Guild Wars 2

I’m hoping BP or AR rank up soon, it’s becoming less entertaining to watch you both bicker like a couple in a romantic comedy. Jeez, just get a room already

Allow me to preface my following statements with the fact that the flamethrower is the reason why i chose to play an engineer, I think the visuals are terrific and l love the whole “kill it with fire” vibe. In concept it could be a really fun mid-range tanky type build for PvE and PvP.

In its current state Flamethrower is horribly broken and needs an entire redo, while I am encouraged about the sigils/adding weapon states, these changes are not going to make much difference.

1. Damage – Is subpar. For a weapon that has a range is slightly larger than melee (you have to get up close) the damage is pathetic. you will do 2-3 times the dps at that range with a grenade build. Damage needs to be buffed massively (or the skill coefficient needs to be reworked) on skill 1.

2. Skill 1 doesn’t land. Skill 1 requires you to center the camera, an even then you get a lot of random misses, especially on siege machinery. It is incredibly finicky to use in high mobility PvE and PvP fights causing you to lose even more of your subpar dps.

3. Skill 2 is equally buggy, and often times does not detonate.

4. Skills 3 and 4 are pretty good, they should stay.

5. Skill 5 is OK in certain situations, but seems a bit underpowered for a 5 skill. I think it should be a field, but I can understand folks who disagree.

6. Retaliation/reflection will destroy you. One of the few advantages of a flamethrower build is the ability to shoot through doors (which a guardian does better with a staff, but anyway….). however the prevalence of retaliation, especially on mesmer illusions, will cause you to slaughter yourself as every proc of your gun will cause you to take 340+ damage PER ILLUSION. I’ve done over 2000 dps to myself shooting through doors that mesmers put illusions on. Many classes have retaliation abilities and even if they upped the damage on skill 1 you would still be running against this hard counter.

7. One of the other advantages of flamethrower is the quick attack speed that would allow many “proc on crit” abilities to synergize well with the build. however A net has put internal cooldowns on practically all of these abilities (I think the only one without an internal cooldown is the bleed proc on the first tier of the firearms tree). Any class will proc just as often as you will with a decent crit chance because of these cooldowns.

8. Juggernaught is lackluster. Stacking might is meh, especially because the damage coefficient on skill 1 is so low. the difference in damage in negligible. Toughness is literally the worst stat in the game due to the fact that it doesn’t scale to overcome the massive crit/bonus to crit damage that people stack (and has no effect whatsoever on condition dsmage).

9. DPS and utility traits are stuck in 2 entirely different trees requiring you to spec heavily into alchemy/firearms (this is a problem to a lesser extent with EG as well). Grenades only require a 30 point investment in explosives to be viable with pretty much anything else.

Basically you have all of the disadvantages of a melee weapon and all of the disadvantages of a ranged weapon (and none of the advantages) in a single weapon, with very little to compensate.

In the end SF wins as we choke their rivers with our dead.

style.6173:

People still complain about thiefs? They are by far the easiest class to kill. If I see a thief, that’s my first target.

And that’s the problem, you never see (competent) thieves. I don’t mind warrior dps, because they can’t instantly disappear with 4 different escape options and they can be kited. Once they engage they are in it to win it.

I rolled a thief alt on my wife’s account and have been wvw with her and I can honestly say it is MUCH more powerful than my fully exotic geared Engineer. I die less and kill more, I can’t even imagine how good they are fully geared out.

Krathalos.3461:

amiable.4823:

/shrug Stick your head in the sand, I’ve played MMO’s since EQ 1, thieves are going to get the nerf bat. It just can’t stand in the current state of play… Whether it is a hard hit or a soft one depends on how realistic the community is.

Excuse me, Mr. MMO Professional. Thieves were already nerfed. A lot, actually. Thief burst isn’t any higher than other classes’ burst.

Well, good then you are getting used to it! I will be happy to wager you, say a gold in game (I’m poor), that thieves will get nerfed again within two months time (by Feb 10th). I’m not saying it to make you upset, I’m saying it because I’ve seen plenty of OP classes in the past make the same arguments you are. They will honestly probably get nerfed far worse then they should (devs always over-compensate).

Fiction.6418:

Dodge is your friend, blind is your friend, snare is your friend… learning your class “skipping the last word for now”

Yes, because that lets me live a whole 4 seconds longer when they instantly teleport to me. If they get into trouble they will just stealth for a bit and come back all over again. I am well aware of how to use the dodge and blind/knockdown/snare mechanics. (It takes a bit to retarget as well becasue tab targetting in this game is wretched).

/shrug Stick your head in the sand, I’ve played MMO’s since EQ 1, thieves are going to get the nerf bat. It just can’t stand in the current state of play… Whether it is a hard hit or a soft one depends on how realistic the community is.

Rinzler.8072:

My guardian drops AOE 6k bombs every 4 seconds in addition to my AOE autoattack.

Thats 30kdmg on one hit to a group of 5.

But that’s not burst…. a 4 second lag time gives your opponent time to respond. listen I don’t think the solution is nerfing every aspect of the thief, it still needs to be viable to play, but something should give, either:

1. make toughness give better damage reduction/critical protection so it makes it reasonable to survive burst if geared properly, or

2. Increase the re-stealth timer so thieves need to think more carefully when they engaged/don’t have multiple get out of jail free abilities or

3. Remove the jump-to ability from HS (or put it on a 4-6 second cooldown)so it becomes reasonable to kite thieves.

Any of those relatively minor changes would go a long way on balancing things out.

Nilgoow.1037:

When did 5k become a lot of damage? I guess if you have 1700 armor (or was it defense? or maybe toughness?) then that would seem like a lot.

It’s a lot of damage when it can be applied every 0.8 seconds and there is no way to kite. Damage is fine if there were realistic escape options.

brandon.6735:

For my thief i had around 14k health once and was somewhat 70-80% glass cannon. My heartseeker was never that close to that amount of damage to anyone.

This can’t be right, I’m in full knights armor and I regularly get backstabbed/heartseekered for 6k+. I’ll grab you some screenshots if you like on my next engagement.

Several issues:

1. It is impossible to kite a thief as they have a spammable high-damage gap closer. That ain’t right.
2. They need to up the time to re-enter stealth from 3 seconds to something like 15. Being able to re-stealth multiple times in a 10 second window is broken.

I’m fine with having the high initial burst damage opener if those things are done, it will make fights a lot more tactical. Still folks running a full toughness build should not be taking 7k+ damage from an opener, another option may be to re-evaluate toughness’s interactions with crit damage so if you go defensive you actually have a bit more survivability. A full toughness build should not be taken down in less than 5 seconds by any class.

So let me preface this thread by saying a few things about Sorrow’s Furnace. In many respects we are pretty terrible:

1. Half our server speaks Spanish, they tend to be the really competent folk who are yelling at the rest of us to do stuff. Unfortunately we don’t understand them.

2. We are totally disorganized, we rarely have a commander online and heaven forbid we have two, because it devolves into petty bickering like an old married couple. We actually do better when no commanders take the field (like Sunday).

3. Siege? What’s that? Should we put it in our castles? Should we upgrade?

4. We are easily distracted by… Hey look, that squirrel has a fluffy tail!

5. Flanking? Whats that? Why am I falling down all the time? Why are rocks falling from the sky? So we need to appease the rock-god or something?

6. Guys! Guys! Guys!!!! There is a dude in the jumping puzzle, send the zerg over here!!!!!!!

7. Between the hours of midnight and 6am EST we have about 5 people on.

However, despite our shortcomings we have without question, the funniest general and local chat in the game, a few gems:

“For Narnia!!!!”
“Everybody RUN AWAY. No, wait, YOU STAY HERE, I WILL RUN AWAY.”
“Sorrow’s Furnace Server motto: ‘Jesus Christ people, we need our sleep!’”
“I hate it when mommy and daddy fight, why don’t you just love each other!!!!!” (In response to commander bickering).
“We will defeat them through the awesome magic of teamwork, and the incredible power of not bickering.”

So why bring this up? Sorrow’s furnace is a pretty awesome server, even when we lose most folks are having a lot of fun. I’m really glad I chose it, but we totally deserve to be sitting in Tier 6.

And so do you. Listen, the fact that we are all in Tier 6 indicates that we are all somewhere on the spectrum of pretty terrible. And that’s OK. But chest-thumping and getting all bent our of shape about it is like a trio of fat kids arguing over who is the fastest.

Fat kid #1 (Borlis Pass): We are the best!!! Kneel before Zod!!!!
Fat kid #2 (Anvil’s Furnace): You only won because you got new sneakers, also we weren’t really trying.
Fat kid #3 (Sorrow’s Furnace): Listen guys, I’m going to go eat some pie, you in?

We are all fat kids, own that kitten.

Hey let’s see what’s going on in this threa… Oh lawd. Chillax guys, we are all here to have fun!

DKz Lux.4125:

Awesome, thank you. I will do something rarely done on the Internets and say that I was wrong to accuse BP of spying/collusion. It’s impossible to know the motivation of the idiots building siege in the middle of nowhere, so mea culpa. And I will add thank you for being a good sport and a stand up player about the siege issue.

DKz Lux.4125:

SF has been a lame opponent this week. Stop QQing on the forums about random kitten that doesn’t even make sense. This just pisses me off to no end.

Welp, I’m sorry it makes you sad. Why don’t you help a brother out and destroy these banks of siege weapons when you see them then? Thanks!

Hadan.2841:

We have owned 95% of the map this week. Do you really think we would send someone over to your server to waste seige/supplies in a keep that we will most likely take in a few hours. Dont blame us for the actions of a few trolls on your server.

Well then, I guess you won’t have a problem being a good sport and destroying these sieges when you take objectives. Thank you!

DKz Lux.4125:

I’m a bit puzzled. Did you guys actually hit siege cap? This doesn’t make sense to me. What exactly was the problem?

Did you get to a point where you couldn’t place siege anymore or were you just annoyed they were in bad spots?

Didn’t hit siege cap but a few things:

1. Siege cap was mentioned, we never hit it, but that isn’t the only point.
2. It uses up vital garrison supply building useless siege. Its not just “bad positioning” to have a flame ram sitting in a siege depot.
3. The evidence of collusion is pretty strong, normal modus operendi for taking an objective is immediately destroying all the enemies internal siege equipment. Yet miraculously all this useless siege sat untouched while you held the garrison for several hours.
4. Really? you guys are dominating the entire week do you really need to have a spy kittening up supply depots and siege? That’s just unsportsmanlike.

I’m sorry but the mesmer downed skills are totally ridiculous, and the stealth is certainly longer than 1 second, a smart mesmer will wait until you try to plant the flag and then use the illusion at the last second. Meanwhile of his illusions are still beating on you, so you have to fight them, while dealing with stacks of confusion and the retaliation every mesmer has on their illusions. One of my first 1v1 experiences in thes game was downing a mesmer solo and still having 2/3rdsof my health and then trying to stomp him only to teleport away, and then on my second stomp having him do so much damage that I was downed (I died). Then I fought him again, got him down with about 1/3 of my health left and decided to be smart and kill his illusions, only to find myself slaughtering myself to confusion and retaliation.

Every other classes down state I can deal with (although I think every other class has a superior mechanism, save maybe for rangers). There are occasional turn arounds (warriors popping their stand up ability when I am low on life and managing to get me before they expire). Mesmers are in a league of their own.

Great build and outstanding video. I have a few questions about the solo build…

How important is self-regulating defenses? I was thinking fast-acting elixirs might work well there because it will increase your up time on elixir B and Elixir S. Alternatively you could fit backpack regenerator into tier 2, which would synergize incredibly well with your build

How important is the rune set up? have you considered other defensive runes?

Thanks!

This is my favorite “all-rounder” build (can’t take credit for it though other folks had this up with minor variation).

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcEQFAUl0pCYnvSiF1LJyoCdGoC6lIFPml95Bb1WQIA;TYAqZMzImxOjbG5MA

This is more PvP oriented, for PvE I use:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcEQFAUl0pCYnwSiF1LJyoCdGoCAmIFPml95xb1WQIA;TYAqZMzImxOjbG5MA

There is some argument that elixir R can be used for PvP over Elixir S but I like the Elixir s toolbelt skill to get me out of jams!

For gear in this spec I go knights, useful for both PvE and PvP and super easily obtainable.

Something I did not know until recently: you can switch the 10, 20 and 30 point traits when out of combat, so it costs nothing to move between these two specs.

It’s something like 7k healing per minute, which is passive and stacks with everything. I am a pretty big fan of it, it has saved my bacon lots of times in WvW (I think it functions best in larger sieges where you are taking constant AoE splash damage). In smaller engagements its of more limited use, but I can’t count the times I have escaped or won a 1v1 with 200-300 hit points left. I would have been dead without the regenerator.

mclovinballs.4031:

Which norn are you talking about? Is it the guardian that has a CoF helm or a warrior with no helm showing that switches from greatsword to hammer to stun a bunch of you. the guardian is a commander and the warrior is me

I’m going to let my guild wars racism show and say that all you norns look alike to me. ;-)

Air.6452:

I’ve gone through and read some of your posts. You are a gentlemen’s gentleman and I would like to shake your hand. Seems it really takes a rare kind of person to come in from the dominating team and respectfully acknowledge those opposing them.

You’re very kind. There really is a lot of unnecessary negativity on the boards. /begin internet soapbox It’s up to all of us to make the community what we would like it to be, that includes being understanding to our fellow players on our own servers and being courteous to our fellow players on other servers. This means even cutting everyone, especially folks who may be a bit angry or frustrated (or folks on your own server who are new and need some guidance), a lot of slack. /end internet soapbox

I wish I knew players names on the opposing server so I could call out specific good play, but I have to give props to some very good folks on ET. I’m not sure who the large Nord is on your side with the two hand sword who is always smacking me, but he is terrific and a great point-guy (I assume he is leading groups). The rushes out of the tower to destroy siege engines are really great to watch. There are also a few good thieves out there harassing supply lines and taking out back objectives like pro’s.

I don’t want to leave HoD out. Henge has quite a few good roaming groups, and executes quick strikes on objectives really well.

mclovinballs.4031:

We on ET would like to thank SF for some awesome field battles, a lot of our players have stated their slayer achievement counts are skyrocketing. I would also like to thank you guys for teaching us the value of siege at stopping giant zerg and allowing us to receive 100 badges of honor. Again, thanks SF, hats off to you, good luck on your world record.

That fight at the red tower last night was fantastic, kudo’s to you guys for playing so well. Honestly we were a somewhat mindless zerg and you guys were incredibly organized, sending out groups to attack trebuchets, using siege engines to great effect. In the end we won by attrition, but you certainly got the better of us most of that fight. also, please know that the world record jerks do not speak for most of the SF community.

Helcor.9527:

When I want to stomp someone and don’t want to be interrupted, I use elixir S. This is fun because there’s nothing they can do to stop me(in most cases). For some reason I never see engineers do this.

Because elixir S disables all of your attack skills. Did you mean throw elixir S?

Thanks to the ET/HoD folks who are coming out, you guys are good, the map would look very different if you had some numbers.

Orion the Cursed.1206:

i am not talking exclusively about grenades. I used it as an random example. I am talking about all kits. Flame thrower, bomb (both do aoe and condition damage), are on par with lvl 80 exotic rifles while tool/medi/elixirgun kits, have great usability. All kits can be traited in some way to compensate for the lack of sigils(grenadier/juggernaut/etc). You claim that non-grenade kits are not “appropriately scaled” then why do you run EG?

Re EG: Solely for the utility, which is terrific (condition removal, heal field, snare, combo generator, escape mechanism). As a damage kit there is really no way to build out anything with an EG that would be competitive with a good rifle build. I won’t dispute you on bomb, which I think is a terrific kit (although it has its limitations), but there is no way on gods green earth that FT’s are on par with level 80 exotic rifles except in a semantic sense, no mater how you build it. Toolkit as well is a subpar dps kit. I think I misunderstood what the OP was requesting, because he would still allow kits to go in utility slots, if they added this I would think that should be removed.

Orion the Cursed.1206:

But are you/he/they willing to scale down ALL kit damage (by about -30%) and scale up the cooldown (+20%)in exchange for the stats and sigils of their current weapons? Kits currently are balanced to be stat-less. If you want the stats and sigils of their current weapons, then they are "extra"s. You cant have it both ways. If grenades have stats and sigils, in return they must do less dps than a standard rifle shot because they are aoe as well (or maybe equal since they consume an utility slot). If your friends truly believe that kits are underpowered without the the stats and sigils, they wouldn’t use any kits.

I think what you are arguing here is that grenade kit is overpowered, which is a separate discussion. TK, EG and FT are clearly underpowered due to borked mechanics and poor scaling as well as the lack of sigils and the stats gained from equipment. (I think the bomb kit is in a good place though). Grenades are also a different mechanism than a rifle shot because of the travel time/aiming issues. In any case I am not arguing they should do this because I would prefer the status quo to this (I run EG on my utility bar because of all the wonderful utility it has and bomb kit for DPS).

If you are coming from the standpoint that any change is going to break engineers because of the effect it will have on grenades the answer would be to suggest nerfing grenades, not nerfing everything. If you are arguing that an engineers other dps abilities are appropriately scaled I don’t think you are going to get a lot of agreement on that.

Orion the Cursed.1206:

No no, i mean compulsory as in everyone MUST choose 1 kit. You would be stupid to play without a kit. Also it wont be fair to the other classes because now we have 2 special class mechanics.

Edit: dont bother answering, i just realized all you are interested in is what YOU want, and not improving the game.

-You want extra stats & sigils
-You want extra utility slot
-You want extra toolbelt slot(s)

but you are willing to sacrifice…
-nothing

I don’t think this is what he is asking for. The issue is that that engineers don’t want "extra"stats and sigils, they want access to stats and sigils that every other class has, but are denied save in limited circumstances due to their class mechanics. And they are losing something that is important to a lot of players: kit variety. I know many folks who use 2 or even 3 kits on their utility slots, under this framework they would be limited to a single kit.

In regards to bombs you have to understand that you have a very specific role in PvP (both RvR and WvW): area denial. To a lesser extent you can also serve as support, especially if you trait for healing and grab elixir-infused bombs. As such, do not plan on being top damage dealer unless you happen to be in the middle of a scrum of melee dropping bombs.

Played correctly however, you will be incredibly difficult to dislodge from points, and you will be a total nightmare for melee with even rudimentary kiting. Those annoying thieves that kill you so quickly? Watch most of them commit sepuku on confusion bombs (the good ones won’t, but i haven’t seen many good ones).

In WvW your role becomes a bit more obtuse. You can provide a constant stream of healing for keep assaults and defense, but if you are running solo it sucks because you will not get any kills. With proper kiting you can take out minor objectives solo, so you can do that if you would like. If worse comes to worse you really want to participate from a damage sense grab the mortar elite and fire from a defensible position.

During open field assaults wait for a big melee engagement and then run in and start spamming (begin with a glue bomb and go to town).

One final point: survivability is not optional in this build. You will need to invest heavily into two of the following: vitality, toughness and/or healing power (if you have elixir infused bombs). I would prefer vit/healing/power, but there is no armor that does this so Cleric’s is your next best option. Unfortunately toughness is just a weaker stat that vit currently due to scaling issues and the fact that it does not reduce condition damage. On the bright side bombs have the best scaling of any engineer ability with power, the only exception being a grenadier, and even then it only edges slightly, especially after the new patch. Grenades of course have the range advantage (but lose the support option).

Thanks Casia, obviously you get to it when you get to it. Especially considering you are doing this out of the goodness of your heart and fidelity with your fellow engineers!

I know this is a bit much ot ask, but any idea of the healing coeffic for engineer skills?

I am seeing about .1 for elixir infused bombs but I am curious as to how the regen abilities and super-elixir scales.

I run a mine support build and I am currently collecting full clerics. I was considering mixing half with prec/vit/healing but i’m not sure the math works out (bombs have one of the best power coefficient scaling with 1.25 damage per power). If I had my druthers I would find a way to trade out some toughness for vitality to deal with annoying condition damage in Pve/pvp.

I would go for something along the lines of this:

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-V70;2Z;0h0k5cQFx0;9;49T-T-4;0538;119A;14;5CoF2CoF26gx

Honestly though I’m not a rifle player (I’m a midnight bomber what bombs at midnight) so i’m sure folks with more experience could refine that build more appropriately. For PvE I might switch out rifled barrels for precise sights.

Rifle 5 is good for PvE, but the animation issues kill it for PvP. If it didn’t have that 1.5 second “stomp” at the end before the damage hit it would be much more useful.

Why did you put all those points in Invention? that really doesn’t have much synergy with the rest of the build. Move 20 points to firearms and 10 to explosives. I think you would be far better off.

One thought I had was to simply give the engineers 2 weapon switch options but allow one or both of the weapon switchs to be kits. Kits can then no longer be one the utility bar.

This would limit the concerns about folks running multiple kits that do everything.

The problem is that this would require significant re-balancing of the toolbelt mechanic. (perhaps, but maybe not, toolbelt skills in general are relatively weak compared to other class mechanics, with some notable exceptions).

I am also having issues with the Queen’s throne room. Cannot load and I require a second client restart to play the game.