regen, or protection injection. And you still wouldn’t even have elixir cooldowns which are honestly very long with the exception of toss elixir b (which doesn’t even get affected by the cooldown trait due to it being a tool belt skill)— you’d have to sacrifice another one assuming you’re maxing out alchemy. Furthermore, you’d only be able to use one utility toolkit as one 409 powered elixir would hardly be enough, unless you want to replace your heal with that elixir, and that’s questionable.

Ultimately, engineers do have many ways to combat conditions and I have tried builds in wvw that take care of condis easily for myself and even the group, but at a big cost. It’s just that I do feel that they have to overspecialize in it a lot more as opposed to other classes to a degree where you sacrifice the class’s unique strengths in order to accomplish things other classes could do way better anyways. (Well, I play engi, necro, ranger, and main guardian, dunno about the rest). I could tell engis to take leg mods which is an awesome trait and laugh at immobilized, but it’s hard to fit that to many people’s builds even if on paper it’s the godsend to one of the Engineer’s key weaknesses. And likewise, Elixir C, while would be an awesome slot to take on say, a ranger, becomes problematic on an engineer.

Balance needs to be split 3 way between the 3 modes; the “wvw wasn’t meant to be balanced” crap has led to the current situation, and it’s just silly that pve changes can have such impact in wvw.

It’s time to stop treating wvw as the kitten child of pve.

Wtf? Insecure kittenes that can’t go find bags on their own have no right to insult people’s voices and nobody is under any responsibility to entertain those people. Sounds like a direct trip to the blocked list.

In any cases, yes, the mobs demand bread and circuses, so to speak. Which can be hard to provide, but you really just need to find your own core of regulars in case the rest are uncooperative. Otherwise, it’ll just be no fun. Even if you have only a dozen followers, you can still make an impact.

Weapons are about 50-60g, armor is 50-60g per piece but it’s a lot more for light armor because they require more damask which needs tons and tons of silk.

I would prioritize getting weapons first and then armor in the far future; as getting runes for the armor can be an expensive endeavor in and of itself. You can also just prioritize the chest/gloves/boots piece as those have the biggest stat boosts.

Oh, since it’ll take a while to craft stuff, I’d suggest to put out a ton of buy orders in advance instead of just using the buy price on the tp.

What the heck are spirit weapons? I guess that would be a nice addition to the game.

Oh, you mean those things. I think calling them a weapon may be misleading. I actually unlocked them lately, and… I want my skill points back!

Well, hopefully people are listening to this.