Guild Wars 2

Just for reference, this is my medium armor set. Don’t think the gloves fit exactly, still trying to find something I like for them.

synk.6907:

You go the same speed. Enjoy your placebo.

I believe there are a number of comments that indicate folks realize they all go the same speed. However due to the small stature of the asura, ground travel has a visceral sensation of speed because of how fast they have to move their limbs to cover the same distance a larger model does. Do you even know what the word placebo means?

BobbyStein.2315:

Mia Lunarfang.5826:

Okay, so I understand if you cant or have no desire to implement my suggestions, but I would appreciate a response if possible.

…

I posted this elsewhere, but… whatever.

We don’t have the time to directly respond to every bit of feedback. It’s nothing personal, by the way. We just don’t have the time/bandwidth/free cycles/etc. We read as much as we can in the forums (and at other sources) and reply when we’re able.

We do value all thoughtful suggestions, so thanks to you and everyone else who has been posting here with ideas, concerns, and constructive criticism. We’ll take it into account as we work on future Living World releases.

Not to mention, there are occasionally liability issues involved with intellectual property sourcing in professional circles. This tends to show up more in other media (movies and books), but I’m reminded strongly of the old Babylon 5 USENET forum back when the show was first aired (‘93-’97ish?). JMS was the producer, writer, and all-around genesis of almost all ideas B5 related. He graciously acquiesced into participating on the newsgroup, however there were some strict rules against excessive speculation and fan-created story content. Basically, even if completely accidental, if someone started writing content that became what happened on the show, there is then liability for the one crazy person who sues becaue “JMS STOLE MY IDEA”.

That being said, I’m pretty sure we probably signed away our firstborn in whatever user agreement was needed to sign up for the forum so they could probably use anything written here without notice or consent, but writers still need to be gently careful about idea sources.

Not to mention that if you have Sigil of Battle, you’re getting might stacks on kit swaps (as long as it passes through the weapon first). Swapped out my runes and that sigil this weekend and will start trying this out this week to see if I can notice anything significantly different.

I just wanted to ping this bug. I found out the same thing about stat prefix names and transmutation. I had some exotic level medium armor and used transmutation to get the look of the “Rascal” crafted leatherwork. As it happens, I’d made “Berserker Rascal” longcoat. The exotic stats were actually Knight’s. So I combined a Knight’s Emblazoned, and Berserker’s Rascal together. I got the look of the Rascal, kept the stats of the exotic. However now the name is “Berserker’s Rascal X of the Y”. It really should have kept the Knight prefix and become “Knight’s Rascal X of the Y”.

Probably not a way to fix it so that it changes all previously done transmutes, but it would be great to get it fixed for future transmutes so that stat prefix was assigned with the stats box during transmutation and not with the model box.

Well, can’t say for sure because aesthetics are very subjective, but I found a lot of the “X Emblazoned” crafted stuff to sort of blouse out too much around the hips and legs of my asura engineer. I perused the gw2armor site and the argos-soft site that lets you put the clothing on various race/gender combinations and decided that I liked the Rascal coat and shoulders the best. I leveled up leatherworking and made and transmuted them onto my character and was pleased with the look. The rascal longcoat looks more slim on my engineer and doesn’t really have much of a flare til about knee to shin level which is entirely workable for me. Also there’s some really great detail with the belt and shirt that gives you some good dye options.

Upvoted for

kurtosis.9526:

little zipping zooming pinball of death

Oh sure. Once the widget is in place, there’s probably a half dozen great places where it could be hooked into. I think oil slick would be another great location — both thematic (not sure if oil is a TRUE accelerant in the purest arsonist sense, but sure does burn) and helps out the gadget set.

Now, my perspective is almost entirely PvE, not even WvW. Seems pretty standard flamethower build. In groups there’s tons of ways to build might so I tend to back off HGH, and just take CF409 for the grandmaster trait. I usually carry Elixir B and Elixir R so there’s condition removal there, and healing turret also provides condition removal and AOE effects. Clever use of healing turret for area healing or area might works pretty well.

That being said, I still have things up for might persistence, which means 2x runes of str/hoelbrak/fire on gear. Probably another reason why HGH doesn’t really give me much of a boost. I get my might on, and it doesn’t really ever go away.

I have seen variations where if you don’t want CF409, you can skip grandmaster alchemy entirely and put 5 points down in tools. I think you still want that 25 point minor trait though for the extra damage.

Gear… I tend to run with mostly knights with bits of beserker mixed in. Entirely beserker jewelry. If you have a higher risk tolerance, switching out kit for beserkers is more damage at higher risk of getting smashed into paste. Entirely personal preference I imagine.

Personally I like pistol/shield, but if you do more 1-on-1 PvP, I have heard rifle is awfully good for the number of control options it provides (see nakoda’s articles on FT/Rifle for sPvP). Pistol gives me a little something I can do at range if I need to get out of FT range (plus the 10s of poison is good, and while not as good as it used to be, the confusion is not too bad). Shield gives me reflect (situationally useful), and area might detonation in fire fields.

The thing to remember is that flamethrower, by and large, is not a condition build. There’s really only one condition that we care about and that’s burning, which doesn’t stack in intensity, but rather duration. So going nuts with condition damage gear doesn’t buy you a great deal in my opinion. Better off to work off the power and crit potential of the rapid ticks of flame blast.

Sigils, just one sigil that crits and one that buffs. I think I have might on crit, and then force for the 5% damage. You could go for the precision buff too, but honestly with 30 in the precision tree and lots of precision from gear, I was over 50% and felt like more oomph was more valuable. If you found yourself still maxed out on might, switching to a crit proc on fireblast or something might be cool.

Hope that helps, it was kind of rambly but there you have it.

I like the idea a lot. I think it’d require a brand new debuff. I can’t think of anything in the game that while applied enhances condition damage. So it’d be a fresh thing to code, integrate, and test but it’s a good idea. It’s got a ton of synergy with our other abilities. Might be a good thing to make the flamethrower toolbelt skill for thematic purposes. That might also alleviate concerns that it’d take a separate elixir.

Lakanna.2073:

A snap-target that could be enabled or disabled would work for me, but I’m afraid that it would require a nerf to grenades in general, which is something I’d really not like to see.

It seems to me that this is a really telling concern about the attack. If a BASIC KIT ATTACK (not talking about some elaborate combo of 4-6 skills, but a basic attack) is only balanced by the fact that it’s a pain in the kitten to use — if it were easier to use or more accessible it would be overpowered, then I’d have to say that’s a really kittening bad design and should be FIXED.

Look I get it, the profession as a whole has been knocked around with patches, the traits and this is the ONE THING that seems to still work for high damage. I would not want to see a damage reduction associated with it, and would like to see other profession capabilities raised to this level. But to argue to keep something at a bad design because it works for some folks but not others just seems wrong to me as a REAL engineer.

A notion I’ve had with thinking about the ground casting would be to try to find a compromise between the flexibility of “anywhere” casting and the desire to have an auto-target. What we really need is a target “snap”. As with all snap functions in CAD or other software, it’s usually toggleable, so those that choose to continue life as normal can have that ability. However a target snap would instantly either move the pointer, or put the reticule at the foot of the currently targeted object. Once snapped there, could be moved or adjusted by hand. Or you could just leave it there and release.

I think that’d be a decent compromise myself. I don’t mind the button pushing, but I frequently lose my mouse pointer in the chaos of graphical effects that are going on. This doesn’t just affect grenades, but any ground targeted effect (thrown elixirs, etc). I know I’ve had more than a few Elixir R’s gone astray because my mouse pointer was not exactly where I wanted it when I threw it at the downed person and it ended splattering against a wall or somewhere else useless.

Yeah Flameseeker Chronicles is more Guardian style, but it still looks cool. As an asura engineer, my options for legendaries is even more limited because you can’t freakin’ SEE any of them — except for the shield ;-).

I currently use the SAB shield skin because it felt like it would be something that would appeal to the character.

1) I’d like to see Flamethrower buffed a bit. Wouldn’t take much, but would be nice, maybe Flame Blast be a blast finisher.
2) Turrets… have more or less completely forgotten about those.
3) Gadget improvements would be nice… again, have completely forgotten about those. Between necessary kits and necessary elixirs, gadgets have no room.

I think more than other professions, the proliferation of kits and gadgets and elixirs makes the limited number of utility slots quite a problem. I don’t know what they really envisioned, but it would be kind of cool either be able to specialize in any of these paths, or do something like one turret, one kit, one gadget, one elixir. I suppose Flamethrower comes close. I usually run healing turrent, FT kit, and two elixirs.

I would tend to go with neither for many of the reasons stated (Quip’s silliness, Predator’s sniper look vs engineer’s shotgun usage.) But if you’re dying for a legendary, why not consider The Flameseeker Chronicles?

Robert Hrouda.1327:

He did it alone (or as alone as we all develop things as a team) because it was only a couple bosses in a small area – he didn’t and shouldn’t have needed any assistance with it, and it was finished within the scope of our initial plan.
I can’t give estimates on how long our team was developing this content, but it was an accelerated dev cycle for our team. Thankfully due to the schedule of our release, our team was staffed with some of the fastest iterative folks from the company to get something good out in a short time.
Our next schedule is much more relaxed than this one is though, so I’m very eager to see what we can do with it.

This explains quite a lot about how this part of Living Story has run. Appreciate the insight and looking forward to what comes next!

Well I may have just missed that stuff at Steampipe. I do remember the woman who said it was a mistake to get help from Canach, and there’s the backpiece — but seems to me like that’s a long way from linking him. Now, there’s another post that has a bunch of the emails that were associated with the Lost Shores event. All of that included with the clues provided might have fleshed things out a bit.

I think more exposition would have been better, and the single player instance/dungeon/event would have been a fine place to put it.

As for not bringing a synopsis on every part of the living story because it’s ongoing, that’s simply silly. Here, based on everything I’ve pieced together after the fact, I’ll do it right now.

Initial dialog with Inspector Kiel on Day 1 of Southsun.
“Well we’re back here, hopefully it won’t be as chaotic as last time!”
Player response: “Why, what happened last time?”

And voila… a perfect introduction into relating most of what was conveyed by emails in the prior event. If you already knew what happened in detail, then you don’t have to read it, or you can skim it. If you didn’t, well this is a great time to find out a lot of backstory information in the game.

I do agree the wiki is a WONDERFUL resource. I just don’t think it should be relied on as the SOLE place to explain things that came before. For a creative storytelling mind, there will be ways to draw your player characters into the world, help them find context for your current story without the assumption that they participated before, or the assumption that all you have to do is rely on the wiki.

Honestly, making Kiel sort of a “heart” would have been really nice. I know GW2 has shunned the use of !/? quests for the larger world but providing a driving mechanism to put the player into various locations and situations that were expository to the story might have been another way to do it. The achievement system was an interesting mechanism for driving exploration to various parts of the island, but did keep the focus on their little “tool” for doing the collections. If the Kiel heart got player characters to go question witnesses and report back findings, or search regions for clues, that might have also been a good way to work this TYPE of story.

I think TYPE of story is important here. Flame and Frost was a region wide ongoing story. Things were happening to everyone in Ascalon and Shiverpeaks with attacks. The two personal instances with Rox and Braham were great for uncovering more of the story, as were the spy dead-drops. A police procedural is a very different kind of story and involves a lot more direct involvement — Agatha Christie, CSI, Colombo, LA Noire, etc. Would that have been tricky to implement in an MMO? Very possibly. Still I think more could have been done in this vein to bring player characters into Southsun.

Yes this was tremendously enlightening. If only some of that had made it into Southsun, the Return of the Big kitten Heroes.

Well, telling the story through things NPCs say is fine. However I have to say I think I talked to everyone I could find, explored dialog branches and STILL didn’t really pick up on Canach, or anything other than the basic unpleasantness that was going on. No real “clues” per se.

For those claiming it’s absolutely necessary to go read a wiki to pick up on story elements that came before, have you NEVER read a book that had a synopsis at the beginning? Seriously, it’s not that rare. There are ways to explain the story thus far in ways that are in the same media (book, movie, game, etc).

If there were vital NPC dialogs that did have clues in them, it probably couldn’t have hurt to have highlighted them a little more. It’s been a LONG freakin’ time since I played Ultima 4 and 5 and went around to every single moving icon and asked them NAME, JOB, and BRITISH.

I’ll be the first to admit that monologuing bad guys is very cliche, but holy crap I would have seriously welcomed it. The good guys weren’t telling me jack kitten, so please bad guy, please tell me what the hell you’re doing, why, anything that explains why I’m doing what I’m doing. But there appears (at this point) to be no voice over work. That’s okay, Kiel didn’t have any either and not all stories need it. So after a few attempts I get it done plus the not stepping in a mine achievement. Reward! Wait… there’s some sort of faint sound.

So I turn around and Canach is talking “with” Kiel. A few things to note here about the instance.

It’s a large room.
You may not have killed him near the center.
They put positional audio in the room.
I only barely heard that dialog was happening, I almost missed this.

Now, Canach does have voice acting! Hooray! But… Kiel does not? We don’t even have voice bubbles over their heads, it’s all playing out in the chat window. And with one side having voice acting and the other, it’s seriously ridiculous. It doesn’t have to be a big name. Get freakin’ Sally out of the ANet canteen and get a tape recorder into a conference room and have her read out a few lines for god’s sake.

And there we have it. A single player instance that appears to have been knocked out over the course of a weekend. A villain who has a one-sided conversation about how we’ll never undo his dastardly plan, but honest we don’t even know what his freakin’ dastardly plan is because no one ever adequately explained it. A fight mechanic that is done almost entirely silently. Poor visual cues and ultimately low difficulting. A fight mechanic that completely negates any sort of capability your character in particular might have brought to the encounter.

And yay, we get to do this for a gold piece a day. Yeah. I’ll probably skip this one. I’m not even going to get into Subdirector Null. Exactly same fight mechanics (more or less). Exactly same instance environment with poor lighting, poor indicators (I really hate those icons). Absolutely zero idea why NULL was created (though I understand it was the golem he stole in the story). I didn’t get the impression that Canach was a seriously techy guy. Honestly I didn’t get the impression that he was much of anything because the story never explained him. But I guess he has the capability to rebuild an asuran golem? We got to college for years to learn that stuff!

(Admittedly, knowing Asura, there MIGHT have been a “good golem” / “evil golem” switch in there that was just installed in case it might ever come in handy, just to be completely thorough.)

I’m not even going to touch on overall reward structure for Southsun. I am one of those who have opened MANY chests and gotten ZERO weapon tickets — and I really would have liked one for my mesmer character. But that dolyak has been beat to a bloody pulp in other topics.

So I’d like to end on a lessons learned for ANet here. As in, I hope they learned these lessons.

1) Please make the environments interactive for storytelling purposes.
2) Please pay attention to your story. That’s one of the huge draws for GW2. It’s one half of the label “Living Story”. Give it some TLC.
3) Please do not assume everyone knows all the characters from prior events.
4) Foreshadowing is a tried and true technique in fiction to clue the particpant/observer into what’s going on.
5) Never again have characters have a conversation with one half of them have voice acting and half of them do not.
6) Monologuing bad guys may be cliche, but voice and audio clues during a fight are really GREAT! At the very least, speech bubbles is a head’s up visual rather than looking at the text chat box. That was a TERRIBLE idea.
7) If you’re going to make us distinguish things, make the icons big and bright, and consider text labels for those with less than great eyesight. Especially if you’re going to locate this in a foggy steam filled room that has a tendency to obscure.
8) If you’re going to have a police investigation mystery story, you need to have your police investigating visibly. Have your BDH’s help out! That’s what we’re there for. Plus loot natch.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts on it for whatever it’s worth.

I suppose this is as good a place as any to put my review of the current storyline.

First, while I had the game at launch, I took a long hiatus for life reasons, and did not participate for many months. I missed the Halloween and Christmas stuff, and I missed whatever happened prior to the current story at Southsun. If reports are correct, the prior event was the “only happened over one particular weekend” event so it’s possible people even playing regularly missed out on the story there.

I came back in at or near the beginning of Flame and Frost. While that story got off to a slow start, I have to admit that overall I really enjoyed the arc. I like seeing the world evolve and alter. Super Adventure Box as well was a lot of fun as a one-off event. So with these two as precursor efforts, I had high hopes that the storytelling would continue in good form with Southsun having built on learning from the prior events as to what works and what doesn’t work well.

So into paradise I went…

The story at the outset was interesting, though already there were signs that things were a bit thin. This is essentially a crime style mystery. Inspector Kiel was there at the Islet and said she was going to get to the bottom of this. Frankly I never saw her move, but maybe she’s more on the “administrative” end of inspecting. I talked to everyone I could find, and yes there were settlers and consortium people at nearly every location but they really mainly said the same thing. There are a few books to be read, but nothing super illuminating. I had hoped that I would see Kiel wandering about the island, questioning consortium and settlers alike. We have wandering bounties in the world, a pathing NPC over vast distances would not have been trouble. However she just mainly stood there. At some point later, she did say she had a lead, but how she got this lead I have no idea.

Granted, police authorities do not necessarily need to discuss everything with everyone, but I’m a BDH (big kitten hero, ain’t we just). Surely she could have asked for a little help, or let a few things slip.

The timeline of two weeks I thought was appropriate for this, so I believe ANet did a decent job pacing this. I would have liked to see Kiel with more movement, more inspecting, and a LOT more clues planted around the world. There are a few books yes, but again, not very illuminating. Compare this with just a one time instance in Molten Core where they had inspectable objects that were mainly there for the story (thinking right outside the test chamber). They had those two dead guys with keepsakes.

Now the second half launches. Suddenly — what exactly? I did read the vignette (hate to call it a short story) and there’s this guy Canach throwing down with a Consortium fellow. Okay great. WHO THE HELL IS HE? This is where things start to unravel big time. I have gathered since then that he was a character in that one time weekend event. He seems like he has a decent beef with Consortium to do some evil villain kinds of things, but there needs to be a crapton more foreshadowing when you do story telling. Also, remember this was a widely panned single weekend event that many people didn’t get to participate in. Also, this is a MMORPG which people are picking up and purchasing all the time, coming in fresh to the story. Some backstory would be a SUPER idea.

But there’s no backstory, aside from the vignette which still didn’t really do much to introduce the Canach character.

So here we are in the second half and BOOM we’ve found his lair. How? Doesn’t matter. Police stuff I guess. He’s trapped. Why are we after him? Doesn’t matter I guess. Police stuff. Let’s go get him.

And now we come to the excruciatingly disappointing mechanics issue of the story. Single player instance — fantastic. Loved it with Rox and Braham and was looking forward to the same sort of thing. Presentation on entrance, steamy crustacean environment… well okay, matches Southsun. Kiel is there. She doesn’t really say much other than we’ve got him trapped down here. Why do we have him trapped down here? Don’t know. We just do. Couldn’t be bothered to explain anything to the BDH beforehand, but now GO GET HIM.

What?

Okay, well lame story, but it’s an event right? Let’s see about just getting it done and getting the achiement and forgetting this ever happened. Grab a mine detector. Man the walls look really washed out. I’m supposed to detect mines… well I can see the kitten mines but they’re all alike. Ahh, the type is a dinky icon that reveals when you scan. Pity there weren’t WORDS to go with the icon because honestly it’s seriously foggy in here and a text highlight would have been really helpful. Carefully working through the tunnel and there’s a boss area. Just standing there. Defuse a few more mines and he attacks. Silently.

Out of curiosity, sometimes you select a personality choice dialog option and there is no sound. Other times it makes a weird twangy sound. Anyone know what this actually MEANS?

I’d like to put forth the notion that the rewards for completing the personal story ought to be accelerated up to the character’s true level.

My first character went to 80 before doing much past Claw Island as I did things with crafting and exploring more than quest. So for that situation I knew I had not done things exactly the way ArenaNet had envisioned with their design.

With my second character, I’m attempting to keep up with the personal story as I hit the recommended level (i.e. the level that the gear reward is going to be). Something as a challenge to myself, and something as a test to see if it can be done.

What I’m finding out is that some of these quest locations for each subsequent personal story quest lie in such contested and gradually more difficult areas that by the time you GET to the quest you are likely to be overleveled for the quest reward. It might be possible if you do nothing on your way to the quest, but there are hearts and events thakitten ’s natural to pick up on. For example after the Lich quest, I headed south. I hadn’t had to explore the zone just to the south of Lion’s Arch because I was Vigil, so I had to explore that zone to get to the exit south. Then I had to explore southwards through Sparkfly Fen. The quest was at the asura outpost right by Tequatl. I was very much over leveled by the time I got to the quest marker.

And really the overleveling is fine. The scaling factor makes the personal quest a challenge frequently in various situations, however the REWARD at the end is more or less completely useless. One can argue that the story itself is the reward and the kit is a bonus, but even in a rather flattened non-gear driven MMO like GW2, there is still pleasure in getting something USEFUL out of an event and one would think that their best shot of providing something useful actually comes from the personal story questline as it’s very much NOT random.

Anyhow, perhaps ANet will read and rethink this. Given all the myriad ways of getting kit at the end of the game, I don’t think there’s much that could be exploited by someone delaying all personal story til 80, and that wouldn’t have to be the only answer. Perhaps the level scaling only happens on missions past Claw Island where the destinations become far more spread out.

Well maybe I’ll give that a throw and see how it works out.

Phineas Poe.3018:

And they don’t take Runes of Altruism. They take Condition Duration runes.

Just for pure curiosity, how does Rune of Altruism work out to be better than the Str/Fire/Hoelbrak choice? Is it only particularly associated with toggling to EG frequently? It doesn’t seem like the Might spreading and Fury add up to the extended duration? Maybe it’s just an ensemble synergy thing?

Quetz.4389:

And yes, it’s exactly 50% more haha.

:-)

2. Overemphasis on burning…

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s not get crazy here. Can you really have too much burning? I think not. The fact they put in special “death by burning” screams does make the little psychotic inside of me smile every time. :-)

All kidding aside, you make good points. And it’s probably good for us AND for ANet to make sure that your basic steady damage isn’t completely overshadowed by burst. 100-Blades is burst damage, and it’s EASY burst damage, and there are plenty of other bursty things to fill in the gap. Thus you end up with warriors who do phenomenal damage because they can chain burst skills back to back and suddenly — it’s not really burst damage any more it’s just high constant damage.

I don’t mind FT not managing other conditions because it’s so thematic, but I’ll admit, the fact that the great ball o’ fire doesn’t count as a combo burst finisher just seems so completely unintuitive. I mean seriously, is there another skill by any other profession in the game that looks MORE like a “burst” than an exploding fireball? (maybe that big ol’ rock spike that elementalists can throw).

Perhaps if they did that and they tweaked up the flame jet’s numbers so that a full 10 count blow did pretty much the same damage as a 3 count grenade (maybe link it to Juggernaut simply because to get the 3 count grenade requires a grandmaster level trait). An untraited 2 count grenade is already roughly at the 10 count FT damage level. Then it all more easily boils down to skill (either skill with hitting with grenades or skill with managing a jet of flammable liquid) and we can dispense with these silly elitist outlooks on life about what “newbies” use and whatnot.

My purpose is more in trying to show why abilities or kits don’t feel satisfying due to the numbers behind them as well as in trying to figure out if there are any tricks that may not be straightforward to improving builds.

I think that’s a good purpose!

Quetz.4389:

For grenades the values I used are conservative, I’ve done testing and the cast time seems to be closer to 1 second than the 1/2 second listed on the skill.

Well if you’ve normalized to a per-second frame of reference it doesn’t matter. However if cast time is actually longer than it states, that would serve to lower grenade damage.

Quetz.4389:

Untraited the damage values are already in favor of grenades, traited the grenade kit does over 50% more direct damage, with just it’s auto attack. Grenade kit utility skills do damage in addition to their effects and with grenades you can have massive bleed, vulnerability and poison stacks on top of the direct damage.

I think to be specific, traited with Grenadier, a grenade kit does exactly 50% more direct damage ;-). Unless they actually make each individual grenade hit harder and not just throw a 3rd one.

If I really had to guess, based on the numbers ANet makes a number of assumptions when trying to balance these skills.

1) I have a sneaking suspicion based on how close the numbers are that they assume on average you will only hit with 2 out of the 3 grenades. I do not know how accurate this is. I imagine a highly skilled person can hit with all 3 regularly against a dodging target. I personally do not cope well with a ground reticule in the middle of a firefight (too much graphical bloom — hell, have a hard time finding the freakin’ mouse pointer sometimes). My average would probably be lower than 2 out of 3. But assuming the 0.35 per-second ratio is correct, and considering that burning is built into so many of the FT abilities, 0.7 is remarkably close to 0.68.
2) At the same time, they assume FT hits with every single tick. This is probably a mistake. While from personal experience my jet uptime is nearly 100%, it’s not always, and occasionally range and terrain interfere. If you’re good with circle strafing though, it’s not nearly as hard to keep it locked on target as I’ve seen folks complain about.
3) They’re probably not including a lot of knock-on effects (conditions from traits) in their idea of balance, unless the ability is primarily by itself a condition ability.

Quetz.4389:

For comparison that the flame jet coefficient is not very good here are a few examples. Hundred blades gets a total coefficient of 5.5 over 9 hits in 3.5 seconds. The tool kit 1 chain has skill coefficients of 0.76/0.65/1.66 for 3 hits over 0.5/0.5/1.0 second cast times.

Longer ranged weapons usually get lower coefficients, but the engineer rifle hip shot has a skill coefficient of 0.65 and a 3/4 s cast time.

Hundred blades also has a 8 second recharge time. Do your numbers include that?

That being said, the burst on hundred blades is incredible, and warriors have lots of other things to do to fill in the gap. Which leads to another assumption I suspect they make:

4) They tend to consider abilities in terms of the ability by itself, as opposed to the opportunity of doing things in the down-time.

I write this all mainly for analysis purposes. My own opinion is like I stated before. I agree that FT is a lower damage weapon than grenades. It could use an additional boost in a couple of ways. I do not think it is abysmal though as many have asserted. If one is not good with ground reticules, it’s likely better than grenades. And in before “LOL L2PLAY” I really don’t know why people have such a hard time keeping a FT jet on target ;-). Basically my point there is that it’s all relative to a person’s proficiencies with various playstyles. I doubt even with practice, I will ever get exceptionally great at ground targeting in a frantic situation due to a variety of reasons (age, lack of twitchyness, eyesight, etc).

EDIT: Error with post tags.

Quetz.4389:

The damage formula is:

Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

Each skill has a unique coefficient, for the flamethrower flame jet it’s 0.14 per hit and it hits 10 times over 2 1/4 seconds.

So from the formula the skill coefficient directly affects how well the weapon scales with additional power.

So applying a little algebra, the damage done for a use of the flame jet is:

Damage done = N * (weapon_damage) * (power) * (coefficient) / (armor)
= (weapon_damage) * (power) * (N*coefficient) / (armor)
Where N ranges 0-10 based on the number of times flame jet hits.

Essentially what you’ve got with flame jet is a variable coefficient compared to say a single rifle shot.

If you are particularly good with hitting, your coefficient is actually 1.4. How this compares with other abilities I couldn’t say, but comparing it based on a single hit of flame jet is disingenuous at best.

EDIT: I read up to the original thread and you do then average this out with per second, and then the numbers are comparing more apples to apples. So over 2.25 seconds, assuming all 10 hit, you get 0.14 * 10 / 2.25 and you do get your 0.62 coefficient when normalized to a per-second frame.

However, assuming your numbers are right for the others (didn’t check) you assert 0.35 per grenade per second. Untraited that’s 0.70 which is very comparable to 0.62. Traited you get 1.05 per second.

The conclusion is a matter of perspective I imagine. It’s a little more than half damage if you do nothing but use Grenade #1 versuse FT #1. Whether this is important to an encounter I would imagine depends greatly on the circumstances.

EDIT #2: Also this disregards the additional damage done to burning targets… it’s not a huge increase but brings the basic per-second ratio to 0.68.

And a more editorial comment, the number of damage inflicting abilities on a kit is not exactly relevant. FT has 2. Grenade has 5 (6 counting toolbelt) You’re only using one at a time — not like you light them all up at the same time. So the argument there is basically variety and possibly a utility argument (various fields).

I would appreciate a damage bump, though it wouldn’t take much, and maybe the #2 being a blast finisher would be sweet, but I think FT is in a pretty reasonable spot.

Plus, it’s fun, IMHO.

blurps.2340:

Remillard.8691:

blurps.2340:

PS: Unless you go full elixirs the new Southsun Cove is a pita for Engineers with all the conditions being thrown around. Way to go Anet.

CF 409 is available at the 2nd tier for elixirs. Medkit has #4 for frequent cleanse. Our new respanked healing turret is also pretty great for conditions. Haven’t noticed a problem.

You have to equip elixirs for 409 to be useful, 3 at least. Med Kit #4 cures one condition on a 15s cooldown.

409 build, Med Kit and healing turret are mutually exclusive by the way.

Yes, you do have to have an elixir out. I was taking issue with your assertion that you have to go full elixirs. Additionally, I do understand that the medkit and turret are mutually exclusive.

My personal experience though does not bear out your assertion that the area is difficult for engineers due to conditions being placed on the character. I run healing turret, CF 409, a one or two elixirs, mixing up as I go (usually at least Elixir R as the stunbreak is great in so many situations — thinking particularly here of the reef drakes with their pull — though sometimes switch to C for the F-key reflect wall which is particularly useful against either karka or those reef riders.)

So, no, you do not have to go full elixirs to get adequate condition removal. You can be choosy with what you haul around.

You DO have to make sure you address the situation. Going in and expecting to have to do nothing at all is a mistake. But you have options, as presented.

blurps.2340:

PS: Unless you go full elixirs the new Southsun Cove is a pita for Engineers with all the conditions being thrown around. Way to go Anet.

CF 409 is available at the 2nd tier for elixirs. Medkit has #4 for frequent cleanse. Our new respanked healing turret is also pretty great for conditions. Haven’t noticed a problem.

Phineas Poe.3018:

People run the FT/EG build because it’s a hybrid spec that offers extensive group support and reasonable DPS. Doesn’t matter what dungeon you’re doing: An FT/EG Engineer with a Hammer Guardian and content just becomes trivial. Nobody dies.

On top of fundamentally being fun, and not having to kitten around with a ground targeting reticule 100% of the time.

Mif.3471:

Agent Batanga <3

I also <3 Agent Batanga.

Also in the cute category, I’d count Agent Zrii who shows up in that personal storyline quest where you rescue the Priory explorers who uncovered the Dwarven tome.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Agentzrii.png

Phineas Poe.3018:

I think a lot of it is self-inflicted hysteria.

Whatever gave you that impression? ;-)

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Engineer is probably the best class in the game currently.

tigirius.9014:

This actually illustrates perfectly the problems with the class.

As so often is the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle… I personally tend to think we’re closer to the “pretty much okay, few things need tweaking” rather than the sky is falling, but I’m not going to blow rainbows up anyone’s kitten either.

I think there is potential for exploring various theories. In reality, the MMO game world is merely a model. The amount of benefit obtained from empirical data obtained from the MMO world model will only be as good as its general fidelity to the real world in key ways.

Let’s take Modern Monetary Theory as one example. Generally this economic theory breaks the macroeconomy into segments and applies accounting principles to the flow of money across the boundaries. Rather than treating money as a commodity, what’s more important in MMT is observing the flow and relative volumes. Think of water sloshing around between tanks. Maybe we can ask some meaningful questions about this:

1) Is there money involved? Yes, gold appears to be a currency.
2) What is the source of this money? Money is spontaneously generated by in-game activities, usually the destruction of various also spontaneously generated virtual non-agents (either NPC monsters or loot or both).
3) Why would someone want this money? There are various requirements placed on agents in the game, namely purchasing in-game goods and services from non-agents.
4) Why would someone NOT want this money? Unlike the real world, there is no fundamental tax placed on existence. Someone could stand 100% still and not create any need for the money.

And so on. One could analyze the money supply, look at the various rates of currency generation (inflow) and currency removal (since there’s no tax — really it’s only purchasing goods and services from NPCs and the transaction fees on certain player-to-player interactions), look at the overall way this drives behavior towards pursuit of the currency and then decide whether or not this is the state of the world as they want it.

Or you could try to model other theories, answer some basic questions and see if THAT gets you from point A to point B.

Anyhow, I suppose the tl;dr is that there is value in models, but only to the point where they are telling you useful information that will inform some policy or direction.

Oh I remember Below the Root very well. Seem to remember winning it too, played over many attempts during study hall :-).

In a funny synchronicity, I had run into this earlier today on something completely unrelated and it also had BtR: http://www.virtualapple.org/belowtherootdisk.html

Enjoy!

I’ve noticed Elixir C not removing all conditions, though it’s always been in situations with AOE conditions, so I have to believe it’s because C removed the condition, but the zone reticked and added the condition back on again.

I’d also note that with the Flamethrower builds, be sure to completely mix up your Elixirs to the purpose at hand. I’ve found that Elixir R tends to be a godsend in many situations. If you’re on your kitten you’re probably about to get it handed to you. For high knockdown/condition situations (running through and/or skipping trash sometimes) you can even pop your goggles in for another stun break though I wouldn’t keep them there for an actual fight.

Also, mixing up HGH and Cleansing 409 is pretty handy situationally. The extra might stack may not mean much if your Elixir C is on cooldown.

Another viable deviation is the first tier in Firearms. I tend to run with the speedboost on crit trait rather than vulnerability. We aren’t taking the points in the toolkit for freebie speed, and Flamethrower works at medium range, so having some additional maneuverability can be situationally awesome.

All this being said, since you asked for general information, also be sure to look up the grenadier/condition damage builds that circulate around. They are very potent, high damage, and frequently less dangerous than flamethrower due to being able to lob those kittens from a far distance. I personally find flamethrower to be more viscerally fun, but I can’t gainsay a great damage build like grenadier either. Experiment and find what you like the best and provides you and your compatriots the most benefit.

I actually have little to no trouble with the flamethrower hitting, though I tend to circle-strafe just out of old FPS habit so I may be “doing it right” without knowing it. If you’re using the Juggernaut/HGH type might build, you can probably stand a LOT closer than you think to “regular” mobs, though for Champion and Boss level ones be careful obviously.

Slopes and Dragons have major issues. I can hit Shatterer and Claw of Jormag, but I cannot hit Tequatl’s foot for the life of me with the flamethrower. I just get misses standing next to it.

Well I didn’t know a whole lot about the GW world when I started, but I wanted to play an engineer. When I read each species/culture biography, the asuran sounded like the best match personalitywise.

After that, I’ve made a human (kind of boring), sylvari (meh), norn (meh), and charr (likewise awesome). Just for the story and character uniqueness, asurans and charr win hands down in my opinion. I love the animations, I love the attitude, I love the quotes. I love running and nearly tipping over. I love jumping puzzles with them. I love the capitol.

My respect for charr is just as great and they’re definitely up there, but my favorite are the asurans.