Guild Wars 2

Auto response on an Engineer with Elixir R will beat a condi Necro every time. Thieves will kill zerker Mesmer almost instantly.

Its not like any glass builds are doing well anyway outside of maybe shatter Mesmer or Ele. Guardian is far more effective and its hardly run either.

Inventions and tools only have one decent trait each for this kind of build which elixirs can semi replicate. Giving up hgh or hair trigger and fast acting or 409 for perma vigor isn’t worth it for grenades. 30/10/0/30/0(5-8-11, 6, 2-6-11) is really the best option. I prefer 30% boon duration and 20% might on runes and sigil of strength/force or corruption with rabid gear and p/p. I like toolkit so much, it makes carrying S hard but necessary.

I was really hoping for a pistol auto attack buff or instant box of nails at the least. Engineer bleed stacking is very weak outside of grenade builds.

Asura shatter mesmer is thief level cheap. The two of them are why I don’t run zerker on my mesmer, or without toolkit or elixer s on my engineer.

Hammer is too much like toolkit for my taste, I’ll take a chainsaw however.

abyss and cherry are my usual colors, sometimes antique gold.

For a female human I like the rascal boots, pants, gloves, slayer’s vest, outlaw mask.

Using it with heal turret to stack up a lot of perma regen is pretty useful, I guess.

This really is like the first game that at at least I’ve played where this has been considered a problem. Red/blue is just another step towards making everyone feel like a nameless drone.

Typical deflection towards mesmers, just like every guardian/thief thread.

I only dislike the way the hip shot animation looks for female human. It makes any sort of rifle like model that isn’t a blunderbuss look incredibly stupid. It could also very much use 1200 range on the auto attack.

I’ve seen personally ele, thief, guardian, mesmer, engineer played at equally high levels. Only once with an ele but he was amazing. Also Engineer isn’t weaker than any of the top classes its just harder.

As they say you can’t have everything, unless you’re a thief.

Only one button class I’ve seen are rangers, and I’ve literally never seen one who wasn’t SB. They should remove that kitten class imo until its out of alpha.

Auto Elixir S doesn’t suck. About the only time I die is when I’m getting stunlock burst to death. Something that trait takes care of nicely.

Hsinimod.5784:

It just feels sloppy and clunky. We have all the tools, but we cannot build up the tools we may wish to use. Many options are just not viable.

If you play in certain styles, you’re fine. If you wish to branch out, you may find you are weak at anything you do (compared to others).

My main issue is, personally, when I try to make it all about Condition Damage, it is lackluster at best. The duration and/or damage just is not the same as if I do it on another profession. I love Pistol/Shield, but Rifle is just so much better for my playstyle. I feel pushed into ways of play I don’t favor.

I’ve found if want to condition engineer, 30 explosives and 2 10% duration rune bonuses and high crit are what works. Then you can get up to the 7 bleed stacks, 14 second poison, 12 second burns, 7 sec confusion etc necessary to compete with other classes. I do agree however that its harder than other classes due to the ultra short duration on pistol bleed.

My problem with this class is that carrying kits like we are intended to do makes it very hard to bring condi removal and a stun break. Which makes carrying turrets or gadgets a luxury that’s often relegated to gimmick builds.

It wouldn’t be so much of a problem if anet had stuck to their guns on stun design. Unlike other games before they made all stuns in gw2 1 or 2 seconds. The intent obviously being that stunlock and dieing while unable to control your character was not fun. A great concept except they went ahead and added quickness to the game where instead of being stunlocked and killed in 10 seconds like other games, in gw2 it happens in 2, making stunbreak more necessary then ever before.

All well and good except stun break is only available through utilities, and Engineer has the most utility slot demand of any class.

Otherwise the class is very good imo. It has no useless filler skills on available weapon sets. It has access to every buff and condition in the game in moderate to long duration. Only class that can easily stack all of poison, bleed, burn, cripple, chill, and confusion at the same time. Its a melee hard counter.

People slot elixir R over S because its toolbelt is a lot better, and they often slot the trait to auto use an elixir S at 25% life.

About Elixir X, I’d prefer Engineers get their own unique form. A graphic resembling something like the hulk/mr hyde.
Tool bar resembling something like thus

1. punch, punch twice, double arm sweep, all attacks frontal aoe arc.

2. breathe cone of poisonous stomach gas inflict moderate duration burn and poison

3. big aoe stomp with a 2 sec kd

4. Aoe channeled whirl that does physical damage and inflicts bleed per tick.

5. Axe handle fist smash that inflicts daze and confuse

I’d rather make deployable baseline and change the trait to giving turrets clockwork spider legs so they can follow you. Much like the ranger spirit trait.

I’d like an elite kit over mortar. Something fun like an electro magnet kit or a lightning rod/tesla coil sort of kit with a cool Dr. Frankenstein backpack.

Also about aesthetics some things are good, some need improvement. Flamethrower is strong on skill 1, but weak on all other skills. Shield effects are good but its hard to make a build that works on its theme graphically. Bomb Kit is good, but grenades have weak graphics. Turrets are all poor and essentially look like clutter.

The profession is also overloaded with explosive effects imo.

Mine, slick shoes, and battering ram all do the same thing.

Something that is specifically disappointing to me is the elixir gun. It has such potential for coolness. Instead its just a flamethrower re-skin. I’d imagine something like a kit that creates, instead of a 2h, an offhand syringe gun and a main hand chemical gun that connects to the backpack.

I think if you can land bomb hits you can land grenades. With my build the chill grenade last 9 seconds, poison for like 14 seconds on the first tick, bleed 3 stacks for 18 seconds on 4 sec cd. They even do over a 1k base damage on top of the conditions. They are ridiculous.

Some little things annoy me more than the big ones. For instance I personally prefer the stealth from throw Elixir S and would like that alone to be the effect while stability can go to something like throw elixir C. In its current form its almost unusable for me.

Battering ram and slick shoes are redundant, but besides that having two shoe gadgets subtlety annoys me.

No cool engineer themed asura elites on human characters.

I was curious so I slotted it in my condition build. If you pop Incendiary ammo and do one channel of flame jet you get a 16 second burn with +50% condi duration. Add the KB and blind and that’s a pretty good return for a utility slot. It lets you swap your second pistol for shield while recouping some of your burn.

I’ve been waffling heavily on whether to ever slot elixir B when Hidden Flask is spec’d. When I’m screwing around I’m inevitably switching it for S or R whenever there is a stun thief, a hammer warrior, or a frenzy warrior around. I generally enjoy the alchemy builds but the toolkits for them are so lacking.

First game I’ve played with a real steampunk class.

Just put a 36 second burn on a target golem with incendiary ammo, blow torch, and a fire bomb. Rolling through 2-5 on bomb kit will also produce 15-20 vulnerability stacks with 30 explosives and precise sights.

I don’t have a problem comparing class mechanics, given that engineer’s sucks and is designed to return basic functionality that was superfluously removed.

Rifle skills were designed for comic effect and not gameplay imo. As is the norm for engineer skills apparently.

I went with a female human for mine, with the short red rockabilly sort of haircut. Looks like a complete steampunk vixen with the starter goggles. So human can be made to fit well with some creativity. Originally I went with Norn but their movement speed feels slow due to their upscaled size.

Most of the Engineers conditions are 2 sec duration. So I don’t think anything is going to add more to your dps than 30% duration from explosives combined with two global 10% condi duration rune bonuses. The grandmaster grenade trait will give another long duration bleed off the 2 skill as well if you choose to carry it.

Make a power build and try to use flamethrower as your main weapon. Even in hot join it does garbage damage. Theres really no reason to use it imo considering how they for whatever reason gave Engineers 600 melee options all over every kit and weapon set besides.

Engineer pistol auto attack has to be the weakest in the game out of any weapon. With the shortest bleed.

Warrior rifle 6 sec
Warrior sword 8 sec
Ranger shortbow 3 sec but double the attack speed
Elementalist scepter 6 sec
Mesmer staff 7 sec
Necro scepter 4 sec

It doesn’t look as bad as it is until you start to account for how stacking condi duration effects it. Warrior rifle can get up to 12 seconds per shot with traits and gear.

link it, someone used this weapon setup on me the other day and the number of stealths were obscene.

phantasm build cds aren’t prohibitive in practice. Offhands can get down to like 9 second recharges with 2h at around 12. So the cds are less of a problem than they are for mirror images and decoy. GS and pistol can also mantain 10 bleed stacks well with sharper images with either weapon.

Its hard to hate just one thing about the scepter. It’s only redeeming quality is it’s aesthetic appeal. The beams channel and cooldown both are too long for its power. The auto attack is weak slow and feels unresponsive. The clones it produces lack the condition application of staff, or the quick bleed stacking of gs clones w/ sharper images. The block doesn’t fill a specific need and would be better replaced with something else.

The purple butterfly effects are understood symbolically in certain circles. It is relevant to the theme. Similar character tropes appear in other media from time to time and ANets interpretation of it with their Mesmer would fit in well with them. The way to look at the effects is not that they are a biproduct of the spellcasting process but a specifically crafted theatric effect.

I’d also consider a little antagonism in the responses inevitable given how indulgently negative your portrayal in the op, but we can always feign ignorance after desired reply count.

xp stinks compared to pve and lowbies do crap damage against high levels.

I’d like a fan, but I fear it wouldn’t look so stylish when paired with the awful ready melee stance of dual wield. A mind a rapier style sword with a basket hilt either btw.

No problem with it up to 32 so far. Stack power, rune your armor with just seperate power runes and use sword/focus + X. So far I can only say that I slightly dislike greatsword for solo pve. Zerker whirl damage seems to be pretty random and he can miss entirely pretty easily on mobile targets. Also some care needs to be taken for warden to do damage and not get one shot by certain mobs, but duelist and swordsman both work fine anyway.

Also works easily by going full condition build and going with a staff + x/pistol clone build with illusion spec, master trait iii, master trait vii. Might not be as useful for gold boss events with other people maxing up bleed stacks.

If anything clothing doesn’t fit the theme well enough for my taste. Starter mask also seem to have a bugged display, changing the texture of the characters face underneath to black. I’d be happy if I could find something like the cultural tier 2 female human armor. Just sans and goofy hat and the half dress.

Mesmer kit is all based on counter play. Mantras are the ultimate prep skill which seems like the kind of cheese a theif would pack instead.

Staff can be traited to generate a clone every 5 seconds requiring 20 points in the incredibly useful chaos line. Its auto attacks aren’t far behind scepters in combined damage with a power build, probably better with illusionary elasticity, and its clones are actually useful.

Mirror Blade with greatsword training and illusionist celerity generates a clone every 4.6 seconds as well.

So the scepters effect is only useful in some kind of full on glass cannon shatter centric build. Maybe if you go something like 10/30/0/0/30

Mesmer needs a second condition based weapon to go alongside staff. I’d like to see scepter as that weapon, in which case skill 1 needs to lose the clone so it doesn’t overwrite superior staff clones and ideally its attack should be half power half condition.

The block on the 2 skill could also use some work. Blind is a desired effect but the bolt is hard to land and using the skill while being attacked can trigger the block too quickly to activate the blind. I’d like to see these effects reversed. The block creates a blind and the active ability shoots a bolt that does damage and creates a clone.

Sword skill 3 imo the range is too short. Also the swap immob consistently fails against moving targets either due to the immob effect having too short of a range or the clone not being able to keep up with moving targets.

Geatsword mindstab is still underwhelming even after the animation speed increase. Can we just make this auto centered on current target and do something about the pathetic aoe radius. Normalizing the spread on spatial surge or removing it entirely would make my day as well.

Mantras are all underwhelming. The heal is especially bad. Also I don’t think anyone uses sig of midnight or inspirations. Probably because they are largely redundant with mantras and have almost no supporting traits.

A guardian has more utility than a mesmer as do elementalist who also outlcass them greatly in mobility. In fact if utility is discribed as everything you can do for others or anything that isn’t personal dps/survival then mesmers are mislabled as being good at it. Most mesmer builds run staff/sword and the only thing they provide to a group are null field, chaos storm, and an unreliable 1 sec daze with the standard utility choices. The stupid treb shouldn’t even be in the game and if it weren’t most people wouldn’t even take portal.

Mesmers actually have good elites like a prof is supposed to while most do not. Mesmers have some varied and powerful utilites that for the most part serve dual purposes while many other profs are filled with weak one dimensional utilites. Thats where the Mesmers power actually comes from.

Clones and phantasm are largely meaningless as mechanics. If their effects i.e damage or shatter where removed from them and replicated by direct active effect abilities the class wouldn’t suffer much.

Scrub solution is just to lower damage when the prof isn’t a high dps prof and glass cannon mesmers aren’t close to the best spikers. People want phantasm gutted when sword can’t sustain dps in melee due to poor control, and greatsword can’t sustain decent damage at short ranges. Mesmer condition builds are subpar at best. Confusion is a nerfed nusaince in spvp and has awful durations, staff relies on fragile clones, rng rolls, slow cast times, and slow projectile speed.

Yeah nerf mesmers, only like half their skill set is either garbage or bugged crap instead of nearly all of it like everyone else.

1v2 isn’t possible in any real sense. Mesmer with distortion for instance I can kill and stomp one of the two opponents unless its another mesmer, or a thief who can teleport and waste my invulnerability. Chances are one of them is a thief since they are 50% of the population.

Putting that aside however there are too many combos that ruin any chance of real duel situation 2v1. One of them is a mesmer and uses Moa. One is a thief and uses shadow refuge and comes back at full health. One is an unkillable dot necro. One of them is a dps guardian with invul shield and full heal tome. One of them is an unkillable condition tank engineer with the rez pot.

Condition build didn’t work well from my test until I ran with 30 alchemy, buff duration stacking, the quickness elixer, and almost capped out crit with fury. Otherwise the damage simply wasn’t there. It also feels glass cannonish without a shield but the leeway is there for either or.

Anyway its a fun build imo due to it having a theme you can roll with from a rp perspective.

Grenades and bombs condi build work better for the tankish route I believe.