to OP if your only looking at damage then that may be right.
But I think you miss the utility involve with pbr / goggles.
pbr gets you a ranger cripple that is easy to hit with, and a great low CD knock back to pair with overcharge shot for chain CC’ing or interupting skills.
With goggles you get a stun break paired with 10s of blind immunity, which is huge with all the blind spam builds right now. While the 10 stacks of vuln might not be a huge boon for you over the dps from RT, it does increase the dps of other players, and pets by 10% which is not shabby at all, with a 1200 range. Not even talking about the fury.
With RT I think your also missing a trick. You can deploy and detonate rifle on top of a water or fire field, inbetween TB cool downs, to can a blast, and an extra SD.
If you time it right you can actually let the turret dps a bit 2-3 seconds before you blast it as well in 1 V 1 and with traiting that can get you a knock back
while this is a bit tongue and check I would like to seriously thank Abandons!
While fighting on EB Sunday night, I crashed due to the mega blob.
Said crash ended up putting me in queue, so I went to get a drink.
As I got to my kitchen I heard a noise outside, and when I checked I found a guy trying to cut my bike lock with a pair of bolt cutters.
After cursing at him he ran off.
But I am rather pleased that my bike was saved.
Thank you abandons mega blob! You saved my bike!
what kind of wvw builds you looking for?
solo roaming,
zerg play
small guild roaming
guild play
I have a few builds I use and a few I am playing around with
right now I am using 2 variations on SD.
one is rifle – healing turret – eg – slick shoes – rocket boots – supply crate
you spec generally
0 30 10 0 30 with rifle traits, the 20% reduced damage while cc’d, and then SD, gadget cd, and then kit refinement.
It sounds odd but it works well.
You have a great condi remover with fumigate and super elixir on the EG, and plent of blasts and CC breaks.
The way you play it is to utilized a combination of our group pool CC with super speed + leaps.
As in if you use slick shoes them rocket boots you leave a line of the knock down goo, which can be used to stun tightly group zergs.
If you swap in EG you get immobilize goo which does the same.
Basically you can rocket in and stun, and then EG out and immobilize, with a supply crate in their for good CC.
You really need to bring defensive gear, knights or invaders is a must really, and you have to learn to aim the jumps well. Keep in mind the pools are small radius and enemies have to move on them to be cc’d.
But with practice you get good at lining in zergs or cutting guild groups in half as they move.
The other spec is more standard.
rifle – ht – tool kit – thumper – rifle turret – supply crate.
same general setup but you can swap points into explosives if you like for more power, its a defensive gear setup. I tend to do a mix of knight / invader gear, with beryl orbs for extra crit damage, and a valk rifle. It mixes well. Good toughness, with good vit, and okay dps.
this is front line support, I often switch in EG in place of TK.
the idea is as you push in drop tumper and rifle in a safe place, overcharge thumper if your close to it. When your leader calls for it detonate the turrets for 3-4 blasts depending on if your close to the thumper. You can use this in connection with the healing turret tool belt to nearly max your own water field for around 5-6k aoe healing.
you can also use it for might or ret stacking. But in general you play in the front use rifle / tk for a bit of dps on top of the blasts and SD burst when you use a water field.
Engineers have something unique in the fact that we have a lot of blast finishers that we can preload going into a fight. They might not be as constant as warrior blasts, but dropping 4-5 in quick sucesssion is extremely powerful for guild groups.
the asura / char / and sylvari racials are really nice in PvE / WvW
you can easily use some of them in place of class utilities. Like hiden pistol, the slyvari block, and asura AoE confusion skill.
as for leveling PvE is typically fastest.
going into a bomb or flamethrower build works well.
Looking forward to some good fights with Millers. You guys n gals are typically a lot of fun with plenty of guild groups and smaller scale roaming.
Please try to ignore our more kittenish players and their corpse jumping.
Your a fairly fun server to fight against.
As for Abbadons, It might be fun if we can avoid the 3-4 second ability lag, but that does not seem likely.
You`ve got enough guilds that you could split off and do other things if you wanted, and potentionally spare the match up a bit of lag, but we’ll see.
If you like the lag that the map blob tactic brings, there is not much anyone else can do about it.
elixir X can also be a good escape tool due to the stability it gives and the high amount of CC on both forms.
I use mortar from time to time but it is so situational and it dies so easily I really feel it is a waste to slot.
Even the coolness of letting someone else use it doesn’t really help since your better off just building an arrow cart in such situations in WvW.
well I use EG and thumper in my WvW build already. Combing the blasts with the condi removal on the EG is really fantastic support, and with SD rifle, the dps is not bad.
But I am still debating if I want slick shoes. I tend to go for tool kit or rifle turret. Both give good dps, rifle gives an extra blast, tool kit the block + quickness + aoe cripple.
I have actually been thinking about the new rocket boots as well. EG out RB back in. Could be fun.
to be honest I see this whole mini story as a parady of scooby doo.
Kasmeer is Dafney, Majory is Velma, Thackery is clearly scooby doo. Keil is more than likely Fred, and we are put in the place of Shaggy.
Mai Trin is clearly the blubling bag guy (even does the “if it were’nt for you meddling lionguard ….” line!)
I think the main arguement on this is that new kit / backpack and turret skins are something that they want to do, but these kinds of changes take a lot of time and energy, which could be spent handling more wide ranging issues.
new turret skins for engi or new sets for every profession.
toggle to turn off backpacks, or reduced lag.
It really sucks but we are really on the bottum of the list of things to get done, with ever more important things popping in.
I am not sure we’ll see anything done towards this until a full blown expansion, and even then their will more than likely still be bigger fish to fry.
When it comes right down to it, there are not that many people who play engineer, and cosmetic changes are not high priorty.
It’s kind of depressing. I really want to be rid of the hobosacks, and get some snazyier kit / turret skins myself. There are really awesome ones already in game as well, like the char flamethrower, the char backpack, and the char gatling turret.
I do miss most of the old abilities more than the new ones, with the exception of med kit and FT.
I got a lot of dps out of grenade kit, and a lot of utility out of EG / TK, but I do acknolwdge EG was a bit strong.
unless if your in a tanky 1v1 dueling build or catch the theif off-guard you are always going to be a free to kill even a half good thief if they are 1v1 spec’d which most of them are.
Even when you do have the right build if your fighting a decent theif you will never take them down in WvW. They have the tools to reset the fight as many times as they want, if they make a mistake or if the fight doesn’t go their way.
Simply put they are monsters in small scale.
They really have to bin it for you to win, if it is a good thief.
That being said if you are solo roaming, or just running around solo till you get to a group / zerg.
You always want some kind of condi removal, a solid stun break (elixir S or R), and potentionally a turret.
If your fighting a newb heartseaker spammer turrets can eat them alive, as long as you break the initial stun and channel a block / dodge.
When I am solo I tend to run SD rifle with med kit, tool kit, rifle turret, and utility goggles, with kit refinement you get either quickness or projectile reflect ontop of the tool kit block, and 10 sec of blind immunity. If you see them coming you can drop a few med packs and then do box of nails + rifle turret. 2-3 med packs and make or break the fight.
It is good against p/p, d/p, and s/p theives, and okay against d/d. But s/d suck, and there is no reliable way to catch them if they swap to SB and teleport away to reset and comeback.
Thats the big problem you face, they will hit you, and you have to burn your CD’s and possibly elite to stay alive, they then break off reset and come back when the bulk of your abilities are on CD.
I’ve been using thumper since mines were nerfed for the blasts. A lot of people do tend to overlook it, but the triple blast is some of our best utitlity espeically in WvW when it comes to utilizing waterfields for quick group heals.
All it takes to use it is to have a good key binging setup and do 2 double taps.
I use 2 mouse bottons. 1 drops + overcharges, cleaning burst then detonate + rumble. 3 healing combos every time.
I also like dropping the turret with another turret in a safe place, such as in a tower before I push into a zerg.
Doing so lets me have 3-4 blasts ready to go as soon as they are needed without having to drop + detonate in heavy AoE.
4-5 blast finishers at the same time can turn the tied of a fight. Espeically if you got 2-3 engi’s doing it, in a group of 18-20.
I would play a stone dwarf.
It is precisciely because stone dwarfs have such a different take on, and potentionally different look to standard fantasy dwarfs that it would be a thrill to play them.
You have a very strong narrative and backstory from which to craft a detailed and compelling personal story line about dwarfs not only coming to grips with the transformation and the effect of over 200 years of constant warfare, but to the significant changes to the world above, the advancement of the other races, and the devistation caused by the other dragons.
You have an elder race which was akittens cultural and technilogical height, rebuilding and restarting, in a completely different world, haunted by the legacy of thier past.
There are so many ways they can take the story that it is simply amazing to think about.
Reconciliation with the dredge, reawakening and relearning the lost arts of brewing, and crafting from the Norn, rebuilding and possibly reclaiming their lost cities.
So often the dwarf narrative is that of a slow decline and then a stormy end. Anet has the chance to flip that narrative around and focus on dwarfs rebuilding and growing as a society. Something that no one else has really done, espeically in a game setting.
I leveled a fair bit in WvW.
You really wanna focus on a ranged option such as grenades, or traited elixir gun / rifle. Invest in vitality and toughness gear, and then focus on staying alive.
I’ve found that’s the best option whether your zerg, run guild groups, or roam. XP buffs are also vital if you want to level fast. Guild banner buffs, food, and gem store buffs help a lot.
Overall PvE grinding will be faster though, but not by much depending on your WvW community and the current activity level.
./wave TDA
TDA is cool they have pie and dress like banana’s.
well the whole retal things hurst anyone using multihits and ground target AoE`s, and there are a lot of professions who have their AoE builds centered on multi hit AoE, ranger, ele, necro, and grenade engi are some of the key builds.
You can’t stay alive if your taking 3-6k per second in retal ontop of normal damage, so a lot of people swap to beefy melee or to spec’s that don’t use a lot of multi hits.
It is not some intentional sneakiness, it is simply just the way it has to be until something is done about retal on the BL maps, and in general for anyone using an ability with multiple projectiles.
But with the balance the way it is there are not a great deal of viable WvW spec’ing options for guild play if you gotta avoid multi hits or multi projectiles like the plague.
It depends on how you build SD. Typically if your end up autoshooting you need to rework your utilities a bit. With points in tools you can get reduced tool belt skill cool downs and with rifle turret get a SD every 7s.
But typically you want to pair the build with other kits or use it with turrets.
I’ve ran it with rifle / rocket turret, and with tool kit, eg / bomb kits to great success.
The key is to swap between different abilities, and it tends to be a more much melee build than it seems.
My favorite PvE build for it at the moment is rifle – healing turret, tool kit, rifle turret, rocket turret. You can run this with PP if you want a more condi build. Right now I am power spec’d using a mix of knights / valkerie.
its 0 / 30 / 10 / 0 / 30
But I use the tool belt abilities on rifle / rocket turrets as I push in then I leave them in a safe or mostly safe spot and push into melee. Once in melee I use a combination of rifle and tool kit swapping back and forth between cool downs. I tend to detonate rifle turret when the overcharge is on CD and then hit the tool belt for a double SD and then redeploy when it’s back up. If you use healing turret you get a heal out of it and a 3rd SD.
But for pve it is a melee build, and melee builds don’t work well on some bosses and you need to be careful about placement. You need to be good at dodging and knowing when to use your tool kit block, and to be honest the dps from HGH is better and you do not really have to play well to do well with HGH.
So it is a harder build to be effective with. But I find it to be more fun overall, but if you doing higher level fractals, besure you know the boss fights well.
you can still hit stealthed targets with projectiles or any ability for that matter when they are stealthed, it is just a bit more trickey to hit them.
the best method is not to use the auto shot and to mannualy trigger for 1 skills. Even if a theif goes stealth you still keep shooting, with the auto hit it stops when the target drops. Manually triggering it is over 1-2 more hits on a target even after it’s stealthed.
Ground aoe like box of nails, frost grenade, glue bomb, glue shot, acid bomb, and a few others work well since even if a thief goes invisible they will be in the aoe and take either cripples, immobilizes, or chills to help slow them down.
Using a wide frontal AoE as an enemy pops into stealth can work, abilities like flame fet, flame blast, blunderbuss, fumigate, throw wrench, and a few others are also fairly good.
If a theif gets away a good way to deal with them is to drop bombs from bomb kit or more ground target aoe, many will miss judge the range of BoB, or move strait onto a smoke field.
Or if you use turrets to stand on top of thumper or net turret and have them overcharged. As soon as they attack they’ll come out of stealth and get CC’d by the turrets.
if you goal is not to keep the turrets up for long. Such as with healing or rifle turrets then then you drop them long enough for the overcharge and then detonate for the blasts.
This is how I and a few other engi’s I know utilize healing and rifle turrets as on demand knock backs to disrupt finishers, melee trains, and zerg blobs (supply crate)
We are more interested in turrets for blast finishers / quick tool belt skills, than we are for keeping turrets alive. It is more useful to use the blast asap, than have it uncontrollably attack random targets.
But this is not a TPvP build or a PvE build, this is a 15-20 man guild play WvW build. Your using knock backs and blasts for group support, that’s the beauty of acclerant packed turrets.
It turns supply crate into monsterous CC, and adds extra utility to water / fire field blasting.
But how would you suggest to combine all the turret traits into one line? acclerant packed turrets and deployable turrets are extremely strong traits. Would you combine them with the others? You’ve got 3 major trait slots but 5 major traits. I can see metal plating and auto tool installantion being combined, but that only gains you 1 slot.
Actually it doesn’t. It only encourages min-maxing one type of skill by branching into other trait lines. If all turret traits would be in one line, you’d have to pick your top three, and get another top three in another line for another set of skills entirely. As such, you’re much more inclined to have diverse builds.
Second offense of the current system, is masking broken skills behind several must-have traits that make them either balanced or OP. Skills should be functional without traits to begin with. If a kit is broken without 3 traits, the kit has to be buffed.[/quote]
yeah but your not using acclerant pack turrets if your using a turret build. The turret KB is best used when detonating turrets, if your running a turret build, you want your turrets up as much as possible, not on cool down. That is a completely different way of using turrets.
Thats my main point. If that trait was inventions I more than likely wouldn’t use it. Inventions focuses on keeping turrets alive and increasing their damage.
Also you can only have 3 major traits. So unless if they combined everything something has to give.
I run what is namely a SD build.
It is typically 0 30 10 0 30
I run it with 3 different gear sets depending on what I want to do.
Condition: P/P with pistol traits, healing turret, EG, rifle turret, (open slot) I use a mix of carrion and rampager gear, with an earth sigil, and a + condi sigil. For runes I typically go for rampager gems, but I am trying out different builds atm.
WvW team / roaming: Rifle, healing turret, tool kit, rifle turret, thumper turret. Invader gear, mixed with some knights. knight orbs. Good for burst dps, burst healing, and staying alive with dodging + tool kit block.
Crit build: Rifle healing turret, tool kit, rifle turret, pbr. I run valk gear with a bit of knights, and then berzerker orbs. Good for burst dps, and a mix of melee + mid range.
With both rifle builds I run the sigil of blood for power stacking, but when I hit 25 I swap to a second rifle with sigil or fire or air.
The condi build is something new I have been playing around with. The damage is actually really nice since is has a good amount of power ontop of condi, and good crit thanks to tools. Between rifle turret, the firearms trait, and the sigil of earth, there is great bleed stacking. 10-12 stacks + with the burning, posion, and confusion, with a bit of power damage on the 1 skill from EG, acid bomb, and the constant SD’s.
There really isn’t a build that replaces HGH grenade for dps’ing, but I hate the way that build plays, so I play around and find builds I like using. As long as the bosses / enemy players die, I do not really care about min / maxing so much, even if I am technically gimping myself.
You can treb them with a supieror treb ontop of the supply shed, but you have to have that treb down, or else your doomed.
To be honest in situations like that there is not much to be done, with out reinforcements.
The best option is to go hit those trebs with AoE from below, but with only 4 that is not a good option.
Eventually a severly out number side will lose a tower, but pushing them off 4 times is nothing to shake a stick at.
If a 5 man group could hold out indefinately in rebriar against huge numbers it would be fairly broken.
I know some people think that themed traits should be locked into themed trait lines.
All turret traits in inventions, all elixir traits in alchemy. But by having those traits in other lines it incourages use of traits and utilities outside of the primary trait lines.
Accerlant packed turrets is a brillant trait in it’s own right and it functions in a different way to the main stream turret traits. It lets you use turrets on demand knock backs and skill interupts, which is pretty awesome.
But agree there are a lot of traits that need trimming firearms, inventions, and tools all need a good review.
Although I think the issue with inventions is not the traits as much as turrets themselves. If turrets are weak and extremely limited, there is not much traits on their own can do to help.
With tools, the real questions, where are the gadget support traits? There is only 1. The kit traits are nice to be sure. Kit refinement, speedy kits, power wrenches, and the tool belt traits and minor traits are nice. But the others are just meh.
I would love to see some proper gadget traits. Every other kind of utility skill or weapon, inculding the elites, get more trait coverage, they are extremely under supported.
Do you care about graphics quality?
If you are willing to run on minimum graphics, kill the sound, and minimize cpu usage from other programs and appilations you can hit that target on even some older outdated systems.
I have an old HP Intel dual core 1.6ghz laptop with an nvida 150 and 4 gbs of ram that maintains around 25-30fps with a cooling pad, if I run absolute minimum settings across the board.
But for building a new P.C. there are a few things to keep in mind.
CPU speed is important, infact it is the most important for WvW fps. But anything above 3ghz is more than enough for the job. I`d recommend either an I5 or I7 chipsets.
For the hard drive a SSD, even a small SSD is a must. A lot of the models seem to load from the client, so a faster hard drive makes a huge difference. If you want to save money go with a smaller SSD maybe just 60 or 100 gb.
For ram I would say 8gb is enough, but ram is cheap enough it is not to costly to get 16gb.
For the GPU you do not need to go crazy. I would recommend a 2gb unit like a nvida 660TI, but you can run solid fps on even the lower end cards like the 1gb 650’s if you are willing to reduce your ingame graphics a bit.
It depends what you want to do in terms of graphics quality, but you can put together a solid system for WvW without breaking the bank.
hmm
I can’t see your build link but I think there is a better way to do this build.
You can get 3 blast finishers off of just thumper turret, so if you combine that with rifle or foresake the last turret for another utility skill it could work better.
If you drop, overcharge, denotate, and then use the tool belt you`ll get a triple blast or 9 stacks of might. It is good for might stacking or doing burst AoE healing on water fields.
I have done a FT turret build in WvW before and I liked it, but I ended up dropping it due to retal damage when facing guild teams.
In PvE if your focus is purely dps I think you would still do better with grenade kit.
I have already started down the invader route with my armour. And it already seems to be making a difference, I am usually in the think of it, and when it gets too much I will skirt round the edges of the mass aoe laid down by the opposition.
You’ll see a big difference in survivability if you get your toughness and vitality both to the 2k mark.
I typically run 1.6k toughness, but I tend to always have a bit of group cover.
consumable food and the new karka potions (from the 4/4 event vendor) from southsun can really help as well in the short term to boost toughness / suvivability.
With the potion + toughness food you can get an extra 250. It makes a huge difference.
Keep in mind that (zoom hacking) is wide spread. It happens on every server and no matter which server it is there are going to be a few people at big keep sieges doing it.
Simply put it is far to easy to do, and there is no real way to report it.
It sucks and frankly I hate it, but until the dev’s find a fix there is nothing to do about it, except move on, and look for another fight.
The only thing you can do is if you know people who are using it or if you got guildies using tell them to stop, or gkick them if you can.
I would like people to play in a fair manner, without exploiting, but I have come to accept it is a suck part of an online gaming experience.
the ai for the turrets is way to hard to pull off.
The turrets would have to despawn and respawn as a new turret. So depending on the number of turrets you have out it would be a lot for the game engine to handle and process.
the same applies for the abilities depending on slotted abilities. There is a lot of back house calculation going on, which is very resource dependant.
You also talking about some 40 new abilities off 1 skill.
Its not a bad idea, and it’s really creative, but I do not think it is very feaseable with the current technology, and the amount of development time needed on the skill.
Aspects of the overall idea might be do able though. Like spawning a new type of mobile turret ((something similar to necro fleshgolem) or perhaps a limited duration or use kit with fixed skills ((no different skills per each unique ability, something like guardian tomes))
Keep in mind that the dev’s have said that just with text changes it is a 3 week turn around with the translations alone.
I rolled human, but it is mainly because I just do not like the char or norn animations, I think they just look goofy or at times bad, and for char I hate the armor modeling on a lot of the non racial sets.
I really can’t being an asura or a slyvari as well. They just are not my thing.
Now if there were dwarfs, or skritt, and possibly tengu I could go for them.
I dont agree with the idea of norn being hamfisted offs. There is no reason they can’t be big but dexterious and fluid in their movements. They just move very clumisly, and when you dig into the lore and a lot of the characters norn do not come off that way in battle. Drunken and boisterous yes, but not clumsy.
a key trick you missed is utilizing blast finishers from turrets.
You can place turrets before a fight in a safe area, and then detonate them. The blast finishers trigger off you and not the turrets. This lets you preload those blast finishers.
Also with the thumper turret if you drop and overcharge it then blast you get 2 finishers, 3 if you use the tool belt after, along with a double static discharge if you have it traited.
So if you run 2-3 turrets and drop them before you push in with thumper, you can set off 4-5 blast finishers with 4-6 static discharges.
I use this with the healing turret tool belt for 4 Aoe heals and 6 SD’s. It’s great group healing and burst dps.
If you trait the knock back trait from explosives those turrets give chain AoE knock backs, which is good CC. Be warned though the knock backs trigger off the turret though, not the player.
But you can use these blasts for any combo field which is really handy.
I found with FT the issue you hit is that you do not get as many tags due to the mid ranged abilities and just the way FT functions when at it’s max range, also if you push in hard you take nasty retal hits.
If your key on sticking with FT I would advise a more tanky gear setup if your not already doing so. Knights or invaders, and maybe augmenting your build with another ranged option.
Rifle / tool kit are nice to have in FT builds, as is static discharge since it gives you a bit more range to get tags, and with tool kit and the block it’s nice survivability if you wanna push in.
Throw wrench is great for tags as well.
I personally use a SD melee healing build with rifle / healing turret / tool kit / rifle turret / tumper turret / supply crate. Something like 0 30 10 0 30. It works really well for badges in both guild and solo play.
I think the key if you just want badges though is to be a bit more ranged and hug the edges of the fight. If you punching in the middle, your going to lose badges without support, since you wont have time to pickup bags as you go unless if you win the fight and completely wipe them. Outside of guild teams those kinds of fights are somewhat rare in the open field.
Well keep in mind, that since Gandara is doing well this week the casual player population has exploded. When things are rough and you lack numbers they are no where to be found, but when you gain any kind of lead they immediately show up and zerg across the map in search of wexp.
A lot of us are dumbfounded as to where all these players and commanders are coming from. Where were they last week when we were getting sandwitch between the German zergs?
Fair weather WvW’ers what can you do?
Also I can not say this for every guild on Gandara, but a lot of our organized guilds do run seperate, and we do avoid using commander tags to avoid blobbing up, but it can be hard to keep from froming a tail when fighting is restricted to very small portions of the map.
You port out or run up north to try to shake them off but they just keep coming back.
in small scale fights ret is not bad.
But if you take a close look at any organize guild group, you’ll notice that they stack a lot of guardians, warriors, and blast finishers.
It is not an issue to keep ret up, and you re-apply it so quickly that the limited amount of boon stripping does nothing.
The key thing to keep in mind a lot of this ret stacking is not an intentional tactic as much as it is a passive effect of running heavy on warrior / guardian.
You pretty much have to run more tanky, and cut any multi hit, or multi projectile abilities out of your build.
There is no way around it for most until ret gets changed.
But keep in mind that this is a wide spread problem.
Almost every profession has a build or two hit by it, but it is more devistating for some than others. Ele, Engi, Ranger, and Necro being some of the worst hit, since the bulk of thier builds, or functional WvW builds are dependant on AoE multi hits or persistant GTAOE.
I use tool kit a lot and I love it.
The only change I would make is to make the thrid hit AoE and slightly faster on the 1 skill, and to potentially make the 3 skill AoE, so it matches the melee skill set on other professions a little bit better.
With those changes you could really play front line more with tool kit in WvW and team play, with the benefit of not being stuck with a lot of multi hit attacks.
It’s the kits lack of AoE on the key dps hits thats my big issue. But I use it none the less.
well an easy way to provide more group healing is to swap something for thumper turret.
If you drop thumper, overcharge it, and then denotate and hit the tool belt. Basically 2 double taps with the right keybinds, you get 3 instant blast finishers you can toss on a water field for a burst of AoE healing from your healing turret’s tool belt.
Or 4-5 blasts with your bomb + healing turret detonate.
All in all if you time it well and get use to running it, you can do burst heals of 3-5k AoE every minute.
It is also nice for might stacking on a fire field, you can easily set your team up with 9-12 stacks before a fight.
Keep in mind the turret detonate blast finisher is now off you, and not the turret, so be sure to stand in the fields when you use them.
PP is not really ideal for condition builds, unless you pair it with grenade or bomb imo.
Grenade gets you the bleeds with #2 skill, bomb gets you more confusion / more burn.
If you run grenade or PP with coated bullets in WvW, you really really have to be cafeful of retaliation damage on bigger groups / zergs. You can take up to 15-20 hits of ret off a single autoshot with pistol if you enemies are tightly packed and your unlucky.
That can be 5-6k damage to you per second. The same is true of grenade kit and flamethrower.
If your focus is 1v1 or small scale it’s okay but you really have to watch it when your doing the bigger battles, or you will kill yourself farily quickly.
Some really nice fights on Arborstone BL Sunday morning – early evening.
Espeically to the [Dova] guild and those that kept coming back for more. Had some great fights, and you really kept us on our toes.
Hope your out and about later this week so we can get some more great fights.
Sincerely,
Karast Drinkerofmalibu
[CNTK]
@Deniara
thief is better for consistant blast finisher. But there is still a way to compete.
What we can do that others can not is to drop multiple blast finishers at the same time.
For example if you use thumper, drop + overcharge then detonate + tool belt you will get 3 blast finishers all at the same time + the knock back around the turret.
If you practice you can drop it on the healing turret toolbelt for a cool 3.6-4.5k aoe heal.
Depending on your build you can get 4 additional blast finishers with EG, supply crate, healing turret, and then another turret, bomb kit, or mine gadget.
7 total.
The good thing about the turrets is you can drop them before you push in, and when you detonate the blast triggers off you now, not off the turrets. So you can have 2-3 blasts ready to go before the fight starts.
If you go Static Discharge with a sigil of fire, this can be pretty good dps, ontop of the healing.
My current build is
0 30 20 0 20
pretty much rifle traits + prot proc / power shoes, and then SD and either kit refinement or speedy kits.
You can swap the 20 to alchemy if you like as well.
I tend to run invader gear with cleic orbs.
But it is pretty much burst dps + burst healing.
It is the best I have been able to come up with atm. But I am also working on leveling up my warrior, so that pretty much sums up how it is right now.
I think if ret got toned down or at least had a GCD on ticks it would be a different story and FT / Grenade could become the focus for great builds, but ret kills everything as it stands.
the thing is that without smart target, the ability to control what your turrets are hitting, they are always going to be lackluster.
Thats the key issue with them, if you get past cool downs, placement, survivability, and dps.
If it doesn’t what you need it to hit, when you need it to hit, you can’t rely on it.
It’s the same kind of RNG issue we hit secondary effects on potions, and a whole host of other abilities.
Do I get lucky? Does my turret hit the ranger, or does it hit his pet? Does it go for the boss, or some random unaggro’d mob.
There are a lot of great suggestions liek the OP’s but I think without targeting turrets will always be a bit subpar.
It was the offhand response from a Q/A session a few years ago if not more. Made by only one part of the writing team, at that the continuity team. The team of writers that exist to spin whatever new content and story the core team writes up into the overall lore background of the universe.
Saying that one comment from a few years back is a definitive stopping point for one of the major races of the Guildwars francise is hubaris at best.
The writers can and will do as the wish with the story as they continue to develop the game, its for that very reason why continuity writers exist.
It is so ever present in fantasy writing, and game writing that dragging old quotes from years back into thread after thread is next to meaningless.
The only people that know where the story is going, and what the games long term future will hold is the dev’s, writer’s and creative leads, and any serious writer will tell you that a story is never finished until it’s released, and sometimes not even then.
There is simply no need to go into every post done by people who liked dwarfs in GW1 or done by people who like dwarfs in general and state as if you were the grand poobah of the lore forums, that no its not gonna happen.
Maybe yes, maybe no, at this point no body knows, wait and see, and if you really want it to happen garner support and push for it.
Is all that is needed.
@ Deniara
I’ve been working on that a while and to be honest the only things I have really come up with is a limited amount of water field usage off the healing turret, stacking multiple blast finishers with thumper, and general group support with cleansing / light fields from elixir gun.
Combined with a bit of rifle dps.
But in organized play we are really in a bad spot balance wise, and to be honest we are a weak link with retaliation as is it.
Retaliation shuts down grenade, FT, and PP in any serious fight. You can’t take incoming aoe, ontop of 5-12k froms your own skills. Bomb kit is to situational, tool kit is to ST focus with 1/3.
So that’s about it. I am not saying it’s absolutely horrible, but your guild gets much more out of another warrior, guardian, ele, or theif in your spot. So your more for fringe and flavour than anything else.
But being able to drop 2-4 blast finishers on demand gives you someone of a niche role as a burst healer.
if you dink around a bit you’ll notice npc’s that use turret models, and in one case a kit model that is different from what engi’s use.
You have asura, slyvari, char, and some odd looking turret models in game. If you run around BC there are some minigun turrets and a flame turret with funky wheels.
I have always surmised that the original plan was to have turrets differ between the races, but it became to art expensive so it was cut, but a lot of the finished models are still in game if you hunt around a bit.
Konig why you do always jump on any dwarf threads so viciously.
Yes they have been turned to stone but that is by no means writing them out of the lore. They are ever present in the lore and a lot of the story lines, and it is by no means impossible or even improbale for them to make a return.
They were and still are a major race. They are simply not in the spotlight right now.
At any point in time the dev’s can bring them back and reintroduce them. One offhanded quote, from a lone dev, several years ago does not a dead dwarf make, and anything else is just suppoisition.
to be honest we are just not that mobile. We have the standard switftness that is pretty much generic, and with slick shoes / kit reifinement + tool kit you get a little bit of situational speed. But your not in the same league as warrior, theif, ranger, ele, or mesmer.
You best bet is to port out or stay near a friendly objective like the most foward tower. Otherwise the zerg will run you down.
As for organized team specs I really recommend doing a tool belt / turret build. Taking advantage of the healing turret water fields with triple blast finishers for solid group healing. But keep in mind, you are not using the turrets as turrets, you are blasting them and using the tool belts. Thumper is a tripple blast finisher if you keybind it right. That’s 3600-4500 aoe healing every 50 seconds, with the ability to drop more.
But whatever spec your running tool kit with kit refinement makes a huge difference with survivability. haste ? 3s of block and an AoE cripple field can save you if you time it right with dodges.
Also although it is disliked the elite elixir and the rampage form can save you form time to time. Stability ? the knock back and chage is often enough to get that extra bit to safety.
The tankcat build is for support. You don’t understand the usefulness and the dynamic of the build because you’re not as good as you’d like to think (most people are too stubborn to accept this, but that’s okay) No other class in the game can do what it does, even if other classes spec bunker.
What he does in our group is since we typically have 5-8 people going against 40+, he runs around and soaks damage and assists on picking our teammates up. This is an extremely important job, perhaps moreso than any amount of damage output that any class can do. Why is that? Because think about it. If a smaller group downs 8-10 people, those people are down. But if a single person from your group dies, then those 8-10 people all rally off you. It is extremely important that when taking out larger numbers nobody on your team dies. Ever. And the tankcat is always right there to ensure that doesn’t happen. The tankcat also is unmatched in finishing downed opponents, something that the other classes can’t do because they’re not as tanky, and they’re also more efficient doing something else.
That’s the key engineer role in WvW, and it can be done in a number of ways utilizing elixir S, self regulating defenses, elixir R, rocket boots, and our numerous block skills.
What we lack in the heavy hitting dps department, or in the “tank it all day, all night” arena we make up for in situational usefulness.
You can push in, do a nice amount of damage and conditions, draw attention, and escape.
Tankcat does this, as do some bomb / FT builds.
I personally use a dps focused tool belt rifle build.
I get stability from a guardian and then do a jumpshot / blunderbuss into the zerg. I swap to tool kit for the aoe cripple / bleed from kit refinement and then use gear shield to draw attention for 3s. After that I hit elixir S, swap to elixir gun dropping a light field, I then use super elixir for another light field, use fumigate, and then acid bomb to escape after elixir S fades. At that point I’ll use throw wrench and supply crate for a bit of CC, dps, and support.
1v1 it’s not a fantastic build. In TPvP it’s not that great. In PvE it’s subpar to grenade.
But when doing WvW, and when doing pub game’s it’s fantastic with a little bit of team support.
It’s something we can do with a number of builds that other professions have a hard replicating.
I hate the engineer downed state and I just let myself die most of the time.
It is not worth my time to do anything else.
Unless if someone is especially fail you cannot interrupt them twice with the 2/3. The cast on the 3 is to long.
The damage from the 3 is nice but you’ll be stomped / killed before you can use it.
The 1 skill throw junk is worthless. Half it’s dps is split between a RNG condi, which gives 1 stack of bleed, and a weak power hit.
Even glass cannon you’ll be lucky if it crits 1k versus 2-3k hits from other professions.
The whole skill set is a crap shoot.
I cannot count the number of times I have had a close fight with a thief, mesmer, warrior, or ele, where I have downed them, been downed, and then been killed by them in their downed state, while I hit like a wet noodle and do nothing usefull at all.
the thing with P/P is that you really need 30 points in firearms for coated bullets to make it work, and it tends to do better with power rather than condi damage.
It’s silly but true.
For Condi spec’s grenade / bomb kit do much better.
The only thing we have the really compares well to warrior / thief is a power grenade build with the grenadier trait.
later on your can do burst spec’s with rifle in static shock spec’s but while they have competitive burst, their sustained dps is not that great.
At lower levels you might trait flamethrower, or tool kit. They work well until mid 50-60s.