It’s in the game because of PVP. It wouldn’t be fun to get stacked with 50 stacks of bleed and then be dead without condition removal in ~3 seconds. It isn’t fundamentally different from getting insta-gibbed but it feels different to the player because they’re basically dead but just haven’t realized it yet.
I am not really sure why it carries over to PVE, though.
There was a dev post about this a while ago where they were remarkably honest about how the process works. They don’t spend much effort banning individual botters because they are mostly stolen accounts anyhow. Instead they work to figure out the newest bot and then change the code to stop the bot working.
This leads to crests and falls in the bot population. When a new bot comes out the bot population swells until Anet figures out how to break the bot and then the population crashses until a new bot comes out. This cycle repeats itself.
The new bots use teleportation, so you don’t see them around as much. They are still there, and the bot population will continue to climb for a few weeks until anet disables this particular bot.
It’s an improvement on the situation from a few weeks ago but I think that has more to do with general game populations crashing than anything else. It isn’t worth it to bot 10+ accounts now because the game’s population is only about 10% of what it used to be.
I am sure ANet is working hard and does ban a lot of bots but I think the drop you’re seeing is just a general drop in population more than anything else. I see at least a bot or two every time I go into a higher level world zone for any length of time. The difference is that I and everyone else do that much less often because people simply play the game a lot less than they used to if they still play at all.
What’s the point in typing anything out? You’ll just say the same thing you have.
But just to humor you, I’ll take just one of your silly assertions:
You claim EG is bad except for super elixer. This shows you have no idea how EG is supposed to be used. EG 4 is an excellent movement skill that also deals very good damage. EG2 has excellent power scaling if used right, i.e. by bouncing it off yourself so it hits the enemy twice.
Or your comment about overpowered shot. Overpowered shot has one of the lowest cooldowns on the game for a knockback, and the KD on them lasts longer than the KD on you. It is of less use in a 2v1 but in a 1v1 it’s one of the more powerful skills out there, especially when comboed into a net shot which then becomes undodgable.
I could go on but I dont’ see the point beause the only reason you would write some of the silly things you have is because you don’t understand the class at all. Me telling you how you are wrong probably isn’t going to help that. I don’t flatter myself that I am some super genius.
The purpose of agony is to be a hard gear-check to stop you from progressing unless you have the right gear. Anet in its infinite wisdom decided that after swearing up and down they wouldn’t make a gear treadmill that what people really wanted was a gear treadmill.
If you could avoid agony it wouldn’t be a hard gear check and there would be no point to it.
Agony isn’t SUPPOSED to be a clever mechanic. It is supposed to be a mechanic that checks your gear and kills you if you don’t have it. It’s really that simple.
Of course right as I made this thread they did the lazy thing and just nerfed Plinx into oblivion while also introducing fractals, which obsoletes orr completely.
GG anet. Orr is now basically a waste of a huge amount of time and resources that went into developing it. When all you really had to do is find a way to incentivize people to use more of the zone than they were.
The chain lightning build from the other thread is probably the most obvious choice. 10/30/0/20/10 or 10/30/0/10/20 being the two most obvious choices. If you run that build between your shield block and your toolkit block and your pistol 3 and your near-100% uptime vigor you can tank damage quite effectively.
Engis are fine from a balance point of view. I’m sorry you can’t recognize it. Talking about proof is silly. Nothing you’ve written in ths thread is proof that engis arn’t balanced. Your comments on overpowered shot and rocket boots for example show you really don’t have a clue about how either of those abilities should be used. Ditto for your comments about elixer gun, and for tool kit. You get some stuff right (FT being junk except for utility, for example) but it’s probably just a case of a broken clock given how much you get totally wrong.
We could go back and forth but what’s the point? More skilled players know the problem is you not the class. Engi has lots of issues at the moment but overall underpoweredness is not really one of them. Certain builds could use a buff but the class overall is in a pretty good place and really about where all classes should be.
Toolkit is one of those kits that feels weak and useless on its own but combos really well with a wide variety of other skills. The block skill alone is almost worth taking the kit for, especially now that it’s 3 seconds long.
The only thing that really needs work is the auto attack. It doesn’t really mesh well with the rest of the class.
This isn’t about thought, this is plain fact of instant cast versus 1-2 second cast time. This affects both PvE and PvP. Clearly you have not had much time or experience in understanding its flaws fully.
I don’t know what to tell you. You are obviously doing it wrong. Engis are fine in both PVE and PVP. We’ve still got a multitude of bugs to work out but balance wise the class is in a pretty good spot. You just can’t spam 1 button and do well like you can on a thief or warrior. Maybe those classes are more your speed.
Engi is in a solid place balance wise. But it is one of the classes that requires some thought when building it. Definitely has a higher skill floor to be effective than something like a thief or warrior or guardian.
P.S. Whoever said elixer gun is bad for damage in PVE is smoking something. EG 2 and 4 have excellent power scaling when used correctly. The auto attack is not great but it’s surprisingly decent when you figure in the weakness + the bleed. It’s overall dps (when you figure in the bleed) is higher than pistol auto attack on a single target IIRC, and isn’t THAT much less than rifle.
As I hope I’ve made clear in my posts fixing the culling issues is a major focus of the WvW team right now and I firmly believe that we will be able to achieve significant improvements when our current development efforts are complete.
The point is that “significant improvements” arn’t good enough. Being killed by 20 people and seeing 10 of them is not much better than being killed by 20 people and seeing 5 of them.
If you can’t tell us that at some point we’re not going to have culled enemies killing us how can you expect people to be satisfied? DAOC managed to do wvwvw 10 years ago with no culling.
Also your comment about culling always being in the game just does not ring true from those of us with experience in the beta. If you really think nothing is changed it is probably worth looking a bit closer because it sure feels like something changed on the user end. I remember playing in the BWEs and seeing many, many more people onscreen than I see in post-launch wvwvw. I can’t tell you with 100% certainty I never got attacked by culled enemies but it certainly didn’t feel like it does now.
The reinforcement events would be ok if they took approximately the same amount of time as the other events. Instead they took 10x as long, and there was nothing interesting about them. Hopefully arenanet will learn that no one likes those sorts of events and remove them next time around.
I am just trying to make some positive observations that hopefully will be recognized and applied next time around. The event could have been so much better with just a few changes as noted above.
Again, their stated explanation makes no sense. If it was really about making the game playable on bad computers they would give you a slider option to control how much culling you get.
The only reasonable conclusion is their stated explanation is not the real one. Either culling exists to lower bandwidth costs on their end or it exists because of some other flaw in the game engine. Both of these explanations fit with the way it was introduced after beta.
1. Reinforcement waves are NOT fun. I don’t know a single person who enjoyed this portion of the event. And it not only happens once but twice. Please do not ever include phases of this type again. It was an exercise in frustration and complete and total boredom.
2. The rest of the meta-event was very good. The phases where you have to knock down the tree, the boulders, and use the steam vents were fun and fit much better with the meta-event text of moving the ancient karka back to its lair.
3. The events before and after you get the ancient karka back to its lair were not quite as bad as the reinforcement events but also felt like busy-work and went on much too long. Having to place bombs in three locations and then clear webs off in three locations felt too long. This portion of the event should have either been reduced to planting bombs in a single location or the amount of spawning mobs should have been decreased by 2/3s to stop this portion of the event from being tedious.
4. More generally, events which involve specific objectives are fun. Events which involve chipping away at the huge health bars of wave after wave of veteran and champion mobs are not fun.
It was a very strange choice by the devs. The drop rate was clearly vastly jacked up. My particular instance had several people linking precusor drops from the chest, as did everyone else’s I know. It was probably more like a 10-20% drop rate at least.
Given that, it just seems odd. If they were going to make a concerted effort to put more precursors into the game, why not just raise the drop rates temporarily from all sources. Giving a few people a winning lottery ticket from the one-time event seems totally arbitrary. I am one of the people who didn’t get a precusor from the chest and while I don’t feel hard done by I do wonder about the justification for why a lot of my friends got one and I didn’t. I wouldn’t feel the same way if the overall drop rate had been boosted.
Pro tip:
Ask Mythic how they get all this done perfectly well 10 years ago with DAOC RVR. sigh
Mythic had their own problems back in the day. But you’re right that culling makes the issues DAOC had seem like small potatoes.
Them talking about BANDWIDTH being the problem is very puzzling. MMOs dont’ take much bandwidth. It really shouldn’t be the limiting factor on displaying more characters. There is something very, very wrong with their game code if it’s sending so much information back and forth that they can’t let someone see 100 characters on the screen for fear of maxing out the clients’ internet connection.
This is the most serious issue in the game and the dev post is pretty clear it will never be fixed. Look at the last paragraph. The goal is to get “more” characters on screen. They won’t even claim they are TRYING to eliminate culling entirely.
It is apparently part of the game that isn’t going to change. Those of us serious about large-scale PVP just need to give up and go elsewhere.
The change to c&d while leaving backstab and mug intact is proof positive the devs who do class balance have no clue. They took the least problematic part of the 3 ability combo and nerfed it for some completely inexplicable reason while leaving the two problematic parts untouched.
I hope people don’t think the designers are the team of programmers who actually implement changes. The designers only really give direction whether the community approves of it or not.
That isn’t what the quote suggests. He says “give us time, we only have two designers working on skills” in a thread about the lack of fixes in the patch.
“Let’s make our endgame running the same brainless event over and over again with 100 other people such that the mobs die before they even become visible!”
Doesn’t really inspire confidence about the future of the game if ArenaNet is only willing to shell out the bones for two people to work on this stuff.
Please nerf Plinx. It is awful that half the game at max level seems to be running Plinx over and over with 100 other people trying to get a hit in on the mobs before they do.
The really disturbing thing about that post is he says there are only 2 designers doing class updates. No wonder it is taking so long to fix.
Arenanet needs to get off its behind and hire some more people to do this stuff. It really doesn’t inspire confidence that only a few months after release they basically have only a skeleton crew fixing the myriad of problems with the game.
It is pretty hillarious. Obviously whoever was doing the elementalist changes wasn’t communicating with the extern they assigned to do the engineer changes.
It is really mind-boggling that they had the nerve to keep the notes secret and get everyone’s hopes up and then release…that. Obviously no one on the dev team with any power actually plays an engi or they would have realized what a slap in the face it is to get a list of “fixes” like that
I don’t know what the solution is but having 50-60 invisible culled people killing mobs within half a second of when they spawn at pre-determined locations that are being bombarded with AOE damage in anticipation of when the mobs spawn is just awful gameplay. There is nothing remotely epic about it. Right now arriving in Orr is a massive shock for a new player who is used to a game that is actually a game not whack-a-risen.
They need to find some way to incentivize people to spread out over the whole map instead of just farming 1-2 events over and over. Diminishing returns by event would make sense, as well as a stacked karma bonus for completing different events within a given time period. I.e. a +10% karma gain for each unique event finished within a 1 hour period.
Right now the only viable dps output for pve is a Rifle/pistol/pistol pots or turret spec. Anything else is useless honestly.
wut
grenades are by far the highest dps for engis. if you are bad at targeting that’s your fault. it is awkward admittedly but it shouldn’t lower your dps in most situations.
Pistol with coated bullets is the most obvious. You can also use flamethrower or grenades effectively if you memorize mob spawn locations but it requires preknowledge of where they spawn or else they often die before your attacks hit.
I think the “l2p” responses are misguided here. This seems to be a situation where the mechanic is not working as it should. You killing an animal attacking you shouldn’t rally your enemy.
It does feel kind of stupid that a foot high ledge blocks you from aoeing things on the ground below you.
At least change where the players LoS start is calculated from, preferably changed to the height of a mid-size norn. Right now feels like if my knees can’t see a target, I can’t hit it.
Yep. It’s absolutely perverse that it’s substantially easier to hit someone on the wall with AOE than it is to hit someone on the ground FROM a wall with aoe.
For some bizarre reason A-net seems to think it’s funny to invert the normal laws of physics and make standing behind a wall a disadvantage rather than an advantage in siege situations.
Simple change for them while still keeping the same gameplay, on wall you get protection buff.
This is actually a very clever suggestion. Although it still doesn’t address the bizarre fact that it is actually easier to aoe people BEHIND a wall than it is to aoe people FROM behind a wall. Which makes zero sense. I can’t even throw my grenades over a 5 foot tall parapet to reach the enemy but the enemy can throw their grenades against my 20 foot tall wall and hit me.
You guys seems to forget the most important fact, that you can use this while you’re knocked down. With this ability no class can knockdown/stun you and unload on you. It’s a must have for pvp and pve for me.
No kidding. This is the use for the skill and it saves your life SO many times in pvp. Particularly when you get jumped by a glass cannon warrior or thief. It is one of the better ways in the game to avoid getting gibbed by HB or a backstab combo.
