The problem with randomness is that if all of the random effects don’t achieve the same goal OR do not work in the same situations….
TO ANYONE WHO STILL THINKS RANDOMNESS ISN’T BAD:
There isn’t a judgement call to be made. The opinion that the randomness is bad arises out of a playing style that demands a high degree of pre-planning, expects execution to always go according to plan, and has a low tolerance for deviations. I understand that one can get upset at the randomness, especially in the hypothetical situations. I’d be upset too if I always expected that I would knock a zerg off a cliff with Elixir X or that I wanted to speed buff a party with a toss of Elixir H (I think you’re actually thinking of Elixir B ).
Let’s say we have two players who go into identical battles. …The enemies are all ranged, so they both throw Toss Elixir U at the space between them and the enemies. The first player gets the guardian wall skill…. The second player gets veil…
What is the skill difference between the two players? Nothing. They both did the same thing, only one got lucky, and one didn’t.
And Veil creates a light field which can be followed with one of our many blast finishers for Area Retaliation. Projectiles reflected. All three of the random outcomes can reflect projectiles actually. The difference here is in playing style. One player had a planned goal for a particular skill which they plan to follow up with some other move and the other player compensated for a deviation from that battle plan. This is a result of the difficulty in playing an Engineer. We have to be familiar with waaaay more skills than other professions because one skill is really three different skills.
Let’s say two players are trying to escape from battle. They both toss Elixir S. One gets stability from being a giant and gets wrecked because they can still see him. One gets Stealth and is able to avoid being killed because of it.
The difference here is an expectation that only the Stealth outcome equates escape from battle, that the only way to escape from a battle is to become invisible. Keeping in mind that we are not Thieves and we do things differently, Stability grants immunity against incoming control effects which can also allow us to escape from a battle. Their purposes are not crosswise for this goal. Both Stealth and Stability from this toss last only 4 seconds which means we have to be ready with another skill anyway. Why not Drop Stimulant or activate Super Speed while either Stealth or Stable?
Let’s say two players are trying to speed buff their group, so they toss Elixir H at the party.
Again, there’s an expectation of goal, that the purpose of Toss Elixir B (not H, H grants Vigor) is to place speed buffs on the party so it can get to the target destination faster. Yes, that is one thing that can be done with it even if not reliably. Yet consider how many other professions would love to be able to block a treb shot for an area like an elementalist? There are other projectile block skills that only partially work but not like the elementalist because that’s not our role. Not all professions can serve the same purposes. But we can be sure we won’t get funny looks from our party when they get that random 30 second boost of Might right when they reach the target or in the middle of a fight (which is when I usually Toss Elixir B ). Lanny.6987 touches on this concept too when he considers above that Toss Elixir U is better for smaller fights and his mention of us not being a support class (he should try Elixir Gun sometime). Consider too the randomness in receiving such buffs from us in the middle of a fight from another player’s perspective.
Let’s say two players are in WvW and the enemy zerg is attacking Anz. They’re up on the hill and are building siege. Both player’s zergs attack the zerg and use Elixir X. One player gets the tornado and one gets the giant.
The giant form’s Stomp also does blowout like the tornado and there’s no reason we have to stay in that form until we get killed. The giant form also has combo finishers.
I hope it can be seen above that there is a difference in these situations. An expectation of outcome was made, it wasn’t the one desired, and the playing style didn’t have tolerance for any adjustment to be made. Or maybe the difference is due to the difficulty in being familiar with the skills since we have so many more than other professions. If anything, I’d call judgement on the difficulty of having to remember so many more effects rather than attribute the problem to the randomness of certain skills.
