Learn to dodge. That’s right, really learn to dodge. Why? Because the engineer is so squishy compared to the Warrior (far less blocks and worse armor) and the Ranger (no pet to draw off agro) that avoiding damage in combat is an essential Eng skill.
Learn to use kits a lot. Eng’s weapons are nerfed because we get a lot of our effectiveness from our kit skills – so much so that most Engs probaly spend more time in kits than out of them (the exception would be the Pistol/Elixir Eng, and even then they make liberal use of the Tool Kit). As part of this, master kit/weapon switching and chaining skills from different kits/weapons for greater effect.
Master the grenade kit – it’s our most effective kit in all zones (PvP, WvW, PvE).
Master the Tool Kit – it’s our best 1v1 kit.
Try out a Pistol/Elixir/condition build.
Try out all the other Eng kits and weapons.
Once you’ve done all of the above, decide which combination you most enjoy and build around that.
Levelling is your opportunity to learn the different abilities available to the Eng. You need to do this because Engs’ aren’t strong enough to have a single build that covers most situations. Instead, expect to have to keep changing your builds around to stay viable. (If you don’t learn our abilities while leveling, you’ll end up like me, having to go back as a L80 and spend time learning things I should just tried earlier).
What’s up with that? There are ghost engineers with kits, so why can’t we keep ours? After all, our weapons skills have been deliberately nerfed because we have kits!
This looks like yet another instance of forgetting the Eng class when making changes to the game.
The ANet version of “My bad . Turns out you were right after all”:
Karl McLain.5604
Looking at the script, things looked fine. We’ll have to dig into it more.
Regardless of current functionality, it’s still something we’re looking at down the road as we continue to improve traits for all professions.
… and immediately lock the thread, presumably to avoid the inevitable flaming.
Special thanks to ASmallChicken and Eviator for all the 1000s of test they performed collecting the evidence required to finally convince ANet we weren’t BS’ing them.
I think it’s hilarious that they added this feature now that no one uses KR. This would have been so great a few months ago.
It’s a pride thing: Who wants to admit something they put a lot of work into was a waste of time? Especially when they persisted in the face of solid advice from the community saying it wasn’t going to work that way. That, and who wants to admit to their bosses and work colleagues that the project they’ve been working on for the last couple of months didn’t work out. Instead of just going “my bad” (which admittedly can be very humbling in situations like that) and moving on to something more productive, there’s a very human tendency to keep charging down the failed path in the hope that one day they’ll be able to say “see, my idea did work out after all”. Shame really, as people who admit something didn’t worked out as planned and learn from the experience typically end up becoming very valuable professionals.
As for KR itself, even with a visible timer there are so many more-useful traits, that I still can’t see a reason to pick this one in a build.
What Clip said applies to WvW and PvE as well (can’t speak for PvP myself).
You could try the Pistols and Elixir Gun in a full condition build as a support and conditions spreader. It’s not as much damage output as Grenades or FT so it’s not so good for soloing, but it’s useful in groups.
I used to be like you and preferred non-kit builds. I finally succumbed and invested the time to learn kits – result: I love them now and wouldn’t go back. One major bonus for Wvw and PvE is the Speedy Kit trait (Tools, adept) gives you access to 100% swiftness when you run kits = faster/easier roaming.
Now that our only bit of survivability was damaged at the cost of both survivability AND damage I can justifiably say it’s a more balanced build than what it was before.
Is this the end of your “HGH is OP” posts, Ostricheggs?
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by inattention.
ANet really are trying to improve the Eng class. They just seem to be a) aiming for some incomplete PvP concept for the class; b) applying that to WvW and PvE regardless of how well it fits there; and c) overlooking (or ignoring) the discussion on this forum about the class.
Did the Supply Crate just get a stealth nerf due to the Healing Turret changes?
Elixir S: now run away only = nerf
Incendiary Powder: improved for those with low attack and crit rates; for everyone else Burning uptime is reduced and longer delay before reapplying Burning (after cleansing) = nerf IMHO
Cloaking device: longer effect plus CD = buff (I think)
Healing Turret: improved, but survivability unchanged = buff, but may still not be sufficient
Kit Refinement: ICD now displayed = inadequate buff IMHO, trait still below the standard of the alternatives
Elixir U: much improved = buff
Conclusion: Overall a minor nerf. Despite the major nerf to Elixir S, Elixir Engs still appear to be ANet’s favoured style of Eng. We’ll see more diversity in stun breakers due to the Elixir S nerf, some more Healing Turrets (most of which will die or be exploded after their first overcharge), and less consistent burning uptime. I’m guessing Anet are hoping we’ll diversify into more builds before they nerf HGH might stacking.
Anet said they were trying to bring down Cantrip Ele’s which was likely to spill over to Eng boon stacking. But instead of dropping killer nerfs on them, ANet restricted their nerfs to RTL and Mist Form (both of which were so OP nerfing them was more like removing an exploit), and did a small (5s ICD) PvP only nerf to the Cleansing Water trait. At the same time they Ele’s a big stack of buffs. Either Anet really do just favour Ele’s, or they’ve learned something from their fiasco with us over the last two patches – here’s hoping it’s the latter.
Sam Lowry:“I suppose one has to expect a certain amount.”
Harry Tuttle, Heating Engineer:“Why? I came into this game for the action, the excitement. Go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there’s trouble, a man alone. – Now they’ve got the whole country sectioned off.”
Some skills have random effects. This impacts the players who use those skills, because they never know which effect they’re going to get when they cast them.
But does this randomness actually affect combat against these players?
Or does it just look like the player has triggered the wrong effect?
To be fair, ANet reduced (not eliminating, but at least reducing) a little of the Eng randomness in the last patch. That they are still heavily attached to randomness as a core Eng mechanic sucks, as the only people that seem to be disadvantaged by the Eng’s random skills are the players who use them.
Boon Hate will result in FT users doing even more Might stacking than before!
Why? Because Boon Hate doesn’t scale with boon stacking and FT users will already have the Boon Hate penalty for Might from Juggernaut.
FT users may as well pour on extra Might stacks ahead of other boons, as the extra stacks won’t incur any additional Boon Hate penalty whereas other boons will.
What I fear: A general change that punishes less viable but popular Eng builds.
What I hope: That ANet have learned from their mistakes with theory based balancing and overlooking the wider player base of a class, and as a result now make better changes to classes.
Thanks for your post cero. We do work hard to make the most of our smaller toys . . . cause the gods keep taking away our big ones.
That was why the Kit Refinement (KR) nerf hurt so bad – ANet went to remove one big toy (KR burst damage on Grenades) and in the process stomped all over a lot of small toys we’d been working on. Still, indications are they’re being more cautious with Eng’s in this upcoming patch so maybe they’ve learned some from the KR debacle.
FYI, Filk like that doesn’t seem to cause copyright problems. If anything, you just promoted the song – thanks for that btw, I hadn’t listened to Linkin Park for a while.
+3 . . . just need to be careful what you ask for as the easiest way to do this is simply delay the start of the crate animation and in doing so delay the time it starts working.
Instead of asking for an animation change you could ask for a shorter cast time and have the existing animation start once the cast is finished.
Pros:
Removes the misleading visual cue for the caster (the animation only runs when the cast is successful)
Animation warning of the impending stun is the same
Less time spent casting the Elite
Far easier for ANet to program = more likely to happen
Cons:
Later arrival of the crate (cast time + animation time) (ANet may accept this as offsetting the shorter cast time)
Also, suggest you repost this thread in the SPvP forum as bugs like this actually get ANet attention there.
Here are the important ideas the devs shared:
- Plan to diversify the builds and encourage a variety of combo usage.
- intention to buff PVE damage without affecting PVP and vice versa. This way kits such as Bomb and Grenades may behave different in PVP and PVE
- They admit Gadgets are not strong enough
- Too many Engineers rely on Elixir H and very few on the healing turret
- The HGH is considered overpowered. They did not nerf it directly. In stead, the Thief and Warrior can steal boons on attacks. So be careful how and when you stack your might.
- Grenades are still considered very powerful but will not come down yet.
All good in theory. Lets hope they get the theory crafting to match how Eng’s actually work.
“Intention to buff PVE damage without affecting PVP and vice versa.” That’s a good idea and about time too (though I suspect ‘buff’ is interchangeable with ‘nerf’ in this instance). “This way kits such as Bomb and Grenades may behave different in PVP and PVE. hope they’re looking beyond just those two kits.
“They admit Gadgets are not strong enough” – sounds like someone has tried them and discovered what we’ve been saying all along.
“Too many Engineers rely on Elixir H and very few on the healing turret” and for good reasons … which are well documented on these forums if they want to know why (healing turret has such poor survival it works best as a 3 step AoE skill: place, overcharge, explode; vs Elixir H with its go anywhere heals, defensive buffs, might and 409 condition cleanses)
“Grenades are still considered very powerful but will not come down yet.” – hey, looks like they’ve learned to give us a break between major nerfs. Hope that when they drop the nerf they keep it within the grenade kit only and don’t end up with another multi-build slaughter.
The catch is, he is talking about PvE, which no one give a kitten about it.
Who are you referring to when you say ‘no one’?
PvE is the most active area of GW2 by a huge margin, and the people who play there presumably do that for the simple reason that they do in fact ‘give a kitten’ about PvE.
Which brings us back to point that balancing for PvE is important.
Are you talking PvP? WvW? or PvE? Because it’s different in each case.
Take Engs for example: Their boon/condition builds are flavour of the month in PvP but overall they’re poor performers in PvE. The boon/condition builds are about to get nerfed which may ‘balance’ Engs in PvP but will unbalance them even further in PvE if it applies there.
And that’s the problem in the concept of the class. We are taxed for being versatile, but we’re mediocre at best if we try to do so, since we strictly depend on traits. And when someone makes an extremely specialized build (100 grenades, hgh condition) we get nerfed all across the board.
That’s the problem all right. Eng’s flexiblity is great in theory but doesn’t reconcile with the heavy commitment to traits and gear needed for each situation. Want to WvW with an Eng, use a condition build. Want to PvE visit a trainer to re-trait (4s) and have a alt set of equipment to switch to a power build. (Ignoring PvP here, as builds are free in PvP). In reality, Eng builds that are comparable to other classes’ better builds typically have only one utility and 1-2 individual traits that can be hot swapped to a less effective but still reasonable build – flexible that isn’t.
The new version of Incendiary powder is better if your crit rate is worse than once every 1.3s – though even then, the longer duration/cooldown makes it more vulnerable to condition removal.
If you’re crit’ing more often than about once every 1.3s, you’re worse off than before with Incendiary powder.
Once again a nerf aimed at the Grenade Kit has a bigger impact on other kits, in this case the Flamethrower. (Burning duration from Incendiary Powder drops approx 40% for FT#1. For grenades the drop in duration is only 10% at 30% crit, or 30% at 50% crit, and even with 100% crit the dro kitten till lower at 35% duration.) With on-crit effects all getting CDs, the benefits of long cast channelled multi-attacks like FT#1 have all but disappeared – about all that 2.25s channel is good for is occasionally stacking bleeding (Sharpshooter) and maybe vulnerability (Precise Sights). Time to rework FT#1, again?
Are we supposed to have completely equal skills in every area with other professions?
If thts the case I can think of some other classes skills that should be brought down/up to ours.
Should the Ranger Minor Trait Natural Vigor be moved up to a GM like Adrenaline Implant or vise versa?
That is an argument that has already been made and the defense was that because everything else was different with the profession there was a reason why one is better than the other.
I can think of alot of things that Ele’s have over Engineers that would warrant us being able to use Utility Skills while under Elixir S.
Like someone else already said maybe our downed #2 needs to get switched to drink Elixir S.
Otherwise any arguements about how its just not fair we have a skill that is better than other ppls skill is just BS. Keep feeding the Devs stupid decisions!
Good point!
You caught me making the same mistake the Devs seem to be making of looking simplistically at the skill. I’d just assumed Elixir S was meant to be an escape skill only and therefore doing anything else with it was an exploit. – My bad!
As you imply, the skill should be looked at in the context of the overall class. In which case, why wouldn’t Eng’s build some extra utility into the skill? Other classes have survival skills that allow them other actions while they’re active (e.g Ele’s Obsidian Flesh instant cast 5s invulnerabilty) So, why not Eng’s?
Nerfing a single top build may be a fast way to bring several previously second rate builds into the limelight. For this to work right a) the nerf must impact the top build far more than it does on other less powerful builds, and b) there must be viable builds left in that class after the nerf.
Nerfs that do this well may increase diversity and improve play overall. Nerfs that do this badly reduce diversity and are ultimately worse for the game.
Healing turret: like previous turret buffs, this buff is nice but inadequate, in particular it fails to address the fundamental problem of lack of survival in AoE. (Healing Turret, another expensive but high quality explosive bought to you by Turret Inc. – maybe that’s how turrets are meant to be used, but they’re generally too expensive and trait distribution too high)
Incendiary Powder: yet again a nerf to Grenade builds that hurts less powerful builds (e.g. FT) more! (Hoping against hope that this nerf is PvP specific.)
Elixir S: exploit removed – that’s reasonable. (It only hurts because of our weaknesses in other areas.)
Once again, the nerfs look like they outweigh the buffs.
Minor tweak: revise #13 revise to acknowledge ANet’s recently work to improve the FT and EG, and ask what plans ANet has to complete this work and bring the FT and EG up to be as valuable as other kits such as the Grenade Kit and Tool Kit. Or is that not their intention?
Here’s some possible additions:
Where does ANet see multi-kit builds fitting into their vision of the Engineer? Have they considered encouraging multi-kit builds? If so, how might they do that?
Recent changes mean elixirs are now the distinctive characteristic of Engineers, supported by Grenades or the Tool Kit. However the GW2s promotional videos for the Engineer profession ignore elixirs. Only the Grenade Kit is featured and the other videos (rifle turret, glue shot, jump shot) emphasise skills that have serious deficiencies in play and are therefore rarely used. When will ANet provide an introduction to new players that reflects the true nature of this profession?
The promotional material for the Engineer profession used to feature Gadgets but there is no mention of gadgets in the current promotional material. Also, recent work on the engineer ignored Gadgets and they are rarely if ever used in play. Is ANet considering dropping Gadgets from the Engineer arsenal? If not, what plans are there to make gadgets viable?
The Engineer profession is now dominated by elixir engineers. Is this how ANet see this profession? Or does ANet have another vision for the Engineer? If so, what is it?
