Right now keeping it as is is hurting the class as someone new to the class might take it unaware that it literally does nothing.
It really is a shame that this trait has been broken since release and the only reason I can come with on why it isn’t fixed is that they just simply have problems with the coding in making it work. If that is the case either change the trait into something that works or remove it. Any of these are preferable to what we have now.
I’m surprised that more people don’t use the elixir gun (instead of nades) in WvW. It is absolutely punishing with maxed out condition damage stats and the traited range improvement. Plus you heal and give retaliation to zergs, so it feels like you’re actually helping the group.
Nades are better at damage and spreading conditions. Each grenade toss (when traited) can potentially spread conditions to up to 15 targets compared to elixer guns 1. Fumigate can also only hit 3 targets at a time so even that is inferior to spreading conditions. Grenades are also great at proccing on crit effects as each grenade you toss has a chance of proccing the effect since you throw 3 attacks at once. Elixer guns direct damage is also kitten poor compared to nades (even if your spec only for cond dmg, with full might stacks nades direct damage can be very noticeable while elixer gun’s will always be kitten poor). All of this combined with the fact Nades have longer range and WvW has devolved into a giant zerg blob fest and you can see why nades are more popular.
As a zerker, couldn’t I accomplish more damage by using bombs, or possibly wrench? What about stacking might with Flamethrower and trapping to rifle?
While the Bomb kit auto attack hits harder than Nades, it requires you to be in melee range to use and as a zerker thats one of the last places you want to be. The other nade skills hit harder than bomb skills though and are better at spreading conditions and stacking vuln for more damage.
While might stacking with a Flamethrower is pretty good, you’ll still do alot more damage with grenades. Don’t be fooled by the big number at the end of the Flamethrowers attack, that attack is spread out over 2.25 seconds. In that time you would have launched three grenade attacks which would have done more damage overall. Also you’re able to might stack using Grenades too. Overall grenades are better damage wise.
The tool kit also suffers from the Flamethrower’s shortcommings. Its attack chain while giving pretty high numbers, takes 2.25 sec to complete.
Overall the grenade kit is the best kit for pure damage (and conditions). However the other kits have their own niches and you can also switch between kits and cycle through their strongest attacks.
An easy way to build up stacks of might is abusing the fact that just switching into the Med Kit (not even using a skill from there) counts as using a healing skill. That way you can gain 12 stacks of might just from switching in and out of Med Kit (3 from sigil of battle, 3 from Enhanced Performance trait, 3 from 2 runes of Altruism).
Letting your elixers take care of the rest along with some might/boon duration runes will let you build up those might stacks fast.
Im a Tool
/15
Nothing much will happen. This community is pretty dead at this point.
Grenade Kit nerf is gonna happen sooner or later. It is only a matter of when at this point. Finally put the nail in the dps coffin of the engineer.
We’ve been expecting this ever since Anet in their infinite knowledge decided nerfing aoes was a priority.
Don’t worry guys, they buffed rifle turret to deal 476 flat damage every 2 seconds (238 dps) and reduced the Flame turret cooldown (provided you arn’t using deployable turrets) to make up for removing a build. Winning! Class is perfect pack your bags and go home.
Arn’t you thankful ?!
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It’s not a bug, just a feature to our class rngness. Anet just needs to fix the tooltips to:
Drink Elixir U, gaining quickness and a random utility skill from another profession.
Breaks stun
Quickness
Haste
Frenzy
Nothing
Am I missing something? Is there suppose to be a link or something? Is thread just a joke? Is this why Engineers can’t have nice things?
In the meantime this video is always worth a chuckle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q3em9s5I4c
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Why must every build be Grenade based on Engineer, so tired of grenades, it even feels totally wrong for a ranged class…
Its the strongest thing we have in engineer at the moment that synergizes particularly well within the class. It scales particularly well with both power and condition builds (moreso with conditions ever since the grenade and 100nade nerf).
We used to have a lot more toys to play around with, but Anet does that thing where they nerf stuff down alot (granted some of it was called for, even if I disagree with the degree they did it with). The old beta Pistol was extremely strong (nerfed down), the old Juggernaut Flamethrower (nerfed down and reworked), old elixer gun (nerfed down/bug fixed and then buffed up but nowhere near as good as before), old bomb kit, etc.
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This really needs more attention. For traits that are suppose to be powerful and “build defining”, we’re instead given garbage. And it is a real shame that they have been garbage since release and have seen no changes. Then again we still do have a trait that absolutely does not function at all that still hasn’t been fixed since release.
Flame Turrets cooldown uses the old cooldown.
Thumper turret’s tooltips use the old tooltip.
Since our KR got nerfed because it was too powerful and build defining as a tier 1 trait, how about we make our GM traits in the tools line powerful and build defining. Currently there’s a reason no ones was taking them with 30 points in tools or even not going 30 in the first place, because those traits are kitten. Can we get some changes for those traits that put them in line with some of our other GM traits like Grenadier, HGH, Juggernaut, etc?
Also anyone else get the sinking feeling Static Discharge will be getting the nerf hammer soon? It fit the description of why KR was nerfed; it is a powerful build defining low level trait. I’m predicting a 20 sec internal cooldown for it.
Be happy people still care enough about this class to complain about it. A forum full of whining is still infinintly better than the worst alternative, a dead forum that no one cares about.
I understand the frustration. I really do. Trying new things makes sense in that regard, but trying less effective things isn’t going to get us anywhere. Maybe there is an alternative path of relying information to the devs, but a negative method isn’t going to be it. Until then, really the best bet is to continue making threads on the topic and discuss in detail exactly what the issue is in both the Engineer and Bug Report forums. Bring it up to devs when you can and the like. The In-Game Client is a wonderful way to report the bug too. Don’t assume others have already done it, do it yourself.
How can you say what things are less effective or not? Currently right now nothing is effective. So we must try anything and everything to get the attention.
This is absolutely ridiculous. I don’t mean the change, because any patch fix is great for this game. I mean this whole line of thinking. They fixed a bug, and just because it wasn’t the Engineer’s bug you are all complaining?
I get it, you are frustrated that Scope is still bugged and that Deployable Turrets recently is bugged. However the fix to Hidden Killer was probably exceptionally easy to do. Now this is speculation driven by experience with programming, but to me I’d imagine the Scope bug is incredibly difficult to fix and the Deployable Turrets one is at least more difficult then the Hidden Killer one. The Hidden Killer bug is also a much higher priority as many more people were using it then these other two Engi traits. Is there anything wrong with that? No!
There are tons of bugs across every class that are like Scope and Deployable Turrets. Do all the other professions complain about things like this too? Actually yes, they do. We are not alone in this department. They have a lot of things to fix, and it sounds incredibly petty when we identify a bug fix and complain that it wasn’t ours.
What should you do instead? Make a thread with a topic concerning the Deployable Turrets bug. The Scope bug. Make bug reports about it. Put it in the Bug forums. Do anything other then the completely unproductive task of complaining about the bug in a thread obfuscated via complaints that other classes are getting fixes. That’s not going to get anything done and is nothing more then a fruitless activity of pessimism.
That’s cute, but we have been making bug reports/posts on this bug for the past 7 months. And nothing has changed so I will continue to press the issue in what ways I feel will bring attention to it the most until it is fixed. If you do not agree with the way I do it, then please by all means feel free to ignore/report me.
But we are getting off topic so great fix for the thieves Anet, however please fix our Engineer bugs too.
Hidden Killer is much easier to fix than Scope would be. Hidden killer has an active trigger (stealth). This is as easy as “Oh, I mis-typed an if/then statement.”
Scope, on the other hand, requires a little more. Especially since it depends on latency. Something as simple to the player as run-stop-pop-run can be missed by Scope’s watching script. Since it doesn’t take but a half second to shoot, by the time you stop and shoot, Scope would apply the +10% too late and the quick shot would be missed.
This is just one theory why Scope doesn’t work and is harder to fix than Hidden Killer.
Then they should have changed the Scope trait into something they can competently implement. Having it broke for 7+ months looks really bad on them.
“Profession
Thief:
Hidden Killer: This trait will now function correctly, and will display the increased critical chance in the hero panel."
But wait, wheres our Scope trait fix? Its only been broke since the game released.
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Dodge roll w/ Evasive Arcana + Confusion = Happy engineer.
Dodge roll w/ 5 point minor Explosive trait + confusion = Dead Engineer
Do people seriously think that developers don’t play Engineer at all? ArenaNet is a multi-million dollar company and you SERIOUSLY don’t think their developers know a lot more about class balance than their players? It’s their job to do this, we all do it for fun. Of course they have people who play each class, it would be insane to think they don’t. A lot of these changes are made in mind with ALL other changes made to other classes, everyone likes to look at their one class and scream “STOP NERFING US!” but never take it into the big picture.
It’s not like these changes are permanent, they do a lot of things to “test the waters” and see if it works or not. These forums are a mess, crying every patch I swear.
Dude they literally admitted before that they only have 2 guys on class balance.
Who cares about the cooldowns. We got some of our strongest abilities replaced with garbage abilities that lasts a whole 2 seconds..
And we all know that this means nerfs to this build are incomming.
I was looking forward to trying out a condition / turret build… then discovered that the turrets dont get the new buffs if you slot “deployable turrets”. Good times.
Uh, what…?
Deplorable turrets ( trait ) still uses old turrets, so if you have it on, flame turret will go back to its 40s cd, rifle turret will do 50% less damge and no cripple from thump!
its ironical how the trait, that people asked Anet to fix for soo long, is now bugged again and worst then before
With the new build that recently came out, only the flame turret is still broke and has the old cooldown. Rifle and Thumper now work properly (although the Thumper tooltip still uses the old one with deployable turret).
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So with the new build that came out, it appears that its now just the thumper turret has the old tooltip with deployable turrets. All the turrets now appear to function correctly with deployable turrets.
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Just watch next patch EG will be nerfed.
Taking the trait deployable turrets trait does not give the new buffed turrets. It uses the old values (pretty sure it also applies to supply crate). I must say that I’m not surprised that this bug made it through QA given the state of this class.
If this is what happens when they focus on this class, I’d rather them go back to pretending this class didn’t exist anymore.
Alright this is beyond joke status now. This trait has been broken since the release of the game 8 months ago! The only reasons I can come up for why this trait has not been fixed is A) They don’t care or B ) They are unable to code it in a way to make it work.
If its A) then they need to just straight come out and tell us so we can stop getting our hopes up. If its B ), they need to change the trait so they are able to code it in way that’s more appropriate for their ability level.
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Is the Scope trait still not fixed?
Its still only been like since game release.
“Watch the ledges”
“Look Up! Up!”
“There’s something in the water!!!!”
The kit refinement nerf doesn’t even affect the build it was meant specifically to nerf (100 nades). Instead its bugged out and doesn’t impact the two kits that help make 100 nades possible, grenades and tools. Its a failure in all fronts.
Pretty much tells you exactly how much care and testing goes into the Engineer class.
So from the SOTG interview, they’re going to push ahead with the aoe nerf. Pretty much our entire class relies mostly on aoe with the only single target skills being:
Rifle #1
Tool #1
Prybar
Poison Volley
Rifle Turret
And errm… that’s it.
So it seems that as a whole, our class is going to be hit with the nerf bat.
Now they’re saying that this nerf will be carefully applied and tuned. However given Anets history with this class, there is little chance that such a change will be anything other than a negative detriment. It certainly does seem demoralizing knowing that such nerfs are on the horizon.
So I went over some of the interview, and I picked up that they wanted to add some things that give some hard counters to boon stacking builds. Now as this was mainly aimed towards elementalists, I’m sure our elixer drinking engineers will also feel its effects.
Yes, you know how thieves kill you in 5 seconds? If you have boons it will be 2 seconds.
Actually, the specific counter they mentioned was to create at least a couple of NPCs (not player character abilities, NPCs, presumably dungeon bosses or event bosses) that have preferential hate towards the player character with the most boons on them.
The subject of boon stacking came up in one other regard: their explanation for why thief spike damage is so high is that they were specifically worried that, since they were striking from stealth, they wouldn’t be able to use a boon stripping ability first, so they needed to be able to hit through any plausible combination of boons. They admitted that this made them too powerful against other builds, and said that they can’t do anything about that unless they decide to nerf boons across the board, which they said they’re considering, but only very cautiously if at all. That part really would hit elixir engineers, but no harder than it would hit several other classes.
They didn’t say what their fix would be to the dual problem of condition stacking limits kicking in and ubiquitous condition removal, but they did say that the damage of condition-stacking abilities was balanced around a lot less condition removal than the game currently sees. My impression is that, since they’ve admitted they can’t increase the number of DoT stacks allowed, that pretty much paints them into the corner of having to really increase the damage numbers from all condition stacks. That’d be a huge buff for quite a few engineer builds, not least of which my beloved elixir gun.
If you go to 34:15 in the pod cast they specifically state they want to add things that will counter boon stacking through traits or somesuch.
So I went over some of the interview, and I picked up that they wanted to add some things that give some hard counters to boon stacking builds. Now as this was mainly aimed towards elementalists, I’m sure our elixer drinking engineers will also feel its effects.
Also I still don’t get this concept of “mid-range”. Either we are at long range lobbing grenades or rifling, or in their face with tool kit/bomb/every other engineer skill.
Wait is our rifle weapon damage going to increase, or rifle turrets? It is kinda unclear.
For all the talk about nerfing classes, it seems the only classes that actually do get nerfed are classes like Engineers (because they are so overpowered right?!?).
This whole KR nerf/mess is pretty representative of the Engineer class as a whole. Something is done to the class but its not really thought out nor even tested to make sure its working right in the first place.
And yet while changes like this occur, bugs like the Scope trait are still not fixed after 6 months.
I’d consider it a buff if the #3 ability let us kill ourselves so we can waypoint faster.
Kit refinement nerf didnt seem to go through, there is no IDC atm. Abuse this before they nerf it.
It only applies if you use the FT or EG kr first. All other kits are unaffected.
But yes its best to abuse this until it gets fixed.
Show me your math and I’ll show you mine.
Done. Check out this post:
Thanks… um… which one? I’m not seeing any calculations, nothing plugged into the damage calculations formula or any of that. I could be missing it…
here. Those calculations were done back when only amulets and rings were available, but they were rather conservative in their estimates, and that calculation is not even factoring in procs or boons, which would increase the difference even more.
Now show yours.
Only amulets and rings? Will do. First, the calculation for damage:
Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)
Now, when comparing two different damages and calculate the percent change we know that the coefficient, armor and weapon damage, being constant, negate each other since they’ll be equally represented above and below the line when dividing. Hence they can be left out or substituted with numbers that make the math easy. As such, I did my calculations based on my mesmer. First, the amulet. The exotic I had was the Ruby Orichalcum of the berserker flavor, the ascended is the berserker equivalent. Power with the exotic = 1982, with the ascended = 1993.
Before: 1100*1982*.5/1000 = 1090.1 (Assuming a coefficient of .5 and an armor of 1000 to simplify the math)
After: 1100*1993*.5/1000= 1096.15(1096.15 – 1090.1)/ 1096.15 = .00552 or a single attack damage increase (not DPS) of approx. 0.55%.
The same rings now. The exotic ring adds a total of 92 power, the ascended equivalent adds 103 power, or +11 each, identical to the amulet, which means the math is the same at 0.55% increase in damage. Or, adding the three together we get:
Before: 1100*1982*.5/1000 = 1090.1
After: 1100*2015*.5/1000 = 1108.25(1108.25 – 1090.1) / 1108.25 = 0.164, or a 1.64% increase in damage for the amulet and both rings, berserker to berserker equivalent upgrade.
EDIT: Adding backpieces… again berserker to berserker adds 13 power (43 to 56). That makes after = 1100 * 2028 * .5 / 1000 = 1115.4.
(1115.4 – 1090.1) / 1115.4 = 0.0227, or a damage increase of 2.27% for the equivalent upgrades of 2 rings, amulet and back pack, berserker to berserker equivalent. The math I saw on that link did something wrong, coming up with twice that amount.
Did you seriously not include the increase in crit damage or the increase in crit chance from greater precision? You need to add in those things in order to give a better estimate of your average expected damage.
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See the thing is we don’t even know what they even intend with this nerf right now. Currently only FT and EG trigger the global cd. Tool kit and Grenades and Bomb can still chain into each other. However they still have internal cooldowns that are ~20 sec. From the wording of the patch it can be interpreted that the global CD applies to all kits, and the next KR can be used within the next 10 sec. However it is currently bugged (I’m assuming) so we don’t even know whats intended or not.
It’s pretty bad when it appears they half-kitten a nerf.
so they equalized the CD of all kits to 10 second and removed the ability to drop 4 kits all at once.
sounds like kittens are mewling that they can’t rofl foes by button mashing any more. I mean I’ve read numerous times that people felt they were just mashing buttons with KD hoping to hit something, and now it is timed and reliable and there every 10 seconds.
on top of an exploit fix (which you all seem to call a nerf) they buffed 3 other kits. and you still complain.
Well its currently not working correctly as you can still tool kit kr into grenade kr. However elixer gun and ft kr does kick in the cd.
But working properly, theres a global 10 sec cd for kr so you can’t chain kr. However kits still have their own internal cd too. So grenade kr still has the 20 sec cd.
1. Scope
2. Adredenal Implant
3. Acidic Elixers
Well at least the devs are aware that we are the butt end of jokes.