Guild Wars 2

It’s a large circular object held in one hand used to block damage with the name “shield”, but yeah.. let’s make it not count. Wonderful.

I think putting 30 in firearms is a must as you can pick up the trait that causes pistol shots to pierce (causing an explosion on EACH TARGET). That’s the only advice I can offer.

Does the reinforced shields trait apply when using the toolkit? Technically it has a shield….. But… Technically not…

I’m assuming you’re talking about the distancing skills.. I wasn’t saying you would use all 5 at once. In fact, in the next sentence, I said you could have 3 at once (4 with a simple weapon swap).

Flamethrower OR Rifle OR Elixer AND Battering Ram AND Rocket Boots

Posted this is another thread but I’ll post it here too.

I think what needs to be done first and foremost is increase the cooldown on kit swaps to be on par with other professions’ weapon swaps.

Then, have a grandmaster trait to reduce it back to where it is.

So now, if you want to swap to 4 weapon kits, you need a solid investment in that line. Boom. Now we can start increasing the effectiveness of kits since we know that if you’ve spent the points to fast swap all the time, you’ve compensated by losing power/precision.

I feel like “kit swapping” is a build, more than anything else. Some people like it, some don’t. It should be an option and neither side should be penalized for picking how they want to play.

I think 30 points is an adequate amount of points for defining a specific playstyle…

Well with the trait, possibly in the ‘tool’ line, the cooldown would be reduced again.

My point is, it seems like ANet overall kittens engineers with the thought that “Oh, engineers can swap kits every second so that makes up for it”. Which basically means, if you’re not swapping kits, you’re not taking advantage of the only aspect that puts engineers on par with the rest. The solution: Make the fast kit swapping a build. This way, if I have no interest in swapping every 3 seconds, I’m not penalized.. but those who do still can.

How about they increase the cooldown of kit swaps to be on par with regular weapon swaps, increase the effectiveness of kits to compensate, and implement a grandmaster trait that reduces the cooldown back to where it is now to be used with builds that focus on kit swapping.

There is something that bugs me about engineer weapons / kits. All the kits are made to be used MID RANGE (except tool kit and bomb kit).

That being said, we have no real reason to swap between a multitude of kits. I played mesmer for a while. I used greatsword and sword/focus. At long range, greatsword was great (lol). When they got close, I could swap to sword.

As an engineer, I rarely feel the need to swap besides to activate a combo field. Engineers have no shortage of “distancing” skills. Rifle overcharge, flamethrower push, battering ram, rocket boots, elixer gun.. thing. That’s 5 right there, and you can have 3 of them AT ANY GIVEN TIME. I just feel like so many of the weapons and gadgets are so similar that there’s no real need to swap to another kit besides cooldowns.

Exceptions: Grenade kit – I’ll swap to this if I need to lay down some AoE .. but honestly, the flamethrower covers almost as much area.
Bomb kit – This is the most boring kit ever. Run away and drop bombs, kiting dumb enemies into them. They took the grenade kit, removed the area targeting and made it drop at your feet. Boring.
Tool Kit – Now I actually like this kit. Why? It’s really the only weapon kit we have that actually offers a different kind of playstyle – melee. It’s usefulness in healing turrets isn’t fantastic.. maybe if it got a little more attention, this would absolutely be my favorite kit.

Didn’t read all the replies – don’t have time.

I forced myself to use the flamethrower for a while .. and I found it works best when you use the rams head gadget.

Start fight with #2, you will deal some good damage at max range. Use a #1 to proc a burn, drop a firewall and #5 to force them to miss you, can get another #1 in there while they’re sitting in the flames and they still haven’t hit you. Use #3 to push them back and get a couple more #1’s off. When they get to you again, ram head them and immediately lob a #2. Ram head puts them at the perfect distance and you will nuke them pretty hard.

While I agree it’s not perfect, the flamethrower does a decent job at keeping enemies at mid-range and controlling them. I kill stuff faster with the rifle though, but it’s nice to change it up once in a while.

Clones and phantasms die just as fast. Only difference is, mesmers can create them MUCH faster and they can be traited so that they’re intended to die, applying effects on death.

No. I can kinda see where you’re coming from, but no. Heavy armor users have damage mitigation for survivability. Light armor users have dodge mechanics for survivability. Both should be able to “tank” (if the word must be used) just as well.

^ Not to mention the lack of mobility with a turret. That alone should give turrets the upper hand in terms of damage… and .. ANet decided to go a different direction.

Spawning a turret automatically would be nice, plus that gives some incentive to actually use the tool kit. I kinda like it. I like the mini turret as well, but throw wrench is useful.

I’m also hijacking this thread to add some ideas of my own (no prior thought went into these, just came up with them).

Suggestion 1: Make turrets act more like a gadget. Turrets are deployed, last for 6 seconds, then explode. They would do increased damage for their brief effect. This solves the problem of enemies killing them because they will likely explode before they are focused. It would also make the trait that allowed you to throw turrets MUCH more effective. However, I completely understand that this negates the idea of a turret, making it function more like a gadget.

Suggestion 2: “Pick up” turrets allows you to carry them around while they continue to fire. When you pick up a deployed turret (assuming suggestion 1 is not in place), it will continue to fire. It replaces your weapon set so you can’t use any abilities (ability 1 is replaced with a “Re-deploy” button (4 second channel to re-deploy), the rest are empty). This allows the engineer to be much more mobile, re-deploy as needed, and potentially save the turret from being killed. To prevent engineers from being able to kite endlessly, just have the turret fire in the direction the engineer is facing while picked up rather than a nearby enemy. I admit, this isn’t a great suggestion, but better than the current implementation.

The biggest problem is that they’re easily killed. This MIGHT be ok if they were able to do some decent damage before they died, but they don’t. Plus, enemies seem to LOVE to smash them first. I would love to see a mechanics that allowed the turret to be invulnerable, but obviously only under the right conditions.

Suggestion 3: Master trait: Turrets take no damage as long as the engineer remains within 200 range. This would allow an engineer to hold a point for a while, but the turret would not get immediately focued down. The downside – engineer is no longer mobile. However, it is the tradeoff you make when you go deep into turrets so it kinda works well. You would see engineers with 4 turrets just bunker down in them all. While they could hold points fairly well, this makes them 100% immobile.

Suggestion 4: Take a page out of the Team Fortress 2 book. Have turrets spawn as very basic turrets, use the tool kit to upgrade them. Could include a grandmaster trait that allowed the turret to be deployed as upgraded. Upgraded turrets could do more damage and have more health. Again, this works towards the “holding a point” mentality that turrets were CLEARLY designed for.

1. Honestly, I wouldn’t plan much. I went into it thinking I’d use grenades and bombs all the time, but it turned into me using rifle and gadgets, mostly. I would try it before you try to plan a build. Bombs can be kinda irritating to use.

2. I wouldn’t agree about the burst.. or the damage. Engineers aren’t exactly consistent, with our condition build being less than satisfactory at the moment (seems on par with every other condition build though .. unloved). However, engineers are all about adapting to situations. It’s not just about maximum DPS.

3. AI.

4. Pretty sure they fixed this in the last patch. Could be wrong.

5. Nope. Maybe once or twice to say “Hey look what I got!!” But .. most people never touch it. Charr and Asura fit the role of an engineer really well. I picked human just because the armor looks better on them.. and in the end, looks are all that matters from a race.

6. Honestly, the best name generator I’ve ever found was not a name generator at all, but a word creator. It gave me my engineer name, “Thwackstat”. http://www.randomwordmachine.com/ I have a lot of fun with it.

Don’t change rifle. Good long ranged damage with pierce, immobilize, gap closer, burst, and a push. It’s one of the most well-rounded weapon sets engineers have access to. You can easily control the entire flow of a 1v1 (PvE) encounter with that single weapon alone.

P/P or P/S is good too, but without the overcharge, you’re required to kite more with glue or slow. Granted, you have utility skills that can push them away (ram) and push yourself away (rocket), but I feel like if you wanted to put something else on your utility slots, rifle is a great way to encompass some solid damage at a decent range, good burst at close range, immobilize, gap closing, and distancing in a single weapon.

I’ve gotten maybe 5 keys total (including from chests) on each character I’ve played. So far, I have yet to find ANYTHING useful in these chests. It’s garbage. If ANet wants people to buy keys, they need to show us that something useful can (and WILL) come out of the chests. I’m not gonna spend 4% of the game’s total cost every time I want to look like a pink moa.

Silly silly silly.

So far, the only thing I’ve bought from the gem store is an extra bank slot .. because cooking materials take up a TON of space.

Edit: Also, how are people buying gems with in-game currency? I dropped some $$ on gems early on, but I was unaware that they could be bought with silver as well..

The collectibles bank is really just an “Extra” thing that I’m just glad exists AT ALL.

However, I would love it if when I was crafting, it would look to the collectibles AND the regular bank for materials (since we need to use the regular bank to store all the non-collectible items). I could deal with that.

Or .. just add everything to collectibles. That works too.

I read most of your post and .. none of the other responses (I ain’t got time for dat!)

Heart quests: Yep. They streamlined questing. While the system in place is better than the traditional “Hi there, can you kill X bears for me?”, it does nothing to make you feel like a hero and it can be done almost mindlessly (almost every heart quest has the option to kill something.. so you can essentially just roam around killing everything and get rewarded). There’s a better system than this to be found.. just gotta wait for someone to think of it.

Events: You hit the nail on the head. They were supposed to be game-changing events to make the world dynamic. Instead, it’s just a matter of “Oops, the bull is raging again, let’s go beat it up” or “Bandits are spawning, let’s kill some waves”. You see the same events all the time and they just serve as some bonus XP. Hardly the revolutionary system that was advertised. What is needed is epic events. Single events that span days, weeks, months… the world is actually CHANGED from them. What would also be good is events where you can pick sides. So like.. an event starts, you can either collect items and turn them in to some guy or do.. something else. And whichever part is done more successfully will “win” the event (and get different rewards depending on which part was done).

My friend smokes weed a lot and tends to zone out in MMO’s just wandering aimlessly and killing stuff.. he would probably excel here.

I know some dev in some post in some forum said they were looking at conditions and how they can be improved. That’s all I know.

I don’t care so much for the lore behind it, although it does come into play a little the the industrial feel of the Charr.

I think I may need to re-roll as a human engineer. I don’t really want to, but I think I’m gonna miss out on looking awesome if I don’t.

Right, like I said, it may just be a learning issue.

Elementalists, like all professions, require you to change stances/sets/kits to get the most out of the profession. I don’t know much of the specifics of it, but I imagine most of it is getting used to what the 4 elements offer and knowing what to use in each situation. Fire seemed to be all about consistent damage, water was support and healing, air was high crits and movespeed, earth was slower aoe and debuffs.

I think you would primarily focus on 3 elements due to how your trait points would be spread out.. but it looks like it’s all about knowing what each element offers, comboing the abilities and switching to the right element for that situation.

Oh wow… that .. looks really kitten. ……

Edit: it appears I can’t say the word I wanted to. How about.. badbutt?

If you really want to try elementalist, don’t let people dissuade you! I played one for about 20 levels and the only part I couldn’t really get over was swapping elements regularly. However I never saw them under-performing in terms of 1-20 PvE – was still killing things pretty quickly. If they are in fact weaker than the rest, it’s 1) Not as a big of a difference as everyone makes out to be and could just be a “L2P” issue or 2) ANet will fix it. There’s a solution to be found in either case.

My point is, if you really want to try it, go for it. No one should be convincing you not to.

I’ve been struggling with this for some time now. These are my current thoughts for each race based on 3 factors. 1) Look/feel, 2) Sound, 3) Racials (not focusing too much on it).

Charr:
1) They look the part in terms of race. They’re industrious and the whole crude invention thing works well with them. However, armor tends to look just terrible on them. Lots is stretched out oddly and just the shape of the armor to cover their body .. it tends to look pretty bad.
2) Most of the voices are low growling. It’s fine, doesn’t get annoying.
3) Racials fit the best here. C’mon, charzooka?

Human:
1) Humans, for every profession, seem to wear armor the best.They don’t quite feel right as an engineer .. almost because they’re too NORMAL. I feel like an engineer needs to have a little crazy.
2) Not .. terrible. They tend to get annoying .. URGE TO KILL RISING!
3) Racials don’t tie in well.

Norn:
1) Big race = big armor/weapons. They’re like humans but scaled up. One big problem is the backpack visual you get when using the grenade kit is so large and ugly looking.. it’s honestly a deal breaker.
2) Wow, the norn have some awful vocals. I couldn’t stand it. Any time I did any skill, just an obnoxious grunting.
3) Shapeshifting doesn’t fit well with engineers.

Asura:
1) The good: Everything is scaled down, so that big ugly backpack is just a small sack. Overall, it looks great. Plus the skills like the rifle 5 look awesome when you’re just a little guy flying through the air. The bad: You never get to really see any good looking armor because it’s all just too small. There’s no showing off of weapons either. Also, people have complained about odd camera issues with this small of a race. I don’t see how that’s possible though …
2) Vocals are kinda silly, but they fit.
3) The poison field thing is kinda nice .. not a fan of the golem, but whatever. Fit better than most races.

Sylvari:
1) They’ve got the right body style, but the whole plant thing kinda ruins it. Sylvari look odd with guns and granades.
2) Eugh. Can’t stand the vocals.
3) Nope.

So it’s really just between Charr and Asura .. the, obviously, most popular engineer races. Charr’s armor looks bad but makes up for it with racial skills and weapon scaling. Asura’s armor/weapons are so small you don’t really notice them (both a good and a bad thing). Plus their comical size is pretty awesome.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

@Deepblue … wtf? Is that supposed to be helpful?

Thief is a very chaotic playstyle. It requires you to pop skills at the exact right time with perfect positioning. The reward is bringing someone from full health to none in seconds. Stealth is your best friend for both offense and defense, but if someone is able to control you long enough while your stealth is on CD, lights out.

Mesmer is the current “1v1 King”. Which may do wonders to boost your ego, but many mesmers don’t help the team simply because they’re looking to 1v1. However, mesmers have a large variety of utility (teleports, time warp) that greatly help group fights. There’s a happy medium of single target and support to be found in there with some good burst if you spec into it. Due to the nature of the mesmer, I don’t think of them so much as “glass cannon” .. they have some ramp up time and lots of utilities to escape.

I have not yet tried Ranger, but from what I’ve heard (can’t always believe what you hear…) ranger is more of a “jack of all trades” rather than a specific damage profession.

Guardian… you would be hard pressed to come up with a guardian build that was pure glass cannon and didn’t offer any support (to self or others).

Other professions you might want to consider:

Engineer: Lots of kits can be overwhelming, but you can create some unique builds that allow you to output a ton of damage in neat ways (ex, getting the trait that zaps a player when using a toolbelt skill and focusing on using toolbelt skills on cooldown.. lots of burst!). Engineer definitely has some “glass cannon” viable builds.

Warriors: Obvious choice.. they have some great damage output. Many find the playstyle too straightforward and boring.. but many also enjoy it.

Necromancer: I haven’t played necro as long as some of the other classes, but necro traits seem to shine when it comes to conditions. Unfortunately, conditions need to be shown a little love by ANet. I’m sure you could find some other builds that focus less on conditions, but I guess I never saw necro as a glass cannon. Could be very wrong here.

Edit: Forgot elementalist. I feel like someday, elementalist will get some love and people will play them more often. Right now, they are disregarded by many as “useless”, however I still see quite a few around. I think people just like to overreact. If you don’t mind switching between elements fairly often, elementalist will probably have quite a bit to offer in terms of high damage output.

In summary: I think you should look into Thief with mesmer/engineer as a secondary.

Hm. I just used it as a “Oh hey, lots of guys, guess I’ll press F1, use skill 5, and F1 again”… or if I was gonna die, it’s a good “oh kitten” move.

But I guess I don’t get a full feel for a profession only at 20.

I picked asura becuase I honestly thought every other race didn’t quite fit it.

Charr: Second best option, but .. honestly look too mangy. Don’t like their style.
Norn: The mammoth backpack you get while using the grenade kit looks so ugly and out of place .. can’t stand it.
Human: Humans are boring.
Sylvari: A plant with a gun doesn’t look right.

According to Arenanet, it was: Necromancer>Elementalist>Mesmer>Engineer>Others

.. Necromancer? What’s difficult about a necromancer? Granted I’ve only played one to 20 or so, but it was pretty straightforward ..

@VakarisJ … wow.

I am very amused at all of you complaining about Moa. Very amused. At least as long as you’re complaining in the forums, you’re not in the game. I guess I’m just glad that of the elite skills you decided to kitten about, you picked Moa instead of Time Warp.

I’ve been kicked many times for being idle (I tend to just walk away for a couple hours to do something else and leave myself logged in). I would like to think auto-casting a skill does not count as “player activity” and you would remain “idle”

Worked great with every class.

Haven’t tried it with an engineer.

:-/

I love the concept of using a gamepad for action-oriented games where cursor aiming is not important, but the control you get with a mouse I feel surpasses the (admittedly amazing) button functionality of a gamepad.

Yeah, took me a bit to figure that one out. But setting a trigger button to change the function of one of your joysticks from mouselook to cursor fixed that for me.

So you can’t turn the camera and target the ground at the same time? I’m trying to imagine how awful this would be for a grenade oriented engineer…

Camera movement as well as ground-targeted abilities have kept me from trying controller.

I think it was pretty accurate. I love exploring so the free-roaming playstyle suits me well, although I absolutely have to agree that there’s no real sense of purpose. But maybe that’s a good thing. When you have millions of players, it doesn’t make sense that every single one is the Supreme Grand Champion that will save the world.

The concept of aggro never made much sense in SOME ways. Often with trinity based games, the tank gets threat-generating abilities which accumulates and forces the target to attack the tank endlessly. I believe this needs to be ignored.

However, I can absolutely see threat-generating abilities that force the target to attack you TEMPORARILY (maybe 2-3 seconds) with auto-attacks. This would allow a beefier character to pull a critter off for a couple seconds and allow someone else to recover. (Edit: Would also combo with retaliation effects .. and maybe confusion?)

It makes just as much sense as a “fear” effect. Instead of forcing them to run, you’re forcing them to attack. However, I see this as a temporary altered “enraged” state of mind, so to speak, and it shouldn’t work like traditional MMO threat mechanics.

Creating clones is the “charge time” and can only be done in combat. I’m not saying mantras are fantastic, I almost never use them. But I can see where they were going with the idea and with a few tweaks they might actually be viable. Pretty sure this is off topic though.

I’ve never been bothered by the dialogue, mostly because I always forget to prepare the spell so I only hear it once in a while.. or in the middle of combat when I accidentally press that button when the charges are gone.

Mantras aren’t meant to be nukes. They’re instant so they can be used while casting/channeling other skills without interruption. Plus you get two of them. Basically, for preparing, you’re rewarded with some extra free damage.

Whether it’s worth it to replace another utility skill with this mantra is another argument. But I can absolutely see their niche.

How about make it say “Sandwich, Zipline,Walrus!”. It would really confuse your enemies .. and isn’t that the point?

If each clone could summon its own set of clones..

I would like to thank ANet for not locking this thread and allowing us a place to discuss and bring up our concerns. It is clear we are being heard, hopefully the right steps are taken.

It may have just been armor received from a story quest, just jumped to the conclusion that it was all eventually going to be like that.

This really makes me want to re-roll as a female. At least it fits a female character.

Yes, I was referring mostly to balance issues instead of bugfixes. Performance issues, skill bugs, and incorrect tooltips (as silly as it is) should be top priority.

Edit: I should add I have not experienced any framerate issues, crashing, BSOD’s.. only skill bugs and incorrect tooltips.

Ironically, one of the worst things about MMO’s is the massive playerbase. You need all those players to play the game and maintain upkeep, but devs also listen to players. Players are .. I’m just going to say “kittenheads” (that was not corrected, I typed kitten deliberately). A few minutes of reading through this forum is evidence that most players just talk out of their kitten.

Almost every profession forum has “This profession sucks, all others rock” threads. The result? Game companies ACTUALLY LISTEN. They may not ‘fix’ things in the direction the players want, but they find their own solution. Then, all the players kitten about what was done. Players have this terrible mindset that absolutely everything needs to be fair. They’ve been conditioned to think they should be able to mash their face on their keyboards and get points and butterflies and fluffy clouds. Rewards for doing nothing.

Games are consistently getting “dumbed down” to accommodate the screaming children that come here and WHINE ENDLESSLY. It’s one flaw of having a bigger company with a larger audience. The problem is what I call the spotlight effect.

When a game company is new, it is able to be innovative and make flaws and they won’t get the world yelling at them because .. the world mostly doesn’t know about it. Look at WoW after they released their first expansion – it’s just “dumbing down” right down the line. Blizzard did the same thing with Diablo 3. You can expect this of all major game companies that listen to their audience. Obvious double edge sword.

The old saying “The bigger you are, the harder you fall” works pretty well here. Every single change ANet does will come under HORRIBLE scrutiny, so they’re forced to either
1) Give in to player demands for stuff to be carebear fluffy easymode or
2) Make changes so incredibly small that they don’t really matter… but then people still kitten about them.

Lose/lose situation all brought on by the fact that ANet lets us have an open forum to discuss it.

I hated the GW1 mesmer armor. Prevented me from ever using mesmer as a main class.. not that it was incredibly appealing anyways.

If a mesmer wears a normal piece of armor, does it get ‘mesmerized’ and suddenly have a “frilly” (I’ll just use “frilly” to encompass all the oddities of this style) appearance?

So I’ve never cared much more for the ‘elegant’ part of the mesmer. I don’t care really for the lore or whatever behind it. I like a mage who focuses primarily on manipulation rather than direct damage .. which seems to fit the mesmer quite well.

I enjoy the playstyle, but the more I play, the worse the appearance gets. I’m getting all these masks that just look .. awful. I keep using those transmutation stones to give my starting sadface mask the stats of the newer ones. But now I’m getting these armors that are all frilly in odd places and have like.. ties and bowties built in … it looks awful!!! Am I going to need to transmute everything or are there other armor options besides … that .. style?

I’ve played engineer and mesmer to 20, the others to around 15. I’ve also done a bit of sPvP with them. I just really want to find a profession I can enjoy so I can play with my friends. It does sound like there’s more emphasis on pets than I’d like. Also took a look at the trait tree, seems like you really can’t get around the fact that it’s a pet class. Kinda what I expected.

One by one I’ve been going through the GW2 professions. I have yet to find something I really like.

Guardian: Too support-oriented.
Necromancer: Didn’t like the direction most utility skills went in (pets and ground-targeted abilities)
Elementalist: Didn’t like the constant element swapping
Mesmer: kinda kills me to say this but .. I didn’t like how they looked. Fancy-pants armor and masks .. I severely disliked it.
Engineer: Wayy too much clutter, kits are a mess.

That’s it so far. So I’ve come to consider the ranger class. I’d previously disregarded it as I’m not a huge fan of pets (dislike micromanaging a pet, making sure it’s healed, plus I don’t like using something to tank for me while I kill from afar.. I’d rather kite or be in it’s face).

But I see that the ranger has a nice combination of ranged and melee skills. Could a ranger be played mostly in melee style? Still able to swap to a ranged weapon when needed, but mostly up close? I tried Guardian because it was an off-shoot of the traditional warrior class.. could ranger be the same way?

I know the front page of every profession page is flooded with “This profession sucks, all others are great”, so I’m sure I’m going to get some disgruntled people in here saying “Don’t play this profession”, but I’m just looking for some constructive information. I don’t care so much about how the profession performs in terms of damage output compared to others, more how the playstyle feels.

1) Are rangers severely dependent on micromanaging their pet?
2) Are the pets a pain in thekitten to manage? (Preventing them from getting killed all the time?)
3) Is a ranger viable in close-ranged situations?

Thanks,
-whatever my name is here