Guild Wars 2

I’d like to see our hook changed to work like Overcharged Shot works. We would knockback one enemy that’s in melee range of us, but also knock ourselves back. The direction of our knockback would be opposite the way our camera is currently facing.

There’s two reasons for this change:

1) It allows us a chance to get out of harm’s way (which I think all #2 skills should do, if they are going to allow certain classes like Ele/thief/Mesmer to do it.)

2) This allows us to reposition our character to better make use of our booby trap. With this change, #2 and #3 would have greater synergy, since we could use #2 to set up #3 to have a maximum impact.

-Travail.

Looks solid. I’d change up the runes a little, at least for sPvP. Keep 2 Strength, but then have 2 Runes of Fire, and 2 Runes of Hoelbrek. The 40% extra might duration is better than the 5% extra damage, IMO (I say for sPvP, because there should be other ways to get extended might duration in the open world.) I’d also switch up the Soldier’s amulet for the Knight’s in sPvP; I’m not a huge fan of the toughness stat in PvP.

You can use your block/Elixir S to defend against burst, and toughness doesn’t do anything against conditions. I’d rather have the higher crit chance, for more devastating burst damage.

-Travail.

I found levels 1-20 were pretty brutal on my Engi trying to do the story quests at the same level as the quest (as an Asura.) I don’t know why, but most of them I couldn’t do without dying multiple times.

It got better, though. Eventually you get the Elixir Gun, which despite it’s lackluster healing is still 2 more heals to make you a little more beefy (and condition removal, if you don’t run with the medkit.) Once you hit 20, you can also finally take a major trait, which helps a lot. Kit refinement gets you yet another heal for your EG, and a second Grenade Barrage if you use grenades. Going with Forceful Explosions allows you to bomb kite much easier, and is probably the most powerful trait at such a low level.

-Travail.

SoulstitchMMO.1396:

Near 100% uptime on a light field… Seems pretty amazing to me.

If light field removed conditions on blast and leap attacks, it would be alright. Retaliation isn’t a particularly great boon anymore, especially in PvE where mobs hit relatively slowly. Unless you’re running with classes who are shooting ranged projectiles, IMO light fields aren’t that great.

Now, if this was a water field, it would be great as-is.

-Travail.

Shivenis.3761:

But you are comparing one skill with single target and another with multiple target effect, it’s pretty obvious multiple target and AoE skills do less damage ._.

The rifle pierces.

Besides, most weapons in the game can hit more than one enemy with their #1 attack. It sucks that some don’t, but you can’t balance the FT against a single-target weapon, when so many other AoE/cone/multi-hit weapons out there are superior to the rifle. You’re dooming the FT kit to be inferior forever if you do that.

-Travail.

I would certainly like to see “full support” be made a viable build theme in Guild Wars. So far, I don’t really see what’s so great about a lack of trinity. Dungeons have basically become DPS races, where other players expect you to provide enough DPS to finish the dungeon quickly. In my opinion, this hampers players more than it offers them freedom of choice.

There are plenty of groups out there who run 5 dps, because that’s the fastest way to clear dungeons. If 4 players within a group are skilled, then they will be forced to carry the 5th if that person is not also specced primarily for dps.

Compare this to a game like TERA. Although it is also a “skill-based” game (arguably much moreso than GW2, seeing as how there is still tab targeting here), but tanks and healers are still necessary components to the group. A system like that offers a place for players who don’t want to play DPS. Guild Wars really only offers that in the form of “bunker” builds in PvP. In PvE, it will always be better to run 5 dps, assuming each of those players is skilled.

At least, that’s my observations up to this point.

-Travail.

KinkyPotato.4219:

This exactly sums up how I feel as well! I mean there are also more glaring problems with the class but I figured this was one of the more important ones to be tackled for support engineers. Cheers because I thought I was the only one that wanted more burst heals. I feel like the game would go a long way in having League of Legends style supporters (I’m unsure if you’ve played it or not). Basically, the supports in that game either have a high value/high cooldown shield or heal that they can use on a single ally. Knowing when to use those defensive abilities could very well determine a 5 v 5 PvP Teamfight.

While I feel that some classes have LoL-like support capabilities (Elementalist, Guardian), others don’t (Necromancer, Engineer, Mesmers…etc). In general, I feel like a lot of the coefficients/values on support abilities need to be re-evaluated and looked at again because Guardians and Elementalists reign supreme in the support archetype. They have higher numbers, more abilities, more boons, and shorter cooldowns. As a primer, this is NOT a call to nerf these two classes. This is where other classes should be brought UP TO to feel impactful. Just take a look at these two examples:

Necromancer
Deathly Invigoration: Heal in an area when you leave death shroud.
Heals for 8 + level * 1.8 + 40% of Healing Power.

Elementalist
Healing Ripple: Heal nearby allies when attuning to water.
Amount healed = Base Amount (1302 @ 80) + Healing Power

Granted that there are various other factors to consider such as availability, why are these two numbers not closer to each other since they are functionally almost the same spell? They obviously are both very interesting traits…and the apples to oranges argument doesn’t apply here either because of how inferior the Necro’s group heal (With 1700 Healing Power at Level 80, heals for ~832) is compared to the Ele’s group heal (At 1700 Healing Power at Level 80, heals for ~3002). Cleaning up a lot of these numbers and buffing all of the other classes’ support options would go a long way in diversifying the support archetype and making it worthwhile and fun for every profession.

Generally, I feel that a game designed around PvP (and it seems that’s what players expect from Guild Wars 2) should be designed around burst damage, and burst heals. That doesn’t mean sustained dps/HoT builds can’t also be there (it definitely has it’s place in WvW and PvE dungeons) but we all know burst is king in most PvP encounters.

This means short duration bursts of damage along with short duration bursts of healing. This also means tanks or “bunkers” should have short duration blocks and reactionary abilities to counter those short bursts of damage (which they do, and it’s something I feel Anet basically got right.) This also means CC should be focused around quick interrupts with the goal of stopping burst damage/healing in it’s tracks, in order to gain tactical advantage (which, again, is something Anet implemented decently well.) We have burst damage, counters for burst damage, and anti-burst themed CC; all that’s missing is the burst healing.

Without it, they have seriously alienated healer players coming over from other games. Doing away with the trinity in general is a mistake, IMO, but getting rid of “dedicated healing” is the one that hurts Guild Wars the most (they do, after all, still have “bunker” builds, which have their place in the game.) In PvE, everyone has to largely rely on themselves for their own healing, so you have more homogenized builds. In PvP, some of the tactics of engagements are lost when there are no “squishy, but powerful” healers to protect. It’s basically just a brawl, with any enemy being just as good a target as anyone else.

As it stands now, you basically just rotate through all your healing spells as soon as they are off cooldown, hoping that it’s providing a benefit over time for your team. I’d like to be able to make more of a noticeable impact than that with healing skills, and would like to see just as good a tradeoff for sacrificing damage in favor of healing as bunker builds get for sacrificing damage in favor of survivability.

-Travail.

We don’t really need any weapon to be useful at 1500 range. One of the only things I agree with the devs on is that an acceptable tradeoff for versatility can be maximum range. We aren’t a long range sniper; instead, we are offered more versatility within the medium and close ranges. That’s fine by me.

The only reason grenades are fine with that much range is because you can only reasonably expect to hit stationary targets from that distance. This makes them useful against walls and stationary weapons, but nearly useless against a mobile opponent (at max range.) We are medium range skirmishers, and that’s ok.

-Travail.

Zero Angel.9715:

digiowl.9620:

Honestly i feel that Anet could buff heals across the board in PvE, but leave it as is in PvP. Anet seems to have a vendetta against bunkers in sPvP that ends up making anything but perma-swiftness glass cannons pointless in PvE.

Bunkers were fairly abusive in low-level PvP in GW1 because of how unkillable they were, so I can see why ANet would have a vendetta against bunkering/healing. I do think that it really makes healing a ‘not worth it’ stat unless you’re willing to sacrifice a lot of a stat to gain only a modest boost to healing. That said, most bunker builds in GW2 are high vit/tough builds that are kitted with survival skills (reflects, knockbacks, etc) — self heal is not even really a factor. I think ANet could modestly bump up healing coefficients along the board (especially ‘other person heal’ skills) without having a negative impact on the game.

I agree. They could make healing more powerful for those players who invest in the healing stat, while leaving it as-is for players who choose not to invest in that stat, and the game would be better for it. Allowing players a little more specialization in the healing role will not destroy guild wars, nor will it lock us into some hard trinity. It will make playing a support role more fun, though, and perhaps allow us to build a support spec that doesn’t also have to bring dps to the table.

-Travail.

What they should have done is fix the bug, but increase the coefficient so that it is possible to see similar numbers to what we were seeing before, provided you invest heavily into the healing stat. It needed a small nerf, and needed to be fixed so that not every build could take advantage of such strong healing. This “fix” went too far, though.

-Travail.

I see mortar just like any other weapon conjure.

Except that it’s an elite version of a weapon conjure, and it’s a weapon conjure that must remain in the spot it’s summoned (it can’t even be carried like the Warrior banners.)

This means that it should either be more powerful than most weapon conjures to compensate, or it should be changed to bring it more in line with other weapon conjures. Someone suggested making it more of a rocket launcher that can be carried at reduced movement speed. I like that idea. It’s probably better than making the Mortar deal a ton of damage to make up for the immobility, since then you’d have other classes complaining about the skill’s damage output.

-Travail.

There are issues which prevent us from seeing the full benefit of some of the changes meant to offset the nerf to the damage of Grenade 1.

Shrapnel applies more bleeds. Great, except that if your group was already stacking 25 bleeds before, then this change doesn’t bring an increase to your DPS. Also, as I understand it our bleeds tick for less damage than other classes (by intentional design) so if our bleeds are preventing the bleeds of our groupmates from being applied, our group might suffer for it.

On the PvP side of things, there’s plenty of condition removal to go around. More reliance on conditions means being more susceptible to condition removal, and it also means less “burst” damage is available to this kit. Burst damage is better than sustained damage in PvP, so taking away the immediate hitting power of this attack cannot be seen as a buff, except under absolutely ideal conditions (good bleed procs with the RNG, a lack of condition removal by your enemy, and no one else around you also stacking bleeds on your target. Not to mention having to consistently hit your player target with the grenade attacks, which was always a limitation of this kit.)

As for sigils, the only way to see equal damage numbers to what we had before is to stack might. So, rather than offering us the ability to use a number of different sigils with this kit, by nerfing the damage of they kit they actually offered us the ability to use 1 specific sigil, and one specific mechanic, with our kit. That’s not exactly what the community was promised when the devs promised us working sigils on kits, and that’s not exactly what we wanted, either.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s better to have sigils working with kits than not working, but I would have liked for them to find a way to have a wider variety of sigils be useful with our kits. Right now, I can’t see any sigil being more useful to any of our offensive kits than Sigil of Battle. Perhaps that’s just inherent in the way kit swapping works, though. It would be nice, at least, if other “on weapon swap” sigils could find a way to compete, to at least keep things interesting (I’m talking dps-focused builds, here. Obviously there are other sigils that work well with other types of builds.)

-Travail.

I would love to see Super Elixir become more bursty. With a high emphasis placed on the use of dodge and mobility as a means of survival, it’s hard to expect a group of players to stay within the field of Super Elixir; and it’s often counterproductive to do so, since the healing is so small per tick. Standing within Super Elixir’s AoE for the full 10 seconds will often get you killed, which seems to me to be counterproductive to what that skill is supposed to be doing.

Furthermore, the Engineer has multiple movement abilities that blast us right out of the AoE effect of Super Elixir. Acid Bomb is found inside the same Elixir Gun kit (this kit just generally lacks synergy. I mean, Acid Bomb puts you out of range to use Fumigate, too; and attack #2 grants swiftness, which isn’t put to very good use in a kit with an AoE ground effect, and a cone frontal attack… anyway, enough about the Elixir Gun’s problems.)

So, there’s Acid Bomb, Rocket Boots, and Overcharged Shot, which all send you out of the AoE effect, as well as regular dodging which also can easily have the same effect. Changing Super Elixir to a shorter duration effect would allow it’s healing to be more noticeable (even if it healed for less than it does now overall) and would allow us to only have to stand inside the effect for a few seconds to get full benefit out of it.

Besides, this game is seriously lacking burst healing. Constant, tiny heals over time are fine for many PvE situations where encounters are predictable; they are of little help in PvP. In a game which offers so many different burst specs to it’s players, we also need some burst healing to offset that.

-Travail.

Casia.4281:

We don’t give up a utility slot. that is what toolbelt skills are for.
Grenades=6skills. rifle 5 skills=11
warrior rifle 5 skills. warrior axe 5 skills.=10

-snip-

Hmm, it’s actually:

Engineer
Main weapon = 5 abilities
Kit = 5 abilities
Toolbelt skill = 1 ability

Warrior
Main weapon = 5 abilities
second weapon = 5 abilities
utility slot = 1 ability

Don’t forget, our kit takes up one slot which other classes get to use as a utility slot. So, it’s actually the same number of abilities with a single kit. However, where the Warrior can choose any 2 weapons plus any utility, our toolbelt skill is linked to our kit, which offers us less options. Also, toolbelt skills on kits are not always equal to utility skills. For instance, no toolbelt skill linked to a kit breaks stuns or removes conditions.

Generally speaking, kit toolbelt skills are also not equivalent to utility skills. If you had a utility skill which only granted regen, like Healing Mist does, would you be happy with that? I wouldn’t, because I have things like Elixir B which grants multiple boons at once. By comparison, that is a weak utility skill, yet it is supposed to match up against full-fledged utility skills from other classes. Signets, shouts, glyphs, traps, cantrips, banners; all are better than any kit toolbelt skill we have, with the exceptions of the big bomb and grenade barrage.

You could say that this is offset by the fact that we could potentially have another 6 abilities by equipping a second kit, but then we’re giving up yet another slot which could otherwise be used for condition removal, stun breaking, or elixir buffs, which in many situations is counterproductive. When we compare this to Elemental attunements, we see that an Elementalist can run with 4x 5 abilities, and still have room for three stun breakers, or 3 glyphs/signets which provide stronger buffs to their character than our own toolbelt skills provide.

Furthermore, the only kit which has any abilities which remove conditions is the EG, and no kit has any abilities which breaks stuns. So, we can’t even look within the kits themselves to find such abilities, to offset the fact that these kits take up utility slots.

You could say that the inferiority of kit toolbelt skills is offset by the fact that kit swapping has no cooldown. I would counter by saying that kit swapping is of no help while I am stunned or knocked down because I had no room for stun breakers. Furthermore, swapping kits is already balanced against something like attunement swapping, because our “on kit swap” abilities have internal cooldowns to prevent them from being spammed.

If kits were “made to be swapped” as you say, then why don’t they work like Elementalist attunements, taking up slots f1-f4, leaving us to choose our own utilities as we see fit?

-Travail.

Moddo.7105:

Proposing major class changes is useless. Anet does not even have the man power to fix stuff already in-game. A total rework of the class is not in the cards.

I don’t really see them as class changes, but class “finishes.” This class was obviously rushed, and it’s suffering from a lack of identity because of it.

Besides, that’s no excuse. It’s the contractor’s fault if they can’t find enough guys to construct the building. They chose to take on this project.

-Travail.

Lifelike.5862:

Do people here ever go and look at other class forums? Elementalists have been complaining about their damage and crap skills since day one. Yes, eles are versatile, but they certainly aren’t particularly stronger than Engineers in terms of dps and are much squishier.

Many of us here also play Elementalists. They aren’t in the same boat as Engineers.

Elementalists can at least find builds which, while they aren’t top tier in terms of pure dps output, are still plenty desirable in group PvE. They are also very strong in PvP. Are they perfect? No. Do they have multiple viable specs across all different types of content? Yes.

There are plenty of ways for Elementalists to be effective while they wait for some of the issues with the class to be addressed. Furthermore, while they might not be fixing the sub-par aspects of the Elementalist, they aren’t nerfing the bright spots of the class, either.

-Travail.

A little more explanation of my idea:

Giving us 2 slots for kits reduces our total number of “hotkeys” by 2. The main reason I do this is to offset the fact that our kits don’t have cooldowns. If we had access to 3 kits + 1 weapon, we’d have as many attacks as the Elementalist, but we wouldn’t have any cooldowns on our kits, causing an imbalance between the two mechanics. To help deal with that, we lose the ability to equip a full 3 kits, and lose a total of 2 hotkeys. Not a major change for us honestly, considering many players didn’t make use of all of their toolbelt skills when they only wanted the utility skill in the first place.

The current toolbelt skills would be removed. Or, alternately, the toolbelt skills people liked could be made into their own utility skills. Either way, the concept of linking kits with toolbelt skills would be scrapped.

Traits which affected “toolbelt” skills would need to be reworked. Really, a change as simple as switching all of those traits to affect gadgets instead would probably be fine.

Lastly, you’d have to make most elixirs able to be tossed; at least Elixir H, B, and C (maybe not U or S ). If you didn’t, it would reduce the effectiveness of several of the Elixir traits because you could no longer apply your affects to allies. You would reduce the effectiveness, however, of these now throwable elixirs, on allies other than yourself. Elixirs H and B would apply every boon they have to allies, but at a reduced duration (-33% maybe?), and Elixir C would only remove up to 2 conditions on allies other than yourself, and apply up to 2 boons, instead of “all”.

-Travail.

DesertRose.2031:

Travail.7390:

The most might you can stack with a sigil of strength is something like 6 stacks, which is 6% damage; 1% more than using the flat +5% damage sigil, and you don’t have to worry about building and maintaining might stacks.

Might is 1% more damage? So you have 3500 Power and ~2650 Condition Damage?
At level 80 Might increases your damage by (#Might*35+Power)/Power.
So, assuming you have 2000 Power 6 stacks of Might increase your damage by (6*35+2000)/2000 = 1,105 or 10,5%.

You’re right, of course. My brain left the building for a minute, there.

Couldn’t we stack 25 might before, though? Will this provide us with more might than before, or just the same amount of might in a slightly easier way?

-Travail.

I don’t agree that toolbelt skills somehow make up for having to use a utility slot for our kits.

I mean, does anyone think that Throw Wrench or Incendiary ammo is as good as Elixir S? Elixir B? Elixir R? Rocket Boots?

Elementalists are stuck with 4 attunements in place of where our toolbelt skills normally go. That leaves them with 3 functioning utility slots. Engineers operate in the reverse, where our utility slots disappear when we equip kits, and we are left with our toolbelt skills in place of full utility abilities. But that’s not all, we are forced to take the toolbelt skill which corresponds to the kit we’ve chosen. We can’t actually choose our toolbelt skills as well as our kits, because they are linked with each other.

I mean, even if the FT was balanced to be as good as the Elementalist’s fire attunment, does anyone think Incendiary ammo is as good as a signet? A glyph? A cantrip? Not a chance, especially not in specs designed to abuse those mechanics. Cantrips can offer stacks of regen, vigor, and might on every activation, in addition to their primary effect.

Incendiary Ammo causes our next three attacks to burn, which is attached to a kit which specializes in causing burning already.

It would have been better if the “toolbelt” was the place where we equipped kits, and then got to choose whatever elixirs/gadgets we wanted in our utility slots. Perhaps give us only 2 toolbelt slots, and have those be specifically for kits, then allow us to choose three utility skills as normal.

-Travail.

Jarin Arenos.2736:

It’s just how WoW druids were for years. I don’t expect ANet to figure this out any time soon.

“Learning from our competition? Why would we ever do that?”

Druids were always great healers, and could tank ok, too. Druids actually had stronger single target healing than Priests. There was definitely a niche for Druids to fill in groups and raids right from day 1.

Engineers are more like Grenadiers in Tabula Rasa, which also received a variety of weapons that were cool in concept, and unique to the class (rocket launchers, grenade launchers, flamethrowers) but poorly implemented. In that game, it was the harsh diminishing returns you had for hitting multiple enemies that destroyed the viability of those weapons, which all caused splash damage.

-Travail.

If they are going to approach grenade kit balance by balancing it under ideal conditions, then it might be better to change things up a bit.

Instead of bombs versus grenades, have bombs versus a grenade launcher; then offer a trait to make bombs able to be thrown.

Bombs would work as they do now, but with an option to throw them in a trait (perhaps a trait in the second tier of the Inventions line, since nothing there really works with bombs right now, and you have to get to tier 3 to take Elixir-Infused Bombs.) This allows players to play the classic bomb spec, or play just like they used to with the old grenade spec, throwing everything by hand (but throwing bombs instead of grenades.)

In the grenade kit, individual grenades would not be changed, but the mechanic by which they are lobbed would be. We would now have a grenade launcher in our hands, and we would tab-target like any other kit. Grenades #4, #5, and the Barrage would still use AoE ground targeting (since one is a combo field, and the other two have large radii.) Abilities #1, #2, and #3 would auto-aim for your tab target, causing splash damage centered at that location.

We get a grenade spec which isn’t so hard to aim, and can therefore be balanced properly against other specs. We also keep the bomb spec true to itself for those who don’t want it changed, while offering an optional “bomb throwing” spec for those who enjoy the current grenade rules. Best of three worlds?

-Travail.

Do we have better condition damage than the Elementalist? Seems to me we had a nerf a while back, specifically to our bleed damage.

Not sure how their bleed stacking compares to ours, but they can definitely stack bleeds with their Earth attunment (the staff can keep 12 stacks up just with ability #2, and d/d looks to be able to stack about that many as well.)

A trait which provides a 60% chance to cause vulnerability on crits (10% better than our own trait.)

They can trait for a 30% chance to inflict burning on crits (we have a 33% chance, but we also have an internal cooldown on our activation which guarantees less than 100% uptime.)

Not sure what else they have, but I don’t think they are lacking in the condition stacking department.

-Travail.

Wasdclick.1764:

Kind of seems like the optimal thing to do anyway if you’re going for AoE damage, right? Procs won’t trigger on each target, so static bonuses become the needed thing.

Grenades were strong beforehand. Real strong. Now we just have to invest a little more to keep them strong. And are you really going to complain about 5% Damage and Crit sigils on your weapons? It’s boring but arguably the most effective way to go about it on weapons anyhow.

Also, Crit-Might (Sigil of Strength) will work wonderfully with crit-proccing anyway. So there’s a load of might you can add to each grenade for even more damagey goodness.

The most might you can stack with a sigil of strength is something like 6 stacks, which is 6% damage; 1% more than using the flat +5% damage sigil, and you don’t have to worry about building and maintaining might stacks.

The point is, implementing sigils was supposed to offer us more customization of our builds, not less.

Seems to me, all it’s done is elminated the rifle as a mainhand weapon for dps specs that rely on kits for their damage.

-Travail.

CriSPeH.8512:

Yes but now you are forced to run a 5% damage Sigil to compensate for the fact that you can use Sigils.

What’s more, you’re forced to run two +5% damage sigils on a pistol/shield or pistol/pistol just to see the same results as before.

Using a rifle with grenades, even with the +5% damage sigil will see a 15% decrease in damage output, which eliminates the rifle as a viable mainhand weapon entirely for grenade dps specs (and possibly all of our dps specs, if Anet takes the same approach when balancing the rest of our kits.)

So giving us sigils now forced all grenade dps specs to use pistol/pistol, with two +5% damage bonus sigils (or maybe crit chance, if your group isn’t already stacking bleeds.) Here I thought this class specialized in versatility.

-Travail.

They probably wouldn’t get as much slack for this patch if they had included a little blurb about how the Engineer “isn’t where it needs to be,” and how they’ll be showing it some love in the future.

If they are going to nerf the highest DPS spec of a class which was struggling to keep up to the others, they must make sure to reassure us all that they know there’s a lot more work to be done to bring this class in line with the others. Work in the form of buffs, not more nerfs.

We still wouldn’t be happy about the changes, but at least we’d know there was a long term plan in place to balance Engineers. The dev post about weapon stats is little consolation, since we don’t know if further nerfs are around the corner to “make up” for adding weapon stats onto kits.

-Travail.

In “fixing” this, they basically took away yet another support tool in our so-called versatile repertoire. Even with kit refinement, 2 ticks of 170 healing is nothing. If they were going to “fix” it, perhaps they should have also buffed the correct numbers up a little, recognizing that the old healing numbers weren’t enough.

The thing is, you shouldn’t NEED kit refinement just for this skill to be usable. Super Elixir, all on it’s own, should be a decent heal. Ticks of 170 aren’t very good at all.

To put it in perspective, Super Elixir now heals for just under half of the staff Ele’s Healing Rain. Now, these abilities are not otherwise identical, but under half? That’s unacceptable. Simply put, a heal needs to heal. It needs to be noticeable, or it’s useless. At this point, I’d almost rather Super Elixir cure more conditions, and take the heal off of it altogether.

-Travail.

The people who think they nerfed the damage of grenades in order to make up for weapon stats are going to be in for a surprise when they nerf grenade damage again in the patch where they add weapon stats to kits.

We should all prepare for another round of damage nerfs, and not just to the Grenade kit. All of our kits could potentially get nerfed in the patch that brings in weapon stats. If they think Sigils alone offer a 15-20% damage boost, who knows how big a hit we’ll have to take to get effective weapon stats.

-Travail.

SW:ToR put snowballs (“holiday orbs”, lol) in their cash shop and called ’er a day.

I’ve only logged in for about an hour since the patch, but had an absolute blast participating in all the different events. So far, what I’m seeing is more than I could have expected from a holiday event.

This is the kind of thing that lets us all know that the devs appreciate their players.

-Travail.

For something like this Wintersday celebration, that’s a good idea. There’s no reason to leave anyone out of an event like this.

I wouldn’t want easy versions of every puzzle in the game to be offered to players, though. Generally speaking, we should be embracing challenging content, and adapting to it; not asking the developers to tone it down. This holiday event is different, since it’s meant to be pretty casual and relaxing.

-Travail.

Is there something wrong with Blunderbuss? I always thought the damage was fine, pretty good considering how low the cooldown is.

-Travail.

Tentacle Love.3412:

Dinny.5310:

Alex.9268:

Good taste is subjective, and if you don’t like kittenty outfits, then don’t wear them.

How do you people even manage to go out at night, do you confront every girl in a short skirt or visible bra straps in the club?

Cause they aren’t out in a kittening battlefield, in stabbing distance of someone else who is looking to stab.

It has nothing to do with prudence, and everything to do with being reasonable and practical. As I said before, while it’s a fantasy game, you can only suspend your disbelief so far. No matter how you slice it, a girl character charging into close-range combat with a metal bikini is just ridiculous.

See, this is the weird argument.

Those swords? They’re made out of fire and annihilate everything they touch. METAL ARMOR DOES NOT PROTECT YOU FROM THAT.

The elementalist over there? Summons liquid hot magma and sprays you in the face with it.

Someone wearing “skimpy” armor is FAR MORE LIKELY TO LIVE than someone wearing 400 pounds of tank plate, flinging around a thirty pound sword and lugging a fifty pound shield to go along with it.

You get one of two choices:

Either the mass of the armor and weapons matter, in which case you will die of exhaustion from wearing your heavy armor longer than an hour at a time…

Or it doesn’t matter, in which case skimpy armor makes MORE sense because it takes less material to make the armor.

There’s no scenario where bulky full plate armor wins out.

Against fire, perhaps not (though flame resistant and flame-proof suits do exist.) The armor would certainly help you against being crushed by earth based attacks, though, and would absorb some of the impact from non-magical weapons, as well as water/ice based attacks. And let’s not forget that plate armor was tested against rifles, to make sure it could stop bullets. You might even be able to find a way to ground your metal suit in order to nullify electric attacks, if you put your mind to it.

Fire turns your metal armor into an oven. Everything else, though… seems like armor has the advantage, to me. Not to mention armor grants protection from the elements while you’re adventuring through harsh climates.

Just sayin’.

-Travail.

Once you become comfortable with the different initial snowflake paths, it gets quite a bit easier.

Also, I believe the snowflakes do not begin to melt until the first person steps on them. I can’t be certain (I’ve never been alone on a run to see if they start to break on their own) but that’s what it seems like to me.

I’ve been behind a group, heard the cracking of the snowflakes, but then the guys ahead fall off and suddenly the snowflakes ahead of me are pristine. Maybe I just started moving faster and got ahead of the melting, like I said, I can’t be 100% sure.

-Travail.

xiv.7136:

Pretty sure that never happened, and it’s just you inventing stuff to make a point.

Unfortunately for you, engis are awesome in PVE and in FOM. And it’s not because of their DPS.

I hope you aren’t talking about all the healing the Engineer brings to the table, because they nerfed Super Elixir as well in this patch. It heals for less than half of what it used to, if the reports from players are accurate.

-Travail.

To be fair, it’s not the full 30%.

They increased the chance for explosions to cause bleeding by 9%. I’m not sure exactly how that translates into DPS output, but assuming the bleeds aren’t redundant, you’re going to see a dps boost from that.

They also gave the last 2 grenades a damage component, which allows them a chance to proc all of your conditions, like bleed/burn/vulnerability. This also contributes to DPS, though probably not more than a couple of percent.

Regardless, I don’t think any Sigil makes up for more than about 5-10% total damage output, so unless these two changes combined offer a 20-25% damage boost to the spec, the dps output of the kit took a hit.

-Travail.

PotatoOverdose.6583:

Caldric.1685:

In the mean time I love my 1000+ crit with autoattack Ranger.

Auto-attack rifle engineer has had 1200-1400+ crit at 50-70% crit rate since before launch. And unlike your ranger, due to piercing, a single rifle shot can hit multiple foes. It’s posts like these that make me wonder if the people in this thread ever even tried a non-grenade build.

I’m pretty sure the Engi Rifle shoots slower than the Ranger’s short bow, though. Against single targets, or targets who are spread out, the Ranger should win out, I think. Plus, the Ranger applies automatic bleeds when beside or behind their target with their short bow #1.

You also need to factor in pet damage on top of whatever the Ranger is dealing.

-Travail.

Did some quick testing in the mists, with nothing but the Grenadier trait chosen. Bombs are dealing 950 non crit, 1500 crit. Grenades are dealing 3x 270 (810) non crit, and a max of 1290 if all three crit (3x 430.)

I seem to recall bombs dealing less damage than grenades, once you got the third grenade from the trait. I can’t recall exact numbers, but I don’t think bomb damage has been reduced. If it was, then it wasn’t by as much as grenades.

Running these tests is kind of depressing. There used to be a pretty good roaming burst damage build in sPvP using the Rifle #3 and #5, along with Grenade Barrage. Grenade Barrage used to hit upwards of 11k damage. Now? 6-7k. So long spec, you were fun while you lasted.

-Travail.

Players weren’t using the grenade kit because it was amazing… they were using it because there was nothing else.

There weren’t Thief, Elementalist, and Guardian players all jumping at the chance to go roll an Engineer for our awesome grenade spec; that’s something you just didn’t see, because the spec really wasn’t that good.

Not better than Cantrips. Not better than stealth abuse. Not better than signet stacking Warriors. They don’t seem to mind Elementalists winning 1v4 skirmishes, but god forbid the Engineer has a competitive dps spec.

-Travail.

Einherjar.6709:

Travail.7390:

Einherjar.6709:

BurnedToast.3781:

Hey it’s ok, the buffed warriors again, so you know what class to reroll as.

Warrior buffs? You mean like Whirling Strike, Tsunami Slash, and Harpoon Pull becoming finishers? All underwater abilities … Or did you mean the 4 bug fixes warriors got like Fast Hands working for the first time ever like it was supposed to.

Hammer Shock not immobilizing you is the only real buff they got. Furious Reaction has become situationally good too now, but it was unusable before.

I’m glad they nerfed grenade damage, because it was way out of line — simply put. Now I can play my engineer without feeling like I’m doing less than I should be doing using grenade spam — which I cannot stand. Other builds like pistol/pistol condi becoming viable isn’t a bad thing you know.

They didn’t do anything about the viability of pistols. No matter how far into the dirt they nerf one spec, it won’t make another spec better. That’s a logical fallacy.

-Travail.

In a heavy condition build pistols are viable. 20-25 stacks of bleeds all ticking for 120 damage each second, in addition to poison and burning is viable unless you’re grouping with other heavy condition build players (which honestly, I think everyone’s damaging conditions should be separate to be fair, but that is another issue entirely).

Your fallacy is presuming they’re not viable. And also, if you were using full exotic berserker’s gear and grenade spamming, there is absolutely no way you couldn’t agree that grenades were doing more than they should have been.

You said, “become viable,” as if changes to the grenade kit would somehow affect the viability of pistols. “Viability” is not only relative to other specs within your class; it is a measure of how your spec stacks up against every other spec in the game.

If you thought they were viable already, then you shouldn’t care what happens to the grenade kit, because your chosen spec is viable regardless. Likewise, if your chosen spec isn’t viable, then it also does not matter what happens to the grenade kit, because nerfing grenades doesn’t make your spec better or worse. Only if the grenade spec happened to be the very best dps spec in the game would nerfing it make pistols “more viable.” Grenades were definitely not the best dps spec in the game.

So, stating that changes to the grenade spec made pistols viable is a logical fallacy.

Let me ask you, what do you do when there ARE other condition heavy builds in your group? Tell the other guys to switch their specs?

-Travail.

That write up is comical.

They call the Engineer highly versatile, then immediately say that they aren’t comfortable either at long range, or short range. Limited range is versatile? In fact, apparently we are only comfortable at medium range in “most” fights. Yeah, real versatile sounding.

It then talks about our control as well as our boons. Now, I can’t argue with the control, we have a lot of CC. But, we do not have all of that CC at the same time we have all of our group buffs. We either equip kits, or Elixirs. We can’t equip it all at once. So it is more accurate to say that we can choose between having CC or boon sharing.

It says we use boons to keep ourselves and our allies alive. We really only have one Elixir (toss Elixir H) that has a chance of providing a buff which would keep others alive. What else is there? And don’t anybody say Super Elixir, because that thing just got nerfed into the ground. The truth is, we only have a few decent boon shares, and they are mainly offensive, not defensive. We do condition removal quite well, I’ll admit. The article says boons though, and removing conditions isn’t applying boons. Besides, condition removal on it’s own isn’t good enough, when that’s really all we bring to the table in a group now.

Finally, they talk of how the ability to equip kits comes at the cost of our main hand damage output. Why is that necessary, when every other class in the game can equip two weapons? Furthermore, if our ability to equip kits comes at the cost of MAIN HAND dps, then why are they also nerfing kit damage? That write up implies kits are where we’re supposed to get our damage from. Does anyone think any of our kits deal competitive damage? Enough to justify a penalty to our main weapon? Really? Arguably, the grenade kit might still be ok; time will tell. Other than that, all of our kits deal lackluster damage, nothing close to justifying any penalty to our equipped weapon.

-Travail.

Netheren.3261:

I was looking forward to getting off work today and logging in to check out Wintersday and play with new sigil ideas.

I stopped by the engi forum while patching.

Im still on the engi forum 2 hours later.

Reloading. Hoping against all odds someone will post some great thing that would obliviate the fact my build just got nuked. Which took more skill than anything short of a full on elem pro, with half the power.

I just dont feel like logging in. Maybe that could change if I read enough general discussion…

Hmm…

Well, bombs got a buff. They now benefit from a 9% better chance to proc bleeding than before, without taking any hit to their damage. That is, assuming you have the Shrapnel talent.

That’s all I got.

-Travail.

Looking through the patch notes, I see that arrows had their travel time sped up for Rangers.

If they would do that for grenades, all might be forgiven. The only way we make back the dps we lost is to be able to viably hit things with grenades. Making them travel faster would go a long way to accomplishing that.

-Travail.

Einherjar.6709:

BurnedToast.3781:

Hey it’s ok, the buffed warriors again, so you know what class to reroll as.

Warrior buffs? You mean like Whirling Strike, Tsunami Slash, and Harpoon Pull becoming finishers? All underwater abilities … Or did you mean the 4 bug fixes warriors got like Fast Hands working for the first time ever like it was supposed to.

Hammer Shock not immobilizing you is the only real buff they got. Furious Reaction has become situationally good too now, but it was unusable before.

I’m glad they nerfed grenade damage, because it was way out of line — simply put. Now I can play my engineer without feeling like I’m doing less than I should be doing using grenade spam — which I cannot stand. Other builds like pistol/pistol condi becoming viable isn’t a bad thing you know.

They didn’t do anything about the viability of pistols. No matter how far into the dirt they nerf one spec, it won’t make another spec better. That’s a logical fallacy.

-Travail.

LordNat.4963:

Ulfnar.8317:

Wow, even super elixir was nerfed this bad? Why does arena net insist on physically abusing one of the least played classes to such a ridiculous degree?

Druids in WoW had the same problem for years as well. AN does not seem to understand what they want Engineer to be so they just kind of give it a huge mesh of things and nerf anything that pops it’s head above the pack.
What they need to do is sit down and work out a few hard specs for the class and make sure those are all in line with say a normal warrior spec, then play around from there.

I agree. It doesn’t feel like they have their priorities in order with this class. I mean, they nerfed grenades, nerfed the Elixir Gun, and changed some underwater skills. Who asked for that? Why would those be the first places they turned to when looking at this class?

I mean come on, Anet. Look at turrets, the flamethrower, our broken traits that aren’t working properly. Don’t rob us of the few usable specs we had.

You nerfed the things everyone uses, when you should have been buffing the things no one uses. The end result would still have been more diverse specs; but without any loss loss to the functionality of the class.

-Travail.

I was already at a point where the only reason I was playing my Engineer was because it was my sole Asura character, and that’s my favourite race to just run around exploring with.

From the moment I tried out an Elementalist, it became my main. From the moment I made a Guardian, I was impressed. I was completing level 8 content at level 4 on my Guardian, just stumbled into the level 8 area and didn’t even notice. I was finishing those fights with full health. My Engineer couldn’t dream of doing content 4 levels above his own; even with the old Super Elixir I’d get walloped.

I’m not one for shelving characters, so I’m sure I’ll continue to run around as my Engineer from time to time. I’m done trying to do anything competitive with him, though.

-Travail.

You know what I’m not seeing in even a single thread?

I’m not seeing even one person coming in here saying, “No, you’re wrong. The Engineer Grenades did need a nerf. They were definitely OP before.”

No PvP victims wandering in here to tell us all how we were “unbeatable” with Grenades. No one coming in here to tell us how we were stealing their spot in groups because our Grenade spec was so awesome. No one complaining about how we were unkillable with Super Elixir.

Usually, that happens with a round of nerfs. The players of that class don’t like it (obviously) but others come into these threads and voice the other side of the argument.

That’s not happening this time. I wonder why…

-Travail.

NickDollahZ.5348:

It was bugged and was healing for the impact heal amount instead of the pulse amount during the last patch. They decided to wait till this patch to fix it.

The new numbers are unacceptable. Even double-stacking it is pretty weak. What they did was make it on par with bomb healing, which is terrible.

I’m testing it out right now, and it is failing to out-healing a single enemy (a ram) my own level in the open world. Rams attack pretty slowly. How, exactly, is that going to help when my group is fighting a boss, or when I’m trying to help mitigate damage in PvP?

-Travail.

Number 4 is a big one no one really talks about. If part of our functionality is applying boons to support allies, then more of our Elixirs need to be able to be tossed (not just the toolbelt versions) and the radius’s need to be a lot bigger.

If one of our strengths is supposed to be boon sharing, then why don’t we have something even better than shouts? Many classes have shouts, Rangers have spirits, Elementals have AoE boon sharing on attunement swap, and aura sharing… We are far from the best at group buffs. Oh, and they nerfed Super Elixir, so we might not even be competitive at stacking regen anymore.

The biggest one on that list is, of course, the fact that our kits use up utility slots. That is a HUGE payment for our so-called “extra versatility.” I can’t take as many stun breakers in PvP as other classes. I can’t take as many Elixirs that are supposed to be one of my strengths. We are the only class that can’t take 3 utility skills at the same time we take multiple weapons. THAT is the tradeoff we suffer.

-Travail.

I was wondering how much of a nerf that was. I saw it in the patch notes, but hadn’t been paying close enough attention to the ticks of Super Elixir before to test it myself.

This is just a sad day for the Engineer all around. Two decent kits nerfed.

-Travail.

Without the nerf to the primary damage skill (or with less of a nerf) the changes would have been very positive.

- Having every grenade deal damage allows all 5 grenades to proc conditions.
- Increased the chance to proc bleeds from 6% to 15% means more of our damage comes from bleeds, which allows us to miss more often without losing as much dps.

Those are pretty fine changes (though I’m not sure who was asking Anet to look at grenades at all, except a few people asking for a targeted auto-attack.) Unfortunately, I don’t see how these will make up for a flat 30% damage nerf to the main attack.

-Macheath.

Coltz.5617:

LegoTechnic.5910:

Coltz.5617:

calm down people, what if the sigil effects apply to each grenade being thrown? then 30% is perfectly reasonable..

Sigils with proc effects have internal cooldowns so they can’t fire more than once every two seconds or so meaning multi-hit grenades gain no benefit other than ease of application, similar to how they eat up all three incendiary ammo charges but only cause a single burn.

Sigils with passive effects like force’s +5% damage are unaffected, but then… that’s just +5% damage.

On the other hand, since weapon stats still have no bearing whatsoever on your kits you can feel free to use a pistol/shield or pistol/pistol to maybe stack up to two sigils. That could be a little nicer, assuming the offhand weapon’s still apply. Would kind of suck for rifle users, though. If both weapon sigils apply, then every kit engineer out there will probably want to dual-wield for now.

Also did you notice most weapons get a holiday skin in the notes, but not rifle? At least there will be Christmas pistols. :-x

increasing chances of activation would really help since you have 3x’s the chance to activate it.

You still only get a single proc on a single enemy. In order to justify a 30% damage decrease, we’d need to be able to proc once per enemy hit, IMO.

As an example, because of internal cooldowns, the most we can proc a lightning strike or flame blast is once every 10 seconds. Due to the AoE nature of grenades, we likely will be proccing these effects exactly once every 10 seconds, assuming we have a high crit chance.

The thing is, every other class can do that. Anyone with 50+% chance to crit will be able to proc a lightning or flame blast attack every time the internal cooldown finishes. We don’t have a significant advantage just because grenades are AoE.

In fact, they are a much smaller AoE than many other classes get. Many AoE attacks from other classes deal more damage than grenades, hit more reliably, and have larger areas of effect. I don’t see any of those attacks being nerfed by 1/3rd their previous damage output, and they’ve always worked with sigils.

I mean, do the devs think that we’re the only class that gets an AoE auto-attack? If so, I have news for them. Most weapons in the game have auto-attacks which hit multiple targets, either a cone in front of the player, splash around your target, or piercing. Grenades weren’t unique in this regard, nor were they the most devastatingly powerful weapon. In reality, they are the hardest weapon in the game to hit with reliably, but that doesn’t seem to have been taken into account at all.

-Travail.