Guild Wars 2

In PVE back when Orr was popular I ran a coated bullets build.

P/S
10/30/0/30/0

Full zerker gear. After buffs the pistol attacks could only hit for 1.1k, but the pistol’s auto attack explodes on every enemy along the way, hitting 5 additional enemies. This meant that, in peak conditions, you could land 25 hits with every auto attack doing, 27k damage with each attack.

But that is somewhat selective in its use. At maximum range, coated bullets can hit twice, doing double the pistol damage against a single target. However, in general this only equates to roughly the same damage as the rifle.

Hopefully it’ll come sooner than that turret fix I’ve been waiting for.

Geff.1930:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Player Character.9467:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

and click on my various utilities.

Well there’s your problem.

No mouse, no right click, no right click hold, no gamer mouse Believe me, I’ve tried surrounding my hands with every “recommended” keybinds system that other people use, and it doesn’t work. There’s only one thing that lets me Move, Target, Change my Camera, Dodge, and take action at the same time, and that is if I use the mouse to quickly execute skills and target with them while my keybinds are devoted to movement and dodging.

I’ve gotten quite good at it, but nonetheless unless I blow a lot of money on a gaming mouse (and a table to use it on), I can’t overcome those limits.

There is such a thing called tab targetting.

You don’t need a gaming mouse. Virtually all mouses nowadays have a back key a forward key and a middle mouse button. That is a gaming mouse.

Mesmers will PWN you with tab targeting, Chuck Norris style.

It would be… very interesting. I’m not sure it would be particularly useful, but I would probably prefer it more to Dhuumire.

Still, though, I’m in favor of either confusion or torment there instead of burning.

EDIT: I thought about it a bit, and I suppose the biggest problem with changing it so chill does damage is that it basically just flashes up a gigantic indicator that says “They’re going to chill you. Block/dodge it, or be ready to cleanse!”. Unless you are running a dedicated chill build, there’s always the chance this will activate and you won’t catch that little icon under their name saying “Chill them now!”

It’ll be really hard to use, but the advantage is that it won’t be overidden like burning is. As a unique condition, this will allow Necromancer to do hefty condition damage without being immediately mitigated. By both your own teammates and their cleanses.

I suppose the issue is more with running a thief in a zerg than running a shortbow in a zerg. Thieves generally have shorter range on their ranged weapons, and they rely on melee attacks to do the most damage. Problem is, they also have no protection, very low health, and most of their defenses come from blinds and evades, which leaves the thief open to being swarmed. They can contribute meaningfully to melee trains, though.

That said, the Shortbow seems like a logical choice for a zerg fight. The bouncing projectile does relatively high damage while tagging multiple enemies. The cluster bomb can spam a blast finisher as well as do an AoE attack or a highly dispersed ran on enemies. The evade shot is decent for escapes and defending yourself from a zerg. The poison shot can poison people and also spam weakness in an area. The shadow shot is a good movement and escape skill.

Considering the alternative is lolpistol, the shortbow definitely wins. There are several things a thief can contribute to a mindless zerg. One of my favorites is scorpion wire, which is really useful for yanking an enemy right into your frontline, killing them very quickly.

I use carrion on my condition build (can’t speak for others) for several reasons.

1)Thieves don’t have good crit procs. We have the occasional fury, and 2 second haste (which, if using a P/D right, is nigh useless), and 1 stack of vulnerability per second, but basically you are using Rabid for the Sigil of Earth, and the Sigil is only so-so at best.

2)Thieves benefit more from vitality. As a class with the lowest HP, giving us a lot more HP makes us quite a bit more survivable. Thieves have the ability to hide and disengage, so healing up isn’t too much of an issue.

3)Thieves benefit more from power. Precision is really only good if you have good procs or if you have a high crit damage. That build has neither. Because of this, the extra power will help out with doing more damage than precision would. I also run D/D right next to P/D, and power really helps out with Backstab, Heartseeker, and even Shadow Strike.

I wouldn’t recommend using a condition necromancer until at least 60. At low levels, conditions tend to scale horribly, and it is much better to just go with power. At 60 is when you get all of the grandmaster traits, and it is also when you get gear that gives enough stats to make conditions truly matter.

I’d highly suggest at least 10 more points into explosive to increase the radius of bomb.

Considering the balance strategy for this game is whackamole, it won’t change at all by having more skills.

I’ve actually done a bit of super-amateur game design myself, so I can answer the question.

The thing with the leveling system in the games is that they are usually an afterthought to the content of the game. What game designers will do is make the story, then the environment, then the enemies, and then once those 3 elements are in place they will go about balancing the stats needed for each section, as well as how quickly stats are gained. This establishes the pacing of the game, which is a 4th important element to design around.

Usually, the peak stats that are desired for any circumstance are decided beforehand (stats at maximum level against final/extra boss), and then afterward the developers make a system that slowly grows toward having those stats. This can be accomplished one of three ways:

1) Freehanding. Sometimes they’ll just make the experience equation, and then after some alpha testing the gauge roughly what level it’ll take to reach certain content, and then set around that level the maximum, and give a stat distribution that grows along the way. This method has fallen out of practice, for its simplicity is often times its demise: this type of leveling only works in circumstances where there’s nothing gained in levels but stats, so leveling in general ends up being something tacked on to the game at the end.

2) Ability Resource Management. This is what GW2 does. Leveling up in the game gives you trait points which are invested into traits to give certain abilities. Here, the maximum level determines the overall amount of resources you can invest, and this is chosen as a matter of balance. If the level is too low, then you don’t have enough points to buy a variety of traits to make a variety of builds. If the level is too high, then you have too many points and you just buy every good trait with no sacrifices.

3)Arbitrary build standpoint. Sometimes, for the sake of the sanity of everyone in game development, they’ll set the level cap to an arbitrary number in the beginning. Then, the leveling pacing as well as equipment stats, customization, ability resource pools, and so are determined from there. The advantage to this method is that you can adjust the stats, the experience gain, the resources, everything to all fit into this number, so balancing enemies and plot lines can be done as they are made instead of later on in the process. The disadvantage to this process is that the system becomes inflexible, and should changes be needed in the future it can end up screwing up everything.

This is what is done in general. As it happens, there is no strict manual on how to pick levels while making an RPG, so often times whomever is making the game will just come up with a system on the fly.

The thing that keeps nagging in the back of my mind is that I could’ve sworn that all smoke fields were nerfed in the past, making it so they only apply blinds once every 2 seconds instead of once every second. Then, the fields were extended to be longer than they were previously (usually from 3 seconds to 4 seconds) in order to accommodate this nerf in stealth application.

Was this reversed at some time?

Wukunlin.8461:

This is actually the first mmo I know with this sort of problem. It is a huge oversight and no sign of a fix with the game nearing it’s first birthday.

As for the people who use the flaw to troll, kill them with fire.

It isn’t the first for mine. I’ve encountered MMOs where when the former leaves it will sometimes cause a glitch that will halt progress in multi-mission based areas.

That said, it is inexcusable. The fact that the dungeon is hosted on an instance that terminates as soon as the leader leaves has absolutely no excuse. Just host the instance on the server, and then eliminate the instance once everyone leaves. THIS SHOULD BE SIMPLE!

Player Character.9467:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

and click on my various utilities.

Well there’s your problem.

No mouse, no right click, no right click hold, no gamer mouse Believe me, I’ve tried surrounding my hands with every “recommended” keybinds system that other people use, and it doesn’t work. There’s only one thing that lets me Move, Target, Change my Camera, Dodge, and take action at the same time, and that is if I use the mouse to quickly execute skills and target with them while my keybinds are devoted to movement and dodging.

I’ve gotten quite good at it, but nonetheless unless I blow a lot of money on a gaming mouse (and a table to use it on), I can’t overcome those limits.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Take any group of 5 players, and they’ll capture camps and kill Dolyaks five times faster.

You are now making couple of false assumptions:
- that 5 man group also travels 5 times faster than a solo player, which of course is fallacy. Big part of the time is actually spent moving around and solo player can do that as efficiently
- that the 5-man team never need to fight against enemy invadersand always captures the supply at right time, in other words when the lord is not buffed, no need to wait

I have found that at least here in EU top tiers a solo roamer without any stealth or teleportation skills can survive much longer than most small teams. One can stay alive hours upon hours. Enemy zergs rarely chase after solo players as it is not efficient, but enemy 5 man-team might chase a solo player (which is not then doing the supply camps). A 5 man team on the other hand often gets the interest of an enemy zerg, thus facing complete or partial wipe.

I agree that 5-man is of course better in building stuff and defending towers. But for supply camps and quaggans etc. 5 solo players all capping different targets would probably get more their server than 5 players moving in one group.

#1: It is a small map, so travel times are negligible. Also, every second that solo roamer spends slowly capturing a camp is a second that a small team is already moving to their next objective. This also isn’t including run time for when that solo roamer gets caught and killed by a bigger group. Because of this, the small team has a culminating travel advantage that grows the longer they are active in the field over a solo roamer.
#2: This is assuming that the small team fights invaders. A small team can dispatch an invader much quicker than a solo roamer because they come with 5 times the offensive power as well kitten times the control. The 5 man team can also kill more invaders than the solo roamer, contributing toward more loot and greater impact on the field.

Here in the US, enemy zergs love to send 20 or so random players from their zerg to chase a solo roamer. This is assuming they don’t just pull that player or bowl over them instantly, getting hit by dozens auto attacks in an instant. Of course, the advantage to a small team is that you often won’t be attacked by solo or duo roamers, who are usually thieves and mesmers that attempt to burst you down as quickly as possible. There is no safety while running by yourself here; you are a target and little more.

There are some things I’m looking forward to, and some things I’m not.

For example, Mesmers/Elementalists/Necromancers using Rifles and Pistols. Anyone who was a fan of Outlaw Star probably remembers being disappointed that something like Caster Shells rarely ever shows up. Apparently in great works of fiction, no one ever has the idea of propelling magic with gunpowder. I’ve always been fascinated with bullet technology in real life, and while the engineer provides some form of trick bullet, I’m looking forward to what happens when these classes get firearms.

Other things… not so much. For example, I can’t see much of a use for a scepter or a focus on a Warrior or an Engineer. A Torch is counter-intuitive to a Thief (try and stay hidden while glowing like a nightlight). I can’t figure out what a guardian would use a Dagger for, and a ranger with a hammer just seems… cruel to the animals they are fighting.

Whenever I refer to solo roamers, I’m usually talking about those players who walk around looking for 1 vs 1 fights.

The big problem is that pretty much everything you listed can be done a whole lot better with a small team. Take any group of 5 players, and they’ll capture camps and kill Dolyaks five times faster. They also have the added benefit that they carry 5 times the supply, letting them use siege and take towers. They can also defend towers, both with and without siege.

The only thing solo roamers are actually good at is scouting for larger groups. Otherwise, grab a small team.

I’ve never played or fought a spirit ranger, but I’ve done a whole lot of things like that:

Turret Engineer: Destroy the turrets and the offense/control potential of the Engi plummets.

Spirit Weapon Guardian: Destroy the spirit weapons and the supplementary offense/control lowers. Not as severe as turret engi, but still something to do.

Minion Master Necro: Destroy the minions and the Necro becomes a big bag of HP.

I think the only class that this doesn’t work on is Mesmers, since they summon clones and phantasms quicker than you can kill them. From what everyone else says, I’m assuming that the spirit rangers follow the same logic.

Having looked at the structure and function of a compound bow in real life, I can definitely say that is an engineer’s weapon. Seriously, the thing is a mind-boggling set of gears and pulleys that doesn’t make sense until you’ve fired one a dozen times.

A good lesson to learn early in life is that other people will always make mistakes and have big oversights in their designs The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Remember: N.A.S.A. forgot toilets on their first space craft. Hundreds of scientists and engineers all working on the project, using a toilet roughly twice a day, never stopped and thought “You know, this might be important on a spacecraft”.

Exploit. Each time one of these crops up, where someone can jump over the walls of a tower or keep, Arenanet fixes the map so it doesn’t work anymore.

I’m not talking about the build that a solo roamer uses. I’m talking about the fact that, as a solo roamer, you can only be outnumbered. Duos, trios, 5 man groups, commander groups, big zergs, the bigger they are the less likely you are to win. Nearly any well built class can 1 vs. 2 in the right circumstances. The problem is that it is really hard to 1 vs. 8 with the right build. At that point, you are a free loot bag to whomever stumbles upon you, and this comes at the cost of your repair bill.

In sPVP I don’t have many combos. I use the grenade kit and net turret/rocket turret. The burning and the control really helps with the grenades skill shots, but I wouldn’t call this a combo as much as it is good synergy. Anyway, I have a few combos I use in WvW.

#1: Magnet + Freeze Grenade. Using freeze grenade at point blank range with 70% condition duration gives a 10 second chill, which lets me hit my opponent with everything.

#2: Toss Elixir S + Overcharged Shot. If you gain stability, you won’t get knocked back, and so you can layer up more combos from there.

#3: Static Shot + Pry Bar + Gear Shield. I use this mainly against nooby thieves. When I get ambushed I immediately open with static shot, then follow up with the pry bar, and then hide behind gear shield as those thieves wail on it in a confused and impotent frenzy. The confusion hits for 1200-1400 damage a tick, so after a few shots the thief is nearly dead.

Those are the 3 big ones I use a lot.

I don’t see the point of solo roaming, even on a thief.

#1: You don’t accomplish objectives that well. Maybe you can slowly solo a camp or if you hide well you can solo a tower, but in general forming a 4-5 man does things so much quicker, offers so much more power, and offers so much more safety.

#2: You don’t get that much loot. In group vs. group you get a lot more loot bags and experience than wandering around picking off enemies 1 by 1.

#3: You are bellying yourself up for ambush by anything that is built for an ambush, or also anything that doesn’t roam alone. This makes solo roaming more expensive due to repair costs.

I don’t really have an issue with thieves, either. Every once in awhile they can gank me in WvW, but most of the time they die then run away.

I main a Necro in WvW and minor an Engi in WvW.

Every team is made up of 5 individuals. The idea that the game should be designed so an individual cannot stand on their own is just faulty design. Already, competitive teams have different builds that contribute different things, such as area control, debuffs, bunkering, and burst DPS. The ability for some builds to kind-of do multiple things at once is actually good design, because it allows hybridding of roles and more viability in build diversity.

Take the inversion: Dedicated Holy Trinity team MMO. You have to have a certain team composition, and you can’t break away or be unique about it. A hybrid tank/DPS will always be worse than having a pure of either side, and a hybrid damage/healer will always be worse than having the pure healer.

I’m glad GW2 has such an open ended system. It lets me be creative.

I love passives. With lack of a mouse or the ability to hold right-click, my peak PVP performance is severely limited. I only have so much mental capacity to both maneuver my character, pay attention to tells on the screen, and click on my various utilities. To say that builds like these do not take skill is absurd, since it requires maintenance and positioning and timing. Using their activation abilities at the wrong time is just as costly and wasteful as if you wasted a skill that didn’t sit on the field before using it.

Building for them requires sacrifices, too. When a player picks something like dagger training for their utility, they have to do this at the cost of picking something else for a utility. They have to invest those trait points into that line, and then pick dagger training over improvisation or quick venoms. These abilities aren’t some free benefit that gets thrown on top of whatever it is you use. It is there instead of something else.

Maintenance =/= skill. The fact is that players exist that choose to use builds that are lower maintenance than some 20-cooldowns button mashfest (my biggest criticism as an engineer main), and there is nothing wrong with having a low maintenance build. The only thing wrong here is that players are intolerant of other people’s playstyles.

Engineers are the 3 wheel of the universe. Just pick whatever and it fits.

I think one of the issues ATM is that Automated Response is bugged. It is supposed to just reduce condition duration by 100%, instead of giving full immunity.

Then again, like most bugs that engineers have, it’ll take months before it gets fixed. Man I wish my turrets were fixed…

I feel like I’m in the same boat. I play WvW mostly at night when most of the NA server is asleep, and I still have to deal with horrendous skill lag. When I decided to main a Staff Necro in WvW, I never thought that would mean that I would spam the auto attack for 75% of the fight. Glad I’m specced as a bit of a hybrid.

I don’t play WvW as much anymore. This is because even when I go to play WvW, I can’t play WvW.

I say that the skill lag is the worst problem WvW faces, and it should be fixed as soon as possible. Any content that doesn’t work is immediately bad.

The biggest problem with transferring over is that I didn’t pick my server based on WvW prowess. No, SoR wasn’t always at the top of the line. I picked it because, after playing on another server, I decided I liked the SoR community better.

I don’t want to risk paying real money to transfer to some other server where 3 out of 5 players are entitled elitists.

Whenever I used AR, it didn’t do a thing against melee classes.

Warrior: Has several movement skills and swiftness. They just leap at me and kill me quickly because they run power builds and lol at condition immunity. That or they whip out the rifle and shoot me to death.

Guardian: Has leaps and shadowsteps and also swiftness. Also they have good area denial skills and condition cleansing, meaning that you can’t permanently disable them.

Thief: Has a lot of shadowstep abilities as well as leaps, swiftness, and a movement signet. Also they have stealth, meaning that you can’t disable them unless you get lucky with tossing grenades around.

Ranger: rarely runs a pure melee spec. They just shoot you in the back when you run.

Mesmer: Has teleportation and stealth, letting them close the gap quickly. Besides, clones pursue you like mad when shattered.

Elementalist: This is the most mobile class in the game. Enough said.

Necromancer: Rarely runs a pure melee spec. They have pulls and teleports, and also they can just pop into Death Shroud to hit you with Life Blast no matter what they are running.

Engineer: Just as OP as the other engineer everyone claims is OP.

Like I said before: AR never saved me once. If the complaint is that a pure melee spec can’t catch up to you, then I’d blame the build more than anything else. Once while trying out different builds for my pre-patch necro, I tried out a chill heavy build. It didn’t do anything special, except against one warrior I fought that didn’t bring a longbow or rifle for some reason.

I have a hard time coming up with the specs nowadays that would be stopped by AR completely. The only ones I can come up with are rabid terrormancers and rabid mesmers.

HGH has nothing to fear from AR. Under HGH those grenades hit for over a thousand per toss, easy.

Aww… I want to talk about how now Engineers are the big bad wolf

The biggest issue with thieves is that players want to be able to solo roam without getting ambushed by what is the best ambush class in the game. That’s really all there is to it.

In small team fights, thieves can contribute a bit with targeted kills and giving stealth to other teammates, but otherwise they’re nothing too special. Best part here is that they have a spammable blast finisher on one of their weapons.

In big team fights thieves don’t do anything that meaningful. They have short range on their ranged skills, and they need to be in melee range to do a ton of damage. Their support skills are mild, and other than stealthing and targeted kills there’s always a class that can do better.

In zerg fights thieves might as well not be there, since there isn’t any targeted kills that are meaningful. Other than scorpion wire pulling enemies into the horde of ants one by one, there isn’t anything special they accomplish.

For tower/keep defense they aren’t particularly special. They have short range on their AoE attacks, and they don’t have distanced controls, either. Other than stealthing a small group to ambush a far off undefended siege, they contribute nothing special.

For tower/keep assault… you know the drill. They can spam cluster bomb on the walls while being at dangerously close range, and they can pull players off the wall with scorpion wire, but otherwise they might as well not be there. This is nothing special at all.

There are only two places where the thief really shines, and that is ambushing solo roamers/very small groups, and in small group vs. group combat. Some player will be running around the map by themselves, a thief specced to ambush people will see them, that player won’t see the thief coming, and then after the thief ambushes them they come to the forums and cry that thieves are OP in WvW.

I couldn’t disagree more. On the map, thieves contribute little more than ganking solo roamers that themselves don’t contribute that much. Their utilities otherwise are not unique and far from being the most potent of their kind, rendering most classes other than a thief preferable to the WvW scene. The only class that arguably contributes less to WvW is the ranger.

The thing that is deceptive about this is that toughness is not the stat that is used in damage calculations. Armor is.

Armor is the base armor of your character + how much toughness you have. Heavy armor classes have a base armor of 1211, medium has 1094, and light has 916. So, if you take two classes with 2k touhness, the light armor class will have 2916 armor, and the heavy armor class will have 3211 armor, making the heavy armor class take less damage.

Effectively, heavy armor has 291 extra points over light armor classes. By default, heavy armor reduces damage more. However, this doesn’t take into consideration that a player may choose to build themselves up to have more toughness or more HP than the other class. Builds trump armor tiers greatly, so if you want to be defensive, you’re much better off sticking to block/evade/control skills, and building stats around being defensive. Armor tiers won’t take the work away from you there.

darkchicken.8692:

ok so i tried to make the build from what everyone says an engi always have on them with AR

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQFAUlspqb3zSgF87IRoHF2+qV0jHTZH/pgcB

I couldnt possibly fit everything in there like protection injection, speedy kit, backpack regenerator (since you know, elixir gun and bomb), i couldnt get either all those elixirs to clean away with cleaning formula 409 since i had to make place for the OP elixir gun and the bomb kit. So we got no supply drop since we need elixir X for the perma balance too.

I think alot of people dont know alot about engi and they are just mad. There is only a certain quantity of traits and utility we can take and the way some of you described us, there would be a ton of different AR build.

So lets try to get this straight. At the start people were complaining of AR and perma conditions cleansing via elixirs, then we moved to hold a perma weakness while comboing in the field of the EG gun (the weakness last one second so you better not combo if you want it to be perma.., and the damage is terrible) then we moved to the fact that AR user play with bomb kit to heal and hold point.

I dont really know what we are debating anymore, only AR? Engi bunker with AR trying to make a stand on a point? Ar + Cleansing formula? Ar + protection talent?

Perhaps we should start making argument while linking a specific build because the way some people talk about it, i got way more traits and utility slots.

They aren’t debating the engineer. They’re debating the boogeyman. The boogeyman has no set form, no set build, no weaknesses, and no practicality limits. He’s under the bed, in the closet, around every corner, and he’s right behind you.

I’m the boogeyman now. It’s pretty sweet, hanging out with the lochness monster and Elvis. BTW, Elvis has lost all the weight. He’s in pretty good shape now.

The biggest problem with healing is that healing isn’t guaranteed. It can be interrupted, controlled over, burst down, and degraded by poison.

EDIT: Also, vitality gives a better starting investment for every class that isn’t a necromancer. That includes warriors, too.

Something I do hate is that in sPVP there’s no way to achieve a golden ratio, when armor = HP/10. The best way to build for durability is undoubtedly to gain vitality until your HP is roughly 10x your armor, then increase them at the same rate. For some classes like the thief and guardian, it is nigh impossible to reach the golden ratio. For other classes like the Warrior or the engineer, it is fairly easy to reach the golden ratio. The necromancer starts out at the golden ratio… lucky ducks.

I do find it hilarious that engineers have evolved into some kind of boogeyman for classes to fight against. I’ve read a lot of complaints about how engineers can apparently counter everything that you throw at them (EXCEPT FOR BLOODY CONDITION DURATION!!!) and have limited access to tools.

I find it hilarious because it both speaks about how infrequently engineers are played, and also about how good the class is themselves. I feel I should talk about it here:

The engineer’s greatest strength is their weakness. We engi’s don’t have an overcentralized build that is clearly stronger than the others. Repeated nerfs have seen to that. Instead, we have something much scarier on our side: the unknown. Without a centralized build, opposing players truly have no clue what an engineer will do until they do it. Swapping out utilities and stats is done more as a matter of preference, and not a matter of necessity, and changing just 1 utility or using a different trait utility can make for very different strengths on what would otherwise be the exact same build.

It is the fear of the unknown that makes us so intimidating. There’s a saying in war: “If you don’t know where the enemy is, then the enemy is everywhere”. It applies here as well: If you don’t know what an engineer does, than the engineer does everything. You can rest a bit easier to know that the competition in our utility slots is fierce. The different kits and utility lines are all fragmented heavily in our traits, making it so building effectively can be limiting. With every choice for a utility slot we sacrifice something big that also could’ve gone there.

Take, for example, the feared HGH build. Now, I’ve seen many HGH builds run 3 elixirs for their utilities, and do quite bad. Its simple to know why: they lack an offensive option. Our weapon skills are… meh at best. So then you swap out an elixir for something else that can do damage, usually a kit. Then what do you lose? Do you lose the burst damage + projectile reflection? Do you lose the stunbreak/evade + stealth/stability? Do you lose the endurance regen + aoe Rez? Do you lose the long duration fury/might/swiftness/retaliation? Once you’ve made your choice, then you come up with more weaknesses. Maybe you don’t have any control skills to make your hits count. Maybe you don’t have a stun breaker anymore. Maybe you can’t cleanse conditions anymore. Maybe you no longer have any defensive utilities.

Out of all 5 classes I play, the engineer is the hardest one to build for. As soon as an engineer thinks they have something, their weakness is going to walk right up and gank them, and that engineer goes right back to the drawing board.

My best advice for fighting an engineer is patience with steady pressure. Once you learn what their utilities are, then you can devise a plan of attack.

You know, I main an engineer. I’ve used one in sPVP for a long time. And I have have used a dozen different weapon and equipment combinations on that engineer. During all that time, Automated Response has not saved me once.

Not. Once.

The reasons for this are quite simple: while engineers certainly are great at doling out conditions, engineers themselves are only slightly above adequate at removing them. In that department we have very few effective options. I’ll list some of them:

Cleaning Formula 409. This cleanses one random condition each time you use an elixir. Problem is, you probably only have 3 elixirs at most, and so to us Cleaning Formula 409 against another condition build you have to burn all of your cooldowns and waste 5 seconds doing absolutely nothing but chugging down elixirs in order to get the effects of 409. So you can blow your heal, or blow your burst, or blow your stun breaker, or just use elixir C and have no need for 409 anyway. But elixir C doesn’t do much anything that useful, either.

409 is only useful for passive cleansing against lightly applied conditions. You get hit with something like Signet of Spite and you are helpless, either from being unable to clean those conditions or being unable to do anything else after cleaning those conditions.

Healing Turret: this cleanses 2 conditions every 20 seconds or so. Maybe 2 conditions every 15 seconds if someone isn’t smart enough to destroy the turret when it is on the ground, spitting out AoE regen for everyone. This is fairly average as far as condition cleanses go, and is matched by the condition cleaning available to pretty much every class in the game. The big problem is that the heal will frequently vault you over the 25% HP mark, making the cleansing moot in respect to AR.

Elixir C: This is also fairly standard in that it is a single full cleanse on a rather long timer. 40 seconds, and to boot it just gives random boons with a 5 second duration. Elixir C is rarely ever used in tournaments because it doesn’t do anything but clean conditions, and competition for utility slots on engis is fierce.

Rocket Boots: Cures movement disabling conditions only. This is something half the classes in the game have already.

And from there, we have a few scattered condition cleanses, like 1 in Super Elixir, a slow one in Toss Elixir R, 1 in Med Kit, immunity to blindness, etc. All in all, this adds up to make it so in many Engineer builds, there is a few spots of condition removal in different places, or one big cleanse fixed on via Elixir C.

The only strategy that would really make sense using AR is to use Elixir C, and just refuse to actually pop Elixir kittenil you hit that 25% health mark. This leads to a big problem though. By doing this, you are letting a condition build beat the snot out of you until you are at the brink of death, and then utilizing a risky maneuver to go “ha-ha, I’m immune to part of your damage”. You will have a relatively strong enemy to still fight against, since completely unmitigated conditions will disable and destroy a player with no way to fight back against them. If you get stunned or knocked down, then you have 2 seconds to live. And the worst case scenario is if they have highly increased condition duration, since that increased duration will go right through AR. Th common necro specs ATM run with a 50% increase in bleed duration, so overall you are only cutting the effectiveness of bleeds by 2/3rds.

There is a big risk to this as well: if you encounter anything that isn’t a pure, rabid condition build, AR is completely useless. Power builds and Hybrid builds will just auto attack you into oblivion at that point if they can’t finish you via some combo they undoubtedly have, and even a carrion condition build will have enough power to slap you to death without the extra condition damage. Also, it will never save you in a 1 vs. 2 scenario.

Because of this, it is a fairly bad trait. It only works when things go precisely right. Not a pure condi build? It does nothing. Get CCed near death? It does nothing. Forced to pop your cleanses beforehand? You’ll get eaten up. Facing a build specced with big condi duration increases? It’ll go right through you.

Suffice to say, I’ve stopped using it. The alchemy tree has far more useful utility in it than AR, especially since AR is competing with the epic trait of HGH.

Something I do wonder is if ascended gear will be overly limited in its stat distributions.

Exotic Trinkets and Exotic Armor both have equipment slots where you can throw in jewels and runes and stuff. This lets you mix ’n match equipment easily, use hybrid sets of runes to make some pretty interesting products from them.

Ascended items just have an infusion slot. From the looks of things, ascended items might be stuck with a default stat distribution of “their class + the corrosponding jewel equivlaent” in order to make room for their infusion slots. In this manner, ascended armor would be valuable because it would have more stats, but exotic armor still would have a place by allowing mixing stats and runes.

Needs moar clarification on blog post.

I’m not looking forward to this change. The new ascended equipment will become standard, since it gives around 8% more stats (7.5 on minor stats, 9.5 on major stat, compared amulets for reference), and that will add up to be quite a bit. Time-gating the whole thing, while not affecting the rest of the economy, ultimately makes the whole thing slow to obtain while favoring only the richest players in the game. The rich players can afford to get all the things needed for a full set by buying them, which will instantly create a divide between the have and have nots.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens now that there is 30 more AR readily available to players. I imagine uber-level fractals will be sick.

Wow, this devolved quickly into a poo fight. Now, for something more civilized than chimpanzees in a cage.

On Vitality and Toughness: In general, you can find out how much more survivable one will make you over the other by comparing your starting HP or your starting armor, and then how much HP/Armor you end up with. Ultimately, your survivability is going to be a ratio of what you start with, so you can see how much more damage you can take, or how much less damage you receive.

So, lets say you go just nuts and invest 1000 Vitality/armor. For each base HP

10,805 becomes 20,805 HP, resulting in a 92.5% increase in survivability.
15,082 becomes 25,082 HP, resulting in a 66.3% increase in survivability.
18,372 becomes 28,372 HP, resulting in a 54.4% increase in survivability.

And for armor, we get
1836 Armor becomes 2836, resulting in a 54.5% increase in survivability.
1980 armor becomes 2980, resulting in a 50.5% increase in survivability.
2127 armor becomes 3127, resulting in a 47% increase in survivability.

Ultimately, investing in vitality gives greater starting survivability for every class except for Necromancer, where toughness and survivability are equal.

On Vitality and Conditions:

Vitality doesn’t help against conditions insomuch as vitality doesn’t discriminate against its source of damage. A necro in sPVP with 1300 malice is doing 107 damage per tick with bleeds no matter what you’re packing. Vitality gives you a bigger health pool, meaning it will take more damage to bring you down no matter what that damage is. It is true that conditions take off less of a percentage of your HP, but that is just because you have more HP. There is another way to view things:

On Vitality and Healing

And that is with how much you heal. The thing with vitality is that the advantage vitality gives is limited: It is only worthwhile at the beginning of the fight. After that initial 10,000 HP is gone, you are in the exact same boat as everyone else. Now, heals can be considered a subtraction from the damage you were dealt, and it is here that toughness gets its arguing points. Toughness reduces the direct DPS by a fixed percentage, and healing subtracts from this damage, resulting in an overall increase in healing effectiveness as well as a survivability advantage that never leaves the fight. Of course, this does nothing against conditions, who hit the same regardless of armor.

The appropriateness of toughness and vitality changes between PVE and PVP. In PVE, fights are longer duration due to enemy’s insane HP pools, so long term survivability is important. Also, sustained conditions are less common, so toughness’s lack of mitigation there isn’t a problem. In PVP, fights are often very quick and short term, so the extra initial HP is a great boost to survivability, making or breaking a fight in a few seconds.

As for what people run in sPVP, I honestly don’t know. All I know is that I prefer vitality to toughness in sPVP. But in the end, the best way to stay survivability is to have a 1:1 ratio of vitality and HP.

Nearly anything in PVT is hard to kill. But for specific bunker builds…

Engineer and Guardian are your best bets. They both have permanent vigor, as well as a lot of blocks, blinds, and heals.

We have something similar to that with Guild Bounties.

I see both sides of the argument, but I also see the flaws in the argument.

For zerging: there is something to be said about large, epic battles. Some of the funnest times I’ve had in the game were when my group of 30 people bashed against an enemy group of 50 people, and through superior tactics we won somehow. When you have so many people all attacking a single objective, and so many people defending a single objective, you get an epic feel to it. The tower feels like a well deserved, strategic victory, and even though the battle was huge there was still those piles of loot everywhere that made you feel like you contributed.

On the other hand, 1v1 to 5v5 lets you perfect tactics and really get a feel for how your toon and other player’s toons feel. You learn strategy and become a better player on an individual level. While not being nearly as epic, it is more personalized and meaningful on the individual level. You can still accomplish various goals in a small team, and you can claim that tower for your own.

There is nothing morally wrong with either of them. So, why is it that, even though it is an often complained about tactic, zerging is still favored over small skirmishes? Well, this ultimately comes down to the goals of WvW. Despite what many would have you think, the goal of WvW isn’t backstabbing roamers with your zerker thief, or soling camps. The goal is to obtain key locations and maintain them to get points. It is natural that the tactic that accomplishes this goal easier is the one to use.

The problem with small teams and solo roaming is that there is always a danger of being overrun by an enemy group twice your size. The bigger your group is, the harder and less likely it is to be plowed through by superior numbers. Every small group that gets mowed down contributes nothing to the cause, so inevitably to be successful people bunch up into a big group. In response, the enemy tries to make a bigger group, and then the arms race of group size begins. Soon, to make sure you “win” the bout, you end up having groups of astronomical proportions running about.

This arguably isn’t the superior strategy. If we take a 100 man zerg, and 5 groups of 20 players, then those 5 groups can hit 5 times as many objectives as the 100 man zerg. With enough coordination, this will be capable of maintaining more objectives and receiving more points than just a big blob. The problem is that the 100 man zerg themselves are highly mobile due to waypoints, and also whenever this zerg meets another group that other group dies quickly. So, although multi-tasking gets you more points, it also gets you less loot and higher repair costs.

So in the end we are left with a giant arms race.

Engineers can be pretty boss in WvW, since they can accomplish many roles:

A) Support. Water fields heal, fire fields give might, smoke fields give stealth, light field gives retaliation. They can cleanse conditions and heal quite well, all the while putting many disabling conditions on the opponent.

B)Bunker. By flipping through all of the blocks, blinds, jumps, stuns, and heals an engineer has, they can be incredibly hard to kill when built right.

C)Damage. The grenade kit can rain unholy hell on anyone who gets stuck in the barrage, and the ability to self-stack 25 stacks of might easily makes them a force to be reckoned with. Nearly everything they do is in an AoE, so they are effective at Skirmishing, Zerging, and Defending.

It really comes to what you want your engineer to do in WvW, and what you want that engineer to do in dungeons. If those two things are different, then you’ll have to either have two builds or pick one or the other. If those two things are the same, then just make one build and go nuts. And that decision is whether you want to do WvW or dungeons more.

I could’ve sworn I had posted in this thread. Is there really that much debate over the subject that I’m starting to merge things in my head? Anyway, I’ve definitely posted stuff elsewhere, so I’ll just copy my posts over from there. From the condition meta thread:

The biggest buff that necromancers saw to their condition damage was not burning. It was the large increase the amount of fear they had available, which is now letting terror specs inflict an incredible amount of damage. The addition of torment also helps. Dhuumfire itself is a trait-investment heavy ability that only procs off on crits and has a long cooldown. It has numerous weakness in that it is heavily build specific, contributes little to AoE and can be absorbed by mesmer clones/ranger pets/ whatever, and it is readily overwritten by nearby guardians and elementalists who have not specced into condition damage, making it unreliable in team vs. team circumstances. It only stacks in duration, making multiple sources of burning redundant and easily cleansed away, contributing no greater DPS than if only one person had burning. It is the worst scaling condition in the game, requiring 50% more malice to double damage output.

Necros received about a dozen meaningful buffs in the last patch:
#1: Greater Life Force Generation
#2: Torment + Immobilize in DS
#3: Doom duration increased by 50% at point blank range (fear)
#4: Weakness condition greatly increased with necromancers maintaining high duration.
#5: Spectral Wall now owns everyone who crosses it and makes chain-stunning three times easier (fear)
#6: We received new stunbreakers and all of our bad stun breakers now have shorter cooldowns.
#7: Poison duration from the scepter auto attack was doubled.
#8: Our slow casting skills are now much faster.
#9: Spectral effects now remain while in Death Shroud.
#10: Signet of Spite now provides a meaningful power boost, recharges 33% quicker, and seriously messes someone up when used.
#11: Blinds now persist until the enemy actually misses their target.
#12: Vampiric now heals for more and does more damage.

And that isn’t even mentioning Power Necro buffs or Dhuumfire. It annoys me how everyone looks at the big bright flame that Necros received and assume it is the problem when Necros have been made so much better in so many different ways.

I duo-main an Engineer and a Necromancer. I tried Dhuumfire for a few rounds in sPVP, then respec out of it since it preformed exactly how I expected to: poorly. So I went back to stacking fear for terror damage, combined now with torment and the fact that I am basically better in every way as a necro.

I also do some more elaboration on the condition damage and terror in another thread, particularly why it is I am unsure if a nerf is called for on terror. Its two posts long, so I’ll just link the first post:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Terror-Nerf-Incoming/first#post2364453

I’d prefer if terror simply had terror’s damage reduced. Although it is cool that I can get it to tick for 1400 or so in WvW, before the recent changes the only time that would happen was with Reaper’s Mark and Doom, and only for a single tick.

I used it in much the same manner that I use terror now: a finisher. After sustaining in the fight a bit, I fir off my remaining fears in an attempt to chain-stun my opponent to death. Back when I received only 3 ticks of fear this was more balanced: I could do about 4.2k unavoidable damage with fear, but unless used wisely this would wipe my defensive abilities, leaving me helpless. But now that doom is 50% better and spectral wall is 1000% better, I routinely fear other players for 6-7 seconds at a time. Note: this is not a dedicated fear build (only have 50% duration increase).

I now burst for twice as much damage: about 8.4k now. This damage goes right through protection and toughness, hitting their HP directly. This is bad news against anyone who stacks protection/toughness, or anyone who has low HP. The low HP classes being thieves, elementalists, and guardians: 3 of the 4 most played PVP classes (the other being mesmer). Knowing that, a lot of the QQ starts to make sense: A class with 2900 armor can get burst down from 75% health by these darn necromancers, and they’re stunned for the duration of it, too.

If we look at the situation mathematically, a simple solution shows up. If all necromancers received at least a 50% increase in fear (doom), then arguably terror should do 50% less damage. As it happens, terror does 50% more damage when the opponent has a condition, so if we remove this bonus, then terror becomes much more manageable. Doing this, my terror damage goes to 930 a tick, coming to 5.5K for a full fear burst.

With the combined difficulty of stacking fear (positioning with spectral wall is not easy against a smart opponent), as well as the ability for stun breaks and stability to stop / prevent the burst, this is an understandable number to have. It is slightly higher than what was available to me pre-patch, but it also has the potential to be lower than what was available to me pre-patch.

Ehragus.5843:

Elixir S. Problem solved.

It is actually a bit more complicated than that. Elixir S can save you from the follow up burst, but without control or counter pressure a thief will just walk right over you.

You need something that can mess the thief up. Tool kit to sustain block and counter with prybar for surprisingly high damage, bomb kit to cripple and cause a blind field (counter stealth + counter ambush) grenades to chill and blind and explode Shadow Refuge, the rifle for control + burst damage at point blank range, turrets for locking down and sustaining low-maintenance offense, rocket boots + slick shoes for escaping…

You need something to fight back with. The biggest problem with the utilities and weapon set in that image is that he has nothing to fight back with. No hard control, no counter-burst damage, very little soft control, very little defenses, no movement skills, not even high sustained damage. That set is gank-bait, and can probably be outplayed by a shortbow thief that doesn’t bother to go into stealth.

I find the lag to be a big problem. On SoR myself. Been on SoR long before we were big in WvW.

There is a certain standard that I have for entertainment, media, engineering, and inventions. It is a very simple and absolute standard, and I see no reason to move away from this standard anytime soon. This standard is a line drawn in the sand that instantly renders anything crossing that line as bad. Bad in content, bad in execution, just bad in general. The inverse of this standard does not have the same decisive nature, however, as things can be bad without crossing that line.

What is this magical line of quality, you ask? Well, it is quite simple: Anything that does not work is, by default, bad.

Just imagine if a movie cuts out halfway through, or if a videogame’s controls do not function properly, or if your car leaks all its fluids every time you drove it. Imagine that it was by some oversight or even by purposeful design that things were that way. You would say “Yeah, that movie is bad. It just breaks halfway through and they never finished it”. You would say “Yeah, this car is horrible. It drains all its fluids and breaks every 10 minutes because of it”. You would say “Yeah, that game is bad because the controls don’t respond so I can’t play the game”.

And this is why WvW is suffering. If I can’t use my skills, then it is bad design. If I can’t stay connected, it is bad design. If I can’t travel around due to the map lag, it is bad design. The system was built up and is incapable of handling the load put on it. So now the legs buckle and we’re all feeling it.

I can’t suggest a fix to the lag because I don’t know the cause of the lag. I’ve been in many circumstances when the lag seemingly came from nowhere. In the middle of the night, no large battles going, the map isn’t full, neither side is out-manned. All I know is that it seems like with every update to the game, the lag gets worse and worse. Fixing this lag should be priority #1 for anyone on the WvW development team, since until it is fixed by default WvW is bad.

The big theory floating around now is zerg balls. I am not sure if this is the true cause, but whatever. If the server can’t handle the load, then we either need a way to greatly reduce the incentive for zerg balling, or we need to reduce the number of players who are in WvW at any one time. Even if this is locking players out of WvW, as it stands right now Lag is already locking players out of WvW. Then, once the system has better optimization and it can handle greater numbers without having a seizure, then we can increase the cap again