Guild Wars 2

I swear it feels like I’m the only one who uses an axe necromancer. I tried going with conditions in sPVP and it just didn’t work out. I didn’t do damage fast enough or have much of an impact in the battle no matter where I went or what I did. So, instead I went with a power build that used axe/focus, dagger/warhorn, and it works out great. The Axe Training trait is just awesome, and lets you throw out Ghastly Claws every 6 seconds, and Unholy Feast in a group can put retaliation on you nearly permanently.

Biggest problem IMO is that the mortar doesn’t see a range increase with any of the traits. I keep testing it out after each patch but to no avail.

The turrent cleanse takes forever to activate. A lot of people say 7 seconds to finally activate, but it seems like a lot more time than that. 7 seconds with 15 bleeds or so takes off half of your health, so it isn’t a reliable way to cure conditions.

I run a completely different engineer build (turrets, mostly) and I also have problems with conditions.

There is a very simple explanation for this, actually. Most classes that have condition curing abilities actually do “something” while they cure a condition, or their main healing skill jut natively cures conditions. Just to name a few:

Thief: Hide in Shadows stealths and heals. Roll for initiative retreats and grants initiative.
Warrior: Mending heals and cures conditions, Shake it off AoE cures and breaks stun and gets shout support.
Necromancer: Putrid Mark, Deathly Swarm, and Plague Signet transfer conditions to your enemy. Consume Conditions heals and cures.
Guardian: Cleansing Flames causes AoE ring burn and cures, Smite Condition Causes Damage, and a ton of passive condition curing abilities.
Mesmer: Glamour Field rips boons and has glamour support, arcane thievery steals boons and transfers conditions
Rangers: Healing Spring cures and heals, has passive condition heal and Empathetic Bond regularly takes conditions away.

The problem with Ranger condition curing is that it doesn’t do anything else useful. Elixir C converts conditions to random short lived boons, making it unpredictable and not really useful in a pinch. Elixir R pulses slowly and is on a long recharge. Healing Turret takes forever to finally activate it’s condition heal. Autoimmune response only makes you immune to newly applied conditions once it’s too late. The best condition cleaner is 409, which requires you to run multiple elixirs to be useful, and even then using the throwing skills is mostly useless for elixirs since all they do is grant a random buff. When you compare Elixir C to something like Arcane Thievery or Cleansing Flame, Elixir C is incredibly kittened. Compare Cleansing Burst to Consume Conditions or Hide in Shadows, and Cleansing Burst seems horrible by comparison. So, when you make an engineer, you have two options: Either you use elixirs and take the Cleaning Formula 409 trait, or you have a bad condition weakness.

I actually took a completely different route. I equipped runes of Melandru onto my turret engineer and completely forwent condition curing, instead focusing on regen and controlling my opponent. The build can hold a point like boss, but it undoubtedly has a condition problem.

Now, as for your posted build, my advice is as follows:

Axe Elixir C for something else. Elixir U comes to mind: it is unpredictable but it’s utility is unparalleled. 1/3 chance for smoke field that blocks projectiles, 1/3 chance for light field that reflects projectiles, 1/3 chance for stealth field which isn’t as useful but nonetheless a 2/3 chance to stop projectiles is awesome. If you don’t want elixir U for whatever reason, Elixir B gives fury, swiftness, and retaliation and Elixir R regains endurance and makes for an excellent death-recovery mechanism.

For traits, remove 10 points from alchemy and put them into explosives, getting incendiary powder. That trait is a must-have for condition builds, and the 10% increase in condition duration helps a bit.

For equipment, cleaning formula if used correctly should be sufficient for nearly all condition problems, so runes of Melandru are not necessary. I would suggest either Runes of Lyssa (10% condition duration, increased precision, boon on heal, elite cures all conditions and grants all boons), or for condition offense runes of the Orian, which gives haste at 20% health.

I’ve come to like the close range nature of the engineer rife, mostly for it’s control effects. In WvW I use the rifled barrels trait to give me 1200 range with the auto attack, which really helps in an area where distance is important. In sPVP however, I don’t see the range limitations at all.

I suppose what a lot of people don’t know about is how long range the turrets are if you have them traited up. I’ve only done a few experiments, but the rifle turret fires further than 1200 feet, and the rocket turret can practically snipe targets that aren’t even visible yet. One of my favorite tactics for defending towers in WvWvW is to put a rocket turret on the furthest end of the wall and just let it snipe enemies from afar. It lets me go and get supplies since any attacking force will destroy that turret before proceeding, alerting me of an offense.

In PvE the grenade kit is arguably one of the most awesome things in the entire game. It is only in select sPVP and WvW circumstances where the rifle’s close range is a detriment to how engineers are played.

I would argue that engineers are not at a disadvantage since I don’t find signets to be that big of a deal. If they were a big deal, then every class would be running them since they would be superior. Of course they don’t… you get a couple of classes that run signets, and many times not because it is actually good for anything.

No one has anything to say about this?

Urkhan.7126:

And Blood Red Spider :-P, I don’t think that’s the problem, to calculate the staff damage you have to sum all those factors, conditions, illusions uptime, shatter damage, staff damage, is the damage in 12 seconds that much to handle? How much time to setup? With or without phantasm? how much of that damage is avoidable or cleansed? What can be imbalanced for a weapon may not be a problem for another at all.

Hence, why it is that making clones weaker will hurt other builds that don’t spam them too much. All of these other questions should be immediately answerable to anyone who has experience with the build: Set up is nearly instant since clone manufacturing abilities like Mirror Images, Decoy, Desperate Decoy, and Deceptive Evasion and this is all without going into weapon skills or weapon swapping. The damage from conditions caused by clones is not avoidable since 3 of them firing it off constantly provides no focal point in which you can dodge and evade. Cleansing it not beneficial since the conditions caused by those skills are short lived and are continually reapplied to sustain damage. Avoiding the damage from shatter skills is not reliable since shatters are instantaneous at close range and cannot be seen from behind and will chase the player down instead of detonating at whatever location they are standing in, assuming that the player is not dazed, stunned, or otherwise disabled, which they usually are.

Sometimes you just know when someone didn’t pay attention.

It’s really hard to say. I play 5 different classes in sPVP, and each one is hurt by different other classes. In general, the mesmer is always the most annoying since I have trouble keeping track of which one is the real one. Bad mental confusion and all that. But so far…

For my engineer: Rangers. Superior ranged damage, superior distance, annoying pet, and conditions. While rangers are only “meh” against my other builds, for engineers a good ranger always spells a very difficult fight.

For my thief: Guardians and Warrior. The big problem with those two classes are that as I try to fight them with a dagger, they’ll stand in melee and fight right back. With superior sustained damage and survivability, the advantage is theirs.

For my mesmer: Thieves. The thieves can usaully keep track of who I am and put down some nasty ambushes and burst damage. With a comparable bag of tricks it isn’t always a straight up fight with them, and many times I’ll be taken down before I can gain momentum.

For my guardian: Mesmers and Necromancers. Other classes I don’t really have an “issue”, but as I am chasing down mesmers and teleporting to them and all that, I always find myself heading right for a clone instead of the real once, since Leap of Faith decided to send me backwards or something. Similar stuff happens with necromancer minions.

For my Necro: Engineers and Warriors. Their control effects knock and disable my poor necromancer all over the place, who’s build happens to be somewhat vulnerable to that. None of my other classes get hit by stuns, immobilize, fear, and knockback as much as my necromancer.

The one profession that I never have problems with are elementalists. Seriously, no matter what profession I play or what build I use they just don’t have an upper hand.

I run an axe/focus, dagger/warhorn minion master build in sPVP, and I handle thieves mostly by knife fighting with them. I’m usually already on the axe/focus at the beginning of the fight, so if I see them coming I’ll use spinal shivers to lock them in place then unholy feast to get retaliation. That way, when they’re blowing their ambush they’re getting smacked right back by retaliation. If the heat is too much I can go into death shroud, but usually I switch to dagger/warhorn and start knifing them right back. Wail of doom lets me stop their attacks, Locust swarm lets me chase after them, and the dark pact + siphon life combo lets you healing off of them in the middle of the fight. Consume conditions puts a stop to those nasty venoms.

Built with soldier’s equipment, in a straight up knife fight between a thief and a necro, the necro has the advantage. I usually only get beat by theives that kite and use dual pistols.

For PvE it makes sense for there to be no condition limit on enemies since it is just a detriment to condition damage builds that serves no real balance purposes.

However for PVP, I would keep the stack limit simply to avoid certain abilities from randomly causing an extremely negative effect. It is extremely rare in PVP situations to ever achieve a full stack on a single player for any length of time, let alone theoretically exceed that stack by a large amount. This is due largely to two things: condition removal and mitigation effects in general. Players are always dodging and stunning and attacking and stuff, making it so the condition build has to spend a lot of their time stunning and dodging and stuff, too. It isn’t like with PvE where you can sit back and just hit the enemy with bleed after bleed. Condition removal makes it so the cap is nearly never reached, and you’ll have to apply conditions continually to maintain a decent offense.

There are a couple of abilities that draw conditions or duplicate conditions, and it is here where having no stack would cause a problem. It would make things like the Plague Signet and “Save Yourself” pure suicide in many instances, and more or less just kills the usefulness of those skills.

I came up with the sword/pistol/staff shatter build on my own awhile ago, and it is quite powerful. The entirety of the power can be based on one thing that I do think should recieve a bit of a nerf:

Clones are too difficult to kill.

The issue with a good mesmer build is that they are capable of mass producing clones very quickly. This wouldn’t be a problem if the clones didn’t do anything, but the fact is that the clones do many things. Sword clones stack vulnerability, and staff clones cause conditions, and the presence of clones themselves gives increased power to shatter skills. You would think it would be advantageous to kill the clones off so they lose these abilities, but the mesmer makes them so fast that no advantage is really gained from destroying the clones. The clones themselves have enough HP that it takes several attacks to destroy any one, and they don’t always bunch up into an easy-to-AoE cluster. What you can do is spend the whole fight just destroying the clones, who then act as a defensive barrier for the mesmers that stop incoming damage. It doesn’t help that often times a mesmer can get lost amongst it’s clone army.

Darned if you destroy the clones, darned if you don’t. There isn’t a tactic other than to try and take the mesmer down before you get overwhelmed, and to that end the mesmer has plenty of tools to stop that from happening. The hardest bit is actually fixing this problem, since no matter which way you turn you end up stepping on toes.

You can make clones have less health, but this hurts players who don’t use clone builds since their naturally forming clones now crumble like leaves, making them useless. You can make it so players can’t make clones as quickly, but this destroys the usefulness of any and all illusion based abilities since they can’t be used as frequently or just don’t work as well anymore. There needs to be some kind of diminishing return system in place where having a few clone abilities is good, but overloading with clone abilities doesn’t work that well. If you can figure one out, be my guest.

The debate between vitality and toughness can only exist where one is echanged for another. If all other things being equal, one class having lower HP than another class is never advantageous. Period.

The first thing I’d like to ask is if we have ever confirmed that armor doesn’t suffer from diminishing returns as it goes up.

The gigantic elephant in the room that is being ignored is how important sustained defense is compared to front-loaded defense. I have only used a guardian in sPVP, and from several weeks of sPVP I would argue that ablative defense is more important than sustained defense because of the short life of any battle that players get in. It is rare for me to ever use a healing skill more than once in a fight, since by then one of us has defeated the other. After the battle is over, players are healed back to full health and are ready to engage the next group with a full HP bar. Because of this, healing potential in sPVP and in many cases of WvWvW is overrated, not only because healing is a linear benefit but also because it only gets used once and “over-healing” shouldn’t be an issue because of this.

Of course, the most important factor is the sweet spot, which is the point in which both HP and armor are both ablative and sustaining up until that point. Too little HP and you’ll get burst down, or burned by conditions. Too little armor and enemies will rip right through that HP bar like it was tissue paper, hitting for massive damage very easily. Generally you’ll want to build in what you are lacking, and it is only after you have a good balance that you should consider going for sustained or ablative defenses.

I definitely agree that engineers seem to be aggro grabbers. Originally I thought it was because I was running a grenadier build, and a grenade engineer does extremely high AoE damage, and also stacks chill and vulnerability frequently. As a grenadier it makes sense that mobs will go for you, since you are probably doing more damage than anyone else.

But then I changed over to a strictly rifle and support build, and I still draw a ton of aggro. Even when I’m not attacking, enemies will go straight for me more than my other teammates in dungeons. There do seem to be exceptions to this, as while most enemies and a lot of bosses will target the engineer almost exlusively, there are several bosses that just seem to ignore you completely.

I suppose one of the better examples was a HotW story mode run I did with a team a few days ago. We were at that boss that stood in the center of the room and had a nasty knockback to anyone who got close to him. There were many pillars littered about that room. Now, I was the primary tank in that team (two elementalists, two mesmers, and me the engineer), so I had been taking aggro the whole time. Eventually because I needed to heal I stood behind a pillar to avoid his attacks when something interesting happened: the boss quit fighting. Instead, the boss just stood there, staring at my location behind a pillar, and refusing to do anything while my teammates pounded on him. For a solid 30 seconds I was behind that pillar just waiting for him to turn around and attack someone, but instead he just stared at me and waited. And then… he died.

I suppose the best thing about being the aggro drawer is that, if you realize that you are captain aggro, then there is a large degree of control and planning that can go into it. One of my favorite tactics is one I call the reverse death waltz: two teammates stand on your left and right with the engineer in the center. Draw the attention of the group, and then as they run toward you throw the freeze grenade right in their face. Then, you can walk backward throwing a ton of grenades in their face, while your teammates all attack the enemy group from the side. Since there is very little danger of teammates getting aggro, then can run up and melee all out while the enemy group slowly follows you into a barrage of grenades. Doing this, you can kill some of the largest and hardest enemy groups in the game rather easily.

It also makes melee bosses really easy, too. Once you get one that won’t stop chasing you, you can use the net turret to keep layering immobilize on that boss, who will just stare at you while everyone else runs from behind and melees it. Throw in many of the knockback abilities and a few defensive abilities like gear shield and elixir S, kiting a boss can get pretty easy. I’ve built my engineer to be durable just because of this aggro issue, and my teammates thank me for it.

I’ve tried running a condition build with an engineer, and it just didn’t have the same impact as running a condition build on a mesmer/thief/necromancer/elemtalist did. The biggest problems are that an engineer cannot stack or sustain conditions very well in a PVP setting. The short term conditions might seem viable in the face of condition curing, but it is actually the opposite of that. Condition curing usually only works once or so before it goes on cooldown, leaving an enemy open to stacking again. Engineers lack that option, so a good regen can negate much of their condition damage.

So I joined a guild with 500 members, and as with anything that size there are bound to be people in that guild that are… disagreeable. So I tried blocking a few of these guys.

And yet I still see their nonsense in the guild chat. I’ll also still see their antics in party chat if I ever get invited to the same party as them. Now, this completely defeats the whole purpose of blocking. The whole reason we are blocking these guys is because we do not like what they say, and in all likelyhood what they are saying is not constructive or useful or vital to the team. I haven’t tried every chat, so I assume that the block function must work somewhere and somehow, but currently it isn’t working for me where I need it to work.

Make it so the block function actually blocks that person’s chatter from appearing, Period. Or at least give us a “super block” function that lets us do this.

Something I’ve noticed is that turrets do not get any benefits from any stats at all. From having nothing in traits and nothing equipped to having fully placed traits into damage and fully equipped, the turrets do not change at all.

The more interesting part of this is that, in turret descriptions, the tooltip says that their condition damage increases as you increase your condition damage stats, but in practice they don’t actually change at all.

Is it supposed to be like this, where turrets don’t recieve any stats of any kind? Or is this a bug?

The best build I’ve had so far in sPVP was a turret based build. It would be even stronger if turrets recieved buffs from stats, but so far it works fairly well.

Traits:
20 in Explosives (Accelerant packed turrets)
30 in Inventions (Metal Plating, autotool installation, rifled barrle turrets)
20 in Alchemy (Self Regulating Defenses, Protection Injection)

Soldier’s Amulet w/ Soldiers Jewel, Rifle as the primary weapon. No set list of particular turrets used, but I usually go with Healing Turret, Rocket Turret, Rifle Turret, then Flame or Thumper or Net Turret.

The biggest strength of this set up is how tanky it is. The alchemist abilities exist to make the engineer as hard to kill as possible, and over time the turret damage really builds up. The second advantage is the contol effects: with every turret being an AoE Knockback waiting to happen, the turret build can forcibly disable another player for lengthy amounts of time, and can also save the engineer from combos and ambushes. Each turret itself is a blast finisher as well.

From there it depends on what you want to do. Usually I go for rocket, rifle, and flame for damage, but when holding a point I will opt for rocket, thumper, and flame turret. If attacking in a group, I will use the net turret since an immobilized enemy is a dead one in those circumstances (Rifle net + toolbelt net + turret net + overcharged turret net and daze = a very long duration of immobilization).