Guild Wars 2

Stand The Wall.6987:

i think hes talking about this while casting this, to this, to this, to this. while walking out of caltrops is really great advice, you will undoubtedly pick up a couple tics.

So it’s an exploit because Caltrops doesn’t continuously reveal a thief for 10 seconds and prevent other actions from being done while it is ticking? Get a condition cleanse or two and that change would make caltrops literally better for the opponent than for the thief since they could just stand there making sure you can’t enter stealth to heal or remove conditions or sneak attack.

You mean you don’t stab yourself in the leg sometimes just to feel alive?

Jana.6831:

It’s always better to try to kill the mob attacking you – otherwise you can’t – maybe that’s why everybody is still throwing their mud when I use SR to rez them, thus they unstealth and draw the mob/player attention to that spot so we’re both downed.

Hate when people do that, but if you’re not an organized group, I kind of expect people to do that so I don’t bother and instead Clusterbomb their soon to be corpse.

Evigishki Gustkraken.9623:

Engineers are actually really good class , not only they have tons of AoE, CCs, and water field for the group that you are running with, but engineer also deals one of the best Damage in the game regardless of what build you are using.

IMO it is more towards the bad word of mouth that happened in game. People do not try and experiment the class when one random dude come out and say the class is s***. BUT I can say that it is not an easy class where you can spam 1 all the time, you have to know the rotation of your skills to maximize the damage and CC that you can put down for the team.

Cheers
Grand Excutor

That and everyone compares everything to the absolute meta that assumes that every single person is amazingly skilled with their class, makes no mistakes, and plays to their absolute full potential. They do the same thing with dungeon runs. Skilled people know the engineer can bring a lot and shore up the weak points of a party. People who just follow what everyone else says want the ideal party setup for speed runs and nothing else because they assume anything less than that is worthless and won’t work. They see zerg or party composition as something that is set in stone and shouldn’t be changed because if you change it you will fail. I.E. A party should be 1 Warrior, 1 Thief, 1 Guardian, 1 Ele then either a mesmer or another ele, otherwise you will fail. Or a zerg should be mostly necros, guardians, eles and warriors, otherwise you’ll get wiped.

You could replace it with bombs, but you’d have to use a different damage rotation to make up for the lack of range on them. Against melee, it really doesn’t matter as they’ll get hit regardless, but to change the rotation you’d probably want to Magnet Pull>Pry Bar>Overcharge Shot>(while running towards them as fast as possible) throw wrench if you have time, but if you don’t, immediately netshot when you see them start to stand>Concussion Bomb>Glue bomb(to refresh immob)>Fire bomb(since they’re now immobed and crippled, thus more likely to stay in fire)>etc.

Trait wise, you’d probably want short fuse in place of Accelerant Packed Turrets(as you won’t need to use the knockback to apply melee pressure, you’ll have bombs) and Grenadier with Forceful explosions.

For more variety(especially against melee players) I actually find myself using Slick Shoes in place of Elixir S and Elixir Gun. Works best with points in tools as 4 points gives you a -20% Toolbelt cooldown, making Super Speed a 24 sec cd stun break, which most classes can’t even get without using a trait, whereas for us it is just a nice perk that comes with speedy kits and power wrench. Slick shoes I’d also imagine is great for keeping enemies in fire bomb. Circle them with the slick, fire bomb then continue damage rotations.

Having stealth as a downed skill can also help you get rezzed faster if you have shadow arts. Getting low and dropping Shadow Refuge then getting downed in the refuge is perfect for people with lots of points in Shadow Arts since unless they get lucky with landing a skill after you teleport away, you’re probably gonna completely revive and maybe even have some stealth to spare.

Got stuck on the SoM+Caltrops D/D build. Not so great in 1v1 unless they’re MM necros or rangers, but in group fights of like 2v2 on a point, my hp rarely drops below 50%. Best I’ve gotten is 22 bleed stacks on a single person before they died, coupled with some poison from steal/sbow, they melt pretty fast all while I stay relatively safe. Weakness is definitely other thieves or condi heavy classes, but against things like warriors or engineers it does great.

Actually found another thread relating to your exact idea regarding weapon swap cds. Some good points were brought up in favor, but some strong points against also came up. No cd weapon swapping would be strong on Thieves and incredibly powerful on mesmers due to how short the cds on clone generating skills can get(namely Mirror Blade and Phase Retreat). Without weapon cds, mesmers would be able to burst with 2 clones+mirror blade then immediately switch back to staff to go on the defensive with another phase retreat, keeping the offensive pressure of Gsword’s mirror blades and Boon strip off cd while maintaining the defensive positioning of staff. Classes that don’t have instant swaps or reduced cd on swaps are designed around that and so are their cds.

Engineer combats this by making all the skills in the kits(except for toolkit) very single purposed and difficult to chain into each other, making them very difficult to land otherwise and thus reliant on skills from other weapon sets. Grenades for example, are good for condi pressure. Assuming you can land them. Missing with them is very easy compared to other ground target skills due to their travel time, so if your enemy runs all over the place and dodges once or twice, you’ve blown all your highest damaging skills in a matter of seconds. The skills don’t really interact with each other like other classes’ weapon skills might. Because of this, they are reliant on soft/hard cc from other kits/weapons to land use them effectively. If all other classes were to get instant swaps, it would require major revamping of their cds on skills to compensate for the fact that they already interact fairly well with each other and have cds keeping in mind that you can’t rapidly switch weapons more than once.

I’m liking all this variety. Totally forgot about Caltrops+SoM. Gonna play around with all of these and see which wins out.

I could give venom a shot. I only tested out the build for like half an hour, most people weren’t really accustomed to dealing with a stealthless thief with 23k hp. I could fare pretty well but I found myself using S/P more than Sbow simply for interrupts. Initiative was also quite the luxury. In 1v1s it was hard to keep my health up, but in things like 2v2 on a point my health was usually above 50%. Should be mentioned that engineers destroy this build easily. With so little condition removal, conditions stick for the full duration generally.

I’ll give the venom build a shot but I have a feeling it’ll run into the same issues with dealing with long duration conditions.

And I don’t really like Skelk venom. Even as a burst heal, with cd reduction and siphoning, it still heals for like 40 Hp/s less than withdraw.

So it always bothered me that you can’t really have a tanky thief in SPvP since the point of bunkering is to hold points and you can’t do that while in stealth. So I figured why not just throw as much sustain onto a thief as possible and hope for the best. Keep in mind I am well aware this is probably not viable in the slightest, but if we were to try to make it as viable as possible, how would we go about doing so. More of a joke than anything, something you’d play in hotjoins for the lols really.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAV8al8Mp3pVOx7J0PNhORt9tFAJIX5W37QcFEA-TpRDABOcEA0uMwxHEA6uAAA8AAEa/BA

Utilities I just kind of threw in there because I had no idea what would complement this.

That’s what I’ve made so far. I figured Sbow would be a natural complement to a build involving crits and multi hits to heal so I’m guessing that’ll be the main weapon. Plus it comes with build in poison so no need for doom sigils. Main issue that comes up is conditions and how I have no way to deal with them other than Generosity sigils, slowed pulse and pain response. S/P just seemed like a nice complement with blind fields and Pistol Whip being great for scoring lots of fast crits. Maybe open with that then switch to Sbow.

Magi amulet seems like the only choice when going for max healing power(I don’t think it affects Invigorating Precision, but it does bring AE to a nice 121 hp per initiative) since no other amulet has precision and healing power except for Celestial.

So, any thoughts or changes you’d make? Keep in mind I’m not looking for a meta build. I could find those easily. This build is just for the heck of it and I had 20 skill points lying around.

I never understood why a light breeze eles make can destroy even the fastest of bullets but a massive tornado strong enough to throw people can’t stop a thing. It should definitely reflect projectiles, at the very least destroy them.

You call engineer the most versatile class in the game because that is what they’re designed to be. Jack of all trades, master of none. Even the class description of engineers covers a huge array of things that they can do ranging from support, to control to dps. But the thing is that engineer in order to become truly powerful in one of those categories needs to sacrifice something, in most cases it’s the ability to deal with condition pressure and stability(as some of their best pressure comes from CC).

Sheer number of skills doesn’t make up for a lot of them being fairly single purposed or restricted. Most weapon sets for classes are setup to be multi-purposed and IMO the only kit that lives up to this multi-purposed idea is Tool Kit. Every other kit pretty much focuses in on either condi/power pressure(not sure what you’d call flamethrower as IMO it is kinda meh in most situations). You also go on assuming that all engineers run 3 kits to get 15 extra skills. I personally rarely run with more than two(giving me only five more skills that others) simply because I don’t gain enough utility from a third one to justify it over something else. I mean, you don’t see necromancers being gods of versatility even though they have 15 skills do you?

I’m sure engineers would love to have abilities to counter condi-pressure. But they can’t if they trade some of their utility for more skills. Sure I could make my engineer 3-kit with P/S and be super versatile, but I’d be leaving one glaring weakness. My main form of condition removal is tied to my heal and apart from that I have almost no way to deal with condi burst or even just consistently applied conditions. Whereas in the case of say warriors, they could trait to passively remove condis, then slot one skill to make them immune to the conditions for a while and problem solved.

Engineer is by far a very active class, especially compared to the many passive defenses of warriors. Active play is stronger than passive play(at least it should be) and the balancing should be centered around that. As it stands, there is almost no reason to take any heal other than Healing Signet on a warrior. That is an example of passive play gone wrong. Even engineers best heal has active play components to it regarding picking up your turret, detonating it or using it for water fields. It has an inherently higher skill floor and skill cap and because of that it achieves much more versatility than more passive builds. You can say that warrior should have more active play, but just from my experience on the forums, a lot of people will disagree with you and defend their passive play to the death.

At that point you’re essentially just saying that because x class has this, why doesn’t my class have that too. The classes have differences for a reason. For example, elementalists have much longer cds in general on their weapon skills to account for the fact that they have twice as many as most classes. Its just the warriors comparing adrenaline to death shroud again. They’re completely different classes with completely different ways to play them.

OP isn’t exactly providing hard arguments either. These runes aren’t in SPvP so obviously they’re broken and should be removed. I guess that should be said for literally every rune that is not found in SPvP. Condition runes not being useful in PvE is an entirely different problem that is caused by conditions themselves and the PvE meta of everyone going berserker. Does that mean berserker is OP because it is used in all game modes to great effect? With runes specifically though, Scholar runes and Strength runes are used in SPvP, WvW and PvE, so they must be much more OP than Perplexity runes because those are useless in PvE and only good in WvW.

Just know going in, this change would be meant for WvW and is based off experiences there in a zerg specifically.

Intro-Actual suggestion is second paragraph if you don’t feel like reading my whole reasoning.

Retaliation is a mechanic that really varies in power. Sometimes it basically just acts like another condition, other times it can pressure back line fighters to disengage from a fight and stop supporting their zerg. The main professions I see hurt by this are elementalists, engineers, rangers(at least long bow Rangers with that Barrage), potentially SB thieves and probably something else I’m forgetting. Since multi hit skills really open you up to retaliation damage, this pretty much cements the form of a zerg. It needs to be a power based blob that uses primarily melee weapons to push(as these tend to deal more damage per hit) . Since it is fairly passive play(have guard apply retal en masse as soon as you see enemy zerg then forget, no one stacks retal to my knowledge with blasts or whatever) I think a change would be helpful.

Perhaps just making individual skills have caps on the number of times they can proc retaliation hits on you. This would not harm melee zergs as even with a cap of say 5 per skill, cleaves and AoEs would still proc the full amount of times. But, it would stop say flamethrower engineers from downing themselves in seconds. Since AoEs are stronger in the sense that they can and will hit many people in a zerg compared to non-AoEs, it would make sense to have the retal cap be higher for them, but not unlimited. It would probably have to vary from skill to skill, but perhaps basing the retal cap for AoEs off of their radius would be fair. Higher radius skills have higher cap, going up to maybe 10-15 procs.

Keep in mind, I’m by no means an expert in WvW or a pro-player or whatever, I just see a lot of complaints about retaliation being so much stronger against non-frontline classes.

Aside from having no idea what build they’re all playing or if they’re organized or not, one thing stands out. If you were trying to point out how all the rangers have much higher points than the other classes, why does your team’s ranger only have 40 points? Obviously he’s doing something different than the other rangers.

It just bothers me that I can’t dodge during it since you’re in the air/leaping during the chain. Great for catching people who are running, not so much if I need on the spot dodging, although sword 3 is good for that. Either make it more of a rush so that you never leave the ground so that it can be cancelled, or maybe make it so the leap part is actually a leap finisher. Although a leap finisher on autoattack might be dangerous with such long water fields. But then again, Lightning Hammer has a blast on autoattack and eles have great water fields, don’t see that happening ever.

Xyonon.3987:

My eyes – see red post – I – I see hope – I see a light in the eternal tunnel of darkness and uglyness ! PLEASE HELP US WE CRY EVERY NIGHT FOR 25 hours!

I crai 31/7 becuz I cri even wen Im slepin.

Black Box.9312:

Ah yes, the classic “you guys are all dumb and haven’t made any valid points” defense.

Goes great with the “I guess none of you are skilled enough to know what I’m talking about, you must all play hotjoin/kill uplevels/PvE etc”. With a side of insults and topped with purposeful ignorance of opposing opinions.

GoogleBrandon.5073:

andy.7813:

Warriors and thieves get sweet buffs and skills only ranger I treated like garbage.

Cherry picking isn’t fun…

Those sweet venom buffs are too strong. Now every thief is venomshare.

DeadlySynz.3471:

Yes it should, in fact, it should do double damage once stealth is initiated. Stealth has to have some draw backs, perhaps taking double damage while in stealth.

You mean despite the fact that it is supposed to be damage mitigation and yet doesn’t actually prevent damage? I swear people just want thieves to die as soon as you lock onto them. They don’t have blocks or access to protection, they have little to no hard CC and are generally very squishy. Their sources of damage mitigation are stealth, evades and general combat mobility. Who cares if a thief takes damage while they’re supposed to be mitigating it via stealth? But a few weeks ago someone suggested skills that go through blocks and invulnerability and everyone went crazy.

Problem with most people who claim stealth is “SUPER OP GODMODE” is that when thief enters stealth they do one of two things. They either stop everything and just stand there like AI, or they randomly swing autoattacks no matter what type of thief it is. You can tell exactly what a thief is going to do the second you know their main hand weapon. If it is a pistol, you know they’re start strafing away from you as soon as they stealth and try to sneak attack to apply burst bleeds. If it’s dagger or sword, good news, you can know almost exactly where they will go everytime they gain stealth. Unless they’re about to die, they will try to get right on top of you. This gives you a few options, you can AoE yourself and potentially down them in stealth, or you can just use some block. The issue is most of the people complaining are their own form of glass build and those are pretty much the perfect and only target for thieves. If they can’t end the fight in maybe 20-30 seconds(at least in Conquest) they should strongly consider going to another point.

But I feel like everyone takes the WvW meta thieves and instantly assumes that type of play is viable everywhere. Which it isn’t.

Coldtart.4785:

Imagine for a moment, that channelled skills went on full cooldown when interrupted and thief had an interrupt with no cooldown at all, thieves might never worry about being hit by channels again.:D:D:D

If you have the initiative up to Headshot rapid fire every time its off cd, you’re probably playing thief wrong. The problem with headshot is that it is very expensive initiative wise on a set that is already heavily reliant on initiative to burst. It takes 9 initiative to gain stealth with the common D/P setup and seeing as you’re more suited as a burster and not as an interrupter, I think you’d get more bang for your buck by downing the ranger instead of interrupting a rather short cd skill. I mean, you don’t see thieves running around just spamming Headshot everytime they have the initiative. It’s good for interrupting heals or telegraphed skills in a pinch, but you’d be better off trying to kill the ranger than interrupting them.

Adding an animation to it would really throw a wrench(haha :P ) into pretty much all damage rotations in builds with rifles. Maybe if it was AoE or 1200 range like the other things that got animation, but not if its gonna stay single target and especially not if it is gonna keep the self knockback. Without CC like Overcharge and net shot(and both of those are fairly interdependent if you plan on landing the netshot out of melee range anyway) things like grenades become much more difficult to land, especially against other long range fighters. I think rifle is in a perfect place as is. I mean if you were to switch out rifle you could put in shield, which by itself has 2 interrupts, one of which can proc several times and be thrown to proc again, and both of which can be used as an AoE interrupt. I feel all of these skills have appropriate checks and balances keeping them in line but also still useful.

Adding animations to every single interrupt just reminds me of that thread where the person wanted all instant skills to have cast times because you can’t respond to instant skills(even though good players can and will do just that).

A single target, melee range kd that requires stability(plus engi has such limited access to stab) to have no downside. That seems fine. Knockback shot had the great range plus the fact that it looked almost exactly like other arrows unless you saw the little animation. Air blast was also somewhat melee range but it could hit up to 5 targets meaning, unlike Overcharge, it is unlikely to get blocked or obstructed by random things.

Seeing as the main build using rifle(and the one you’re probably complaining about) is cele rifle, it is relevant to note that this build only has 3 attacks that would necessitate a stun break, Supply Crate, Magnet Pull and Overcharge shot. Magnet has a huge telegraph and supply crate is an elite so against such engi the only thing you really need to save your stunbreak for is Overcharge.

I guess I should also note that overcharge removes some CC, but seeing as it is a vital part of many damage rotations, using it purely for cleanse is in most cases a bad idea.

Not that anecdotal evidence really proves anything, but honestly a majority of my matches have at least 1 warrior on each team, sometimes several. Correlation does not imply causation. I usually see a pretty fair mix of classes but if I have a match where there are no eles does that mean eles must be underpowered because no one in that match is playing one?

Hmm, maybe just have it be for PvE then and leave the trait as is for PvP. I just think necro really needs something it can contribute to a party to boost their viability in group settings of Pve. But seeing as necro is fairly good in WvW and PvP but bottom of the barrel in PvE, I think PvE specific changes are pretty much required no matter what.

witcher.3197:

Necrotize.2974:

Could just be saying that is the build that she uses and not necessarily claiming ownership…

Just for the record:

ellesee.8297:

All other builds were created by Vee Wee!

Fair enough, I missed that bit. She did give credit to the two players above too, I missed that as well in my scanning of the builds. To be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a gadget engineer in Spvp and I actually messed around with that build and found it quite fun. Still, claiming any build as a player is kinda meh to begin with since we can’t exactly know what build every single person playing right now is using or whether or not they created it. Kind of impossible to know who “made” a build, but it is fairly easy to figure out who popularizes a build simply by googling things, and as I stated above, googling VeeWee engineer builds brings up several helpful build compilations that would benefit new players greatly if they had no idea where to start.

I’m by no means an expert when it comes to necros but I just thought of this idea randomly(again, don’t even know if someone suggested this already)but what if instead of just boosting your personal damage, what if Target the Weak worked sort of as its own unique debuff that boosted all damage received by the target from all sources, including allies. So that means taking into account the common conditions that can generally be applied permanently on a boss, poison, bleed, vulnerability, cripple and burning, that’s a 10% boost to party dps and makes conditions more usable. Plus it has the ability to spike to potentially 24% damage boost if you inflicted every condition at once, although 22% would be more plausible as Fear would probably fail.

Like I said, I’m no expert on anything necro, so thoughts?

Going male I’d say asura just for the cute animations and such. If it were female I’d say human since female elementalists have a really cool animation with Meteor Shower where they kind of spin and float a little off the ground while conjuring and I love it :P

Vizardlorde.8243:

them runes of lyssa…

Yeah, now that the cd doesn’t match, its super annoying because if you cast Basilisk venom as soon as it is off the new 40 second cd, you’ll have to wait a whole 40 more seconds in order to get the lyssa proc because it still have 5 seconds in the internal cd ._.

Could just be saying that is the build that she uses and not necessarily claiming ownership…

I mean, when you want to direct someone to a specific build without typing out the entire summary you don’t say, Google grenade builds, you usually give them a name that you know will specifically take them to the build you’re talking about. Not to mention, if the person whose name you attach is an active player who has videos, googling their name in addition to the build will bring up videos that helpful for other players.

I could just type engineer pvp builds into google and I’d probably find stuff, but say I wanted a comprehensive guide. I could search Wolfineer Engineer PvP build. Wolfineer didn’t “discover” those builds, but he did make an excellent guide that involves the build. Adding names enables you to find specific posts and builds much easier than generic build names, which honestly is probably how a lot of completely new players find builds.

In this case, searching “Gw2 Veewee engineer builds” brings up this thread and a previous one that is also a compilation of builds, whereas just searching for generic engineer builds will yield a huge mess of build request threads and builds from a year ago.

What exactly makes Basilisk Venom “one of the most deadly elites”? Thieves don’t usually have many disables so unless you’re stun break has a super long cd I can’t see this being super deadly unless it takes you forever to react…

I’m sorry, but how on earth does him/her deciding to share all the builds with us before they’re deleted get perceived as attention seeking? Posts like these are great because they contribute to the community and at the same time provide a good place for new players to start. Posts like your Mitch just come off a petty and make you seem like you’ve been holding a grudge for too long.

A lot of people here seem to have mixed feeling about VeeWee, but a good amount of his/her posts are usually giving helpful advice on engineers and honestly, these forums could use more people that are willing to share builds and tips with new players. What we don’t need more of is passive aggressive people attacking others for stupid reasons.

Just gonna point out, there are only two other elites that can be completely negated by blocking/invulnerability on the first hit, Entangle and Basilisk Venom. The rest of the elites either function even if the person is blocking, don’t affect enemies, or last long enough and hit multiple times for a single block/dodge to not be enough. To make up for this, basilisk venom and entangle have cds of under 60 seconds and both can even be traited to have lower cds. Moa has a 3 minute cd and can’t be traited or improved in any way. Seems a bit inconsistent.

Lifestealer.4910:

Thief isn’t just for stealth skipping though, they have the highest dps in the game and that is made even better with elementalist ice bow equipped. Thief are also much more reliable on applying stealth and can stealth a party though long distances. Engineer can provide a decent amount of stealth at the start of a trash skip but they cannot do it midway like a thief can.

Still, thieves can’t apply as much vulnerability as engis, and I think most would agree that party dps is>personal dps. I mean, why not bring both. Capped out vuln plus the dps of thief would make them even better than they are alone. Seems like engis bring a lot to the table and yet are ranked consistently in the bottom 3 by people…

They’ve got plenty of blast finishers for might/stealth, access to all the useful fields, vuln stacking, AoE heals/condi removal, mass boon removal, reflects/projectile destruction and dps depending on what they swap in and out. They’ve got the tools necessary to either fill or supplement almost any role in the party just by swapping some utilities around. It just baffles me that people can rate them so low when in most cases an engineer will bring exactly what they need to fill out a party composition.

I only targeted thief in particular because whenever you see someone talking about dungeon thieves, pretty much the first thing that comes up is stealth skipping, which engi can do in burst with 5 blast finishers and then apply mid run with Toss Elixir S.

Engis bring so much to a party, hard to believe people rank them so lowly. I mean, why rank thief so highly just for stealth skipping? An engi can bring literally the exact same stealth. Smoke bomb+Big ol’bomb, healing turret overcharge, shield blast, thumper turret overcharge+thumper toolbelt+other blast finisher in last utility slot and you’ve got stealth capped. Quick switch of utilities before the fight and with the exact same build they bring 25 vuln stacks alone. And their damage is nothing to sneeze at either.

Saying you take thief just for stealth skips then rank engi so much lower really just doesn’t make sense, and unfortunately a lot of people who are newer to dungeons take one look at these lists and assume that the people below number 5 aren’t even worth bringing.

You have to keep in mind, it is an elite and it has quite a long cd even for elites. Few elites can be completely shut down just by dodging at the right moment. If Moa had a shorter cd of say 60-90 seconds, I’d probably agree to both of your changes. But as it stands, the mesmer would be lucky to land it in the first of two confrontations and have it be back up by the third. Currently, unless you’re in a fairly organized group, Mass Invis has so many more uses than Moa Morph. As others have stated in the other thread regarding Moa, the reason most people feel like it is a death sentence is because they devote all their time to running while in it. Play smart and that 10 seconds will just be a minor setback. If as soon as you become a moa you chain both your dodges and the evade, you’re probably gonna die.

This change alone would easily make Moa Morph not even worthy of an elite as it would probably never land without extensive setup, and even then you risk putting it on a 3 minute cd if they happen to block/stun break/evade at the right time. It is still an elite, and like I said earlier, there are only a few elites that can be single-handedly stopped by blocks/evades, and they compensate for that by having cds under 1 minute.

Hamster.4861:

GreyWraith.8394:

Hamster.4861:

IMO confusion should proc on attunement & kit swapping, but not necessarily on weapon swap. Many effects trigger on attune and kit swaps, and for that reason i believe confusion should proc there.

thats my .02

thoughts?

Discuss.

Why? Attunment & kit swapping IS weapon swapping for those classes. Your stated reason of ‘many effects trigger on attune and kit swaps’ is unclear. After all, many effects trigger on weapon swaps; why shouldn’t it happen there as well?

Provide clearer reasoning please.

I didnt provide reasoning because I’m asking what people think, and i want to see and hear the arguments for and against confusion procs on swaps.

I focused more on ele and engi because they see the most benefit from swapping, and their swap effects are easiest to access. I also focused on ele and engi because they both can near-instantly swap attunements/kits and weapon swap things are more gated and far less common.

as for ulterior motives, thats lolworthy I’m trying to see what people think in here. I have more play time on elementalist than any other class. my second class in PvP is a tri-kit engineer, so I dont really stand to gain much by buffing confusion in the way that i’ve suggested . You guys are thinking about me too much, and not the question.

Sorry if I jumped the gun, its just generally when people come in a suggest nerfs that specifically target one thing in particular that no one else has really brought up, it usually is just some angry person. But now that whole mess is behind us and on to your question.

IMO it should be the other way around. While kit swapping may not be mandatory for engis, attunement swapping generally is for eles, essentially making many stacks of confusion a lockdown on them, which is terrible considering that most of their skills have longer cds to compensate for having twice as many skills. They benefit the most from swapping because swapping it hard-wired into their class, whereas some classes don’t even need to bother swapping weapons most of the time. Attunements can be switched instantly, but AFAIK, kit swapping occurs at the same speed as weapon swapping and thus can’t be done while stunned/kd. Occurring on elementalist attunements is way too far IMO and should not be a thing, kits are debatable since in theory, not all engineers use kits, but weapon swaps are far less frequent for other classes and confusion occurring on their weapon swap would not be much of an issue.

So quick summary of my stance:
Never on attunements
Probably not on kits, but if it is on kit swap it should definitely be on weapon swap.

More importantly, how do we create an infinite amount of grenades? Kits should be like conjures and run out after a certain amount. And where do turret come from? Engi should have to stop and build them for 2-3 seconds before they become functional. And how do engineers propel themselves by shooting the ground? If the rifle is that powerful, the recoil from the autoattack alone should send them flying. And why can a rifle shoot nets? How does a full net get compacted to the size of a bullet and then open up as soon as it leaves the gun. How does Magnets (pull) work?

CC. I know guards would love to get their hands on some.

Guardians bring support, even their class mechanic is based around providing buffs to others. How does more party buffs(might and swiftness) and some party protection not fit into the guardian role? Ranger brings pretty sizable damage boosts and is a dps class generally, while mesmer is more niche but when used properly can lockdown enemies for extended periods of time or lead to devastating teamwork.

If you’re talking zerg wise, then there’s really nothing to be done. Zergs are successful when they can push. Zergs can push when they have lots of stability and lots of healing, something guardians can provide a lot of. Changing the core focus of guardian because their support role is magnified in large group with many guardians is just gonna make them slightly less desirable in zergs(because makeup generally doesn’t matter much, just numbers) and a lot less useful in smaller groups due to diminished returns.

I’m just gonna take a shot in the dark a redefine balance for the purposes of this thread.

Balance: Nerf an entire class because some specs give me trouble so that those intended to be hit are meh and those that weren’t even considered were smashed into the ground with a 10,000 pound nerf bat.

All these cross-class comparisons prove absolutely nothing. You essentially say something should be nerfed because your equivalent of it isn’t exactly the same. “Oh burst skills can’t ignore LoS, please nerf”. Newsflash, adrenaline and burst skills aren’t Steal anymore than they are mantras. I could harp on the fact that thief’s damage mitigation doesn’t actually stop damage since attacks still hit you in stealth then whine and say thief needs more access to blocks like warrior or protection like guards, but that wouldn’t make any sense, because I’d be comparing two very different classes and expecting them to play exactly the same.

I am impressed with the OP though. They obviously put a lot of effort into misleading exaggerations and bargaining with potential nerfs, and most people don’t even go beyond “THIEF OP NERF PLZ”. Your suggested changes should be standalone, not reliant on changing several other things on completely different classes to make them reasonable. That’s where all of our problems come from, nerfs coming to classes that lowers them down and then at the same time no nerfs or buffs to classes that didn’t need them at the time, creating an even larger gap between the two.

Apart from directly targeting two classes with this change(which screams ulterior motives, like 90% of the threads here) why should it not affect weapon swap when it is the exact same thing, just on a longer cd. If anything, it should be the other way around.

Best thing to do if they have Shared Anguish is open with stealth IMO. Stealth, use Magnet Pull. If you pull them, great, start your dps combo rotation. If you pull their pet, run up to them while you still have stealth and use TK 3. At this point, most LB rangers will panic and dodge out of instinct, take this time to drop Box O’ Nails which will make their pet even slower at catching up after to pulled it away. Once they’ve dodged, use Rifle 4 and dps rotation. Net shot compliments grenades and grenades bring condi pressure which most LB rangers can’t deal with, so make sure you land net shot at all costs then follow up with at least Grenades 2. If you don’t run Elixir S you can simply try opening by running up with TK block at the ready, but the stealth really helps in landing Magnet Pull since it has a really obvious animation unless you hide it with either stealth or obstruction.

I really advise you to look at Backpack’s engi guide because it really is helpful and most of those tips come directly from his video. Once you get the basics, it is a lot easier to come up with new things mid combat.

Beware, Huge wall of text. Don’t read if you don’t want to.

Fields

Ele
Has 6 on weapon skills(1 is underwater skill) with no more than 2 per weapon set.
Could add two more if you throw in Conjure Flame Axe(Don’t know why you would) and could add another 1 if you took the create Lava Font on downed trait(again, why would you).

Engi
Has 3 fire fields, but to gain access to all of them you’d need bomb kit, flame turret and flamethrower to be your utility skills. So you were right on that one, but using that build is hardly advisable.

Blast Finishers:
Ele
Has a grand total of 9 on weapon skills(1 being underwater) with no more than 3 per weapon set but all weapon sets have at least 1. Only exception is S/F which has 4 on the weapon set.
2 More for Arcane Brilliance and Arcane Wave
2 More if you’re last two utilities are both conjures.
1 More from evasive arcana
So that is potentially 8 in a single build if you spec 6 into arcana, use Arcane Brilliance, Arcane Wave, Lightning Hammer and Lava Axe coupled with S/F.

Engi is tricky.
They have only one on a weapon skills
1 from Throw Mine
1 from overcharging Thumper Turret
1 from Rocket Boots
1 from Flamethrower
1 from EG,
1 from thumper toolbelt
1 from bomb kit tool belt
1 from their downed skill.
Then, each turret can be detonated created a blast finisher, giving a total of 6, but obviously you can’t have 6 turrets.
So if my math is right, the max amount of blast finishers they can have is if all skills were turrets(including heal) with shield offhand and their downed skill. That would give them 8 blast finishers in a single build, but the only fire field would be from their toolbelt if one turret was flame turret. It would also require them to put all turrets on full cd to use all blast finishers.

This is still more blasts/fields than most classes, but that’s because they’re boon oriented classes. They have condi AND power weapon sets almost universally and therefore are more might oriented than anything since they deal condi and power consistently whereas other classes spec for power OR condi. For ele, Fire and Earth are split, condi and power pretty much across the board with air being the only pure power element. For engi, every kit except EG is split between power and condi.

For other classes, weapons are usually pretty defined in their purpose. For warrior, Hammer is obviously a power weapon. There are no damaging condition on any of its skills. For Mesmer, scepter is obviously a condition weapon with all of its skills inflicting conditions. Other examples of pure power weapons, mesmer sword, thief sword, warrior mace, etc. Pure condi has lots of examples too. There are some split weapons, but in general, they’re really good for one thing and pretty lackluster at the other(Thief D/D is a prime example of a weapon set that could be great at both if thief had higher access to might).

So if you wanted to nerf might access or power or duration or really anything to do with it, you’d have to consider that the classes that are using it to great effect have weapon skills and utilities that are reliant on both condition and power damage, so forcing them to spec into one is gonna result in half their skills being great with the other half being meh.

~Ignore, felt like deleting that wall o’ text.

“Last time I checked, Ele has about a total of 10 fire fields with a total of 15 or so blast finishers. Engi nearing the same, about a total of 3 fire fields with a total of ~10 blast finishers. Warrior has a lot of blast finishers too, but only 1 fire field. Then the rest of the professions have nearly no fire fields/blast finishers in the same build.”

Fields:
Ele has 6 on weapon skills(1 is underwater skill) with no more than 2 per weapon set.
Could add two more if you throw in Conjure Flame Axe(Don’t know why you would) and could add another 1 if you took the create Lava Font on downed trait(again, why would you).

Engi has 3 fire fields, but to gain access to all of them you’d need bomb kit, flame turret and flamethrower to be your utility skills. So you were right on that one, but using that build is hardly advisable.

Blast Finishers:
Ele has a grand total of 9 on weapon skills(1 being underwater) with no more than 3 per weapon set but all weapon sets have at least 1. Only exception is S/F which has 4 on the weapon set.
2 More for Arcane Brilliance and Arcane Wave
2 More if you’re last two utilities are both conjures.
1 More from evasive arcana
So that is potentially 8 in a single build if you spec 6 into arcana, use Arcane Brilliance, Arcane Wave, Lightning Hammer and Lava Axe coupled with S/F.

Engi is tricky.
They have only one on a weapon skills
1 from Throw Mine
1 from overcharging Thumper Turret
1 from Rocket Boots
1 from Flamethrower
1 from EG,
1 from thumper toolbelt
1 from bomb kit tool belt
1 from their downed skill.
Then, each turret can be detonated created a blast finisher, giving a total of 6, but obviously you can’t have 6 turrets.

So if my math is right, the max amount of blast finishers they can have is if all skills were turrets(including heal) with shield offhand and their downed skill. That would give them 8 blast finishers in a single build, but the only fire field would be from their toolbelt if one turret was flame turret. It would also require them to put all turrets on full cd to use all blast finishers.

So you’re numbers were pretty far off in some cases and the builds that would come close to them are certainly not practical at all.

I’m gonna split this into two posts just in case people don’t feel like sifting through all that advanced addition :P

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

robertul.3679:

It’s the battle sigil not the field blasts.

Sorry, but pretty sure you’re wrong here. If it were the Sigils, then any profession would be might stacking like eles, warriors, and engineers because all professions can use them at the same efficiency (sigil cooldowns).

Everyone only thinks it’s some clean cut answer of “this” specifically is making it OP. But Battle Sigils don’t allow for high might stacking, neither does one person blasting a field. Take an evasive arcana ele, they’ll set up the fire field, blast once in water, then dodge+earthquake to blast twice in earth. That’s 9 stacks of might, which is about equal to the average stack of might obtained via Sigils IIRC. So 9 might on a hefty cd or requiring constant swapping+boon duration is not alone very noticeable and no one complained about it. People are complaining that they stack so that you can reasonably obtain 18+ might stacks by devoting your cds, traits and weapon sigils to achieving higher might.

People need to stop complaining about blast finishers or battle sigils or whatever because when they’re alone, no one ever said anything and both provide almost the same amount of might when used at full efficiency. Someone put two and two together and realized that by using something that synergizes with their class they could make that aspect of the class stronger. The reason you don’t see everyone doing it however is because no other classes build around boons whereas Ele and engineer in particular are very boon-centric classes.

Barring utilities and traits, here’s what I come up with.
Staff has 3.

D/D has 3.

And focus has 2.

Some of them, namely Shocking Aura and Unsteady Ground, can be triggered many times during their duration by multiple people. This is on your weapon skills. Most classes have maybe 1 on a weapon set. Warrior is probably the only class that can come close to that amount of disables with Hammer having 3(counting the burst) and Mace/Mace or Mace/Shield having 3 each.

So…basically turn some instant cast skills that are meant to be openers into useless psuedo-openers that can’t be used during other long casting skills that otherwise wouldn’t hit? Classes need a mix of cast times, including instant, because otherwise it’s just chaining one skill after the other and hoping it works out. With instant cast skills, you reward people who know other class mechanics and those who jump at opportunities. I mean, if a thief is running up to you and about to start the fight, you can be pretty sure they’re gonna steal/shadowstep to you in order to guarantee their burst or opening strike hits.

Instants can be predicted and good players do it consistently. Between two great players who know the ins and outs of all classes involved, fighting becomes more mind games than anything. Can you trick a person into wasting their opener or make them think you’re defenseless when you’re not. Saying you can’t predict instant cast things is more like saying you’re not gonna try to predict them. Obviously sometimes you’ll be wrong, but the more you practice the better you’ll get at predicting things simply by knowing where you are in a fight.

You’d think if Charr created all those kits they’d know how to make them not clip through every part of their body T_T