Guild Wars 2

Skill disparity is a real issue because for newer/more casual players, builds that are relatively easy to play will be way stronger than the higher skillfloor builds. If the disparity is too great, the harder professions begin to look horribly underpowered.

That said, I would rather see the easiest builds become harder than see engineers become easy. And I support the design concept that the professions should be equally powerful, but with different levels of complexity.

I do feel the gap has grown slightly too large, but again, the problem is at the low end, not the high end. Let’s make warriors are little less braindead before accusing engineers of being too hard.

CallousEye.5018:

There is a spread of skills that provide burning, poison, bleeding, and typically a small amount of confusion. I think the most notable skill is grenade kit #2, but with shrapnel the grenade auto has a decent chance to proc a 15s bleed.

Sorry, I was attempting to respond to the OP. Didn’t check the names…:p I hadn’t even looked at your builds until now, heheh…

Rieselle.5079:

I don’t understand why you still show the rank of players in a match. It’s obviously causing a lot of player confusion and QQ pretty much from day 1. And i can’t think of any good reason to display it, especially after it’s been blatantly exploited/farmed.

I’d support removing rank display at the end of matches. Unfortunately, our playerbase can’t handle that information.

jimmyimo.2089:

This also includes PvE-ers that Solo Q’d once.

It actually takes 11 games to be rated.

Also, anyone who hasn’t played since the reset is not rated.

So my best guess is:

There are currently between 10k and 20k players who have played at least 11 solo queue matches in the NA region in the last three weeks.

You have just as many total stat points as everyone else in PvP, but the starting builds are not necessarily optimal. Also, ele is a pretty difficult profession to succeed with in PvP, so you’ll likely feel weak for a while.

CallousEye.5018:

I tried the bomb healing build since my last post, but found it not too my liking and went right back to the condition damage setup.

Just out of curiousity, how many attacks do you have that inflict a damaging condition?

Try changing your traits a bit—maybe give up firearms for explosives III, or energized armor for power shoes (Inventions VIII) and speedy kits for elixir-infused bombs (Inventions XI). You don’t benefit from condition damage very much—protection injection will likely serve you better.

Your runes give critical damage but you will get critical hits very rarely, so that’s not very optimal. You’d do more damage by just getting runes with power, or you could get runes that help you survive better. You might want a sigil of energy or battle rather than a passive 5% crit bonus, which will barely increase your damage at all (probably about 2% total dps increase).

Engineer was announced last and came very late in development in regards to bugfixes and QA. At launch, we were a strange mix of grossly overpowered and non-functional.

The dev team worked really hard and things have been pretty good now for a while. A few of the old lower-priority (read: not gamebreaking) problems remain.

I’m curious as to which area of the game you feel engineer doesn’t work well in? I can’t speak much to PvE, but as far as I can tell we’re doing just fine in PvP and WvW. If you want, hop on one of the “better” professions and come duel me sometime, I’d love to change your opinion about this amazing profession

manveruppd.7601:

Justin ODell.9517:

It would not be a simple change for the existing systems unfortunately. We also can’t just slip things in to random updates like that for many good reasons which I agree with but can’t get into on the forums.

There’s actually one very simple thing you can do to improve things: new players are limited to hotjoin, solo arenas unlock at rank 20, team arenas at rank 30 (ballpark of course).

Rank 30 is something like 100-200 hours of hotjoin. I would never condone sentencing a new player to 200 hours of hotjoin before being allowed into ranked matches.

There are often guilds that try PvP together for the first time, and I think a lot more will be doing it now that rewards are being revamped. There are also second accounts, NA players forming an EU account and vice versa, and the occasional really good WvW player who just hasn’t done that much PvP yet.

The best solution is to keep growing the PvP playerbase, like they’ve been focusing on with new rewards and just making the game better. Even in perfect circumstances, random teams will still be random. You could have a high-ranked teammate who happens to be playing drunk, or the other team could have a new player who played 10 solo queues, lost them all, then spent a month practicing in dueling servers and came back a hundred times better. There’s simply no way to make random arenas not have a random element.

Chuck Zitto.2367:

Partly true I don’t deny that my engi is pretty darn tanky and really good support. Super elixir and bombs also heal other enemies which is nice. However it thing is it takes a lot of work trait points and healing power to get the same healing as a warrior gets passively with 0 healing power. The joke in our spvp team is I say im gonna switch to my warrior for a few rounds of god mode. They really are super easy mode.

I agree. Nothing makes me feel worse than seeing a warrior just stand in poison nades, fire bomb, smoke bomb, everything, but it doesn’t matter because…warrior.

However, we need to be more accurate. Warrior can put out crazy good healing for a zerker build, great cc options for a high dps build, etc. But a zerker warrior can’t outheal a cleric engineer no matter what—not even close. I feel the devs would be more likely to respond to forum feedback if we were right about stuff more often.

Chuck Zitto.2367:

I usually run a support bunker cleric gear engi on my spvp team or my warrior. My warrior with zerker trinket healing singet adrenal heal and banner regen grants me more healing than my cleric gear engi and the warrior healing is all passive. Meaning I can focus on fighting while all the healing is done passively. On my engi I have to give up elixir 409 condi clense to get backpack generater. I have to switch to elixir gun and toss super elixir on the ground. I have to toss elixir h down and hope I get regen or protection and use elixir gun f1 skill to try to keep regen up. I also have to switch to bombs and spam #1 key for bomb healing all to still get less overall healing then what I get passively from my warrior that has 0 HEALING POWER. Its not even a comparison.

Switch to healing turret to instantly double your support healing and improve your personal healing at the same time. If you don’t have 409 or HGH (I’m guessing) healing turret is better than elixir H in every way. Don’t use bombs just for the healing; use them for the attacks and benefit from the extra healing when you can. Use elixir gun toolbelt skill as a stunbreak only; you’ll have plenty of regen already.

With zerker amulet, a warrior’s HS+AH+perma regen should equal about 650 healing per second. That’s pretty powerful, but keep in mind that they give up their #6 heal to do that. Your cleric engineer with BR+EIB+SE+perma regen should equal about 500-1000 hps, depending on how often you can use bombs and stand in super elixir. (If you don’t believe me: BR=175+, EIB=up to 350, SE=up to 175, regen=250+). That’s not counting your #6 heal, which is one of the best in the game.

And that’s not counting your healing turret active+overcharge+any blast finishers. Warrior is really powerful right now and has a lot of advantages, but it is simply not true that a zerker war can out-heal a cleric engineer.

Mepheles.2087:

Well I like WoW’s Rated BG’s, and these are more or less the same, with some differences here and there. I don’t know why this one seems to be out of my comfort zone, but I’ll keep trying. As I said, I’m more used to roaming, finding 1v1/2’s if I can survive. It’s just a new experience for me I guess.

The main difference between GW2 PvP and most other MMO’s PvP is that in GW2, everyone has top-tier stats.

It sounds like you might be used to winning 1v2’s in WvW or in other MMOs…that’s still possible in GW2 PvP but it’s extremely difficult.

There are some good PvP builds in this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/post-nerf-replacement-build-for-bomb-nade/3328285

Engineer traits got an overall slight nerf last patch but I actually feel like our build options opened up into some even better possibilities than before.

Engineer is similar to necro in that it can be a good bruiser, like you say: good damage, good survivability. It is different in that most of that survivability comes from mobility and dodging rather than 45k hp and condi flips.

1) Yes.
2) On-swap cooldowns are 9 seconds.

Bombsaway.7198:

Don’t want to hog the forum, but I am the new kid with a lot of “head scratchers”

1) Nades/Bombs force tradeoffs in Explosives. Which do you skip: forceful explosions or shrapnel?

2) Why take backpack regen and speedy kits instead of power shoes and elixir infused bombs? Inventions focus on healing power and toughness is also better than +boon if you are not taking HGH right?

3) How do you map to manage so many kit swaps?

4) Condition removal seems the bane of the nade/bomb engie. For group support and blast based combos, I would want healing turret, but the only real way to remove enough conditions seems to be the med kit’s antidote. Do I need to drop elixir gun for an elixir? That would be disappointing (especially given the long cooldowns).

5) How are you balancing power and crit chance with condition damage? We have a lot of conditions that come on crit and I could argue that a blend of all three stats beats focusing on one. Is that bad theorycraft? How do you manage the balance with nades/bombs/elixir?

6) Do elixir infused bombs have an internal cooldown that is hidden? Otherwise, using bomb I would be able to heal 2x a second right?

Forceful explosions and shrapnel are both good. I usually use forceful explosions, but I’ve been trying shrapnel recently. Shrapnel raises your dps somewhat, forceful explosions is really only for landing fire bomb in a WvW condition build. But landing fire bomb is huge. It’s up to you.

I’ve been taking power shoes over speedy kits recently. I don’t miss the 8% much, and the stats are better for min/maxing than CD reduction and crit damage. Elixir infused bombs is not something I’m willing to give up BR for. In most roaming WvW situations, you’ll use bombs rather rarely.

Not sure what to suggest for mapping. Find something that you know will work well and then stick to it.

Healing turret is much better condition removal than medkit. Drop antidote only removes one condition compared to HT’s two, on the same cooldown. Yes, condition removal is a major weakness of a three-kit engineer build. I’d recommend using a giver’s weapon and +10% condition duration focusing crystal to get to +50%, then using -condi duration food on yourself to somewhat mitigate this.

There is no internal cooldown on EIB. However, there is a slight aftercast. I believe you can drop about five bombs in four seconds. Again, I wouldn’t depend on EIB for much healing in a WvW build unless you really commit to it as a soldier’s/cleric’s frontliner, 10/0/30/30/0.

Lorelei.3918:

Simple question.

If they do, then why do they state that they don’t care about class balance. Isn’t class balance critical to a enjoyable pvp game mode?

Secondly, if they care about WvW, why doesn’t anet make WvW as rewarding as PvE for the time spent playing it?

Try to keep your answers short and simple, so a person could quickly parse the entire thread and get a feel for every ones feelings on this. TL:DR; no walls of txt, plx

—Yes.
—They didn’t state that.
—The nature of farming is that it is more rewarding than other activities.

Jaxs.5830:

In reality most points are scored when we are sleeping and at work/school/etc, so I would guess it doesn’t matter either way.

True, it doesn’t matter. I was just pointing out that it’s odd to hold “not caring about points” as a badge of honor. But then, I find a lot of things odd.

Sorry to interrupt the regular flow of the matchup thread. I have a hard time understanding the formal exchange of petty insults, so sometimes when I try to jump in I end up touching a nerve.

Jaxs.5830:

I guess that makes ratings equally unimportant as well?

PPT is a rigged game that has nothing to do with skill. As such PPT, and the ratings it informs, are a meaningless measure for a competitive activity.

I was half-joking. It sounds very honorable to say “we don’t care about PPT,” but in reality, all that means is that the matchmaker assumes you have a slightly lower population than you actually do. None of it has anything to do with skill.

lucky.8246:

That was actually one of my concerns – with my full exotic rabid set I’m sitting at around ~46% crit chance, and still being relatively new to the Engineer class, I’m not sure if I could tell if those crit procs from Sharpshooter/Sigil of Earth/Incendiary Powder are making a significant difference, or if they are just making an inefficient overkill in refreshing burns or inefficient bleeding damage for the traits spent. I’m wondering if going full Dire (or maybe even Apothecary) and finding other ways to compensate for the lack of crit and on-crit procs (with something like might stacking, for instance) would produce just as effective of condition pressure and damage while improving survivability ?

Incendiary powder is the exception. It is extremely significant. If you are in a large group, the burn may be wasted, but in small fights it’s very tough to keep burning on a target. Fortunately, you don’t need much precision to proc IP every 10-12 seconds.

I also chose to go the route you suggest. I currently have enough rabid for about 25% crit chance, some dire, and just a little apothecary. I probably wouldn’t use apothecary at all except that I just got applied fortitude (the wvw thing that gives you extra vitality) so I felt like I had all the vitality I needed. It’s very tanky and still puts out great pressure. Just make sure you have mobility in your build—you can’t depend on armor to save you from larger groups.

Jaxs.5830:

Yes because we went into gold league with an intention of worrying about PPT.

PPT is all the glicko ratings take into consideration.

Saying “we don’t care about PPT” is the same as saying “we fight at a lower tier than our server population should be matched with because we throw the ratings off a little bit every week.”

;)

Sharpshooter (5 firearms) is only a 33% chance on critical hits to proc a 3 second bleed. In other words, with a 100% crit chance, you’d only get a bleed every 3 hits. With a 33% crit chance, you’ll get a bleed maybe around once per 9 hits. It’s not bad, but don’t plan your build around it. Just think of it as an extra 40-50 damage per second in most builds.

Sigil of earth is a 5 second bleed with a 2-second cooldown. It’s 60% chance on crit, so with grenades and a high crit chance you can stay close to the internal cooldown. However, even if you proc a bleed at exactly every 2 seconds, the most it could add is 2.5 stacks (5 stacks with 100% condi duration). Realistically, it won’t proc at exactly two seconds every time, so you’re likely looking at an extra 1-4 bleed stacks depending on your crit chance and duration.

So they’re definitely not bad, but don’t plan your build around them. If you’re considering lowering your crit and trying different sigil options, on-swap sigils are great for engineers: battle, doom, geomancy, and energy are all decent options, depending on what you’re looking for.

Unfortunately, a lot of people just stop trying when they get down. So matches that would end 500-400 if everyone kept playing end 500-100.

Sounds like the matchmaking is working just fine. It’s the playerbase that’s not functioning very well.

If we stopped calling it stand in the circle pvp, maybe new players would stop standing in circles and dying horribly instead of actually fighting and then asking what they did wrong.

TheWalkingDead.7298:

All hail to our pvp GOD

Who is that scrub on blue team?

I agree with the OP. I think signet of the ether should heal for about 392/sec, not dependent on illusions. Then, its active heal should be reduced to 3275. Also, it should lose the effect of recharging phantasm skills on use.

Hashtagseewhatididthere?

Manuhell.2759:

Frankly, i think they just wanted to nerf it due to pvp, and they have redesigned it to mask the nerf. But then, in actual use, i find quite hard to justify the change. Maybe just when escaping from many enemies (something the tool kit shield does better, anyway).

If your only example of a possibly better shield skill than shield 5 is toolkit 4, then I think I proved my point. I’m not sure if shield 5 is better now or before the change. As for escaping multiple enemies, stunning everyone who hits you is quite a bit better than an extra 1.5 seconds of block. You’ll gain much more distance due to the stun and you won’t be getting hit while the enemies are stunned anyway.

My point was that shield 5 is very possibly the best shield skill in the game. If you feel a different profession has a better shield skill, I’d be interested to hear. I don’t really care if shield 5 arguably got nerfed if it’s still the best shield skill in the game.

STRanger.5120:

You have to be quite crazy to even try to compare this (master major):
Regenerate health every second when using a kit.
Healing: 117 (0.05)

with this(master minor):

Regenerate health based on adrenaline level.
Adrenaline level 1 healing: 125 (0.15)
Adrenaline level 2 healing: 240 (0.15)
Adrenaline level 3 healing: 360 (0.15)

If you add a signet to this, warrior beats any passive regen of an Engi with just these two abilities, and I guess that he doesn’t even need healing power to achieve that…..

Edit: Also calling a weapon skill (elixir gun) a “passive” ability, that’s the stuff man…..

Adrenal Health gives those amounts once every three seconds. At level 3, the total regen is 120/sec + .15*HP. The scaling (.15) is actually exactly the same as backpack regenerator (.05) because BR gives health every second compared to every 3 seconds, so 100 HP will give BR 5 more healing every second, while 100 HP will give AH 15 more healing every 3 seconds. Also, BR continues to give ticks of health for a few seconds after leaving a kit, which means that unless an engineer is staying in his weapon skills for extended periods of time, BR is always working. Even if a warrior kept max adrenaline up constantly, BR would be just as good. In PvP/WvW, BR is significantly better than AH.

Manuhell.2759:

Oh, the good old “you can’t compare between different classes” excuse.
After all, it isn’t like we are most often on the losing side of these comparisons and one of the least played classes after all.
Oh, wait, we are.
And as for the example above, we find ourselves with major traits (that aren’t even always working – it requires a kit being used) that are even weaker than passive minor traits (even in the worst case). And that’s without considering both armor and base health – something that, in the opposite case, would even have made sense.

See above explanation—BR is as good or better than AH in practically all situations. You can directly compare two professions, but you have to have correct information to do so.

Engineers are one of the least played professions in every game. Warriors were played more than engineers even back when warriors were bad at everything except PvE and zerging in WvW.

I don’t have a dog in this race (I don’t play warrior and I don’t feel weak vs. warrior longbow) but I feel like I could add some useful advice:

Cynz.9437:

- that aoe covers entire point… if i walk out of it my team loses points

Please don’t believe the forums when they claim that pvp is about standing on points. Get out of the aoe, stay alive, and kill people. That is way more important than standing on a point. Sure, if you’re playing a bunker and it could be useful to your team for you to stay on the point and eat damage for a few seconds, go for it. Your team will lose control of the point for a lot longer after you die than if you had just gotten out of the aoe and won the fight, so…

Cynz.9437:

- you can remove torment from pin down, not pin down itself, the conditions keep repplying… shs that removes conditions is on 45 sec for example, what’s your point?

Pin down applies immob and six stacks of bleeding, and doesn’t reapply anything over time.

Is the karma train really more profitable than roaming? As a solo roamer, I usually kill tower or keep guards as I pass by to build stacks, get free wxp, contest waypoints, etc. If the karma train flips that objective later, I get credit for it. On top of that, I get to constantly flip camps, sentries, and get kills (although not as many as a zerg would get, obviously).

I’ve never really done much of anything in a large group, so I don’t really know, maybe the bag drops from other players are enough to make it way more profitable. But from where I’m standing, it feels like I’m getting more than a train player.

You may have just entered a different area than the one you remember.

World vs. World (WvW) is large-scale pvp and is kind of open-world (there are resource nodes and pve mobs on the maps). Structured pvp uses small maps and different gear.

WvW is the castle icon at the top left, structured PvP is the crossed swords. They are very different.

I’ve started running a bombs/nades/eg build in wvw recently. I really like it, it’s a ton of fun.

Passive movement increases don’t stack with swiftness, so there’s no reason to want power shoes and speedy kits. Just take one or the other.

I like being tanky so I recently switched to taking power shoes rather than speedy kits. 30/0/20/20/0. Nearly any kind of gear will work for an engineer, anything from dire to rabid/dire mix to celestial to rampager. Just tweak your stats to get your desired ratio of damage:survivability and you’re good to go.

pheroth.5306:

Would love to see somes changes on shield:

- Lower the cooldown of Shield #5 (40s for a 1.5 sec block? geesh)
- Remove the root for Shield #4 Reflect

Shield #5 is possibly the best shield skill in the game, so I’d be wary of lowering the cooldown honestly. I agree that the root on shield #4 is unnecessary. It’s very rare to get to use the skill as anything except a push or a blast finisher, because nobody has time to lock themselves out of skills and movement just for reflection. Removing the root would allow the skill to be more than just a double-tap skill, without actually adding to power creep.

To the Pyro thief on the SBI bl, thanks for the great fights. I’m sorry I /bowed and let you rez after I beat you the first time, because as soon as you got back up your necro buddy came by and you proceeded to try to jump me 2v1 while I was capping the sentry next to your previously downed body. Fortunately, I then killed both of you, so it’s no biggy.

Also a shout-out to the YB warrior who tried to save the camp by your spawn. I’m sorry I killed you after you tried to jump me right as I pulled the guards. I had to stomp you because I wanted to cap the camp. Unfortunately, you were able to respawn and run back before I finished capping. You lost the 1v1 pretty badly, but the banner rez on the supervisor before you went down was a nice touch.

To everyone else, I’m sure (insert your guild name) is much more skilled and more honorable than (insert opposing guild name), just like you say. Keep up the good work.

redslion.9675:

We need this said by an NPC in the mists.XD

An NPC which will explain to new players how things go.XD

Perfect, we need to replace the old tutorials anyway.

Mesmer is the top profession on skyhammer.

Flic.6938:

I have recently been playing solo and team arena, often I have been the one person that claims home at start while rest of team goes to mid etc. My question is once home secure do people want one person to stick to home point no matter what, or leave. If want to leave when

I think it’s always best to leave home in solo queue, unless there is an enemy player in sight. Depending on your build, you could either swing the teamfight in your favor or quickly decap their far point. Either one is much more important than standing on your home point making sure no one comes, especially since your teammates probably won’t get to you in time if you’re attacked by two people anyway.

If you are on skyhammer or spirit watch, I think it’s especially rare to actually need to defend your homepoint. The map mechanics there are so important that your team will likely be very spread out most of the time. Sitting on homepoint on spirit watch will likely give the other team control of the orb, the midpoint, and their homepoint in essentially a 5v4.

The only exception is that if you can bait opposing players into wasting time trying to take your homepoint, you should do it. If you have a build that can stall two people, keep them there as long as possible before getting out.

Engineer has a pretty steep learning curve. You might want to try a build with one or two kits before jumping into a 3-kit build. 3 kits can be amazing but also requires a lot of micro, invisible cooldown tracking, and apm.

A fairly simple build to start with is HGH grenades:
Pistol/pistol
Elixir B, Elixir S, Grenade kit
Elixir H or Healing turret as your healing skill
Rabid amulet
Might duration runes
Sigil of battle
30/0/0/30/10 (shrapnel, incendiary powder, grenadier, fast-acting elixirs, cleaning formula 409, HGH, speedy kits)

It’s a solid build with good utility through stealth, invulnerability and stability. High direct damage with precision and might stacks, high condition damage through pistol skills and shrapnel grenades. It goes down quickly to focused fire and can’t stay in close range long. It has trouble landing damage vs. ranged opponents.

Some more advanced builds can be found from these tournament players:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/post-nerf-replacement-build-for-bomb-nade/3328285

There are also full bunker engineer builds, which excel at decapping and surviving but lack team support:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/PvP-Roflbunker-Build/3352389

People should really check out all the threads from 6-8 months ago that were like “so, any plans to bring warriors into viability?”

Anet has proven they will listen to the community when it repeatedly calls for huge buffs to an underpowered profession. So can we be a little more careful this time, please?

Acandis.3250:

I don’t believe there is any focus on esports currently. We have finally gotten into the start of crafting a roadmap to where we can get the game balanced enough so that it’ll be fun to play, but I think it’s at least 7-10 months away from being there—because of how ducked up things got over the past 7 months.

Once that is done, or at least in a better place, we can start thinking about esports again. Until then, player/community run tournaments will have to do.

#BelieveInGrouch

Exactly this. The forums are obsessed with esports, but that’s about it.

The game launched a bit too early on the pvp side and some core features just hadn’t been made yet. If that fact makes people feel cheated, wronged, or whatever, they need to find a different game—probably one that has been out for 4+ years.

Iksargo.2640:

This post is weird because I am 12-1 with 3 eles on my team.

Careful, anyone who dares claim that eles are possibly nearly okay is subject to death threats in these forums.

It’s safer to just keep pushing for bigger and bigger buffs. Kind of like how we pushed for bigger and bigger buffs for warrior back when they were out of the meta!

I love the combat. High apm =! spam. I enjoy that the game is more about how well you understand the different abilities than managing a resource bar, min/maxing stats, etc.

The game is very simple at its core but with a lot of nuances, which I like. I enjoy the fact that any player below rank 30 is probably not good, because it means the game is hard/complicated enough that it takes time to learn well. It’s the furthest thing from a “standard” possible. There are games that I could just pick up and play well just because they’re a “FPS,” or “RPG,” or whatever, and I know exactly how they’ll work before I install. GW2 is not one of those.

It’s hard to say. For solo roaming, it’s very hard to beat the amazing pressure + survivability of a rabid/dire mix. For groups larger than three, zerker may be better since you’ll trade your survivability and sustained damage for lockdown and burst, which could be better if you have a good group.

Team arenas will usually have one or possibly two true bunker builds per team. There’s simply no way to survive forever against coordinated dps compositions.

Solo arenas are always a mash-up. There could be no bunkers or there could be several, just depends on who you get. Spirit watch and skyhammer are likely to have more people playing bunkers for obvious reasons. Bunkers are a bit more effective in solo queue, since opponents are scared to run full dps builds without a team to fall back on, and it’s harder to coordinate burst.

Allowing tanky builds is important because it discourages balling up. If one player had no chance at stalling in a 1v2 for more than a few seconds, there would be no point in trying, and thus, no point in ever being alone (except for ultra-mobility backcappers who would run from every fight).

No one is really talking about “imba” engineer builds. Engineers are popular in solo queue because they’re a jack of all trades type profession, so they’re obviously a good choice for random teams.

Engineers aren’t extremely popular in WvW or team tournaments. Teams that run engineers usually use a grenade/bomb build that plays kind of like a sidepoint duelist with teamfight dps through grenades. In teamfights, it’s very vulnerable to focused fire, conditions (usually) and especially immobilize. In duels, it’s vulnerable to ranged sustained dps, like a necro, a phantasm mesmer, a thief who knows how to stay in shortbow, etc.

The effect is a little weaker than other traits/skills like “remove a condition every ten seconds,” but not much. And it’s a minor trait while the others are utilities/major traits.

The cooldown becomes exponentially more effective the less you get hit. In other words, if you get hit by 35 conditions in 15 seconds, it’s useless. If you get hit by 15 conditions in 15 seconds, it’s mediocre. If you only get hit by 5 conditions in 15 seconds, it’s extremely powerful.

What does that mean? It is very strong in PvE in general, decent in most small PvP/WvW skirmishes, and useless in a zerg.

google.3709:

Modified ammo is just bad…… why would anybody give critical dmg or power for unreliable 6-10% more dmg :/

Because PvE.

PvP is in better shape than the PvP forums.

Cynz.9437:

… what is answer to it? I can’t do crap on my thief to even remotely help my team vs such crap.

If i go in, i die to aoe. If i don’t go in, my team is doing 4v5. Try to hold point? Nope. Try to capture point? Nope. Just aoe/condi spam on every point.

inb4 go backstab them, jk blinded, jk blocks, jk immob/daze for ages

as you can guess i faced 3 necros/2 nade spam engis team

The problem is that this forum has a longstanding tradition of telling people that conquest is about holding points. It’s not. It’s about controlling the map by killing opponents.

Dagger thief can do a lot vs. a team like that, but not if you try to be a hero. If you’re running a spike thief, shortbow until a viable target opens and then spike him. If you open on full-health opponents swinging your daggers, you will probably not last.

If you dislike playing a spike damage style (wait-wait-wait-spike) you’ll want to experiment with other builds/professions.

renegade.4851:

NevirSayDie.6235:

The funniest thing about this thread is that within about a month, people will be making them about those OP mesmers.

I have not seen any changes that would make mesmer OP, nor the nerfs to make mesmer OP compared to the rest. Condition mesmer is lame and strong, but I don’t consider it meta and the new fotm build yet

Warriors existed in essentially their current form for about two months before people realized how good they were.

BakiSaN.9281:

Ryan.9387:

And respectively, you will also win 14 of those matches due to 5v4.

Like I said, it amplifies the luck factor. How much will your case derive from the average. Getting more freebies or getting more 4v5s

Statistically, if you never cause a 4v5 yourself, you’re more likely to get a free win than an unavoidable loss.

The funniest thing about this thread is that within about a month, people will be making them about those OP mesmers.