Guild Wars 2

Yeah, it kinda sucks. Although even the auto attack underwater is not that useful as the three grenade spread sometimes missing the target. Most likely it will remain like this unless they nerf it again. So pick your poison.

Personally I don’t think the way that Grenade kit currently works well with auto attack because of the spread and ‘chance to miss’. Sometimes it is more useful to use a bit away from the target to hit more people. It is very clunky like most of the Engineer skills needs some more work.

TLDR: Grenade Kit is already our most powerful kit available so I don’t see them making it easier to use. Sometimes making it easier to use makes it not as useful.

Here is my engineer currently. Looks more like a guardian though so Ive heard. Defiantly has the metallic thing going.

Rifle Mod is working. Doesn’t show up on tooltip though.

I do more damage then flamethrower in down state…. but idk if that is saying much lol.

Of course you would have to bring up other things. I think that is largely the reason they haven’t touched Grenade Kit so much. If you look at it from a non emotional..purely logical stand point Grenade Kit is too strong because it does too many things. I would be okay if it was just strong with condition or just strong with direct damage.. or just strong in that it stacks vulnerabilities… but when it does everything there is something wrong with the balance.

No doubt our other option are weak, that doesn’t mean Grenade Kit is not strong. Personally I would bring up the others at the same time as nerfing Grenade Kit, but I do believe it needs to be nerfed in some aspect. Not just -50% damage of course… I’ll get into it in a later thread. I have derailed this one enough.

No telling how people would react to the nerfing of Grenade Kit unless you actually know what those nerfs are.

Welcome to game balance?

I think they should nerf Grenade Kit. I’m going to make a thread now as to why. Thanks for giving me the motivation.

Very true that you are suppose to play what you like that is the exact point I’m trying to get across. I was speaking on the imbalances of Grenade Kit relative to everything else. This should be the case.

Technically you can still use elixir and Altruism runes and Enhanced Performance. I used to do this when I ran Elixirs. 8 stacks of might every time I use Elixir H. The 30 points into alchemy give boon duration, 1% damage per unique boon, free elixir B and a 8% chance condition converter. So I wouldn’t say it is opposed to other forms of might stacking. It compliment it nicely. Also you should toss your elixirs before you go into a fight so that are off cd when you are about to engage.

With that said Medkit swapping is pretty good too.

No doubt Condition Damage is really strong in PvP scenario, because you dont have to actively fight to deal damage. I sometimes run a max condition damage build with Grenade kit for lulz. Its funny watching a 2 second bleed slowly destroy people. Toss a few Grenades port back to way point.. collect badges… Not as fun as my Static Discharge build but funny nevertheless. Single handily holding a tower and dropping 5 players while not even being there because most people don’t know what condition removal is. Also if they do use condition removal a few more volleys they are back to bunch of bleed stacks and vulnerability again. Also that freeze just makes it even easier. Personally I prefer SD build because it doesn’t give me carpel tunnel.

Like I said before the other skills on pistol are okay. I just think the auto attack should attack faster after they bring down some of our over the top stuff like Grenade kit and Elixirs. Also the pistol is hard to use at range. You are better using it at melee range to maximize effectiveness.

Curious as to the Static Discharge build you are/were using.

I think the reason HGH is used so often is because you can also run Cleansing 409. Might stacking and Condition removal in the same trait line is a God sent for PVPers. Also a lot easier to drink all your elixirs then to do multi button combos or spam swapping your weapon kits. Stacking blast finishers means you cant take the utilities you want. Elixirs have all the utility you need plus u can trait them to be just as powerful as everything else. You also get the boon duration and vitality for free pretty much.

Anyways back to other ways to stack might as we may be needing it soon.

Well that may be true to some extent, It is not because of how good the pistol skills are. Due to the nature of kits, using 2 one handers allow you the option to use shield and/or 2 sigils with no downside since they have their own weapon damage. When you look at the numbers, pistol auto attack is the worst weapon to apply bleed stacks with. You are better off using Elixir Gun or the even more powerful Grenade Kit.

I would like to see the Pistol auto attack brought back to 1/2 attack speed for those reasons mostly. Also for thematic reason, pistol should attack faster then rifle. Plus it is still labeled as such even though the attack speed is actually around .8 like the rifle. Everything else about the pistol is fine.

As far as allowing the explosion traits to work on pistol explosion, that is a terrible idea. It is why Grenade kit is so broken. Insert rant as to why Grenade kit is broken

As far as rifle’s go. I use rifle alot in WvW and PVE. It isnt as bad as you think. I have great success with it. Of course it is a direct damage weapon so of course you have to trade off suitability for damage. Just like every other direct damage weapon besides Grenade kit but again I digress. Engineer has alot of tools to survive in battle. You don’t necessarily need the toughness/vitality if you can control the fight. Especially since the direct damage stats scale better then their defensive counter parts. There are quite a few Static Discharge builds out there should give them a try.

Instead we have Grenade kit that can stack 25 bleeds and 25 vulnerability. On top of doing the best direct damage of all our kits/weapons. All you have to do is learn to aim.

Grenade kit is the hybrid kit but it does condition damage and direct damage better then the dedicated ones. I think that is not right.

Oh yea and 1500 range aoe.

TLDR: Pistol auto attack going back to 1/2 attack speed. It will still be inferior to Grenade Kit.

Would love to see them have the stated 1/2 second activation again. Old tooltips are old.

Looks like they just pushed another build with the traits fixed..

Hope your happy.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Update: the skills and balance team are going to take a crack at this and other sigil/rune bugs, so they can decide on a case by case basis whether the tooltip or the effect needs to be updated. (And we’re working on a system that will base the tooltip on the mechanical effects, so we don’t have to make sure they match up by hand.) Thanks all!

Best thing I heard all day.

Yes, player perception is a totally different thing and sometimes does not reflect what actually is going on.

The skill ceiling of the class is vast so there is always room to improve. I always find myself thinking what if i used this skill from this kit during a fight where you have 6 skills per kit. You have alot of tools to use. Just gotta know when to use them.

Depends what you mean by AOE DPS. Warriors with cleave have the best 3 target aoe.

Engineer have the best range AOE DPS with Grenade Kit. (up 2 15 target)

Engineers are fun in the sense that we can build our characters to have so many skills available at one time. We don’t have the 10 seconds swap cooldown like Ele do. So we can bring a skill for every situation in since. I like being able to pull of all these crazy skills out the thin air. You should give it a try see if you like it.

From reading the Engineer forums we are the worst class in the game…

In reality, we are not that bad. We do well in all aspects of the game imo. Maybe not as strong as other classes but we can hold our own.

And most of all we are really fun to play.

I would suggest Rune of the water for the additional heal when you drop heal turret. It is 690 heal with a 0.5 scaling. With 1700 heal power thats another 1500 heal every time you drop heal turret. It will increase your ability to heal also give you much needed boon duration for stacking regen.

Consider power shoes so you can move around in combat to heal allies. As your build lacks any reliable swiftness.

They need to combine the traits that effect the same kits. Allowing us to further diversify our builds.

Instead of flamethrower having to go 30 into firearms and 20 into alchemy. Combine some of the flamethrower traits so that you don’t have 50 of your trait points already chosen for you.

Either that or make the kits themselves more powerful and just have traits that generally effect engineer skills.

Just tested. It is working.

The turret traits aren’t all that useful anyways. More pressing matter to attend to imo.

30% damage reduction isnt much when they have no armor to begin with and die in one hit due to low HP.

Auto-tooling trait only effective for when turret not getting focused. Even them you are better healing it yourself or picking it up and placing back down. You cant out heal the damage the turret is taking. even if u sat there with toolkit.

Testing with flamethrower is a good idea. I’ll have to try that with Flamethrower to be 100% sure. Although I’m pretty sure it is broken… Ill report back later.

Just wasted another 20g testing Eviator’s theory. Scope is still broken.

You need to test it numerous times before you can know for sure since Crit chance is luck based.

Agreed. They should take a note from some of league of legends balance change philosophies.

Make the skill easier to use, more responsive at the same time they nerf it. Or the would fix a bug associated with the skill they would nerf. Some sure fire way to counteract the nerf. Although at the end of the day it is still a nerf.

andreibianu.8051:

Sadly a revamp of this scale at this point wouldn’t possible . But that doesn’t mean they can’t still save the day and make the cannoneer a new class . That way there would be 3 heavy classes just like the medium and light .

Or they could turn the hobo bag Grenade chucker kit into a Grenade launcher.

:)

Yes I want a shotgun kit/weapon added kinda like Sure-Shot Seamus. Short Range but deadly if you get close.

Probably would be OP but one can dream.

Scope would be very useful in PVE if it actually worked. 10% crit chance might not seems like much to a SPvPer but in PVE stat land its huge.

The trait doesn’t work. It is not giving 10% crit chance either multiplicative or additively. They will get around to fixing it next month patch most likely. Since we go their attention on the trait finally.

And I see Guardians in my party use that auto attack all the time. >_<

Ive tested the trait in PVE and the mist. Doesn’t work in either place. Also the trait is actually really good. It could be worth as much as 10% damage increase with at least 50% crit damage. So it is significant.

Already did that Monadproxy. Still doesn’t work. Still dont crit on occasion.

Just tested Scope in PVE. Still not working indeed.

RIP 20g I used to test.

Quick hotfix it before you look bad.

It was always an AOE heal. Before and after patch.

That Overcharge scales 1:1 with heal power and the blast finisher is a 0.2 heal power scaling. Add in Rune of the water. My Healing Support build that I never use just got better.

Chaba.5410:

Cleansing Burst tooltip always said it cures all conditions.

And Scopes tooltip says it gives 10% crit chance when you stand still.

It has always removed 2 condition from the 1800+ hrs I have played on my Engineer.

Terrahero.9358: stop spreading misinformation

Someone changed the wiki already .. from 60 second cd to 15 sec cd
Heal turret never removed all condition

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Cleansing_Burst&diff=566772&oldid=566335

Another thing I like about the heal turret change. When I was stacking blast finishers, the heal turret would make that water field when i didn’t want it to. Like when i was stacking stealth or Might. Now I can get the water field when I want to. Also the water field last longer so I have more room to work with.

First of all you mean conditions not boons.
Second of all, it always removed two from the 1850 hrs I played the engineer.

I would gladly take an extra key press for an AOE heal + AOE condition removal + water field on a 15 second cd. Huge Buff to Support builds. With the new scaling and PVE/WvW stats you can pull off some really good healing. Although I feel it is laying down the foundation for a Cleaning Formula 409 nerf.

The Regen stacks with itself which is more important. Get some boon duration and sit in your heal turret until you have a super long Regen buff on yourself. I can see that changing pretty soon.

The Overcharge skill scales with Heal Power better then the old one. On top of having half the cooldown. The faster attack rate of the heal turret is nice too so you dont have to wait around as long for the overcharge again.

I’m hoping for a scope fix too but not holding breath.

Bomb kit and Tool kit has the same backpack ironically enough. As much as I am annoyed by the kit backpacks. There is more pressing issues with the Engineer. More creative ques would be welcome though.

Correct Wukunlin. There is a post about it in the big Bug report thread.

I think toolkit auto attack could hit a bit harder.
Better to use bombs,Rifle, Grenades, Traited Pistol then to use toolkit auto attack.

Probably the fact that it heals turrets is keeping it from dealing ‘normal’ melee damage.

google.3709:

Altho i agree with some points, i personally believe the reason grande kit is currently strong is because of the long duration of the conditions, specially bleeds which also happen to have a short cool-down. if they get tone down. It would balance the kit out. without so much condition pressure, mostly stupid people would die to granades.

Sharpnel Grenade and Sharpnel Trait are the ones you are refering too. I was messing around in WvW got 97% condition duration. Pretty fun with Grenades and confusion. 6 second net turret etc. 117% in PVE which apparently is capped at 100%. I wanted to look at the extremes to see how effective the trait and Sharpnel Grenade are. Needless to say good thing this game isnt balanced around PVE stats or there would be some serious QQ going on. Hurling Grenades into Zergs is fun though.

How would you address changing Sharpnel Trait. If they add another internal cooldown it would fix the problem but I hate ICD as it takes some of the skill out of the skills. Also when you nerf Sharpnel Trait you nerf it for Bombs and Mines too. Sharpnel Grenade nerf would only effect that Grenade but if you take off half the duration you just make people want to get more duration. You punish the people who aren’t stacking duration. Doesnt really address the problem. If you increase the Cooldown on Sharpnel you make it more important of a skill to land as you cant spam it as much. Nothing really changes, you are just doing less damage with Grenade kit. It doesn’t promote build variety.

also, about that vulnerability.. I’ve been playing Mesmer on tPvP, (the place where they base balance), with their staff #5 _"Chaos Storm", i will often stack 25 stacks vulnerability on its own. so is not like the engineers are the only one able to do it. and unlike engineer mesmer also happen to have some strong hitting skills. the #3 Warlock normally deals around 6k + 10% for every unique condition. I’ve been able to deal12k crits.

Yeah, I dont think the Vulnerability stacks themselves are the problem. It is the frequency at which you can stack them. Which speaks to the way Grenade Kit works with the whole 3 grenades per 1 second thing. Chaos Storm you need the trait for Vulnerability on Daze and you need to keep the enemy in the circle. Where as Grenades are as effective as you can aim them. There is very little opportunity cost involved. If you miss you can cast another within the next second.

Mif.3471:

How it that any different than any other class with 1500 range?

You really can’t justify that complaint being Engineer specific other than the Dev’s simply hating Engineers for what ever reason.

Granted Grenade Kit is the strongest AOE Ranged damaging skill.. Fun Fact each Grenade has its own 5 target limit thing. So up to 15 targets. Some true AOE there. Also 1500 range so you can stay relatively safe.

So I think it is justified to discuss it at the very least. This type of Grenade Barraging occurs in WvW too at a more prevalent rate.

sigh

HGH build isn’t the reason to play Engineer. You might want to check the patch notes in a few days before you start leveling a character using a FOTM build.

Oh yea and as far as leveling goes. Bombs or Grenade Kit are both decent for leveling.

Very true if you get 25 stacks of Vulnerability and bleeding then you do deserve to die. Although that doesn’t address whether such a thing should be possible in the first place. Also with food+Giver this issue becomes exponentially worse.

One of the reasons 100 nades and Grenade kit in general is so strong is because of the multiple Grenades per second. Each Grenade toss is 3 Vulnerability stacks. Grenade Barrage has 8. The old 100 nades did more then just 26k damage or w/e crazy number they quoted. It also applies Vulnerability stacks which means if you didn’t one shot them the first time. The next skills coming up will hit even harder. This is compounded by the fact that Vulnerability increases the damage received by the target from all sources not just you. Add on the fact that each one of those explosions have a 15% chance to apply Bleed for 12 seconds. Once you add in Condition duration of which you get 30% from explosive tree, it gets even more out of balance.

The problem I have with they way they are nerfing things. They are ignoring the root of the problem which is Grenade Kit. Steel packed powder, Sharpnel and Incendiary Powder are all not over the top in other kits.

Although I realize and maybe even the developers do too. If they do in fact nerf Grenade Kit then the flaws of the engineer begin to show. Grenade Kit is what is keeping us viable for the most part. There are a few Condition bomb/pistol builds but they are no where near as strong as Grenade Kit builds. Also there is play when fighting against those builds. Grenade Kit builds, you either don’t get yourself into a situation where you are on the other end of that barrage or your dead. Opportunity cost argument is not very strong when you can spam Grenades every 1 second and make use of our numerous CC options.

Condition Removal doesn’t hurt Grenade Kit since the time it takes u to remove the condition the next barrage is on its way. Biggest offender of Grenade Kit’s raw damage is Sharpnel Grenade and Freeze Grenade. Grenade 1 used to be good until they nerfed it. Funny the Biggest direct damage skills are also the ones that apply some of the strongest conditions.

Yeah, I think I will make that thread once I get enough time to really break down the Grenade Kit.

I think it is important that Gadget’s feel unique so turning them into a renamed Signet is not the best idea.

They just need to be solid choices for certain builds.

Utility Goggles – Direct Damage Build
Throw Mine – Explosive/Boon Removal Build
Personal Battering Ram – Keep away Build
Rocket Boots – Escape Build
Slick Shoes – CC Build

We need Gadgets to feel like good choices in those certain builds.

As it stand now:
Medkit fury > Googles
Steel packed Powder > Analyze
Reliable Boon Removal > Throw Mine & Mine Field
Overcharged Shot > PBR (dont need to give up a slot)
Freeze Grenade, Elixir F, Toolkit Trait and a bunch of other stuff > Launch PBR
Acid Bomb or any other escape skill > Rocket boots
Incendiary powder or Bomb 2 > Rocket Kick

Slick Shoes is the only one that is semi useful even then you feel bad for taking it.

TLDR: Each of the Gadgets needs to fulfill a role better then the kits in order to make them worth while.

I dont think it is the role of Grenade kit that will change. It will be the amount of damage they do and the inherit advantage you get from taking them.

Somethings that come to mind 25 stacks of Vulnerability and 25 stacks of bleeding. This is especially true in WvW and PVE where you can use food to maintain those stacks without even trying. If built correctly Grenade Kit can be the highest AOE Range DPS skill in the game. On paper, they have the potential to out damage every skill in the game. Something like 6k DPS. In a PvP scenario they dont quite as much damage but they are still quite powerful even with the 100 nades nerf.

There is the whole AOE vs Single taget argument and the range versus melee arguement. Both of which grenades break. It does more damage in aoe then the single target stuff. It does more damage from range then the melee stuff. Even bombs dont start dealing more damage until you abuse the vulnerability stacking of Grenade first.

The reasons I believe Grenade Kit is too strong is because of its interaction with Steel packed Powder and Sharpnel. The nature of Grenades in that they throw 3 grenades per 1 second. Gives them an advantage when it comes to procing traits such as Incendary powder, Precise Sights and many others including the ones mentioned prior.

I still think the Grenades should still have some perks compared to other kits. Although those perks shouldnt be so strong that they outclass all the other kits strengths.

This is a discussion that needs to be had. If I was you guys you should embrace the changes Anet plans to do. Get ahead of the game. Voice your concerns. Give feedback. It is important to do this in a constructive way.

Not to hijack the thread but there needs to be a discussion about balancing Grenade kit for all situations. Maybe someone can create a thread about it.