Guild Wars 2

They changed it not long after launch, so about two months ago. I just mean it’s odd that they would go in and change the trait, change the tooltip, and still leave it incorrect…well, it’s not a huge deal one way or the other, I suppose.

Were you being down-leveled when you checked the scaling on Juggernaut toughness? I can’t check this since I’m at 80, but it seems that it should give you the full 200 toughness unless your entire toughness stat is being reduced. I believe you, it just seems strange that in a fairly recently-changed trait there would still be another tooltip error. I understand that they’re focusing on bug fixes first and tooltip updates later, but like you say, you’d think both traits and tooltips would act the same way.

Bong.6238:

What… this doesn’t solve a thing.
The reason why people aren’t playing tpvp is mainly because the ticket fee is so high. On top of that, it’s really unlikely that a player on his first tpvp session w/o prior competitive tournament experience will get past the first map.

Your solution is even more offputting. Might as well rename the “Join as Solo” into “Destroy 5 tournament tickets.”

He’s talking about free tournaments. I’m just pointing this out to (hopefully) shield you slightly from a flood of 6-8 disheartening comments about your reading ability, since so many people seem to love handing out insults. Honest mistake, no harm no foul.

You’re not the only one—there are currently rendering issues for character models coming out of stealth, which sometimes leaves them invisible for another few seconds. It’s frustrating, but you can still:

—target them, even though you can’t see them
—aoe
—watch the direction that turrets/pets/summons/clones attack
—run away

…and that’s all I can think of right now. Fixing this would go a long way toward making hotjoin more bearable.

Perfectly said. If I may offer some relationship advise, perhaps consider not seeing each other for a few days, and then re-evaluating?

Speaking plainly, I do think things will get better. Their original plan was to begin by appealing to the casual PvPer and add paid/competitive features after launch. Unfortunately, they 1) didn’t predict how lame 8v8 would be, and 2) couldn’t decide if they should balance the top level or the bottom level.

Thanks for humoring me. It’s relaxing to just vent opinions about a game because I know it’s not life-changing, just a fun escape.

I think we’ve been playing the engineer very differently so elixir R is probably a better choice for your build than mine. That said, I refer you to my previous two posts, as I believe they address your questions about why I chose to defend the skill and why I feel it fits with the engineer but not other professions. Thanks for a good discussion.

snaplemouton.1294:

tl;dr? You are an engineer and I can tell by how you try to defend elixir R. Just like thieves defend their daggers.

I don’t usually get into forum “debates,” because they’re pretty pointless…but I feel like giving a couple clarifications for some reason:

—Anet rightly considers casual and competitive players when balancing. My point was that elixer R is not a “grief” tactic that scares away new players (such as backstab thieves), nor is it a skill that ruins competitive tournament balance (like the old juggernaut). It’s generally a useful utility that works as it was meant to work.

—I play engineer a lot but rarely take elixir R in tournament matches. I’m defending it because it’s a fun part of the profession, and because I feel like defending it.

—I agree, it would probably be OP on another profession, that already has two weapon sets and another mechanic. Utility is the engineer’s mechanic.

—For six professions, there are ten weapon skills and three utilities. For the ele, 20 weapon skills, three utilities. For the engineer? Five weapon skills, and anywhere from 8-22 utility skills. That’s why engineer’s utilities are more “precious,” although certainly they are important for every profession.

—To other posters: saying “learn to play” is not usually the best way of making a point.

Same old story—the good players destroy their own game by trolling all the new/casual players.

I agree that glass cannon thieves aren’t a problem at the top level, but they’re a real problem for casual 8v8. Yes, you should be concerned about that.

Because free tournaments weren’t designed for this. Hot join was supposed to be for solo-queue PvP, but no one likes 8v8 so they are trying to “hot-join” free tourneys.

Basically, Anet needs to either make 8v8 more fun, or make free tourneys pug-friendly. Right now there is no place for new or casual PvPers to go.

I’ve run elixer R from time to time, and it’s a lot of fun when you actually pull it off. But please remember the engineer relies on wacky, unpredictable tactics like this, since without them he would just be a weaker version of any other profession. Here’s why elixer R doesn’t merit the nerf bat:

—There are several counters to it. I suppose if you’re running a condition build with no knockbacks it would be difficult to compete with. I’m not sure we need to nerf it just for that, though.

—It fills one of the engineer’s three precious utility slots and has an 85 second cooldown. It had better be good. The engineer’s utility slots are more important than their weapon in most cases. Imagine giving up your second weapon slot for this skill.

—If I lose a fight once, I’ll probably lose it again after I get back up with only a few thousand hp.

—It’s not as frustrating to new players as getting ganked by burst builds; it’s also not very effective in top-level matches. Backstab got nerfed because it broke casual PvP; the flamethrower stability got nerfed because it broke top-level PvP. This doesn’t break either.

tl;dr? Roll an engineer and give it a try. It’s fun, but not game-breaking.

There have already been a lot of helpful (and not) comments above, so I’ll try to hit some things that often get overlooked:

Grenades: yes, hands down the best pure dps; roughly equal to rifle or bombs until level 60, way better after:
—The tooltip for grenades shows the damage of one grenade. Without the grenadier trait, each skill throws two grenades, or double the tooltip damage; with the grenadier trait, three grenades.

—Each grenade applies a stack of vulnerability, and each grenade can proc the burn/bleed on crit (although the internal cooldowns prevent that from being overpowered).

—You can throw grenades behind yourself while running forward.

Utility/support builds:

—Turrets are not affected by your stats. In other words, you can have stats full of toughness and vitality and your turrets will hit just as hard as being full power/prec/crit. This makes them bad for dps builds, good for support builds.

—Super elixer removes a condition (not noted on tooltip) and the elixer gun AA applies weakness. Nice.

—Most blinds in game (pistol, bomb kit, grenade kit, flamethrower). They are all aoe/multiple target, too.

—Most immobilizations in game (rifle, off-hand pistol, bomb kit, net turret, net turret toolbelt, supply drop).

tl;dr? There are lots of fun quirks to the engineer that make them as powerful as other professions. True, other professions don’t have to rely on fun quirks, but I think it’s great.

Aether McLoud.1975:

MarkedOne.1309:

everytime I join there are people under rank 10. yes under rank 10 mostly under 5. they have no clue what to do and myself higher ranked player dont wanna waste time (which they do) so I just leave when I see people with basic outfit.

Yes, it is bad, but newbies join tournaments and ruin other people experiences since there is no balance of ranks/ team/pug.

Yeah people with basic outfits are an instalose. I hate those, those are ALWAYS complete noobs. But how do you leave a tournament? I always get ported back in…

Hmm, so if we just got rid of all the new players, we’ve have a great, empty game

Seriously though, 8v8 hot join is so frustrating it’s no wonder they go straight to tournaments. As I said before, pugging free tournaments is becoming the new entry-level PvP, because even if you go against a premade of rank 50’s, it can’t be any less fun than 8v8 clockwise zerg with 3 professions.

Maybe instead of forcing those rank 10’s to fight 4v5, you should play with them and lose gracefully. If you don’t queue with a premade your chances aren’t that great anyway. So why give four other players a bad experience?

And that’s why competitive players should actually care about the casual community. Thieves aren’t OP in high-level play, but they have effectively killed hot join, and that is now hurting free tournaments (all the casual/new players are leaving 8v8 and solo queueing tournies). Same old story: all the good players destroy their own game by trolling noobs.

Another thing point defenders add to a match is the necessity to be aware of who and where you’re fighting. I think the reason a lot of people hate bunkers so much is they keep on starting long, pointless duels with a bunker on a node the bunker’s team controls. Or, long, pointless 1v2, 2v2, 3v2, etc.

I think Anet will (and should) add a team deathmatch so that people can just run to the middle of the map and fight the other team. I don’t mean that to sound condescending—most people prefer deathmatch style, and it’s no less competitive than objective-based matches. However, some people (like myself) really enjoy that other element of having to constantly decide where to fight. Those decisions usually win or lose the game. On top of that, some people go bunker because they dislike fights that are over too fast.

Why call for the nerf bat when what people really want is to not have to worry about capping points?

—Use a clearly-defined build when you pug, unless you’re just playing a hybrid build because you like the way it feels (I can respect that). Hybrid builds can work, but your team won’t work well with you if you aren’t able to quickly describe your role (bunker, damage, support/control).

—Leave/don’t engage in fights that don’t help your team control points.

—Most of the time, follow even a poor plan.

Oh, and…

—Know your key binding to look behind you, and use it in forest of niflhel while fighting your npc.

I’ll definitely be watching this thread to pick up helpful info myself. There’s no better feeling than winning pug vs. premade.

Hot join isn’t really functioning well as a way to have a competitive, but still somewhat casual, PvP experience—so many players look to free tournaments to fill that pug need. Unfortunately, that’s a job free tournies weren’t really designed to do.

By the way, if 3+ in a party all go into the same queue…by definition, there won’t be any single- or duo- queue people to finish the group. The only options are anything goes (current)—or—5-man or nothing.

My humble opinion is that this is due to lackluster performance of balanced builds in general. Seems most “balanced” builds don’t have enough defense/utility to survive bursts, and don’t have enough dps/burst to get a bunker down.

I’ve seen a lot of great warriors play an essential role in their team, it just isn’t usually sustained dps like you seem to be going for. That said, warriors are not one of the current “mandatory” professions for tournaments.

In other news, even if you’re just asking a simple, reasonable question, don’t be surprised if you hear multiple “L2P” rants thrown your way. Seems to be the new way to show other gamerz that ur l33t.

Master Charles.7093:

NevirSayDie.6235:

—The amount of complaining about OP professions is not really any greater here than most other game forums.
—I have no information, but I’m going to guess that there are somewhere between 10 to 20 times as many casual sPvP players than serious tourney players. Wouldn’t you expect to see 10 to 20 times as many posts from them?
—As stated in many other threads, tournament balance is fairly decent right now but the casual scene is not very good.
—I think a simple TD is usually good for casuals just hopping on to PvP for half an hour. I’m not sure GW2 is ready for that because some professions are not real great at fighting but have viability for point control. So, 3 person TDM would not really see anything other than the four current casual professions.

Agreed, but wouldn’t it be more practical to balance the professions against each other (for combat) instead of for one single mode, effectively boxing the whole game in?

Yes. Come to think of it, no one cares about point control in casual PvP anyway so they may as well just switch it over to TDM. It will be the same four professions, but at least they won’t have to pretend to capture stuff. For that matter, the tourney community doesn’t really seem to like point control either (translate: “point defense is OP!”).

—The amount of complaining about OP professions is not really any greater here than most other game forums.
—I have no information, but I’m going to guess that there are somewhere between 10 to 20 times as many casual sPvP players than serious tourney players. Wouldn’t you expect to see 10 to 20 times as many posts from them?
—As stated in many other threads, tournament balance is fairly decent right now but the casual scene is not very good.
—I think a simple TD is usually good for casuals just hopping on to PvP for half an hour. I’m not sure GW2 is ready for that because some professions are not real great at fighting but have viability for point control. So, 3 person TDM would not really see anything other than the four current casual professions.

Edit: that probably sounded a little negative toward the 3-man TDM idea. I actually think it’s a great idea, just probably can’t be implemented for several months.

Kits. Playing four kits is like being an elementalist, but being able to customize which set of weapon skills you want for each attunement.

Engineers did not get many fixes because they are doing okay in all areas of the game right now. It’s a simple principle of fix what’s broken the worst. Engis are definitely not OP but they are doing decently well in PvE, WvW, and tPvP. That’s not true of every profession.

Yes, there are still a ton of bugs but they’re not preventing the profession from being viable.

Edit: in response to questions about nerfs: the flamethrower losing stability was a huge nerf as far as tournament PvP goes, I think the biggest nerf any profession has gotten. But it was absolutely necessary. Every tournament team would have three engineers if permanent stability was still available.

From my limited experience, I think there are about seven professions currently being used successfully by the best of the best teams. Seven out of eight: actually very good balance. Unfortunately, two professions are practically mandatory for a top team right now, but it’s a good start (we’re only two months past release, after all).

At the hot join level, from my limited experience, I would say there are only about 4 successful professions, mostly due to a low skill floor and deathmatch-style play (sure, there are points but…everyone knows no one cares about points in hot joins).

There’s a reason we’re seeing so many of the same few professions in hot joins: the other professions found nothing fun about sPvP. They came, they got ganked, they left. Goodbye. They won’t recommend GW2 to their friends, they won’t buy expansions, they won’t become tourney-level players. If I were the CEO of Anet, I would rather have a million more people enjoy the game, than to see all 8 professions viable for a few thousand top players.

I would add that turrets are not dependent on your stats, so you can run two pistols with condition damage stats and still throw down direct damage with turrets. Sure, it won’t be the best build, but it’s definitely viable as long as you’re not in tournament pvp.

+1 for the correct recognition that bunkers were a reaction to powerful burst builds. I’m fine with seeing some adjustments, but these accusations that people who choose to play point defense are “ruining” a point-defense game is…odd.

I don’t know why I always feel compelled to chime in on these numerous threads…

I usually play a bunker engineer whether I’m in a premade or pugging, because I like the way it plays and it’s viable but not OP.

I realize there are balance tweaks that need to be made, and I’m okay with that. Some builds still have great support, control, damage, and survivability, in a game where we were supposed to have to choose. I just hope we are still allowed to choose point defense, especially since the only game mode is point defense.

People who play bunkers do so as a reaction to powerful burst builds. The players who really lose out are the ones who enjoy using balanced builds, since they lose to burst and can’t kill bunkers. Unfortunately, nerfing bunkers won’t make balanced builds any better, so…I’ll give you three guesses to what kind of builds we’ll see after that.

Vorpal.4683:

Bunkers are not the problem. Players who want to run around in glass cannon mode and never have to adopt tactics are the problems.

There are many classes that can wreak havoc with bunker builds (necro being the most easily learned). So then you have roamers, damage, bunkers, and anti-bunkers.

That sounds way more fun than 5 thieves running around in full glass cannon mode which is what the game would come down to with no bunkers.

This guy has played more than one profession. Well said.

I think Anet knows better than to nerf defensive builds. Contrary to what a few players seem to think, bunkers are the only thing saving tPvP right now. Why else wouldn’t you go with five mobile burst builds?

Perhaps guardians are stronger than other bunker professions, since they don’t really have to sacrifice anything to be so tanky. Bunkering as an engineer is a lot more fun, but they can’t damage anything or walk to a point and neutralize it with several seconds of area denial. Guardians do already have a couple of fatal weak spots that other people have noted, though.

As I noted on another thread exactly like this one, right now half of the game seems to revolve around knocking someone down and killing him before he can get up. That doesn’t sound exciting to me, so I defend points, which is the other half. We’re seeing some new things pop up—anti-guardian necros, for example. All of those things would be lost with a nerf to bunker viability.

I tried using the +15% stun duration sigil in my shield tonight, and I actually really like it. That extra third of a second seems just long enough to scare people. Just gives me that much more satisfaction when I land my shield 5 on someone, and makes supply drop .3 seconds more awesome. Since I’ve never been able to notice any affect at all using any other sigil, this is actually feeling kind of nice.

Arenanet has made it clear that some professions are more complicated than others. They have also not hidden which professions are simple and which are complex. An observation:

—Many good players roll simple professions, and then type “l2p” on these forums. I am not trolling—I have no doubt you are a good player. I realize there is skill in positioning and timing, but you will probably enjoy the game more if you play a more complicated character.

—Many players rolling complicated professions feel ripped off that a 2-3 skill rotation can kill them, because their profession has nothing that easy. Try out some other professions—you may like them. If not, just realize that the easy professions were meant to be easy, and you will have to counter their few abilities with quick reflexes, well thought-out builds, extensive knowledge of your opponent’s skill set, and a much larger set of abilities.

Yes, there are balance issues. Yes, some people should practice before they complain. Yes, I realize there aren’t any games with “good community” anymore, especially not in pvp—but maybe we can hate each other a little bit less?

Do you have condition procs on crit? I also regularly notice drawing a large amount of aggro, both from mobs and bosses. My current theory is that AoE draws mobs, and procs or a combination of direct damage and conditions adds up to more aggro from bosses.

I use the stacking condition damage for my pistol when I bunker. Sure, my damage is still bad but it’s a more significant increase than a “chance on crit” sigil that will probably never proc a single time in a match, due to low crit and rarely using the weapon.

I still don’t know what to use for the shield, since stacking sigils don’t seem to work in shields. I’m honestly not sure if there’s even one nominally-useful sigil for the shield.

Also remember that the 5% damage only increases the direct damage, not condition damage. So it’s really more of a 1% total damage increase.

In a way, bunker specs are the only ones working correctly: a bunker gives up his damage, mostly for the ability to “control” a little bit more. Most other builds have damage, support, and control.

I think what we are seeing now is bunkers as a reaction to burst specs that can have great support skills on their second weapon set, great control from their traits/utility/main weapon set, and still lay down huge damage.

I like the idea of fulfilling a “role” on a team, which is why I play a bunker. I started out playing a rifle CC build, before I realized that my teammates could put down about as much CC and actually hurt people, too.

Most other good builds right now just seem like tiny variations on the same old theme of knocking someone down and killing him before he can get up. This is still a “role-playing game,” right? Why not let people play the point defender role? It’s the only other “role” left to fill.

Gotta chime in because I play a bunker engineer—I haven’t bunkered much with a guardian, and it does seem easier, but I can tell you that as an engineer I will typically use 21-22 different skills in a 1v1. If I use them all correctly, I usually live. I have 3500 defense and can still be downed by an average burst profession in about 3-4 seconds if I don’t actively avoid damage. Oh yeah, and engineers have no stability. So, if you think that a bunker engi is “easily” healing through all your damage…

On the other hand, it is a letdown that the vision of “damage – support – control” actually just turned out to be “burst” and “bunker.” I hope as weaker professions continue to get fixed we’ll see more variety and more tactics.