Guild Wars 2

With Short Fuse and Siege Round you can go:

• X number of turrets
• Big ol’ Bomb
• Orbital Strike
• Fire bomb or Smoke Bomb for field
• Any blast finisher with a slight cast (like flamethrower #2)
• Blow up all turrets
• Pop Shield #4
• Acid Bomb and weapon swap to stop the leap.

This way siege rounds will hit with both hits

I like taking Streamlined kits and Adrenal implant so this would only hurt my build. Also the trait you speak of is called “Lock On”, Analyze is the name of a skill it casts.

Anything on the same line as Streamlined kits will be overshadowed. There are many reason why nobody uses Takedown rounds, Streamlined kits is one of them.

Kodama.6453:

There shouldn’t be an ICD for Recovery matrix. Just make bandage triggering this trait to prevent exploit with med kit. Without ICD we would be able to have nice protection uptime with healing turret and medic gyro.

Not to forget that AMR can proc it without hitting an invisible cooldown.

Chaith.8256:

Since the spec patch, opening Med Kit does not provide on heal effects, and bandage does not count as a tool belt ability, but the healing ability. It’s gated.

Medkit still proc on heal runes, but they have an internal cooldown anyway.

A bunch of the “buffs” feels like something they added because they knew it would have no impact at all and they needed some “buffs” in this balance patch. It’s mostly bug fixes, and half of them seems to not work.

11% dmg buff to flamethrower AA means nothing.
3 sec instead of 2 sec of bleeding on fragmentation shot means nothing.
36% buff to Medblast does absolutely nothing, except breaking the skill and it is now disabled.
Takedown rounds is a missplaces trait that that makes no sense, why is there a les impressive aim-assisted rocket in tools? Why does it have a 50% health limit?

The only nice buff is Medical Dispersion Field , but I have yet to test it to see if it actually work.

I understand that you want it weaker than Druids Celestial form #1 since that is their class mechanic and they have to build up to use the form. But considering how we can’t heal ourself, have shorter range, and affect fewer targets, Med Blaster having a similar healing output to Cosmic Ray (1600 hp/s) should be fine.

As it stands, even with the 36% buff (isn’t even a 36 hp buff), it is not useable in any gameplay scenario. You will never save players or NPCs with this heal, trust me I have tried and seen my friends die thanks to its horrible ineffectiveness. To me, the kit mechanic represent the engineers ability to prepare specialized tools to deal with niche situations. It is how we become jack of all trades, master of none , players ready for the unexpected. Even if I rarely end up in a situation where someone in my group is low on health and have their healing skills on cooldown, knowing that I have the tools to save the day when it happens is what makes playing engineer rewarding. But we don’t have the tools, or at least, the medkit is not that tool, but it should be, because it does nothing else.

It has already been disabled.

Sounds like Med Blaster might be worth using, just might.

Kodama.6453:

~Stuff that have been quoted to many times already~

Thoughts?

Very interesting, basically your Gyro does a pulsing-weak-blast-combo-finisher.
I think the following effects would be decent if you only have one untargetable gyro floating around you:

• Fire: 1 Might for 5 sec.
• Lightning: 1 Vulnerability to enemies for 10 sec.
• Light: 1 Retaliation for 2 sec.
• Smoke: 1 Blind to enemies for 3 sec.
• Poison: 1 poison to enemies for 5 sec.
• Water: 1 Regeneration for 3 sec.
• Ice: 1 Chill to enemies for 2 sec.
• Ethereal: 1 Confusion to enemies for 3 sec.
• Dark: Vampyric Aura for 2 unstackable sec.

Or we could have the Gyro infuse you with passive stats/effect based on the field it is in:

• Fire: Increase boon duration.
• Lightning: Super speed.
• Light: Reduced incomming condi duration.
• Smoke: Stealth.
• Poison: Increase condition duration
• Water: Increase outgoing healing.
• Ice: Reduce movement movement impairing effects.
• Etheral: immunity to Retaliation and Confusion damage
• Dark: Lifesteal

Adamantium.3682:

I’ve been playing since launch but I must have missed the part of this game where Coated Bullets was overpowered and everyone used it. Is it a serious point of argument to say Coated Bullets is too strong to come back?

It was nice for tagging in zergs and for making the pistol not feel useless in groups but it was still nowhere near what grenades can do. It was a nice upgrade for those who like to use pistol, it helped the weakest 2 pistol skills actually do something. It really should make a comeback, MH pistol still needs love.

This is true. Pistol had AoE and pierce for years and nobody used it, grenades got it by a bug and broke SPvP for weeks. That goes to show how weak pistol are compared to grenades.

Miltek.2104:

Auto-attack comparision (no traits, soldier amulet):
Nades: 3x 331 dmg (1/2 sek casting time) =~1000dmg + perm 15 stacks of vulnerability
Flame-Thrower: 2000dmg (when enemy has burning) + 2 sek o burning
Bomb: 1200dmg + perm 5 stacks of vulnerability

Not to be picky, but you first say “no traits” and then add in the effect from a trait (vulnerability)…

Anyway details aside, the spec patch really hit the flamethrower dps hard. Not only did it remove the 15% dmg buff from an alchemy trait, but they also reduced the vuln on crit traits durration, so we can’t stack up as much vuln from flamethrower AA.

Also if flamethrower AA chain is 2.25 sec and hits 10 times (max 3 targets) and grenades hit 3 times every 1/2 sec (max 5 targets). Grenade hits more and are more vulnerable to retaliation. Ofcourse grenade attack rate isn’t as low as 1/2 sec…

shion.2084:

Are they making being able to use bomb kit any more competitive? Where’s the source so I can check if my bombs will get some love.

The source was the livestream, we only got some preview changes. Most of them bug fixes, none of them about bomb.

Haralin.1473:

hope some bugfixes come tomorrow

Half of the preview “changes” are bug fixes, so we will probably get a good amount of them.

This might bring it back to pre-spec-patch when we had Alchemical Mixtures (15% flamethrower dmg).

dancingmonkey.4902:

Might I suggest then, that you avoid asking for change for the sake of change. Because you might just get what you ask for. I suggest proposing the change you desire, or opening discussions on it.

I know, I for one, will argue tooth and nail against change for the sake of change itself. All too many times I have seen engineer threads demanding something about the profession change. Without hashing out or discussing good ideas for the changes. Only to have Anet decide on making a change in the area suggested, and implement something equal to or worse then what was asked to be changed.

So unless you have a good change suggested, I am not going to care that “you want a change”. I am concerned with what change we would actually want and not simply wanting a change for the sake of wanting a change.

Changing something for the sake of changing it and changing something because it is bad or broken are not the same. You should not have to have a good solution to identify a problem and you should not have to be able to do something better in order to criticize something.

Diet Plain.4513:

I can see how that would work, but they said in the stream they don’t want to require you to bring certain classes to a raid. I’m sure swiftness will cut it based on that comment.

Well both Druid, Mesmer and Tempest can give super speed to allies. Rangers and Revenants can also give them to themself. Thief and Dragon Hunters can place traps that give them super speed if they have Rune of the Trapper.

Considering how they are adding super speed to everything, it would not suprice me if you would need it.

Edit: Herald can also give it to allies with their elite skill.

If pierceing 4 enemies is to strong, they could make it only pierce once. That way we still get the double hit trick when positioning properly without the 25 hit combo from 5 stacked enemies.

I made a thread on the day of the reveal with some rework ideas for the Function Gyro. It is still pretty relevant.

Personally, I feel like the Sneak Gyro can work really well for the scrapper, we just have to stop thinking of it like a thief. It’s instant cast stealth on a non-stealth based class, it can be incredibly useful mid fight in sPvP for both landing big tells, breaking agroo messy fights or to res/stomp (Because I don’t trust the Function Gyro to manage that on it’s own).

For PvE, it probably won’t see much play unless it avoids taking agroo.

I think we should wait and see how well it preforms durring the beta, especially how it works in Stronghold. To quote NapToon in this thread

The Stealth Gyro is great against Nika and absolutely mega awesome WITH Nika.

The Gyro gives Stealth to Nika which removes her from the Minimap, while Nika gives Stealth to the Gyro, removing it from the field of view.

First off, this suggestion is way better than what it seems like we are getting, so good job there.

On the subject of %dmg modifiers, I do agree that it might undervalue the stomp/revive mechanic, but that is also partly because said function is not that usefull in the first place.

However I do not like the idea of getting balanced around allways having a 12% dmg buff. Maybe instead of %dmg, we could have one or more of the following:

• % Condi durration increase (helps with vulnerability as well as dmg-condi).
• % Boon durration increase.
• % Movementspeed.
• Regular might/boon stacking.
• Regular vulnerability stacking (Gyros fire weak vuln stacking bolts).

So this is just a preview of some of the changes, we’ll probably see a lot more bug fixes and changes to other underpreforming traits.

On the subject of the changes we have seen:

• Flamethrower buff seems like a return of Alchemical Mixtures, much needed, but will still not make flamethrower deal damage worthy of it’s AA channel.
• AMR fix for cleansing burst seems nice, might take that over the smokebomb on stun now.
• Medical Dispersion Field changes, will probably test it out, but would rather see Med kit #1 be the go to option for healing allies.
• Fragmentation Shot is still bad, but getting there very slowly.

Seems like half our changes are bug fixes, not sure how I feel about that.

Comparing it to Toss elixir R, I’m unimpressed:

Pros for Function Gyro:

• No utility slot taken
• A bit les cooldown
• Traitable for stability

Pros for Toss Elixir R:

• Indestructable
• 1200 range over 750
• Can res yourself if used skillfully
• AoE so it can res multiple players
• Removes conditions
• Can be used up close
• Can be traited for more condi removal, longer durration, might and cooldown reduction.

I feel like Toss Elixir U needs it’s own spell effect and uses instead of copying other classes. Something like a bubble that grows in size and reflects projectiles could fit the elixir theme.

The Stealth gyro also provides a very usefull toolbelt skill for defense to counter stealth pushes. The short cooldown lets you just check regularly.

BlackBeard.2873:

Perhaps it could be a ground-targeted res like elixir R or something…

Ground target on the F ability? That would not work well for any other part of the game.

Projectile finishers have to hit their target directly to apply their effect (AoE effect from landing does not count).
Water and Light projectiles apply their effect to allies in 150 radius around their target.

There have been a lot of predictions on how Scrapper will work in WvW, Dungeons, Raid and Conquest. However, I havn’t seen anyone make a comment or even acknowledge the existance of Stronghold.

• How do you guys think the Scrapper will preform in Stronghold?
• Defensive or Offensive roles?
• Is stealth Gyro made for stealthing doorbreakers (Considering how it might hide them from the mini-map)?
• Will giving Superspeed to minions be relevant?
• Bulwark gyro to keep NPCs alive?
• Style points for stomping keep lord with Function Gyro?

Or is stronghold just to much of a mess with all the objectives?

Diet Plain.4513:

Are.1326:

An idea for Hammer trait:
Inflicting daze reduces the cooldown of Hammer Skills by 2 seconds (1s icd).

Lets be honest, Rocket Charge is the main reason we take Hammer, seeing it get the same treatment as Gravedigger or Death’s Charge on the reaper would be nice and help support builds that want to focus on hammer and not kits.

fixed

That could also work. With the benefit of reducing the cooldown of all your hammer skills you do however lose the benefit of hitting multiple enemies with the same daze. Both options are miles more interesting than a flat 10% damage buff.

Liewec.2896:

i’m looking forward to trying the juggernaught synergy traits with flamethrower
yeah it should kick you right the way to 25 stacks of might, no more reliance on HGH and potion popping!

Even with 100% might durration, Mass Momentum and Juggernaut won’t push you past 20 stacks on their own. And even without HgH, getting 25 stacks on flamethrower isn’t that difficult as it is now. Not to forget that flamethrower damage isn’t even that good when you have 25 stacks of might.

It’s the new Bunny Thumper because hammer #3 goes Thump Thump Thump like a bunny.

Edit: since it have to be three words: Bunny Thumper Two

An idea for Hammer trait:
Inflicting daze reduces the cooldown of Rocket Charge by 2 seconds.

Lets be honest, Rocket Charge is the main reason we take Hammer, seeing it get the same treatment as Gravedigger or Death’s Charge on the reaper would be nice and help support builds that want to focus on hammer and not kits.

People are overestimating the usefulness of whirl finishers.
Light and Waterfields requires the bolt to hit and enemy and will only apply their effect to allies in a 150 radius around that enemy, it is extreamly clunky and only ever happens on accident.

If you want to reliably use whirl finishers, you need to stand inside an enemy, and if this thing tries to do that it dies.

Haralin.1473:

They already have stomps in PvE but very rarely on Events, stomps in PvE would be good for A-Net cause they can sell more stomp finisher, i would like it

As someone who have done this events a lot, you stop stomping them after a while since pure damage is simply faster.

Rifle don’t force you into a whole traitline, so it will still see play, especially in SD builds since the scrapper gives nothing to them.

“To detonate, press the command skill twice in succession.” I find nothing worst in terms of controls than double-tapping. If they want to keep the “self destruct” function, just add it to the toolbelt like turrets.
For movement, I think a better solution would be a toggle ability. Once the Gyro is out, the skill turns into a “go here” ability, using this ability changes the skill into a “return” ability. That way, the gyro won’t just return to you randomly after a short while.

If (and this is a big “if”) they have programmed it right, quickness/alacrity should make the gyro apply stealth faster. So having a mesmer/guardian apply it to the gyro can help building up tons of stealth for skipping in dungeons, kinda like shadow refuge.

naturesoul.3578:

Which other options are getting over 4K damage off auto attack?

Like on a single attack.

Just because the damage number from Flamethrower stack does not mean the DPS is high. You might be under the impression that the dmg number you see if a single tick, but it’s not, it’s the whole channels damage since you did something else. The visual numbers you can get with flamethrower is only limited by the targets healthpool, but that is still just a visual number. Almost every other AA option on the engineer deals more damage over time, the visual numbers are just not added together on other options.

If they wanted to buff medkit to a useable level they would have buffed it right away. There is no point in waiting.

It is instant on a 30 sec cooldown, great for stomping, ressing or avoiding damage when you are CCed. It probably won’t be used like a Gyro, but that is the only way gyros can be usefull at the moment.

Also, have 2 scrappers and they will probably stealth eachother. 4 scrappers and they can cover eachothers downtime. It probably have a target cap of 5, so that would be your whole perma stealth group.

archmagus.7249:

When they said that the gyros share the boons, does that mean that they count towards the 5 target cap?

I think placing retaliation on them would be ideal. Players will automatically see them as squishy, and attack them first. Hopefully they at least make them immune to crits. that would their help their survivability a lot.

They do have their own boon list, so they do count towards the 5 target cap, however they have lower priority than players so they wont steal their boons.

Here is a mechanic involving a gyro:

• You allways have an invulnerable gyro floating next to you (this is a spell effect and not a gameobject)
• This gyro have it’s own skill queue
• The gyro casts all the toolbelt abilities for you from it’s body.
• CCing the engineer also interputs the gyros skill queue.

It would almost bte like making all toolbelt skills instant casts since you can now activate them while using weapon skills/utility skills, but it will not happen instantly since the gyro have to finish cast times and such. Also activating multiple toolbelt skills with cast time won’t happen at the same time since the gyro have a skull queue.

It’s not much of an upgrade, but it will be usefull in all game modes and you can play with it all the time. It also lets you do some interesting things, like casting grenade barrage while in the middle of a hammer leap. Or heal with the medkit heal while dodging.

Personally I’d like turrets to stay as stationary entities since that is their most recognizable trait. Instead, remove the AI part.

A simple change could be to make them automatically use their overcharge when placed down and have the majority of the turrets usefulness frontloaded so that when they die, they have still done something. Since there are no AI, your target when casting the turret is the one they will continue to fire at. Turrets would only last 15 sec and have their cooldown started once placed down (the explode turret option could be moved down to the utility bar so the toolbelts are never hidden).

Rifle turret:

• Singel target range based skill
• Unloads 12 shots towards it’s target for 3 sec applying vulnerability
• Once done with the unload, it will fire at normal rate until it is destroyed or it’s time run out.

Rocket turret:

• Ground targeted skill
• Fires multiple rockets up in a curve towards the ground targeted location over 5 sec.
• Once done it will continue to fire at a slower rate (once every 3-4 sec) to the target location.

Healing Turret/Thumper turret

• Will use their normal overcharge ability instantly once placed (no waiting for firerate ticks) and continue with a weaker version once a while afterwards.

Morfedel.4165:

I suppose. I think my real gripe is people are complaining before even trying it out. Sometimes things play differently than they look on paper. Yeah of course sometimes they play exactly like they look on paper too, but I feel we should at least give it a shot before we start complaining about these things. And then if it really does suck and then we complain about it lol

The whole point of this thread is that waiting for the beta weekend might waste to much precious time. There are some obvious concerns that can and should be dealt with before the last beta weekend, so that when we finally get to test it first hand our feedback can go towards a final product and not repeat what we already knew.

It is obvious to everyone that noone in the forums have tried it yet, repeating the “but you havn’t tried it yet so sit down” argument holds no ground. Not saying anything is not going to help any more. If you don’t want to hear people “complain” based on the limited information we have, then don’t visit the engineer forum before the beta is here, because this is what players will talk about until it starts. A lot of people are concerned that one beta weekend is not going to save the scrapper, so they try to make the most of it.

It’s important to have it working before HoTs release since a lot of players want to play the new content with their new builds.

I don’t care if Scrapper wont be “Meta” in raids/ dungeon, WvW traits or SPvP on day one. What I do care about is that it is fun and playable when we first step into the new content and experience it. Meta can be decided later, but first impressions will be important.

iKeostuKen.2738:

So its basically, burst group healing with 1 protection vs sustained group healing with 2.

No, that is like saying Reconstruction field gives 5 protection so it is better than 1 protection from healing turret. Protection viability is about uptime, not stacks, and healing turret wins out in uptime.

Sustain heal vs burst heal means nothing since healing turrets burst heal have better sustain than the medic gyro. Normaly, sustain means more health over time and burst means more health upfront, but healing turret gives more health upfront and over time so it is best in both sustain and burst.

Healing turret also gives more health to allies (both in sustain and burst) so it’s no benefit in taking medic gyro there.

And again, Reconstruction field requires that you and your allies stand inside it for it’s durration. It is a 300 field, so it’s not that usefull unles you want to be a sitting duck.

MrTJpwnz.4710:

Making them invunerable to damage would be lame, not even fun to play with (or against) them, 0 counterplay possiblities… Sad that alot of people don’t see that..

Just because they can’t take damage doesn’t mean there are 0 counter play. Non-minion abilities can’t be completly shut down by damage, but most of them have tons of counter play. Even if the gyros could only be CCed or soft CCed, they would have more counterplay than all other non-minion skills. Also, 4 of the gyros are utility or support based, they don’t need as much counterplay as something offensive.

iKeostuKen.2738:

The toolbelt skill actually pulses aoe protection not stability.

opps, typo on my side, I meant protection. 1 sec and I’ll edit. the numbers are still correct tho.

iKeostuKen.2738:

Healing turret also doesnt offer protection ontop of a pulsing water field. Sure it has water fields, but they are very short. Ik Regenerating mist is pretty short, not even a full second. Im not truly sure how long HTs overcharge is or if it goes away as soon as you pick it up, i wanna say 2-3 seconds.

Well, if we run Recovery Matrix , healing turret will grants 5 – 10 sec of protection every 15-20 sec, depending on your boon durration and if you pick it up or blast it. So best case, 2/3rd uptime of protection.

Medic Gyro toolbelt pulses 1 – 2 sec Protection every 5 sec on a 25 sec cooldown. That is at best 10 sec every 25 or 2/5th uptime. (with Tools it is 21.25 sec cooldown).
Medic gyro also grant 5 -10 sec protection every 30-44 sec depending on boon durration and gyro lifespan. So at best it is another 1/3rd uptime of protection. In total 11/15 uptime, or right above 2/3rd like Healing turret, but that is if the gyro dies right away and you lose out on most of the heal.

If we don’t have boon/Protection durration we get the following numbers:

• 1/3rd uptime for Healing Turret.
• 1/5th uptime for Reconstruction Field.
• 1/6th to 1/9th uptime for Medic Gyro.

Looks to me like healing turret wins out in Protection too, unles you want to blow up your medic gyro right away. I guess Reconstruction Field have the added benefit of giving protection to allies, but they would have to stand inside the pulsing field with a radius of only 300, in fact, you would also have to do that.

Edit: typo

iKeostuKen.2738:

Thats not the point at all. 1400 sustain heals is still a nice option ontop of the other healing traits we have at our disposal.

Also wondering if the heal on swiftness and superspeed trait also is affected by healing power.

But healing turret can trigger healing traits almost 3 times before the gyro can do it again… not sure what your point is here. Sustain means nothing if burst heal have better sustain.

Also I’m pretty sure they said that Rapid Regeneration scales of healing power. The question is just: does it scale better than healing blast from med kit (0.033).

iKeostuKen.2738:

If the gyro heal also scales with the same amount, then its full cycle would be anywhere from 6533 – 9800 with just the gyro heal.

That is still les than a healing turret with no healing power…