Guild Wars 2

Goloith.6349:

The problem with retaliation is that you can’t see it when your charging into a zerg. By biggest question is why my guardian doesn’t get faced palmed on retaliation for whirling in circles but my Engineer does with flamethrower.

Some devs actually played a Guardian? Sorry couldn’t resist.

linck.9186:

just wondering, when did they mention they are going to nerf slick shoes and elixir R@@?

They mentioned those while also speaking about “24k damage grenade” builds.

the problem with FT in WvW is, some enemy drops a blast finisher in a light field (or boon shares retal any of the other ways) and area retaliation goes out, suddenly mid FT auto-attack you will take a huge amount of retaliation damage and kill or badly injure yourself.

Omnom lifesteal food used to protect against this somewhat, but not anymore since food changes. Large amounts of retaliation are common in larger fights.

Patch day is almost with us again, so enjoy your current engineer builds before they get ineptly nerfed in the scorched earth approach the devs take to targeting some random facet of engineer that actually works okay and carpet bombing the entire skillset it resides in from orbit.

HGH & any boon stacking/spiking builds have to be concerned about what the boonhate changes will mean for them. Changes designed to make builds that stack boons easier to kill, aimed at bunkers but probably affecting dps builds too as it’s hard to separate the two. We have very few details about what this will entail though. Likely these changes will affect all classes, but the past shows that any classwide changes won’t get engineer specific counter balance changes that other more populated classes might get.

100nades is almost definitely going to be nuked into the dust of history, because no engineer should be allowed to burst anything like other classes, e.g. thief, even if it’s massively more complex to operate and has far less survivability. All because one time at band camp a dev’s second cousin saw a photo-shopped picture of 24k damage. You’d need a planetary alignment to get that against an upscaled level 7 player in WvW. Theif, mes, warrior would probably burst far harder in same circumstances. With the devs past record for maladriot engineer changes that are far more deadly cures than the disease ever was, let’s hope they don’t break grenade kit in the process.

Slick shoes and elixir R were also mentioned at the same time as 100nades, so inept heavyhanded nerfs may be coming for the few people who use those.

Kit refinement will be getting another pass. Considering how asinine the last kit refinement change was, the equivalent of curing a patients headache by shooting them in the forehead with a high caliber pistol, multikitters have every right to be be scared of this change.

On the plus side, they have some awesome boosts in store for us. e.g. thumper turrets will now be able to cripple, so expect all 5 people who use thumper turret to be overjoyed.

The current skill-lag issues are even more game breaking than the culling issues.

I’d rather have culling back if skill-lag goes away in exchange.

If ur in a fight in StoneMist Castle, you have to run halfway back to your own keep before you can activate your heal (or any other) skill.

If u nightcap SM with low opposition, you will own it throughout the day pretty much, because no attack is likely going to succeed due to skill-lag.

Totally unplayable on the EU desolation WvW’s especially in EB. As soon as two medium sized, (even sometimes very small groups) meet it’s total potluck if you or your opponents have any possibility to hammer any skills at all through the lag barrier.

Is it this unplayable/no fun on all servers?

Fast cast is the way to go. You soon learn where it’s going to land without needing the targeting reticule.

Seras.5702:

So basically everyone would bring Turret Kit. Drop all turrets, swap to other weapons, continue as usual. That’s way OP. Imagine if you could drop all 5 turrets and then still have access to your guns and 2 other utilities.

Actually it’s Underpowered. You had to spend all that cast time to place all turrets and they do so little once they’re placed, if they even manage to fire once before evaporating to any passing breeze. Multiple cast times mean you weren’t doing something else. Lost time. Let alone the pickup or cooldown times.

Turrets need to be a 1 kit. Have limited X seconds of invulnerability or be aoe immune. Hit harder. Have vastly better ai. Have their traits redone, improved and condensed to just 1 line not nearly useless traits spread across 60point investment in places with no synergy.

Engineer as a whole was far better balanced in Beta1 than now. Balance excludes the few bugfixes that have been actually addressed, like finally letting sigils and stats on weapons work properly for engineers.

Chaba.5410:

bromi.7809:

I think the main problem with zerg www for engineer is that nobody yet tried to gather a group of 15-20 proper mix of grenadiers and bombers instead of warrior train. Playing a class for half a year i still can’t see how that damage+control could be mitigated.

NERF maybe has tried something like this, but to be honest we don’t demand that people run with certain builds. The Supply Crate drop matches a warrior’s F1 hammer skill with the 2 seconds of stun…

Slightly different cooldown on the two though!

If I sat down to write an exhaustive list of engineer problems each time it would take 4 days per post… even some of our ‘better’ items have their own problems, this doesn’t mean the problems with other things don’t exist.

I agree that a completely static situation like gate ramming, in the rare times when bomb heals etc would actually make difference to the success or not of the gate ramming is one of the times you can get some mileage out of healing bombs. Also occassionally the sustained fights in a corridor/ramp e.g. central keep SM can provide enough damaged allies who don’t move much to suit for bomb ranges. But my healing oriented exotics have been mostly sat in the bank since the big Super Elixir nerf (apart from testing the minor SE tweak upwards).

The stock phrase L2P retort, and that human thing about not wanting to admit you are wrong, can be part of what keeps devs from spending time working on our class.

If we’re going down the tired old L2P route then who knows, it might be that I’m actually significantly more successful with my engineer than many people who might suggest L2P as a booster to their own ego. Having success in certain roles with certain niche builds, doesn’t necessarily mean one has to become blind to the a class’s flaws as a whole. I’d suggest to you that failing to see the difference in finish and polish between the engineer class and some of the other classes, is a Learn To Analyse (L2A) issue.

I’m not trying to get personal or combative, we’ll never know who’s ‘better’ with an engineer. However criticising a classes shortcomings doesn’t necessarily mean the critique is coming from an unsuccessful player with the class in question. Engineers have a lack of role identity, very awkward traits and QoL, and don’t really excel at anything particularly apart from ’nade spam to suppress walls etc.

I’ve seen a great many MMO releases with one or several classes in a rather unfinished state over the past couple of decades, that happens with meeting deadlines and that’s fine, usually they get fixed eventually. What I find disturbing about engineer is that it’s actually extremely rare to see a ‘underdog’ class mainly take downward balance changes post release, and lose a lot of it’s build variety, take very few bug fixes, and not get upward balance changes on it’s weaker areas so new builds open up.

Let’s hope the turret changes go much much better than we anticipate in order to offset whatever happens to 100nades and probably kits/grenades as fallout from the 100nades incoming nerfs.

@amadeus you need to compare things in a far more analytical way. You’re speaking about an engineer with bombs, plus Elixir Gun, plus toolkit, plus elixirs being as good as a shout warrior? EG, Bombs & TK doesn’t leave any room for elixirs.

Shouts are better than elixirs, whether guardian or warrior, it’s just simple facts. Removing conditions, adding buffs, healing, supported by armour runes, massive 1200diameter range, crucially instant casts that can’t be interrupted and put on CD and shouts only require 1 instant keypress to do everyone! Not two long casts with one as a ground targeting with long flight time on top of long cast and deeply horrible 240diameter making it incredibly unlikely to hit many(any) other allies, to finally get some random effect that is often useless for the situation at hand.

Fear me can be amazing. Shake it off an aoe stun break and condition cure also can be amazingly useful. For great justice is really superb and long buffage.

I think we might have to agree to disagree on some points. Yes warriors are simpler to play, but what warriors can do, warriors really do quite well.

Engineer bomb builds are weak in WvW. The healing is too low to matter and scales off heal really badly, the ranges are vastly too small to regularly have both allies and enemies still in range when the bombs finally go off, and you need too much tankiness to go in and bomb an enemy group to have much power/crit/crit%/condition/condition-duration for damage from the very mixed bomb kit.

tl;dr Warrior is easier to use and still does a lot on the side at most WvW jobs – also most people fail to count combos from properly developed weapons not halfarsed kits, in their paper analyses and I think you’re doing the same – the exception is grenade spamming an area to make a few of the enemy reposition which is engineers role.

It would be great to have interviewers who prepare proper searching questions, with follow ups, for all topics.

Amadeus you have to compare like for like. Engineer traited and geared for survival will have much less survival and also much less damage than the warrior, and still can’t swap weapons for different ranges/roles.

Longbow only needs the 10point range option in a line you take anyway to be pretty kitten good because of it’s giant firefield, ranged blast finisher, and finishers on EVERY other move. Grenade has a minimum of 30points in a no survival line to even be worth equipping, and needs either HGH maintenace (which takes a lot of time away from dps-ing and elixirs plain suckitten compared to shouts) or 30 points in firearms and almost no survival traits at all to become useful, and it’s never going to give you any finishers because it has zero, nadda, zip, zilch. No blinds, no burning, no curing, no lifesteals etc.

It’s hardly all bad for warriors. Take WvW:
Longbow shout warrior vs. engineer flamethrower or even grenades

warrior vastly more hp/toughness, huge support to team from shouts, really great condition removal, great survival, combo possibility from EVERY skill, better at range (grenade flight time, FT range), less feedback from retaliation/confusion-proc etc

As warrior swap to your hammer when you push to just devastate enemy groups with the control. As engineer swap to, oh wait nothing, you have to totally trait specialise to get even 1 kit to work, and you don’t have weapon swap either i.e. no versatility.

With multi-kit build and it’s possibilities for cleansing gone, and boon hate possibly interfering with HGH/elixir viability, and 100nades being targeted by devs in interview recently as something to squash (about the only part of engineer they appeared to have any interest in is squashing 100nades).

I’d be extremely cautious about investing time in engineer. Engineer has a history so far of dev attention being a mostly negative feature, with the exception of them finally get sigils and weapon stats to no longer be broken after 5 months. Positive but vague sounding dev statements of “we have 2 pages of engineer stuff!” turn out to be 2 pages of basically tooltip fixes and a massive nerf that entirely eliminates a section of builds.

Most people who have an engineer probably follow the sentiment I heard expressed and widely agreed with in map chat the other day:
“My engineer sits under the offscreen arrow for character slots”
“My engineer is parked at a node”
“I’m not playing my engineer until A-net do something major to them”
etc

There is no real reason for engineer not to have weapon swapping and the VERSATILITY that gives in terms of changing stats and sigils.

Right now our weapons are designed deliberately weaker, we suppose because we have kits, abut yet our kits are weaker because they’re not weapons. Look at the combo potential of our kits… it’s just dreadful for example.

Either we need to get weapon swap:
adding new weapon sets for 2hand hammer(wrench)
maces
focus
torch
daggers

Or we need to stop halfarsing the kit route and do it properly:
with all elixirs placed in 1 kit and random crap removed (elixirs are low power, multiple slow slow cast and keypress, slow flightime, 240 not 1200! diameter, not supported by armour etc etc compared to shouts so this should be ok)
all turrets in 1 kit (& big improvements to power, responsiveness, ai, short term invuln on placement so they do something before evaporating etc)
a gadget kit (and traits to properly support gadgets)
an actual longer range single target kit (sniper gun?) and can hit people who aren’t asleep or afk or npc guards etc
flamethrower that is more similar to warrior longbow for e.g. finishers range aoe area burning application all massively inferior for flamethrower
Elixir Gun overhaul.
Grenade kit flight speed doubled? allowing it to be balanced properly as a greater range aoe kit, without hitting stupid opponents much harder, and hitting smart opponents barely at all.

and big trait overhaul

and finally the 10page buglist looked at.

The consistent truth of all the engineer changes since BWE1 so far is that, the ‘cures’ applied by A-net are far more deadly than the diseases they were attempting to target.

Build diversity and roles for engineers were much better at BWE1 than they are now. Of course some changes have needed to happen, but not these changes. Instead far better thought out changes that actually had a consistent vision of what they want the class to be for.

The recent Kit Refinement failure is a classic example, it deeply hurt many of the builds that most needed help, while attempting to target but basically missing the build the devs were aiming at. What’s so frustrating is that there might be 30 better suggestions on our forums that would have worked instead.

Of course bug-fixes are a separate issue that need to happen also, but that list is still about the same size as at release with the notable exception of recently finally getting sigils and weapons stats to work for engineers.

Regarding balance change decisions I have no idea where the devs are soucing their engineer info, it’s pretty clear from the reluctant & desultory response during the interview that it’s certainly not from playing an engineer for themselves. What ever their source for engineer info actually is, it’s a horribly flawed, short-sighted and inaccurate source that is leading to terrible decisions.

The engineer we have is nothing like the mission statements for the engineer at all, and it gets less and less similar with each patch.

Grenade spam is ok for applying conditions e.g. vulnerability in zerg v zerg. You will force enemies to retreat back to cleanse and heal but you won’t exactly burst them at range unless they are careless and your conditions are really strong. It’s frustrating sometimes seeing targets die long before your grenades even finish inching their way slowly through the sky. You’ll have to learn to guess and pray where people will be when you grenades actually arrive.

In smaller scale roaming stuff, people often choose HGH with pistols so you can both stunbreak and cleanse.

Tankcat variants for ‘annoying to kill’ trolling people and applying crowbar confusion when it’s up.

Multikitting used to be quite good, if a lot of eq1 bardlike keyboard twisting, but with the mistargeted Kit Refinement nerf it’s fairly risky now lacking viable condition cleansing.

Flamethrower is going to mean a lot of suiciding when someone drops aoe retaliation on an enemy team and you take 30hits and die. So you have to be very careful now that you can’t mitigate those 30 retals somewhat with 30 chances to proc lifesteal food.

If you want to survive condition specs you have to go HGH/409 heavy elixir now basically which eliminated quite a lot of the builds that were left. The change to medpack4 early on and the recent KR change leaves just 409.

Super Elixir based heal/support often with bombs used to be middle of the pack for potency, but SE got hammer nerfed a while back and then very slightly adjusted upwards. Maybe it will get adjusted again to a point it’s more worthwhile, but support is done better by others. There are some very specialised booning blast finisher builds, but they’re very narrow and heavily rely on other people’s waterfields to get much mileage out of it, which might mean teamspeak or similar to co-ordinate.

Turret ai is hideous.

It hardly matters how much more damage any of them get when they shoot at pointles targets, that have actually been out of range for god knows how long (assuming of course the extremely rare occasions where a turret is hidden enough to last more than 0.1 seconds from placement).

Kimbald.2697:

Mesmers already have a lot going for them, so i really wonder why they get all the fun new stuff.
how come some of those ideas weren’t used or the engineer, who still needs some defining abilitiesin groups since launch.

It appeared from this interview that they actually give a kitten about the mesmer because they play it, that’s why mesmer gets yet more new cool stuff. Engineer gets balanced based on the complaints non-engineers make about engineer (like please remove 100nades I don’t think engineer should have a burst spec). Because A-net has no knowledge & investment in the class themselves, they have nothing to weigh up the PM’s from friends against, so engineer only gets nerfs and tooltip fixes and blatantly obvious should have been in since pre-aplha kitten like, making sigils and weapons stats actually work (after 5 months).

I’ll say it again for the 1000th time since BWE1. Each and every class needs 1 specialist dev in addition to all the generalists on the balance team, so every class is guaranteed at least one voice that actually gives a kitten how each class evolves.

Shout based warrior, PVT gear, maybe longbow or rifle and hammer or great sword. Can range or melee, very robust, good heals and support, easy to learn and forgiving of mistakes.

The only hope for engineer is to get 8 class specialists added to the current balance team, this would also help with many other classes unique concerns.

Satisfying classes make every part of an MMO much better. Shirking a full sized balance team with individual class specialists as well a the generalists is the killer mistake most MMO’s can never recover from.

You cannot hide unfinished classes under more new content, players have to use the classes to do the content.

Hep.1347:

The problem I have with the idea of nerfing anything on the Engineer right now is that the class is underpopulated and on the lower end in terms of what they give to a group. Nerfing the best build insinuates all builds will be considered balanced when they meet this post-nerf level, so you’re essentially taking an already unpopular class and taking away the most powerful thing about it.

Targeting the viable engineer builds that came anywhere close to thief warrior guardian mesmer standard operation and ineptly over-nerfing those engineer builds into extinction has been modus operandi since BWE1.

Engineer population speaks for itself.

Engineer needs the attentions of a brilliant heart transplant surgeon, instead we keep getting operated on by some random joe who once watched an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

bromi.7809:

“Engineers are a mid-range class” No they aren’t.

Yes they are. In a sense that we stay close to ranged enemies and a bit far from melee ones, effectively dishing damage in both ranges from almost all our weapons.
Most other professions have to dictate their own distance to win and we can choose the one which is good for situation.

having immobilise skills that basically miss over 240range? etc etc

Man. Rifle 4, Pistol 5, grenade 4, bomb 5, magnet 5, net turret are all very reliable CONTROL, no other class can bring this amount of control with him.

Engineers [don’t] have some strong options at range too

This one i can agree with you.

All the range options you list suffer from being really bad at range. Pressing a direction key (not even dodge) negates them very frequently. In other words, in order to make your range options work, you have to already have your target within a narrow range.

Hang time on rifle 4, net shots firing at where people have moved from, grenades 4 stoping to watch an inflight movie before finally landing and so on make these skills much less effective in practise than they are supposed to be on paper.

Mid ranged isn’t a real thing, is it 200, 450, 600, 900? Mid range is an apology for not so good for melee, yet not so good for range either. There’s only 2 situations, lets both close or who can control range to advantage better. There is no lets synchronise dance at mid range in PvP. It’s closing to melee, or best kiting.

Who’s falling behind the WvW pack (everyone has perma swift) it’s engineer, with no working gap openers/closers.

Also to my mind a flamethrower shouldn’t be worse at applying burning than Longbow.

I love that the A-net devs do these podcasts etc, I know they will get a lot of flack, but I was a little sad that no1 on the dev team seemed interested or wanted to have to talk at all about engineer, more like “oh god let me repeat the class description again until this topic goes away”.

It sounded like no1 there has ever played an engineer or knows anything about them really. Using a lot of stock phrases from previous A-net class aims without having any clue which (if any) of it actually applies to engineers other than in theory.

“Engineers are a mid-range class” No they aren’t.

“Engineers can control range” No they can’t. Having only 1 non-functional gap closer is one of the worst range controllers of all the classes. having immobilise skills that basically miss over 240range? etc etc

“Engineers have some strong options at range too” (if you are as stationary as some of the NPC guards)

I hope the turret changes go well, I hope the targeting of boon stackers doesn’t hit engineer too hard. I am concerned that 100nades and elixir R and a few other things will get massively knee-jerk over-nerfed as usual.

The questions from the players could have opened up some better engineer talk but they didn’t get taken anywhere with the responses.

All turrets need to be inside 1 kit,.
Their traits need to not be spread across the entire engineeer tree in a totally illogical and un-buildable way.
They need vastly better ai.
They need several seconds of invulnerability on placement so they do anything before they evaporate.
They need to be useful and provide some meaningful dps or conditions.

With regards to kits:
Kit refinement was the only Engineer trait that really worked right. It made several kits a possibility and helped engineers a little towards the versatility they are supposed to have on paper but seriously don’t in practise. Multi-kit builds pretty much died with the KR nerf. It was an ungly and poor attempt that failed by adding yet more invisible cooldowns ontop of the existing invisible cooldowns (especially when the CD’s can reset with zero skills getting activated because they’re still on the other cooldown!).

Kit refinement should be reverted, and most other kit traits should be revamped to apply to several kits. Kit refinement nerf only broke engineer condition survival/mitigation options outside of elixirs, it didn’t do much to 100nades.

tl;dr the Kit Refinement ‘Cure’ was much more deadly than the disease it was trying and failing to target.

EasymodeX.4062:

If the new rewards include ascended gear, I guarantee that half of the “we don’t care” group would suddenly find themselves caring about retroactive points.

If the new rewards structure still doesn’t include ways for WvW players to get ascended gear then A-net have zero respect for their WvW customers.

2 points.

1) WvW players have seen every patch so far be filled with PvE or sPvP and nothing of any substance for WvW. When we get a patch that finally nods it’s head to our game mode, it would be better if it was a patch designed to make us happier, not a patch designed to make PvE-ers happier if they decide to try a little more WvW.

2) WvW has far too much grind already, and nearly all of it has to be done in the PvE game mode unless you have zero other commitments in real life.

Instead new WvW content should be partly about equipping WvW’ers with equal to PvE gear (or completely replacing pve gear with WvW sets) without them being forced to do PvE, and adding new prestige advancement for status, not yet more power grinds. The rest of WvW content should be about adding more goals and tactics, new layers of strategy, new map maybe etc.

Finally all the WvW JP puzzles should be removed entirely as a seperate PvP super-mario subgame on entirely seperated map servers that has zero impact on WvW maps / queues, and probably doesn’t reward anything that relates to power/gear in WvW.

PvE players got massive amounts of shinies for the last 7 months. Most of them will come into WvW with quite a large gold (buying power) and equipment advantage. WvW focused players basically got slapped in the face with a rotten slimy dead fish in terms of progression, rewards, gear, costs, new content, gold, & balancing.

Whether people admitit publicly or not, WvW players will naturally want to gerti that their loyalty to the neglected game mode has some form of quid pro quo above zero. That is just human nature, and making WvW players unhappy with WvW should also be a consideration

Compare FT with warriors longbow, a fairly comparable mixed power/cd weapon. Look at the massively better longbow range (and traited to 1200), look at the vastly superior amount of finishers longbow gets, and the circle aoe field, and the fact it isn’t so vulnerable to retaliation/confusion.

Typifies some of the engineer core design problems, our weapons are weak because we have kits or similar faulty reasoning, and our kits are weak because they’re not weapons.

Supply dro kitten till a very long cool down for turrets that die in under a quarter of a second that never manage to get a shot off, or shot at something out of range los an object or a pet.

If you’re going mention turret trait you need to be even handed and acknowledge how they are spread across the trait trees in a very inaccessible way, and only elevate turrets from utterly terrible to very terrible. In builds that lose the capacity to do other and better things by taking turrets.

Anyway this thread is about how much worse mortar is. Does anyone have a candidate for a racial elite that isn’t better than Mortar?

The funny part is our elites are so bad in general, we tend to say things like “mortar isn’t anywhere near as good as supply drop” often forgetting how rubbish supply drop is compared to say daggerstorm.

Are there any racial elite skills that are worse than mortar?

Throw wrench and box of nails feel very slow and unresponsive, and 1 auto should either be long range or much stronger.

Sororita.3465:

lchan.2169:

yes. i believe so. engi is just not built for pvp. Regardless of how you build the character its always going to be the weaker one. However in wvw, our role is truely support, looking around to give a warrior/guardian the extra edge to kill an enemy. The same with running dungeons. We stay mid range, move in and out.

Still, there is never one perfect build because it depends on individual gameplay. My build is extreme condition damage, toughness and vitality. From mid range i dump so much condition damage that it makes melee character’s life much easier. While the cond dmg is working, i have a choice to either provide further support like throwing throwing an elixir or minor healing to front forward fighters or move in with my wrench to put vulnerability and confusion and move back out.

sad that we have to heavily rely on other players in order to function as wellas others then, it seems our best spot in WvW would be in a zerg providing short timer buffs and good heals.

Guardian, elementalist, mesmer, ranger, necro, warrior: all of these can offer superior support with the right builds.

Bombs and elixirs lack a great deal of polish.

MikeFerguson.8921:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

wow this is the sort of communication people love thank you Mike!

I think it was Colin who stated in an earlier interview (during development) that people should never have to leave WvW if they don’t want to. Do you feel that you’ve met this goal so far (or was it a misinterpretation on my part)?

You’re welcome! Things have been really busy around here since we shipped, and that’s a big reason why we haven’t had a chance to communicate nearly as much as we’d like to, so we’re trying to make an effort to change that. We want to talk to you just as much as you want us to tell you stuff

As far as being able to play just in WvW and never have to leave if they don’t want to, that most definitely is our goal, and I think we’ve done a fairly good job at that so far. We do need to make sure ascended gear is obtainable in WvW, but other than that I think we’ve mostly made it so you never have to leave WvW if you just want to play there forever. Feel free to point out why I’m wrong about that

At a badge drop rate of 700ish since release, nearly only playing WvW with my 80 main, it would take MANY YEARS to acquire enough badges to buy 1 set of WvW exotics. WvW rewards are just rubbish, costs are far too high, food, repairs, omg seige, etc. yet I hear people claiming ridiculous numbers like they earned the same number of badges in a day that I’ve earned in what 6months?

Maybe engineers also got a hidden cooldown added to their bag drops? I loot all that appear, they just almost never drop.

Mid range is a dev fantasy with no basis in reality, just like, engineers are versatile. Engineers can’t move around the battlefield well (no swiftness doesn’t count for anything, anyone can get swiftness) they lack gap closers/openers.

Also Heavy armour would have made much more sense.

Zinwrath.2049:

I cant speak for PVE, i imagine FT is atleast decent option there for something.

SPVP however it doesnt cut it.. It used to be worth grabbing for the toolbelt skill in condition builds. Not really sure i could see myself giving up any essential tools to make room for it on my utility bar.

the #1 skill
misses a lot due to the still present terrain bug (very apparent on new map)
is channeled so it can be interrupted or dodged before applieng the dot (or they just run/teleport out of it)
Your rarely in situations where you could be hitting multiple people (and if you are, there are better AE alternatives such as Grenades)
Damage is weak when considering the damage on rifle (rifle peirces and hits multiples too…. from further away )

the #2 skill
is actually decent now with only one issue. Seems to become obstructed or dissapear randomly after cast. More of a bug than a weakness.

the #3 skill
Makes no sense on a weapon that wants you to be close range (unless your just reflecting projectiles with it) With that said i think its the best ability this weapon has, because you can use it for extra cc and reflect before swapping back to your normal weapon.

the #4 skill
its a combo field, but it is a wall. So you wont benefit yourself using it unless you swap off of FT to something with a combo finisher.
It casts slow.
It has a long cd.
It is probably the worst ability the kit has. For it has the least synergy with the rest of the kit.

the #5. skill
An aoe blind
Good because you have to get close to use this kit.
You can use it while CC’d which is good.
Its incredibly less amazing than almost any 5th skill on any kit or any weapon in the entire game though. Making it lack luster.

Toolbelt skill.
Boring but good for condition specs.

So there you have it, some pros and cons there for ya.

Biggest issue with the flame thrower is its abilitys dont work together.
Quick solutions.
1 skill applies fire at start.
2 skill blast finisher.
3 skill make it reflect attacks longer. Knocks down instead of knockback. (remove fire damage)
4 skill cast faster should be a circle instead of a wall.
5 Should be something else less boring that works with the rest of the kit. (Backdraft was better)

Do all this then balance the numbers.

Basically this, although I’d add the food changes make FT1 suicidal in WvW now vs retaliation & confusion/proc. Fewer bigger hits needed.

Good summary of 1v1 in downed Kardiamond.

Elementalist downed state was released as rubbish, and got fixed quite quickly, half a year later engineeer downed state is still being ignored.

FT was great fun to mess around with. Unfortunately the person making the weak changes to FT clearly didn’t understand what the food changes mean, certainly in a WvW setting.

Single turrets are currently so weak, and the timer on our 3 is just so kitten long I almost never use engy downed 3 but regularly use other classes down 3 skill. So a single turret just isn’t enough, unless it was some sort of specialised super turret that was worth waiting for.

FT is now much less viable in WvW.

If you ask in general chat in a few different game areas, “should I play engineer?” you’ll get a lot of negative replies typically. Like “my engineer is off screen at char select, and will be until anet do something for them”

A few people get a big kick from playing underdog class, when a lot of people leave a class, you can end up with quite polarised forums, as a few will want engineer to reach a decent level of finish and will hope that talking about it on official forums actually translates to dev actions.

It’s okay that engineer class was made last and wasn’t ready for release, everyone expected it’s fun potential at release to get polished. However engineer development has so far lacked effort, vision or consistency.

Many engineer builds have taken severe hits and become unplayable since release. The majority of engineer issues have been ignored. Anet don’t even head towards their own design statements.

It’s very unclear at this point what the hell devs want engineer to be.

Meaningful medium range in GW2 combat is as much a dev fantasy as engineers are versatile is a dev fantasy.

UNfotrunately the FT changes are an equal fantasy, that might work in a few setting like on dummies, but FT changes are nothing compared to how dangerous it is when you get many retaliation and confusion/proc confusion and have to go into close range with a FT.

FT just isn’t viable with the lifesteal food changes anymore.