Short, sweet and to the point. That’s some good hatemail.
They also outright said that a mesmer’s main defense should be not getting hit in the first place.
THIS. Avoidance and subterfuge IS our defense. Stealth ties directly into that. We should’ve had this amount of stealth all along, it makes total sense for Mesmers, both thematically and mechanically.
Hmmph, I don’t know. Stealth is just such a cheesy mechanic. Do you really be want to be so closely associated with it?
Stealth is cheesy to people who don’t like dealing with it, even though there are several ways. Saying stealth is cheese is basically like admitting this mechanic is annoying so I’d rather it be nerfed into the ground than be viable. I don’t personally play much PU but I rarely have much trouble fighting other stealth heavy players. In Spvp, long duration stealth is a big no-no, and the game isn’t really balanced around 1v1 roaming in WvW anyway. So nerfing stealth because its annoying in something that isn’t even really a supported game mode seems a little stupid.
Not to mention Anet is making it clear that they want several classes to have more access to reveal. They also outright said that a mesmer’s main defense should be not getting hit in the first place. That’s why we can spec for so many useful and powerful things, because our primary defense is preventing or avoiding damage altogether. Stealths ties right into both of those. Another thing to note is that all the GM traits in Chaos are fairly good, just in their own situations, PU happens to be good in small scale fights that aren’t Spvp.
Lets also acknowledge that the game isn’t really balanced around 1v1 or roaming. Those are things that just kinda happen. And even before the balance, PU was always a great 1v1 spec because it gave you a way to setup longer, better bursts, and a way to recover after a burst failed since it could all be dodged in the span of 1 dodge roll.
I mean, Anet did say that they wanted Shatters to be something all mesmer utlized, not just shatter mesmers. It is the class mechanic after all. They also said they wanted to provide mesmers with a higher skill ceiling and make the class more active, which just wasn’t happening with the Clone Death Condi builds, which basically just ignored their clones and phantasms completely while they just focuses on staying alive while condis slowly piled up.
Its also only been 3 days. I’ve been trying around 2 new builds a day and they all work moderately well in Spvp. Obviously some are better than others, but the fact that there are so many viable options now is great.
I wanted a MH Warhorn T_T
Could do cool things like conjuring elemental storms or enhancing friendly combo fields and blowing away hostile ones. Throw in some large cone effects and it could be a melee range AoE weapon.
Few people have solidified builds yet. Pure glass berserker builds however, are fairly straight-forward and easy to build without changing much post-patch. Because of this, a huge majority of the people I run across are full glass dps builds that are still unfamiliar with the changes of most other classes, making them easy prey to fast opening burst.
Tanky builds are possible though. Made a quad kit engi designed around might stacking and point holding with Cele amulet and bomb traits. Not only could I easily hold out against 1 person, but I was able to hold the point in a 1v2 and 2v3 situation fairly easily while providing 25 stacks of might by myself. Damage was still kinda meh without IP, but it just shows that tanky builds are possible, just no one is running them yet.
When everyone is experimenting with builds, its far easier to burst them down as fast as possible rather than build more complex, survivable builds. People deal more damage now, but people also seem to build for a lot less defense now. I’m maining mesmer, and I can’t tell you how many people I see running 1 or even 0 defensive traits.
TLDR: Give it time. Patch has been live for a day, Anet can’t exactly rebalance every classes’ damage and defense after a single day of play.
If you’re not taking a burst then sure, by all means refresh it. But if you’re fighting someone with a lot of condi application or with heavy burst, not having access to Water attunement when you really need it is gonna seem like a really big issue compared to the few extra seconds of mist healing you have. As always with Ele, you can take risks to increase your damage by cycling through attunements faster, but the downside is not having access to a skill you really need when you really need it.
I personally probably won’t change my playstyle that much, it’ll just be a nice added heal for when I switch to water to burst heal or a top off when I switch to water to blast a field.
If you have lingering elements, after you swap out of water, the soothing mist will refresh itself one last time (go up to 10 secs).
If you don’t have lingering elements, swapping out of water still allows you to keep soothing mist, but it’s 10 second duration instead of 13 seconds because it doesn’t get refreshed.
IIRC, lingering elements was completely removed in this upcoming patch. Probably for that exact reason.
Just spam the larger radius grenade like no tomorrow on blank space and you’ll have some nice dead thieves that’re revealed.
If the thief is brain dead maybe…
Not to mention without easy access to perma swiftness, a thief who wants to disengage from an engineer probably only needs a few seconds of swiftness and Sbow. Only thing that this change really screws over a little too much for my taste is Shadow Refuge, which can no longer be used to safely rez anyone if the opposing team has a lock on engi. There were already quite a few counters to SR rezzing, but one trait that can cancel out a 60 cd second utility seems a bit much.sb5 has always outrun engis no matter what… speedy kits didnt let engi keep up with it in any way, shape, or form…
Exactly my point…
All these doomsayers claiming Lock On is the greatest thing since sliced bread/ is the death of thieves are overreacting, looking at this in a vacuum and just spreading the QQ that arises whenever anything changes. There are a huge amount of changes incoming, looking at them from the perspective of our current meta really won’t yield much conclusive information and just serve as hype.
Seems a little hasty to say that, especially since so many things were changed. There will probably be a pretty decent sized meta shift and to be fair, Eles are pretty much mandatory all across the game modes as it is.
Just spam the larger radius grenade like no tomorrow on blank space and you’ll have some nice dead thieves that’re revealed.
If the thief is brain dead maybe…
Not to mention without easy access to perma swiftness, a thief who wants to disengage from an engineer probably only needs a few seconds of swiftness and Sbow. Only thing that this change really screws over a little too much for my taste is Shadow Refuge, which can no longer be used to safely rez anyone if the opposing team has a lock on engi. There were already quite a few counters to SR rezzing, but one trait that can cancel out a 60 cd second utility seems a bit much.
Ehh I’m not too worried. Engis need to choose between hard countering the stealth of two classes and having reliable access to swiftness now. Eventually people will get tired of hard countering one or two possible opponents and life will move on. Especially after every engi tired of getting killed by thieves slots in all the reveal they can then gets mauled by S/D thieves because they wasted a trait and utility.
yeah in 1v1 I think thieves need to be more concerned about this:
Blinding Dissipation: Whenever you use a shatter skill you blind foes around you for 3 seconds.
I think this is going to give shatter mes a chance with thieves.
It’ll be annoying for sure, but unless they add some sort of drawback to a blinded/blocked backstab, it’ll just mean wasting a shatter skill to delay a backstab by 1 second.
even though they’ll see the “missed” sign and will know that thats the time o dodge/stealth/blurred frenzy
but yeah i still think thieves will have an advantage against mesmers – even though who gets the first burst off atm is really important
I suppose, but they’d need to be really on top of things since Backstab has that .25 second cast time. If you use a shatter to blind the thief and you see that missed sign, you have less than a quarter of a second to do something about it.
Now at least they’ll be some way for a mesmer to recover from a burst that doesn’t outright kill the thief.
yeah in 1v1 I think thieves need to be more concerned about this:
Blinding Dissipation: Whenever you use a shatter skill you blind foes around you for 3 seconds.
I think this is going to give shatter mes a chance with thieves.
It’ll be annoying for sure, but unless they add some sort of drawback to a blinded/blocked backstab, it’ll just mean wasting a shatter skill to delay a backstab by 1 second.
Seeing as stealth kinda screws up a vast majority of mesmers attacks(since most are targeted), it would make sense for them to get ways to deal with stealth more effectively. That being said, mesmer’s weakest matchup is arguably thief so I’m glad mesmers can do a bit more than just blow all their evades/blocks the moment they lose sight of a thief now.
Firstly, if an elementalist uses both Water and Earth line with full defensive and healing traits, he will suck on everything else. Please don’t compare it to the Warrior, we are not wearing Heavy Armor and we don’t have the damage that Warrior has even when he is playing defensive.
Secondly, Soothing Mist is so weak that no one will sacrifice a Grand Master to boost it… also it works only while on Water. Warrior’s Signet works always! Elementalist meant to change Attuments he cannot stay on Water for ever, it is not beneficial.
Thirdly elementalist is the only class that really lacks useful tanky abilities (maybe thief as well). Those trait changes, might give him an extra build to focus on, but still I doubt it, there are other more effective ways to play.
414 heal per sec is not weak. The problem is it makes you camp water.
I’d say it’s weak by comparison since you sacrifice so much just for some passive healing. I bet healing signet would be considered weak if having it equipped lowered your damage by a huge margin. So while the ability itself isn’t weak, using it the way this person is hoping to will most certainly make it weak overall. It was not meant to be something you have active all the time.
So I’ve been messing around with Staff builds in SPvP for a while now, mostly pure glass berserker just for funsies, but I figured I’d try something more stable to finally get comfortable with. Starting with the MetaBattle celestial staff build and just making a few changes here and there, but I just can’t seem to decide on a heal skills. I already know the merits of Ether Renewal and Signet, but Arcane Brilliance kinda got my attention. Without any targets hit, it is very subpar healing wise, but having a heal that is also a blast finisher seems to add a nice amount of strategy to it. Can get a massive heal by switching to water, dropping Geyser then AB. When the water blast isn’t really needed you can get Might, Frost Armor, or Swiftness instead in addition to the heal.
Basically, is AB useful enough to replace Signet or Ether Renewal, or does it fall too far behind due to conditions, lower burst and no passive healing?
I noticed it while roaming. At first I thought The Prestige was hitting ambient creatures or I was standing a little to close to someone when it burst but after a few attempt I noticed the revealed happening even out of combat. Got me killed several times when trying to disengage from groups because my Decoy and Mass Invis could no longer be chained together.
Pretty annoying if you ask me, although I’m sure they’ll find a fix soon since I doubt its intended seeing how it interacts with stealth stacking.
I really don’t understand all the doom-sayers claiming mesmer will be uncatchable now…
Only place you’d ever have to worry about catching someone is WvW roaming, and even then, a ton of mesmers already had Traveler’s Runes, so they’re not running any faster than they usually do, they just don’t have to waste all their runes on basic out of combat mobility anymore.
Wanna talk awesome combat mobility? Made a trapper thief just for messing around in WvW. Shadow Trap is hilarious. Once I realized I wasn’t gonna be able to kill this little group of 3 people and they wouldn’t stop following me, I just proceeded to waste a good 10 minutes of their time using nothing but traps. Makes me wish Shadow Trap was more useful in other settings. If teleporting back 10k units under the cover of stealth doesn’t shake a follower, nothing will. Poor suckers finally gave up after I destroyed my shadow trap again and teleported all the way back to the top of a cliff.
ymmv, but when you compare gw2 pvp getting like 2k viewers on a big tournament (where the stream disconnects and it turns out half of the “viewers” are bots) to the, what, 30 or so million who watched the league world championships last year
i mean
you compare two “esports” and … yeah. i’m pretty sure having 1,500x less viewers than another esport means it probably isn’t superior to its competition.
i mean let’s be honest, you’ve got a game with regular balance changes versus a game which doesn’t even bother to deal with a brain afk turret engi build which basically ruins solo queue for months on end.
I don’t care about esports or tournaments tbh – I only care about the feeling of playing the combat mechanics for myself, and for that reason I rate gw2 as superior – mind you, only when playing as Mesmer. I couldn’t care less about the other generic fantasy classes (though I do enjoy melee ranger) because they aren’t as visually satisfying to play.
If Mesmer was deleted from gw2 I’d likely quit and go back to small scale third/first person action rpgs/shooters.
Anyway as a side note, I haven’t tried Dragon Nest yet and have read that it is action based? Can’t watch any gameplay videos right now as on a phone, but is there a crosshair and usual third person action rpg style controls? Sounds interesting from the description, I’ll look into it when I next have some time to see if I might like it.
There is a crosshair and it does fit that description IMO. Many skills can interact very effectively with each other and the combat is very combo oriented. That, and the art and action style are really beautifully done. If you do plan on PvPing in it though, I suggest you do some research because the community has established a “Blacklist” of sorts which is a list of banned/restricted skills in 1v1 matches. Kind of weird but like I said, the only big reason to hate Dragon Nest PvP is the community(mostly on the forums), other than that, its great. I can’t speak too much more on it recently as the level cap has been raised and two new classes released since the last time I played it seriously.
If you want to see a good example of how fluid the combat is, look up Acrobat/Tempest/Windwalker PvP or pretty much any Wall Combo videos. Those things are what made me really want to play it.
I love people holding GW2 combat as some sort of holy grail.
actually get out and play a game besides GW2 and you’ll see that there are games with gameplay on par or superior to it, and LoL is one of them.
I’m just chuckling that people are trying to compare GW2 combat to a MOBA. Seriously, this is one of the most obvious cases of apples and oranges that you could find.
That being said, GW2 combat is blown out of the water by Dragon Nest. Yeah, GW2 combat is good…but Dragon Nest is titanically better.
Unfortunately, the game is very grindy, PvE is required to some extent even if you just want to PvP(since you can’t level in PvP and skills are locked out until you’re the proper level),
You can level in PvP now actually xD. It’s many many times faster than before, actually a viable option now (albeit it will take far longer than PvEing it).
and the PvP community is one of the most toxic I’ve ever seen.
Yeah, as much as I love the game, this fact can’t be overstated. The DN PvP community makes LoL look like a friendly welcoming committee.
Well that’s good news, the idea of grinding a new class in PvE for countless hours just to PvP really discouraged me from sticking with it. But that PvP community… I check back occasionally to see if its still the same, the names change but it always is the same T_T
I love people holding GW2 combat as some sort of holy grail.
actually get out and play a game besides GW2 and you’ll see that there are games with gameplay on par or superior to it, and LoL is one of them.
I’m just chuckling that people are trying to compare GW2 combat to a MOBA. Seriously, this is one of the most obvious cases of apples and oranges that you could find.
That being said, GW2 combat is blown out of the water by Dragon Nest. Yeah, GW2 combat is good…but Dragon Nest is titanically better.
I can also vouch for this. The amount of depth that went into Dragon Nest PvP amazed me when I played. Unfortunately, the game is very grindy, PvE is required to some extent even if you just want to PvP(since you can’t level in PvP and skills are locked out until you’re the proper level), real money is kind of necessary for PvP if you ever want to change your build, and the PvP community is one of the most toxic I’ve ever seen. I loved Dragon Nest, but as the level cap got higher and higher, I grew disinterested faster and faster.
Plus it seemed with the implementation of more ex skills, PvPsuper fragile, which probably what lead to their extensive community made blacklist.
That said, I still love GW2 PvP and its the first game since Dragon Nest that this has been the case.
This looks so beautiful, I just might cry.
As for the condition issue, what do you think of Runes of Lyssa? The precision obviously isn’t wasted, condition duration will lengthen slow, and since Gravity Well’s effects are delayed, you’ll get up to 5 boons as its ticking from the runes(depending on conditions), synergizing with Chaotic Persistence, giving slows applied during that time up to a 15% duration boost based on the conditions cleansed.
I think you all are kind of discounting how big a boon it is that Turrets are immobile with long range. Being 1500 units off point makes them way more survivable than necros minions or spirits, especially since to destroy them, most classes have to leave the point. Since turrets aren’t super tanky anymore, it encourages engineers to actually place their turrets in smart locations, not just plop them down in a ring around the point and go afk.
Feel like you just pulled some of those statements out of thin air though
Not sure what you mean by “Significantly longer cooldowns” unless I’m missing something.
Untraited
Average Turret Cooldown=32.5
Average Necro Minion Cooldown= 33.5
Only turrets with particularly long cds are Rocket and Thumper, only minions with particularly long cd are Flesh Golem and Wurm.
Wurm is the only immobile minion and it is probably the only one that sees play since it has a useful ability and doesn’t die immediately as it follows its master into swarms of AoE.
According to the wiki, necros minions can’t get boons either so… yeah.
Not to mention Turrets can be picked up to shorten their cd, something minions do not have. Most turret engineers never picked up their turrets unless moving their camp to another point.
As for critting, it could be fixed by allowing turrets to scale off engineer stats, but it would have to also include power and ferocity as well to prevent the super tanky turret bunkers from just rising up again because turrets didn’t require investments in power or anything.
Welcome to the life of all minion classes. Enjoy your stay.
You can keep saying that, it won’t make it true. Turrets are currently in a much worse state than any minion type.
I’d say they’re about equal now. The easiest minions to compare them to are necromancers due to the fact that both types are designed to either CC or deal damage. Necro minions have mobility, turrets do not. You may think this is a weakness, but seeing as all of the engineers weapons lean towards melee range, much like necro, you are constantly near your opponent and on point. Turrets have a clear advantage when the fight is on point as they will not subject themselves to AoE damage and have far greater range(especially when traited) than necro’s minions. So you trade minion mobility for situational protection and increased range. Since necros minions have always been subject to crits and conditions, like every other summon besides turrets, they’re now on equal footing. Like it or not, AI controlled builds that trade out all their utility slots for minions never did well for long in any game mode and its clear Anet doesn’t want them to.
I hate to say it. But if you got minions. You know…You KNOW the spec will have to be terrible at everything it does or it will get turret engineered.
Or it will be balanced like every other minion skill and be much less effective than alternatives for obvious reasons. Can’t remember the last time I saw a minion master necro in any game mode. Spirit rangers are uncommon as it is, and I guarantee they’ll almost disappear in SPvP and probably WvW too once they become immobile.
Turrets aside, I really really really don’t want something as boring as minions for my engineer. I love the fast paced switching and utility of kits and I hope they bring something that can compete with or supplement that. Engineers would have a ton of cool skills if they were all balanced around kits as a baseline.
You can’t say they are balanced if they are practically unusable. Balance lies in the middle.
They are balanced to fall in line with Anet’s philosophy, which seems to lean towards non-minion/summon skills are stronger than minion skills due to their inherent skill cap. If the minions are somehow just as good as slotting in another kit, what’s the point of getting that kit if an almost completely AI minion can do just as well?
Don’t count them out too quick. If I’m not mistaken, we still haven’t seen any traits related to wells. I personally would love something like “While standing in wells, condition duration on allies is reduced by X%, and condition duration on enemies is increased Y%”. Would fit well(heh) with the duality of chronomancer while also providing a useful effect useful across several game modes.
Sure wells have the inherent issue of being stationary and usually highly telegraphed, but MH sword mesmers have immobilize, and lockdown mesmers who take CI shouldn’t have too much trouble keeping someone in a well for most of the duration, or at the very least pulling someone in for the final tick. And with Continuum Shift allowing for double casting of wells, if my enemy really wants to stand off point for 6-7 seconds while my wells are ticking, that’s fine by me.
I hate to say it. But if you got minions. You know…You KNOW the spec will have to be terrible at everything it does or it will get turret engineered.
Or it will be balanced like every other minion skill and be much less effective than alternatives for obvious reasons. Can’t remember the last time I saw a minion master necro in any game mode. Spirit rangers are uncommon as it is, and I guarantee they’ll almost disappear in SPvP and probably WvW too once they become immobile.
Turrets aside, I really really really don’t want something as boring as minions for my engineer. I love the fast paced switching and utility of kits and I hope they bring something that can compete with or supplement that. Engineers would have a ton of cool skills if they were all balanced around kits as a baseline.
Really depends on the unrevealed traits. Maybe they’ll address that necessity of blink+usually decoy and buff other utilities or add strong trait support to wells. Just an example, but if wells get a trait to remove conditions on ticks, I can totally see myself using wells. Although it probably wouldn’t be something as straightforward as removing them. Maybe while standing in wells, condition duration is reduced?
That said, wells will help a lot vs thieves in my opinion as now more than ever, a chronomancer can and will recharge their skills if a thief tries to play it slow. But it is really early to make speculation since we don’t even know the details of all our new traits and only one other specialization has been revealed.
mesmers are too strong already imo. they are only weak against thieves if they are not a burst mesmer. they should get some nerf in the new exp. but instead they get overwhelming buff to put them on par with thieves…
For people not used to fighting them, mesmers can seem like a huge barrier to overcome. I’ve introduced several friends to GW2 PvP, and my mesmer is the class they have the most trouble with by far. Stealth is particularly difficult for new players to deal with effectively, but throwing in clones that you might mistakenly use skills on really ups the difficulty if you’re not familiar with mesmers mechanics. In fact, once you get the hang of it, condi necro should be a strong counter to most mesmers you come across as most of their utility slots are tied up in stunbreaks, usually leaving only 1 for conditions.
That said, the best advice I can give you is play a mesmer yourself. When I first started, I hated mesmers with a passion and it didn’t help that around this time was when PU mesmers just started becoming a thing. Ended up making one and now it is by far one of my favorites.
Can’t do detailed response since I’m on my phone, but one glaring issue I saw with your Salvage suggestions is how it interacts with Healing Turret. Drop healing turret, overcharge, immediately detonate getting cleanse and max heal, then since chances are it was around 100% hp when you instantly detonated it, you now have around a 15 second cd reduction on one of the best heals in the game, giving you a 5 second cd.
Almost no minions or summons last very long in any game mode. I’d say they’re in line with most other summons now.
Turret Engineers can’t just slot in all 3 turrets, have no condi removal besides their heal, no stun breaks, no defensive utilities plus only using half their skills and expect to be effective. That’d be like making a condi ranger with Longbow and Greatsword then complaining when you can’t kill anyone. You’re purposefully making a hamstrung build then demanding it be brought up to the level of far more interactive builds. Turret engineers got by before just by their sheer tankiness making it usually not worth it to 1v1 them. You’ll have to oh I don’t know, slot in more utility instead of basically converting all your utility and toolbelt slots to minions. Switch in a kit, get a stunbreak, maybe split your traits up so you aren’t investing almost all of them in one turrety basket.
Engi pull bugs out less for me, but it still happens a good deal. Someone mentioned the one where if your target gets blocked on their way to you, they just go flying up into the air. It also has a tendency to rubberband, like sometimes the game seems to forget a pull is supposed to bring the person to you so it attempts to correct it by teleporting them back to where they were but still knocks them down for half a second. Other times people just fall over on the spot and don’t actually get pulled. Magnet is probably better though due to the cast time, if you think its gonna fail, just cancel it and bait a dodge. Can’t do that with scorpion wire AND it costs you a utility slot.
The problems with turrets was the frustrating and dull game-play they did oppose on their enemies, the way too easy pug-farm and a way too high reward for way too low risk.
So the problem is that it annoyed you? You support invalidating builds based on how much fun you have against them.
This is getting better and better.
Honestly goes both ways. Just because you liked turrets, they shouldn’t be nerfed in anyway? You support having unbalanced builds because its the one you like to play? Better get this info to the thief forums, I’m sure they’ll have a bunch to say on that note.
Because the game isn’t just balanced around high end competitive pvp either. They also need to appeal to the newer players who might have little pvp experience. Turrets made it relatively easy for newer players to outright dominate other players around their skill level. In an uncoordinated hotjoin match, it is was very unlikely that a turret engineer would get uprooted. Anet determined that the reward for playing triple turret bunker was far too great for its risk and skill requirements, so they made it higher risk.
Prior to the nerf, turrets were the only type of summon(not counting banners since they deal no damage and frankly have almost no place in PvP due to their minor benefits) that couldn’t be crit or hit with conditions. Clones, phantasms, pets, spirits, summoned thieves, spirit weapons, elementals, and minions can all be crits and killed with conditions.
The fact that a build running almost no condi-clears, no stunbreaks and playing with only half their skills could be so effective kinda screams that there’s a balancing issue going on.
I feel like at this point its just people being upset that a sub-optimal build isn’t overperforming anymore. I mean, think of it from a different perspective. Why isn’t banner warrior or glamour mesmer a strong option in pvp? Clearly this must been that banners and glamours are underpowered and need to be greatly buffed, right? Or maybe Anet didn’t intend for a person to run 4 banners/glamours and have an effective build. You can argue what engineers and turrets are “supposed” to do, but in the end Anet has the final say in what their vision or turrets are, and apparently triple turret bunkers were not in that vision.
As for cross class comparisons, phantasms are by far not the closest things to turrets. In fact it makes me wonder if you deliberately ignored other options to provide the most biased comparison. Spirits are far more similar(IMO) to turrets, and even upcoming changes draw some parallels. Yes these skills have differences, but lets look at the similarities.
Both are utility skills(which is important considering traits, cds, and effectiveness). Spirits when traited have 8k hp IIRC, much closer to turrets than phantasms’ 3k. Spirits are susceptible to conditions and crits, just like turrets now. In the upcoming changes, spirits will no longer be able to move, just like turrets, so positioning will be vital.
Like I said, cross class comparisons are usually very weak arguments unless there is a great deal of similarity between the builds. This comparison is no exception, I just wanted to make it clear that if you wanted to do a cross class comparison, phantasms are so different from turrets compared to other skill types that it really doesn’t make any point at all.
Oh good another one of these. Cross class comparisons unless very similar usually aren’t good at making your point. You also conveniently left out all the downsides of Phantasms/Clones compared to turrets. Clones/Phantasms eat up cleave damage like a magnet in their quest to stay close to the target, and you can’t control their position so they are consistently line of sighted. Mesmers shatter skills are integral to a lot of playstyles, meaning just summoning a phantasm then never using your shatter skills again is a terribly ineffective way to play. Phantasms scale off the stats of the mesmer and don’t have nearly as many boosting traits as turrets, turrets have 7 major traits btw, phantasms have 4 majors(1 of which is never taken), 3 minors(and all of those minors are in Inspiration). So you can’t exactly build a bunker mesmer and expect your phantasms to do much damage. Phantasms and clones have always been susceptible to conditions, crits and crowd control so if you’re gonna compare them I’m surprised that was missed. Not to mention that most mesmers you run into won’t be running increased health for phantasms, so unlike turrets, phantasms will have around 3000 hp.
Apologies in advance for the long post, I try to say everything I can on the subject so there’s no need to constantly repost.
Who said I never ran turrets? I’ve played my fair share of engineer, usually P/S, but I’ve played around with 3-kit condi, celestial rifle, static discharge burst, and yes, even turrets. Turret engi is by far the least interactive playstyle. Place Rifle+Rocket as far off point as possible, on a high platform overlooking the point, especially if it isn’t in LoS from several angles behind it. Drop thumper turret mid point to aid in decaps/recapping. Since turrets deal a constant damage, way more stat points can be invested into toughness and vitality. There’s really not much to it. I grew bored of turrets after 10-15 matches because compared to using several kits or a high burst build, it was just slow.
I feel like I’m just repeating myself at this point, but like I said, you can cite the class description all you want, but clearly Anet had no intentions of people being triple turret bunkers and having such high success, otherwise no change would’ve been made. That bit you cited also says engineers can pack up turrets and move at anytime, which is a bit strange seeing as the general playstyle was to leave your turrets in a very inaccessible spot overlooking the point and never pick them up again. Heck, people even discovered you could placed turrets slightly in the air to reduce their hitbox so that they had even less reason to pick them up and replace.
@RabbitUp
Active and passive are not just random buzzwords. It compares types of skills and effects. For example, logically, a heal like Consume Conditions with its high risk high reward scenario should be more effective than the almost entirely passive(in that you slot it then forgot it) Healing Signet, which is reflected in their upcoming changes that reduce Healing Signet’s effectiveness and makes it better to activate. Again, those comparisons you used are hardly fair. Phantasms deal damage passively in that the mesmer can’t control them apart from summoning them. In this aspect they are like turrets. However, phantasms also die relatively easily and are usually on point, whereas turrets did not die quickly and are usually placed very out of reach from the point.
Just a recap, the nerf to turrets was necessary in my opinion, hopefully they’ll add more depth to turrets in the coming weeks. Anet’s recent changes show they encourage smart plays that require coordination on the player’s part and adapting to your opponent, not just setting up base camp and waiting for the match to end. Turrets while designed to hold a point, were far to effective without ever even needing to be near the point or in harms way, this is why they required a nerf.
This conversation doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere, so unless that changes, I probably won’t be posting again since I feel I’ve already made my case and said all that needs to be said(sometimes numerous times). I really hope I’m not coming off as rude or disrespectful because that was not my intention at all, I just wanted to express my opinion on this topic as it affects more than just the people that played as turret engineers frequently.
I guess my overall stance on this is that the nerf was justified, but in application maybe went a little overboard. Turrets absolutely should be affected by crits, condis I’m not so sure, but I can see the reasoning since before turrets were pretty much unkillable by anyone who wasn’t very high dps zerker. Condi builds couldn’t even scratch them and had to engage the engi on point, ignoring the turrets.
They should probably be adjusted to be a little more durable, but nowhere near where they were before. Turret camping on a point is the epitome of passive-play for engineers and the fact that such a build was so prevalent and successful for so long seems directly against Anets new balancing changes. All across the classes, passive defenses and offenses are being nerfed or even completely removed(I mentioned these above, but you can also just look at the new trait changes they announced for yourself). Turrets are very low risk for the engineer seeing as to get rid of them, you pretty much need to be as far away from the engi as he wants and in that time he still holds the point. Therefore they should be very low reward.
Since engineers lack weapon swapping, it’d be reasonable to assume that Anet expects most engineers to take at least one kit so that you’re doing more than just autoattacking the whole time. If that’s their vision for engineer, I seriously doubt they’d be fine with a build that sacrifices all utilities to passive offense/defense and then even sacrifices all your toolbelt skills while they’re active. You can argue against this point all you want, but that’s just my observation going off their most recent changes to shut down passive play and encourage more active combat.
That’s what they’re designed to do. In the actual description of the class it clearly states that turrets hold an area. The community dislikes turrets, got it. They destroyed the play style without adding anything to compensate for the now worthless point holding turrets and didn’t adjust traits or cooldowns.
Imagine if warriors lost banners. They’re not essential they’re passive once placed, and everyone loves them. The only reason turrets got hate is they were effective against cookie cutter cheese builds.
I already stated that I believe it was a bandaid fix that could have been more finely tuned, but it was still necessary. So unless you plan on bringing new evidence as to why this change was not needed at all or have a new point to make, I hope you’ll refrain from bringing this up yet again.
You can get pedantic about class descriptions all you want, the point is Anet is clearly against passive play commonly associated with triple turret bunker engis, which by the way was a very “cookie cutter cheese build”(in my opinion), heck you could even find a detailed outline on Meta Battle and countless people claimed it was the perfect build for new players who want to compete in Ranked/Unranked without spending a lot of time learning the class mechanics. Sure banners are passive, but honestly I can’t remember the last time I saw a warrior running anything more than Battle Standard, and even that is uncommon in uncoordinated teams. Its also quite a false comparison if you ask me, seeing as banners don’t allow you to hold a point any better than normal, don’t attack people and generally have a minimal impact on PvP.
Face it, turrets got hate because they WERE the passive “cookie cutter cheese build” as you put it. When banners start shooting down people at 1500 range and bunker banner warriors become a thing, I’m sure they’ll get nerfed too. But until then, drawing flimsy comparisons between very different skills from different classes won’t prove your point or bring back the old turrets.
As I said, the nerf while needed, is a bandaid fix. Turrets should have been changed individually to reflect their usage. Rifle turret and rocket turret are the biggest offenders when it comes to the passive turret engineers. They’re usually placed way off point, sometimes even in unreachable places(with the help of Deployed Turrets) and even if someone could easily reach them, it took way too long to kill them. These turrets should have been hit the hardest by the nerf, leaving the melee range ones a little tankier(although not as much as they were). IMO, Thumper Turret in addition to having the highest health, should be the tankiest of them due to its cd in relation to the others and the fact that to be effective is must be placed on point. Flame Turret should be a little behind Thumper in tankiness because of its overcharge effect preventing some damage and its higher range, allowing it to be placed slightly off point.
Turret builds can be played actively(not so much if you’re using all turrets, especially if you’re using Rifle and Rocket Turret off point), but the issue is that it became very popular to not play actively and it was relatively rewarding. Why take Flame Turret over Rifle/Rocket when you can leave the latter two 1500 units off the point and almost guarantee they won’t be dying anytime soon while applying constant pressure? Why swap in a kit or stunbreak when you’re tanky enough to eat attacks and can just drop supply crate when you’re in danger and pretty much guarantee recovery?
I guess my overall stance on this is that the nerf was justified, but in application maybe went a little overboard. Turrets absolutely should be affected by crits, condis I’m not so sure, but I can see the reasoning since before turrets were pretty much unkillable by anyone who wasn’t very high dps zerker. Condi builds couldn’t even scratch them and had to engage the engi on point, ignoring the turrets.
They should probably be adjusted to be a little more durable, but nowhere near where they were before. Turret camping on a point is the epitome of passive-play for engineers and the fact that such a build was so prevalent and successful for so long seems directly against Anets new balancing changes. All across the classes, passive defenses and offenses are being nerfed or even completely removed(I mentioned these above, but you can also just look at the new trait changes they announced for yourself). Turrets are very low risk for the engineer seeing as to get rid of them, you pretty much need to be as far away from the engi as he wants and in that time he still holds the point. Therefore they should be very low reward.
Since engineers lack weapon swapping, it’d be reasonable to assume that Anet expects most engineers to take at least one kit so that you’re doing more than just autoattacking the whole time. If that’s their vision for engineer, I seriously doubt they’d be fine with a build that sacrifices all utilities to passive offense/defense and then even sacrifices all your toolbelt skills while they’re active. You can argue against this point all you want, but that’s just my observation going off their most recent changes to shut down passive play and encourage more active combat.
Perma stealth thief can avoid combat completely. If that’s not considered passive by you, we’ll never agree on this.
And? Stealth prevents you from capturing or contesting control points in an entirely control points based PvP.
How does a “perma stealth” thief apply its damage passively? How does a “perma stealth” thief passively stealth themselves? How does “perma stealth” thief heal itself passively?
You’re joking right? Passive whenever they want meaning I don’t like this matchup I’ll go invisible and go somewhere else, or just stand here invisible doing nothing until this guy leaves the point, decap it, then go passive mode at will.
You have a problem with the “passive” nature of turret engineers I cite an actual style more passive and you say “and?”.
There’s a difference when you’re talking about PvP. A thief just sitting there staring at a held point waiting for someone to leave is nothing but a burden on the team for however long that takes. The turret engi so long as he sits on point is a constant source of points and if 2 people do come to uproot him, he just made the other fights outnumbered in favor of his own team for however long it takes to kill him. A rotating thief is an annoying thing, but bursting down skilled players and choosing your fights definitely is more active than dropping your turrets as far off point as possible then letting them shoot at whoever tries to fight you on point. At least now there is a reliable way to counter turrets without wasting an inordinate amount of time.
People who complain about “perma stealth” thief seem to be under the delusion that permanently being in stealth is somehow useful to the team. I’d much rather have a thief bursting down off point pressure, decapping/capping far points or making fights outnumbered in our favor anyday. A thief that picks fights, disengages in stealth whenever he picks a wrong one and waits is essentially useless to the team so long as he’s hiding. As I said before, so long as the turret engi is sitting on point, he isn’t being useless.
Since you’re not gonna agree that turrets are by far more passive than any most other playstyles, I’ll just use an example. So we have a turret engi, relatively tanky, usually running 3 turrets and all traits that boost turrets. Right off the bat, you have tons of traits invested in skills that you don’t even really control after putting them down, you just kind of drop them out of the way of the point and forget them. Before the nerf, killing turrets was simply not a good idea as it wasted a huge amount of time. The builds strong enough to burst down the engi couldn’t handle the off point pressure for long enough, and the builds with enough sustain to go toe to toe with the engi on point would make almost no progress as they are consistently knocked off the point or eventually whittled down. You know there’s a problem when its just a huge waste of time to engage a single turret engi on point with anything less than 2 people.
Was it a bit of a bandaid fix? Maybe. But honestly I prefer it to the alternative of teams telling the turret engi to hold home and then unless 2-3 people from the opposing team want to go uproot him, you can almost guarantee no one is getting that point in under a minute.
The recently announced changes clearly show Anet wants to move away from passive offense and defense. Mesmers losing a lot of access to retaliation, higher emphasis on shatters, no more mindless clone spamming to apply conditions. Rangers spirits can’t move anymore. Warriors passive regen getting lowered. Engi is no exception. They just got their change first.
“Turrets weren’t an abomination, Celestial amulets are.”
“Simply a L2P issue.”
“Turrets were the purest form of Engineer.”
The feeling of loss will pass, and you will hopefully walk a mile in a non-turret Engineer’s shoes in ranked queue. My enjoyment in ranked queue has gone up 900% due to less presence of Turret Engineers. While I feel sympathy for those who’ve had their playstyle destroyed (RIP 100 nades), you cannot ever propose a good enough argument that would justify causing even 1 more flavor-of-the-month Turret Engineer in ranked queue.
I have run Cele rifle quite a bit but the class as I played it no longer exists. I have no desire to quit my playstle as my engi was my bunker toon. Engineers were designed to do exactly what I used mine for and need to be fixed.
So basically you’re saying that turrets were the only way to play engineer the way they were designed and without nigh-unkillable turrets our class is essentially useless? Only issue I had with the nerf was conditions affecting them as it doesn’t make sense, but crits make perfect sense and was a nerf that I think was dearly needed. Engineer has the potential to have more skills than any class(aside from ele) and the fact that almost everyone else was having trouble killing an engineer that sacrificed all those skills just for passive offense is a clear sign of trouble. Passive play should never hardcounter or surpass active play.
You can still play bunker engineer, you just have to sacrifice some offensive pressure now like everyone else.
My healing turret gets blown up before I can overcharge and pick it up sometimes.
10/10
I mean, for the longest time there was almost no reason to run any heal other than healing turret, so I guess it did increase build diversity a little. Finally seeing more people playing around with AED and I love it.
Can’t restore illusions anyway because all illusions are shattered to fuel the skill, so its impossible to start Continuum Shift with any illusions. And if using the traits that give phantasms extra lives or create clones on shatter, they’ll be coming into existence just after the Continuum Shift so they shouldn’t be affected at all.
What I think you can do though is
1. Continuum Shift
2. Summon all your phantasms
3. Whatever filler
4. Restore to previous point(I don’t think this destroys illusions, if it does this doesn’t work)
5. All your illusion summoning skills are now off cd again so you can easily reset phantasms twice(since Signet of the Ether does it once)
Gets even more crazy once you factor in Signet of Ether. Shift>Phantasm>Signet>Same Phantasm>Shift back>Same Phantasm again and your heal is still off cd.
(edited by Necrotize.2974)
It only blocks 1 attack(2 if you count Deja Vu) and you can move while holding the shield up even though the screenshots show you kneeling down and holding it up. While I do wish it blocked all attacks for a duration, the phantasm it summons seems really good, especially since I think you can potentially summon two of them with one skill use and their alacrity buff can bounce between other phantasms. So multiple phantasms giving you and other phantasms alacrity.
Seems good on paper, I hope it won’t be another iMage, failing to hit even a slowly walking dolyak.
Same here, from the video it looked to be a bit faster. Also helps that Shield comes with built in timestopping potential and the phantasm buffs its own attack cd speed. Only issue I saw is that without a target, the block can’t be activated due to the phantasm component.