Guild Wars 2

I’ve been noticing this, and I’m very annoyed that they haven’t fixed this problem.

My experience with knockback is that knockbacks actually put the knocked down enemy’s hit box in the ground. This is most noticable if you use FT’s Air Blast followed by Flame Blast, as the bead from the Flame Blast goes into the ground instead of toward the physical body you just knocked down/away.

I would say toolkit is very helpful in ZvZ because you are one more person with a pull. Once you pull, you can hit them with Prybar and (if you use pistols) #3 static shot to add confusion to their current problems. You can also run in, toss your ranged attacks, and run out with a block to protect yourself.

I never said there was a point to cycling through 3 kits. I would definitely not advise using 3 kits at all. You have no getaway skills to protect yourself.

I agree that our kits are definitely lackluster compared to the spamming burst attacks warriors and thieves can put out.

Some of an engineer’s power lies in the ability to flip constantly between his main weapon and a kit without worry of a large cooldown that all the other classes (elementalist being the exception) have.

I’ve looked into this, and this is why they consider the engineer a “highly versatile class.”

Our major advantage is we can cycle through our kits/weapons fluidly (1s CD timer vs 9 or 10 seconds with all other classes save Elementalist, who I will explain below), effectively giving us 10/15/20 weapon skills to use along with 4 toolbelt skills.

However, having 20 weapons skills leaves you with no utility for stun-breakers, gadgets, elixirs or racial utilities.

The Elementalist is similar except he cannot shift back to an element he has shifted away from for 15 seconds (traitable down to 8 seconds from what I get from the trait list. Am I right?)

Engineers can move in and out of a kit at the rate of 1 second per kit, and is the only class that can go right back into the same kit or weapon skill set in 1 second.

I sat down and spent some time going over the kits and their abilities. Our kits are gimmicky and the traits they give us seem like they don’t work well with these kits. This led me to an idea.

What if there were Grandmaster traits that let Engineers specialize in a certain kit?

I have put together ideas for improved kits with more powerful skills that are available only an engineer if he/she currently has that kit’s respective Grandmaster trait active.

I will post the improved kit skills with a traited kit name beside the original name. The traited name will take the place of the kit name if you have the Grandmaster trait currently active. For all purposes, the kit skills’ activation time and CD time do not change.

Flamethrower: (Traited: Roaring Flamethrower)

1. Building Flame Jet: Spray fire in a cone pattern while on the move, burning enemies on the final attack. Every 3rd (edited up from 5th) consecutive hit automatically does double damage (+crit damage). The consecutive hit must be within the same Jet; any miss or interruption resets the counter.

2. Burn Notice: Fire a napalm ball that rolls through foes and explodes. Crits by Flame Blast have a 30% chance to inflict 2s burning on enemies. This can stack duration with the Adept Explosives trait Incendiary Powder.

3. Steam Blast: Sear and push back foes and projectiles with a hot steam blast (Damage and pushback)

4. Fanning the Flames Napalm, in addition to the normal effects, also affects Flame Jet, burning foes for an additional 0.2 second for every hit of Flame Jet while Flame Jet passes through Napalm’s combo field.

5. Superheated Steam Vent: Vent superheated steam from your FT backpack, searing and blinding enemies. (Damage and blind AOE)

Elixir Gun: (Traited: Focused Elixir Gun)

1. Potent Tranquilizer Darts: Fire a dart that bleeds and weakens foes. Tranquilizer darts have a 10% chance to stun enemy for 2 seconds. This effect cannot happen more than once every 10 seconds.

2. Sustained Elixir F: Fire a bouncing glob of Elixir F that cripples foes and grants swiftness to you and allies. Elixir F has a 25% cumulative chance (up to 100% chance on last hit) per bounce to double cripple or swiftness duration.

3. Powerful Fumigate: (2 ¼ s) Spray a cone of elixir fumes, inflicting poison and vulnerability to foes and curing conditions on allies with every strike. Fumigate has a 10% chance per strike to remove two conditions or apply two stacks of vulnerability.

4. Sticky Acid Bomb: Leap backward, spraying an acidic elixir on the ground that damages and cripples foes for 1 second

5. Heightened Super Elixir: Launch an elixir orb, healing allies on impact and creating an area of continual healing. (Impact heal improved by 100% (healing for twice as much as normal Super Elixir). Pulse heal stays the same.)

Tool Kit (Traited Name: Industrial Tool Kit)

1. a. Improved Smack: Smack your foes. Repair Turrets. For every consecutive hit beyond the first that repairs a turret, healing doubles additively (x2, x3, x4, up to x5)

c. Stunning Thwack: Thwack your foes with a 30% chance on crit to stun an enemy for 2 seconds. This cannot occur more than once every 10 seconds.

2. Box of Large Nails: Scatter nails that bleed, cripple, and sometimes stop foes in their tracks. 50% chance that crippled foes will be immobilized for 2s.

3. Industrial Grade Pry Bar (1s) Confuse your foe thoroughly by smacking them with a very solid pry bar (6 stacks of confusion instead of 3)

4. Gear Shield: Block Attacks. (No improvement idea here yet.)

5. Powerful Magnet: Pull your target and all of your turrets to you. This also affects turrets placed out by your Supply Kit

These are ideas. I haven’t figured out where these traits could go, but I have ideas: FT possibly with Firearms; EG with Elixirs; Tool Kit with Tools or Inventions.

Mook is correct, and my wording wasn’t as well. I agree that most traits aren’t versatile enough to deal with the multitude of our kits.

Like I said before, there should be master or GM traits that actually give some of our kits different (or added) characteristics. I’ll look through the effects and see what I can come up with for trait characteristics.

The biggest problem is that engineers actually have too many kits. Because of this our traits fail to work effectively.

FT should be able to be traited to do extra burn damage (+50% burn damage, not duration).

The same for Elixir Gun, though EG needs to be able to cripple enemies who are in an acid pool.

Engineers need gimmick traits to match their gimmick kits. Master or GM traits that actually add characteristics to their kits. Generic traits like bonus crit/bonus damage just don’t do it for Engineers.

I think two things need to be added as traits for turrets.

1) A grandmaster trait that forces turrets to follow a targeted enemy. This is ONLY for enemies targeted by the engineer, not by the T icon (ctrl-T).

2) A master (or possibly a grandmaster) trait that increases the rate of fire of turrets or reduces the coolldown time of turret overcharge abilities. Either one would be a good trait to upgrade turrets.

Here’s a question:

Has anyone noticed a change in downed state health based on vitality? I know that if you constantly go into downed state, the percentage you go down with is less and less.

If it isn’t, then I think downed state health should be based off of vitality. Glass cannon builds would be MUCH easier to defeat/kill when downed, which would balance them out a little more.

If you want more fun with pistol and toolkit, pop Elixir B, pistol shot them, then crow bar them (both attacks are quick), then block with the gear shield. You take no damage, they take 5 stacks of confusion damage per attack as well as Retaliation damage.

If a class grants retal to multiple people, you can take retal damage from each source. This makes AOE attacks vs a retal group very deadly to the AOE user.

Chances are you were hitting more than one person with the retaliation boon.

I kinda agree with Bunzy on the heal after death thing. But only kinda.

Taking away either mechanic prevents a major comeback.

How about this:

On death (after downed state) a 1-, 2-, or even 5-minute timer starts on the corpse. If players don’t get to that corpse to start healing it, then that corpse is instantly teleported to the nearest uncontested WP.

Does that sound good? I know people have been constantly complaining about corpse-spying, so this might work for that as well.

And the funny thing is that even though we are the jack of all trades, there’s already a jack of all trades class (the elementalist) that outperforms us.

I don’t like the way healing turret works, but we can discuss that in a PM or something.

I do like the recommendation that we get all the buffs together, however I feel that we should get only two of them. I would think that 10s of regen and 5s of protection would be perfect. I could care less about having swiftness when I have utility skills that grant me the same thing.

Drinking Elixir H only gives you one of the boons in addition to the spot heal. So you get Regen, Swiftness, OR protection, not all three of them.

This is what many people don’t like about the elixirs. You can’t rely on the RNG of elixirs because they are different from one another.

Protection, Swiftness, and Regen are so different from each other that you can only rely on the elixir as a spot-healing agent and nothing else.

The Full Effect of Elixir H doesn’t compare to a lot of other healing effects. Simply put, ANet is giving us Elixir H as a subpar heal ability because (by some crazy idea) they think we might spam the toss ability along with it. At least that’s the only reason I can come up with.

Elixir H in all ways is a bad ability, and our other heals don’t do that well, either.

Don’t forget about Type Vs. There is one sigil in there that can be helpful for PvP.

The Sigil of Impact grants you bonus damage vs knocked down or stunned opponents. If you can build a knockdown/stun build, this will help increase the damage.

You can also use the sigil that removes a boon on crit, though it only procs once every 10 seconds. Be careful, because this proc can be wasted on people who don’t even have boons.

I stand corrected.

Drinking R is definitely not an all CC break. You’ll recover from a stun, which is anything that prevents all skills from being used.

However, you still have to deal with the conditions that CC, such as immobilize, cripple, and chill.

R (drinking R) is definitely not a CC break unless you pair the trait Cleaning Formula 409 with it. Drinking R only removes stun.

Tossing R is an (eventual) CC break in that it will remove a condition (randomly) every second. However, it doesn’t do too well since it’s only one condition every second. The CD on this is horrible, and I wouldn’t use it for condition removal at all.

dreztina.4820:

Pendragon.8735:

Bunzy.8674:

To Yaks Bend and Ehmry Bay,

When you see the OG guild tag, what is your normal response to this?

Just curious.

What I’ve seen usually you guys get chased back to your spawn by our teams then a few noobs who chase you all the way there get ganked 5-7 vs 2 or 3. Rinse repeat over and over.

I like how you used the word team.

“Definition: Team: A group of players forming one side in a competitive game or sport.”

Yeah. Yeah, I think he used the word “team” in the right meaning.

In a stagnant area, you’ll always have routine. But it’s the people (in PvP) who make the situation anything but routine.

People figure out new ways to attack or assault. Strategy comes in many forms. Decoys, diversions, stealth assaults (those darn golems!), and supply starvation are just a few of the strategies I’ve seen in this game.

The big keeps have multiple entry points. Walls and gates are everywhere (some requiring more effort than others), able to be broken down for the sieging army to come charging in.

Both offense and defense have to figure out what to do to stop each other, and that is where the variety happens.

I find WvW very entertaining in that there’s so many different ways to gain points on the maps. Sure, the basics, the core, is all about area control, but the defense and the offense are what spice the WvW game up.

You’ll find the folks who just get tired of the game. PvE will ALWAYS have routine. Eventually you’ll know what this mob is going to do. Eventually you’ll find the pattern to a fight, and find the most efficient way to defeat it. And it will take months for them to find a new way to challenge you.

The biggest MMO producers have had the problem of challenging folks. Some have failed. Some have succeeded (partially, of late). But you’re going to become bored with a game eventually.

The good news: GW2 is free. You can come back, look at it, and it won’t cost you an extra dime.

The bad news: ANet might not put content out as often as others because of the fact that this isn’t a monthly game. This could be countered by the fact that of the in-game store, which has plenty of incentives that don’t imbalance gameplay. If the in-game store succeeds, then this “bad news” might be moot.

I’m not really sure about the balance for downed states. #2 should usually be a stomp stopper, be it a pull, a push, a fear, or a teleport.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that when you push or pull a person doing a stomp, it’s not counted as an interrupt. That person can get up and instantly start the stomp all over again. Normal interrupts cause a delay in using that skill (5 seconds is what the wiki says, and that seems like what I’ve seen before).

The fact that they’re not interrupted makes the attack a little more lethal. I can’t say whether I’m for or against this, as different classes have different forms of stomp prevention (some more effective than others).

I think downed state is okay, and it helps deal with the “no healers/no instant ressers” part of most MMOs (like the above posters mentioned). Health pools aren’t very big in this game, and it’s easy to reduce them quickly. (A good thief can do it in 1-2 seconds) A certain famous MMO has HP going over 200K at levels above 80. GW2 has HP in the 20K-30K range. Not much at all. So you need something to counteract the “2 second kill” factor.

There are ways to counter downed states. Invulnerable stomps, stealth stomps, stability stomps, and quickness stomps. That’s three different ways, and it takes just as much effort (you use an extra skill) as attempting to res the person.

There are also ways to quickly res enemies. Group res-ing (3 people can res a guy at initial downed state of 50% in more or less 1 second), quickness res-ing, and single player res in combination with Elixir R.

Finishing stomps should be kept as well. This is the counter to a person constantly getting back on his or her feet and rallying. It takes time. It takes effort to make it faster. But it is better (especially in 1v1) than just sitting there and poking the prone, bleeding guy with a stick and yelling “DIE, ALREADY!”

Hint: If someone is constantly stability stomping a friend, then find a way to remove the boon and THEN push him away. It takes quick thinking, but there are abilities, traits, and even sigils that take boons away.

I’m trying to figure out how to talk with what Tulisin said and Archonis agreed with. This is my response.

You can’t say that culling doesn’t give the benefits that stealth gives. Culling doesn’t give ALL the benefits of stealth, yes. It doesn’t give the number benefits, the increase in power that a stealth attack has.

The benefit that culling gives similar to stealth is the benefit of the unknown. The confusion of not knowing exactly where the enemy is attacking you.

Sure, you can say “I know he’s attacking from behind because thieves get the most benefit from stealth attacks behind their enemies.” But where will he go from there? You don’t know yet. You still can’t see him. He still has most of his surprise because you aren’t sure where he is until a second or two later (based on culling).

And by the time the thief becomes visible, by the time you have a definite bead on him, he is able to stealth and confuse you even more. This is the advantage that people think is unfair about culling. This may not be as advantageous against extremely skilled players, but it probably still presents a problem to them.

Archonis replied to one of my previous posts with:

“I would agree that damage should reveal us, if it wasn’t for how short our stealth is and also the monumental amount of AoE that is easy to throw around. Unless you could trait to reduce the reveal effect through Shadow Art or something.”

I agree that if damage would reveal you, that there should be a trait that gives a thief a chance to remain stealthed when damaged. After all, AOE is just a lucky toss of the net to try to find the invisible guy who is harassing you.

The big question is, what should the percentage be and how high up on a trait line should that trait be?

Dual said:

“The problem with that is in anything over a duel, stealth would become next to useless with all the crossfire flying around. And if they brought that over to PvE with it, well high level areas are AoE city, Thieves have low defense and no passive damage mitigation so they’d be pretty much ruined.”

Here’s the problem with that. A firefight is a firefight. You don’t see stealthed people charging across a firefight trying to do things. A thief shouldn’t be running face first into a bulletstorm in stealth. A warrior or guardian are the ones who should be doing that.

A thief should be edging around the back/side or perhaps using the shadowstep/shadow return to do a temporary advance burst. Thieves aren’t soldiers; they get to the frontline of the enemy by coming from the side, where bullets aren’t as frequent.

Is it bad that I giggle if I kill anything with a lightning strike or the pistol electric shot?

When an NPC wiggles in death under the throes of lighting, it makes me think: “Don’t taze me, bro!”

But this morning was a good one. HIRE was fighting the good fight in YB BL, and they took over DB after about an hour of fighting. It was a very smart fight, where they were constantly taking over Faith while pounding on the south gates to prevent supply coming back in.

I know you guys probably had to go back to your BL to fight with Mag (and it was a little depressing to find DB a ghost town after we trebbed the outer wall and basically walked in through the inner north gate), but the fight you put up on YB BL was a good one. Loved it!

Keep the good times coming!

I’ve seen some really good thieves, too. Thieves who don’t need stealth to reduce you to a corpse. A good example is a Sword build with Basilisk Venom and Haste. The guy who had this combo won everytime, and he was good at staying alive versus another one after he speed stomped me.

I know that stealth was meant to be just that. Hidden. They aren’t really thieves more than they are assassins. The only thing that makes them thieves is a steal skill, which doesn’t grant them monetary gain at all. Everything else: assassin.

I also think that certain things should bring a thief out of stealth. If I were putting flames on a hidden/invisible enemy, shouldn’t they catch on fire or at least show a silhouette in the plume of the flames? On top of that, shouldn’t a burning enemy be revealed much easier? If I bleed a hidden/invisible enemy, shouldn’t I be able to see the blood trail they leave (especially if he has greater than 5 stacks of bleeding on him)?

Stealth Stomping can be countered, yes. I have saved others from a thief stomp with a blast of my FT or the #4 offhand shield ability of my eng. But that’s the ONLY time where you know exactly where the thief will be.

All other times you don’t know where and when the thief will strike. And this is what people can’t handle. Even experienced players of the game (and other games) on both sides as thief and opponent agree that the theif’s ability to pop in and out so often combined with the burst damage they can do gives too much of an advantage to the thief.

Mortar needs a range buff at least, and a larger radius OR a much faster travel time for the shells (Both might be a little OP. Just a little.). It sucks to hear this, but it doesn’t do enough as an elite compared to the other skills.

Elites are supposed to be gotcha or comeback moves.

Elixir X is a comeback move, as you buff up into a powerhouse mutant ready to put the beatdown on someone who has been beating you down, or you turn into a whirling tornado knocking the enemy off their feet constantly. Supply Crate’s a gotcha move by stunning people, while the engie runs around to heal himself and gets free hits in on the stunned character both in the form of the turrets and his own attacks.

Mortar . . . doesn’t do either. It doesn’t even support well since the CCs and damaging attacks are easily avoidable and the elixir’s effect radius seems small (I think EG’s SE has an equal size radius).

I don’t think that giving it 2 stacks of might is good. Besides, if you trait into HGH, you already get 2 stacks of might when you use it (or 1 stack of might when you toss it).

I agree with Tigirius and I think he gets what I was thinking more or less.

Elixir R is a good elixir (hell, it’s our most stable elixir!), but it’s just not offensive or CC enough to cause any real effect on raising DPS or player strategy.

Archonis.7249:

Rabib.6580:

I just seen thief take down a group of 4 people, first person is down on the first attack, he restealths, the chase is on, cast random ae’s, no luck. Stomps the downed person from stealth (great idea, stomping from stealth). 3 on 1 now, rinse and repeat 3 more times. I counted 6 attacks to my 1, he hit me 6 times from stealth, i got off ONE (1) attack before I was dead. I don’t care if we all suck as players, 1 should never beat 4. Just another reason that WvW is dying, just send 1-2 thieves to the spawn points, and gank people all day long. Ya a really balanced class.

Or you could learn to kittening dodge and CC the Thief and end his shenanigans. You have a 3 sec window to stun, root, or daze him. Then if 3 people can’t burst him down in that time. Just Alt+F4 and Uninstall because this game is too hard for you. Stick to board games, I heard that Axis and Allies is pretty cool.

The biggest problem to this is the lack of knowledge of who he will attack next. You don’t know when the thief will pop up and attack, and you don’t know who he will attack.

This gives the thief a larger chance for kills than you know. He can easily strike when and where he wants, and he has utility skills and traits that will help him be even more formiddable by varying the time of his stealth.

I can’t even count the number of times a stealthed thief has caught me after I’ve wasted a block or a dodge trying to anticipate when he’ll appear. Not to mention he already has me targetted while I have to retarget and then attack him. Retargetting takes time, even the tab-autotarget, and that’s not too reliable if you have multiple enemies you’re fighting.

Even CC doesn’t work too well on a thief, especially when culling comes around. Thieves are susceptible to CC, but there aren’t enough AOE CCs to counter a thief’s mobility and stealth. Simply put, your idea doesn’t work.

It’s hard for most people to counter a thief’s stealth and mobility because they are so formiddable. It’s not the fact that the thief has a weakness, it’s that we can’t exploit the weakness if we can’t see the thief.

I admit it’s different playstyles, and I’ll retract my argument that it’s a basic strategy and a crutch.

I’ve been watching a lot of Extra Credits, and it was referring to something called “First Order Optimal Strategy”, or FOO Strategy, which is what developers use to give players a crutch early on in a game or give inexperienced players an advantage against other players who have been playing a game a lot longer. (see noob tube for most FPS PvP games)

Compounding on what Eviator said, Elixir R is like a sort FOO Strategy. It gives people who aren’t as experienced in a dungeon the ability to survive. As teammates survive dungeons better and develop better defensive strategies, Elixir R is dropped in favor of more damage-dealing or support to help your fellow player do more damage.

What I like to do is use FT and EG with P/S. With the blast of your #4 shield you can give everyone around you retalitation or might. Pretty helpful, not to mention being able to sit and heal in your own EG combo field while curing conditions on you makes it a very useful tool.

I just wish that FT #3 was a blast finisher as well as a pushback. Now THAT would be good!

A good example of the “all-over problems” that LukeTheQuke is mentioning is the way a lot of underwater enemies all of a sudden bug out and go invulnerable during combat. WEIRD and frustrating!

In response to Isslair’s post:

I would love to see conditions be more powerful. As it is, everyone has the ability to remove conditions, rendering them not as dangerous as they used to be.

I think ANet took the philosophy of other MMORPGs when dealing with the DoT-based conditions. The reason DoTs were powerful in most other games were that you needed a certain class to get rid of them.

If you solo’d an enemy who had DoTs and you didn’t have the ability to remove them, you were fighting against the clock. In GW2 everyone can get rid of a DoT (condition) in some form or fashion, so the only thing that you can do is reapply them and run around hoping the enemy doesn’t remember his heal button.

My hopeful patch will be:

- Charr players will automatically make the text kitty cat face ( : 3 ) upon killing an enemy player. This will be seeable by the enemy player as text chat above the Charr player’s head.

From what the wiki says, sigils of the same type share CD timers. You might want to shift over to two different types of sigils. Either a stacking and a proc on crit or perhaps a more permanent thing, like Accuracy or force with one of the proc-ing sigils.

I tried vuln and might on crit thinking I could give myself a power boost with my FT, but I didn’t see as drastic a change in damage as I thought I would. Dunno if that’s because FT just wasn’t hitting the targets correctly (possible, but I saw damage and plenty of crits at 39% crit chance) or the sigils were actually sharing a cooldown.

Whatever you do, don’t use the target dummies across the land to test your theories. They are damage-able items, which you can’t crit on.

I haven’t totally tested the theory of sigil cooldown sharing, but I do trust the wiki. If you want your own testing grab a sigil of might and earth and test them out on the golems in the Mists.

— On the WvW/PvE idea —

WvW and PvE are . . . different monsters. WvW includes PvP elements, and you will be severely disappointed when you find that the build you owned a monster with didn’t even faze an enemy player.

Speaking of the static discharge trait, I would actually like it if they make it a fixed reaction. Simply target someone, use your toolbelt skill, and the static goes toward the targetted enemy.

To me this makes it a LOT easier to predict what will happen, rather than have it go shoot a bolt 3 feet into nothing when you use a self-buffing toolbelt skill.

You don’t have to use Elixir R to succeed every part of a dungeon. You can roam dungeons with whatever setup you want.

I tend to run EG, an extra elixir (usually B ), and some random item based on what utility I need. A lot of times I’ll toss either FT for an extra weapon (with a blind, a pushback, a cone-based AOE, and a combo field), Net Turret (for extra CCs) or the Goggles (For its stun-break, fury, and the VERY helpful burst ability of 10-stacks of vulnerability).

Elixir R IS helpful. It’s a GREAT defense item as it breaks stun and give endurance back (for 2 dodges). The toolbelt skill is the most stable of all the elixirs, and helpful in that it removes condition and give 20% revive health with each pulse.

But . . . I like my other utility slots to be more versatile. I keep myself (edit: AND my allies!) alive through my constant mini-heals with EG and other attacks.

Edit:: I agree with Raven’s post below me. Don’t try to pigeonhole folks into using/keeping a single skill slot. That’s like telling the guy who likes to use EG or FT (me and other engies) that he shouldn’t be using them because he’s not getting the most damage with them.

No Mag Presence? I beg to differ!

They appeared and brought a lot of fun in YB BL the past hour and a half, tagging NE and SE supply while attacking the north and south doors on SH.

It was a LOT of fun see how often supply camps were being flipped in YB BL today.

Hope you have fun while I sleep, folks!

So you’re complaining that a player found a way to put his turret in a safe place? If he’s not close enough to aggro enemies, the rifle (or any other turret) doesn’t do enough damage to knock out the rapid regen capabilities of mobs. If a mob can’t reach the player, then he will turn invincible and run away.

The only way that the rifle will do damage while the owner is afk is if another is engaged with the enemy. This means that the other player is (either wittingly or unwittingly) exploiting the use of the rifle by keeping the monster in range of it.

Placing the rifle turret where the mob can’t reach it could be called exploiting, but the mob will go invulnerable if it can’t reach the creature that’s aggroing it. Eventually it will reset, and you have to aggro it all over again.

I think it was a Mag thief before the server restarted for the new fight, but I want to congratulate you on your build.

You’ve created the equivalent of the WoW 1 minute Mage, but you’ve done it in an in-your-face way instead of the sneaky here-comes-two-crit-pyroblasts-from-nowhere way.

Just letting you know, I was the YB engie cat that you kept shadowstepping and owning in 2 seconds. Over and over. Was that a sword combo with Basilisk’s venom and Haste?

Good job!

I prefer the FT or the EG because, to me, they seem to mesh more with the pistol than any other kits would.

EG and Pistol both have bleeds and poisons, which is very good for switching in between and stacking similar type damage. EG has #2 and #4 allow for distance control, with #2 being able to affect multiple friends/foes (as long as it hits a foe first). With melee you can use EG #2 to give yourself speed and slow the opponent down, while you either escape with #4 (and lay more damage down) or use P/S #4 to push them away. Not to mention the assistance qualities of EG #3 and #5.

FT with pistol provides two blinds (even though FT is EXTREMELY close for comfort). The knockback from #3 is helpful to get you out of semi-tight jams #4 helps out a little bit with burning. . .Aw, hell., FT really needs help. Please fix it!

So I’m stuck with EG and pistol. Not bad. I like the range you can maintain with EG.

On-swap sigils are supposed to work when we swap kits.

Thank you for the gift, Guumies! I wasn’t there, but I appreciate how giving you were in this season.

Hope you continue to be as giving as you were this past week!

I am referring to the toolbelt skills, yes.

You’re right in that it’s not a sustained 15% endurance per second. It’s a burst skill, and burst skills are notable for having long cooldowns but higher effect than constant or passive skills.

If you go farther down the trait line (15 points) your toolbelt skills recharge at 25% health. Not a lot of help, but this also gives you the ability to once again refill your endurancevia those skills.

Not sustained, but in my eyes certainly more useful than a flat 7.5% per second.

The biggest problem is that you are encouraged to keep a full endurance, which means you have to not dodge to keep this damage increase.

As soon as you dodge, you have to wait anywhere from 4-10 seconds before you can get that benefit again. 4-10 seconds is quite a long time in a fight.

Pannonica, we an get 15% Endurance regen per second with the 5-point trait if you use a toolbelt skill per second. Combine that with the Grandmaster trait and that’s 17.5% per second.

Show us your depressed engineer haikus, Nightpath!

Yeah, the engineer is pretty kittened up right now, especially since our damage on anything is for kittene. No telling what ANet is thinking about this.

Engineers definitely require high levels of skill to kill things normal folks can reduce to corpse mode in 3/4 to half the time.