I never understood why people complained about the perma stealth thieves. I personally could never play one because it just bored me but hey, if they’re permanently in stealth that means they’re not damaging you so move on. Warriors are probably the only class that consistently gives me trouble no matter what class or build I’m using. And just as soon as I think I’m getting the upperhand and kill them, they revive, come back with healing signet, mace and hammer and just perma stun me to death.
It’s like if they start losing they instantly have to pull out every cheap trick in the book. “Oh I died because this person outplayed me, better switch to my passive regen+perma stun build and just slide my face across the keyboard”. And don’t think I’m just hating on warriors, other classes do it to, just to less effect. Thieves commonly(at least from my experience) will switch to dagger mainhand after dying a few times and basically just HS over and over. Now this isn’t entirely effective because I make most of my builds with this in mind and usually have at least one block on most of my classes.
I understand they don’t want to severely hamper warrior because they are probably the only predominately melee class (maybe guardians too but they have staff and scepter so meh) but that doesn’t mean make them the premier melee class that should you try to fight in melee range without huge amounts of mobility you will lose to.
In my opinion a lot of these issues could be fixed by toning down healing signet to be more like other signets so that it activates only ever few seconds instead of every second. This would encourage more active gameplay from warrior and force them to actually manage their healing ability instead of just slotting it and forgetting about it because as it stands, if the person fighting the warrior can get him down to low enough health that he’d consider using signet then chances are it is already too late barring some major kiting.
But either warrior needs to be toned down or the rest of the classes need varying levels of buffs to put them on par and honestly, nerfing warrior instead of buffing all the other classes seems like a simpler solution…
Says it increase the range of rifle, pistol, harpoon and elixir gun by 200. Just at a quick glance this is very inaccurate. When used in conjunction with pistol , the range on 1,2,3 goes from 900 to 1050, IE only a 150 range increase. Blowtorch(pistol 4) shows no range increase despite the icon doing the little flip when the trait is added. Glue shot goes from 700 to 1050. When used with rifles 1 and 2 receive the proper range boost. 3 and 4 only go from 400 to 500. Rifle 5 goes from 700 to 800. When used with elixir gun skills 1,2 and 5 all go from 900 to 1200 while 3 and 4 are unaffected.
There are so many interesting ideas that you could add as escapes or defenses and I feel the current traits and utilities only scratch the surface.
Few ideas
New utility that changes depending on your current attunement.
Body of (insert element)
Fire-Become a scorching mass of flames for 5 seconds. Gain stability and apply 3 stacks of might every second to you and nearby allies. You become a moving fire field and attacks that hit you cause burning on the opponent.
Water-You liquefy yourself becoming a transparent body of water. Gain stealth for 5 seconds and apply regeneration to all who enter your radius. You are a moving water field.
Air-Your body becomes much harder to hit and periodically knock foes over. Enemies that attack you have a 50% chance to miss you for 5 seconds and you have a 20% chance to knock over nearby enemies. Hit limit 5.
Earth- You meld with the very soil beneath you becoming an invulnerable area of churning earth for 3 seconds. Foes passing over you are immobilized 1 sec then crippled. Enemies that stay on top of you for the full 3 seconds become shaken as you emerge from the ground and are knocked over. You are immobile while underground.
I feel this would be most likely a cantrip, possibly even an elite if you toned the durations up and possibly altered earth and water.
The only time I’ve seen signets used for all slots was for a pure for fun build that basically involved sneaking up behind someone then two shotting them with 20 stacks of might and CnD+Backstab. That was mostly for WvW though for quickly dropping other roamers. The problem is that with all signets, you have no escapes. Once you initiate a fight you either finish it or die.
PvE its fine since if you have aggro the mobs won’t be running out anytime soon and will stand there and eat the whole flurry. In pvp though, your opponent would have to be brain dead to stand there for the entire flurry after the .5 sec stun is gone.
It is either stability or timing. If you time jumps correctly you can jump right over wards. Also since mesmers can now provide group stability it wouldn’t surprise me if they knew you pop the mantra the second they saw a hammer guardian.
Could add to the support nature by causing virtues to create combo fields. IE, using Justice causes a fire field at your location for 3 seconds, using Resolve creates a water fields and using Courage creates a light field.
I have a mouse with two keys on the side that are by default set to forward/back a page when not in game. I was surprised to find out that GW2 recognizes a whole score of keys/buttons that most games don’t. A lot of games I’ve played couldn’t recognize anything on the mouse except the scroll, left and right click. Another possibility that I’ve done before and gotten used to is you can shift your entire movement key area over one so WASD becomes ESDF freeing up the W key and putting the T key in easy reach.
Are they still viable or would I be better off going pure conditions for spvp? Basically I planned on going 10-30-0-0-30 for a death shroud build built around fear and spectral skills for building life force since scepter is just so great at that…
Any build ideas or should I just drop the idea of terror totally? I like the idea of it and it definitely has a flavor I like so if I could spec for terror without really hindering myself I’d love your input.
No idea if it was the same person but several people complained about me playing thief, specifically mentioning shortbow as op and giving thief too much AoE today. I personally have never heard this before and honestly I rarely see a thief without a shortbow on swap. The only trend I saw was that they all tended to be minion classes(ranger, necro, and a mesmer who commented but didn’t really complain) and I guess I can kind of see how it could be annoying. I run a power build and a sigil of fire meaning if they have minions out trick shot almost always procs.
So is there something I’m missing or has the community just found something else to call OP now that LS can’t counter boon bunkers?
I think thieves are in a somewhat decent place. My only concern about them is they strongly discourage s/d or staff roaming for elementalist.
Well everything has got to counter something I suppose. If thieves didn’t counter s/d, something else would come along and find a way. Although I’m pretty sure staff has been an bad choice for solo roaming to begin with since it really shines in zergs or in large roaming groups. Thieves make nice roamers because if you look at their traits and skills, most of them are pretty selfish in that they usually will only benefit the thief. Sure there are exceptions like the steal traits and venomous aura but apart from those most of their traits boost the thief’s power while other classes can have even entire trait lines centered around party support.
It would be cool if they could have a build for better zerg support. Like A bigger aoe on their shortbow skills or a trait that increases its range.
Ya the shortbow always seemed… incomplete to me. Just off memory, I think there is only one trait in the entire thief profession that affects shortbow specifically and all it does is a 5% increase in damage. Don’t get me wrong, it is still a nice weapon and can be used to great effect, it just can’t be built around like you could other weapons.
I think thieves are in a somewhat decent place. My only concern about them is they strongly discourage s/d or staff roaming for elementalist.
Well everything has got to counter something I suppose. If thieves didn’t counter s/d, something else would come along and find a way. Although I’m pretty sure staff has been an bad choice for solo roaming to begin with since it really shines in zergs or in large roaming groups. Thieves make nice roamers because if you look at their traits and skills, most of them are pretty selfish in that they usually will only benefit the thief. Sure there are exceptions like the steal traits and venomous aura but apart from those most of their traits boost the thief’s power while other classes can have even entire trait lines centered around party support.
I see, I didn’t think about the cleansing factor. I was only theorizing the damage and testing on golems/npc classes so the cleansing never came up. I think I will stick with forceful explosives for now. It is definitely nice for glue and fire bomb at least.
Simple Ideas(IE, would be easy to implement, fairly straightforward):
Give it some powerful drawback like a speed reduction or a damage taken increase while using it so that you would not want to remain it it for too long.
Give it charges like conjures and make the elite supplies trait add 10 charges instead of range.
Creative Ideas(IE would require some special implementation just for mortar)
Give it a dependent cd that increases the longer you are in the kit. Ex. You use mortar kit for 10 seconds then switch out, it now has a cd of 30 seconds. Use it for 30 seconds and it now has a cd of 90 seconds. Cap out its time in use at 50 seconds which would put the cd at 150 seconds. Seems a little powerful so maybe throw in a speed reduction or some sort of debuff to encourage engis to maintain their kit swapping.
Give the mortar kit hp and maintain the 120 sec cd. This cannot be re-healed and does not regenerate out of combat. While the mortar kit is equipped you receive stability and your mortar will absorb say 20% of the direct damage you take. If the mortar kit is destroyed while you’re using it, its cd is doubled. If it is put away before it is destroyed its cd is halved.
Some of the suggestions seem a bit too powerful but it is an elite skill and it would make sense to make it kit related as there is already an elixir elite and a turret elite.
I’m running a build for SPvP using bombs, elixir gun and toolkit. The rest of the build isn’t so important but I was wondering if forceful explosives is actually worth it in pvp. Because if not I could take Shrapnel and apply some pretty powerful bleed stacks. Any suggestions?
I am suggesting your missing something. If there is not player you have damage in the range of the turret, no player you have targeted in range, shall we just use general proximity next?
Necro, you do realize that the wiki is player fed. There for it is riddled with inaccuracies, and that a dev has confirmed more then once that that exact wiki page is completely inaccurate. As well, they verified that the aggro formula varies from mob to mob.
In another thread I suggested that they add a function to F5 so that it would allow us to use as a “set turret target” similar to how F1 works for rangers. Seem reasonable?
As a back up to that, I would suggest that turrets use proximity if the player you set them too goes out of range. given general AI issues, I think its best to keep it simple as possible.
My idea for this was using the aggro generation commonly utilized by enemies and simply applying it to turrets.
Do we know that this wasn’t what they were using before that everyone disliked? I do not recall ever seeing a dev explain how turrets targeted before, so I don’t know.
Hmm… adding a target skill like rangers could work. Maybe even just make it like a regular targeted skill so that it would attack the target you have selected upon summoning and then after that it would be proximity based? While its not a total fix it definitely would be an improvement.
Now as I was saying, as far as your suggestion, what about when players routinely do not target anyone because they are using grenade AoE reticules, AoE circles for elixirs, have no target because they are using bombs?
My idea for this was using the aggro generation commonly utilized by enemies and simply applying it to turrets. Here is an excerpt from the Aggro page of the GW2 Wiki
1:closest target to them
2:who is dealing damage
3:top damage dealers
4:who is using a shield / has more toughness and overall armor
Now, to improve the AI of the turret and make it function as an extension of the engineer instead of its own intelligent entity I would suggest eliminating 1 and 2 and making the “top damage dealer” apply to the engineer instead of the turret. This means that the turret would attack the biggest damage dealer to the engineer and should damage levels be equal between two targets(like at the start of combat) the turret would lock onto the toughest one.
While this wouldn’t offer the control many engis want with turrets by making them attack what you’re targeting, it would at least provide reliable targets for your turret so you at least know what it will attack and can plan accordingly.
There were so many threads asking for turrets to target the engineers target, there were still other threads that out right demanded the turrets get changed to target the engineers target, and there were even others flat out rudely demanding that turrets target what the engineers is targeting. Therefore I hardly have any sympathy for any players who are unhappy that they target the mobs the players is.
But they don’t do that…
They shoot at whatever you hit last to my knowledge………………………………………………………..And what is the problem? Its still exactly what everyone asked for. If you want them to shoot something else, then you need to shoot something else.
I just explained why that’s a problem…
Shoot something with an AoE/bouncing attack and you can’t reliably know what your turret will attack or direct its fire. Seeing as almost all weapons for engineers, kits included, have AoE components, turrets being only the mildly useful tools that they are really should be easier to control so that you aren’t restricting yourself to only single target skills to make sure your turret attacks your target. It also means it’s almost impossible to get your turrets to focus on other mobs while you’re attacking a boss for very long.
There were so many threads asking for turrets to target the engineers target, there were still other threads that out right demanded the turrets get changed to target the engineers target, and there were even others flat out rudely demanding that turrets target what the engineers is targeting. Therefore I hardly have any sympathy for any players who are unhappy that they target the mobs the players is.
But they don’t do that…
They shoot at whatever you hit last to my knowledge(who knows, it could bug out). Personally I’d prefer if they did at the very least target what you’re targeting, at least that way I know what I’m getting. This way though my turrets get confused and attack random things everytime I use a bouncing attack or AoE.
Uh…dont use bombs. ESPECIALLY if youre already 30 in explosives. Just drop bombs, grab grenades. Toolkit is really good for kiters, cripple and pull, and EG has a cripple.
Somewhat unrelated, but the build in my sig is really good at kiting people around. Pretty similar play style to what you’re using too, except tons of healing.
I thought about grenades but when I tried them before it just felt like a lot of 1 spamming, but I suppose that could change since they updated the ground targeting options so that you can just hold and release to launch a ground targeted skill. I’ll try it out.
You need to notice subtle changes in movement/appearance to determine quickly which one is the real one. If you use a cleaving skill and one of the targets loses health just a little too fast then move on, destroying it will only apply more conditions to you. If you see a clone/mesmer with different weapons than the rest of them, attack that one because luckily for you the scepter auto attack doesn’t apply conditions or do a lot of damage and the clones spawn next to you, ruling them out as the real mesmer(at least until they cloak) so the mesmer will most likely switch to staff after exhausting torch skills+scepter confusion.
Look for movements that clones wouldn’t normally do such as strafing or small twitching movements. Good mesmers however won’t make many of those mistakes and will do most of their moving when you’re either preoccupied or can’t see them. Chaos armor is a dead giveaway that they are the mesmer(not always true but a lot of the time, especially if they are using scepter/torch and don’t have access to the leave finisher from sword that applies the armor to them and the clone) and many scepter/torch mesmers also run staff meaning they will have access to this armor.
(edited by Necrotize.2974)
The main culprit here for me is thieves. They think “oh, its a slow engineer with no long range skills, I’m gonna equip shortbow and kite to high hell”. Usually this leaves me chasing after them with pistols firing because my condition build leaves me with very few ranged options. I’ve considered slotting Elixir Gun and from my limited testing it appears to counter the kiting thieves nicely and is a stun break on toolbelt to boot but I wanted to know if you guys had any other suggestions/playstyle/build changes that could assist me.
I’m currently running a bombs condition build with bomb kit(obviously), tool kit and pistol/shield. Currently my trait setup is 30/10/0/20/10 and so far it has proved to work nicely but I wanted to ask other more experienced engineers since as it stands I don’t have any traits for elixir gun.
I personally would love a super boon elixir. Definitely would love a stun break as we have so few good ones already in most builds. Maybe break stun, gain all boons and then an added effect just to really make it elite like say 5 seconds of immunity to conditions or maybe make it a party buff elixir that has an AoE around you and just grants all boons to up to 5 people for like 10-15 seconds.
IMO picking up turrets should reduce the cd by a reasonable amount because as it stands, there is absolutely no reason to pick them up. To pick them up you not only need to get close to them, but they also perform none of their effects if picked up(IE, they don’t perform their overcharge when destroyed if you have the trait) and they don’t even do the damage associated being detonated. I don’t think a standard cd reduction would work though as some turrets, namely heal and rifle have shorter cds while things like thumper and rocket have longer cds and would probably be fine with a greater cd reduction.
What do you think about bombs being used 1v1 in a power build?
I tried it and didn’t work well, but it was hotjoin, nothing works well.
In my experience bombs work nicely with condition builds. I like to combine it with tool kit and then whatever stun break you feel like. This allows you to stack some nice confusion after magnet pull with crowbar+concussion bomb. Combine with the now rather large range on fire bomb, the stealthing capabilities of smoke bomb, the root and cripple of glue bomb and the “back off sign” that is big ol’bomb you can easily keep your enemy on the ropes.
Although you should keep in mind that this setup trades stun breaks for pulls/blocks/conditions so that leaves you only one slot for a stun break. You also should not be spending a whole lot of time in bombs if you’re fighting anything other than melee classes minus warrior. For warrior you’ll want to be constantly switching between kits to make use of smoke bomb, big ol’bomb, glue bomb, magnet pull, gear shield and other disabling skills because with only one possible stun break, staying in melee range with just bombs is not advisable.
That would involve more effort than I feel they’re willing to put in. Balancing is something I think should be left until everything is working close to properly, besides; we can’t tell how effective something could actually be until it’s doing almost exactly what it’s supposed to be doing.
Fixing/legitimizing the Fire Rate bugs, resolving the issues with Overcharges not functioning properly, these are the main things that I think need to be done before they start trying to rebalance turrets.
Besides, I didn’t make this thread to discuss balancing them. I made this thread to present an idea that could improve their targeting, nothing more.
Balancing them is an issue for other threads to discuss, and I’d like to leave it that way.
Ahh ok. Well then just on the subject of targeting improvements maybe they could do something with aggro and threat generation as in the turret checks nearby mobs before firing for threat levels.
1:So the turret will target the enemy in range that has done the most damage to the engineer.
2: Should damage levels be equal or nonexistent the turret would then attack the enemy the engi is currently targeting.
3:Should the engi not be targeting anyone and there is no threat generation, the turret would then attack the strongest percieved target as in, for pve it would attack the highest level monster or highest ranking monster(IE, champions targeted before trash) and in pvp it would attack the enemy with the highest health.
I personally like the threat generation idea but I feel my last two points are a bit weak, I just figured this could work as it seems simpler than implementing several criterion into the AI regarding current targets and multi-step processes as those would have a higher chance(IMO) to be done improperly.
Or they could improve the base idea of turrets so that targeting isn’t as much of an issue. Make them AoE like attacks. For example, rocket turret will instead of firing one rocket, fire 3 rockets towards the nearest three enemies. If there are 3 enemies 3 rockets are fired but if there is only one enemy, only one rocket is fired. Flame turret instead of shooting in a single direction has its range reduced by say half and shoots flames in a 360 arc around it hitting up to 5 enemies. Etc etc. Because just coming up with better AI for turrets really won’t be enough IMO. They’re too easy to avoid and destroy, not to mention immobile, so they need to be good enough to warrant a utility slot that could be worth 5 skills instead of just 1(if you replaced it with a tool kit).
My is Tekonos which I feel as a nice engineer feel to it.
At least we aren’t Charr. Everything is stretched and your horns and tail clip through literally everything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=_8td7XyA1JU#t=980
I shut this guy down hard. Another to add to the above list is using temporal curtain and pulling into the void while mid flight during earthshaker, or even once stunned when the warrior is about to lay the smackdown.
Also what he said. Focus in general is a much more defensive weapon than pistol. I personally don’t like pistol much, just seemed kind of lackluster IMO. The problem could just be your weapon choices. That’s not to say you can’t be effective in this situation with GS/Sw+P but you might have better luck with something like Sword+Focus/Staff or maybe even Scepter+Sword for the two strong blocks.
Don’t have a build on hand that I’d feel was viable but just general tips. The major trait 20 points in to Chaos line, Mirror of Anguish, can help you by making sure they either need to waste a stun break or are unable to take advantage of your stun. Blink is a given and is used in many builds, lower manipulation cds can help keep this off cd. Try to keep at least one phantasm out at all times(or take illusionary persona) so that if you truly do get into a bind you can use distortion to manage the damage. Other possible utilities that could be beneficial with your weapon set would be decoy for stun break and stealth or possibly even mantra of concentration for 2 fast stun breaks.
Ahh, that part about targeting was ambiguous. What I meant by not able to target was that they couldn’t hit you. Basically you temporarily became their ally for damage purposes. And yeah, I can definitely see it having really OP uses but IMO that’s what a grandmaster/elite trait should be for everyone; in general it is powerful and in specific situations it is amazing. I’d prefer that instead of what a lot of elites are now which is the opposite. Useless/mediocre in many places and only really shines in a few(tornado, mortar, or other “please target me” elites).
Personally, when I saw mesmers the first thing I thought of was mind control/debilitating illusions. There is one thing I always wished mesmer had and I know its OP so if it was in game it would definitely need to be a grandmaster trait or at the very least an elite skill.
Mesmeric Hegemony:
Trait Form- When struck while below 25% hp, the enemy that damaged you is dominated with mind shredding hallucinations causing them to act erratically. For 5 seconds this enemy is unable to target you or your allies and is now capable of harming his/her allies(think friendly fire turned on). Internal CD of 150 seconds.
Elite Form: Dominate your foe’s thoughts and cloud their judgement. For the the next 5 seconds, any damage/condition that hits you from the targeted foe is instead applied to the nearest enemy. Should no enemy be in range, damage and conditions will be instead returned to its source.
Basically just ways of protecting the mesmer and continuing the idea of self inflicted pain that is a motif in the mesmer profession(confusion, mirror of anguish, etc). I don’t know if it would really work or play out but I love the idea of giving mesmers more diversity or possibly a more fleshed out confusion based build. You guys have any cool mesmer skill/trait ideas?
Exact same thing happening here. Log in and everything is fine for a few seconds, sometimes even a whole minute but then slowly things start to degrade. Getting a few seconds of lag when doing things like using endurance or weapon swapping, then eventual dc to character select. Whole process seems to be rapidly accelerated should I enter combat, usually allowing me time to fire off one skill, then that skill’s animation will play over and over until I finally dc( I.E. fire barrage, even after skill ends just keeps shooting into the air, can’t move or cancel, can’t even open esc menu). Gonna try unplugging router for a while to see if this fixes it as normal power cycles aren’t doing the trick.
Edit:Unplugged everything for an hour or so, everything seems to be working fine now.
(edited by Necrotize.2974)