Guild Wars 2

I don’t think we give Anet enough credit on the balance front. Looked at in a vacuum, evilapprentice is entirely right, but compare GW2 balance to other games and it comes off better.

Sure, there are only 1 or 2 specs that work per class, but that’s at least as good as any other MMO I have ever played.

True, the relationship between bunkers, burst and hybrid is exactly as evil says but at least we have very few “I win” classes and it’s not the r-p-s situation of WoW.

However, giving Anet credit is one thing, but I can’t really disagree with how stale the GW2 PvP is. For me it is more about game modes. There is zero variety, so every match feels identical and the tactics on each map hardly vary. After a gazillion runs, that’s bound to feel boring.

Are you talking about spvp, wvw or pve?

It sounds like you want to mostly DPS, is that right?

I was kinda sympathising with the OP at first, but then he said he mainly plays WvW and started to disagree.

Engineer has some major problems in tPvP and PvE, because being second best at everything will mean noone wants you for the top groups, which tend to go for optimal classes to fill simplistic roles.

In WvW, I’d say being second best at everything is a positive. The zerg moves between keep defence, keep attack and open combat pretty fluidly, and the engineer can contribute solidly at every stage, which is not true of all classes.

Loybo, here’s a build you might call “Quite a Bit of Everything.” It’s tough but does damage, healing and clears conditions. I use it for tPvP. I accepted a while back I’d never be the best DPS, bunker or support, so tried to embrace the idea of being all three.

It takes a fair amount of kit swapping to play, and benefits from utilising its combos frequently (particularly aoe retaliation and fire field).

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQJAqel0p6ZnvyuF1LJxoCfO0jCbY1KSRlf8nCyF;TsAA1Cmo2xsjYHLQudkAN24sxECA

On the face of it, you might think it looks a bit like the healer-bomber you’ve already got, but it’s got a couple of key differences in traits and escape.

EG is totally worth it for a supportive build with kit refinement.

I’d suggest taking bomb kit with elixir infused bombs with it. Then you are in real close anyway, and can lay down both damage and heals. With the kit refinement and the combos, it goes pretty well.

Consider pistol+shield instead of rifle with this build. It’s blindness for additional mitigation and another blast finisher.

They added sigils to kits and nerfed Grenade damage by 30%. Find me a build where the sigil portion of the damage you are getting from kits is worth 30%.

For obvious reasons, the benchmark impact of sigils can be taken to be a 5% damage increase. That means that the portion of your damage coming from kits has been boosted by 5% (or equivalent cond/utility). How many viable tPvP specs use kits for a large amount of their damage?

Add in the HGH changes and you might want to say “WoW maybe I can play a jug build on my FT now.” To which I say, good luck – you’ll need it.

However, that is a discussion better left to the Engi forum.

I play engineer these days. I play it because it has a lot of diverse options for builds, which keeps me interested. I’ve tried many, many builds. Rifle, pistol and P+S variations of Elixir, Gadget and various kits.

I would agree that there are no engi builds to match the top-flight burst DPS, bunkers, or nodal domination DPS. However, there are one or two builds that do seem to shine in non-standard ways. You just need a team that can find a good use for those.

At the moment, I am playing a spec I never thought would be usable in tPvP, despite being great in PvE. It’s bomb/EG with kit refinement. The aoe healing and condition removal, combined with a decent level of area damage makes it very strong when supporting a scrap for a node.

Thanks for your answers ppl. I reckon kitteno hit the nail on the head.

PvP balance got a bit worse. That might not sound too bad until you consider the massive lost opportunity. They could have used this patch to improve balance and didn’t.

As an engineer, I am particularly disappointed. They built this patch up like it was going to put us right there in the mainstream. But all they did was buff an ability that doesn’t fit into any realistic builds and nerf one of the WvW mainstays.

Players have been saying since day 1 that more formats of sPvP would help a lot. I find it very strange that Anet develop this kind of fundamental improvement but then only put it into a temporary seasonal feature.

So much benefit could be gained from adding this to the map rotation of sPvP.

Looking for a simple response from people – do you think this latest patch will improve balance or make it worse?

Try to ignore the bugs. I know they are significant at this point, but they are not intended.

I’m asking this question because I want people to show whether they think Anet are going in the right direction or not with balance issues.

The post from JS is insulting. If you wanted to nerf grenades, then say it and we can have a debate about that.

Taking us for idiots and hoping we won’t notice you’ve justified a 30% nerf with a 5% buff is just offensive.

I am extremely unhappy that more effort was not put into fixing Engineer things in a patch with such a large fundamental nerf to a commonly used ability.

HGH needs to be amended to work on other races. AGH, SGH, NGH, CGH …?

What would it take to make us competitive (in tPvP)?

1) More condition removal options. At the moment, our only truly effective condition removal is on Elixir C and/or Cleaning Formula 409. Med Kit has a half-hearted removal, which is impossible to use when you are immobilised, and elixir gun has an okay combo removal with light field but it gimps your attack while using it. I really would like to see a viable Gadget-based condition removal.

2) A bit less ground targeting. I’m not talking grenades here. I mostly feel ground-targeting is holding me back with various tool belt skills. I’d very much like to see a “target at feet” option or “target at target’s feet” option to improve fluidity of our combat, particularly around nodes where camera direction and combatant positions change rapidly.

3) Some tuning of a couple of our abilities would help. For example, rocket boots need to penalise the engineer less to make them a viable escape.

Other than these 3 things, I don’t think we are that far from being a competitive class. My problem is that we don’t shine in any role. Bunkering is done better by elementalists and guardians, DPSing is done better by mesmers, warriors and thieves, and node flipping is done better by mesmers and necros.

We need to be up there with the best at one role.

Hi – here’s a bug not yet on the list:

Mine Field does not benefit from the reduction in cooldown of the Tools trait line. No matter how much you have in Tools, Mine Field always has a 20 sec cooldown.

NOTE – this is NOT a labelling issue. The actual CD is 20 seconds as well as the tooltip value. For other toolbelt skills the labels remain unchanged, but the actual CD is lower.

Is this the right place to mention this bugs? I assumed the main post could be updated if I report it as a reply.

I’d say you have the right idea on playstyle and it’s more your spec you need to tweak.

For the thieves you are going to need a better escape. I personally favour Elixir S, even in non-elixir builds because you can use your kits with it and it buys a decent amount of time in which the thief cannot HS spam you. Some people prefer rocket boots or utility goggles. By using your escape at the right time, keeping him at bay with Overcharge and Net, you should stand a chance. It will always be hard though, so don’t expect to get comfortable with thieves.

Mesmers are even worse. Ideally to take on a mesmer, you need heavy condition clearing as well as AoE. Even then they are OP in my opinion. With a nade build, you are not going to get much condition clearing. However, you can get better AoE. I’d suggest you swap radiation field to Bomb Kit and your heal to Healing Turret. Make sure your power traits include larger explosion area for bombs. Now you have bombs, grenades and healing turret (when you explode it) all doing AoE. This should keep the mesmer’s clone population down a bit whilst allowing you to DPS him. Usually the Mesmer will win, but you need to talk to Anet about that because at that stage you’ve done what you can.

Thief and Engi happen to be my only level 80s.

I much prefer the Engi. Thief is a boring character to play. It takes no thought or effort and has very little to get excited about. Engineer has a nice variety of abilities, which give DPS, healing and utility, depending on how you use them. You always have something useful to bring and there are plenty of opportunities for creative application of skills.

These forums are a sample of the player base. What you asking is how do we tell whether it is a representative sample.

In the absence of evidence showing that the sample is not representative, we should assume it is representative, because there is no reason to think otherwise.

So … is there evidence to suggest that the distribution of opinions on these forums are at odds with the distribution within game?

Well, we might suppose that people posting here are not playing, whereas people not posting here are, which would suggest the forum dwellers are more negative towards the game than the people who never post (i.e. the majority). However this is speculation, there is no real evidence to support it.

What we need to look for is a prevailing opinion here which is not mirrored by the actual playing habits of the user base.

Fine, if you would rather we say 300, go for it. But that’s a long way off the stated 1000. So, what, are ability ranges just some irrelevant random number that we should ignore?

I can’t help thinking that the game design intended for the range to be 1000. Hence the fact it says 1000. Reasonable conclusion I think. So if they intended it to be 1000, as part of the whole class mix balance, the fact that it is effectively 300 is a problem.

I don’t think it would be hard. Just put it in as a buff/debuff indicator. While on CD, the indicator is there with the little border fuse showing how far to it being available.

This is exactly how you use the other kit related traited buffs (e.g. swiftness). You watch the buff so you know when to next re-equip.

Right, so let’s consider this in the light of comments made.

Net Shot has (with trait):

8 Sec CD
1000 Range
Immobilise target

First off, I defy anyone to immobilise a moving target at 1000 range. It never lands at that range. It hardly lands at any range beyond melee.

Secondly it has an 8 sec CD. Overcharge shot has a 12 sec traited CD and a 450 range.

So are we saying it is right and proper that a skill nominally an 8 sec 1000 range immob is in fact a 12 sec, 450 range immob because you can only effectively use it after Overcharge Shot?

It doesn’t make sense. Either it has a range of 1000 or it doesn’t. And people harp on about its low CD so much that it’s kinda absurd that you can’t actually take advantage of that CD.

My sPvP/tPvP build:

http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.4.8.0.0.0.4.0.0.0.79.87.89.90.103.8.8.12.0.0.0.246.249.0.256.0.0.272.278.280.287.0.0.0.20.10.30.10

I tried loads of builds before this. Rifle, Pistols, Pistol+Shield, but the DPS builds die way too easily and the bunker builds just didn’t suit me. I’ve settled on this hybrid. DPS is okay and survivability is pretty good. Also has a bit of utility and support for team.

Key features:

Elixirs.
Healing H – this is the best heal for an elixir build. Seems obvious to say it, but it’s a pretty poor heal in any other build.

B – I can’t play PvP without some form of swiftness and with an elixir build this gives you swiftness for much of the time (plus of course might and fury which add some DPS).

S – absolute must. With 20% faster and longer, this skill can save you time after time. Also, its toolbelt is very useful for both stomping and escaping.

C – the third elixir slot was one I changed around a fair amount by situation for a long time. But I’ve actually settled mostly on C now. Condition builds are still in use, particularly necros and ele’s, and this elixir helps towards keeping on top of them.

Elite X – yup, I am using Elixir X. Despite the supply crate being a great Elite, Elixir X on an elixir build does beat it for me. In particular, it enables you to flip defended nodes with whirlwind and gives you a chance against some classes that are often troublesome with Juggernaut. Of course, you don’t get to pick which form you get, which does impact its usefulness a little, but I can live with that.

Weapon
Rifle – I personally feel that rifle, pistols and pistol+shield are all pretty good, but the rifle is simpler to play and has an easier to apply knockback, which makes a huge difference against some classes (e.g. thieves).

Traits
You might notice the traits other than alchemy seem like a bit of a mixed bunch. There is probably a fair amount of leeway for changing these to personal tastes, but I have chosen the ones I think bring the most overall.

Stats
I tried rifle builds focused on crit and crit damage, but they were all very glass cannon. And as things stand, being an engi glass cannon is kinda pointless, because theives and mesmers do it way better.

So instead, I have gone for a very small amount of crit, which becomes a moderate amount with fury and sigil, but solid power, toughness and vitality. I’ve found I can survive really well even against multiple opponents. The DPS is average/low, but it is enough to kill people over time or contribute to team kills in big battles.

Playstyle
Stand on the edges using rifle and toolbelts. This will add damage but also clear conditions and give team mates buffs.

Use knockback, tactically, to prevent stomps/rezzes or push enemies out of circle (followed by a net shot to keep them out, which is about the only time you can reliably use the horribly buggy immob).

Use Elixir X to cap nodes or in an emergency when you are getting outfought. Both forms are very heavy on knockback. Whirlwind is kind vulnerable to being DPS’ed down, but usually not before you’ve irritates the enemy a bit.

When you need to escape, you’ve got your self knockback, your shrink and (if you get lucky) your toolbelt stealth.

A NOTE ON RUNES – the builder I used is not able to show my rune set up. I actually use 4 earth, 3 water. This gives 15% prot duration, 10% boon duration and a chance for a prot proc when hit.

1) Game developers use their own judgement. If everyone is complaining, it will cause them to look into a mechanic but they still do the re-design decision themselves.

2) Bad players play FotM classes. People who see a class is doing well in PvP and jump to that class to get an edge are disguising the fact that they would be performing worse without that edge.

So maybe the OP is right – bad players DO get classes nerfed. Not by complaining, but by jumping on the FotM band wagon and magnifying the game impact of every little imbalance. We could live with BS being OP if it was only used by a proportionate number of players, perhaps. But when a quarter of the player base roll thieves just to spam BS chains for easy kills, it is bound to cause complaints.

I reckon they need an “underflow” mechanism. If a zone has a population below a certain amount, they should move everyone into the overflow realm.

That way you would always have a decent number of people in the zone and waypoints would not stay contested forever.

I am playing just as much as I ever did, and here is why I think I am still happy when some people in this thread are not:

1) I don’t care about rewards. I won’t do anything in game which is not fun, so I basically almost never run dungeons and gave up on getting a legendary weapon as soon as my laughing fit had ended on discovering the amount of grinding required.

2) I PvP a lot, but also PvE a little. tPvP is good fun, as is WvW. Only a few aspects of PvE are fun for me (the odd event, opening new areas, storyline) so I mix those things up to keep myself interested.

3) I do not care what items/achievements other players have. I set my goals to be things I can achieve while having fun. If that means people are higher rank, have more money or have special items and I do not, that doesn’t bother me.

I’ll give you an example – last Friday I was looking forwards to Lost Shores. Friday night and Saturday daytime bored and frustrated me. So for the rest of the weekend I ignored the event completely as not worth my time. Net result, I was happy with the game again by Saturday evening doing a bit of PvP, etc., while others were still getting increasingly frustrated with bugs and poor design of the Lost Shores content.

I would have preferred a more direct and honest summary. I know it’s partly about PR, and PR people always think euphemisms and allusions work best, but I’d be feeling a whole lot more positive about Anet as a development house right now if they had took it on the chin and said “it was a massive debacle, we are sorry and have learnt this, that and the other lesson.”

Regarding the future, I am disappointed to see an increasing focus on dungeons/fractals. Anet has been innovative in so many ways, I had raised hopes about them finding some other end game for PvE than a WoW-style repeat-these-dungeons-hundreds-of-times-for-a-reward model.

You need at least some CC to get your bombs going. Try using an immob/cripple at first, then drop glue bomb. After that you can get a bombs off.

However, in sPvP I find bombs have limited use. Mostly it’s the big ol bomb and the combo fields that help. As a DPS source they are not reliable. Altough if you’re playing bunker and just want to keep people off you, maybe you shouldn’t care if they hit. Once you’ve dropped a bomb, people will step back or take the damage.

I would happily trade a longer CD or lower uptime for more reliable hitting. It’s all very well being able to fire it frequently but it misses nearly all the time. That means on a frequent basis I am interrupting my flow of attack with a redundant/useless action. Its low CD just means a do a lot MORE of these redundant actions.

And “working to overcome it” doesn’t even warrant a reply. As it stands I am already doing everything I can to overcome it, which is basically to hardly ever use it. I use it after knockdowns and when my opponent is stationary/unmissable – which makes a complete mockery of its so frequently lauded low CD.

The net should not require a knockdown first. For one thing they are on different timers, so it would make the net shot timer meaningless.

Call it a design flaw if you prefer, rather than bug, but I think it is pretty hard to argue that a directly applied single target immobilise is INTENDED to miss any target worth hitting.

I don’t think Engi is weak.

For PvE the bomb/EG build is amazing. It has great AoE DPS and decent healing and utility.

For WvW a bomb/grenade build is still pretty good. Grenades for siege and bomb/rifle for zerg.

For sPvP either pistol or rifle elixir builds work pretty well. My own build is completely unable to deal with mesmers, but other classes are okay. If Net Shot worked more reliably, I would say we are a good sPvP class.

These are not the only viable builds but are the ones I prefer. We have as much flexibility as other classes. It not possible on any class to just pick a random mix of weapons and skills and say “These should be viable.” You have to have a build that fits its context. Surely that’s just common sense.

The Net Shot rifle ability almost never hits a moving target. Given that it is an immobilise, surely this is not intended? If the only targets it can immobilise are ones already stationary, it’s a bit redundant! I believe it could be fixed by speeding up the travel speed of the net animation (substantially) or changing the animation to something with no travel time.

This should be classed as a bug, but I checked the compiled bugs list and this is not on it.

Neilos Tyrhanos.5427:

Cribbage.2056:

Without knowing, the best thing to do is to give people credit for writing their experiences (and conclusions drawn therefrom) accurately on these forums.

I think the best thing would be to give a fair and balanced appraisal, which isn’t what people are doing. People are going off the deep end with descriptions of the “utter crap” involved in this event, and the negative commentary outweighs the positive at least 10:1, when the dungeon & the map work fine, and they’re the bulk of the content.

I think people are writing their own experiences mostly accurately, but I also think they’re not giving credit where it’s due.

I’m sorry, but what you are saying is that a fair and balanced appraisal could not arrive at the conclusion this is utter crap. I disagree.

I accept your point that some of the content worked. I accept that there has been some very good feedback about the dungeon, but that doesn’t change my assessment.

I hate dungeons. The last thing I would want to see is GW2 becoming more dungeon focused. So if the primary “success” of Lost Shores is the dungeon, that’s a negative for me. That doesn’t mean Anet failed with the dungeon, it just means that for me it adds no positive side to this whole thing.

Consider 2 options:

1) Lost Shores had never happened. This weekend would have been a happy mix for me between a little PvE, WvW and tPvP

2) Lost Shore did happen. This weekend has been a complete loss because expectations were raised massively and not met. On top of which, GW2 is one dungeon closer to have WoW-style end game.

Option 1 would have been better by far for me. That’s my honest appraisal.

Neilos Tyrhanos.5427:

phantomdust.4729:

Sorry, let me clarify my warrant for agreeing with him.

I write software for a living, on a contract basis, and I have two startups under my belt. I’ve been a VP and a CO at both of those companies, I love my work and I’m good at it.

I do exactly what the OP was talking about in my own work, and have the exact same expectations impressed upon me by my clients and hold myself to the same standards.

I know how it’s done. I won’t be gracious for a sub-par product, as a gamer and as a software professional.

I admit, I did assume that people didn’t know what they were talking about, which in your case, wasn’t true. I take back at least part of my snarky tone.

I’d say you should also allow for people’s experience being different from your own. You description of “some bugs” does not match my experience. Every single event I attempted during Lost Shores was broken in some way. My experience may not be typical, I don’t know, but then yours may not either. Without knowing, the best thing to do is to give people credit for writing their experiences (and conclusions drawn therefrom) accurately on these forums.

Neon, right from launch the GW2 event engine has looked flakey. Instead of continuously patching individual events, which they’ve been doing for months, they should address the issues with the engine.

I reckon the number of events I have seen personally that either don’t spawn or get stuck halfway through is in triple figures. That level of bugginess is crazy and shows and obvious underlying flaw that goes beyond individual events.

I agree, some thanks is needed to the folks working overtime to get this sorted.

On the otherhand, the people who put out untested, buggy rubbish should be sacked. Every patch Anet put out is buggy. At what point is a long term solution to that going to be put in place? As it stands, I am thinking that I will just not play during whatever the next GW2 event is. Better to just not play and stay blissfully ignorant than to listen to their idiotic hype and spend hours on end frustrated and disappointed.

It seems that even if it is not bugged, the gameplay of lost shores is “go to locations, wait for AGES on one spot for an event, do the event, move to next spot for waiting”

Really? The game designers thought that a “special event” chain would be fun if 99% of it was spent waiting for a spawn? What is this, 2001?

So, I made the mistake of progressing the Lost Shores investigation a tiny amount.

Now Anet are trying to kill me with irony. About every 5 mins I get a duplicate in game mail with 3 locations to go to. All 3 locations are bugged.

The first bug I would like to see Anet fix is this mail. Stop sending me the mails, I will then ignore the Lost Shores event as a complete non-starter, which it obviously is.

This is not a joke or sarcastic. Lost Shores has reduced my enjoyment of GW2 by a significant amount. I will have much more fun if I can just ignore this buggy piece of idiocy.

I think Dee Jay’s suggestions are good ones, but I would like to see them in addition to a backstab nerf.

In my opinion, many aspects of the thief are broken. It can stealth too much, do too much DPS and evade too readily. All of those things need to be toned down so that thieves are more killable and less lethal. If in the first instance the thief class gets over-nerfed, I’d say that’s better than under-nerfed. They’ve been OP since launch, so spending some time under powered would not be out of turn.

This may sound harsh, but for every good thief, or person who just likes playing thiefy type characters, there are half a dozen people who have rolled into the class just for some easy mode killing.

@Fellknight

Your original post was a little ranty, but I know where you are coming from. It is way past time that we all get a break from OP BS thieves. It’s so overdue that I honestly think nerfing them too much would be preferable to failing to address the problem yet again.

If the next nerfs are too weak, I am not going to feel good about the devs decision making on this.

I’m not so sure all the other thief specs ARE underpowered. BS is such an obvious choice it is bound to make all other builds seem weak. I’d be interested in seeing how people started specing and performing once BS is not such a no-brainer.

Of the classes that I have played extensively in sPvP so far (thief, necro, engi) only the thief has a set cycle of abilities that they use. I saw in WoW that people call this a “rotation” and I was originally glad when I thought GW2 had avoided this play style.

Having a rotation completely deskills a class. Most classes you need to do on the fly decision making to pick which skill to use, but thief just employs his BS chain or runs away until he can.

I’d really like to see this disappear altogether. I’m not talking about nerfing. I’m talking about changing thief skills so that they do not have such an obvious and rigid order.

It just creates a game where the class requiring least skill rises to the top, and who wants that???

It takes a special kind of wilful disregard to allow yourself to believe that the explanation for all the thief complaints is that everyone in the game not playing a thief is a bad player.

I agree. In 8v8, the game feels chaotic. You end up having a choice of staying with a big zerg or just getting jumped on by groups whenever you try to go anywhere.

labotimy.2439:

BOONS:
another big issue i have is the way boons perform. since bwe i played a guardian and right off the bat i noticed how overpowered retaliation and protection could be, and immediately made and tried boon builds with very long duration increases. this resulted 2 minutes of retaliate and similar numbers on protection through the use of traits and runes. if these boons happened to have a limited amount of hits they could sustain before being stripped they would be far easier to balance. for example if retaliate only worked against say 3 damage abilities before expiring the damage and even duration would be easier to balance considering you switched a boon from being a passive ability to a proactive one. you wouldnt simply pop all of your boon abilities right before a fight started for fear that they would be wasted on non crucial attacks or simply run out of duration, instead you would wait for that critical moment in a battle where a high impact but very short duration boon could completely swing the tide. this is how i envision boons being properly used in a fast paced mmo pvp format should be.

just these changes although somewhat complex would promote imo smarter, funner, and more balanced game play. they would REQUIRE planning, timing, and coordination, rather then pigeon holed specs and an over reliance on the “who shot first” mentality.

I’m not sure your suggestion for retal and protection would work all that well in this game. GW2 has a lot of abilities that are clusters of small hits (e.g. Necro Life Leech or Thief Pistol Whip). If it expired after 3 hits (or even 7 hits), it wouldn’t make it even to the end of one of those attacks.

Possibly your suggestion could be tweaked for the abilities to expire after absorbing a set amount of damage instead? In a way, that would bring it into line with many other skills, which DO a set amount of damage, so perhaps the whole system would be more manageable for balancing.

I agree with Fellknight’s original comments. The changes suggested would really iron out some wrinkles in PvP and it probably is a good idea to move away from the buff-nerf cycle. Not that class issues should be ignored, but tackling the underlying mechanics might fix some of them indirectly.

I’ve said before, I do believe GW2 has some great innovations. For a few years before its release I was privately wishing someone would build an MMO with no healers. And I’ve always hated the stealth game as implemented by other games. Not sure I like GW2’s stealth side either, but it is a truly original approach.

I don’t understand why you would remove the sharks. My main gripe with sPvP, other than the obvious balance issues, is the lack of tactical depth. The maps feel really samey. There ARE differences, but they are weak:

RotC – The ruins is easier to defend due to Shark control. So the tactical decision is whether to go for ruins or not

BoK – treb emplacement adds artillery. So the tactical decision is how much effort to put into treb offence/defence.

LotF – points for killing enemy boss. Tactical angle is whether/when you go for boss/defend your boss.

FoN – buff from forest creatures.

Other than that, all maps are just 3 node domination maps. If you remove or weaken the shark presence you are diluting the already poor tactical depth of sPvP. Why would you do that?

When you say you want something close range, you mean like if you are zerg v zerg and in the thick of it?

@Linguistically Inept

Not quite sure why you are measuring whether an Engi is good at combos by how much combo access they have through weapon sets.

The engineer relies pretty heavily on kits – hence not having a weapon swap available. If you compare it to any other class with swapping available but rule out kits it is not a valid comparison.

I think you should be asking are there valid, decent Engineer builds which have good combo access and the answer to that is yes. A bomb/EG build or bomb/nade build have several field, and healing turret adds another. You can have 4-5 blast finishers on such a build without making any compromises away from desirable skill choices.

My own usual WvW build has the follow fields:

Smoke
Fire
Water
Poison

With 4 blast finishers and a leap finisher.

How is that not a decent access to combos? Only one finisher on the weapon, but why is that important?

Sevoha.6724

I thought mine field was no longer a blast finisher which would make it 4 blast finishers

I’m actually not sure. You could always swap it for Thumper Turret instead.

Almost every aspect of thief has some issue. They stealth too often, they can evade too easily and their burst DPS is too high.

That’s why they are the most common class you see in sPvP and why all the people here defending them play this class instead of some other class.

Engineers excel at combos. I know that might not actually be directly related to a role, but it really is noticeable when in group play against large numbers of enemies.