there is one big problem I have with the thief, it is the damage out of stealth combined with quickness buff. my engineer carries the soldiers amulet/jewl (yeah right the one with thoughness, vitality and power) and he drops before the thiefs stealth reappear animation ends. additionally the client often refuses to load the player model for a second (which is a known bug since beta btw) which makes it even worse.
I thought that this cannot be true thus I rolled a thief 2 weeks ago and I could not believe how easy it is to achieve such high amounts of damage. there is no way someone can react in time to do anything and even if you manage to do something in this split second, it only delays death anyway as you will be almost dead. it seems that thoughness does not help as much against big hits as it does against many small ones thus you still get hit for almost 8k backstabs even with the bonus thoughness from soldiers amulet.
Overall it looks like a very poor game mechanics when a thief still hits for that much damage and is able to down a target in under a second when the target carries the soldiers amulet/jewel which should make you very durable against direct damage.
just go to mists, take a rifle or pistol into the hand and you will realise that the weapon attack is higher than what the kits have and you dont get any benefits from sigils with kits. now imagine this would be pve or wvw, your gear not only has higher base damage, kits dont benefit from sigils but you also lose a nice amount of stats.
the stealth reappear animation takes some time and the client sometimes refuses to load the model. you can still target the enemy but you dont see what is actually happening.
add quickness and the thief can kill 1,8k thoughness 20k hp targets before they actually appear on the screen, which is really poor game mechanics.
everytime I read “necro UP” I have to laugh. if you know how then you can stack a 20 stack of bleed in no time and removing it via condition removal is non issues as all the skills have decent cooldowns… necro is boss in spvp. just because some things dont work does not mean the class is up.
Flame Blast and Flame Jet are just damage, and not even top-end damage EVEN AFTER spending 50 build points on it (Juggernaut + Deadly Mixture).
What do you consider top end damage on flame jet? 3k non-crit every channel good enough?
nice troll.
1. you only see a crit for each invidiual hit of the channel. just because you dont crit on your last hit does not mean you had no crits.
2. glass cannon build does not really work for a mid range weapon. playing against bad players does not make flamethrower good.
3. my mesmer greatsword channel hits for 2-3k on regular basis. additionally to that, it has a phantasm hitting for 5k critical AOE damage and it has 1200 range…
a rank 1 guy posts that engineer is amazing in spvp, very nice joke. you know what is amazing? my thief with quickness in spvp, that kills any 20khp and 1,8 toughness build out of stealth in under a second, you are dead before my stealth reappear animation ends thus you dont even see what is hitting you =D
saying “l2p” is funny and denying. its always funny how useless those noobs quickness thiefs are when the quickness is on CD or does not proc from their sigil.
I abuse quickness out of stealth kill in 1 second for 2 weeks now. I would really like to see someone “countering” a build that can kill 2k thoughness 20khp builds in a second, which is about the time stealth reappear animations takes to end =D
I would suggest you to adapt to something else because the nerf will come for sure.
just saying, in spvp my engineer with power/toughness/vitality stuff gets killed by quickness stealth abuse thiefs in the time the stealth animations takes them to appear out of stealth… it just does not look right when my build with over 20k hp and 1,8k toughness gets killed under a second. please dont say “l2p”, tell me how much can you do when you are dead before you can even react?
I just rolled a thief last week just for this to troll in pubs in spvp and it really is abuse in my opinion. that does not mean that engi is underpowered but some classes have overpowered combinations. I suggest everyone rolling thief thus anet finally realizes and fixes some of the gamebreaking stuff.
nothing hard in using quickness, jumping out of stealth and kill the target in one second before the stealth reappear animations ends so your target cant see whats happening… if you think this is hard then I suggest you to play engineer or elementalist, then you will see what hard means.
wrong, its not because of server loading the server loads nothing for you lol. the fact that you claim it is a clear sign of denying and lack of networking architecture knowledge. you can actually target the thief the moment he jumps out of stealth but the reappear animation takes so long that you dont see whats going on and after one second you are dead. also you need to learn to read, I get killed by such thiefs in spvp when I carry thoughess gear around sometimes in less than a second. in fact I can kill a “retalation” guardian in 2 seconds out of stealth with quickness.
I rolled one for spvp the moment a thief with quickness killed my engineer with soldiers amulet (which has toughness and vitality) out of stealth before he appeared because of the broken stealth animations. for spvp everyone can create a lvl 1 thief and abuse the current stealth reanimation together with the quickness buff. the damage is on such a high level with quickness that your target dies before he even sees you and I doubt that it is fun for my opponent that he dies before I even reappear from stealth because the stealth animation is broken. I also doubt that it is fair but I wont care, I will abuse it as long it exists. I also dont care about the “hacker, I report you” hate mails afterwards.
except a nerf, it will come and denying will not stop it.
I play a thief from time to time. and yes they are overpowered lol stop denying it. with quickness I regurarly kill targets that carry thoughness gear right before stealth “reappear” animation ends, they drop just before they realize what happened =D afterwars I see in all chat “Hackor” or “i report u”. it is so easy to close the gap with stealth and outright kill them with quickness and the high damage.
perma swiftness is not that great in combat. close combat builds have no issues to close the gap and ranged builds dont care about your tiny extra speed.
Rocket Boots need the self stun removed.
Magnetic Inversion should work while moving.
mantra builds are not bad but hard and boring to use. you have to avoid getting hit (thus mostly staying back) AND restrain yourself from spamming mantras too often in combat in case someone jumps at you. you also have the long recharge after using all the mantras. my GS mantra build hits for 3k with just autoattacks. the problem is you can get high damage with builds that are much easier to use.
That’s a cool fricken story kid. Except two things:
1) That’s true of almost every busrt build in the game.
2) It’s actually not true of this burst. You know why? Static discharge arrives after you use your toolbelts. You can either dodge some of the toolbelt burst, dodge some of the static discharge,or dodge some of the rifle skills, but you wont doge it all. Typical toolbelt burst skills e.g. rocket kick, surprise shots have very low cooldowns (20 and 10 seconds respectively in the case of these 2 skills), so if you dodge them, they’re up again in a few seconds.
I see, so you don’t have a grasp of the fundamentals. Go to the spvp forums and ask them how to kill a thief or mesmer. Do it now. you’ll thank me later.
You know what, I’ll give you a hint. Ctrl+ click the mesmer. AoE (grenades work wonders) the thief. Grenades don’t care about stealth. AoE right down on your own position, starting with freeze grenade.
nice, the pointless answer I expected. you not only have not read what I wrote, you made yourself look really bad =D
go play in a serious match and tell me how your theorycraft worked out when a thief 2 shots your paper thin build out of stealth or when a necromancer with 2k thoughness blocks your damage with deathshroud and then stacks 2k dps on you in form of conditions.
I play thief and mesmer in spvp myself on regular basis and I know very well of what they are capable of. you clearly dont know what what you are talking about if you think that the mesmer/thief is squishy even with a glass cannon build.
and if you think that the clones are the tankiness of the mesmer then you are really bad. the mesmer even with glass cannon can be very hard to kill but not because of the illusions but because of my 6 seconds of distortion. I can jump into the middle of 5 players, kill someone and laugh mykitten off as they try to hit me.
Well yes, that is the choice most classes have. Glass Cannon or Survivability. No class has both at the same time to a significant degree.
If you cc a mesmer or thief, and being an engineer we have multiple examples of every cc under the sun, they will not survive your 20-25k burst either. If they use their stunbreaker, you can cc them again and apply the burst an kill them. Rifle alone has 2 cc’s: net and overcharged shot. Put another cc, say personal battering ram on your utility slot, and you should be able to burst down a target in a 1v1 fairly easily.
that is not even true at all. mesmer and thief glass cannons no survivability? endless stealth jumping and distortion is the best survivabilty you can get. between dodges my mesmer has stealth, several seconds of evading and 2 blocking abilities and you call that no survivability?
I switch between a dual-pistol/elixir condition build and a grenadier condition build in SPvP and consistently score at or near the top of my team. So, yeah, not sure what builds others that complain are using but so far I do pretty well overall in spvp. Though, I have noticed almost every other Engineer I have encountered in SPvP is using a turret build, so maybe that is the issue.
being at the top of the scoreboard does not make a good class. I could go into spvp naked and still get high scores. the difference is the amount of effort and issues you have to endure compared to other classes.
healing turret is the best heal when you dont have any traits in any other healing skill.
you place it, pick it up again instantly and it goes on a 15second cooldown.
you have not only provided the pointless answer I was expecting that repeats the same again, you also have not read anything that was said in this thread.
and regarding your build and “not wasting points” (rofl): you have place points into tools and also runed for power which does nothing for pistols. you also have spend 5 points in inventions and alchemy which on their own are pretty much wasted. please also tell me how it works out when you face a dynamic event boss throwing out AOE conditions that kill you in 3 seconds (in before you claim dynamic events is not pve hahaha). the lack of condition duration bonus is also a loss of 25% of your damage. you also have no way to block ranged projectiles.
He said he does mostly pve and some wvw where he stays back. He is trying to help some of us still learning the class and the traits for it. Thank you original poster, gonna give this a try.
Hey people, wake up, this thread is about PvE, not PvP, this thread is to help people who are having trouble with their engineer in PvE.
So no one gives a bunny about sPvP.
so because it is for pve it has to waste alot of potential? npcs and players in wvw dont do any condition damage? dont get close to you? dont try to shoot you? dont need damage to bring down?
if you dont have a way to remove conditions, control unpleasant stuff and waste alot of damage then it is simply a build that is not good.
if you want a good build, use this one: http://tinyurl.com/8pxmre5
maximum damage via 3s burn+3s bleed, has CC via shield & plenty of utility via elixirs.
I dont pvp, but I can only assume this guy has the best of the best gear vs people who just have average gear.
In other games we have a thing called “Pub Stomping”.
Its, usually, a group of good players that know each other join a game where the other team are just random players thats never met each other before.
I’m sure you can guess who wins.
I assume its something like that, only instead of a group of good players, you have one guy that was probably boosted by friends or a guild to be far better geared than the average player would be. Allowing him to take alot more damage and dealing alot more damage.
PvP in this game = EVERYONE auto lvl 80 and you only use PvP gear, which means no gear advantage. There are no buffs on his bar that explain him being boosted beyond a normal player. This is raw DPS build and nothing else. There is no “they’re weaker” or “better gear.” Everyone is on an equal playing field in terms of gear and levels. The only difference is class and build.
clueless guy detected.
you dont get equal gear in wvw like you do in spvp. a guy with best gear in a damage build will almost 1 shot any lvl 1 character joining wvw.
no cc, no cleaning formula, nothing about runes for condition duration or napalm specialist (for a total of 50% increased bleed and burn duration). in short this build is bad…
a guy with best gear meets some undergeared guys and stomps them with all abilities he has available. what is so special about that? place this guy in a real fight and his build will be useless. 2 dodges, some thoughness and his damage does not even scratch 50% of the hp. you can see this in this video well, as soon as some real fight shows up he has to run…
this argument does not hold. ranger has to use several abilites (last time I check atleast 6) and a few autoattacks to achieve proper condition damage application. you will have to use short ranged trap too, if you want to get the most out of it
btw I can stack ~15 bleeds (+ poison, a blind, chill & weakness) in a single scepter dagger rotation that I use to stack conditions on my target with the necro. it jumps to 18 bleeds when I use a staff mark beforehand. it might be more or less depending on crit and proc luck. my spvp setups has 50% crit chance, slightly over 20k hp, 1,8k thoughness, 20% condition duration in runes (53% from traits) and 1306 condition damage. never lost a 1vs1 duel till yet with this.
I know what necro is capable of, it was my main and 80% of my tpvp time has been played on necro. And I don’t know why you are listing you stats, every condition spec for any class has basically the same stats. I run 3 afflicted 3 krait runes. Also I have read condition duration from traits stack.
Do you have any videos showing you stacking 15-18 bleeds and never losing a 1v1 ever?
yeah you “know” what a necro is capable of, except how to achieve 15 bleeds.
-4 blood is power (via deathly swarm transfer)
-2 enfeebling blood
-1 grasping dead
-3 dark path
-2 autoattack twice
-3 procs (statistically)
=>15
you can also throw a mark of blood into it for 3 additional.
And this necro rotation never goes on cooldown, right?
it does but the necro autoattack can apply enough conditions (after they got removed) by itself and crit proc from traits and earth rune without having to rely on a stupid opponent that opens his flank or back to you. my necro is plenty durable to just wait it out till some of my cooldowns refresh too.
if you are so confident about it then go play ranger and stop complaining. I will meet you on the battlefield
btw I can stack ~15 bleeds (+ poison, a blind, chill & weakness) in a single scepter dagger rotation that I use to stack conditions on my target with the necro. it jumps to 18 bleeds when I use a staff mark beforehand. it might be more or less depending on crit and proc luck. my spvp setups has 50% crit chance, slightly over 20k hp, 1,8k thoughness, 20% condition duration in runes (53% from traits) and 1306 condition damage. never lost a 1vs1 duel till yet with this.
you stack your conditions, fine. but then I remove them. all your abilities that can apply conditions are now on cooldown. your damage went down the toilet. if you have issues to prevent rangers from flanking then it is your l2p issue you have no excuse for this in a game where you can abuse terrain to block attacks.
also you post shows that you have no clue about the necromancer. no one uses plague signet cause it does not work properly. necros use dagger offhand ability to transfer conditions.
I was never hit for that much. ~5k was the max but my condition necro has almost 2k thoughness and I use a stun breaker to not get caught in the combo.
Lol.
Cpt: “Necromancer does conditions better than ranger.”
People: “Nope.”
Cpt: “Doesn’t matter, conditions are useless. Also, cooldowns. Ranger is the only class that has them.”
you have serious l2read issues and I never said conditions are useless. I guess you dont play pvp thus your opinion is null and void. saying ranger is better but neglecting a big part of the game shows how little you actually know about the game.
ranger has no ability in PVP to reliable apply conditions nonstop. when I remove them you do no damage with your pro condition build for atleast the next 10 seconds. have fun with your 200dps after your conditions got removed. or I dodge 2 abilites and there goes your damage down the toilet again. ranger condition build work in PVE only where someone else or the pet can hold aggro from stupid npcs where you then hit from behind with your shortbow.
on the necro on the other had, you remove the conditions, and he stacks the bleeds up again with no issue.
wrong, ranger cannot do this all at once. condition necro can and has access to all conditions except burning.
Shortbow + Axe/Dagger. You have access to all useful conditions. For “useful” I’m not talking about blindness and 1 sec fear.
Also chill on Ranger has half the cooldown than on the Necro.
The topic about “Necro is good at control conditions” is pointless too, since Mesmer is way better in this kind of job.
for pve it works but for pvp ranger conditions are useless. situational bleed application from shortbow does not make a condition build. the rest of the ranger conditions are on abilities with cooldowns thus the ranger has no way to reliable keep conditions on a target. ranger applies the condition, the target removes them and for the next 10 seconds you have no damage… wooooow epic condition damage. or when the condition removal is on cooldown or does no have any then you can just simple dodge 2 abilities and a large portion of the potential condition damage is lost.
can your ranger apply easy 6-8 second duration bleeds (depending on traits & runes), siphon hp on each hit, transfer conditions back to the enemy and spread them around the whole enemy team. has your ranger easy access to poisons, chills, weakness and vulnerability on reasonable cooldowns? can your ranger also do this while have almost 2k thoughness and atleast 20k hp and when almost dead put on the awesome deathshroud to gain a second health bar?
oh wait he cant
1. Yes.
2. Siphoning is lolworthy.
3. Nope.
4. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
5. Yes.
6. Nope. Then again, evades.
wrong, ranger cannot do this all at once. condition necro can and has access to all conditions except burning.
can your ranger apply easy 6-8 second duration bleeds (depending on traits & runes), siphon hp on each hit, transfer conditions back to the enemy and spread them around the whole enemy team. has your ranger easy access to poisons, chills, weakness and vulnerability on reasonable cooldowns? can your ranger also do this while have almost 2k thoughness and atleast 20k hp and when almost dead put on the awesome deathshroud to gain a second health bar?
yeah lets not point at the engineer bug list that is longer than the list of all other classes put together…
You have obviously never visisted the necro forum…
well I play necro often myself and imho necro is in a much better shape.
power necro does abit less damage then power engineer BUT is way more durable.
and dont let me start about condition necro, pistol condition engineer looks like a welp compared to him. being able to manipulate conditions in such a way is incredible.
fanboys are really cute, especially when they did not even hit max level and play some pub games with some cookie cutter pubstomp builds they saw on youtube.
yeah lets not point at the engineer bug list that is longer than the list of all other classes put together…
You’re better off spending on vit, toughness, healing or anything else.
1. healing is the most useless stat ingame
2. Damage scales linearly with Power
3. Each point of Power increases attack by one
4. most of the engi abilities are hybrid in damage.
5. you already get precision, which would make every point of power more efficient in the end. you can cover most of your durability by CC and traits.
has anyone actually tested the scaling? you throw in some assumptions but just because the base damage from explosive shot is lower does not mean that it has different power scaling. I was always under the impression that pistol direct damage was lower because of the low base damage of the abilities and pistols compared to rifle.
scaling alone does not make power crit builds better. high base damage obviously means more direct damage and more benefit from direct damage boosts.
Retaliation is a conter to pure physical builds, condition damage builds is a conter to retaliation, cleancing/healing builds is a conter to condition builds, physical is a conter to clense/condition………
So Nerf Paper and Scissors, but rock is fine!
that could not be more wrong and shows that you clearly dont play pvp at all.
condition removal will only delay the damage shortly. most conditions damage comes from autoattacks that apply conditions. beside that, everyone should carry atleast one condition removal skill.
condition damage does not counter retaliation. you have to attack constantly to apply conditions and deal damage with them thus you will receive damage back.
builds do not counter. profession and equipment choices on the other hand do.
we have players on the EU servers from other timezones. they joined on purpose to abuse this issue. they can recap everything at night while the majority is sleeping and during the primetime when they sleep the normal playerbase of the server will defend their work.
How dare people WvWvW when you are asleep!
Seriously, do you not understand that 24×7 battlegrounds means that this a perfectly valid tactic? It is not abusing anything. If your server cannot or will not form your own night crew then the ranking system will eventually pit you against other servers that also share your weaknesses.
your post shows that you have no clue about the problematic or you are just a fanboy troll. how does having americans playing on EU servers to abuse this have anything to do with being able to form a “night team”? absolutely nothing. you also clearly do not grasp how matching of worlds works.
we have players on the EU servers from other timezones. they joined on purpose to abuse this issue. they can recap everything at night while the majority is sleeping and during the primetime when they sleep the normal playerbase of the server will defend their work.
many forget that retaliation scales with power and there are plenty of abilities that hit several times per cast. 450 dmg per hit per player is quite reasonable if the guy performing the AOE combo has decent amount of power. an engineer will receive 1350 damage back per player he hits if he throws a traited grenade in a group of people with retaliation. he will be almost dead after 2 thrown grenades. should I even mention the flamethrower? it spreads the damage over 10 hits in 2 seconds and this will kill you instantly.
“stop hitting” basically means giving up and watching how they take away the keep under your nose. if you are defending against a big group of players then “stop hitting” is nowhere near a reasonable option.
Being able to hit at 1200=/=playing at that range.
Rifle traited is still a melee weapon.
Grenades, even when traited are simply unviable except on immobile enemies at that range. Just moving slowly is enough to not get hit by them.
I simply don’t agree with you on Grenades, they can be used vs moving enemies, it’s only a matter of skill. Just because you only can hit an immobile enemy, ain’t making it unviable! It’s by far the best setup we have for WvsW, and I have made it work both in group sPvP and solo sPvP. It’s a matter about the right setup, and the skills to aim and read movement!
I have yet to be hit by grenades in pvp. they are just too easy to avoid even without dodging and retaliation stacking will kill you if someone decides to “eat” your grenades. you will hurt yourself for 1,2k damage per player you hit if the guy using retaliation AOE combos has decent amount of power.
