Guild Wars 2

You realize if someone is stacking passive healing you can poison them to reduce the healing amount right? And the engineer’s grandmaster AR immunity trait doesn’t remove existing conditions. If you dump a bunch of conditions on them and they drop below 25%, it only affects new incoming conditions. You should be able to burn through the rest of their health once it’s that low.

There are too many people in here making the assumption that the trait cleanses existing conditions and lets the engineer (or elementalist) run away freely. Nope. That’s wrong. Cripple them before it kicks in, tag them with conditions to keep them in combat. If the target retreats they’ve lost the capture point anyway. Don’t argue mechanics if you don’t actually understand how they work. Surprise-surprise, you actually have to think in order to counter a grandmaster trait.

On top of that, I emphasize again that it’s a grandmaster trait. Grandmaster traits are strong. All of the traits in that category are strong. Compare AR to other grandmaster traits across all professions and you see that it’s in a good place. And hey, if a grandmaster trait specifically designed to counter condition builds is good against condition builds, then why is that wrong? If you fight someone who is specifically designed to defeat you, then accept your defeat with grace.

My personal opinion:

Go for the Eyes: This trait is almost okay. 5s blind, 10s recharge. I think if it’s going to happen on crits the chance should be increased to 50% on crit though.

Rifle Mod: Edit: Actually I’m not sure. Merciless Hammer only applies when the target is disabled, though the reduced recharge applies all the time.

Hair Trigger: Supposedly this has no extra effect other than reduced CD because it applies to multiple weapon sets. HOWEVER, engineers cannot use a rifle, pistol, or harpoon gun at the same time. This should have an extra effect similar to Cleansing Conflagration or Axe Training.

Rifled Barrels: Is in a good place.

ManCaptain.3154:

The fact that placing a turret prevents you from using the toolbelt skill is reason enough not to use them except the healing turret for the quick place+overcharge+detonate combo. This nerf hardly affects Net Turret use as it’s non-existent. Turret fires every 10+ sec, is prone to missing, and you can’t control exactly when it’s gonna fire, non-exact CC loses half its value.

The net turret actually fires every 13 seconds. It originally stated every 10 seconds but was bugged and fired every 13 seconds. Instead of fixing this, they just changed the tooltip to 13 seconds which is just about the laziest thing they could have done given how worthless the turret is now.

Also, people are talking about the issue of stacking roots. If that is in fact the problem, then why is the net turret being specifically targeted for a nerf?

Aberrant.6749:

Imo it’s because of root stacking. If that wasn’t around this wouldn’t be as big of an issue. As it stands right now you can crate->net shot->etc. That’s the real problem and not net turret. But they are treating the symptoms and not the cause : /

Crate inflicts a stun and net shot inflicts an immobilize, which tick concurrently. They don’t stack… so with that in mind, I have no clue why this nerf is happening now. Supply crate doesn’t immobilize people for 2 + 3 = 5 seconds, it immobilizes people for 2 seconds and one lucky target gets it for 3 total seconds.

Escadin.9482:

Frankly, I don’t think it matters. They have buffed immobilize too much and now, every source if it is somewhat overpowered. I know that net turret is probably the worst source for immobilze but they didn’t care for turrets so far, and they didn’t mention any changes to them within the next big patch season. Engineer is in a good place- a bit OP if anything and if you take a look at the current state of ranger, it takes a lot more constructive and negative feedback for even the smallest (or not even barely helpful) changes – all that while ranger is neither considered to be OP nor in a decent place.
It’s just very very unlikely this will be heard by anet at any time and imho it’s impossible to happen before summer. They will nerf them together and that’s hopefully the last thing we hear about it, because fixing stuff is way down on their priority list, regarding professionbalance.

An entire category of utility skills being severely bugged, ignored in the +71% PvE summon HP patch and having all but one turret trait bugged is not “in a good place”. It’s “in beta”, because none of the problems have been fixed SINCE beta.

In the upcoming balance notes, the net turret’s immobilize duration is being reduced from 3s to 2s supposedly in order to reduce the CC power of supply drop. I agree with this, as supply drop’s initial landing is quite strong with the immobilize tacked on.

However, a long time ago there were bug reports of the net turret not firing as fast as it should. The tooltip advertised 10s per shot, but the turret would only fire once per 13s. The bug was later “fixed” by raising the tooltip to 13s.

If the net turret immobilize is being nerfed to reduce the CC power of supply drop, why is the net turret’s attack period not being returned to 10s like it was originally supposed to be? One 2s immobilize every 13 seconds on a turret that has virtually no health is almost entirely worthless. This nerf will put supply drop where it should be but it’ll ruin the net turret utility skill even more.

Engineer.

It’s been about a year and a half since launch and the turret skills haven’t been fixed. Every single turret skill has at least one bug, and all of the turret traits have bugs. A class is not balanced when a quarter of its skills do not behave as advertised.

Previous patch notes said kits would have weapon power comparable to the highest tier available at the player’s level. When ascended weapons came out kits and conjured weapons got ascended damage, and then they were hotfixed back to exotic and called a “bug”.

This is a regular occurrence with the class. For example, all turrets use versions from a completely different build of the game when deployed underwater.

A profession isn’t “in a good place” when a quarter of its utility skills and the traits that go along with them are completely screwed beyond recognition. Having fewer available utilities and traits than all other professions is not balanced.

Out of curiosity today I went into the mists and found out the following:

- The rocket turret gains no range benefit from traits when deployed underwater, even though the tooltip gets updated.

- When they changed the rifle turret’s overcharge from a bleed to a vulnerability skill on land, they also halved the damage dealt by the overcharged shots (unlisted change in the patch notes) and reduced the damage of regular shots by about 20%.

Btw if you equip the deployable turrets trait, the thrown turrets that replace your regular turrets are from an old build of the game. So that’s cool. The quality of bug fixes towards turrets is worse than pretty much every private MMO server I’ve seen.

Escadin.9482:

Karl McLain.5604:

Engineer:
We feel that the engineer is in a decent place right now, but we did take this opportunity to scale down a few outlier skills in terms of potency. Net Turret’s immobilize duration has been lowered to reduce the amount of lockdown after a Supply Crate drop, and Poison Grenade’s poison duration has been lowered to account for poison field stacking.

[sPvP]

• Engineer is indeed in a good position here and A.E.D can really need a reduced cast time, I doubt it will be enough though small steps are usually a good choice.

[PvX]

• Turrets.
  After a series of nerfs and changes to turrets (even if aimed at supply drop), will there be any bugfixes for them? It’s hard to tell what will/has become of the net turret or any other turret since you never see them in action for very valid reasons.

• Mortar.
  Name one part of it that does work as intented. There has been a lot of constructive feed back, so where are we on this matter?

[Pve]

• Scaling with ascended gear or any stats at all is not very common among our utility and elite skills. What is your opinion on the hobo sacks issue? Some people even claim to recognize toilet paper attached to them…

I understand this goes down to the core mechanic of engineering but could you at least give us a clue where you want to go from here?

I really have to second this for more visibility. The original post states that engineers are in a good place, but how are they in a good place when all of the turrets are bugged, and all of the turret traits are bugged? Why is Mortar an acceptable elite skill? What actions are being taken to fix the turret and turret trait bugs that have been around since beta? Why were turrets ignored in the patch that boosted summon health by 71% in PvE zones? Attempting to balance something that’s broken feels like a very backwards approach to addressing the engineer.

In addition, why is it that engineers cannot have ascended weapon power on kits? Engineers have only one weapon slot to make up for the fact that they have kits, yet a kit engineer does not benefit from the +5% weapon damage of ascended weapons. They used to have it when ascended weapons came out but that was hotfixed back. What is the reasoning for this? What is your plan to address this issue?

A lot of people here are saying that levels are in the game for absolutely no reason. Those people are wrong.

The levels still create a difficulty curve, but the slope is much flatter than other MMOs. Level 20 content is easier than level 50 content to a level 80 player. All you need to do is try fighting the same mobs in different level regions to see this. Leveling definitely has its place in this game because there is still a sense of progression – it’s just such that you can’t completely trivialize low level content. Try to solo an elite ascalonian (L35) in AC at level 40, then try again at level 80. Compare L35 dungeon elites with L80 dungeon elites. There is a difference.

This is quite concerning. Arena Net needs to reconsider this and remove the chance for sprockets from the pickaxe completely. It is a best-in-slot item that can only be acquired with gems. End of story.

The fact that it produces sprockets is not the issue. It’s the fact that it produces anything extra at all, which makes it superior to anything you can obtain with in-game currency. You see this kind of thing starting in TCGs all the time, and it’s called Power Creep. Now that Arena Net has created a pickaxe with an extra effect, they have to either maintain that level of usability or up the ante as they go.

This game has a paid entrance fee. It is not free to play. Approaching a Maple Story cash shop would become reason enough to jump ship and play any of the other MMOs on the market. I would recommend the game to a friend, but due to the iffy path that would likely follow from this item, right now I would actually advise against buying the game until Arena Net gets back on track (and if they don’t, I would recommend never buying GW2).

I really like this idea, but as you said…. Arena Net will never add 4*9 = 36 skills to each class without requiring some sort of inflated gating mechanism like paying an absurd number of skill points (as evidenced by the two skills that were recently added for 25 points each despite being sidegrades) or buying obscenely-priced skill tomes for hundreds of gold.

The other thing to bear in mind is that it would have to take into account your raw stats, not downscaled stats. Otherwise your skills would only be usable in high level zones. This is a really cool idea but it will likely never happen.

I just think it’s ridiculous to attempt to balance turrets in their broken state rather than actually fixing them.

A balance patch is useless when there are horribly crippling bugs in the game. Bugs are the reason this won’t be an esport. You need skills to do what you expect.

When can we expect engineer turrets to be addressed? Since beta the only thing that has happened is trait buffs but turrets at their core are still buggy. I’m posting this in general because I want a response, and many of the turret threads in the engineer sub-forum get deleted with no explanation.

- They did not receive the +71% pve health bonus that all other summonables received.
- Overcharging them removes the bonus range from rifled turret barrels.
- Traiting Deployable Turrets replaces all turret skills with versions that don’t have other turret traits.
- The rifle turret’s overcharge doesn’t grant +50% attack speed.

All I would like is an answer as to whether there is actually a plan to fix these bugs or not. They really have been around since beta and it’s incredibly frustrating how time and time again we get a patch with a bunch of bug fixes but turrets are completely absent every time. And we frequently get hotfixes for other bugs, but these problems that have existed from the beginning and have never been addressed fall to the bottom of the barrel. A quarter of engineer utilities are turrets, and four traits (including Rifled Turret Barrels which is grandmaster and broken as mentioned above) affect turrets. This isn’t a small issue. We’re talking about an entire category of skills that has never worked correctly since the game was created. I’ve tested and reported the above issues every single patch, but they’ve never even been acknowledged.

Is there a plan for this or not?

Buffing the turret traits doesn’t help when turrets are still broken.

The turrets are still missing the +71% pve summonable health buff that everything else got.

Overcharging turrets still removes their bonus range from Rifled Turret Barrels.

Deployable Turrets still removes the bonus range from Rifled Turret Barrels.

Overcharging the rifle turret doesn’t grant +50% attack speed.

And you know what’s funny? Until these bugs are fixed, there are also two heavily beneficial and heavily exploitable bugs.

1) It is possible to grant the rifle turret permanent quickness.
2) It is possible to summon any turret at its level 80 version in any zone, regardless of that zone’s level.

I don’t feel the need to report those two until the detrimental bugs are fixed and turrets get the same 71% pve health bonus that every other summon skill got, since they are almost necessary to make the current turrets viable. And to be totally honest, these horribly overpowered exploits are probably caused by the root problems of the original detrimental bugs.

Turrets need to be re-examined and cleared of bugs. All of these have been around since beta. They’re still around. Buffing the traits of bugged skills doesn’t make them okay. Is there a timeline or any sort of plan for fixing turrets? ArenaNet claimed there would be more dev <-> player interaction, but again… every single patch has ignored these bugs since beta. Turrets take up a quarter of the engineer’s skills. This needs to be addressed. Bugs like this are the reason this game is failing as an esport. You cannot balance something that’s broken under the hood.

Snowblind: The Son of Svanir Shaman now sometimes drops AoE ice shards in fewer quantities while he’s on the ground fighting.

It’s a Mursaat.

Increasing the range on this trait does nothing for us if it’s still horribly bugged.

Equipping deployable turrets along with rifled turret barrels removes the range bonus from rifled turret barrels entirely.

Overcharging a turret after it has been placed removes the bonus range of rifled turret barrels from the turret’s normal attack.

I re-iterate: BOOSTING THE RANGE OF THIS TRAIT DOES NOT HELP IF THE RANGE GETS REMOVED WHEN YOU OVERCHARGE.

Why can’t more priority be given to fixing the bugs that make turrets bad in the first place?

Oh, also? Overcharging the rifle turret doesn’t give it +50% attack speed as the skill suggests unless you cast it immediately within 1 second of deploying the turret. If you use it any later than that, the attack speed bonus doesn’t apply. Ever wonder why the overcharge for that turret is so kittenty? Well, there’s your reason.

Hate to say it but there’s really no way turrets will be viable, even with the trait changes, until the bugs are fixed and the turrets gain the same minion health buff that literally every other summonable “thing” in the game got last patch. Also, overcharging turrets disables their traits anyway. For some traits like damage and repair, it disables them momentarily. For others like the range on rifled turret barrels, overcharging once removes the range bonus for the remainder of the turret’s life. Also, deployable turrets simply don’t get the range bonus.

When you have the “deployable turrets” trait equipped that lets you throw turrets, it seems to replace the turrets with older versions of the skills and makes it so they don’t gain the benefit of increased range from the rifled turret barrels trait. Bizarre.

JonPeters.5630:

Ok I had some time to talk through some of the engineer discussion. Overall Engineer is in a difficult place because they have a ton of good adept traits, not a lot of good master traits, and again a good # of grandmasters so you end up spreading points fairly diversly to get all the good adept traits but lose out on a lot of power by failing to get as many grandmaster traits. Here is what I see a lot of talk about:

Incendiary Powder
Moving this was just something that was a long time coming. It was simply forcing almost every engineer into 10 points in Explosives which was really hurting build diversity. We have tried to counter this by improving other triats that might now be reachable by dropping those 10 points. For example Modified Ammunition, Elixir Infuxed Bombs, and Armor Mods. Now all three of these lines, some more than others, have a strong reason to invest 30 points to match the strong grandmasters already in the other lines.Grenadier, Autodefense Bomb Dispenser, HGH, and Automated Response.

Firearms
We still feel this line is lackluster and in the future some merging and redesigning will take place, but we took the lowest hanging fruit for now. We talked about this line more than any other trait line, but at the end of the day the work and testing required got out of scope for this release. The other spot this line could get a quick pick-me-up is by making at least 2 or 3 of the adept traits in this line good choices.

Invogorating Speed
The indirect nerf to this through speedy kits will reduce some surviveability in the alchemy line, but we felt like it was important given how much other strong stuff that line has.

Master tier traits
Some good suggestions on builds that might open up if we improve some of the master tier traits would be good to see. Here is a pretty decent list of master tier traits that I still find underwhelming.

Explosive Powder, Enhance Performance, Power Showes, Elite Supplies, Deadly Mixture, Potent Elixirs, Packaged Stimulents, Power Wrench, Leg Mods.

Keep the discussion going and let’s see if we can find some room in those traits to bring those trait lines some more into play.

We won’t be able to address all of the concerns, but we will address the most pressing if we can.

Thanks,

Jon

The balance patch notes made absolutely no mention of turrets aside from a slight buff to a near-useless regeneration skill. Are there any plans to make turrets usable and to fix the bugs that have been around since the beta weekends? These skills take up almost a quarter of the engineer’s utilities.

I feel the need to mention this here as it’s been reported repeatedly and absolutely nothing has been done about it.

The +33% range component of the “rifled turret barrels” grandmaster engineer trait doesn’t do anything. The trait has absolutely no impact on turret range, or maybe the boost is actually 3.3% instead of 33%. I don’t know what’s going on here but it’s simply completely broken and has been for a long time. The range bonus is not reflected in the turret tooltips nor is it reflected in-game. The rocket turret tooltip also shows the old rocket turret, saying it inflicts burning (it does not), and none of the turret tooltips reflect the damage increase from the trait.

Also, it would be nice if we could get some justification for not giving turrets the +71% PvE minion health buff even though each one can sustain less damage than necromancer minions, cannot move, do not naturally regenerate, cannot target world bosses, cannot crit, and get hit multiple times by AoE attacks because they’re considered structures. Strangely, none of these points were brought up in the list for the December 10th balance patch despite turrets occupying five of the engineer’s skills. Is there a plan for these skills at all? They have never been in a usable state since the beta weekends before the game launched, and from what I’ve seen it appears there is absolutely no plan to do anything for the next month either.

To quote from the Dec. 10 balance patch introduction:

“Our goal for many of the classes was to increase build diversity while still maintaining class roles and identities. Some of the things we increased were abilities/skills that people don’t run very often. Our goal was to increase these abilities to make them viable alternate builds.”

Engineers very rarely run turret builds because they get destroyed in one shot by veteran or higher mobs. A regular drake mob in a borderlands map can breathe on a turret for 10k damage, killing it with one skill. Keeping engineers locked out of nearly a quarter of their skills does not feel like build variety is being promoted.

Rezzet.3614:

i doubt you even used rocket turret’s toolbelt to begin with wich would explain why you hate the change 7-9k damage with 1500 default range is a massive buff if used right and hey since it has a lengthy landing time you can throw a grenade barrage right after the rocket and bam instant AoE death try it in wvw before complaining

Can you actually show me a video of an engineer hitting for 9k with the rocket tool belt skill? I don’t believe you in the slightest.

No mention of engineer turrets getting the same +71% PvE health as every other minion in the game is extremely disappointing.

The engineer changes sound pretty reasonable, but turrets are still lacking the recent +71% PvE health boost that every other minion in the game received. This makes them way too easy to kill… a single stray shot from veterans and higher is capable of blowing up all but the thumper turret. To compound this problem, turrets have the same massive hitboxes as every other structure in the game, and a lot of the time this causes AoE skills to hit them more than once.

Since the patch that makes turrets target your target, turrets will now refuse to attack anything that’s considered a world boss. This includes dragons, the wurm, the fire elemental, the big nightmare tree in TA, Tequatl, and anything else that has those big red reticules and cannot be crit.

I’m wondering if anyone else can also try confirming this.

When I use the rocket turret, rifled turret barrels seems to apply the bonus range to the turret (even though it’s not shown in the tooltip), but if I overcharge the rocket turret outside its normal range but inside its expanded range, it fires off one direct round (a non-overcharged shot) and then its range reverts to the pre-trait value.

I reported a bug report just in case, but am I crazy? This is such an oddly specific problem.

Edit: Actually, the turret loses its bonus range after you overcharge it no matter what range you do the overcharge at. Well that sucks.

Something for you guys to consider… do you really want turrets to be able to follow you? For those who use a flamethrower or tool kit, such a trait would make the turrets completely useless. Think about it… the only “melee” turrets are the flame turret and the thumper turret. If a rocket turret or rifle turret can move, that means it can put itself in harm’s way when you enter combat. When I place one of those turrets, I place it with purpose: at the edge of its range, usually at an elevated position that’s hard for mobs to reach. Whenever I use turrets, I visualize their range and the mobs’ positioning. I want those turrets to stay where they are.

I think turrets should be immobile, but they should be strong. A nest of three engineer turrets shouldn’t be something that a berserker illusion can spin through and completely destroy without even dying itself. If you see a flamethrower, rocket and thumper in a single spot, it should make you think twice about getting close. Moving between them should really hurt. They need higher health, toughness, and damage.

In addition, make the Mortar elite skill both a usable siege weapon AND a turret. When it’s being used the player should have direct control, but if nobody is manning the mortar then it should launch its 1 skill automatically, perhaps with an overcharge (~45s CD) that will make it remotely fire its barrage skill.

The last patch fixed the trait damage with rocket turrets but I’m not sure if the range is fixed. Must test further.

How did this make it past QA? Add it to the list of turret bugs. This trait does NOT increase turret range at all.

It used to work before the patch and now it doesn’t. Are engineers meant to use turrets or not?

I just found another bug. Activating the Inventions Grandmaster trait XII which boosts turret damage by 15% actually causes your rocket turret to revert to its original damage before applying the 15%. So turning on that trait actually REDUCES your rocket turret’s damage by about 40%. Okay.

Please test turrets.

Rezzet.3614:

Tulki.1458:

Also of note is that the rocket turret no longer causes burning, which removes roughly half of the damage at level 80, or more than half if you were a condition build.

This change was not listed in the patch notes.

it got an unlisted direct damage buff

It got a buff of about 400 damage at level 80 against squishy targets in exchange for 3 seconds of burning (= 984 damage with zero condition damage).

That’s a nerf even if you had no condition traits or gear.

Anymras.5729:

…Wait, that Overcharge thing. Is that new? I’m pretty sure that’s a bug I haven’t got recorded.

You might lump it in with the horribly buggy “target my target” AI they added. I noticed it in the Mad King’s Labyrinth today, though I was hitting many enemies at once so it could just have been the AI locking itself up as usual.

The rest of the things I listed I have confirmed.

Also of note is that the rocket turret no longer causes burning, which removes roughly half of the damage at level 80, or more than half if you were a condition build.

This change was not listed in the patch notes.

Turrets were heavily nerfed this patch. Their life is the same as before (apparently turrets don’t count for the 71% increase in minion health, but ranger spirits do).

- Overcharged rifle turret now inflicts ONE stack of vulnerability instead of bleeding the target. If you were a condition build before then this is a definite nerf.

- Rocket turret no longer inflicts burning (40-60% damage nerf, but closer to 80% if you were a condition build).

- Overcharging the rocket turret immediately after it shoots a normal round causes it to lock down and not fire until it cools off.

- The rocket turret tool belt skill was turned into a slow-moving arcing projectile which takes roughly 5 seconds to hit its target at max range. I.e. it’s useless unless your target is stationary. It also hits the roof in dungeons, making it useless in many rooms. It also no longer works underwater AT ALL.

- Hitting multiple targets with AoE will cause the new turret AI to break. Your turret will now spend time slowly turning between targets instead of shooting if you’re hitting more than one foe.

So yes. They are much weaker now. Just when I thought they couldn’t possibly ruin turrets any more, they actually managed to do it (and snuck in a massive rocket turret damage nerf without mentioning it in the patch notes). I’m convinced that some angsty dev has been playing a joke on engineers, as these turrets have actually never been in a usable state since BETA. There has not been even a single build where they worked properly, and instead of fixing bugs they just managed to introduce another one in this patch as well. It’s not even a case of being underpowered. They’re just horribly broken and not a single one works as advertised. I’ve seen better support from private MMO servers…

Engineer turrets have been broken in some way or another since beta. Literally every bug fix introduced another bug.

Now that the turret traits actually work, there’s a bug where all turrets get downscaled twice. If you’re level 80 in a level 40 zone, your skill will properly drop a level 40 turret. But then that level 40 turret’s stats get downscaled by the same fraction that a level 80 character would. Whoohoo. No fix in sight, it’s been like this for a long time. That’s FIVE basic utility skills (rifle, rocket, net, flame, thumper) and one elite skill (supply drop) that are all severely broken.

Only one weapon set can be equipped because we have kits, but now kits can’t have ascended damage. And they still take up a utility slot. Whoohoo.

Rodigee.7139:

I assume this was done for spvp reasons (like everything else that happens to this class). Ascended damage doesn’t exist in spvp so they can’t just flat out buff kits/banners/conjures. They have to buff those only in pve/wvw.

I don’t understand this though… they already have the ability to split a skill in two for PvE and SPvP/WvW. Why would a kit skill be an exception?

I’m pretty sure nothing’s going to happen with turrets, sad to say. They were broken at launch and every single patch for them so far has fixed one issue and introduced another. Even today they’re still broken, as a developer somehow managed to make it so turrets are wrongly affected by downscaling. If you’re level 80 and you deploy a turret in a level 10 zone, you end up deploying a level 10 turret that ALSO gets its stats reduced due to downscaling, so it ends up being worthless.

I really hate to say it… but these things

- Time-gating
- Dailies
- Massive crafting grind costs for ascended weapons

… they remind me of Farmville.

So no post as to the reasoning behind the change? They just decided “nope” and did a 180 on their promise?

And for those saying the kits can just inherit equipped weapon damage… that really wouldn’t work. Exotic kits have 969 weapon power and an exotic rifle has about 1200. Engineer kits were never really up to snuff as it was, so nerfing them back down from ascended stats is even more of a kick in the teeth.

I know for a fact it was confirmed elsewhere more explicitly (it was confirmed by a red for sure, and I believe it was in the massive ascended weapons discussion thread), but on the January 28th patch when kit damage was revamped, this note was added:

Bundles from player skills (engineer kits, elementalist conjured weapons, warrior banners) now have base damage that is consistent with the highest rarity weapons available at the level of the player.

When the patch dropped, level 80 engineers got kits with ascended weapon power so they could keep up. Then it was hotfixed to cap it down to exotic. The obvious problem is… exotic is NOT the highest available rarity, so bundle builds get kitten and can no longer use ascended power.

Nike.2631:

Kashrlyyk.5364:

How much damage was removed from all those skills?

The amount that was accidentally added to them, I should think.

Except it was already promised that these kits would get the extra ascended weapon power. Not an accident.

For visibility I’m copying my post from the engineer board for more proof:

ShadowPuppet.3746:

Tulki.1458:

Actually before ascended weapons came out, ArenaNet stated that after their release, engineer kit damage would get increased to ascended levels. And it did when the patch released, but for some reason they just dropped it back down to exotic. What the hell? This means NO ENGINEER WHO USES KITS is allowed to gain ascended weapon damage.

Not saying they didn’t say this, but perhaps you could point to the source and give a bit more supporting information like actual numbers to verify the changes and troubleshoot what is going on. What I mean is are you certain that the kit strength scaling was actually correct before this most recent fix and it has not simply been brought back down to where it should be. I don’t want to come across as skeptical but without more actual information it is hard to tell what is going on.

Fair enough, I suppose.

The only proof we really have is that at the time that they said “weapon kits will remain at exotic strength until ascended weapons come out”, we can assume the kits had exotic stats.

Now, before the patch dropped I took a screenshot of my character wearing a grenade kit in a level 80 zone with no buffs because I had a feeling they were going to forget to buff kits to compete with ascended weapons. The shot is attached. In it you can see the grenade kit’s weapon power by subtracting my power from the “total attack” stat. It is 969.

After the patch dropped, I checked under exactly the same circumstances again, and the grenade kit’s weapon power was increased by 5%, which is exactly the same difference between exotic weapon power and ascended weapon power. After the hotfix, the weapon power is back down to where it was in that screenshot (i.e. exotic).

All of this back-and-forth with engineers… first with broken turrets that were fixed and then rebroken several times (and are still broken), and now apparently engineers who use kits in their build aren’t allowed to compete with ascended weapon power? Really? It’s absurd.

ShadowPuppet.3746:

Tulki.1458:

Actually before ascended weapons came out, ArenaNet stated that after their release, engineer kit damage would get increased to ascended levels. And it did when the patch released, but for some reason they just dropped it back down to exotic. What the hell? This means NO ENGINEER WHO USES KITS is allowed to gain ascended weapon damage.

Not saying they didn’t say this, but perhaps you could point to the source and give a bit more supporting information like actual numbers to verify the changes and troubleshoot what is going on. What I mean is are you certain that the kit strength scaling was actually correct before this most recent fix and it has not simply been brought back down to where it should be. I don’t want to come across as skeptical but without more actual information it is hard to tell what is going on.

Fair enough, I suppose.

The only proof we really have is that at the time that they said “weapon kits will remain at exotic strength until ascended weapons come out”, we can assume the kits had exotic stats.

Now, before the patch dropped I took a screenshot of my character wearing a grenade kit in a level 80 zone with no buffs because I had a feeling they were going to forget to buff kits to compete with ascended weapons. The shot is attached. In it you can see the grenade kit’s weapon power by subtracting my power from the “total attack” stat. It is 969.

After the patch dropped, I checked under exactly the same circumstances again, and the grenade kit’s weapon power was increased by 5%, which is exactly the same difference between exotic weapon power and ascended weapon power. After the hotfix, the weapon power is back down to where it was in that screenshot (i.e. exotic).

No, they actually explicitly mentioned it in the last patch notes for the hotfix, stating it as a “bug” even though the kits were supposed to get ascended damage so they can keep up.

Actually before ascended weapons came out, ArenaNet stated that after their release, engineer kit damage would get increased to ascended levels. And it did when the patch released, but for some reason they just dropped it back down to exotic. What the hell? This means NO ENGINEER WHO USES KITS is allowed to gain ascended weapon damage.

Seriously?

They said before ascended weapons got released that when they come out, weapon kits would be buffed to deal ascended damage. What kind of crap is this?

Anyway I just rechecked kit damage. Yep, it’s back down to exotic weapon damage, meaning ANY engineer who wants to use kits (i.e. the vast majority of engineers) is not allowed to gain ascended weapon damage.

What a load of kitten.

The way level scaling is currently designed, it makes players fight against their own level. Every time you level up in Guild Wars 2, you lose stats in downscaled areas, and it’s getting really silly. This game acts like an anti-RPG. Instead of leveling up making you more powerful, all it does it make you weaker and you have to get gear to compensate. The next time you’re leveling your character, go into an area where you are downscaled (or upscaled) and level up. All of your stats will drop significantly.

I tried a few tests to see just how wonky it is. They were inspired by this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y_7iBht0ms

Level 4 engineer in starter gear using pistol 1 against a level 2 doe: ~13-14 damage per shot.

If I take my level 80 engineer into the same area wearing starter gear, and he’s downscaled to level 4 but still has 30 points in power traits (+300 power), he hits for 3 damage per shot. There’s something really wrong here. I know being a high level shouldn’t let you completely steamroll low-level content, but your level shouldn’t be a penalty either.

So I went and figured out exactly how downscaling works. It’s like this:

Let R = (base power stat at effective level) / (base power stat at core level).
Multiply all stats by R.

Note that you can also use base precision, or toughness, or vitality for R since those are all the same base value.

So what’s the problem with this approach? There are two issues:
1) Base stats grow faster than stats on gear as the game progresses. This means that when downscaled as a high level, your stats will be lower than that of someone at the zone’s level can achieve, regardless of how well-geared you are. You see those people who demand level 80s for Ascalonian Catacombs? They’re actually demanding weaker characters. Apply the formula and see for yourself.

2) Downscaling totally ignores the gear you’re wearing, and applies the ratio to your total stats. This is why leveling up in a downscaled zone reduces all of your stats. Assuming you can always immediately have the best gear available for your level when you level up, then gaining a level won’t hurt you. But this is obviously not the case.

Solutions: There are a couple of approaches…
1) Diminishing returns on stats based on effective level. With DR for downscaled zones, gaining a level theoretically wouldn’t drop your stats.

2) Probably a better approach: Scale all gear individually. Rather than applying the ratio to all of a character’s total stats, just cap each piece of gear depending on the player’s effective level. For example, let’s suppose we have a level 80 character in a level 50 zone.

- Character has a level 80 ascended berserker’s amulet: The best rarity for a level 50 zone is rare (yellow), which has lower stats than level 80 ascended. So cap the level 80 ascended amulet at rare level 50 stats.

- Character has a level 40 masterwork helmet: The helmet’s stats are lower than what is available for the effective level (level 50 rare), so don’t scale it down.

Solution (2) would stop characters from losing a significant amount of stats by leveling up, and it would still keep the game fairly challenging as a high level character cannot harness rarities above what the zone would normally offer.

Issues with upscaling
Upscaling is also fundamentally flawed. I want you to look at the attached screenshot in WvW of me being upscaled. Something isn’t right here. Look at my stats. Can you see what’s wrong?