Guild Wars 2

Engineer and Thief are both great in WvW. Both have lots of good options, but the best/most obvious ones are glass cannon ranged AoE (grenades) for engineer, and glass cannon gank (dagger) for thief. Engineers have much better support builds than thieves.

I was attracted to the engineer because I love creating my own builds, and engineers are super flexible and have arguably the greatest possibility for customization. I also like the idea of a fighter who doesn’t have any special talent, magic, or strength. The engineer just creates what he needs from what he has, as opposed to an elementalist, who is gifted with magic, or a thief, who has a natural talent for keeping out of sight.

Ah, I think in the chart you are only considering the auto-attack for each profession/weapon. In that case, the grenade kit auto-attack will probably do more than any other auto-attack, especially with burn/bleed on crits and might stacks.

Casia means that other professions usually do about 3-5k dps, on average, because average means over a period of time and using all available skills. That is really a better way to think about it, because no one would only use their auto-attack. Some builds hardly ever use their 1 attack—for example, an elementalist will cycle through all four attunements and maybe a conjure weapon as well and only use their auto-attack a couple of times.

Elementalist. Engineer can be as complicated, but it can also just as easily use a very simple build.

Pistol seems to be more popular for PvP, especially tournaments, because both shield skills are great against other players. For PvE, it’s hard to get any better than rifle + grenades.

Yes, loved engineer 1-80 PvE. Their weapon sets are nothing more interesting than other professions but kits are a ton of fun. Using a turret or two can also be really fun.

I’m not sure that adding glory for winning would fix it, but yes, that is the problem. Right now, 8v8 is like a football game with lots of interceptions and tackles but no endzones.

I think when Anet is ready they’ll want to replace 8v8 as it is now, maybe with a deathmatch or a shorter game mode. In a ten-minute match, the teams will usually auto-balance multiple times, and the teams will almost always be lopsided by at least one. Maybe more appropriate glory rewards for winning and playing well would help, but my guess is that the casual PvP population will not significantly increase with the current hot-join meta. They’re not even sticking around in free tournaments, because they weren’t designed for matchmaking.

shrewd.5319:

The thief profession is doomed.

This is how balance is done at arenanet, by JonathanSharp: "When we’re in those meetings, we’ll talk about hot topics, and issues that are currently a big issue for a certain piece of content. We also listen to high level players, we read the forums (sometimes we even take the best-written posts, print out 10 copies, and bring them to a balance meeting), and we play the game to get a feel for ourselves. Just because you don’t see a change that YOU want, keep in mind that someone else may disagree. Just because we don’t do every single change YOU want, doesn’t mean we don’t care about you or the game. We just try to make the best changes for the greatest number of players.

Full post here: http://www.guildwars2guru.com/arenanet-tracker/topic/245674-the-teams-that-work-on-pvp-wvw-balance/

They’re right. The greatest number of players are casual. A couple of patches ago, there were 6-10 thieves in most 8v8s and they were driving casual players away.

No one can blame them for making the best changes for the greatest number of players.

And hey, as a lot of people have said, thieves are still 100% tourney-viable. Certainly, not with a large variety of builds, but most of the other professions don’t have a huge variety of good builds, either.

Infinitus.3712:

Our team if we ever hear a thief is going to steal we just completly miss the boss and carry on to keep and our close cap. The thief just stands around with a sad face and moves on then whilst we have successfully taken two points and they are stable we’ll take the boss whilst it’s safe. If thief trys to take the boss anyway then we just stomp him and take the boss anyway

This is what I was trying to say. Casual teams can’t defend it, and good teams avoid the mechanic completely.

Again, as many people have said, this is not the most pressing issue in PvP right now, but it’s food for thought…interesting design questions. Each map mechanic will certainly be different for different levels of players. I can see a “last hit” mechanic being fun for casuals, except casual thieves > casual everything else at it. It could also be fun for competitives, except point control > everything else for competitives.

I don’t really agree that the game needs more cc, but the OP makes some valid points—for example, I used to run my engineer with tool kit + kit refinement for permanent AoE cripple, which was great, except it just didn’t help me win fights. Gap closers, dodge rolls used for mobility, and heavy AoE damage just negate it most of the time. I survive much better using flamethrower—one knockback, one blind—than I do with perma-cripple and the best block skill in the game (tool kit 4).

That said, I still don’t agree that the game needs more cc overall. I think it’s good for the best burst professions to have less access to cc, actually—I prefer having to choose between cc and damage instead of easily doing both.

Good idea. Maybe advertise in the mists too? Seems like everyone here plays at different times.

If enough people are interested you could even set up some 2v2s.

I think I understand the issue after reading through the thread again:

The developer rightly points out that organized teams have found a lot of ways to deal with the problem. 100% correct.

It is also 100% correct that the entire mechanic is ignored by organized teams.

In other words, the mechanic is only enjoyed by casual players, but casual players aren’t good enough to enjoy the mechanic.

Plague Bound.8674:

Pretty sure top teams don’t even both with the boss. The time it takes wastes resources, the points are far more important. Even if the other team gets all boss kills, it won’t determine the game.

They will always ignore the boss at start. After wiping the opposing at the keep, they’ll have time to send a roamer to grab the npc.

I understand that it hurts to receive a direct nerf with no compensation, even though I rarely play a thief.

But I am consistently seeing more good tournament teams use two thieves now than I ever had before the patch. Why? Because with the bug fixes to bunkers, roamers are more viable.

The only area in which thieves saw a net loss in effectiveness with the last patch is the area of crushing inexperienced players. (They are still the best profession at it, though.) In competitive games, thieves are equally as viable as before, or slightly more viable.

(Yes, I realize there are issues with build diversity—but this post is about effectiveness in the best builds, not how many equally effective builds there are.)

tl;dr? Thieves are now less frustrating to new players, and equally or more effective against experienced teams. Diversity issues remain.

It’s an familiar and usually fun mechanic. The only downside is that balanced or defensive builds shouldn’t ever try to attack the npc solo, if there’s a thief in the opposing team. (Backstab does as much damage than my bunker engineer can inflict in 5-6 seconds, so unless I can chain cc for that long I have no business attempting to solo the npc. It just won’t work.) Also, newer players should usually not engage the npc alone.

It’s fun at the start, when there’s usually 2-3 players trying to hold off that one thief from landing the perfect blow, but after that, it does reward sitting and punish action for some players. Even so, it’s a working mechanic and worth leaving in the game. The devs have other concerns right now.

The leveling system in GW2 has ONLY one limitation—it’s not very efficient to level up doing only one thing (unless you really like WvW).

As long as you have at least two aspects of the game that you enjoy (say, exploring and crafting, or story and WvW, or events and heart quests) you will find yourself leveling up very, very easily.

I guess there’s one other limitation: grinding mobs is not a good way to level up. Don’t choose that as one of your 2+ things to do.

Pistol/elixir engineer is pretty decent. It’s not THE best engineer build out there but it’s effective and not too difficult to learn. Just don’t be afraid to tweak your build as you go!

Everyone complains about pugs having “bad” players, but I usually find that pugs have much better players than your average guild. The only reason pugs are not steamrolling most guilds right now is that the chances are pretty high to get at least one very inexperienced player in a pug. In a guild group, at least no one is rank 1.

No disrespect meant: there are also some very skilled guilds playing, and you may meet them in free tourneys farming tickets.

I agree, it is a great feeling when you beat the system and make that premade wake up in Khylo, only to find they’ve already lost to a pug. Sure, the whole PvP system could be a lot better, but it’s still fun most of the time.

Mrbig.8019:

SameHH.1048:

I play condition thief at tournaments and I still own people, thieves are still viable.

Power/crit thieves are not viable anymore.

Condi thief is viable and it will always be ( unless they nerf DB or sneak attack), but 1-1-5-1-1-5- or 3-3-3 is not very fun, really.

Sounds like you’d enjoy playing a different profession more (i.e. initiative system will always favor using your best attack multiple times).

Eddie.9143:

i use bomb kit, flame throw and pistol shield, and my CC is nice, but it’s over quick, and im not as useful after. try to 1v1 an ele lol

Yeah, I should have left…please don’t feel like I’m trying to be argumentative or mean or getting this thread get off topic—I just feel like the engineer has some things that it’s better at than elementalist, and one of them is crowd control.

—bomb kit has aoe blowout on 30 sec cooldown
—flamethrower has aoe knockback on 15 sec cooldown
—shield has aoe knockback on 30/24 second cooldown
—shield has ranged double-daze or melee 2 sec stun on 40/32 sec cooldown
—you still have one utility slot left.
—your elite is probably a 2 sec stun and a net turret (3 sec immobilize every 10 sec)
—you also have 3 aoe blinds: 15, 20, and 25 second cooldowns.

I suppose an ele could get this number of cc skills by taking an off-hand dagger, an earth shield, and a lightning hammer, each of which have two cc skills. Most of those are single-target and elemental weapons have 60 sec cooldowns, though.

I love dueling eles—always fun, interesting fights, not just the same 3-4 skills like all the other professions. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose.

I like the part at the end that says one of the fundamental principles is that no character should be good at everything. This one in particular applies to GW2 because the developers really want to make every profession have a variety of damage, support, and control skills. It’s a good idea, but there’s a danger of players finding a build that’s good against everything, thus destroying any chance of the meta changing.

I should probably just leave threads like this..I guess it just bothers me that my favorite profession is getting misrepresented:

—statements like “other professions use power/crit builds and kill mobs before my damage-over-time skills have even hardly done anything…” (Well…yes, you get the point.)

—statements like “eles are better at absolutely everything, including crowd control.”

Is everyone using pistol/elixir builds or something? Engineers have great power options and way better cc than eles.

tigirius.9014:

Acension.9270:

I am stuck between the two, please give me pros and cons for both

Until they fix the gaping holes in our class I would suggest going ele…they seem to love that class. They buff it and buff it constantly. It’s my last mmo all over again where mages were given everything and no one else would play any other class because they were all nerfed to death.

Expect everyone to be eles and warriors in the future Anet if you continue this trend.

It’s strange how everyone who chose engineer keeps telling you to choose elementalist. By the way, elementalists got a pretty large nerf last patch.

I, for one, choose to not do things that I don’t like. I’m playing an engineer and I like it. They have a certain depth—eles are probably a bit more complicated, but engineer has never felt like memorizing arbitrary skill sequences to me, because everything on our kits has a low cooldown. So, whereas elementalists rely on chaining similar complicated rotations of skills each fight on long cooldowns, engineers can use a small number of skills effectively or use massive, flexible skill rotations.

Actually all of our rifle attacks hit multiple enemies except net shot and overcharge, which are, to my knowledge, the lowest cooldown ranged immobilize and blowout in the game, respectively.

Pistol/Pistol is designed to be an attrition/damage over time weapon set. I agree that you should be able to play how you want and be as viable as any other profession, but you should make weapon/trait/utility choices that make sense with the style you want to play.

In other words, someone else might want to play an attrition style, and they should probably use pistol/pistol or pistol/shield. Why would you deny them the ability to play their style by making pistol a power weapon with similar output to a greatsword warrior?

There are no traditional healers in this game, even if people build completely for support. A traditional healer has:

1. great healing,
2. low armor,
3. low damage,
4. low cc

In GW2, the traditional “support” spec is

1. low healing,
2. high armor,
3. low damage,
4. high cc

Yes, that does make this game ten times as difficult to balance as a standard MMO. Give it time.

Hindsight is 20/20. No one expected that people would join tournaments for anything other than competitive playing, so tournaments weren’t supposed to need matchmaking. No one complains that paid tournaments don’t have matchmaking, because they don’t need it. It was the same for free tournaments.

Shortly after release, it became apparent that hotjoin wasn’t working out for many casual players, so free tourneys had to support both premades and pugs.

Would you have seen this coming in March/April of this year in time to plan for it? People loved hotjoin in the beta weekends.

The artwork and “vertical” concept is terrific. I also have a soft spot for mountain dojos. I haven’t played enough matches to know if the buff system feels well balanced, but overall it seems really good so far.

I think there are elements of this game that make a lot of sense in duels/small deathmatches. Since every build has support/control/damage to varying degrees, large-scale fights feel a little bit absurd (i.e. knock someone down, kill him before he can get up, repeat).

I would love to try some 2v2 or 3v3 arenas. I’m not sure the current profession balance could support it, though, so it would need testing. And if the professions just don’t support it yet, let’s not clamor that it be released too soon.

Anet is loyal to their player base. Their player base is probably 90 to 95 percent PvE.

Considering the few thousand (ish?) players who regularly PvP, Anet has put in quite a bit of manpower. Not sure what you’re asking them to do here.

Zawaka.5170:

I feel that balancing around casual players and not pro’s is not a good way to make a game into an E-sport.

-snip-

Some are barely possible to kill (if at all * cough* guardian cough). The Thief Class needs to be more durable.

Many professional (paid) players in other games have started to call for balancing games to casuals, because games die when all the casuals quit after they get cheese gibbed.

Before this patch, I rarely saw more than 1-2 thieves in a tournament because bunkers are a hard counter to roamers. Since bunkers got nerfed/bug fixed more than thieves got nerfed/bugfixed, I have seen up to six out of ten thieves in a tournament, all doing quite well.

tl;dr? Thieves received a nerf to pubstomping, but a buff to competitive matches because of the harsher fixes to bunkers.

I’ve played a bleed warrior a bit, and yes, they can stack up way more bleeds than a condition engineer can. If you want to play conditions in solo PvE just for fun, then yes, warriors will do more damage. (Not nearly as much damage as either class built power/crit, of course).

In PvP, I think the main difference is that the warrior can’t really apply any other conditions, so it’s really easy to remove their bleed stacks. I’d rather have poison, burn, and five stacks of bleeding on a target than 20 stacks of bleeding and nothing else…

If people want to switch professions after this mostly positive patch, what will they do after an actual nerf?

And Kimbald, my favorite spec is also four kits. No one can blame you for choosing (imo) the most fun build in the game.

I’m sorry guys. I’ve only played a few matches on ele, and I certainly don’t have the guts to now.

On the plus side, I have this urge to mail gold to all elementalists that I see in a tourney now, just out of respect.

NevirSayDie.6235:

Everyone thinks eles got hit really hard but the way I read the patch notes, they can still do 4 dodge blast finishers in 10 seconds, right? They just have to switch attunements between each dodge roll now.

Hmm, just checked the ele forum and it looks like I was wrong. No more blast finishers at all. Looks like I have to eat my words on that one—looks like eles are back to being the weakest profession.

For PvP, engineers were not nerfed nearly as much as the other two viable bunker professions (well, they weren’t actually nerfed—just some very advantageous bugs got fixed). Since bunkers have been causing problems recently, my guess is that Anet wanted to prevent all the guard + ele players from just hopping on to the next best bunker. FoTM is bad.

I think everyone was expecting a buff, and instead there were just bug fixes, which were much more necessary. It will take maybe three more patches this size before the rest of the bugs are fixed, and only then will they be able to consider buffing the profession in general.

Might have to start taking toolkit over flamethrower now…crazy. Very few people use grenades in PvP, so that one made me scratch my head. The nerf to Elixer R was probably necessary, since there are very few skills that can do stuff like that and they’re all on long CDs—but it makes it even less likely that I’ll ever take it.

Props to the PvP team for implementing some good community suggestions and ignoring a whole lot of poor community suggestions.

Thief workaround was excellent—slightly reduces their ability to make new players uninstall without touching their viable tournament builds. Bunker guardians are still the best at point defense, but less buggy and less cheesy. Everyone thinks eles got hit really hard but the way I read the patch notes, they can still do 4 dodge blast finishers in 10 seconds, right? They just have to switch attunements between each dodge roll now.

Zosk.5609:

It doesn’t. This whole thing is fundamentally flawed and they are going to have to give classes more pronounced themes, strengths and weaknesses if they want the game to be interesting and balanced for fights one group or larger. But I’m not sure they will bother since according to these forums, the PvP audience is made up mostly of people who want a WoW Arena-like experience. They should just make 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5 deathmatch and be done with it?

People are going on about zerging but they really should be asking themselves why maps that support 10-20 people per side in every other game feel like complete chaos, chicken-head-cut-off-running and button mashing with just 8 people per side. But it again, won’t get much attention probably because people here will tell people who enjoy the type of play in scenarios in other games they should just go play WvW….

I wouldn’t say the whole thing is fundamentally flawed, but I agree it is fundamentally flawed for large-scale fights because there are no “priority targets” like in most MMO’s. “Trinity” fights are less hectic, even 10v10 or more, because the 3 dps on each team are trying to kill the 3 healers on the other team.

Here, everyone fights everyone, and 3v3 feels about as hectic as 10v10 in a traditional MMO setup.

If you’re worried about money, you can pick up four major divinity runes for a few silver. Same crit damage, you only lose out on +5 of each stat. Cost is about…1% of the superior runes.

Schwahrheit.4203:

Bleed + confusion (Sword + Sword/Mace + Shield). Its kind of a counter-pick type of build but its workable.

Haha, awesome, I’m not the only one. I just started using it as an anti-bunker build (warrior is an alt for me). It seems to be painfully bad at everything EXCEPT dueling bunkers 1v1…for that it was awesome.

What utilities would you recommend for this build? Also, rune for double bleed duration or more condition damage? I’d like to play in this spec more.

Very nice work. I feel hipster maining an engineer again.

Let’s face it, guys, removing the healer was a gutsy move. I almost always play healer classes because I like support roles, but I knew from day one that it wouldn’t work in GW2. Basically, we got what was advertised.

It makes things more difficult to balance, but not impossible. Standard trinity is easy to balance: everyone knows the assassin is supposed to be able to kill the healer in 1.5 seconds, and that the tank can last forever unless attacked by 3+ people at once. They’re still tweaking that here. It’s just plain harder.

The one thing that is difficult to swallow is the way every profession can spec for every role: I can have control-burst, or support-tank. I’d rather have to choose. I commend Anet for making every role viable for every profession (to an extent), but when it comes to PvP, I’d rather have my support professions be less tanky, and my burst specs depend on those controllers.

evilapprentice.6379:

KB, KD, Pull, and Launch are all currently more powerful than stun, and need to be brought in line with stun.

I generally disagree when people say there’s too much cc in an RPG (even though I main a profession with no stability in this game). But this is really true. I stopped taking a stunbreaker because it seems to be one of the least-used and least-dangerous forms of cc. Even immobilize seems more dangerous to me than a stun (~double the duration of stun, difficult to remove if there are other conditions on you, etc).

Click both mouse buttons.

I’ve gotten ruined ori chunks while in combat several times, even though I don’t have a problem in combat with lower resources. Problem solved, no reason to assume the OP is mistaken.

Sprawl.3891:

The simple point is casual players should play against causals and organized teams against organized teams. GW2 doesn’t allow that, every other game does. Hence the barrier.

To be fair, Anet’s original plan was that casuals would all play 8v8, and tournaments would be for competitive players (although they gave you the option of solo-queueing and knowing you’d be playing pug vs premade).

Unfortunately, 8v8 didn’t turn out to be very fun for a lot of casual players, so they joined tournaments. Actually, I think Anet has done a really good job with all aspects of PvP—except taking care of the bottom level of PvPers. And now it’s hurting.

Interesting idea. So far, the competitive PvP content has appealed more to casual players than competitive players, and the casual content has gone downhill fast. (In other words…8v8 has problems and low-rank players prefer to solo-queue free tournaments.)

So…it could work. I would definitely give it a try. The few remaining competitive teams would still crush everything in free tourneys to get tickets, and then crush everything in paid tourneys because of all the pugs, though, right? Unless I’m not understanding the idea correctly.

A final check: I haven’t tried queueing for a paid tournament solo. I thought paid tourneys were still premade-only?

Wallach.7291:

I suppose it is ironic that it is the Engineer that is handed a bunch of dysfunctional systems and left to figure out how to make them work. Who says role playing is dead?

Hahaha, I love this. And I can honestly say I love being left to figure out how to make it work.

I do agree with most of the above points as well. Every weapon/kit the engineer has some major flaws, and yet it’s just possible to almost make up for those deficiencies by making good, difficult choices. I think this is the way all the professions are supposed to function: you can’t have everything in your build.

On the downside, I will admit that I usually choose to make up for the flaws by taking at least two kits out of the 4 utilities (including healing). My favorite build uses four kits. I wouldn’t mind feeling like I could safely use some of those fun gadgets/turrets/whatever without leaving huge holes in my build, but I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

One somewhat-related thought: don’t envy the elementalist too much—they have the best support bunker build in the game right now, but their other builds are a little below average. And, to top it off, there are only a few utility skills that bunker elementalists can really benefit from.

It was unfortunate that the original vision of damage/support/control turned into burst/bunker so quickly. I think Anet’s commitment to giving every profession multiple viable damage/support/control builds is awesome, but it certainly made things very near impossible to balance. In a traditional trinity, no one complains that the healers can’t build for burst damage.

That said, they will have to be super careful in nerfing stuff. It’s going to take a lot of time, and there are only a few simple fixes. Also, Anet is committed to their player base, which is overwhelmingly PvE right now. It’s fairly narcissistic to complain that Anet is spending more time on PvE than PvP.

Faction.4013:

Im finding it rather hysterical that nobody has atually answered the OPs question, rather then just saying how great they are in WvWvW with Grenades…

I use a Flamethrower, so I wouldn’t know sadly.

+1. Yay for forums.

Since only the 2nd skill does a bleed, it’s a little tough to use as condition damage. Poison (on the #5) is more valuable for the heal debuff than the damage. However, with bleed/burn on crit, it’s not bad, since there are three chances to proc on each grenade throw. Even the 6% bleed chance trait is acceptable because, if you throw into a zerg or have good aim, you’ll get the 6% three times, i.e. 18% chance.

Even with all the additional condition chances, I think power/crit is better. Maybe after they add sigils with kits you could take earth sigil for another bleed…

Unless you play with friends that absolutely refuse to take a ranged weapon and want you to have a mortar, supply drop is hands down better than either one.