Guild Wars 2

After minipatch, might have been the larger patch. Legendary effect from Predator does not apply to Static Discharge or Aim-assisted rocket on Engineers. Yes this is minor compeared to players who can’t play, but it really bothers me that my shoots are in all kinds of colors instead of the consisted fire shoots we had pre-patch.

After the second 28.07 patch (few hours before this post). The legendary effect from the Predator (maybe the quip as well, needs to be tested) on Static Discharge and Aim assisted rocket no longer applies. I have a recording on how it was yesterday pre-patch if anyone are interested.

Turrets from Supply crate sometimes spawn partly or completly underground.

This may be releated to the Splintered Coasts underground area.

Considering how prominent Rampage is atm (not sure about high level PvP, but unranked is flooding with rampage warriors), I don’t think engineers would be happy that the overpowered skill remains in warriors hands but we lose our RNG version of it. They might be happy if we got something equaly (or almost) powerfull transform that have no RNG.

At the moment, players count on a few things from Elixir X:

• More stability than anyone can strip
• Much CC
• Higher health pool
• Higher dmg stats

They are also hoping for the following functionality when getting rampage:

• Still able to revive
• Still able to lift hammer in clifside fractale
• Still able to stomp uninterupted.

I suggest that they design a new unique transform with all of that in mind so they please as many engineers as possible and avoid ruining current functionality or builds.

I’d go for some form of slim-theme. Toss Elixir X could transform enemies in the area into slimes (with a similar skillset to moa) and Drink Elixir X turns the engineer larger (like rampage) and gives us a transparent green shader. They could also use the bouble-head tech to give us larger arms that woble around.

Mechanicly, it would still pulse stability like it does. As well as letting us interacte with downed players or bundles like rampage currently do. For CC abilities, I imagne a belly-flop in addition to daze on third auto attack (like Rampage). It could also have a unique mechanic of sacrificing transform duration to give out boons to allies or attatching yourself to an ally and absorb all the dmg they take (Engineer is now an Aura!).

Well we know there are drones of some sort, and they seems to be connected to our utilities. ANet also have this strange tendancy to fill holes, just remember how the revenant is a heavy armor proffesion in order to have 3 of each type, and how they were about to have no weapon swapp just because they wanted one in eash armor type to have this handicap.

So it would be no surprise to me if they wanted to give engineer signets (currently every proffesion besides Engineer and Revenant have signets, and signet icons was data mined for the revenant elite spec).

It is also quite possible that their passive is the drone flying around you doing their passive thing, and the active is sending your drone to a target location or target enemy to blow up for an effect.

This way, our “signets” (if they even call them that) would follow the engineer theme of making everything a bit more complicated than on other classes. Our healing drone might fly around us using the Med-kit auto-attack heal towards us, healing allies nearby as well. Thus beeing weaker than Warrior healing signet, but having the bonus of healing in an AoE.

Maybe we get a Spy drone that we can send to a location and using the new camera-disconnection-from-the-player technology, we can spy from our drones view. (no idea why we would ever need to unless we can put them at some WvW gates when scouting).

If it is the case, we might see some powerfull signet traits that charge up two drones for each signet and lets us activate them twise or maybe we get something like “writen in stone” where the drone survives the effect and comes flying back to us.

So do I want this… Maybe, depends entierly on the toolbelt functions, cooldowns and general active effects. Thematicly it fits and it would look cool. I just hope they are untargetable and invulerable while passive (like a spell effect instead of an actual minion)

Peutrifectus.4830:

Runes of the forgeman do on being hit.

I’ve had some good performance from them with carrion gear. They also increase duration. Protection on shield skill and protection injection give a very high protection uptime.

There is also Rune of the Grove and Rune of the Earth . Unlike Rune of the Forge can they trigger over 50% health, and have 30 sec cooldown instead of 60 sec and give 30% protection durration instead of 25%. However, they only apply 4 sec of protection instead of 10.

Ah, but what if our drones… made more drones

It will clearly not become baseline when they added it to Explosive Powder. Rifle Range is something we havn’t seen a referance to anywhere, and no official words on it, Accelerant Packed Turrets on the other hand is in a new place, so we clearly know what they decided to do with it.

Tested this too, rune of the centaur works with med kit. So what counts as a healing skill by runes is not the same as what counts as a healing skill by traits.

This is generally a problem with abilities. They are designed around a “tag” system where skills may have multiple tags or be of multipe types, like a Healing tag or Kit tag. However there is no system in place that takes care of them, instead the developers have to manually add the functionality of this tags and add them manually to the tooltips too. This means inconsistency as diffrent developers take care of the manual koding.

What they should have done is add a String Array (or int array if they connect numbers up against tag names) in each ability, then have the skill check for each of it’s tags up against a list of equiped traits/runes/effects that would trigger on said ability, then apply the effect to the ability or trigger a related ability that (like Cleansing Synergy).

For example: Elixir H would have the tags Healing and Elixir. On activating the skill would check a list of equiped Healing effects and then a list of equiped Elixir effects. In the Healing list it will find Cleansing Synergy and thus start up the ability Cleaning Pulse. Cleansing Pulse have no tags so it would skip that step, do the ability and set the trait Cleansing Synergy on cooldown. Then we would move onto the next step in the list of Healing effects, in this case that would be Heal Resonator. Like Cleansing Pulse , Heal Resonator would check it’s tags, do the effect and go on cooldown.

When done with all effects in the Healing list, it would move onto the next tag, aka Elixir, here it would probably find HGH and thus apply the HGH bennefits to the healing skills, such as cooldown reduction, extra boon durration and the ability that gives extra stacks of Might.

It would take some dedication to put every skill into the system, but it would free up a lot of work in the future and help avoiding many bugs or inconsistancies. It could also automaticly do some of the tooltips work for them.

Instead of a weaponswap, a button in the same place that toggles the weapon (not kits) Auto attack function could be an interesting way to add more gameplay to kitles/ non- rotation based builds.

Just imagne, rifle could toggle between a long range snipe shot with aim-down-sight animation and a spread-shot with the current hip-shot animation.

For kit-rotation builds is it not much of an improvment, you are not using your AA anyway so changing how it works don’t matter much. However, builds that run one of no kits will get a bit more interesting gameplay. It would also let us aim down the sight of our rifles.

It is possible our drones are a change to toolbelt skills. It would requier a lot of work, but they might even change every singel toolbelt skill. Could be that every toolbelt skill summons a drone that uses a similar ability passivly and you can reactivate them to send them to a location or overcharge them. It was more than 10 drone skins datamined, so if they are all going to be used, it might not be our utilities.

Killyox.3950:

Maybe Tricks ? Tricks seem like a good fit for engie going in with a hammer of doom.

What are tricks? Are you refearing to thiefs class specific utility name? Because we have that, they are called gadgets. Every class have this, an utility category for skills that don’t fit into any other categories. Physical for Warriors, Survival for Ranger, Tricks for Thiefs, Gadgets for Engineers, etc. All this categories have nothing that defines them besides the class they are a part of.

Shouts are easily defined, it’s an Point Blank AoE effect, Signets are defined by having a passive and an active ability, Wells are pulsing AoE fields, etc. What makes a trick?

With the reveal that Dragon Hunters would be getting traps, a lot of us assumed that no other elite specialisations would be getting the same utility type and Engineer would have to get something else. However, Tempest was revealed to get shouts like the Reaper, so ANet have not added an arbitrary limitation to their design with the first wave of elite specialisations.

That means, traps are back on the menu boys! or at least not off the table. So this begs the question, what would you like to see if we got traps? or even wells or shouts. This is ofcourse assuming that the drones we saw are a part of the class mechanic or the hammer skills and not the utility skills.

Personally, I’d like to see more synergy with explotions. If shrapnel got rebalanced to all explosives and not grenades tripple proc, then the cribble and bleed from it could be great for explosive traps.

I feel like this line had a lot of good ideas but many of the traits are under tuned or suffers from ICD syndrom.

• Cleansing Pulse do not need an ICD, the only time you will hit the ICD wall is when Automated Medical Response kicks in.

• Automated Medical Reponse have a 90 sec cooldown, while 10 was way to short, 90 sec is to much if the trait can trigger when the skill is not even on cooldown. It also needs to reset the cooldown of Clensing burst on Healing turret.

• Soothing Detonation isn’t even noticable at the moment, I ran it for a while and havn’t feelt a diffrence since I swapped away from it. A number tweek could be a simple fix, but making it act on all combo finishers and not just blast finishers could make this an interesting pick in many builds, mortar could even become something like our old elixir infused bombs.

• Advanced Turrets, I would not even run this in a full turret build. 33% dmg reduction is nothing when the turret only have 1 hp (effectivly) .The bubble spawns way to late to reflect anything as a reaction, and lasts to short to force ranged enemies to repossision.

• Medical Dispersion Field, this trait triggers on weak heals from allies and gets put on a 5 sec ICD. It is also completly selfless and unnoticable by allies. I think it should be redesigned to only trigger when an engineer gives health to himself, no ICD or healing ammount limit. This way engineers can run Backpack regen and passivly heal allies for a small amount.

Well if you are camping in flamethrower you will be quite durrable, but the meta is heavily burst focused and you won’t be able to do much with flamethrower. Maybe run runes of Mercy and res your allies as they go down, then you are both keeping the point uncontested and making sure your allies stays alive. It should be viable once guardian quickness shout gets nerfed (that thing makes it impossible to stop stomps).

I do not think Josh Davis is in charge of the design on how the mortar is supose to work, after all, his title is Competitive Event Manager. He probably went on the testing client to check and posted that comment based on what he saw. A lot of people on the forum have referred to that comment as confirmation that the projectile finisher is supose to work in an AoE.

No reason to keep flame turret out if you want to stack burn, it currently applies a 2 sec burn on a 3 sec attack rate with almost no base dmg. Turrets in general got hit hard by the spec update, and by all of them flame turret got hit the hardest:

• Burning on flame turret was not updated like other burn skills (most got 2-3 stacks instead of the old 1 stack)
• The 15% dmg trait was removed.
• The Turret regen trait was removed.
• The Turret range trait was removed.
  There was also the patch earlier that made them recive crit and condis.

Malchior.1928:

So if I want a condi cleanse, I basically need to be standing in a light field spamming mortar 1 at about point blank range of enemies?

Yes.

When asked (before the patch) about the nature of Mortar 1# projectile finisher, a dev (I don’t remember who) stated that the pop-up would apear if the mortar passed through a field, basically dodging the question about the effect working in an AoE.
There have been no official words on how it is supose to work since then, so we just have to assume that it will forever be clunky and impractical.

This is the case with all fields when using the Mortar 1#, or any other projectile finishers. The way projectile finishers work is that the projectile itself have to hit a target after getting the effect from a combo field. So in the case of mortar 1#, you have to fire right behind your target so the projectile passes through them before hitting the ground in order to apply any effect. It does not apply in an AoE around the impact area (like we all wish it did)

This is also the case for Regen (water field) and Condi removal (light field), the projectie have to hit an enemy target and then the effect will be applied to allies around that target (very small radius).

I like how Horrik holds it, but that would work badly with Asura. Maybe they could make it more like how Tristana in League of Legends holds her cannon (example) or how Spartans hold Missile pods in Halo 3 (example)

If you are using SD, use analyze on them, the ability itself is instant and will mess up their stealth.

Not sure if I’d even use it without the cooldown, using dodges to proc blast finishers seems a bit counter intuitive. The explosion is delayed and you can’t put out fields while you are dodging so the fields have to be last long.

I’d say a lot of this needs more clarification on why. The developers are not as interested in what we think the traits should do, but instead why we have problems with them at the moment.

As for your trait suggestions, I mostly agree with them, except Shrapnel.
Currently it have a 15% chance to proc, with 3 nades that becomes a 38.25% chance to proc at least once. (about 0.34% chance to proc all all three).

A 3 sec ICD would make this weaker for ALL explosive basic attacks because they can all attack slightly faster than once a sec. An ICD in general causes problems with the travel time of grenades and mortar shoots when you are moving towards your enemy (they will hit more rapidly than how fast you fired them). It would also stop it from procing on multiple targets (the main benefid with explosions over other attacks) and it would mean that traited explosions like mines from bunker down, Aim-assisted rocket and takedown rounds could hit the cooldown time and not get a chance to proc like they should.

My suggestion to solve the problem of shrapnels useability when using grenades instead of mortar/bombs/pistol 1# (if it was an explosion) is to make it only proc on the main grenade (the one that allways goes in the middle of your AoE circle) and incresse the proc chance to 33%. This will bring it down a slight bit on grenades (can’t multi proc on the same toss and loses about 5% proc chance) but brings the proc chance up to the same level for all other explosive attacks (even Aim assisted, mines or takedown rounds.

This would also alow the developers to tweak the proc chance to be balanced on all explosive attacks (because we can expect one proc around every 3/4th of a sec).

Some clerification on what is and is not bugs would be nice, but I’m sure they prioritize working on what is bugged and see no value in explaining it to us. It is kinda sad that the only value they get form explaining things to us is that we stop giving them a headace.

Other problems with AMR:

• If your healing skill is not on a lengthy cooldown when you hit 25% then it is wasted
• If you are using healing turret, it will not reset cleansing burst and you end up using your heal without getting access to the majority of it.

I think I way to improve AMRs usability would be to have it only proc if your healing skill is on cooldown while under 25%, and make it reset clensing burst as well.

Dojo.1867:

Ye this skill should have been changed to always shooting the nearest target (in a certain range) to make it work with any toolbelt skill. Current implementation is just stupid.

This change would kitten off a lot of SD users, myself included. I think making it allways fire at your selected target is a better simple solution. A more advance solution would be to have diffrent effects depending on what type of skill it is:

• Current implementation for targetable skills such as Suprice Shot, Analyze, etc.
• AoE around you for self aplication and point blank AoE skills like Regenerating Mist , Detonate X Turret and Super Speed
• AoE around impact area for skills that are ground targets like toss Elixirs and Orbital Strike at the moment of impact.
• Some special cases for special toolbelt skills, for example a non bouncing shot for every attack with Incendiary Ammo or lightning strikes on every mine detonation with Mine Field

Foefaller.1082:

…all these fields should be pulsing Vuln on any enemy that’s standing in them.

They do not, and should not because they don’t pulse explotions.

Foefaller.1082:

…and most importantly (assuming this is still true from the first specialization livestream they did) Pistol 1.

Don’t hold your breath, the engineer we have now is completly diffrent from the first livestream engineer. There is nothing indicating that we will get the explosive tag on Pistol 1#.

Foefaller.1082:

Adrenal Implant will be the only profession that can hit the endurance regen cap of an extra 100% of base.

They do not stack, Proff

Foefaller.1082:

that means a new chance to dodge (and therefore, a new blast finisher) every five seconds.

This trait have a 10 sec cooldown.

There are a bunch of other misstakes in your post, but I can’t be bothered to cover it all.

IF HgH should get a buff, I’d rather see them add the Elixir tag to more abilities and traits. Maybe set Experimental turrets to count as an Elixir (could make for some interesting turret banner builds).

But before they eventually buff HgH (I don’t think they will), they should buff or change the two alternatives that most players probably don’t even know exist.

Iron blooded now reduce dmg pr boon by 2%. There are currently 10 boons in game (we can ignore Aegis as it will negate the dmg reduction), so at best (you’ll never get it) it is a 20% dmg reduction (as well as the 20% from protection). This trait replaced a trait that reduced incoming condition durrations, so I think they should buff it by also adding a reduction to inconing conditions based on the total number of boons on you. In addition, I think 3% would be a more balanced choice when compeard to HgH considering that you’ll never have more than 4-5 boons in most encounters. If you ever get more then it must be a pretty large teamfight and you would die the moment they focus you anyway, or your team is going 5 vs 1 on some poor kid and the dmg reduction won’t matter.

The last trait I don’t even remember the name of, it’s some poor on heal trait that spawns a bandage pack or something. I think it also grants fury. Does anyone use this? Did anyone even care to try it out? And does anyone have an idea why Anet thought this was a “build defining” trait?

Overtime does not work, we lost while fighting the lord at 300 vs 305. they didn’t even break our inner gate.

digitalruse.9085:

They do stack, but it does not appear to be additive. I used a stop watch and timed energy regen with vigor, with adrenal implant, and with both. There is a difference, but it is only slight most of the time.

A stop watch is not good test. I’ll do an ingame recording of both and review the time on a frame by frame basis.

Edit 1: The resoults are in. a 60 fps recording shows 210-214 frames to recover endurance. My counting starts in both cases on the frame where endurance is the lowestr and ends on the frame where the endurance bar glows because it got completly refilled.

Edit 2: More testing shows a constant 4 frames advantage from vigor. This is leading me to belive they are supose to stack but there is a bug that reduces the effectivnes by a lot.

Edit 3: I’m rendering a video to show side by side comparison in 25% speed.

Edit 4: Video comparison here.

I don’t think “Elixir Gun skill 4 (Acid Bomb) not applying Might to allies in range” is a bug. It’s not like it sends your allieds flying backwards as well. The AoE effect is the offensive part of the ability, HgH applies to any self/team effects, and Acid Bombs only effect like that is the backward jump. I guess some toss elixirs is an exception to this, but I belive that is only because the grandmaster minor trait is an self/team effect.

Also, the “Reproducible” description of “Med Kit skill #1 has no sound” is “Yes. Pistol skills do not travel through enemies when used.”. This does not sound right.

25% is so close to the 20% we could get passivly before, I am disappointed they put it so far down from the 50% they planned. As it stands, I would not take it over 50% endurrance regen, even in a multiple gadgets build. (I’m not taking the multi activation bug into consideration as long as it is a bug)

A few problems I see with this trait:

• To low cooldown reduction considering that it is conditional and not passive
• Some effects are boring like might from utility googles.
• To few abilities counts as Gadgets. Elixir not only have their utility/elite/heal abilities, but their toolbelts also counts as elixirs, as do some abilities on kits. Same case for explosives, you can find 3 kits with 5 explosive skills, one or two passive procs, a gadget skills, turrets exploding etc. I’d say, categorize some toolbelt skills as gadgets, maybe even set Aim-assisted rocket, Takedown rounds, Bunker down or other proc traits as Gadgets.
• The method of activation is outside of the players control and contridicts the way you play this game. They should change it to something else, like a charge you build up by moving or critting enemies, or a short buff you get after activating a toolbelt ability.

Casia.4281:

ah lame. Especially when the mechanic for attaching the charge to the target is IN THE GAME, as Mork pointed out.

Should we /bug it?

The trait have two descriptions, one for the trait itself and one for the ability it uses, the ability states it’s current functionality so it’s probably just the trait description that is a unclear.

The trait states: Striking a foe above the health threshold places a delayed explosive charge on them.
It does not state that it attatches the charge.

The Ability states: Drop a delayed explosive pack at your foe’s location.
followed by some stats: 650 Damage, 5 targets, 1 second delay, 240 radius.

Very intuitive design, even someone like me who only playes 8 characters would also find benefits in this design.

The only problem I can see is how it looks for new players, they only have access to 5 slots (or maybe 6 with HoT). The only look was designed around that, the new one might not look too good if you don’t have 28+ character slots.
They can fix that by making it change dynamicly.

I wonder if changing the Account medals/achivement box we currently have (and your design keeps unchanged) would make sense.

Now try to add in 3-4 Elite specialications and see how your B design works…

Same thing with A, your idea might not be very expandable and does not include all the unlocks that the training wheel includes: Traits, Abilities, The Specialication line, Skins (yes we will be getting skins with Elite Specs).

C is something we have asked for since release and they have said they are looking into it and have heard us.

I like Aim-assisted a lot, will be even better if they fix the explosive traits to work with it.
Takedown Round on the other hand makes no sense to me, why the health cap? Why Explosives in Tools? How does it just spawn inside your enemies (lore wise)?

Zefrost.3425:

I feel the whole “electricity” themed engineer potential isn’t being tapped. 1 trait? That’s it? Sad.

Potential elite specialization right here.

The problem with AED that I don’t feel it’s old balance accounted for is how you wont use it before you are almost dead, unlike Healing turret and Bandage Self (there are no other heals right ;p ) that you use as soon as your health drops down 5000. This means other healing skills can be activated much sooner and get off cooldown much sooner.
This also takes better advantage of AMR, since you would have used your healing skill before you hit the treshhold unlike AED. It is way to easy to accidently let AMR proc before you use your AED and then miss out of the healing skill reset when you counted on it.

Today I tried Medkit, Healing Turret and AED in diffrent builds in Silverwaste, Drytop and Southsun cove. For some reason AMR never proced healing turret, however, Kinetic Battery proced Bandage Self quite often, giving me AED level of healing when I needed it. I need to do some more testing, but if AMR procs bandage self, then Med kit might be the better option for bunker builds that want to max out self heal (let us just ignore how bad the kit itself is for now).

AED worked kinda well for Explosionles SD rifle builds taking Firearms, inventions and Tools. But that was mostly because I could use bunkerdown to keep my health up and didn’t really need to bother thinking about using the main heal. And the AED toolbelt ability aims SD quite well.

Casia.4281:

Balanced around grenades… like everything else…

But, yes. give it a .5 second ICD, and shorten the bleed to 2 6s bleeds. Much more effective all around. Now it works with EVERY engineer weapon, not just grenades.

An internal cooldown would not work well with explotions AoE function.
I say: make it only proc on the primary grenade (the one that goes where you target). Then set the proc chance up. Now it works with SOME engineer weapons, not just grenade barrage.

Pffft, you Humans have it so easy, Asura have had shoes cutting our toes off for years.

Maybe using a directional groundtarget type skill (like Whirlwind Attack), that way we can easily control where the beem goes, and see how large the area is.

Also the healing needs to be more than 90×3, it’s not even noticable when I try to heal up important event NPCs like Vinewrath caravans.

I think the biggest problem with the explosive line is how Shrapnel and Steel-Packed Powder are balanced around grenades and their 3 hits. You can also pick up grenadier, Aim-assisted Rocket and Shrapnel at the same time, while Mortar will have to chose Shrapnel or Siege Rounds, both good in control/condi builds.

Re-read Alchemical tincture, it is not the same as the old trait.

1. 18th. june , around 17:00 Central Europe. ( I belive, might have been the 19th and a later time durring the day)
2. Are.1326
3. Lions Arch (Aurora Glade)
4. In between the lonbster docks eyes.
5. Doing the Trolls Revenge Jumping puzzle with friends
7. No spell effects, but my friends could not revive me, even when they were standing ontop of my dead body.
8. There was water under me that should have taken the fall if the server calculated a fall, the distance down would not have killed me if I fell.

I also died a bit later the same day, this time futher down the jumping puzzle just before the 4th chest.

You can get your crit chance back by taking the bottom first two traits in Inventions. It will give you 50% uptime of vigor (if you have alchemy), 10% on nearby foes and 10% on bleeding foes. Combine that with bleed on crit (minor) and additional bleed durration (also a minor, and you should have 20-40% additional crit chance to proc your Sigil (remember it have an ICD).

Also, since you are going into alchemy, invest in HgH with elixir gun as Arantheal said.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Thanks for compiling these in a single place. We’ll be trying to address most, if not all, of these issues as soon as we’re able.

Thank you so much, having someone from the team post that you are awear of this makes all the diffrence. We hope to hear more from you in the future.

The combo system have allways been interesting in theory, but neglected by both developers and players.

• Projectile finishers are mostly unreliable with only 20% chance to proc, you can’t plan them so players rarely care.
• The effects are unintuitive and requiers players to learn every combo instead of learning a system (All fields should have one effect that is done diffrently based on the type)
• The effects are unbalanced (not overpowered), some are quite good (Might stacking and AoE healing), while others are plain bad and ignored.
• Projectile finishers act weird and unexpected to uneducated players (the projectile have to directly hit the target and any suport effects are applied to allies in a small radius around the target)

The Mortar kit shows what kind of potential the combo system have, but also shows how flat it falls. The dream is to finally have a build focusing on finishers and their versitality, alowing both interesting strategies withing positioning and counter play.

I was really hopping then would use the additional stats to add a fourth stat to current sets (could sneak in Condi durration and boon durration this way) instead of just adding more flat.

Boon Durration and Condition Durration are the most interesting stats at the moment. Having more of it dosn’t just make numbers higher, it’s very versatile and can be used for support, control, offense and defense.

Adding more ways to get it could make the whole statbuilding part of GuildWars2 so much more interesting.

Xyonon.3987:

I agree that it should mention it in the tool tip, but this trait gives you an unstrippable vigor buff forever. You don’t have to use any other traits that give you vigor, so imo it’s totally fine.

But it completly invalidates the same trait lines first minor trait. Traits in a spec line should work together, not compeat.

Elixir U have its fury listed as haste and its might listed as something else. It does not apply its might when out of combat. HGH works on it tho and that might will be applied outside of combat.