Guild Wars 2

@Myrmidian Eudoros:
I get what you’re saying, and I apologise if I have offended you. It’s also why I put Analysis/Opinion above my comments on his response. It is after all, my opinion.

It is my opinion that this attitude of “no forward looking commentary” should change. I believe that a lot of grievances in the community could have been avoided, especially if something like the June 25th patch had been previewed and discussed with respect to balance changes.

However, I don’t run the PR department or the Community for Arenanet so my words are worth nothing. I just feel that Arenanet is copping a lot of flak by sticking to a policy that only galvanises the community against them.

@Jubai:
Sounds like you were trying to get into Hotjoin.

I am disappointed that there was little mention of the matchmaking, fixes to Skyhammer, and fixes to the Leaderboards however. The talks about the new reward systems was heartening, but QoL must go hand in hand with new features.
You don’t just release something half-baked and leave it for months.

I would be willing to play tPvP even with this meta on something difficult like Power Engineer or D/D Ele, if I were more assured that I would be getting fair matches and a fair go, rewards be kitten ed.

@Boomstin:
http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2guru/c/2883614

Having actually watched the video I don’t think that some of the negativity on this thread is justified.

I do agree with the general sentiment that the skill floor of the Ranger should be raised along with the skill ceiling. Trying to play one after having levelled my Engineer and Elementalist made me fall asleep at the keyboard. I don’t think that Jonathan Sharp is correct in this instance for keeping the pet mechanic as it is.

WRT The Ranger issue: 50:15 is where the discussion starts
I do think that there was some kind of misunderstanding on the side of Jonathan Sharp though. I believe that his response was with regards to Vonethils original proposal, which was to add an extra skill button for Rangers to do clutch knockdowns and fears and so on instead of tying it to the pet.

Obviously this then led to the reaction by Sharp and Grouch to shut that down and cite skill floor reasons and balance issues for Rangers getting another cooldown to use dependant upon the pet.

I believe that their original answer – WRT making the AI work a lot better and be a lot more responsive – is probably what people should be looking for instead. On this, I believe that both the community and Sharp have agreement, and there is a programmer working on tightening up the AI such that the Fear or the Knockdown or whatever is on point when you click the button.

@Kimoe:
The problem remains that damage in PvP remains too high for players to not be dodging every 5 seconds.

Any nerf to dodge mechanics – as they are the singular most efficient damage mitigation in the entire game – will need to accompany global nerfs to AOE damage and condition application across all classes.

Otherwise you can bet that the game will become even more mindless and spammy.

The TTK would become so low that it essentially turns into a Mexican Standoff – whoever pulls the trigger (spams skills) first, wins.

There’ll be no Observe, Orient, Decision, Action loop governing smart use of skills once the pace of the game exceeds a certain level.

In a way the Condition meta is a sign of things to come because Condition AOE negated dodge spam . You had to run out of Endurance eventually. When you did, Condition application ticks over time would get you even where your Endurance eventually came back up through Energy Sigils, or abusing Weapon skill evades.

The problem here is that by nerfing the profligacy of dodging the AOE Condi meta is prolonged.

I think that a nerf to Endurance Regen could work ; it just requires a global nerf to crit-proc conditions.

I do think that moving away from crit-procs could also open the way to more active play – however, for Condition builds specifically, something has to exist to force Condition specs to diversify their stat distribution.

@digiowl:
Zerging in WvW basically boils down to 2 things: Have a long ranged auto-attack to tag things, have a few Guardians for Might, Retaliation and Aegis, have Warriors for Swiftness, Fury and Might. After that it’s Staff Elementalists and Necros for support. Everyone else can just spam 1 and pat themselves on the back. Oh, and Arrowcarts. Arrowcarts as far as the eye can see.

The GW2 design has been broken for 8v8 and upwards since beta. I wouldn’t read much into the whole “tactic” of zerging.

@tattoohead:
Actually if you’re running Mace/Shield/Hammer your DPS is comparable to GS assuming you take Unsuspecting Foe/Merciless Hammer. Your autoattacks hit for 2-3k depending on the build which is just hilarious. You’re slower than a turtle though, but that’s what permaswiftness is for.

Besides, Axe/Mace has been shown to be objectively superior to GS 100B in terms of DPS. GS is good for 2 things: Mobility, and spiking CCd targets. Even the latter is beaten out by a proper Hammer build, so it’s really more for Mobility.

I will say that Engineer doesn’t have to stack Might to be effective at DPS – as long as you’re running Grenadier and you can hit every single skillshot.

There’s a reason why FT was given Juggernaut and the condi-Grenadier spec first found its way into PvP in conjunction with HGH.

With regard to Static Discharge, it’s an all-or-nothing burst build that does have downtime between periods of peak DPS.

Really, if you’re looking for a balanced build that also has excellent DPS, Grenadier is our only real, relatively safe and effective option. Other classes have a lot more leeway and it’s sad that for the Engineer that this is the case.

I think this is where ViVorcha is going with his arguments.

@tattoohead:
Elixir Gun 1 and FT with Sharpshooter will let you stack up some good amount of Bleed; although nowhere nearly as efficiently as Shrapnel and Grenadier, for sure.

I do think that the Bleeding Duration for Elixir Gun could do with some looking at, though. Either that or to make the stacks of bleed inflicted higher. Engineers trying to stack Bleed are pretty hard done by without Grenadier.

@amiable:
As I have mentioned earlier in the thread, I eventually came to the conclusion that IP should stay in its current implementation, lest Engineer’s place in balance become highly volatile.

I do feel that other crit procs could do with some reworking though.

• Go For the Eyes : I’ve mentioned before that I feel that loading the blinds into the Weapon skills would make it at least tolerable enough to take.
  As it is, it’s an RNG Sun Spirit . Calculable uptime assuming 40% critical chance for Go for the Eyes is 1/0.8 (Hip shot auto) * 0.4 * 0.5 * 5 = 1.25 seconds of Blind on average per 10 second ICD.
  Added to the fact that you can’t control it – you can’t clutch Blind which is the entire purpose of Blinds – and you get an RNG proc that people only take because it probably covers Burning.

• Precise Sights :
  I feel that Precise Sights is balanced as it stands, but it finds use largely in 2 builds: Grenadier builds to guarantee the 25 stacks of Vulnerability in Dungeon DPS, and in Flamethrower builds geared towards eking out that little bit of extra damage from FT1.
  Yet it doesn’t really offer much aside from increased DPS for the party – something that a lot of crit-procs for the Engineer are especially guilty of. In PvP, Vulnerability is favoured largely as a condition cover. Individual stacks are largely negligible – it’s only when you have 10+ stacks on you that you begin to worry. It’s arguably why classes like Mesmer have a much better design with regards to Vulnerability with Dazzling and Illusion of Vulnerability .
  I feel that the current implementation of Precise Sights should be altered in some way to promote clutch play rather than be some boring DPS increaser.

• Infused Precision
  With a good enough crit chance (40% +), or running the Flamethrower, Infused Precision offers combat mobility at 100% uptime. Coupled with Invigorating Speed it also gives you permanent Vigor.
  With the appropriate trait synergies Infused Precision is good for combat mobility, yet it suffers from again, a lack of interactivity. It’s just there, and the sad thing is that it seems to be the case for a lot of Engineer traits.

• Sharpshooter
  Sharpshooter is used in condi-Grenadier builds like that of Ostrich Eggs and combined with Incendiary Powder to provide, once again, a little bonus DPS and a cover condition for Burning. It doesn’t reward risky play, and it doesn’t reward smart play. Once again, it’s just there. Half of a Sigil of Agony to give a boring boost to DPS if you put 25+ into Firearms.

• Shrapnel
  A DPS booster for the hybrid Grenadier engineer.
  The 15% chance is too low for Bomb Kit, and tuned to give 2 (Grenades) * 1/0.5 (GK1 attack speed) * 0.15 = 0.6 stacks of bleed per second for 12*1.1 (Base condi duration with trait) seconds on average.
  It averages at 7.2 stacks of Bleed before Grenadier or 3*1/0.5*0.15*12*1.3 = 14.04 stacks of bleed with Grenadier before other modifiers.
  Again, this is a boring DPS booster that is stronger for GK spamming DPS builds for dungeons.

Together, these crit-proc traits compete with other Engineer traits in various lines (most egregiously with the Firearms line), to simply provide a boring DPS boost. There’s no clutch potential here. Procs are just “there” with the exception of Infused Precision.

I feel that Engineer could be much better designed if traits like these were replaced by others that:

• Reward risky play, i.e. entering sub 600 range
• Reward clutch moments, i.e. offering clutch Blinds or CC
• Don’t just increase DPS or provide cover conditions for Burning as we have enough of those on Weapon Skills like Pistol already.

@NevirSayDie:
I’d argue that Warrior is actually almost balanced, just a little OP.
The main culprit is in Sigil of Paralysation rounding up stuns by a full second (!!!) which turns Earthshaker, Skull Crack, Shield Bash, Pommel Bash etc. into a full CC train that is nigh impossible to break out of without long (6+ seconds) upkeep of Stability.

Add to that the animation issue of Asura’s wielding Mace also having their Skull Crack animation be the same as their autoattack and QQ ensues.

You can bet that when the Sigil is fixed that the complaints will die down – Warrior Sustain is only good if they’re taking only chip damage i.e. autoattacks from Elementalists – and Stunned Targets deal no damage, which “adds” to Warrior HPS. I will say that the Healing Signet needs to have a lot more of its heal backloaded onto the active and the CD reduced, perhaps – the basic regen at 400HPS is a little too passive.

With Regard to nerfs to Engineer’s condition application – I certainly hope that it comes hand in hand with buffs to Engineer’s sustained Power damage and fixes to SD so that procs that don’t have target don’t fly into the ground. Burning is the only major condi “threat” that Engineers put out – unlike Necromancers and Rangers that also have their Bleed stacking.

For Engineers running Condis, every other condition is just a cover for Burning. Nerfing Incendiary Powder will make its position in balance very volatile indeed.

I would like any change for IP to be made a lot more active, however. Perhaps Incendiary Powder could instead apply 4 seconds of Burning to the next skill use after a Toolbelt Ability is used.

If you’re only playing PvE then there is no need for Automated Response. Oftentimes in dungeons – even if you’re playing a condi heavy path like Twilight Arbour – you will never be under sufficient condition pressure to justify taking such a hard counter.

HGH is just so much better when combined with Elixir heavy builds that there is little comparison. You’ll only ever want to take Automated Response if you’re doing these things:

• You’re playing PvP, and there’s 2+ condi classes on the enemy team
• You’re only going to take Elixir C as your sole elixir.
• You’re running a build that requires close range – i.e. Bomb Kit which would expose you to condispam AoE

In any other case, HGH is objectively superior if you’re going to be running 30 in Alchemy.
The added DPS of Might will add to your counterpressure and if running 2+ Elixirs then your condi management with CF409 will be sufficient in all but the most extreme of cases – and even then AR would have only prolonged your death by scant seconds.

Even in WvW, HGH is almost universally better in comparison to Automated Response due to the extremely low (25%) health trigger before it kicks in. Given that most builds in WvW – even “pure” condi damage builds still try to have a little bit of Power damage – you’ll still be cut down with such low remaining HP.

@Kontrolle:
I will agree with you that Engineer has little role in ZvZ in WvW. In fights of 10+ on each side, Engineer’s relevance quickly falls to the wayside due to – as you mentioned – lack of high stability uptime and a shonky Retaliation implementation that all non-Engineers claim is “fine”.

WRT The Warrior:
If you play classes solely predicated upon base stats and a stronger toolset all the more power to you.
Warrior was designed to be an easy to learn, medium-hard to master class with highly telegraphed animations and a strong backbone of Traits and weapon skills.
Engineer was the last class added to the game and still suffers from junk traits, utilities and requires excellent APM. It was designed as a hard to learn, hard to master class.

If you find that making it easier on yourself is the way forward then I’m sorry to see you go.

This is not to say that Engineer is “fine” as it is. But it’s “Good enough” for most cases and if you don’t want to fall asleep at the keyboard then it should be the class to play.

Yup. Dodging will mitigate more damage than you will ever need to heal in this game, if you do it right.

For Engineer, a lot of the abilities and kits are not stand alone. No kit is a complete skillset; nor is every Gadget and Turret and Elixir. Slotting different utilities opens up new combos and new possibilities. This is one thing we have over the Elementalist, which I also main.

If there is one thing I do advise if you’re running Kits, however, it’s to put 10 into Tools and get Speedy Kits. Permaswiftness helps a lot with map completion and I’ve found it difficult to play any other class without it.

It also teaches you a 5 second tempo. This is important because the sense of timing will let you get your combos down.
If you’re lazy, run Infused Precision (10 into Firearms) instead, but keep in mind that your out of combat mobility will suffer without Rocket Boots.

Also note that Engineer actually has a few animation cancels.

• EG4 (Spam “Drop Bundle ~” to stop your leap backward prematurely)
• Rocket Boots (Flick camera to left or right upon landing to direct your dodge roll into another direction
• Jump Shot (Here’s a link to how to do it)

There’s a few others, but those are probably the most useful. It’s little things like this that distinguish “good” engineers from “great” engineers; along with the ability to improvise skill chains as the situation permits.

I highly recommend that you also watch a few stream VODS of Teldo to learn new combos and tricks to the Engineer. It’s PvP focused, but PvP is the school of hardest knocks – and what you learn there is easily applicable to open world PvE

@fourhim: There is an autoattack on Bombs, fyi.

Anyway, at early levels, Condition Damage is definitely not a good way to do things. You simply will not have the traits and the %Condition duration through Explosives to have significant enough impact on your DOTs.

Added to that, you’re attempting a Condition build on Flamethrower – whose primary DPS is Power based and whose only Condition component is Napalm and the 60sec CD Incendiary Ammunition.

P/P might work – at levels 60+ when you finally have some Master level + traits to work with and you can unlock Coated Bullets – but until then, Power builds are the way to go with low levels.

By the way, I hit level 80 entirely off the back of White items and karma Fine armour and weapons. The most important thing is to have gear that is at your level . Even having trinkets that are a few levels behind will make your Time to Kill (TTK) seem excessive.

Consider realigning your gear to be more power based. You can see that this is in fact the way Arenanet intended levelling to be done, in fact, when you visit the Weapon vendors and all their armour and weapons for the White rarity are all Power (then Power + Precision, then Power, Precision, Crit damage at later levels)

• In short, you can play Condition Engi at low levels, but expect a lot of sweat, pain and misery until you get proper Condition damage gear.
• Don’t bother trying to use FT for its Condition damage. It’s primarily a Power-based weapon, and its Burn is for the ancillary bonus of +10% damage on the FT1.
• Condition damage downscaling is a killer.
• Engineer is all about kiting. Get used to it. Kiting enemies with Bomb Kit, Kiting with FT, kiting with GK, kiting with Rifle when your SD procs are all on CD. It doesn’t stop, so you may as well exploit it – your best damage is at close range.

For Flamethrower, consider comboing it with Elixir Gun, which will give you a Blast Finisher, Stunbreak, HoT light field and Cripple to kite foes better for FT1.
P/P will also help – Blowtorch will guarantee that your FT1 is doing bonus 10% at all times; but really, you want to be using Rifle if you want to kill things quickly.

Turrets are bad. Like, really, really bad. Their firing rates are bugged, their AI is shonky, and at lower levels, their HP is really terrible so they’ll get 2-3 shot depending on what mobs you fight.
The only turrets that are good are Healing Turret, and Rifle Turret for the Static Discharge proc and the Blast finisher. You can try making them work, but why be immobile and tied to long cooldowns if your turrets die?

WRT Sigils of Bloodlust vs Sigils of Agony – I’m pretty sure you mean Sigil of Corruption ; because Agony is a Bleed on crit proc.
Bloodlust is infinitely superior to Corruption at lower levels, especially with FT as it is Power based.

WRT Rotations:
There are no set rotations for the Engi. It’s all about improvisation.

For FT, you can start in it, FT1 and kite mobs together, FT2 for the AOE Blast, then fight them within the Napalm field with FT5. FT3 them away if you’re getting antsy about low health.
Drop EG5 and heal up if you need to. EG4 your Napalm field, by the way. 3 stacks of Might is incredibly significant at low levels.

Your Weapon skills can be ancillary, especially with Pistol mainhand.
Use it for the Static Shot and the Poison Dart volley at sub 600 range, Glue Shot and Blowtorch when needed, but otherwise, stow it for the FT. Pistol 1 is terrible.

If running Rifle, Rifle 2, Rifle 5 to close the gap, Rifle 3 in the face for delicious burst, then swap to FT/EG to finish off. If you’re getting antsy about your health, Rifle 4 them away or FT5 then EG4 away.

As for the rest, I’m sure you can figure it out yourself.

If you want easy levelling, run Rifle and Bomb Kit with Healing Turret, with Rocket Boots to zip around and some other utility.

• It’s power based – good for levelling.
• It has a ton of combo fields and finishers – teaches mechanics.
• It’s positionally demanding – teaches mechanics
• And it’s highly mobile, which is great for map completion.

@Kontrolle:
As has been said before and no doubt there will be others that have said it before me, it is facetious and useless to take 2 “equivalent” traits from 2 different professions and directly compare them in a vacuum. It fails to take into account the professions other traits, weapon skills and weaknesses.

With regards to Adrenal Health vs Backpack Regenerator, it was originally conceived because Warriors were designed to be weak to conditions and therefore needed some form of sustained regeneration to soft-counter that through traits.

With the addition of Cleansing Ire and changes to Berserker stance along with many other changes to Warrior including a massive boost to the passive regeneration from Healing Signet this trait is now – in the context of Warrior – effectively defunct as Warrior now has “good enough” condition mitigation.

So I would say that it is not Backpack Regenerator that is OP, rather, Adrenal health is – after the condition management changes for warrior .

That being said, I have never and will never take Backpack Regenerator in any build. I believe Teldo used it at one point in his condi-burst far point assault build – and you’ll still see some engineers running it because they copy-pasted his innovation – but it is far inferior to something like Protection Injection where the additional mitigation you have while disabled is far stronger than any passive health regeneration.

I wouldn’t mind a rework of the trait though. Passive regeneration – even on a specific trigger of requiring a kit to be equipped – is boring and it takes up a Major slot to boot. Perhaps a trait replacement that introduces Stability on a specific trigger may be in order.

With regards to Dogged March – if you look back in the PvP forums you will actually see that some Warriors claimed that it wasn’t enough because at the time their condition clear was simply not there. After Cleansing Ire hit with the Dhuumfire patch though, Dogged March was now optional considering that Restorative Strength and Mobile Strikes was also available along with Berserker Stance.

As for whether Leg Mods is “good enough” in the context of Engineer?

Most of Engineer’s arsenal is ranged – although its best DPS comes at close range when most of its skillshots are guaranteed to hit. I think that Leg Mods is “good enough” considering that ranged abilities have less onus to close the gap to enemies than melee.

That said, Engineer has a heavy, heavy reliance upon dodges for survival. I think one positive change to Leg Mods would be for it to also reduce Weakness duration along with the others. Alternatively, the Vigor boon could be granted for 5 seconds but that might be too much.

Transcribing Isiah Cartwright’s response to MattVisual’s question WRT PVP made it painfully obvious to me that Arenanet is extremely cagey and falsely optimistic about the current state of PvP:

Transcription as follows, syntax errors may follow due to transcribing natural speech

MattVisual:
“What is your goal for PvP right now?
I know-understand that you guys are trying to go like, Esports and stuff like that.
I would think that modes – other modes would be in the works for that?
Or are you trying to stick with Conquest for now?”

Isiah Cartwright:
“Oh, for PvP? In general, type of things?
You know, I think we’re trying to build the base, fundamentals for Esports, get those things all going.
You know, we’ve gotten Custom Servers in, we’ve also been adding Spectator stuff.
We’re trying to get the fundamental building blocks to get an Esport going. So that’s our main focus right now.

You know, we don’t want to add tons and tons of gametypes and make it confusing and harder to do esports stuff, but we do know that there’s always tweaks and things.
We want people to have a lot of fun and play around with the Custom Arenas in PvP.
And so it’s something that, you know, we’re dabbling with; something that after we get this base fundamental building blocks down.
But right now it’s just focus there."

Talking points

• Arenanet is trying to get the basic fundamentals of Esports going.

• In their mind, this means spectator support and Custom Arenas

• They do not wish to “confuse” people with “tons and tons” of gametypes.

Analysis/Opinion

• It really seems that with this kind of focus they’re putting the cart before the horse. You cannot have an Esport without a large PvP population to discuss the scene.

• You also cannot have an Esport without a plethora of competitive teams and a tournament scene to support it – neither of which are present at the moment.

• Isiah Cartwright is most likely in the wrong department and so would probably be a bad person to ask regarding PvP. I believe that his vagueness is probably obligated.

• That being said, the company line being that Esports should be established before anything else is disturbing. Esports is grown, not made. It’s a community, not a developed feature.

@Wolf:
I’ve had a similar idea actually – being able to set multiple bombs then pulling foes into it was my first thought. Kinda like setting up a Mesmer’s Shatter.

My problem with it is that Bomb Kit is a sustained damage kit. The auto-attack is one of the few that are worth spamming, yet the only direct damage burst skill is Big Ol’ Bomb – and that resets a fight to end your combo.
It also directs Bomb Engineers more towards the Condi-Burst side of builds which, given that Bomb Kit is already AOE, will do nothing for adding a Power build for the Engineer that also adds high sustained DPS in fights.

@Dirame:
Best Burst healer in the game still probably goes to Elementalist, yeah, as digiowl has mentioned.

A full Water attunement combo with 15+ Water in Scepter/Dagger or Dagger/Dagger is around 6-7k plus depending on how much Healing Power you have. Evasive Arcana, Cleansing Wave and Heal on Water Attunement also scale 1:1 with Healing Power; on shorter overall cooldowns – and this is without using the 6 skill on top of that.

Blasting a Water field will always be constrained by the base value of 1320 and 0.2 scaling; whereas this scaling limitation is bypassed by the Elementalists’s 1:1 ratios.

That said, there are pet peeves I have with the Engineer:

• Blunderbuss really needs to have a really really good reward for getting into 100 range – or provide utility beyond 4 Bleeds. I believe that this is where some calls for putting a Blast finisher on Blunderbuss comes from. I would like to see some improvement in either of: CC – Cripple instead of bleed or Damage – <130 range should really be 2.0 scaling, not just 1.6; and 130-400 range should really be 1.2, not half base damage and 1.0 scaling.

• Magnet Pull goes crazy on inclines. If an AOE pull for Mesmer’s Focus can be implemented relatively bug free, without causing rubberbanding even on rough terrain, there really needs to be a fix to Magnet for it to do the same thing.

• Engineer lacks sustained, single target damage options that aren’t ranged or AOE that are competitive with other classes’ DPS rotations. The best we have are Grenades, whilst our main hand weapon skills languish.

• Flamethrower is a Retaliation trap. I believe that double damage with only 5 pulses and a better scaling with Power should be a good first step.

• Turrets languish half-way in balance between semi-permanent entities – Rocket Turret, Net Turret, Thumper Turret – and disposable gadgets – Healing Turret, Rifle Turret.
• Make them fully disposable with low CD, high DPS if left unchecked, <100% uptime and self-destructing on Overcharge to emphasise the disposable gadget part. This would increase Turret Engineer mobility and allow Arenanet to keep them as non-stat scaling entities; whilst promoting an active playstyle. AI should not have 100% uptime in this game as it is very volatile to balance.

• Engineer Rifle needs to have some kind of boost in damage to controlled foes like Unsuspecting Foe . Sitting Duck was a good start, but there needs to also be a reward for Hip Shot dealing extra damage once you enter close range – otherwise Rifle is largely predicated upon Static Discharge Burst; and the Engineer puts himself at risk for minimal reward and minimal chance for escaping retaliation.

That reminds me:

• SD builds are all-or-nothing, kill-or-be-killed burst builds that incorporate too little condition clear and escapability. There does need to be some kind of sustained direct damage build outside of Grenades that doesn’t rely upon SD to 100-0 someone in a single rotation.
  Traits like Modified Ammunition increase Rifle’s burst potential – yet few traits exist to turn it into a high sustained DPS, high CC weapon that some classes like Warrior have with Mace/Shield, GS.

@Swagg, regarding Bomb Kit suggestions:
I aim to please.

@Wolf:
I really like the suggestion of adding the Charge skill implementation of Bombs to the Bomb Kit. It’d be the reverse of the Super Adventure Box Mini Bomb and adds a level of interactivity for Bombs similar to Grenades.
It’d also make Bomb Kit Engineers start to complain about RSI again – so I’m not sure if making Charge cast on the 1 skill is such a good idea.
I think the idea has merit on the 2-5 skills as well, but Bomb would have to have its damage increased significantly to compensate for the longer cast. And any damage increase will also be capped by the option to simply drop the bomb at your feet.

It’d be a whole new can of worms to rebalance. I think it might be easier to add more direct damage to the 2-5 skills on charge cast, or more utility.

• Concussion Bomb could pull foes on a fully charged cast, for example
• Glue Bomb could pulse its Immobilise twice instead of just once
• Smoke Bomb could pulse its Blind 3 times instead of just twice
• Fire Bomb could have its direct damage tick harder and the Fire Field persist
• I just don’t think that putting a charge cast on Bomb is a good idea for RSI reasons.
• If Bomb was instead a 6 second cooldown but much higher damage, and a Blast finisher though, we could then transition Bomb Kit to a full utility kit.
• On the other hand, Engineer is really suffering for sustained direct damage already, and turning Bomb into a utility cast will take away everything except for Rifle Hip shot – which is only justifiable if Rifle was actually good at auto-attacking.

@tigurius:
I think that making Turrets

• Short duration
• High DPS if left alone
• Short cooldown (but not enough for 100% uptime)

Would be a good start to re-implementing turrets without having to recalculate their stats altogether.

• Turrets can stay as fragile as they are – if they were on 20-30 second cooldowns.
• They can also fire as slowly as they do – if each hit was significant.
• They can even not scale with Engineer stats at all – because making Turrets disposable means that you now have the opportunity to balance them with far greater granularity without having to worry about stat scaling with certain builds.

I actually like the current implementation of Turrets – for Healing Turret and Rifle Turret – fully disposable, highly useful in their niche. I believe that they should be the “model” such as it were, for Turrets moving forward.

Keeping them as a semi-permanent entity will only lead to one thing: overtuning. It’s happened already with Ranger pets – and now Spirits. Low cooldown, non-scaling, disposable turrets will allow granular balancing, higher Engineer mobility (just blow them up when you want to move), and a more interactive playstyle than just plonking down all your Turrets and beginning to kite.

@Gunlaugr:
I think that the cut to Vigor should go hand in hand with the buff in effectiveness of Vitality. In this way, even classes running Berzerker’s Ammy and Jewel would notice an increase in survivability – even if they aren’t dodging as often.

The problem remains, however, that some classes have excessive access to Evade frames on Weapon skills. You can bet that a cut to Vigor will bring those classes and builds up – if only indirectly.

One way to counter this counterbuilding is to introduce a buff to Immobilise:

Using Evade weapon skills while Immobilised will not grant Evade frames

I think any patch that majorly revises a condition and boon – such as the Dhuumfire (Aetherblade) patch – needs to be fully previewed however.

If not on a PTR, then on a Patch Preview. to explain the rationale. Otherwise you can expect the same explosion of QQ in the forums the day after.

@Julius:
I like the idea behind putting GK 1 on a cooldown so that it’s no longer a spammable autoattack replacement, but the fact of the matter is that Engineer Main-hand weapons are pretty bad at sustained damage .

• Pistol 1 could have been a candidate – if it didn’t have aftercast turning it to 0.8 seconds per cast and Power scaling of 0.4 and base of 114.
• Rifle is a CC/burst weapon – Hip Shot although relatively strong is simply not something you can spam out when your things are on CD.
• I like the principle behind it, but Engineer main hands would have to be much stronger in sustained damage and less bursty (Condi burst for Pistol, Power burst for Rifle) and that would basically be a complete redesign of Engineer weapons.

I actually don’t agree with regards to the global nerf to Endurance Regeneration. For one, it basically makes Vigor mandatory – either that, or traits like Adrenal Implant will simply be taken more.
I think instead that Vigor should be nerfed to 50% bonus Endurance Regeneration – 1 dodge per 7.5 is still strong.
Traits increasing Endurance Regen could then be reduced as well to 25% bonus instead.

I also think you’re conflating dodge “spamming” with the sheer overbearance of AoE, instant casts, and multi-condi procs on a single skill. Players need to dodge this often because otherwise they’d simply fall over.

• An overall nerf pass across all AOE skills, multi-condi procs will reduce the need to have to dodge “at random” and will make the game more tactical regardless.
• Nerfing AOE will also increase the Time-to-kill, allowing more measured play.

As it is, a blanket 50% nerf to endurance regeneration will hasten TTK, not reduce it. You can bet that certain builds that previously weren’t that strong will emerge and be called OP in this instance.

@Manuhell:
I actually agree with Julius’s proposal regarding Automated Response, if only because it removes a hard counter. Soft counters should be the way forward – otherwise the game devolves even further into “Build Wars 2” which is:

• unfun if you’re on the losing end of a matchup, and
• the fact that it creates a matchup in the first place will make balance even more complicated.

That being said, it would be the nail in the coffin for Automated Response for it to only reduce condi duration by 50% at 33% HP. It’s already underutilised especially compared to HGH.
I think what would be better instead would be for Automated Response to proc Elixir C at 33% HP along with reducing new condition duration by 50%. It might then see use – but still be counterable with Corrupt Boon or a Bleed spike.

@natsos:
I’m not sure what the reaction would be if there was a big enough protest by the community to be honest, given this reaction by Jonathan Sharp in the context of Xeph announcing his intention to quit:

JonathanSharp.7094:

See you Xeph! It’s always been a pleasure watching you play and listening to your ideas!

Good luck in whatever you decide to do next in life!

The response sounds relatively neutral and good-willed – whilst developers – Jonathan Sharp included – have gone on record claiming that PvP population is growing and that it is significant.

There is thread after thread and post after post on this forum bringing up the same issues over and over -

• broken matchmaking that puts top players against unranked players ,
• broken leaderboards ,
• broken map randomisation that favours Temple of the Silent Storm , (acknowledged 3 weeks ago, no word)
• matches starting despite not having a full roster.
• PvP rank not indicative of anything except the length of time farming hotjoins; whilst the rank up curve forces grind
• rank points and reward system being, well, unrewarding

And whilst developers have acknowledged these issues, there have been no:

• roadmaps of changes moving forward
• patch previews regarding balance changes (most egregious)

I will say one thing that has been heartening, and that is the recent change in developer participation in the PvP forums. I can only hope that Xeph’s leaving catalysed a change in attitude strong enough to ensure that this continues such that other top players are less inclined to follow his path.

Take home talking points:

• Whilst engagement with the PvP community has increased as of late, developers remain relatively tightlipped and vague regarding upcoming balance changes.
• This does not help the community perception that the PvP team is opaque, slow, and pushes out half-baked changes and scene releases
• I believe that if nothing else is done and considered ; that as a bare minimum there should be bi-weekly fixes to Sigils and Runes and tooltip fixes to avoid the perception that the team is sitting on their hands

Lastly,

• The style of engagement the developers have with the community on the PvP side needs to change. If PvE is to receive patch previews , so should the PvP scene regarding balance changes . Roadmaps to PvP scene releases should be considered so that the community can discuss ETAs.

You can forgive that they screw up every now and then, if they’re really fast with the changes.

It’s been a point of considerable angst recently that Arenanet chose to “freeze” the state of balance for nigh on 2 months in the lead up to the PAX Tournament final. You can imagine even more angst then, when the changes announced after the Tournament and implemented on September 3 – just over 2 months post-Aetherblade (or Dhuumfire) patch – “shaved” dominant specs such as Spirit Ranger and Necromancer.

I believe that this issue could have been sidestepped – if bug fixes and tooltip error fixes had occurred in the interim.

It’s no secret that several Runes and Sigils have been bugged for a long time. Fixing items ancillary to class balance yet integral to PvP could have made a difference in community perception that the PvP team were “doing nothing” in the interim.
Just as an example –
Rune of Vampirism still has bugged 2, 4, 6 bonuses
Rune of Lyssa still suffers from the 6th bonus not applying on certain Elites such as Engineer Supply Crate
Rune of Strength the 6th bonus is not applied when under effects of Might.
Rune of Rage The 6th bonus does not apply bonus damage while under the effects of Fury.
Sigil of Paralysation It appears as though this sigil increases Stun and Daze duration by 33% instead of the 15% as advertised on the tooltip.

I believe that the perception that the PVP balance team were doing little in the lead up to the PAX tournament could have been changed if changes like this – completely agnostic of class changes – were addressed. Even if you merely fixed tooltips and did not alter skills in any way, the perception will change.

With respect to the speed of changes – it is notable that the SPvP scene has grated under the current leaderboards for months. An acknowledgement of the issues, if nothing else, along with a road map to changes – could go a long way to addressing this long standing grievance.

I’ll lead off with the transcript part in question I’m talking about:

• You can forgive that they’re slow, if they’re open about how they’re slow.
• You can forgive that they screw up every now and then, if they’re really fast with the changes.
• And you can forgive that they’re slow and don’t talk to us if they make great patches

So to elaborate on these talking points:

• Transparency: With every patch – especially those that offer class and balance changes, there is little to no preamble or fanfare. Yet with PvE and Living Story changes – especially those that can potentially affect the economy in drastic ways, there have been such previews.
  It is in fact notable that the so-called Dhuumfire patch that introduced the Tainted Shackles patch preview included no news whatsoever of upcoming balance changes. PvE’ers would know it as the “Sky Pirates of Tyria patch”.
  This needs to change. If Guild Wars 2’s PR department is to continue to promote GW2’s potential as an “esport” then there must be advance warning and dialogue of upcoming changes – along with explanations as to why. The elephant in the room – League of Legends – has done this with aplomb. Their LoL patch previews garner millions of views each regarding changes that could affect champions and their lane matchups, always with an explanation as to why. As if the video is not enough – there are preview patch notes with detailed explanations on each and every change.

This is the first step Arenanet needs to take if they are to shake off their perceptions of lack of transparency.

• Hints dropped on SOTG are not enough. Concrete changes and discussion must take place or else the perception will persist.
• With each patch release there needs to be a patch feedback thread. . Ideally the feedback is right at the bottom of the patch notes.
• Dialogue should be opened – if not on the forums – then on the Mists in Anvil Rock or Desolation – the two “de facto Official PvP” servers – regarding patch changes, with the developer responsible officiating. “Owning” a change allows the community to put a face to the people driving balance – and introduces a sense of responsibility that should come with balancing any game as large and as complex as GW2.

It’s notable that with the last point that there seems to have been a sea change in the developer’s stance recently – and multiple threads with suggestions and ongoing grievances have been addressed by the developers . This stance should, and must persist if the developers hope to have a healthy relationship with the community. Silence breeds uncertainty. Uncertainty breeds fear, which leads to anger. Don’t fall to the dark side.

@natsos:
Whilst your stance is technically correct – after all, Helseth does make more than a few claims without offering a solution – you’d be incorrect in that Helseth doesn’t make his point without offering an out.

His proposed solution is simple – to get Arenanet to give the PvP staff more resources. That was his entire argument from halfway through the rant onwards. It’d be facetious of you to say that he didn’t present a solution when he did so.

The problem here is that the solution is entirely out of our hands. We as the community do not drive HR or whatever department makes the decisions regarding allocating staff to particular problems – Arenanet does. However I believe that this is the first time in the forum that Helseth has coalesced this sentiment. Too often the SPvP forum is filled with threads regarding the current metagame without discussions on what has led to this point and how to fix it. You’ll see things like “Spirit ranger OP, Healing Signet warrior OP, S/D thief OP” – and in the next few weeks you can bet that similar threads will emerge regarding every other class and every other “cheese” build.

It is the nature of people to blame noticeable outliers for the state of certain things; rather than analyse more deeply and highlight an underlying problem. It happens all the time, and I’ve done so myself.

With regard to the two “major” releases for PvP that Helseth chose to highlight – Leaderboards and Map Randomisation – they have stayed in their current form for months. There’s been no followup fixes nor news of fixes.

But here’s the thing: if the PvP team at Arenanet had been allocated sufficient resources to tackle the problem in the first place, the releases would likely have been well managed from the get go. This is what Helseth is disappointed in. There has been all this hue and cry – yet the issues remain. This is the source of Helseth’s frustration, and a lot of other players’ frustration. And the frustration is driving veterans of this game away – this hope turned to despair that these half-baked SPvP releases would ever be followed up upon.

Now, it would be remiss of me to post this without offering a solution.

Helseth mentioned 3 key things that should be considered for releases of which at most 2 can be unmet. If all 3 key things are unmet then frustration for a release develops. I’ll continue in my next post.

Dirame.8521:

MonMalthias.4763:

• Number 1: is that the updates are insanely slow for PvP, while for PvE they’re obviously very very frequent, quick, of very high quality.

Funny, some PvEers will disagree with the “high quality” part of that statement.

As I said, I’m just transcribing.

I personally believe that the PvE updates are putting essential PvE QoL changes on hold – whilst changes to Dungeons to make them more than a simple DPS check are passed over in lieu of temporary content. It’s taken 12 months to implement a LFG tool, whilst CoFP1 farm has caused steady inflation across the board and blown the high end fine material market price far further up than necessary.

However this is off topic.

As I said, these are not my words. Grammatical errors and syntax is broken due to transcribing natural speech.

Core themes:

• Helseth seems to be disappointed at the pace of development.

• He believes that the lack of development resources causes PvP content releases like the map Randomisation and the Leaderboards to be half-baked.

• Followups to the releases are slow to come, again because of lack of resources.

• He believes that this state of development is contributing to competitive teams leaving and a dearth of competition because the “veterans are done waiting for the game to get good”

• He believes that the development team for PvP must be split from WvW and PvE and given resources consummate with their task such that they can execute on their promises.

• He believes that the game has immense potential that is being squandered by a lack of commitment by Arenanet to the furthering of the PvP scene, either by profligacy of releases, or by slow and steady quality releases that are well executed.

• He believes that the disappointment stems from player comparisons of the quality, profligacy and timeliness of PvP releases to PvE releases, which have typically been timely (now every 2 weeks) and generally of high quality.

• He believes that if this state of development is to continue, that players should lower their expectations of this great game to one that is merely a good game. Players should play the game if they find it fun, but wait for it to “get good” if they want to maintain their high expectations.

Discuss.

And I know that this isn’t what any of you [the viewers] expected, but yeah. I mean, I could rant about PAX.
I could do a rant about all sorts of things, like this was the free week, with all the posts?
I’m sure I could quote mine and be an kitten and such.
But I want to genuinely present my concern – what I mean – I wanted to present what the potential can be and how it’s being squandered. And it’s being squandered because of this. Like, the developers are getting so much fire for this. But in the end we can’t really put it all on the developers.

And yeah, this is going to be the final Rant of the Week. I know that it’s popular and that the people are enjoying it, but this is it: this is the problem of Guild Wars.
I don’t see a point in further continuing the series when I’m just going to point out things that are all going to be answered from one thing.
The developers are like, “We know, it’s on the list” but in reality it’s a very very long list which has the slowest work process ever.

By the way, for future events, if you ever hold another LAN Tournament, please, PLEASE put some booths up! They were right next to each other. They heard each other.
They literally were typing in chat because they didn’t want to tell the other guy like “I’m going far” and the other guy going “Oh! He’s going far. Gonna defend”.
I mean, what on Earth was that PAX Event? Whatever. Bye.

But if you screw up all 3, then there’s something painfully wrong, right. And I mean, this is why the PvP [Competitive] Teams are leaving, because when things happen, I mean, when they’re finally implemented what we’re asking for (sic) we see the quality of what they put out. We see the quality of the leaderboards. We see the quality of the PAX tournament. We see the quality of the soloqueue. And we compare that quality to everything else. Every other game. 10 year old games. And the quality of those games, all surpass Guild Wars. By far. I know indie games that have a much better system for PvP than the Triple A, fastest selling MMO [in history]. How is that possible?

Obviously, it’s possible because [Arenanet] lack of resources. I’m not going to, I mean, I bash on the developers like the Karl and the others but the reason is I don’t think in particular they’re in the wrong here.
In fact, I think that they’re very much engaged into what they do. But in the end, how do we fix this PvP? And this is a concern that I’ve been trying to voice as much as possible. But I’m just going to say flat out that this is how to fix the PvP.
And I know a lot of people were very happy at this post Jonathan Sharp did but it’s the same thing as always. It’s a wonderful post from a guy who clearly cares about the game, but is anything going to change? Does the PvP department have any more priority within? Do they have any more resources? Do they have any more staff? Do they have any more anything? I mean, they still can’t split the game, even though splitting the game is obviously what we need.

I mean, we need a different game for PvE, WvW and PvP. You can’t have 50 vs 50 WvW in a castle having the same balance as a 5 on 5 Conquest Mode. But it’s still like this.
And while he makes out a wonderful excuse for why – well, he doesn’t really – I hardly skimmed it. But even though he makes the excuses, it’s clear it speaks of a lack of resources.
Imagine if they had a balance team specifically only for PvP that could chug out balance patches all the time for PvP. If there’s something broken, bam! It would be fixed. Of course, this is what we would expect, but this isn’t what we got. Everybody expects so much. But this is why the veterans are quitting. Because we’re done expecting.
We’re done playing a game that we’re waiting to become good. This is what we did all the time. We saw so much potential. We still see so much potential in Guild Wars. But we recognise that this potential isn’t being unleashed.

And I blame, I mean whatever toilethead who decided to not give any of the resources to PvP. Because it’s clear that PvP nowadays is a superb source of revenue. Both in popularity, I mean, in selling more copies. I mean, while PvE tends to fade out eventually in many games, the PvP scene stands forever, as long as you have the forum to compete in, there’s going to be people competing. As the examples could be from Quake, DOTA, Starcraft 1 and 2, Counterstrike, all sorts of things. But whoever it is, he’s not putting priority on it.

And that’s the core issue of Guild Wars 2 PvP. Like, this is the issue: The development team has nothing.

And until then, I say this. I mentioned these rants for the ideal of PvP for Guild Wars and what I’m expecting from Guild Wars, but I’ve dropped that dream. Personally, I think, I still think that the game is good. But not right now, of course. The meta.
But I still think is passable. I can play it. But I can’t imagine that it’ll ever be an esport. I can’t imagine anything [of] those heights. And I implore everyone to give up all of those thoughts.
Like, everybody knows how much I wanted from PvP. But if you drop all those expectations, this game is still decent game to play.
And I believe that that’s what we should be going for. Until we see something else in PvP. Just, if you find the game fun, continue playing. I mean, obviously go for it. And that’s what I’d go for.

Once the metagame becomes something that I can bear, I will come back. My team will come back. And we will play a lot – I mean, if the game is fun for us, of course.
We’ll compete, of course, I mean, why not? But until the metagame is done, we’re disappearing. And until the game’s potential is actually being tapped? All these players that left aren’t going to come back.
And they don’t think that this [potential] is going to be tapped until you get an increased – what they know is not going to be better – until you get an increased staff as Arenanet.
I mean it’s very unfortunate, because this game has so much potential. It’s very, very unfortunate. Anyway, that’s about it.

Now, leaderboards have been something that’s been expected for forever. In fact, I expected them upon release to be honest. But then when they included all sorts of things such as the Paid Tournament and such, everybody expected leaderboards to be in there.
They didn’t talk about it, but then it was pretty obvious, but then it didn’t happen. And there were no leaderboards. And when people actually started talking about them, they [Arenanet] acknowledged them but did not give us an update – no transparency? And eventually, they developed (sic). They gave us leaderboards.
Well, they said they would give us leaderboards. They gave us a date, to be specific. After a while. A long time, actually. And when we got the leaderboards, well, on the date of the leaderboards, there were actually no leaderboards. They had set – I think it was the 21st? And on the 22nd there was no notice of leaderboards, no notice of anything in fact.
And this is a basic feature. This is something that exists in everything. But here for the Guild Wars 2 PvP development team, even though they were super slow with this, they couldn’t even match the time (sic). Fine. If you miss out the time (sic) that’s understandable. I mean, anything can happen while developing.
But they didn’t say anything. Not at all. In fact the forums went into a complete riot which I guess I instigated and got permabanned for, but [omitted for repetition] eventually the leaderboards were released. And what do we have now? We have the exact same leaderboards as they were released.
The second they were released, people posted “these were (sic) broken”. Like, the matchmaking was a mess – the leaderboards were equally of a mess.

Everything was a complete mess. And what do we have? We had a horrible leaderboard. We still have a horrible leaderboard – which hardly factors in any decay at all, updates insanely slowly, only exists on a website! Like, it’s useless! You can’t even track yourself in there.
Or you can go to Guildwars2Shack for info, which is a fan-made website. Something a fan made like a week after the leaderboards – a week after! – with none of their [Arenanet’s] time! And it’s a much better website than the current one.
I hope you’re not using the current one because that one’s pretty much useless. Go to Guildwars2Shack instead. And it goes to show – I’m not doing it to bash on developers – how inefficient the development is for them. Now this doesn’t have to say (sic) that they’re incompetent developers. That doesn’t say anything at all.

It just means that their resources and priorities are so – they have so many things to work on, that they can’t pull the more basic things off.

If you can’t pull off a leaderboard, how about the random map generator? Now, paid tournaments were introduced – I have the exact date now – February 26th . When it was introduced, people were play a week of the same map. And that continued for months. The first day, people were like, “Um, Random Map generator? Can we get a random map generator? Basic thing? Accessible in all sorts of games, from Newgrounds games to Atari games, to everything”
Months, with little to no word. In fact the only word we really got was that they wanted to surveil the meta which sounds like an excuse. Whenever I read their posts nowadays all I see are excuses. Just excuses for slow development. I believe that they’ve worked hard into this. I mean, obviously, I believe that they’re trying. I don’t believe they’re just messing around. But I believe that they can’t do this. I believe that because of the development resources and whatever team they have, the fact they have to do multiple things – it becomes so split that it’s not working out.

Anyway, February 26th, the random map generator. It took months, several months. How many months? It’s 9 now. I believe it was like, correct me if I’m wrong – was it 5 months? For the random map generator? 6? Something like that?
Something like that for a random map generator and when it came out it – it had a bugged loading screen on Legacy [of the Foefire] which took forever to fix. They had to disable the map, and the map was just not in it at all, and now we have one which doesn’t work either. Rather, it’s putting massive priority on Temple of the Silent Storm. And yeah. Doesn’t work.

Very little transparency on how it’s going to work, and very little transparency on when it’s going to work. Same 3 things over and over: the speed, the efficiency, and the transparency. See, I personally believe that you can forgive 2 of these.

• You can forgive that they’re slow, if they’re open about how they’re slow.
• You can forgive that they screw up every now and then, if they’re really fast with the changes.
• And you can forgive that they’re slow and don’t talk to us if they make great patches.

Helseth has put up another Rant of the Week regarding the development of PvP.

These are not my words. Transcript as follows (Some errors will follow):

“Greetings. This is a demotivating Rant of the Week, to say the least. See, during the Rant of the Week, the last one, I told you guys that a lot of people are quitting/taking a break.
Despite us having played the game for forever, people are quitting, myself included.
A question should be asked, considering that we love this game so much.
The question which is obviously, “Why are we quitting or taking a break?”
Why are there so many people that are essentially saying, “I’m gone until the game gets good and [I] don’t think that’s happening – moving on out of the game”
It’s perplexing, isn’t it? Because considering the amount of time we play and considering that the problem at the moment that’s currently voiced the most is just – the metagame.

You’d wonder why people were quitting. And the problem is that the people that are quitting don’t feel as if the PvP is going to get good. But what I mean by “good” is that despite us loving the core of the game, this game has always had very, very big flaws. Blatant flaws.
For example, at the beginning of the game, there was nothing. Literally nothing – there was free tournaments [and] hotjoin. Nothing else. Yet we still stuck through. We continued to play.
When paid tournaments – a horrendous system, I might add – was out, we still continued to play. And we kept going, over and over. The entire PvP population kept going. And now we’re here and we’re leaving.

The reason for this is that people have realised something that have frankly should have been realised a long time ago. And that’s that this game just has very low – borderline non-existent priority for PvP.
What I mean by that is thakittens been shown time and time again that even if the PvP developers are not incompetent, they’re still not going to get this through – they’re still not going to fix this.
Because the resources are what seems to be less than a PvP indie game developer.
In fact, one would even say that considering that they perpetually mouth off on how many problems for them to do it (sic), even if they just wanna say, design a skill differently or even add a new skill you have to go through all sorts of hoops to deal with and such (sic) that they [might actually be more limited] than an indie game developer.

Obviously, I can’t really say exactly what’s happening. Nobody can. But I can say that the 3 problems that seem to happen with all the development updates.

• Number 1: is that the updates are insanely slow for PvP, while for PvE they’re obviously very very frequent, quick, of very high quality.

• Number 2: is that we have absolutely no idea what’s happening with the updates. Like, before they happen. Right now there’s a patch today I believe, might be the day after, I’m not sure – we don’t have any notes. We don’t even know what’s happening to PvP. We don’t know any of the details, and have no idea aside from some very very very vague posts. See, the developers might try seem as if they’re transparent with a post every now and then, but heres the deal. In the first beta of the game, they acknowledged that AoE was a problem. We’re not getting anywhere, are we? Because they said it’s a problem, that’s something we need to fix but evidently, it’s not happening. Or it might be happening, but I don’t know.

• And Number 3: is the quality of patches. Obviously there are problems with every patch that’s been put in. Every single time there’s been a PvP patch, there’s been some broken bug, there’s been some big problem. And the fixes and everything are insanely slow. There’s currently a Jumping on block bug that’s very well known, right now, that the developers have acknowledged that it existed on the GuildWars2PVPTV stream; and it’s been on the forums, people have posted about it, people talked about it [for] a long time but it’s still not been fixed. That’s when the Guardians are jumping and blocking and it increases the blocks. And that’s another example that’s not been fixed.

This is an unfortunate topic to talk about because it essentially means that we really don’t see any hope at all. See, when I did those Rants of the Week, I didn’t really expect them to be fixed. I honestly don’t. I’ve tried to be as optimistic as possible, but considering that I might not be here forever, I want to mention these grievances. To put an example of all of these 3 things (sic), I’m going to mention the leaderboards and the random map generator.

amiable.4823:

MonMalthias.4763:

• Do you think that Engineer is improved in gameplay with RNG procs? If so, how do you counterplay against such procs?

There is clear counterplay to all conditions in the form of condition removal/melandru runes, certain foods in WvW, support builds with condition removal, etc…

If the current Meta is heavy condition then you need to adjust your build to account for that, almost every class can have very good condition removal on a relatively short cooldown IF they decide to spec for it. Many classes can apply that condition removal to others as well.

@Amiable:
I don’t see where you’re going with your post. I also don’t think you’ve read the OP.

Your answer essentially boils down to – “In a condi meta, bring more condi removal and counterbuild against condis”

Well that’s great and all, but it fails to address the topic at discussion.

Right now condi-burst is a thing – where you load up the opponent with as many DPS conditions as are possible (Burning, Bleed stacks 6+) through RNG crit-procs, condi-loading autos, and utilities that inflict condis – then cover with “junk” conditions like Torment (Necromancer, Thief, Mesmer, Warrior); Vulnerability (Engineer with 25+ Explosives); Weakness (Necromancer, Mesmer); Poison (Engineer, Thief, Necromancer) – then play defensively until the opponent dies of DOTs.

The issue being discussed is not “bring condi removal in a condi meta”.

The issue here is that many condition applying skills also proc other conditions ; typically through RNG Crit-procs.
Traits, sigils and yes, even Runes (Nightmare, the worst offender) exist to turn even a single auto-attack into Bleed/Burn/Poison/Vulnerability/Whatever.

It leads to:

- Random dodges, because you don’t know when an opponent’s ICDs are up – See: NevirSayDie’s points about fighting Necro Staff marks – dodge pre-emptively (Visually unscoutable procs lead to uncertainties of play and erodes the tactical use of the dodge mechanic in lieu of dodging whenever, because you’re bound to dodge something)

- Skill spam – hey, if X trait procs off RNG surely rolling the dice more often will make it come up, right? Especially egregious with Necromancers, but also present in Engineers

- An increase in the complexity of the game whilst decreasing depth . The game becomes more “spammy” and more about casting on cooldown rather than intelligent, measured play.

- Obtuseness of play. When you have died to Spirit Ranger procs and have gone “wtf happened to my last 5k HP?” you’ll understand what this means. Basically, players don’t know why they die and/or what they die to – neither of which is conducive to fun. It leads to QQ threads and forum toxicity – where is the fun in that?

- No counterplay. What incentive is there to become mechanically proficient if you are playing against the RNG? Just spam away and hope for the best that your spam beats your opponent’s spam. It lowers skillcap to rely on passives – look at the entire Ranger profession and shudder.

The purpose of this thread is to explore various ways we can change certain traits for the Engineer such that:
- They are no longer predicated by RNG and thus more reliable
- Without RNG to hold a mechanic back (due to risk of consistent reapplication), traits can be changed to be more situational and therefore more powerful
- By making traits more situational, trait choices can predicate new playstyle choices: more builds are possible
- Having a reliable situational trigger deepens tactical depth by allowing counterplay. Counterplay reinforces and rewards mechanical skill

Conan.8046:

How would you change my proposed change – or would you rather Go for the Eyes stay RNG as it is?

Neither i would scrap the talent completely. You don’t try to fix something that doens’t work if its obviously design flawed. You replace it. The proposed fix would have punished players taking full advantage of a situation.

What would you replace Go for the Eyes with given that you believe that it is fundamentally flawed in design?

Also, I cannot quite grasp what you’re trying to say when you mention that my proposed fix would “punished players taking full advantage of a situation.” Does this mean that taking Go for the Eyes punishes players trying to burst? I suppose it does, yes. But it changes the playstyle of Rifle and adds an active defense component through Blind application and is reliable – both of which add to the usefulness of a trait.

I’m happy to receive any alternative propositions – Go for the Eyes has never been popular anyway – the only reference I have found for it is as an alternative trait when running 30 Firearms in his BoBomber burst build. .

Do you think other RNG Traits deserve changes for better reliability? If not, what would you change instead about the lesser used traits to make them more palatable?
Not when you make something that was usually totally useless. Bad changes are worse than RNG because they are just nerf’s.

Okay. So what suggestions do you have?

Do you think that Engineer is improved in gameplay with RNG procs? If so, how do you counterplay against such procs?
I would 100 times rather have procs than abilities that restricted play style. There’s no counter play to loads of thing’s in the game. There is no counter play against loads of things in the game, for instance…stealth. Wheres this idea come from you can counter everything? you clearly can’t.

The reason why I want everything for the Engineer to be reliable is this:
People don’t take a trait when they cannot count on it in times of need.

Incendiary Powder’s change from 33%, 2 seconds every 3 seconds to 100% 4 seconds every 10 seconds is an example of one such tweak to something RNG that turned something from “bonus DPS” to “100% required for Engineer condi-burst”. Even at relatively low Crit%, with the number of skills Engineer has and with relatively short activation times, Incendiary Powder procs are pretty much guaranteed to proc upon ICD. This is an example of a crit-proc done right, because it turns a fight into something that you can measure by metronome and something as an opponent, you can play around.

Right now a lot of crit-procs for Engineer are RNG. Simple as that. There’s no way for yourself as the Engineer to play around them – they just “come up” sometimes, like Go for the Eyes , and it’s a nice little “bonus”.

Similarly, there’s no way for the opponent to play around it either. They just try to fight you in melee, load up a skill, and randomly get Blinded. There’s no depth here, no counterplay. The proc doesn’t enrich Engineer’s gameplay and it doesn’t add mechanical or strategic depth – it just “happens”.

That’s why I want more reliability to certain traits for the Engineer.

@VIVorcha:
I do agree that Engineer requires changes, although probably not in the way you think. Engineer’s big damage remains squarely at close range, but there are insufficient rewards for the risk at the moment, unlike other classes. That being said, Engineer is clearly competitive – it just isn’t easy. Power Engineer builds remain one of the riskiest builds to play due to relatively low condi-cleanse and vulnerability to chain CC – but the damage is there.

Dirame.8521:

I make builds and post them on youtube. Here’s my Engineer playlist;

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtEsG2yvx3EtLgtQ7oJlUfbIwwVo7JZd0

What you will not find is two of the 3 things you listed.

The most popular builds contain SD, Grenades and HGH BUT that is by no means the only builds available to us. We’re the class with THE LARGEST amount of build possibilities, even with a crappy set of turrets.

@Dirame:
Since you’ve been making videos of builds, I have Swagg’s Bombgineer build to recommend .

It’s a BK/EG/Rifle Turret with Rifle build using Sitting Duck and Cripple spam to keep people in range of bombs and SD procs. I’ve been using it to good success in PvE and WvW; people don’t expect the triple Water Field Blast taking you to 100% health, or Might Stacking the Big Ol’ Bomb to deal big damage.

Rozbuska.5263:

Duke Blackrose.4981:

ldowns and new trait status as a 30 point trait.
Armor Mods
(Reworked.)
Gain Aegis for 5 seconds when you use a Tool Belt skill. (10s cooldown)

This one isnt bad idea.

Yeah, this one’s pretty good actually. Engineer currently suffers from too few traits actually exploiting the Profession skill mechanic – Tool Belt skill use. This would be a good change to help bring that back instead of one entirely driven by RNG

As I said, it is something other than RNG.

I agree with you in that Blind doesn’t stack right now, and taking Go for the Eyes and chaining Rifle skills would be counter to using the trait effectively. But it does force the player to spread the skills out. One application I thought of for this change was against melee classes, for example.

The Rifle combo is especially perilous against Melee because you’re bringing yourself into their range as a class with low access to Stability – they can easily counter-CC and start their own burst combo. Having 3 Blinds on demand would force Rifle Engineers taking the trait to using the 3,4,5 skills smartly instead of chaining them for burst.

So the questions are:

• How would you change my proposed change – or would you rather Go for the Eyes stay RNG as it is?
• Do you think other RNG Traits deserve changes for better reliability? If not, what would you change instead about the lesser used traits to make them more palatable?
• Do you think that Engineer is improved in gameplay with RNG procs? If so, how do you counterplay against such procs?

VIVorcha.7853:

You know that trait “Adrenal Implant”? It’s a Grandmaster trait in the Tools line.

Well, rangers get that as a minor adept trait.

That’s just insulting.

We were given a minor trait as our grandmaster trait.

If you have played WvW or PvP in any capacity then you know that Endurance and dodges is life – and that it should be Rangers, not Engineers, that should have to slot that in Grandmaster. We are actually balanced with how that trait sits, not the other way around.

I will also go ahead and echo what others have said in this thread as well – plucking 2 traits from different professions and putting them head to head is a pointless exercise. It fails to take into account:

• The weapon skills
• Other traits
• Profession specific mechanic
• Profession strengths and weaknesses

So whilst I may have agreed with you 6 months ago, I will have to refute your statement as it is now – because it simply is not that straightforward.

I will also have to disagree on the continuing sentiment that Gadgets should be a “Signet” analogue for other classes, granting passive benefits. As an Engineer you should be proud of the fact that nigh on all of our capabilities – defense, DPS, healing and support – require smart, active play and improvisation.

Passives aren’t counterplayable, don’t add depth to a class, and worsens balance issues. You only have to look at the recent buff to the Healing Signet to see that giving passives to utilities will always result in 2 things:

1. The passive is too weak and the utility too “meh”, so no-one takes it
2. The passive is too strong and the utility just “good enough” so people leave it on cooldown and howls of OP! OP! OP! ensue (See: Signet of Restoration nerf and the howls of indignation after because it also crushed Staff ele using Resto signet)

I, for one, do not want to see Engineer being put into the same volatile spot balance wise when we have as a class worked so hard throughout the games history to make active play a necessity to be effective and survive.

What would be better would be Traits that instead give additional utility to Gadgets:

• Using a Gadget Toolbelt skill transfers conditions to foes
• Gadgets have an additional property – Personal Battering Ram is now 130 radius PBAoE Launch and a Whirl Finisher, Rocket Kick is a Leap finisher and deals double damage, Slick Shoes oil can be ignited with GTAoE Burning to cause a Fire Field, etc.
• Proccing conditions on foes with Gadget skills – Slick Shoes causes Weakness to knocked down foes, etc.
• Proccing Boons with gadget skills – Stability for example
• More boon hate – Gadgets remove a boon on foes, Utility goggles forces Revealed on Stealthed players
• Synergy for taking multiple gadgets – Slick Shoes with Rocket Boots lets you set the oil on fire, Throw Mine and Utility Goggles makes Mine Field inflict 10 stacks of Vulnerability, Rocket Boots and PBR makes your Rocket Kick knockback as well, etc.

There are a ton of ideas that do not involve putting in passives to Gadgets that would round out what Engineer currently lacks as a class right now and would reinforce the active play that playing an Engineer should bring.

If you wanted to run all passives and still be effective you should be rerolling Warrior and running 5 signets – or Spirit Ranger and 3-4 spirits. There should be a place for low APM builds in GW2 – but even with Engineer (Especially for engineer) – there needs to be critical thought as to when to activate abilities, and Signets subvert that thought process.

Shrapnel – Explosions have a 15% chance to apply 1 stack of Bleeding for 12 seconds

Incendiary Powder – Critical hits have a 100% chance to inflict Burning for 4 seconds. Internal cooldown of 10 seconds

Sharpshooter – Critical hits have a 30% chance to apply 1 stack of Bleeding for 3 seconds

Infused Precision – Critical hits have a 50% chance to grant Swiftness for 5 seconds. 5 seconds Internal Cooldown

Precise Sights – Critical hits have a 50% chance to apply Vulnerability

Go for the Eyes – Critical hits with the Rifle have a 50% chance to apply Blind for 5 seconds. 10 seconds Internal Cooldown

I’d just like to bring up the list of Crit-procs for the Engineer again as I feel that a little too much of the conversation has centered around Incendiary Powder in lieu of discussion of Engineer’s other Crit-procs.

For the record, I think that Incendiary Powder is balanced in the context of PvE, WvW and PvP.

That said, RNG has never sat well with me and whilst I think that diversification of stats is required to make Condition Damage not OP, using Crit-procs to address the issue is wrong

Now, I recognise that not all traits can be totally balanced for all arenas for the game – nor can skills. The Warrior healing update turned Healing Signet into something monstrously OP – whilst reinforcing reliance on Signet passives, for example

But I do think that some Crit-procs for the Engineer can be addressed to make it:

1. More reliable – and therefore making it more attractive to take in builds
2. Less passive – forcing the player to make playstyle choices based around his/ choice in traits
3. More counterplay-able – with an active choice changing playstyle, enemies can play around it to make the game deeper mechanically, instead of using RNG for complexity
4. With deeper choices, there is less of a optimal choice for traits – leading to greater build variation

I’ll start off with one of the least seen crit-procs used for the Engineer as an example – and a fix for which I’ve proposed in my other thread.
Go for the Eyes – Critical hits with the Rifle have a 50% chance to apply Blind for 5 seconds. 10 seconds Internal Cooldown

Instead:

Blunderbuss, Overcharged Shot and Jump Shot apply Blind for 5 seconds.

I feel that this change would take away some of the RNG of the Engineer. At the same time, it emphasises the utility side of the Rifle for the Engineer. Being situated in the Master Tier, this would also force a sacrifice between damage and CDR and active defense for Rifle Engineers – as traits should be doing in the first place. It would also give Rifle Engineers some close range active defense – something that Pistol Shield users take for granted, but which should also exist as an option for Rifle.

It’s changes like this that I feel would ultimately lead to a deeper engagement in terms of buildcrafting for the Engineer rather than what it is now – 30/5/0/20/15 Grenadier or 0/30/0/10/30 SD or whatever else floats your boat. There are clearly optimal choices in traits for the Engineer right now, including RNG ones like Incendiary Powder. And I feel that addressing at least some of these issues could lead to a better Engineer experience.

(Doubleposting because of word limit and there’s a lot I want to reply to)

VIVorcha.7853:

Don’t you dare nerf us until you fix the kittenload of bugs and buff our turrets and gadgets.

The purpose of this thread is not to discuss nerfs to the Engineer, but to address the way Critical-hit procs are affecting the class design and its place in balance in terms of other professions. Right now it is possible to apply massive pressure in WvW and PvP entirely off the back of a single RNG trait that could proc off any skill use.

In the context of having a competitive game, this makes PvP balance a lot more tenuous as you now have RNG entering the mix.
In the context of build crafting, having RNG procs simply means the following:
If you have something RNG, players simply won’t use it or take it into account when buildcrafting and instead use something reliable. I have said this in the past, as have others.

Now, as for fixing and finishing the class – I have made multiple threads addressing Turrets, Gadgets, mainhand weapons, the Mortar elite and various Junk traits of the Engineer. Threads have come up time and time again regarding these issues and if you go through my posting history then you will see that I have the same aim as you – bringing things up in the forum so that it can be addressed by Arenanet.

It is no secret that Arenanet has been glacially slow in bringing all utilities and weapons and traits for all classes up to scratch. I play multiple classes myself and I can tell you that Elementalist, Mesmer, Warrior, Ranger, and yes, even Guardian have their own “junk” traits, weapons and utilities. Hell, I would say that Elementalist has it even worse because you have 2 subpar weapons (Focus, Staff, out of 4), 3 sets of utilities (Conjures, Glyphs, Signets), 1 elite (Tornado), and 2 entire trait lines (Fire, Earth) that are significantly worse to use.

These issues have been seemingly sidestepped in favour of monthly “Living Story” releases that provide temporary content in lieu of finishing each class and making all dungeons something more than just a DPS race.

So in the end I think you will see that I want the same thing as you do – a balanced game, with fun permanent content, with competitive PvP and WvW.

Knox.8962:

This section and your chart are basically all wrong.

At 1100 condition damage, burning ticks for 603. Bleeding will tick for 97. It only takes 6.2 stacks of bleeding before the bleeds are stronger than the burning. 13 stacks of bleeding will hit for more than double the damage per tick of burning.

You seem to be only including the base damage in each additional bleeding stack, and ignoring the scaling on all but the first.

Crit procs are needed in order to push condition classes into other stats besides raw condition damage.  If you removed all of the crit based procs from the game, you’ll see every single condition class running around in Condi/Tough/Vit gear (assuming it becomes available in PvP) because they already get very little damage from power and subsequently crits on that power based damage.  The on crit procs push people into Rabid or Rampager gear sets to ensure that they actually get Incendiary Ammo or Dhuumfire procs, and other similar effects like Sharpshooter.

The issue with proccing such a powerful condition on crit is that it basically can’t be avoided.  You can’t dodge/blind/block every single attack, so as soon as an attack crits you, you’ve basically got 5 seconds of burning to contend with as well.  This is probably way to strong for a randomly procced effect to be delivered in a single hit.  The problem from a balance standpoint is that if you reduce the duration of the burn, you have to also reduce the cooldown to make the trait still worthwhile.  The net effect would basically be 2 seconds every 5 instead of 4 every 10.  This creates a different problem because now you’ve just made the re-application of the effect much more common, and basically made removal nearly meaningless against it.

I think that in general, crit procs are good to drive additional condition damage scaling, but the implementation of them is very problematic especially for burning because of the forced packet size of the conditions.  They work reasonably well for bleeding based procs, but the mechanics of removal and application make them problematic in that setup as well.

There are multiple ways you can clean up some of these types of things, but neutering burn damage is probably not a very good way to do it.  It’s already pretty weak in PvE due to the way that it stacks, and reducing the damage it does will only make it worse (unless you decide to make it stack in intensity like bleeding).

At the end of the day, you need something to force condition damage dealers to take other offensive stats, but the mechanics of the game make it difficult to make those effects balanced currently.

@Knox:
You’re completely right. I shouldn’t make charts when I’m tired and sleep deprived. Looking back on the chart today I was facepalming at the magnitude of my error. I knew that I’d heard that “6 bleeds is better than Burning” from somewhere, and having the chart refute that despite my gamesense should have keyed me off that something was wrong.

What a difference a pair of brackets makes.

So yes, 6 Bleeds does begin to exceed Burning damage at 1200+ Condition damage; although if you have lower then the number of stacks you require increase.

I agree that there must be some sort of stat diversification required to make Condition damage work, and Precision is just one of those ways to do so. I think Attack damage scaling for Conditions might work; however, this would simply “force” Condition users to turn to Carrion or Rampager’s Amulet and stats – the preferred stat combo would change, but not the basic problem.

One idea that I had was by making individual condition “stacks” scale better with condition damage, but nerf all condition application durations across the board. Burns could then be an “unprecedented” 2-3 seconds after a lot of +Condition Duration traits and runes, but hit a lot harder. Necromancers could stack up to an “unprecedented” 8 stacks of Bleed in a combo of Weapon Skills and Utilities that only lasts for 4 seconds, but has the potential to take off over 50% of an opponent’s health if not cleansed.

Similarly, the Engineer could use a combination of Pistol 1, Incendiary Ammo and Rocket Kick to deliver a 4 second burn – that can 50% someone from full if left unchecked.

The idea here is to make Condition application a lot more “bursty” – short duration, high intensity, requires co-ordination from team-mates. Right now the way Conditions work is that you don’t really have incentive to invest into +Condition Duration unless the traits are already there laid out for you.

Burning

@NevirSayDie:
I agree that Burning is too strong right now. Even though it is – theoretically – the lowest scaling Condition Damage DPS, it still has massive threat because of the way it was originally formulated – high base damage, high intensity, low duration – has been subverted by the %Condition Duration stat and Runes and Traits that allow for consistent, persistent Burning application.

I actually see the Dhuumfire patch as the culmination of a design failure of Arenanet to take into account the base damage of burning and the overall placement of it in traits.

(0.25 * Condition Damage) + (4 * Level) + 8 damage per second (328 base damage + 0.25CD @80)

The formula here grants Burning a very handsome 328 DPS before any bonus Condition Damage is applied. This gives Burning extremely high base damage. Compare this with Bleeding with base damage of 43 (7.7 times the base damage of Bleed).

Using Ostricheggs’s Bomb/Nade build as an example , we see that with a bonus Condition Damage of 1156 before Might Stacks the potential for Burning is a hefty 617 DPS – on par with some Autoattacks of some classes.

With many traits that give bonuses to Burning in the Power/Condition Damage line – after all, it was intended to be a “bonus” amount of DPS to Power classes to give them some sustained damage after their burst – the problem is compounded. Incendiary Powder alone without using any +Condition Duration Runes at 30 Explosives grants Burning at 5.2 Seconds every 10 Seconds (Rounded down to 5 for ticks don’t go to fractions of a second).

With the Dhuumfire patch Necros and Warriors, with Rangers and Engineers before them, brought Burning into the forefront as a prime source of DPS after condi-burst. Necro’s Bleed stacks could, in theory, out-dps Burning, if stacks were high enough. However, as the graph shows, as the amount of Condition damage scales up, Burning still outscales Bleeding up to the point of 13 Stacks of Bleeding (!!!) at 1100+ Condition Damage. I think at this point it should be obvious that obtaining and maintaining 13 stacks of Bleeding is unrealistic.

Part of the reason is the ludicrous base damage at level 80. Another is although Burning scales better with Duration than Condition Damage at low levels, investment into Condition Damage still yields excessive benefit at high levels of Condition damage.

Arenanet realised this and gave Burning to Necros to more effectively DPS down their target through conditions. What they neglected to realise was that the Burning Condition itself was potent enough to supplant Bleeding as the prime source of Condition DPS.

Essentially the Dhuumfire patch was a band-aid solution to a wider problem. I think that they were right to give Necros Burning, but the Burning condition itself should have had its base damage and scaling reduced.

As for Engineer and Incendiary Powder, I think Super Riceman’s suggestion has merit:

Maybe make them apply on the next attack after toolbelt use and give them an effect like signets when used
IP, Acidic Coating, and Go for the Eyes won’t need ICDs since they are applied less often unless you have rifle turret and 30pts in tools.
They will be as strong 1v1 as they are in a group.
Plus both the engi and the target will know when the attack has an extra effect

Too little traits right now exploit our actual profession mechanic – the Tool Belt instead relying on Crit procs and other gimmicks. If Incendiary Powder were ever nerfed further, the Tool Belt should be the first place to consider moving some of our procs.

NevirSayDie.6235:

I do think it’s a problem that against pet-heavy professions, you’re likely to waste your burn (since practically every engineer attack worth using is AoE). Another problem is that burn is just ridiculously good. There’s no such thing anymore as a condition build without burn.
—The best thing for engineers would be a reduction in the condition-meta, either through buffs to cleansing or nerfs to condition application.
—IP certainly keeps engineers relevant in competing with necros and rangers for condition spam. I wouldn’t mind seeing things shift away from condition spam in general, though, and I think engineers have a lot of other things besides condition spam to offer.
—Engineer survivability has taken massive nerfs since launch (juggernaut, smoke bomb, super elixir, elixir S, and others), but I think it’s still pretty good. We still have ridiculous healing, cc, and blocks.
—I think engineers are balanced right now. They’re not the best condition bomber or bunker, but they’re pretty decent at both at the same time. I feel engineers also have more viable niche builds than other professions (I currently play rifle engineer, no IP).

I’ll have to agree with you on the point that there’s no good condition specs without Burn these days. I have seen the rise of many classes that previously did not have a condition role into one that does. Now, this is a good thing because it brings more classes and builds into the meta, however – all of the new builds that have arisen – Longbow burn warrior, Condition Ranger through Sun Spirit – contribute massively to the condition AOE balance issue.

One thing that Ostricheggs did mention was particularly striking -

conditions that proc while applying other conditions are extremely strong.

We as Engineers running, say, Grenades, have been largely reliant upon things like Vulnerability, Bleed, Freeze and Blind or Poison to cover the burns from Incendiary Powder/Blow Torch/Incendiary Ammo TB use.

For one, it generates a lot of “Cover” conditions that exploit the “Last In, First Out” (LIFO) condition system to “Cover” heavy DPS conditions like Burning with cover conditions like Vulnerability. For another, this kind of consistent reapplication of conditions – even on auto-attacks – swiftly overwhelms the cleansing capability of many classes. The only classes that can keep up are – Ranger and Guardian – each of which have a passive condition cleanse trait every 10 seconds in addition to their other tools for condition management. It’s also contributed to many builds now turning to Lyssa runes as an additional tool – the 6 set bonus grants a full condi clear and all boons on Elite activation.

So now we have passive condition cleanse being used to counter passive condition application. This may have been what players like Helseth and others have been complaining about – that the game has become too much about buildcrafting rather than active use of abilities. Where the presence of a single trait can define a duel far more than cooldown management, expeditious dodging or strong gameplay mechanics.

So here now is another question.

• Ostricheggs has mentioned, along with you, NevirSayDie, that Incendiary Powder has a weakness against high amounts of summons bodyblocking the IP proc. Would you agree that this mechanic simply further encourages high AI builds like Minion Master Necro or Spirit Rangers – builds that some have commented to be low skill ceiling and therefore should be low reward in the past? If not, do you think that Incendiary Powder should be changed somehow to make it “fairer” in true 1v1 scenarios free of summons?

• You mentioned the following – The best thing for engineers would be a reduction in the condition-meta, either through buffs to cleansing or nerfs to condition application. Would you not agree that buffs to either aspect would further erode the Engineer’s role in Condition cleave? What nerfs should Engineer receive and what buffs should it get in return for the loss in Condition pressure?

• Should we as the Engineer class continue to propagate the current state of the game (through AOE condition spam)? This refers mainly to proccing cover conditions on our primary DPS condition, Burning.

• If not, what changes are needed to turn Engineers away from this role? Keep in mind that Ostricheggs thinks that Engineers are well balanced in the current state of the game, and that any changes to Incendiary Powder will make Engineer highly volatile in terms of balance once again.

• If so, what do you have as a response to players of other classes? The other class competing for the same role, Necromancer, also relies heavily on procs applying conditions with other conditions. What counterplay exists to procs in your experience?

I think that given the right pick of skills, this elite skill could very well replace the Rampager component of Elixir X, whilst providing a limited source of Stability that Engineer sorely lacks right now.

It would be fantastic, but I do think that there is a lot more work required with current skills before new skills for Engineer could even be contemplated.

For discussion purposes, here is a list of traits for the Engineer that involves RNG:

Shrapnel – Explosions have a 15% chance to apply 1 stack of Bleeding for 12 seconds

Incendiary Powder – Critical hits have a 100% chance to inflict Burning for 4 seconds. Internal cooldown of 10 seconds

Sharpshooter – Critical hits have a 30% chance to apply 1 stack of Bleeding for 3 seconds

Target the Weak – Gain 10% critical chance against foes with less than 50% health

Infused Precision – Critical hits have a 50% chance to grant Swiftness for 5 seconds. 5 seconds Internal Cooldown

Precise Sights – Critical hits have a 50% chance to apply Vulnerability

Go for the Eyes – Critical hits with the Rifle have a 50% chance to apply Blind for 5 seconds. 10 seconds Internal Cooldown

Transmute – 8% chance to convert incoming Conditions into Boons

Acidic Coating – When struck with a melee attack, gain a 50% chance to Blind the attacker for 5 seconds. 10 seconds Internal Cooldown

Scope – Gain 10% critical chance against targets more than 600 units away.

Preamble:
I have created this thread pursuant to the comments made by Ostricheggs in his debate with viewers in the Guildwars2PvPTV Twitch channel in which assorted viewers debated with Ostricheggs the usefulness of the trait Incendiary Powder, its power in 1v1s vs pet/AI heavy classes, and its balance. I am opening this discussion in the hope that it will attract some commentary on traits like Incendiary Powder, and other RNG crit-procs that the Engineer is privy to in the hopes that the discussion engendered can lead to ideas to move the Engineer forward in terms of balance.

For the debate itself, the conversation starts at around 1:13:00 with HGH. Ostricheggs discusses various topics including his build (he runs P/S HGH/Nades and P/S HT/Nade/BK – both builds utilise Rabid Amulet); various nerfs that have happened to Engineer in the past (HGH survivability among others); and his stance on where the Engineer stands in terms of balance today.

Anyway, I’m sure Ostricheggs can probably articulate far better than I can whether Incendiary Powder is balanced in terms of SPvP. In his opinion it is:

• It is the only trait that is making Engineers strong enough to compete in the current meta (with respect to Necromancers fulfilling the same role of AOE Condition cleave)
• Without Incendiary Powder many Engineer builds would largely be crippled of its Condition pressure
• Recent nerfs to Engineer survivability have reduced build variety in SPvP
• Because of its current implementation, it is strong in 1v1s, but tapers significantly against multiple targets / AI classes

However, several viewers were of the opinion that:

• As a passive crit-proc there is little counterplay
• It is too strong for its RNG nature

It is important to note one point that Ostricheggs made as the stream wound down, which I believe to be highly important to any conversation regarding Incendiary powder changes: (Keep in mind that everything below is paraphrased from several statements)
“If Incendiary Powder were ever changed or removed, Engineer would have to receive such a plethora of changes thakittens current position in balance would become highly volatile”

So I put the questions to you now, fellow Engineers.

• Do you believe that the current implementation of Incendiary Powder is overpowered?
• If so, what changes could be made to keep the Engineer as it stands in the balance of things?
• If not, what would make Ostricheggs make the claim that Incendiary Powder the trait that keeps Engineers relevant, and should this be changed?
• Does Engineer as a class require changes in certain aspects before it can be considered “meta” with a greater variety of builds? If so, which aspects should be changed?
• What areas of the Engineer do you feel are weak at the moment? Ostricheggs mentioned that Engineer survivability has been nerfed – do you agree with his sentiment?
• Where do you stand in terms of Engineer balance? OP, UP, balanced right now?

@Lupanic:
Delete all the other bits except for the video code. Otherwise just visit his channel’s main page, it’s the most recent upload.

@Dirame
That’s fair enough. I suppose I should have remembered that you were running Shamans amulet and not something like Rabid where you would have a lot more Precision to be able to get Incendiary Powder on cooldown.

With that in mind have you considered Cleric’s Amulet with, say, Valkyrie’s Jewel? Without bonus Condition Damage in Firearms your DPS with Shaman’s isn’t that jaw dropping, whilst your sustained DPS through Bombs and FT would be largely anaemic. If you had Cleric’s Amulet your FT and Bombs would apply decent enough pressure, but you’d also lose the strength of Napalm. On the other hand you’ll have a lot more consistent damage.

This is looking like a pretty strong side point defender build, although it looks like you don’t really have the damage to counter pressure people off the point.

That being said, the addition of Stability to Thumper Turret’s Toolbelt seems to have paid out big for you. I think I saw a Skull Crack being wasted on you when you had Stability up.
A few criticisms though. You build massive Condition Damage yet you don’t take Incendiary Powder, which would ordinarily be your primary source of counterpressure through Burning.

I understand that it has to be a compromise otherwise your Bombs would suck, but have you considered it? It may be more consistent because otherwise you’ll be tied to Incendiary Ammo and kiting people through Napalm for your damage – neither of which are strong enough on their own.

Your first fight in the video, in fact, shows that you had a little bit of an issue staying up against the Guardian and the Ele before your Guardian friend could intervene and contribute enough DPS to force them down.

I also think that Invigorating Speed could be a better contender for your Alchemy second trait over Backpack Regenerator. As useful as it is to have constant background HPS, more invulnerability frames will always beat out sustained healing.

@lakdav:
Thanks for the compliments!
As for Explosive Shot counting as an Explosion, I’m a little hesitant. Pistol’s kit is already the best condition spreading weapon in the game – having Steel Packed Powder proccing Vulnerability would give it yet another cover and support condition that could take up more cleansing capability of all classes.

Making Pistol 1 work with the Explosives traits would also make it run into the issue of proccing Shrapnel – and as much as I’d like Pistol 1 to be able to stack Bleed more capably, I think that Engineer as a class is already too dependant on passive RNG procs already. Removing the Aftercast of Pistol 1 will already be a substantial buff – 0.8sec / cast → 0.5sec / cast is a 37.5% buff to Pistol 1’s Power and Condition damage capability – and will allow Engineers just using Pistol 1 to take peak Bleeds stacked up to 4 before Condition Duration.

In a Condition build that also runs Incendiary Powder assuming that Pistol 1 worked with Explosives traits – that would allow Engineer to proc Burning and Bleeding, with Vulnerability to cover. That’s quite excessive considering only the auto-attack and not just a further 3-4 more conditions from the other Pistol skills.

Now that being said, it would be a little better if Pistol 1 had a little higher direct damage component (not in the explosion). Along with an Aftercast buff, slightly more direct damage may yet redeem it by making Pistol 1 at least somewhat of a minor threat as a hybrid weapon.

@Kimbald:
I agree with EG1 being made to do a little more damage. Elixir F and Fumigate, too, could do with a little buff to the Power component.

At the moment Engineers have little capability to deal sustained, single target damage, and EG is one possibility that can rectify that, as can Tool Kit. Perhaps if the Bleed component of the EG1 were de-emphasised such that EG could be closer in function to Warrior’s Rifle (although damage doesn’t have to be close to that) we could have an alternative.

On the other hand, we could also buff Rifle’s Hip Shot, but that would also make Rifle both a high burst and high sustained weapon – which might not sit well in terms of balance.

It should be noted that Engineer already has the potential for rewards by keeping the enemy at bay. The problem is that the only trait in the game that involves Range for Engineer is RNG.

Scope is what I’m talking about. It’s a fairly simple mechanic. Keep your enemy more than 600 units away and be rewarded with an extra chance to crit. This is all well and good if you’re playing Grenadier, but playing with Rifle, the only true “long range” skill is your Hip Shot .

If you want to give Engineers a real alternative to running Ranged other than Grenades, here is your best bet. Outside of that, it’s introducing new traits – and given Anet’s track record with new traits (cough coughDhuumfire*cough cough*), I have little faith in a trait release resulting in a decently placed, decently balanced, and decently counterplayable trait. But one can dream.

Now, to make ranged a decent option for Engineer Rifle, the most important thing to do is to make Scope also replace Blunderbuss with another skill. That’s it. Net Shot, Overcharged Shot and Jump Shot already control the range – Blunderbuss is the reward for getting to close range. Therefore, Blunderbuss must be replaced by something else with the Scope trait.

So a new weapon skill that could replace Blunderbuss could be:
Marksman’s Shot 3 second Charge Cast . 15 sec CD.
Does more damage the longer Marksman’s Shot is channelled. Damage is halved below 600 range. Inflicts increasing Vulnerability the longer it is channelled:
0 seconds channelled: 1 stack of Vulnerability for 8 seconds
1 second channelled: 2 stacks of Vulnerability for 8 seconds
2 seconds channelled: 3 stacks of Vulnerability for 8 seconds
3 seconds channelled: 6 stacks of Vulnerability for 12 seconds

Press and hold to charge cast. Release to fire. Charging reduces movement speed by 50%.
Animation: Target has red crosshair across centre-mass that increases in size as cast is charged. Similar to Kill Shot, enemy dodges do not interrupt the cast. However: Projectile upon firing is same speed as Static Shot (and just as visible) to allow for dodging.

Now, as for replacing the RNG of Scope giving %Crit chance beyond 600 range, instead make it like this:
Scope
Inflict 1 stack of Vulnerability for 8 seconds on targets at greater than 600 range.

This rework turns %Critical chance into %damage – more reliable, visually scoutable, and builds up over time – it takes 8 seconds to achieve peak Vulnerability stacks, which is an eternity trying to kite. Support the entire party by making your target take up to 10 % more damage 8 seconds later – if you can keep it at arms length.

One can also make Scope alter Pistol 1 such that it instead inflicts 1 Bleed stack for 4 seconds – essentially doubling its current duration – if the target is beyond 600 range.