Guild Wars 2

Tools:

Traits that are fine:
Deployable turrets
Speedy kits
Power Wrench
Armor Mods
Adrenal implant

• Always Prepared: Terrible trait. You can’t use the bandages you drop, and they’re at best slightly helpful for people trying to res you. 25% damage boost when downed would be alright, but our downed ability barely scales with power in the first place. Needs replaced. 2s Protection on a10s CD when swapping to Med kit is miles better than this.
• Static Discharge: Great trait! The problem is that it only works with a few tool belt skills reliably, otherwise discharging where the camera is pointing. As our only real burst option, it needs fixed so that the discharge goes to our current target.
• Speedy Gadgets: 20% CD reduction is great, but it’s our only trait that affects gadgets and that makes it pretty lackluster. Increased gadget damage is a great way bring this trait up to speed.
• Kit Refinement: Very Clunky, a global 20s CD punishes you for using multiple kits. A 20s CD per kit would be far more reasonable without allowing it to get too strong.
  *Packaged stimulants: No real use for this in pvp or pve. If I’m using the medkit, it’s so I can heal up with the bandages while running away from a group of enemies. It’s a very niche trait that you could use to toss speed boosts and small heals out to someone else? Maybe changing it to “drop 1 bandage near yourself at 75% health. 10s CD” would be more reasonable?
• Scope: Almost all of our heavy hitting attacks are within the 100-400 range, Engineers aren’t very good snipers as none of our skills support that mode of play. Maybe reverse it so we gain 10% crit within 400 units of our target? That would suit the play style and allow for risk vs reward.
• Leg Mods: Combine with power shoes. Place a new trait in its place that buffs gadgets. Possibly something that gives them stats like signets or makes gadgets into stun breakers. Even just giving 3-4s of stability or condition removal on gadget use would be a huge improvement for engineers and would open up a ton of new builds for us.

The Tools trait line suffers from not knowing what it’s supposed to be. It seems like a dumping place for any extra traits that were thought of, and almost all of them don’t really have a place in pve or pvp. The minor traits are overall pretty good, and the stats it gives are great. The line needs to focus more on gadget use and damage dealing, and less on role playing niche builds.

Problems with the base Engineer:

Our main weapons aren’t that bad. The pistol #3, 4, and 5 skills are all great, and the rifle skills are all great. Our shield skills are the best in the game! Our pistol #1 skill is the worst! Worst power scaling, worst condition application, and it’s slow to boot. Pistol #2 just needs to group its shots more tightly and it’s fine.

We’re very reliant on kits because they offer 4 more skills over each of our other utilities. If any of the utilities were to become better, or if our main weapons became better, we wouldn’t rely on them so much.

Turrets need to be debugged. There are plenty of posts around concerning the issues with them, please take a look. We don’t need any more trait buffs for turrets, we need the turrets themselves fixed.

With a few notable exceptions, our skills have very poor power scaling and our grandmaster minor traits don’t make up for it at all. To compensate, almost all of our attacks are aoe in nature- making it very hard to block our damage. Unfortunately, that means almost all of our attacks get us killed by retaliation faster than we deal damage with them. Take the flamethrower for example, its auto attack deals damage over 2.5 seconds, but it deals less damage than any other classes autoattack does per second and each hit triggers retaliation. Even running a power build you might crit for 400 only to take 290 damage back in retaliation damage per target you hit, per tick. If you use it against a group and someone uses stand your ground you die before you even know what happened.

We have little to no access to stability and our stun breakers are on long CDs or are just flat out terrible skills. If we get caught, we go down. Fast. Giving better access to them would allow players to be something other than a glass build or a tank build.

Thank you, I hope you take a look!

Inventions:

Traits that are fine:
Explosive descent
Metal Plating
Stabilized armor
Energized armor
Cloaking device
Reinforced shield
Auto-tool Installation
Elixir Infused bombs
Rifled Turret barrels

• Protective shield: 3s protection on a 20s CD? Eh. 15s CD would make it more viable, but it’s usually taken as a filler ability.
• Power shoes: 25% move speed while in combat isn’t terrible. It’s that there are better options in every way. I like the changes to speedy kits, it was too strong with Invigorating speed. Power shoes would benefit from merging with Leg mods greatly, or possibly just becoming 25% move speed when no kit is equipped would help it out.
• Elite Supplies: The problem isn’t with the trait, it’s with the base abilities. Elixir X is terrible, a random chance to get weaker copy of a warrior elite or an ele elite. Really doesn’t fit the engineer at all. And the mortar is bugged, its range is terrible, its damage is terrible, and its utility is terrible =/
• Performance Enhancement: 10% healing to power bonus is okay if you’re running clerics gear and bombs, but it’s pretty terrible if you run anything else. I don’t honestly have any idea on how this could be fixed.

The Inventions trait line fits it’s stats in that it helps defensively and with healing. It isn’t great defensively, the Alchemy trait line does that better, but it does an okay job. I’d like to see more emphasis on the utility of this line, adding in ways to buff or heal other players more effectively. It’s very turret trait heavy, which is bad because turrets themselves are very lacking and it closes the line off to any other builds.

Alchemy:

Traits that are fine:

Invigorating speed
Fast-acting elixirs
Self-regulating defenses
Blood Injection
Protection Injection
Deadly Mixture
Backpack regenerator
Cleaning formula 409
HGH
Automated response

• Acidic Coating: Provides you with a passive free blind every 10 seconds. It’s alright, but it could and probably should go into a different trait line. You have to give up one of the other fantastic adept tier traits to get it, and it’s really not strong enough to compete with any of them. Possibly move it to another trait line?
• Transmute: Really didn’t need the nerf. leave it at the 8% chance that it had. It helped with Energy conversion matrix and with our condition management, since we have such poor condition removal.
• Potent elixirs: Suffers from the same problem as Acidic Coating. 20% duration increase on your elixirs is nice, but not nice enough to preclude backpack regenerator or cleaning formula 409. Adds 2s of much needed stability when you use an elixir? 5s of Fury? Makes all elixirs instant cast?
• Energy Conversion Matrix: if you had every boon in the game, it would be a 9% damage increase. At best, you have 3-5 boons with uptime on you netting a 5% damage increase. Compare that to every other classes 10% damage increase grandmaster minor traits. 2% per boon would be very reasonable.

Alchemy is by far our strongest trait line. Again and again I find myself going deep into it for backpack regenerator or automated response. It’s focused on elixir use, but also has traits that make it appealing to every build we can use. I would really like to see other trait lines brought up to its level.

Here are the things i feel are lacking on engis currently, please keep the discussion civil and hopefully we can give the devs an idea of what needs fixed. And please keep the requests for clearly OP things to a minimum lol

Explosives:

Traits that are fine:
Acidic elixirs
Forceful explosions
Empowering adrenaline
Accelerant packed turrets
Incendiary Powder
Enhance performance
Grenadier
Autodefense bomb dispenser

• Shrapnel: Increase bleeding chance and decrease duration
• Exploit weakness: Add 5 stacks of 5s Vulnerability, or possibly 5s of weakness? overall, still a pretty lackluster trait. No real use for it in either pvp or pve right now.
• Explosive powder: Possibly combine it with forceful explosions or Short fuse? Or combine Short fuse and Forceful explosions. The real issue is that you have several great traits for bombs and no way to take all of them. Especially now that IP is in the master tier.

Overall, the explosives trait line really caters to bombs and grenades. It doesn’t offer anything to any other weapon set, and it doesn’t offer anything to condition builds that don’t use grenades or bombs.

Firearms:

Traits that are fine:
Fireforged trigger
Sitting duck
Infused Precision
Rifled barrels
Hair Trigger
Juggernaut
Rifled mod
Go for the eyes
Modified ammunition
Napalm specialist

• Sharpshooter: 5s duration? Very weak, a –condi duration opponent nullifies this trait.
• Target the maimed: 10%? Our bleeds don’t last long on anything but grenades.
• Precise sights: Again, no real place in either pve or pvp. You could increase the vulnerability duration from 3s to 5s and give flamethrower crit builds a way to apply vulnerability (at the cost of CD reduction), but it seems like you would be better off merging it with exploit weakness and placing something else in its place.
• Coated bullets: This would be great, but pistols have the worst auto-attack in the game bar none. Adding piercing to one of the skills isn’t going to fix that. The bleed needs to be increased to 4s and you need to look at the power scaling. As it stands, coated bullets just gets you killed from retaliation faster than you deal damage.

The big thing that Firearms lacks is anything for condition users, which is kind of funny since it’s our condition damage line. It focuses on using our main weapons, and has some good traits for rifles but none for pistols. Possibly look at combining/buffing some of the weaker traits and adding something that says to a condition user “hey, I’d be a huge help!”. Since all of our conditions have low durations, a trait that isn’t in the grandmaster tier to help with that would be a great place to improve the line.

When it’s just one abomb, it’s not bad and the group can take it out quickly. when it’s 4, and a smaller group, they’re completely unstoppable. by the time you get one down, the rest all have huge stacks of frenzy and hit for 10k+ on targets with 3k armor. if they charge they multi-hit everyone in their path and drop everyone.

It wouldn’t be a problem if lyssa’s south seal didn’t lag so badly that you drop to 1 fps until you relog. Can’t even see that they spawned before half the group’s dead, and then they just sit up there and kill anything that comes near them.

Vet Subjugators and abombs are pretty broken right now, they’re wiping zergs out like nothing. Getting 2 shot with 3k armor? cmon =/

And lyssa’s south seal is completely broken. You can get the npcs up, but if they go down they just stop working on the cannon completely until you get overrun and wipe. Then all the veterans just stay up there and crush anything that comes to them. And that’s if the lag doesn’t shut down everyones computers first, it drops to 1 fps at around the halfway mark on the cannon every time for the entire zerg.

And we get a light show at dwayna, which while neat also causes seizures.

Are the devs looking at any of this at all? Unless you’re doing Orr with a 30 man zerg, you can’t do half the content.

i want to say it’s not. it triggers within a half second of being stunned

Hello there, i’m recently having issues with the autodefense bomb dispenser trait in the engineer’s power line. prior to the patch it worked fine, but now it’s screwing up. Still drops a smoke field, and the CD reduction works on it from short fuse, but it isn’t blinding people who stand in it reliably. Especially when they’re using hammers, even without berserker stance up.

Also, it doesn’t trigger for mesmer’s chaos storm or thieves basilisk venom, and only half the time for necro’s fear. i’m guessing it’s an issue as to when it’s considered a condition vs a stun.

Try autodefense bomb dispenser out, it shuts down the opener on almost all the current meta’s builds. if you get loaded up with immo and then stunned, you can stop the incoming damage and rocket boots out for a free stealth and reset without wasting a single CD or taking much damage.

Would it be possible to make an option that turns off the “are you sure you wish to salvage this item?” every single time? it’s annoying with masterwork pieces and downright silly with pvp items.

Have you ever tried to spend 200k+ glory? the only thing you can buy with it is mats for making dyes, and it takes hours and hours to individually salvage all the pieces.

Anyone else getting .5s-1s skill lags? or random lag spikes? and starting 30 minutes ago i’m now crashing every 5 minutes.

Added bonus, really loving the new wvw matchups. take the lowest rated t4 world and match em against a t2 and t3 pairing, because that makes sense to someone somewhere apparently. we were already the lowest pop server in our tier, now we can’t cap anything more than 1-2 camps .

lets be honest here, hs needs a 10-15% damage nerf as it stands. if i can immobilize, then spam hs 6 times and kill anyone without invuln there’s probably an issue with the skill’s damage.

either way, body shot’s the only thing in the set that can be changed without screwing over every other set that uses pistol oh. vital shot does reasonable damage, unload does reasonable to good damage, and sneak attack does great damage. body shot does jack for us.

only other thing i can see happening is body shot can be made into leg shot and given a 1.5s immobilize, but that’d make it too strong on that weapon set

even easier, just make body shot a reverse heartseeker with a lower damage coefficient due to it being ranged. deals more damage if the opponent has more health, and less as the opponent’s health decreases. then make it a backwards leap. bp→body shot→sneak attack with unloads as a tactical ini sink if you can afford it.

this way both power builds and condition builds can use the set.