Is nerfing the best builds good for the game?
I used to think that the solution to balancing was simply to bring weaker areas up to the same level as the strongest ones. After all, everyone wants their favourite build up there with the best of them, right?
But there’s something to be said for working at the other end of the scale; for winding back the most powerful builds and, in doing so, give previously second rate builds a chance to compete.
Having nerfed individual exploits/skills/traits/etc. that are noticeably OP, ANet now seems to be turning its nerfing attention to top builds themselves. Winding back the top builds may be a great way to level the GW2 playing field and make more builds competitive. But, like all things in GW2, the devil is in the detail – there seem to be plenty of ways this could cause more problems than it fixes.
The problem is that the top builds no longer rely on OP skills/traits/equipment/etc for their effectiveness.
Instead, top builds now combine otherwise reasonable skills/traits/equipment/etc in ways that collectively provide an advantage. This means that unless ANet is careful to nerf unpopular skills/traits/etc only, every nerf to a top build will adversely affect a range of other popular builds.
Here’s some problems that have arisen recently from nerfs targeted at winding back top builds:
- Nerfing for one area of the game (e.g. high level PvP) having overly harsh effects on builds used in other areas of the game
- A lot of people having to spending a lot of gold to re-equip on replacement builds
- A lot of players having to learn new play styles to be competitive in replacement builds
- Popular but otherwise unremarkable builds being severely impacted by the nerf
- Reduced build options for a class (due to nerf of a widely used skill/trait/etc)
- (And an older problem) Players having to change class to remain competitive when their (favourite) class does not have at an adequate fall-back build
Personally, I think the approach is a good one, but that extra care needs to be taken to ensure that the benefits of each nerf outweigh their wider impact on first the class and then the overall game.
TLDR: Is nerfing a top build actually a good idea (given top builds are now based on reasonable skills/traits/equipment/etc. and any nerf is likely to impact far more than just the build being targeted)?
If so, how do you ensure the nerf does more good than harm?
I talked to Hammon in game who is a dev and he said HGH is getting nerfed. Gadgets are not being worked on at the moment and basically nothing else lol.
Actually Zone, a properly played Carrion, Condition Necro is the hardest fight for an HGH Condi-Nade Engi. Condi nade HGH Engies do not win an equal skill 1v1 duel vs. a conditionmancer.
You’d need to seriously outplay them to win, IE, predict and dodge at least putrid mark, sometimes both Staff4 & Dagger4. If the Necro uses his flips badly, or misses, and the Engineer blows supply crate, thats when the Engineer wins. A necro’s common plague form is completely useless in a 1v1.
Here are the main determinants:
- Condition Flips: If a necro flips a blowtorch and 1-2 shrapnel tosses, all he needs to do is corrupt boon and its an auto-lose. You can start channeling your condition removal, but in my experience, removing 1 condition at a time in panic mode rarely saves you, unless you RNG remove the burning and bleeding first. As soon as this happens, I’m forced to run while removing conditions, and typically reset combat with little health.
- Damage avoidance: Engineers get to nullify one rotation of conditions around every 25s by casting elixirs for about 3 seconds. In that duel, a Necromancer can Consume Conditions on the Engineer’s first rotation, and Putrid Mark the next rotation, and Death Shroud soak or Deathly swarm any residual.
- Health Differences: Carrion > Rabid in a condition fight. The Necro should be sitting at around 24k, and the Engineer at 18k.
- Control: During the fight, the Engineer is going to have a decent amount of fear dropped on him. Elixir S is the only counter, but multiple fears.
I’ve gotten like, 15k putrid marks to the face after really putting the hurt on a Necro who I thought had nothing left. There’s no telegraph or projectile for Putrid mark, so, hope you get lucky.
Alchemy Engineers do die to overwhelming conditions. Engineer condition removal handles a full bar of conditions poorly, you can’t just Cleansing Flame 4 conditions off, or Contemplation of Purity, or Consume Conditions. HGH Engineers have smaller, but persistent condition removal.
Necros on the other hand, handle full bars of conditions quite well, with Consume Conditions & flips. That’s the main reason why the Engi will go down before the Necro in a condition damage slug-fest.
Had some good results vs HGH on my Mesmer using the following build:
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-NFcZ;1VPF01A7wUV71;9;4JJ-T-06-49;225A;9Ewk2Ewk25Bk
You lose quite a bit of utility and damage, but get pressured a lot less overall…
Rocket Boots is the glass cannon of stun-breakers – and it doesn’t work for that reason.
Better to drop the self-stun and balance that with a longer CD, then it would get more use.
There’s large and active thread about whether or not the HGH Eng needs nerfing – but despite HGH Engs having a range of weaknesses, discussion about how to actually deal with them in game is noticably absent.
Rather than just crying ‘foul’ on the forums and begging for a nerf, how about a decent discussion on how to counter HGH Engs?
- What the weaknesses of HGH Engs?
- How can you exploit these weaknesses?
- And a bonus question: How can you counter the strengths of HGH Engs?
(edited by Zenguy.6421)
@Zenguy.6421
I got a cool nerf for you that completely seems possible; here is it
- Elixir guns’s Elixir skills will now be affected by Elixir traits.
- Acidic Elixirs damage increase by 50%
“Due to the buff to elixir gun, we felt that some traits would be too strong and needed to be balance in order to work as intended and provide more utility”- Cleaning Formula 409: added 10s cd
- HGH: recuded might duration to 5s
Personally, I’d love that, as I like the EG, don’t enjoy tossing Elixirs and don’t PvP. Yeah, I’m one of those people still trying to get non-standard Eng builds to work.
However, removing that much of the our condition removal would be too punishing for the class, especially after we lost so much condition removal with the KR nerf. Fighting Engs? Easy, just hit them with conditions.
I’ve been following this issue for a while now and it seems like it’s just the engineer community that has perpetuated this idea, probably out of boredom.
More likely, nervousness.
there was one QQ thread and it just got swarmed with engineers. Most seemed like familiar posters from this forum with the exception of a few from other classes. Half of the people from other classes said they have no problem dealing with engineer HgH, the other half (of which there weren’t many) said we need to get nerfed before we become as useful as an ele. Half of the engineers on the thread wanted HgH nerfed and the other half were dead set on no more nerfs.
Good summary.
I’ve tried to figure out why this community is so intent on nerf mongering before every patch. Is it because HgH is perhaps boring for them? Is that why they want to see it nerfed? Or does the community want fuel for the “nerf-resentment” they have for the devs. It’s probably the latter, as people find conflict engaging and amusing, they want more nerfs as an oportunity to bash the devs again.
That’s a very large and unsubstantiated leap to the conclusion. General chit-chat aside, most posts here seem to be attempts to foster common understanding between the Devs and the players, not increase division between the two groups.
As to why top players insist on HgH getting nerfed, I think it has to do with the engineer being a very niche and high difficulty class. If I had to make a guess it would be that top engies view HgH as “too good” because being an engineer has never before been FotM, nor has it ever been easy. Having a well rounded build with few weaknesses (which HgH has) may seem too good for an engineer because there have been very few builds like that before, and they’ve all been nerfed.
Astute observation.
If you ask a mesmer/elementalist/thief if they think their class (or build) is overpowered, they’ll happily inform you about the drawbacks to those builds, or the skill required to pull them off. Apparently, if you ask a top HgH engineer, they’ll probably tell you that yes, the build is overpowered because it can’t be easily countered like every other engi build. This speaks of a weak class, not an overpowered build.
This makes a lot of sense.
Ask good mesmers if they think HgH is overpowered, I doubt they’ve even bothered looking it up.
Lol.
There is a strong thread in the SPvP forum to that effect: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/It-s-time-to-nerf-Engineers
It doesn’t help that a couple of our top Engs have been joining in saying that HGH is OP. Ostricheggs in particular has made repeated posts in that thread saying his own HGH is OP.
Speculation is that it’s Might stacking that needs nerfing, rather than HGH specifically.
Which concerns me the most about this is that the Eng class might end up balanced for the top 10 or 20 players only. It’s bad enough for the 99.x% of Eng players already, without our play experience being penalised even further because a few talented freaks (nice guys, they just have a freakishly high level of skill) can get this class to be competitive at the highest echelons of SPvP.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Burning
Burning you apply does a fixed amount of damage per second; this does not increase with stacking, Instead, stacking multiple burns means the target burns for longer – the extra damage adds up over time.
E.g. Hit a target with 9.5s burning (blowtorch) plus 1s burning (flamethrower #1) and then run away. Result, the target will burn for a total of 10.5s. Come back 10s later and the target will still be burning.
In the last two patches (26 Feb, 26 Mar) ANet fixed a range of Eng bugs and delivered a range of buffs to Flamethrower, Elixir Gun, Turrets and Elixirs. They als nerfed 100nades and Kit Refinement out of existence.
Who benefited significantly?
- Elixir/condition builds (giver’s weapons now work and RNG on elixirs reduced)
- Toolkit builds in PvP/WvW (Pry Bar stacks more confusion)
- Flamethrower builds (more damage, less misses)
Who lost out significantly:
- Kit Refinement builds (major reduction to survivability; replacement KR trait is widely considered worthless)
Buffs that have had little impact:
- Elixir Gun
- Turrets
What’s happened: Elixir users are happy; 100nades users no longer exist; Flamethrower Engs more common in PvE; the few Elixir Gun and Turret users liked it but their numbers haven’t increased significantly; major migration from other Eng builds to elixirs/HGH/conditions.
Overall the patch turned Engs into an elixir based condition class with a common play style. If that’s what you like, the patch was great. If not, other Eng builds can be made to work, but you’ll have to work very hard to achieve that as 100nades was deleted and all the popular but only marginally effective KR based kit builds were heavily nerfed.
If HGH really is OP, then it’s by a very small margin.
Still, given how much they do for our class, if our top Engs are now outplaying everyone else, want better competition and the only way to get that is to wind back the HGH build, then they’ve probably earned it.
I only hope that if ANet do nerf HGH, then they do a much better job than they did with KR, and make sure whatever nerf they deliver doesn’t sink other builds even deeper underground.
Think the HGH Eng build is overpowered? Try it yourself and see how well you do.
All along Engs players have had to work incredibly hard to get Eng builds to perform. You just have to watch HGH Engs in action to see how hard they work for every bit of advantage they get. Want to spot the Eng in a match? Look for the character that’s moving about the most – that’s skill, not build power.
Engs have taken the hard gruelling route to get to the top, and in the process have become possibly the best players in the game. If the HGH Eng really is OP and not the result of hard won play skills, then it’s by a very small margin. (Still, maybe nerfing the HGH Eng build will give the top Eng players better competition.)
Why is no one taking the time to work out how to counter this build?
It’s not a new build. It’s taken the top Eng players months of work to get to the point that they’re successful with this build in a range of situations. A huge part of their success comes from the degree to which they’ve mastered both this build and GW2 combat in general.
If this build was truly OP, then why has it taken them so long to get it to perform like this?
Or have HGH Engs just raised the bar a bit higher for GW2 combat?
The build is so kittening balanced and an exceptionally good player with a good team can make up for its faults and exacerbate its strengths.
I think the balanced part was just a mis-type. But I completely agree with you. On the top level of tournaments (maybe top ~100 leaderboards) teams are so good that they can cover almost every weakness of the build, and the only viable counter is to focus the engi at the start of every team fight and hope you take him down quick. Everywhere else, it’s just a good build somewhere in the vicinity of a bunker guardian. Does its role well, pretty one-dimensional, can decide the match if not countered.
If this was an RPS game every team would have at least one fundamental weaknesses that could be countered by the next element in the RPS cycle. Where skill levels are virtually equal, team-vs-team matches would determined as much by where each team is in the RPS cycle as anything.
But ANet have deliberately avoided turning GW2 combat into a Rock-Paper-Scissors game. How would you know they’ve achieved that? Top teams are able to compensate for the weaknesses of each member of the team, and success comes from the consistent quality of play of each team. This sounds like the situation you’ve described.
If it turns out every top team has to include an HGH Eng to be competitive, then the HGH Eng probably will need winding back. Given the quality of skill being applied, the difference between being OP and UP at those levels may be very small, and the degree of winding back require to correct this may be equally small.
@this individual,
Still waiting on in-game video that shows HGH being OP. Anyone have some?
Looking up the player attributed as “mask” may be the confirmation u need.
retaliation + might stacking makes me a smelly fish
OP means “Over Powered”.
OP does not mean “effective if used skilfully in extended play”.
HGH is a great build. But it is misleading to calling it OP when it requires prolonged application of masterful skill to be effective and can be countered by other class’s builds using comparable levels of skill.
I love Maskaganda’s videos and all the others who take the time to post great Eng videos here – they are testaments to masterful play. The only ‘superior force’ in those videos is the skill each person uses against his opponents.
If anything is OP here, it’s the skill level of our top Engs. Those guys are awesome, and a real tribute to what can be achieved with this class when played masterfully.
(edited by Zenguy.6421)
FT is weak at low levels. It gets a lot better when its traited but is still a bit underpowered IMHO.
It doesn’t show it in the tooltip or the wiki, but FT#1 does +10% damage against burning enemies. Use the Incendiary Ammo toolbelt skill to apply more burning at the start of the FT #1 attack. 1s burning on the last tick is both too weak and too late.
Flame Blast needs to explode if it hits an object. Some control on this would be awesome, but with two other control skills (4 and 5) I’m not holding my breath on this.
FT#3 Napalm doesn’t do any base damage (if it seems somehow underpowered, this is why) and is a small area. It could do with being be bigger with some base damage and longer burn (it’s a napalm after all). Cripple would be a nice.
Air Blast is ok. I’d love to see it get a stun break, but so far stun breaks are restricted to single utility skills (rather than 1/5 of one).
Smoke Vent is an AoE blind which is useful sometimes but not a lot for a #5 higher CD skill. There are regular requests to make it a short duration smoke field.
Good idea, like it.
With the dominance of HGH/conditions builds for Engs it seems like it’s time to address the primary weakness of condition builds: PvE.
I’ve put together a couple of suggestions for doing that in the Suggestions forum: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Making-conditions-work-in-PvE
If you think they’re good ideas, please add your support. If not, please say so. Either way, please throw in any ideas you might have for making condition builds more comparable to direct damage builds in PvE.
Condition builds work well against other players in PvP and WvW but they are weak in PvE where direct damage dominates in group fights against major mobs.
Here’s two suggestions for making condition damage builds more viable in PvE:
1. Give priority to higher +cond dmg applications in condition stacks and sequencing
Situation: The current condition stacking system does not reward investment in +cond damage for group fights. Many class skills applying conditions automatically. This means that in group fights the condition stacks on major mobs can be dominated by low +cond damage condition applications, while higher value condition stacks fail to be applied, get push off the stack, or their effects are deferred.
Suggested implementation:
- Condition stacks consist of the highest active +cond dmg applications only.
- Higher +cond dmg automatically pushes lower +cond dmg down/off the stack.
- Lower +cond dmg can only join a stack when there is a space (e.g duration has not reached cap).
- For conditions that stack in duration, the highest +cond dmg applications on the stack are applied first.
Effect of the change: Builds that invest in higher condition damage will be more likely to have their condition damage applied, and applied sooner, in group fights. Builds with low or no investment in +cond damage will be more likely to have their condition damage ignored or deferred in group fights. (There is a natural logic to the mob being more likely to be affected, and affected sooner, by the large gash across its torso than the small nick on its finger.)
2. Increase the caps for stacking conditions on major mobs
[Edit] It sounds like this isn’t viable due to sever constraints (thanks teacup)[/edit]
Situation: Condition damage is capped in PvE while direct damage is uncapped. This heavily favours direct damage builds in PvE as direct damage always works regardless of how much is applied, whereas once a condition cap is reached (a common scenario in fights against major PvE mobs) additional cond dmg of that type is effectively wasted.
Effect of the change: Condition damage builds will be less likely to have their investment in condition damage ignored when fighting major mobs.
(edited by Zenguy.6421)
I don’t see Anet doing anything to persuade the Hugely Vast amount of players running Macro Thieves or D/D Ele’s.
That may in fact be coming, for D/D Cantrip Eles anyway:
Just so you guys know, we’re trying to bring down the cantrip Ele, while also being careful to let other Ele builds work. We don’t want to just take all Ele’s out of play, but we do need to bring a few things down (traits/skills) in efficacy.
From https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Analysis-of-Cantrips-Eles/1808207
Just hope they do it in a way that doesn’t mess us up at the same time.
twitch.tv/ostricheggs
Just watched that for 5 minutes while you played in a group fight. In that time you killed one player who was hanging back from a fight when you arrived (you even ran away from them twice while they were downed before finishing them), you were killed twice and you captured an abandoned point with no opposition.
You play well (much better than me) yet there was nothing that I saw in that time that even suggested HGH might be OP.
Speedy Kits isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
What you’re really asking for is an upgrade to Leg Mods: faster base speed and apply to all kits. Applying Leg Mods to all kits would make it more popular (it’s pretty much ignored atm); the higher base speed would probably be excessive.
Looking for substance behind the “it’s OP” and “it’s not OP” posts produced the following:
Sure we can do pretty good damage, but honestly its easy to shut down.
Their [HGH Engs] entering damage is great but I know that and go “duck and cover mode” and burst back with SD and rifle and thats about it.
it’s a very strong damage build—but it’s certainly much better at the top tier than anywhere else. Top teams are able to compensate for the weaknesses while utilizing the strength of the build, which is countering bunkers.
In top tier tournaments I win 90% of all even fights and 1v1s. Team fighting is a breeze.
[…] takes a lot of practice.
It’s time consuming to set up for most, but nothing a little crowd control can’t handle.
Anyone who just comes in close to hgh engi with stacked might simply melts down in seconds. He doesn’t need very strong protections cause of all condition spam under himself, not somewhere far away as you suppose.
Good ele and thief will run away, and good ranger will kite you on max distance and kill, yes, they are worst for us.
There are many counters to a HgH build. Such as CC. We only have one way to stability: throw elixer S. It’s on a 45s CD and is only a 50% chance we get stability. Hammer guardian kicks our kitten
HGH pulls us up to the damage other professions are putting out with ease
I tried it for the first time yesterday and did pretty well vs. some good teams.
It gives a lot of burst at the beginning of the fight. Although you have to reuse all your utility skills to maintain might stacks. This takes too much time in a fight and really cuts down on your dps as you cant attack while buffing unless you use the laughable Acidic Elixirs.
… but honestly other classes and builds do it better.
If you have an Engineer raining down grenades on a group fight and nobody spots him and stops him, right now, no other profession provides that kind of sweeping AoE damage by a long shot.
[…] last I checked CC and damage mitigation wins in most 1v1s, and the HGH build has almost zero of any of those things. To me, it’s the pinnacle of the ‘sidekick’ build, in that you always run with another or a group, and they peel opponents off of you and do the CC for you while you rain terror.
In the situations that you specified, Grenades and turrets both do a great job in forcing your opponent to leave the node/spot being bombarded. I’d argue that they wouldn’t out right kill you.
[…]
As far as sidekick build, I think there alot of other classes/build that can destroy a CC’d opponent. I believe grenades are the strongest ranged AOE damage skill in the game.
Draw your own conclusions …
Still waiting on in-game video that shows HGH being OP. Anyone have some?
Summary of the 29 March patch:
Who benefited significantly?
- Elixir/condition (giver’s weapons now work and RNG on elixirs reduced)
Who lost out significantly:
- 100nades (build removed)
- KR multi-kit builds (major reduction to survivability)
Buffs that have had little impact:
- Turrets
What’s happened: Elixir users are happy; 100nades users no longer exist; the few turret users liked it but their numbers haven’t increased significantly; major migration from other Eng builds to Elixir based ones.
Overall the patch turned Engs into an elixir based condition class with a common play style. If that’s what you like, the patch was great. If not, other Eng builds can be made to work, but you’ll have to work very hard to achieve that as the popular but only marginally effective KR based builds were heavily nerfed.
Prediction: Might stacking nerf on its way due to Cantrip Eles.
ANet are “trying to bring down the cantrip Ele, while also being careful to let other Ele builds work” – Jonathan Sharp in the PvP forum https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Analysis-of-Cantrips-Eles/1808207
Impact on other classes isn’t mentioned.
Non-Ele specific nerfs to Cantrip Eles are likely to hurt Eng HGH builds as both builds focus on stacking similar conditions and boons. I’m hoping they focus on Ele specific nerfs and stay away from things that will also nerf Engs, but that seems unlikely.
The three major boons Cantrip Eles stack are vigor, regeneration and might. A nerf to vigor stacking seems inevitable; hopefully this will be Ele specific as other classes don’t seem to be as excessive in this area. Same for Regeneration. (A global nerf to Regeneration seems very unlikely as it will reduce survivability across the board and the backlash from that would be severe,) Which leaves Might stacking…
A global nerf to Might stacking seems likely, as this will not only help balance Cantrip Eles, it will also help reduce the dominance of burst damage in fights and shift PvP combat more towards skill-over-time (which I think is what they want). In the long run this may actually work out in our favor as they ANet seem to see us as a major skill-over-time class. In the short term, however, that will make non-might stacking burst builds even more dominant, which is very bad for us.
(edited by Zenguy.6421)
Is it actually OP?
Or is it just effective at dealing with a particular type of build (bunkers) if played very skillfully over an extended duration and the other player doesn’t play with the same level of skill?
Wayfarer Foothills (1-15) and Diessa Plateau (15-25) are normally busy due to the Living Story events happening there atm.
Also, incendiary ammo still seems to be a bit broken for many of the kit skills, with all the rounds triggering on the first hit rather than individually for things like grenades or elixirs UNLESS you time it just right and use it after the grenades/shots have been spawned (but not hit). You shouldn’t have to sit and try timing something like that when the utility belt skill is supposed to prime your shots automatically.
Did you experience that in PvP? If so, file it as a bug in the SPvP forum as that’s more likely to get attention.
Static Discharge won’t be much use since all 4 of his toolbelt skills are non-targeted at that point, and I don’t really see how Packaged Stimulants would be much help, if anything it makes it more annoying to heal yourself, which leaves, uh….. Kit Refinement lol.
The following only applies if temporarily running Bomb Kit instead of Tool Kit in this build. The result isn’t optimal, but it does provide a quick hot-swap 4-kit alternative for those situations where Tool Kit isn’t ideal.
When running Bomb Kit instead of Tool Kit, the 20pt Power Wrench trait is useless. Potential hot-swap alternatives:
- Static Discharge: SD much better with targeted toolbelt skills, but will still hit if you make sure you’re facing an enemy when you trigger a non-targeted toolbelt skills.
- Packaged Stimulants: Handy for group support. In extreme cases (running from a fight, low on health and losing more from conditions, toolbelt heals and Super Elixir are on CD) it can ensure you’ll pick up your own med kit drops (there’s nothing I hate more than being downed and looking back looking at a trail of antidote and bandages I dropped but couldn’t get to).
- Kit Refinement: In this build KR randomly generates one of four minor utility effects every 20s. Expect it to produce something vaguely useful maybe once/minute if you’re lucky.
- Leg Mods: if it stacks with Speedy Kits (does it?) it will give an extra 10% movement rate while in Med Kit and Bomb Kit.
@MrSilver, I’ve been running a similar build in PvE and it’s lots of fun.
It allows you to dynamically chain a lot of different abilities and can generate a lot of combos. When soloing PvE with four kits I generally run Bomb Kit (with FT and EG) rather than Tool Kit for the extra AoE and combo fields (also Big ol Bomb is superior to Throw Wrench as a tool belt skill). In parties I prefer Bomb Kit over Tool Kit due to the support potential of all those extra combos.
I tried hard to get the new Kit Refinement to work for me, but unless I stayed in one kit for a long time (which is completely counter to the purpose of this build) the KR procs every 20s were just too random to be much use. Swap for Speedy Kits for perma-swiftness, which really complements the dynamic mid-range play of this build.
Precise Sights is useful for the extra damage. However, for better durability swap to Infused Precision which synergizes perfectly with Speedy Kits in this build to give you prema-vigor.
Switching between Tool Kit and Bomb Kit is easy with this build. Just hot-swap Power Wrench for Static Discharge (extra damage) or Packaged Stimulants (extra healing etc on the run) when running with the Bomb Kit.
On the down side, it’s not so good in WvW (or presumably PvP) as it’s prone to stun and is weak on condition removal (only Super Elixir and projectile combos off that when you’re close enough to the target).
(edited by Zenguy.6421)
^ We’re playing Eng’s, we have to be amazing ;-)
Op, yeah, all that running in and out of different ranges constantly swapping kits to combine abilities and effects so we can do damage and survive is a kitten load of fun – and not something I’ve experienced on the other classes I’ve played so far.
I think Juggernaut and Deadly Mixture are each fine. What they really need is to be put in the same trait line.
The KR suggestion looks promising. (I love the thinking about a trait that genuinely supports multi-kit play. Does it need it’s own label to distinguish it from the current 10pt trait Kit Refinement in the Tools line? ‘Empowered Kits’ perhaps.)
I agree. It may have one or two rough edges (what MMo doesn’t?), but overall it’s superb – and as for value for money, OMG!
Especially notable are the zone scaling (you can enjoy every zone, even when you hit max level), and the way the game accommodates and even rewards more people participating in areas and events (“Sure, come join the combat – the more the merrier!”).
The manuals only unlock the trait level, with a trait reset that happens. Once you’ve used a manual on a character it can’t use that manual again.
To reorganise your traits after you’ve used the manuals you need to vistit a trainer to reset them.
Being able to quickly switch between trait builds would be very helpful. This would be especially helpful when moving between PvE and WvW.
A special note of thanks to the moderators for leaving this thread in the general GW2 Discussion forum. This discussion, which is essentially about how players of just one class can have comparable experience with the players of other classes, has benefited enormously from the input by players who normally play other classes. Thank you, mods, for leaving this thread in the general forum so that could happen.
Thanks, also, to everyone who doesn’t normally play an Eng but has taken the time to contribute to this discussion. Your input is greatly appreciated.
Tyler Bearce is an ANet Dev who plays an Eng in TPvP using Turrets and the new KR. His reasons for using the new KR trait are:
- “First, I’m often bunkering a point. So my refinement is cooling down while I’m waiting for an opponent to show up”
- “The other reason is because my fights tend to last a long time, so … I’ll often still get multiple uses out of it before I fight is concluded”
(Is it just me, or do these sound more like apology than praise for the new KR trait?)
It seems that what we need is an influential ANet person who plays other Eng styles in WvW and PvE like the remaining 99.x% of us Engs.
Is the Eng the ‘best’ class in GW2? No.
Is really fun to play? Yes, and then some.
This is a natural consequence of 1) events being part of daily’s, combined with 2) dailies are now a major way to get ascended gear.
Many people are pressed for time to get their daily, not so much because of the daily roll over, but because other demands on their time may mean they have limited time to play GW2 on any given day. But they still want to get the daily if possible, because that will shorten the duration of their grind to get the ascended gear they want. Events are especially prone to this problem as they are a fast way to tick off multiple parts of a dailys (total kills, kill variety, veterans, champions, people to heal, etc.), as well as being quick XP, karma and loot.
So more people are genuinely in a hurry to find events, which means more people asking about events as soon as they arrive in the map (the last thing they want is to miss a major event just because they logged onto the zone 1s after the announcement went out). Just something to live with.
TLDR: map chat requests for events are an inevitable feature of Gw2 right now so we may as well learn to live with them.
Perhaps it’s related to how close each person is, because the order changes whenever someone changes zone and whenever I change zone.
The Eng class is a lot of fun to play – that’s a pretty good start.
They must read some of this section, as they picked up that getting turrets to work was a high priority. It just doesn’t look like the read it very deeply – but that’s not really surprising given this forum seems to get less views than the other profession forums, so missing something here is less of a problem.
I think Anet is cautious with their buffing for the exact reason the OP says they shouldn’t be.
Not correct: I didn’t say they shouldn’t be cautious when buffing. I suggested they a) " err towards over-delivering on buffs", and b) “have resources available” to wind them back if they’ve overdone it (i.e. allow for a proportion of hotfixes).
Why? Because GW2 doesn’t have a large scale test environment and ANet are having to use the live system for iterative development. They’ll potentially get better results faster, if a) more buffs are effective when first released and b) hotfixes are used to quickly tune down the ones that prove OP.
Would you rather see a gradual improvement over 3 months or a massive boost, change your build based on it, only to have it nerfed 50% away. Again…neither approach is inherently right/wrong.
This is where hotfixes can be very efficient (remember, they’ve just changed the code for the buff so they know exactly what and how to rescale it). Plus, a 2-3 day glitch is not going to drive people to break their builds. (c.f. the current system where all except the most extreme problems with a patch affects builds for months).
Wow! The title of this thread got stealth nerfed!
The new title is not only inaccurate, it misrepresents me and my original post.
The original title was “How to Update Classes?” (or something like that). Which is exactly what my original post was all about: discussing ways ANet could potentially improve the process they use when working on classes.
Now it’s “My Take on Balancing”, which is weird, because my original post does not touch on balancing between classes at all. In fact, I took extra care when composing the post to specifically avoid that topic.
What’s going on here?
Was there something about the original title that was unacceptable, inappropriate for this forum, or just inaccurate? If so, what?
(edited by Zenguy.6421)
The gw2lfg post asked for an “experienced” mesmer with full berserker gear.
That’s your warning right there.
Those guys were playing a different game from the rest of us. I don’t envy them – their enjoyment of the game must be very shallow, their people skills seem dismal, at best, and if their actions are indicative, their values can’t be giving them a great experience of life either. Be grateful that at least GW2 is keeping them off the streets.
It’s just kinda sad only grenade kit has some extra love from legendaries.
The Grenade Kit is different if the Eng playing it uses a Legendary. Wow!
And yeah, a Legendary Flame Thrower would be awesome.
(p.s. Amazed this thread has lasted so long in the general Guild Wars 2 forum rather than being rapidly shunted out of sight to the Eng forum.)
- If the player community says it’s important, its important – ignore this at your peril.
I do not agree. I have the professional experience that if the customer says it’s important, it’s probably not important at all. The problem lies somewhere else entirely but the customer feels it through something he thinks is important.
That depends on whether you’re talking about the solution to be applied or the result that needs to be achieved.
When it comes to the result required, the customer is the best judge of that – if they say a particular result is important, then it really is likely to be important. (The exception is when developing a truly innovative product, in which case a visionary approach works best. GW2 is over 6 months old with a large and well established customer; in this domain that’s a long way past the visionary stage for its eight existing classes.)
Furthermore, patients, I mean, customers always lie to get what they want rather than what they need. Believing clients is not always the best thing to do. Yes, I do have a Dr House attitude towards helping my customers and that helps far more than believing in blind faith whatever they say.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. The greedy ‘I want …" posts are pretty easy to spot and discount. It’s the more insightful posts and the collective wisdom of the player community that’s worth drawing on.
(FYI, “Doctor knows best” works well when dealing with known problems with well defined solutions, but struggles when faced with new types of problems. Just compare the medical profession’s success at controlling rates of infectious disease with its failure to control rates of ‘lifestyle’ diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.)
Suggest you try finding someone in RL (or maybe via skype or voice chat) who plays GW2 and can a) show you through the game, and b) introducing you to some of the lore.
I was never interested in GW2 until someone properly introduced me to it – now I’m hooked.