Guild Wars 2

There could be some elegant solutions for bringing confusion and/or retaliation more into line with other damage sources (talking wvw here). The first thing that naturally comes to mind is diminishing returns for a critical mass of confusion stacks/retaliation sources, in which each additional stack/source would be less and less effective. This shouldn’t be problematic to solve on the programming side.
But I am afraid, instead of applying surgical precision to bring stuff in line there will be a hammer and anvil balancing.
Moving on.

Jump Shot animation with traited rifle range is just silly.
It looks as if they just skewed the whole thing to a smaller range so the duration of the animation stays the same, but the range of the skill is shorter.
It has been corrected for the untraited version of the skill though.
Why on earth they wouldn’t let the range traited Jump Shot have the non-hovering (or shorter) end animation escapes me… I file it under careless mistake and hope for it to be corrected soon™.

Fair enough.
We can apply more quickly.
But confusion, like reta only works with the cooperation of the enemy, so applied to a player that has no awareness you could call it op.
In my opinion though, our quick application of a maximum stack of confusion under ideal circumstances (each of our moves connect), is nowhere as problematic as 100nades was for example.
Combinations of skills, be it to apply a huge stack of something or a cc-dps combo potentially can be very strong in this game, but in my understanding most classes have access to such moves.

joukuoj.2075:

… but now i played agaisnt engi which didnt take any dmg from 3 ppl. My rapid fire hit him (2500crit dmg) and his hp didnt change(no evade, no elixir s) […] but later his hp drop from no reason and he went down(actually we didnt know how).[…]

Pretty much sounds like he desynced.

So you confused a guardian, who didn’t pay attention and nuked himself for about 10k and you call the engi op?
Seems legit.

Edit: I use op as a synonyme for ‘needs nerf’, not as a positively connotated adjective.

I vote for Pie without cooldown for Engineer only to counter retaliation like pre nerf.
Maybe a Gear Pie or something. :F

The only way for it to ‘go’ should be bringing other trait lines up to par, not nerfing Alchemy/HGH.
Also, I think people are talking sPvP mostly in this thread.
From my point of view (WvW), HGH is fine in non BS builds. HGH pulls us up to the damage other professions are putting out with ease (and potentially without might stacking… but just pulling this out of my kitten). If it gets stripped, we’re sausage again.
Retaliation generally kills Grenade builds in zerg situations, even more so if its traited Grenadiers.
Of course some honk in a BS build will gank people, seem op and people call for nerfs… Its sad the whole community gets hit by nerfs, when they should really only hit honks.

The problem with a hacking/cheating option in the report tab is, that ANet would get an insane amount of reports. Trolls would report just for trolls and normal people would report anyone who they feel have done something wrong. As an example, I once got a whisper from a guy accusing me of hacking after I transformed into a tornado via Elixir X as an engineer. That dude would have potentially activated guild/raid members to report me too, if there was an option for that.
I’m not trying to say the report system is good as it is, but they would get swamped in nonsense reports if they would have an option for cheat/hack/troll in there.

And I doubt they have the manpower to wade through the logs to see if people used a speed hack, to be honest.

I’m definitely curious how they will solve this, if at all.
The only thing that I can think of at the moment are ingame moderators (expensive option), who can look at what is going on directly and live and then take countermeasures. Surely not a bulletproof system, but a remedy for things that need immediate attention.

Will respect blob for egg, Genev.

Wolfheart.1938:

Hello necromancer IRON commander at redwater in SFR, could you please ask your guild to stop /dancing on corpses of lone enemies when they zerg them? It’s kinda disrespectful and has happened a lot in the last weeks. Makes me lose a lot of respect towards you, especially when your zerg wipes my 10 men guild and spams multiple /laugh /dance on us. It’s not like I was kicking your kitten at that supply camp.

So one dead sfr can keep loads of IRON members tied to a spot, preventing them from doing anything useful?

I don’t see the problem to be honest.
Just go to the toilet, grab a coffee/tea or make that call you put off the whole afternoon, knowing they waste their time doing nothing, potentially enabling us to wipe them and preventing them from getting ojectives somewhere else.
If the emotes in chat bother you, switch them off.

Op, I’m running exactly the same build.

No need to hate op, of course!
However, it must be stated that the cost/benefit ratio of Kit Refinement post patch has been crippled if you look at the other options for the trait points.
Ops chain looks nice on paper, but if you add numbers including cooldowns to it, it doesn’t add up, especially if you factor in fights that do not go according to plan or take more than one chain to win.
But YMMV, and ops milage apparently does, so thats that.

Edit: Making the cooldown of KR visible could potentially up it’s usefulness a bit, I think.

I got excited when I read the patchnotes for the first time as well…
But what looked good on virtual paper is meh in game.
Most of the bullet points are bug fixes (lets say they all work and no new ones got introduced). That I appreciate, but I can’t thank ANet, because fixing bugs should go without saying.

The next major things that come to mind:
Super Elixir buff, Veil gets removed from Throw U, and Kit Refinement.

- Super Elixir buff is decent, but can’t make up for the Kit Refinement modification. I tried this in full heal gear and it doesn’t really enable us to go full heal support, but then again ANet doesn’t want healers in this game. ‘Sadly’ other classes excel in healing specs though.
- Throw U veil removal is a good step into the right direction (removing randomness). Many people like the removal. I liked the gambling and a second source of invisibility plus yet another source of confusion by comboing the field with projectile finishers. But it is gone now, so no questions asked.

- Kit Refinement, and I’ll try to keep it short:

Invisible Cooldown makes it kind of unusable.
Invisible Cooldown introduces new randomness (opposing the removal of randomness)
Duration of effects don’t make up for it.
-> Skill is basically dead, in line with other dead cheap skills respectively.

More detail:
Grenade Kits Kit Refinement effect hits ok’ish. Damage scales with stats and can crit -> proc crit effects. Hits 5 targets from what I can tell.
Would be interesting to know whether it removes one boon from each target it hits. Doesn’t make it viable or plannable though, cause of the clunky invisible cd.

Magnetic Bomb synergizes well with Bomb Kit. Pulls only 3 enemies though. Range isn’t amazing.
Unusable in intense fights though, because you usually activate Bomb Kit when people are already near you. If you don’t know if the cooldown is up to pull 3 people, you shouldn’t activate Bomb Kit to pull them towards you in the first place though.

Glue Trail has a long duration, but I can’t see its application via invisible cooldown.

Super Speed seemed too short duration to be anything useful.

I don’t have a solution for how to make Kit Refinement viable for the devs.
But I don’t think they even need one.
They brought Kit Refinement in line with other cheap traits, basically removing the notion of how awesome it could be from the game. Lets just forget about Kit Refinement and move on.

Edit: Maybe introduce a master trait in the Tools trait line, replacing one of the useless ones there, to remove Kit Refinements cooldown and make the effects more awesome by increasing range, duration and effectiveness of all KR effects. This would make speccing into the tools trait line viable finally.
But suggestions like these are moot, since ANet devs follow their own plan and one post on the forums won’t change that.

Moved here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/RIP-Kit-Refinement/page/2#post1714857

On mine.
I placed a Net Turret in WvW and let it be hit by a mob for about 4000 then threw a wrench while the turret being my target (in range of course), and while the mob being my target but the wrench clearly passing through my turret as well.
I didn’t see the health of the turret going up while the wrench passed it. No green numbers and no apparent change on the turrets healthbar.
Same for Flame Turret and Rifle Turret.
I had to stop the test there.

Just for the sake of completeness: this was without healing to turrets traited in any way; only the basic Trow Wrench, but it should heal turrets nonetheless in its basic form:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Throw_Wrench

Throw Wrench doesn’t heal turrets as stated in the tool tip… at least not in WvW.

Theres some good stuff in those 30-40 bullet points tbh.
I find op to be overly dramatic.

Mizu.9387:

Ahh, good old Vizunah.
Just now, someone ordered merchants in SM while we where waiting for T3 upgrade. This upgrade, naturally, drained all our supply, and 4 minutes later the french zerg shows up. In this case, led by LM.

With 25 + golem vs 10 defenders, you would have taking SM anyway, so this was a very unnecessary move tbh.
Expect a strongly worded letter, Troma

EDIT: It may have been LNM, now that I come to think of it. Sorry to the guys who did not lead this assault.

So someone strategically drained SM of all supplies in the face of an incoming unwinnable battle?
I don’t see a problem there.
I would have done the same if 25 golems inc and only 10 def and no chance of winning and to be honest so should have you!

Caliban.3176:

Maybe it wasn’t even a spy but just a person with less mental capabilities than your average dungbeetle, all servers have those.

So much for that. Who is the dungbeetle now? xD

Have never seen so many condition thieves on siege like last night tbh.

Nyssa.5467:

You SFr really cry like babies, you said you have the man power, and you only Q-Q when you got blobbed, especially red guard the best Q-Q of all, its always the same, if you cant handle T1 battles move back to a low populated server
On the stream of Red guard, is always massive numbers. (same blob as deso and vizunah) so dont complain if iron crushes you. specially when iron is with 30 people and RG is with 4 (well your stream tells otherwise) dont make false speculation if your streaming the evidence, You guys have the same amount of numbers just accept your defeat
Just to make clear: RG VcY, CoN, SiN are the blobbers also, the only non blob on SFR is ZD’s.
So stop the Q-Q now and play forums are meant for nice community talking in general

You get an E for effort and T for nice try.
<3

This late night/morning in lowlands keep in EB:

Killed 8 deso golems plus blob south valley gate.
Then killed 6 viz golems plus blob like 5 seconds after that on north inner.
Then killed 9 viz golems plus blob trying to hide behind wall south gate lowlands 10 minutes after the last 6… and valley is still ours and being upgraded?! Come on… get it together!
Some crazy kitten action going on tonight at those gates.
Can’t you just send us the gold/tokens you spend on those golem armys instead of throwing them at the gates? Oh wait… the tokens.. we get.

These failrushes were almost as bad as our own fail golem rushes in EB, to be honest…. almost.

(golem numbers can be slighty off due to culling, but you catch my drift…)
</sfr moan about failgolemrush>

Serophous.9085:

Pannonica.5378:

graverr.6473:

Working as intended.End of thread

Is it?
Sauce please.

Ok, if you follow the nomenclature of the wiki:
“Leg Specialist: Apply a 1-second immobilize whenever you cripple a target with a skill.”

it is working as intended, since every ability slotted onto the skillbar is a skill and when you mount an arrow cart button number two can be considered skill number two.
…but under skill on the wiki there is no mention of abilities provided by siege, only abilities that you can allocate to the skillbar yourself. This would mean, this trait (or others) applying to siege skills is a glitch introduced by ANet.

So until sauce is provided or commentary by officials is made, we can’t tell for sure, but we can of course continue to venture into dialectical discussions.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Arrow_Cart

SKILLS:
Fire – Fire your arrow cart at the target area.
Fire Crippling Arrows – Fire your arrow cart at the target area. Arrows that hit cripple the target.
Fire Barbed Arrows – Fire your arrow cart at the target area. Arrows that hit bleed the target.

oh, and looking on the siege weapons page…

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Siege_weapon

Siege weapons are environmental weapons used in PvP. They are fixed to their build site location, except for siege golems (which can be moved). These weapons can only be used by the team that created them; opponents can attack (and damage) the structures. Important for both offense and defense in World versus World combat, Siege weapons are often the key to winning an otherwise impossible battle.

I bolded the part of you quoting me, which you happen to have overlooked in my original post.

graverr.6473:

Working as intended.End of thread

Is it?
Sauce please.

Ok, if you follow the nomenclature of the wiki:
“Leg Specialist: Apply a 1-second immobilize whenever you cripple a target with a skill.”

it is working as intended, since every ability slotted onto the skillbar is a skill and when you mount an arrow cart button number two can be considered skill number two.
…but under skill on the wiki there is no mention of abilities provided by siege, only abilities that you can allocate to the skillbar yourself. This would mean, this trait (or others) applying to siege skills is a glitch introduced by ANet.

So until sauce is provided or commentary by officials is made, we can’t tell for sure, but we can of course continue to venture into dialectical discussions.

Light.6095:

If you’re running a support build with Elixir Gun, it shares a lot of traits with Flamethrower. Granted, there aren’t many reasons to run a support build, but if you do, FT and EG have a lot of synergy when used together.

If everything works out, this will be getting more attractive in seven days.

Some good Elixir X possibilities in here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q3em9s5I4c

Nice suggestions, but those are stating the oblivious honestly.
You can’t seriously be suggesting accepting a blatant game error, by saying dodge, stability, condi removal? Facts about stability, condi removal and the pulsing nature of the AC aoe effect aside: Just lol…
This would be like accepting a design flaw like culling and saying “yeah, just be careful in wvw and learn to avoid the invisible zerg” or like: “oh, your enemy engi has exploited into 5 minutes of stability? nvm, just don’t try to cc him.”

Why learn to deal with a non intended use of game mechanics when fixing it would be the correct way to go?
Oh, you guys.

Those nest on you when you’re Sylvari naturally.
Not for sale!

Sobat.8650:

Is this new?
Rifled barrels in Firearms gives pistol auto attack about 10% more damage.

There is wonky things happening with rifled barrels. Jump Shot distance/animation gets distorted and not working as intended and:
See bug notes here:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rifled_Barrels
Some fixes will make it into the next patch and some won’t.

How did you validate your findings, Sobat?

GanJoe.5374:

definately, i dropped like a fly. Twice 4k dmg, same second.

guess the last picture is a working flame blast, contact and detonate dmg + a flame blast sigil procc.

Ok, I can confirm this now.
It happens when the flame blast isn’t detonated and the target is at max range.

A little bird told me next patch will change game for many builds (this might be a bad thing though).
Theres good things to come and bad things, but the majority of things got me excited if they get implemented as rumoured.
I’d estimate about 30-40 bullet points (and thats not only tooltip or bug fixes!).

We need to stay flexible though and it won’t solve all of our problems, but some labour is being done behind the curtains.
Of course not everybody will be happy and never will.

Just in here so everyone can (ab)use it and ANet has to do something about it.

So I was in EB last night, passing through SM and viewing some players hitting a naked dead Viz mesmer. WTK?
Turns out a perma (as in perma) stealth thief was trolling them, rezzing the mesmer all the time (for hours already apparently).

Challenge accepted!
Dropped some bombs, turrets and siege buildsites and finally freed our people from anti trolling duty.
Cheers to the brilliant knockback from one of our players, to knock the thief out of inner SM over the wall.
Case closed.

Sadly, a big number Vizbus took back SM the legit way 15 minutes after we killed the thief and the mesmer released. But it was a good push on their behalf, so kudos to the legit attack and win.

Enjoy permastealth as long as you can, trollthieves.
Next patch will hit you hard.

This just in from WvW:
Warriors trait Leg Specialist and getting on AC to lock down enemy forces for ever.
Better yet: have a few arrow carts and coordinate AC #2.

Intended? I think not.

Dear Vizunah player noclipping and moving underneath our Bay in SFR borderlands, outside of the textures, stop taking out our siege.
kktybb

Thanks. Really weird that.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t reproduce it on golems.

Have you actually been hit for 2x? Just trying to rule out a combatlog display error.

Gonna test this on golems tonight. Getting twice the detonate damage might get some people excited, but is definitely not intended afaic.
Would you be so kind and upload a screenshot of this (including the combatlog)?
Please edit out any visible names.
Much appreciated.

Don’t forget the veil!
It is not dead yet. ;(

Concerning the flame blast ‘bug’… are you sure you don’t get hit by the roll damage+the detonate damage?
I never have been able to make it detonate twice. But roll damage quickly followed by detonate damage is certainly possible (and legit) due to the topology of this skill.

There seems to be a problem with the Jump Shot animation/speed when Rifled Barrels is traited:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Jump-shot-1

gkaare, if you’re really done with this game, I’d like to thank you for the work you put into this bug list/keeping it updated/verifying bugs.
Much appreciated!

I hope someone picks up where you leave it.

So they take away one of our two sources of invisibility?
No more veil from Toss Elixir U?
And most importantly no more Ethereal combo field from it for confusion via projectile and chaos armor via jump/blast?

Sad Panda here, if they really implement it.
Although I appreciate the randomness getting looked at, I don’t appreciate the deletion of veil.
IF it procs, it is a nice defensive ability against every profession, not only against projectile based attacks.

I’d like the randomness to be solved like this: elixirs have a different outcome depending on your spec.
Maybe set up (passive) traits that will make the elixirs not random anymore, so that if you spec accordingly you will always get the result you want from otherwise random abilities.
And if you don’t spec into this trait randomness stays random.

I’m watching your video now.
Thanks for making it and so far it has been good and I think it’s a good guide for new engineers and be much appreciated!

One tiny thing I’d like to point out though is, that the combination of loads of room information on your quiet voice audio signal and heavily compressed loud music makes it sometimes difficult to understand what you are saying. This is most apparent in the beginning.

Now I realise you can’t rerecord all your commentaries, but you could try to remove the ambient room information from it with an audio application/addon, or, if you’re not comfortable doing this, just lower the volume of the music in the video.

To make it more easy next time, try to record more of your ‘direct’ voice audio information and less room information, i.e. get much closer to the microphone.
If your voice sounds unnatural with less room information, most audio processing applications let you put a small ‘ambience’ type reverb on it to make it more natural without swamping it in reverb.

Edit: The voice sound gets better (closer) when you start talking about the pistol, but theres still a lot of potentially distracting room information there.

Haha! Now you spilled the beans and every Wild Bill out there will go for our turrets!
Oh noes!

Much appreciated. Going try this when I meet one next time.
Judging from your hints, I think it is really good to catch those builds on their own, with no surrounding neutral mobs, since every friendly hitting him or every mob potentially enables this build to destroy their focus, because they can always get a c+d off of something. As long as they keep their main target and c+d off something they are kind of untouchable I guess.
Thanks for the hints, Amadeus.

Loads of good videos! Thanks for sharing.
Do you remember if you got some action against wild bill spec thieves (p/d) in there somewhere as well?
Found them hard opponents lately and would love to view some of your strategies against them.

Need more than the natural behaviour of cats and coincidental colors to be a reference!
A grey cat chasing a brown mouse isn’t exclusively Tom and Jerry. Whereas if the cat would trip, fall, stumble or get knocked down, while the mouse gets away, I would say it would definitely be a Tom and Jerry reference.
Not saying what you found isn’t a reference, but the reference is kind of weak compared to others.

bigtankstarsp.3581:

Im really interested in this build but what gear/runes/sigils are u using?

It is all in the links he provided.

Best way to get fun things nerfed: post about it on the official forums (including a video and also stating it is a trick and you can do things with it you otherwise can’t).
Second best way: bump the thread containing the find.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Generally, if you have elixir gun equipped, you should be using the Elixir Gun’s kit refinement. If you aren’t, why even keep Elixir Gun around?_

For the sake of lazyness, let me just copy paste a post Casia made about the EG in this EG build discussion thread.
Add to everything he says that EG 4 is now a blast finisher.

Casia.4281:

The elixir gun is pretty interesting.

It scales in alot of different directions. This can be an advantage or a disadvantage depending on your playstyle and how you want to look at it.

A main potential flaw is there is very little options for your build. 30 firearms, 30 alch, 10 tools pretty much. its hard to justify anything else.
20 in firearms will give 20% reduced CD. and rifled barrels which is range, and other stuff which I will mention in a moment.
Going 30 fully is hard to not due as 5% damage vs bleeding, and that extra crit/cond works with EG so well.
Alch same deal 15% damage potentially. however, if you are not going for a DD build, you might be able to skip out on going deep here.
10 in tools for kit refinement is a given.

EG 1 scales at .4 direct, and has a 4second bleed. .85 attack speed. 1s weakness.
At a 4s bleed, this is a highly consistent application of bleeds. 4 stacks. without sharpshooter, or any +duration. and it does scale well with +duration.
Pistol 1 is .35 p direct, and 2s bleed. Note then, EG1 is way more cond damage, and direct is pretty close. (weapon damage)

EG2 is .75 and 4 bounces. 8second CD. this is quite a bit of damage. all direct.
EG3 is TERRIBLE. .08 scaling. 5 hits over 2.5s. Insanely low. 1s poisonx5 hits, 5s duration, and 5 6s vuls, and cures allies cond, but not yours. Really, dont use this. there is a better option to do each of those things alone, elsewhere.
EG4 is .8 per tick for 5s. 6ticks total, first is instant.

So, what? EG2 and EG4 scale very well with direct damage. very. EG1 is ok direct, and great cond. Most of your damage will be direct with the EG. however, since the main attack is a cond based one, Cond is viable really.
Toolbelt and EG 5 obviously scale with +healing.

Rifled barrels. Changes everything.
It says it adds range. and it does… but thats not all.
EG1 is 1s weakness and 4s bleed normally.
With rifled barrels it becomes 3s weakness, and 3s bleed. 1200 range.
So it adds 300 range, adds 2 s weakness, and reduces the bleed to 3s. So it will do LESS damage with rifled barrels. The extra range however, may make up for it. (plus what it does for EG2)
EG2 3s cripple, 3s swiftness. 8s cd.
With rifled barrels the tooltip will SAY 5s cripple, 5s swiftness. however, this does not occur. it is still 3s. The big change aside from 1200 range, is the CD however, does become 5s. Which is a very large buff to direct damage. EG with rifled barrels is a significant ranged burst weapon.
There are tooltip bugs with the rest of the skills and rifled barrels as well, but no more function changes.

direct damage good and bad. +15% trait is obviously the largest trait. Rifles get 10, grenades get 10, many others get nothing. So that 15% is a significant buff to EG damage, as well has high up time on the bleed for the firearms trait. however, EG is still chained to the kit weapon damage. 920 average. while a rifle is that 1095 average.
So an EG 2 that hits at .75 twice, gaining that +15%, 5% vs bleeding, etc, sounds like it should hit super hard. hits.. good, but not omg hard. A rifle auto attack is competitive due to the base higher weapon damage. Its just naturally 17% stronger.

Acid bath problem. Acid bath hits like a ton of bricks. its a lavafont. (2kx6 is not uncommon for it)The main problem is the leap back is not tied with a CC Break or evade like other similar moves. Play with it, and you will find yourself using it, and not going anywhere more often then you would like. Its extremely unreliable.

Yeah the good old days…
RIP xaoc and thanks for all the fish!
BT was you!

Liquid.9672:

100 Nade Engineers can have some pretty massive burst on a target. Although Kit Refinement (the trait that allows Engineers to have another instant Grenade Barrage) was nerfed in the recent patch and now has a ICD so it requires a bit more micro management.

One of the few micro managements that have a sensible cost-benefit ratio to be honest.
Actually I expect this to be nerfed soon, since engineers are supposed to have a high cost for their versatility, which usually means no benefit (or even punishment) when mastering it. x_x