Guild Wars 2

Massively under-rated is the 10 second Ice Field from Mortar. Lay that down and blast away for Frost Aura. The enemy blob will be constantly chilled (reapplied as soon as they cleanse it) and yours will be taking -10% damage.

As of next patch, I’ll spec like this (very similar to how I spec now, few tweaks to counter the changes).

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcIQJAqelIq6ZH5yuF1LJxoCdGUh6LSR+t8nHyltpF-jECBYhCh0CgkIBJHqIasl1FRjVdDTHjIq2YuIa1CBsYNA-w

Great to see all the Piken excuses crop up so quickly (almost as quickly as you cast aside SFR’s “excuses” last time round).

Scarran.9845:

Being focused by SFR is indeed a compliment as to how well we performed in the Week 1 match-up. At the end of the day I and probably most others at Piken don’t care you are focusing us. If your expecting us to throw our toys out the pram like certain SFR individuals did on the forum then im hoping you will be surprised that we actually have a mature community who doesn’t steep to certain SFR forum warrior levels.

Fantastic logic here. Tailoring your view of the entire SFR community on a select vocal minority, meanwhile presenting your own server on a pedestal, skimming over the detritus already posted by a select few members of your own community. In reality there are forum warriors on all servers, and they will come out of the woodwork when things aren’t going their way. This happened to SFR when we were double-teamed. Let’s face it; double-teaming happened. It wasn’t a premeditated scenario as some conspiracy theorists suggested, simply a result of the circumstances. Piken had an opportunity to achieve more than they would otherwise have been capable of by riding in Vizunah’s slipstream, and they took it. Fair play to them. Now SFR is going to focus Piken, because that’s our best way to better our position in the league. Again, fair play. Call coverage wars if you like, but don’t forget how quickly you dismissed the coverage issues SFR experienced last time. But that was “fair ’n (vizunah) square”, right?

Back to lurking for me.

I usually run Bomb Kit, Toolkit, and Elixir Gun. You have blinds from pistol and bomb kit, interrupt/knockback from shield, block from shield, block from Toolkit, cripple/immobalise from Bomb Kit, cripple from Toolkit, ranged cripple from Elixir Gun, leap back from Elixir Gun, and permanent vigor and swiftness. Couple all this with the hammers slow attack speed and heavily telegraphed attacks (especially the burst stun) and it becomes laughably easy to avoid most of their damage and stuns, and keep your distance. If they do manage to stun you, you have a stunbreak from Elixir Gun toolbelt skill. Using elixir gun heal, medkit heal and F1 heal, blasts on water fields, and backpack regenerator, you’ll give them a really hard time out-damaging your healing whilst you’re negating all their efforts to hit you. Admittedly killing them isn’t usually easy given the high health pools and healing/condition removal they have. Don’t let them hit you and keep the pressure up on them, poison from pistol and elixir gun helps to keep their health from replenishing. Eventually your burning and confusion will wither them down and they’ll either die or just run away (this is what usually happens). Hammer warriors usually only cause me bother in 1vX fights when it’s harder to devote all defenses to preventing their attacks. Sooner or later they’ll proably catch you with a stun and then you’ll suffer for it.

Pyrasia.9281:

Hammer and Axe for melee weapons.
Engineer = builds stuff. Hammer and Axe are important tools !

Very very few areas of engineering involve axes.

…fixed the “issue” of the new rare miniature from the tower being Account Bound and untradeable, yet dungeons continue to be unusable nearly 24 hours later. Whatever you did (I’m sincerely hoping you at least did something) hasn’t worked.

Yeah, you’ll not survive a full SD unload even from full health with that gear as an elementalist; you’ve no chance if you’re not even aware what to look out for. If you see an Engineer with a rifle, there’s a good chance he’s running SD. He’ll unload a load of burst on you at some point, usually towards the start of the fight or as an opener. You’ll see a barrage of sparks fly out of him. Hit Mist Form at that moment. He’ll have blown his CD’s and then you can bring him down. It will all recharge when he hits 25% health though.

Infor.9703:

I don’t find that mine field hits all the hard. maybe im missing something.

They don’t really. I don’t think they scale well, if it all. It can add some extra damage if you lay down the Mine Field, throw a BoB in the middle of it, Magnet someone in and trigger the Mine Field just before the bomb goes off. Will only hit with all the mines if you’re traited for the extra bomb & mine radius.

Here’s my Charr Engineer, using the Sorrow’s Embrace dungeon set, Charr Tier 3 cultural Adamant Guard Pistol, and crafted Dredge Barricade Shield. Dyed Pitch, Orange, and Iron with the Multitool hobosack backpack.

Lupanic.6502:

We have a hard time to 1on1 any class. With this nerfs it does not get better.

Are you mad? Engineer is among the best classes for dueling at the moment (not that the game is balanced around this anyway).

Sorry, you’re wrong. Retaliation is a permanent buff in a large group of players given the frequency of Guardians and light fields in large group play. You’ll be literally waiting forever for the retaliation buff to drop. I’d love to know what else you propose that we use, our only AoE attacks all require that we either take 3-5x as much damage as any other class from retaliation, or get into melee range without any stability whatsoever. The class is severely underperforming in large group play, and most Engineers will agree that retaliation and stability are the source of this problem. The changes I proposed will fix it, without creating a knock-on scenario where the class is at all overpowered in other areas of the game.

Jon, are there any plans to address the two glaring issues for Engineers in large group play in WvW? As it stands, Engineer (and perhaps Ranger) feels by far the most underperforming class in this area. It also seems to me that the issue, for Engineer at least, could be fixed with two simple changes. I imagine that even with the trait tweaks (the significance of which I feel is is being blown out of proportion my fellow Engineers) we’ll continue to perform very effectively in small-scale combat. No issues here. However, there’s very little to address the glaring issues we’re facing in zergplay.

• Retaliation – Retaliation is a big issue for Engineers right now. As it stands, the most logical kit choices for zergs are Flamethrower, Grenade Kit, and Bomb Kit for their AoE damage. The problem is that the Flamethrower cone attack hits with a stacking series of smaller numbers, cue 5x retaliation hits per second for each player we damage. This results in the Engineer taking more damage than he’s giving out, and probably killing himself in one or two auto-attacks if he’s also taking fire.

The Grenade Kit suffers the same fate, hitting with three smaller grenades instead of one big one, causing us to take 3x as much retaliation damage as anybody else. The simple fix would be to cap retaliation intake at 5 times per action. If I press button 1 on the flamethrower and hit 5 targets, I should take five hits from retaliation, not 25. If I press button 1 on grenades, and hit 5 targets, I should take five hits from retaliation, not 15. A change to this mechanic will not cripple any other classes gameplay, there are no builds that rely on this to defeat other players, as it stands all that it serves to do is make Engineers all but redundant in large group fights.

• Stability – Bomb Kit was the other kit mentioned, which is currently almost entirely useless in a large fight because it requires melee range yet we have absolutely no reliable source of stability. Sure, we can use Elixir B for a negligible amount of Stability on a high cooldown, but that is literally where it ends. Stability is also crippling for Flamethrower. Other classes have far more reliable means of obtaining stability than we do.

What I’d propose is a rehashed reintroduction of the old Flamethrower Juggernaut stability trait. Every time you hit three or more targets with the flamethrower, you gain 3 seconds of stability (3 second cooldown). This would prevent the old issue of permanent stability and messing with sPvP point holding, but allow us to maintain stability while in a large group of players. The trait could also be expanded to accommodate a similar effect for bomb kit too.

These two simple changes would do nothing to hurt any other classes builds, they would do nothing to create overpowered tweaks to the current Engineer meta, they would simply allow Engineer to at last perform respectably in a large group fight whilst changing little else.

I think there are simpler solutions. Having tried to make a viable turret build recently, I decided that the main problem was the damage and the cooldown. In my opinion the cooldown should not exist if we pick up the turret (and be maybe 15 seconds per turret if we blast it, not 50 seconds). This cooldown could also be incurred if the turret dies. Running with Deployable Turrets means your turrets are unlikely to die very easily if you’re careful about where you place them. The main problem as of now is that you have to stay in that place or wait a whole minute until you can do anything at all in combat. Following a fight you should be able to pick up your turrets and carry on your way with no downtime until you can set them again. The damage is also fairly weak, I honestly feel that a 50% increase in damage would put them on about the right level (look at the damage a mesmer illusion can do whilst being mobile, on a lower cooldown, and taking up a single weapon slot rather than a utility slot).

EDIT: And I still feel that turrets should belong in one compact kit instead, so that we can get some actual utility skills alongside them. We have no weapon swap, running a 3 turret build (which is fairly necessary for a turret build given the amount of traits that have to be invested just to make them remotely viable) leaves in with all of 5 buttons to use ourselves to try and stay alive and deal damage. Not a great situation. Tool Kit is designed to synergise with turrets, yet you’ll only have two turrets up doing anything if you’re running Tool Kit.

cazza.6078:

Although SFR have a match-winning advantage of being an international server with multiple time zones they are already 12k behind. If you look at the coverage, they should win the league with ease. But it seems they slack when they don’t outnumber the enemy 2:1.

Canada.

Here’s a build I’ve been messing with today. Hybrid FT/HGH power/crit build:

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQFAUlspyanuShF17IxIFde0gUA47K6R+p8kB-TkAg0EBpyxljJIZN2aGicEB

Near enough 25 stacks of might permanently if you do it properly. 6000+ flame blast crits on squishies, decent survivability through elixir condition removal, mobility and dodges (perma Vigor + Elixir R) and CCing opponents. Has a decent 21k health pool and an extra 200 toughness from Juggernaut too. 2650 power (with might), 40% crit damage and 60% crit chance (with fury up). Landing all the attacks puts most people under a lot of pressure. Especially fun on Skyhammer with all the knockbacks.

Fairly happy with the trait point distribution, but not entirely sure about the individual traits. Would like to try and work Fast-Acting Elixirs in there somehow.

Either make Entangle susceptible to conditions, or at least possible to avoid through evading (more apparent cast animation etc). As it stands, the ability is definitely manageable with a power spec, but it’s extremely messed up by comparison versus a condition spec, as there’s no tangible way of destroying the roots in any sort of reasonable time frame at all.

Thanks.

Yeah I long for the day we get Warrior animations on rifle. It’ll never happen, but a man can dream.

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

not so sure it was PvE update, tbh. They could easily have been trying to fix WvW with migrating to new servers and ooops. We don’t know.

Seems unlikely to me. Were that the case I imagine they would have stated so by now. It would be a PR disaster to watch idly as all this forum flaming continues and WvW continues to be down if the reason that it was down was that they tried to do something to improve the WvW experience. That would make the downtime a lot more acceptable, because at least there would be some advantage to it. The reality is that they broke something in the update which has screwed the match-ups and now they’re trying to fix the problem and manually re-do the match-ups as they were before (hence a global tower reset once it eventually goes live again).

Okay, here’s an idea that may or may not have been suggested before, and more than likely won’t even be read by a dev, but I thought I’d post it anyway purely to see what others would think of it. I’ve always liked the idea of turrets, but never really used them beyond picking them for the corresponding toolbelt ability, largely because they feel cumbersome and usually ineffective.

My post is mainly prompted by reading the recent “leaked” patch changes and contemplating the still limited viability of turrets should those changes go live. Worth noting that I’m viewing this from a predominantly WvW (and a bit of sPvP) perspective.

Essentially it seems to me that the two main reasons turrets aren’t great is the following:

• Mobility - There isn’t any. They can have fairly lengthy cooldowns which essentially roots you to the same spot should you wish to be performing as a level 80, rather than an upscaled sub-level 5 character with no utilities. In WvW especially (where there is lots of open space) the fights can quickly change pace and direction and only being able to change your position every 40 seconds or so isn’t really a great state of affairs.

• Survivability - There isn’t any. Turrets die quickly as it is. The health boost may help, but I’m not sure it will finish the job. As it stands I can easily see, for example, a stun/greatsword haste warrior catching you in amongst your turrets, and bringing down all your turrets within the duration of the stun (as well as doing 10k damage to you [please give back Elixir R stun break]). In a group situation the amount of AoE encountered renders turrets almost entirely useless.

I can think of a fix that would assist both these areas; heli-turrets. Put rotors on top of the turrets and allow them to take to the air, liberating them of their static squishyness. Essentially the way I can see it working would be as follows:

• Turrets no longer stay where they are initially placed. They will fly around the Engineers head remaining close to him, following him around (including during combat) whilst performing whatever function they are intended to.

• As a result of now existing in the air, turrets are unaffected by ground targeted or AoE abilities, or damaging fields. This means they will not be instantly squashed into the ground during a zerg. They will not die after a few seconds in combat by getting cleaved by abilities that weren’t even directed at them. Equally, they can be targeted for single target damage and destruction should the opponent find a particular turret to be intrusive enough to justify such a decision. This makes destroying turrets a tactical decision rather than something that happens a couple of seconds into a fight (often unintentionally) as a result of cleaving from attacks directed at the Engineer himself.

• For the sake of balance, airborne turrets could fail upon the Engineer entering downed states (nothing more irritating than a situation similar to the one found in Rangers where a downed player is nigh on unkillable without using stability/invulnerability/blind while their minion mauls you to death).

• Equally, I imagine for something like this to not have have overpowered effects on non-turret based builds perhaps running just the one turret, I think it should be something that Engineers have to trait for. I feel that a grandmaster trait in the often unloved invention line would fit the bill, but details like this could be fine tuned anyway.

Thoughts/opinions/changes etc?

Here’s my thief. Tried to go for a sort of Highwayman look. Not sure the Dragon’s Jade Dagger matches though.

Every time I attempt to log into the game I get the following message:

“The Game Client is unable to gain access to the log-in server at this time. This is most commonly caused by firewall or router settings, security applications, or connecting through a campus network.”

I’m using a Netgear DGN1000 router. I’ve tried resetting the router to factory settings, but the error persists. However, this is the only thing that doesn’t work. Every other game/website/internet-based-application on my PC works fine. I don’t believe that it’s an issue with my machine because I’ve tried tethering it to the 3G connection on my phone, and I’m able to connect with no issues. However, I only have limited data and there’s a little latency, so this isn’t ideal.

Any suggestions on what to do in order to get up and running again?

Thanks

I’m talking about sPvP, gear/level is irrelevant (though I’m level 80 with full exotic anyway). Yes, I’m running a glass cannon build, but that’s a non-issue versus any other profession as my build is good at avoiding damage. Not particularly helpful when you’re locked down though. I seem to get stunned by something (updraft?), use my stun-breaker, nothing happens, they nuke me, and then I’m stunned again by Shocking Aura, my stun-break is already on cooldown, and they finish me off. Any other class attempting to stun and burst is unsuccessful because I can simply break stun and then block for 3 seconds. All of this is largely irrelevant anyway, the point is simply that elementalist stuns are incorrectly not being affected by Utility Goggles.

No, there’s no time to attack. I’m down, and I stay down. There’s no period after using Utility Goggles where I can attack to get stunned again, because I simply remain stunned even if I don’t do anything other than use the Utility Goggles.

I’m not entirely sure precisely which abilities are causing it, but I keep getting stunned by D/D elementalists and my Utility Goggles (Engineer stun breaker) simply isn’t breaking the stuns. It breaks stuns/knockbacks from every other profession, but when I use it against elementalist stuns it triggers the cooldown and provides the boon (fury) but I’m still incapacitated.

I don’t know if other classes stun breakers also neglect to function correctly against elementalists, but I know that the Engineer ones fail (but work against all other classes). A fix would be nice, I’m tired of getting killed before I’m out of stunlock despite having a stun breaker on my bar.