Guild Wars 2

Kardiamond.6952:

So I will prolly have to hot join until higer level huh?

That’s what I didn’t want.

sPvP get boring very fast in hot join.

Will keep looking, thanks for the answers!

No, I don’t think so. There are several very decent, high-population guilds that accept anyone regardless of rank. Scroll through a couple of pages of forum topics and you’ll probably find several guilds advertising for people just getting into tournaments. iPug and tPvP are two guilds off the top of my head that will take any rank but have some really good players in their ranks as well.

“Tournaments” seem intimidating, but they really are the best choice for anyone just starting out in PvP. Unfortunately, there’s no matchmaking (there’s not really any matchmaking in hotjoin, either) so you’ll only get a close match every so often. Still, it beats hotjoin by miles.

Long story short, the OP is right—it is very difficult for new players to get into PvP.

I believe hotjoin uses a wave timer so that multiple people will respawn at the same time (softens the need to wait at spawn to regroup/cuts down things like spawn camping, etc.) I can’t remember what the exact times are, but it’s something like three preset respawn times per minute. If you die right before one of those times, you’ll respawn quickly. If you die right after one of those times, you’ll respawn slowly.

I posted this in a different thread/same question a few hours ago—if they do nerf kit damage when adding weapon stats to kits, it will mark the first time in GW2 history that something gets nerfed for being too strong in PvE.

This is a great idea overall. I would just add that this cannot be implemented for free tournaments until a deserter debuff is added. Solo queue players are already being asked to 4v5 every few matches—it would really sting to have to 4v5 three matches in a row (or worse, 4v5, then 2v5, then 1v5…or just wait it out in the spawnpoint).

It would also probably be good to wait until there are ranked single matches or a random vs random game mode.

I still support the idea, but it’s not something that we want to see tomorrow. After a couple much-needed changes pave the way, this will be a good change to the tourney system.

aydenunited.5729:

My intent isn’t to sound dismissive. On the contrary, I’ve posted several builds posts here, and I give in game advice quite often when other Engie players ask.

But those posts? Yeah, they scroll off the first page within a day, where the complaint posts stack up dozens of posts of people chiming in on things we supposedly can’t do. I don’t understand what happened in gaming where if something is a challenge to do, ‘why bother trying’ seems to be the mentality. That’s the part of me that probably starts to shine through and sound a bit dismissive, but it truthfully does come out of a mentality of wanting to help other Engineers and show them what we’re capable of, but it feels like there isn’t any interest in that, because it’s hard.

Understood. In that case, keep up the good work and happy thief crushing.

aydenunited.5729:

I’ve played around 900 matches on my Engi, after initially rolling a Guardian and playing up to around 600 matches. Never looked back so far, and I’ve found in PvP we are quite good and have more variety of builds available to use than most professions, despite a lot of posts on these boards.

The main problem is that everyone wants to just kill things quickly, and we don’t do that quickly without sacrificing a lot.

I also have great success in PvP with my engineer. However, this statement feels like an oversimplification, given the huge popularity of bunker guardians. They don’t kill things quickly either, and yet they are extremely popular and effective.

I think, perhaps, it’s a mix of several things: 1, the issue you describe; 2, engineers have a high skill floor; 3, engineers have a higher-than-average number of bugs; 4, engineers have a couple of real holes/viability problems with their skill sets/mechanic.

I appreciate that you’re not berating other engineers for not being good enough, like some other engineer players seem to enjoy doing. I also agree that engineers aren’t as bad as everyone thinks. But maybe we shouldn’t dismiss everyone’s troubles so simply?

I enjoy pugging tournaments, even though I expect to play a man down roughly every third queue. 3v5’s are rare but I’ve had those as well. I just put on my tryhard cap, head to the mid point and see how long I can 1v4 (usually at least 5 seconds, sometimes more). I try not to take those matches too seriously, and get my fun winning against bad premades and other pugs.

Unfortunately, the game was designed on the premise that if you aren’t the type of player who organizes/joins premades, you’ll be satisfied with hotjoin.

I don’t blame them for that—everybody loved hotjoin in beta, when people were still doing things like playing entire matches at a time, running balanced builds, and fighting on points. Now, it’s just a glory farm, so casual players pug free tourneys…

tl;dr—tournaments were designed with one thing in mind: a premade party of 5. However, until hotjoin becomes more bearable, solo players are still better off pugging tourneys to get a decent match every other time or so.

The combat system works better for small teamfights than anything else. 1v1 would be fun but with obvious difficulties. Any teamfights bigger than about 6v6 are chaotic due to the fact that most builds are essentially close-range dps or tanks. I think that anything from 2v2 to 5v5 would work great.

Despite the legitimate concerns/issues PvP has right now, very few professions/builds have actually fallen to the bottom after a patch. Mesmer and Ele are both strong in PvP right now. Neither has a very wide variety of good builds, but the builds they do have are very strong. Right now, mesmers are considered mandatory for competitive teams.

Correct, this fix has been announced but there has been no date given. If they do nerf kit damage like last patch with grenades/sigils, it will mark the first time in history that something was nerfed for the sake of PvE only, since this currently has no effect in PvP.

The devs have been pretty quiet about everything for the last week or so here…seems they are taking some time off over Christmas? I won’t begrudge them that.

Anet knows engineers aren’t desired in high-level fractals or paid tournaments. They are also aware of the novel-length list of bugs, but I don’t want them to fix everything poorly tomorrow. Let’s not forget that engineers were legitimately overpowered until Anet pushed a quick fix about a week after launch…

EaGrimdarK.7849:

You know what sPvP needs? Quaggans.

+1 to that. Maybe they’d calm people down.

TwoBit.5903:

Get rid of glory farming. Gonzo. Piff! Pretend it never existed in the first place, because it was a terrible system. Who created such a system anyway? I’m sure their mother would be ashamed of them. Pure farming without proper pacing or addition or rewards leads to burnout. Furthermore if the rewards lie in players playing for the wrong reasons and in the absolute worse manner possible for a competitive team based eSport. That not only leads to burnout, but it leads to burnout done through a system that wasn’t engaging or enjoyable for the players involved.

Replace Glory farming with something more involved and risky. An MMR system for example, would not only force players to not farm, but it would encourage them to play in a manner conducive to their team’s success.

Nailed it. This is the #1 challenge the PvP devs should be thinking about right now.

PvP has some issues but the game was very ready overall. PvE/WvW make up probably 98% or more of the population, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the developers have been spending more time on those aspects of the game.

Games are much more difficult to balance without a trinity. Even with time, it will probably never feel “balanced.” The devs decided they wanted every profession to fulfill every role in PvE, which is great—but it makes balancing much harder, since there’s nothing a profession “shouldn’t” be able to do.

I do agree with Archonis, however—hotjoin is really, really bad and is the main reason that the PvP population is still so small.

Engineer is really hard to theorycraft, so my hat’s off to you for creating a build that’s a thousand times better than any of my first half-dozen attempts were.

The healing field on elixir gun has a similar healing power as the regeneration boon—nothing too exciting. I like it for the condition removal, though.

What amulet/runes/sigils are you using?

Now, brace yourself for some hard news…

Balanced builds in general are unfortunately very difficult to make work for PvP right now. Basically, a few professions have full glass cannon builds with enough escapes to outsurvive and far outdamage any balanced build.

The flamethrower in general is unfortunately very difficult to make work as a main damage kit.

Hopefully that’s not too discouraging—I love playing my engineer in PvP, even though it’s generally considered one of the weakest professions. I also use pistol/shield, elixir gun and flamethrower, but give up the stunbreaker for bomb kit and take full defensive traits/amulet.

Edit: Ah, just saw your last update. Box of nails is also decent for condition damage.

I have not seen a grenade engineer in a tournament since the (most recent) grenade nerf. Even before that, I only saw maybe one in a hundred tournaments. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but you will probably be quite literally one of the only few in the world using that build in a tournament. That’s kind of cool, actually.

100% Johnny. I mean, I play an engineer.

Take both, and elixir gun! 4-kit bunkers are super fun. Sure, you won’t have a stunbreaker but…bunker eles can have 3, so we’re really not trying to compete with them there.

1. Engineers are pretty good at dishing out burn, but I wouldn’t recommend building a PvE build around conditions only. If you build for support, you’ll end up doing quite a bit of your damage as conditions even if you don’t have a lot of condition damage. If you build for damage, power/prec/crit damage will always do more than conditions.
2. Kits are great for leveling because they scale with your level, so it’s like always being decently-geared. Static discharge (tier 1 in tools) is also a great leveling trait.
3. “Engineer” is just a name—we usually don’t end up putting up many turrets or doing other “engineerish” things. Don’t feel like you have to be a charr or asura just because you’re an “engineer.”
4. Really fun! and, lots of bugs. Very dynamic! and, yes, you will pull your hair out sometimes.
5. Engineers are very good in skilled hands, but realistically, we fall behind other professions both in pure glass cannon roles, and pure support roles right now. I would expect that to change in the future—engineer may be the current least-played profession, and very, very few tournament PvP teams or high-level fractal teams use them. With a couple of fixes/buffs, we’ll become much better.

1. Call/take targets
2. Never fight anywhere that doesn’t help your team control points

If pugs figure this out, premades will have to start playing with both hands.

Oh, and…

3. Memorize downed skills/common rez skills for every profession. There aren’t that many to remember, actually. Don’t stomp the wrong mesmer, it just looks bad. That thief didn’t go anywhere when he stealthed…

It would certainly make my job as an engineer a little bit less painful. It’s tough to keep track of how many people in a fight currently have stability and whether or not I should use my AoE cc.

However, I don’t feel ripped off when I blow a cooldown uselessly—at least I feel like I could have seen the stability boon and played better.

They do talk about PvP, just not right now over Christmas. None of our favorite TV shows are airing new episodes, either…people who work in entertainment gotta take time off too.

Salt.6794:

Or you can just watch a few videos/streams of your selected profession and practice in hot join until you get it. I’ve done it on a few characters and haven’t had issue. If OP is decent at PvP he/she will be fine.

+1. People pick up a lot of bad habits in PvE anyway—have you seen a PvE warrior try to PvP? It hurts to watch.

Edit: oh yeah, and +1 to the people saying that if you succeed as an engineer, you’ll turn heads.

It’s actually not quite as bad as it seems right now. For example, a single condition removal will usually remove a high bleed stack from the middle of several other conditions, because bleed is usually getting continuously re-applied.

But yes, the only real workaround to this is to have so much condition removal that you can remove everything.

I also enjoy tournaments a lot. I even enjoy pugging. The only part of PvP I don’t enjoy at all is hotjoin. It’s true—there are a few forum threads that are pure QQ, and a lot of threads that are pure troll. However, there are still a lot of constructive/critical threads are there because people like the game’s PvP, and would like to see it become better able to attract and keep new PvPers.

Right now, I’d say the state of the game is something like this: frustrating for new players/casuals; pretty fun for semi-casuals; very fun for serious gamers (albeit lacking the variety that keeps games entertaining over long periods of time). It would be great to see GW2 get up to the “very fun” level for more of the playerbase.

Follidus.8027:

why do you make threads like these when the community is as small as it is? You’re just making it smaller with troll threads…

+1.

Fair enough. Engineers certainly have good tricks for getting endurance back. I wasn’t sure where you were going with the average percentages back per second, since we were talking about gaining endurance on skill use. Over a given period of time, those numbers are probably pretty accurate for typical builds.

Let’s try to be more accurate/realistic/useful on these forums. Engineers have some very real, very serious problems that a few very good players can apparently overcome. That does not mean anyone should

1) Insist that engineers are fine, and if you are having trouble you need to l2p;
2) Insist that Anet hates engineers and is actively ignoring the problems.

In regards to endurance back on toolbelt skills: I think you are mistaking toolbelt for toolkit? It’s impossible to use a toolbelt skill every second for longer than four seconds, because there are only four toolbelt skills. Also, it’s just 10%.

I think we would be better off to focus constructive suggestions on our better builds, i.e. tanky kits and static discharge burst. What buffs would those builds need to land a place on a paid tourney team, or a level 35 fractal group?

aydenunited.5729:

If you’re struggling making Engineer work in PvP, then you probably don’t want a class that has a variety of skills and tactics, because they require time and effort to learn and become skilled in.

One trick ponies are easy to play, Engineers are not, so you’ve basically just said “I want something complex to play that isn’t too complex to play”.

Umm…

I’m pretty sure that’s not what he said at all. Guardians are great but much simpler than engineers; eles are closest to engineers in terms of number of skills; necros also have a high skill floor but can be effective in paid teams as counter-bunkers.

Very well-reasoned post. These are most of the reasons I dislike playing burst classes in general, and really dislike playing burst specs in GW2. Playing a burst spec doesn’t even feel like playing against another player—it’s more like a sandbox time trial where your burst must be faster than their reaction time. Can you kill someone before he can react? Exciting!

I don’t think there’s much chance to re-design the entire concept of burst from the ground up, though, so…

—Anet should focus on the aspects of combat that are fun—i.e., small-scale teamfights where burst professions can’t just kill at will like in hotjoins.

—They should work at rewarding other playstyles besides gank (hotjoins again not looking very good here).

Small-scale arena fits this bill, limiting the disengage/gank playstyle. CTF might work, although burst/mobility professions would look pretty good there—we’d need a mechanic that encourages different team splits while limiting 1v1 chases.

So, basically, remove hotjoin.

Just depends on what you like! Tool kit works well with rifle or static discharge builds. Rifle turret is also excellent for static discharge. Bombs will do better straight up damage.

Turrets are in an odd place right now because they’re not that great as simple damage-adds. For example, taking static discharge and just using the rifle turret toolbelt and immediately blowing up the turret after you place it will do more damage than the actual turret would if you left it down. You can definitely make them work for you if you like them, though.

After you hit 60, you can use grenades. I find PvE with rifle+grenades a lot of fun.

Ostricheggs.3742:

Phantasmal rogues, the mesmer’s DOWNED 3, show up as dealing damage with “smoke bomb” in the combat log IIRC. It hits for double the damage from behind as well.

They’re probably the strongest downed fighters in the game :|

Yup. Smoke bomb is a solid skill for engineers but deals no damage. I’ve had smoke bomb come up on my combat log after fighting mesmers, I didn’t know it was the downed 3.

Engineers have one of the more complex mixes of range/melee in their builds. As with all professions except condition necro, our damage tends to increase the shorter range we are at.

You might try rifle—it has a decent ranged autoattack and melee burst. Fully ranged engineers are still viable. Grenade kit is our only all-ranged option.

Click on the PvP icon again (the same way you teleport to the heart of the mists) and choose the same option—“Go to the heart of the mists.” You’ll leave your match and go back to the mists. From there you can go through the asura gate to lion’s arch, or join a different PvP match.

Another night of continuous paids popping! Keep up the good work.

Khalifahaze.6045:

This game isn’t set up for the random casual player, its anet’s terrible design. That being said, you can’t expect them to hold your hand. If you like this game use your brain form a team and get better. Stop all the crying and progress like the rest of the player base.

I’ve done all that. I’m concerned about the lack of casual playerbase. I like PvP but farming pugs isn’t my idea of fun, so it would be great if we could increase the playerbase over a few dozen good PvPers and a few hundred casuals.

Khalifahaze.6045:

1) find people you enjoy playing with and think are good players.
2) invite them to a group or guild
3) que for free tournies using voip
4) develop strats and work on team synergy
5) when ready go into paids
6) pvp is now fun

/thread

This is true, but it’s why PvP isn’t attracting new players. Seriously, who jumps into their first PvP match and thinks, “this is great! If I just find friends who are good players, form a guild with them, use voip, and theorycraft/practice with my friends, I won’t be affected by the lack of meaningful casual vs casual PvP!”

Those things definitely need fixing, but on the other hand—it’s Christmas, the devs should be home taking a few days off.

New PvPers often don’t realize the importance of the “PvP amulet.” The amulet represents all the stats of all your armor, weapons, and jewelry in PvE. It’s done this way so you don’t have to change out over a dozen pieces of equipment when you want to try a new build. As Phuriocity said, there is no way to gain a stat advantage over other players in PvP, except to craft a better build.

Coming to all these threads just to say “l2p” doesn’t actually help noobs l2p and is textbook trolling. Why do it?

The main problems with high burst:

1. Hotjoin.
2. Lack of meaningful matchmaking.

If the devs can fix these two things, I think about half of the “nerf” cries will automatically disappear.

@Bargaw—I originally typed “engineer support builds are cute,” but then changed it to “nice” because I didn’t want to sound too whiny/troll-ish. My point was that engineer support builds are cool but ineffective in fractals.

@Sabyne—yep, protection would be even better. I think Anet might actually go for condi removal, regen, or vigor; because of bunker guardians, they’ve had to nerf protection skills pretty hard.

I really think that a couple of small buffs could make up for our inability to afford “utilities” (i.e. stunbreaks, support, condi removal) in our “utility” slots. Because of the way fractals are designed, support builds need to come close to the projectile stopping of a guardian to even be considered useful.

Anet has been very careful so far in buffing underplayed professions, so I thought I’d suggest some very small buffs that might make engineers better represented in dungeons and paid tournaments. D/D eles have recently become very popular and effective, but engineers lack the versatility of having twenty weapon skills and still being able to equip stunbreaks, condition removals, or support skills as utilities. The following are possible ways to address this issue without making the engineer a clone of the ele.

1. Fix the kit refinement effects for the flamethrower, bomb kit, and med kit. These effects are flat-out bad (in the case of flamethrower or med kit) or non-functional (in the case of bomb kit, which is bugged when forceful explosions is traited).

—Med kit: the tiny explosion the med kit causes makes no sense (why is a med kit exploding?) and doesn’t do noticable damage. I’d recommend making this kit create a short AoE regen, vigor, or single condition removal on equip, with internal CD, of course.

—Bomb kit: even if the current effect worked, it wouldn’t be very useful. If it has to be one of the current bomb kit skills, let’s make it the immobilize (smoke or concussion would be too powerful). I’d rather see a large-AoE vulnerability bomb or a small-AoE .5-sec daze bomb.

—Flamethrower: the 1-sec burn at melee range just isn’t useful. I’d say change it out for smoke vent. If that’s too powerful (it’s not like any professions have a blind on a 10-sec cooldown, right?) it could be swapped for a chill/immobilize removal.

2. Fix turrets. Right now, they offer bad damage, some control (net turret, rocket turret, knockbacks) and zero support. I’d like to see turrets become a staple of dungeon support builds—for example, the flame turret toolbelt could be a smoke wall to give give us a small fraction of the projectile-stopping power of the guardian. (On that note, elixir U toolbelt could stop projectiles 100% of the time instead of 66%…) Even if both changes were implemented, we still wouldn’t come close to a projectile-blocking guardian, but maybe with our other utility it would be enough to play fractals support.

3. Buff toolbelt skills: Several of our best kits/utilities have sub-par utility skills. This could be a nice place to put a stunbreaker for kit or turret builds.

tl;dr: Kits and turrets are our signature moves, but currently contain zero stunbreaks and very little condition removal. Since you can swap kits while cc’d, a blind or interrupt on swap would be a way of standing in for that missing stunbreak without being overpowered like the old juggernaut (stunbreak+stability any time, no cooldown). An alternative could be to add a stunbreak to a kit or turret toolbelt skill (perhaps flamethrower or elixir gun). Our support builds are nice but lack the projectile blocking needed for fractals, and I feel like turrets could step up to that challenge.

Level 39? If you don’t like bomb kit (probably our best kit), I’d say go rifle and toolkit, with maybe a buff and escape as your other utilities. Sure, you won’t 2-button through mobs like a warrior, but you’ll kill stuff pretty fast. Throw wrench, prybar, blunderbuss, and jump shot are all decently high damage skills, and can be chained together very quickly.

Or, pick up static discharge (only 10 in tools) and do the same thing except with rifle turret and another short-cooldown toolbelt skill.

Sure, engineer is a bit behind other professions right now but lots of people have found ways to get creative and melt mobs in PvE. Just remember that grenade kit is our absolute worst choice until you get grenadier—then it’s pretty decent for PvE and WvW.

Trolls gonna troll.

I don’t think Anet will go for such a huge nerf. I think the two main problems with heartseeker are:

1. Hotjoin, where heartseeker spam playstyle is encouraged;
2. Lack of effective matchmaking, i.e. heartseeker is incredibly frustrating for new players to counter.

When thieves say “l2p,” what they mean is “your reflexes are too slow.” There’s nothing wrong with that in theory—GW2 was designed to require twitch reflexes. Unfortunately, reflexes develop over time as a player learns to anticipate his opponents’ moves. Right now, new players meet situations that require extremely fast reflexes to counter, but with zero learning curve—if you can respond to a thief fast enough, you live, and if not, you die. The traditional MMO learning curve has to do with understanding your skills, your opponent’s skills, theorycrafting, and positioning. That makes GW2 a pretty hard slap in the face when people jump into their first hotjoin and realize that GW2’s “learning curve” is getting your twitch reaction time to a fraction of a second.

“Initial skill cap” is commonly referred to as a “skill floor.” And yes, Anet’s goal was to make professions with varying skill floors and skill ceilings, all equally effective. I think it’s possible.

The OP’s example of the (probably) two least-used professions for paids—warrior and engineer—is very good. The two professions are at opposite ends of the spectrum as far as skill floor goes, but at a similar level of effectiveness, i.e. not very effective. On the other hand, you have, say, guardians and eles, two other professions at opposite ends of the skill-floor spectrum, that are both doing fine in paids.

I don’t think we need to worry too much about the “skill cap vs effectiveness” because Anet has already shown that it can make professions like guardians and eles both be good. So, let’s focus on making other professions as viable as guardians and eles, whether they are low-skill-floor professions or high-skill-floor professions.

In my opinion, all professions have a similar skill “ceiling.” I.e. it may not take you long to learn your warrior at first but to really play well you’ll have to memorize attack animations, learn when to dodge, have good positioning and great reflexes, reflexes probably being the most important. Still not sure if I like that or not.

aydenunited.5729:

On a seperate note, I think we are supposed to be the CC experts… we can spec for more knockbacks and knockdowns than any other profession… the problem, to me, seems to be that this doesn’t translate into much usefulness in PvE, and with the current meta making all good tPvP teams run bunkers with Guardians, stability also screw us over, especially AoE stability that Guardians provide. So our best quality is nullified by the lack of it’s necessity.

I think this is a very accurate description of our tournament problems. I play a cc-based engineer and it’s very enjoyable, and viable in free tournaments—I’ve had pretty good success anyway. But as you say, anyone who pops stability nullifies the build. Also, the only way for us to get more crowd control than the average ele or guardian is to give up all of our stunbreakers and all or most of our condition removal.

To top it all off, knockbacks and blowouts underperform in teamfights because in GW2, damage = melee. So your teammates will always prefer a guardian’s cc to an engineer’s cc, because the guardian can better lock a target down for his burst to kill. I feel like the devs thought that knockbacks and blowouts would be really powerful, when in reality, they are little more than an interrupt.

tl;dr—our numerous short-cooldown knockbacks/blowouts can make a very strong build, but it is easily countered and leaves no room for survival or damage tools.

(As a side note, I think the devs originally expected all professions to function at about this level—but the numerous builds that sport high damage/control/survivability at the same time have proven them wrong.)

Free tournaments are your best option—you don’t have to have a full party of five to start. Even though you’ll be put with three other random people, you’ll always be on the same team as your friend.

Hotjoin is like that to prevent premade teams from farming random players. Unfortunately, hotjoin is just bad all the way around right now. There is effectively no matchmaking in free tournaments or hotjoins, so your chances of having a close game are similar. Also, hotjoins rarely have more than half the players stay for a whole match—most just pop in and out for a minute or two at a time.

Even if you guys are just trying PvP for the first time, free tournaments are probably your best bet.

Pistols/condition build is viable. It’s not very good for high-level PvE. It’s okay-ish for PvP because it can deal bleed, burn, and confusion at the same time, but it can’t stack more than 4-5 bleeds without some major help from kits/sigils.

Edit: forgot to mention that all main-hand pistol autoattacks in the game are currently slower than the tooltip states. Basically, the pistol autoattacks at the same speed as the rifle, even though the tooltip says pistol is faster.

I think this is a great idea. Probably won’t be able to play this Saturday but I’d love to try a 3v3 deathmatch. In my opinion, 3v3 is one of the first modes Anet should consider adding, along with CTF (after both are tested for balance, of course). You might want to get a guild behind it like tPvP has done with paid queues.