Guild Wars 2

Take Pistol/Shield, Rifle or Hammer. You want the defensive aspects of these weapons. Do not listen to inbred buffoons that try to tell you to take Pistol/Pistol. That is a damage option. What did I tell you about damage?

That’s boring. Go P/P. Max burn duration. Blowtorch every 12 seconds to deal up to 30k damage to your target (maybe more if you proc sigils!). Incendiary Powder taking your targets down to half health every 10s. Static Shot is your offense and defense. Sneak Gyro or Rocket Boots if you’re getting focused. Dodge like you’ve got some skill

Live dangerously. There’s no glory in just surviving.

Overcharged Shot – hits ‘Last Stand’ (or similar). oops. dead.
Overcharged Shot – hits reflect. oops. dead.
Net Shot – only a 2s immob, but it’s broken immediately by a dodge or movement skill anyway.
Hip Shot – meh damage compared to revs dropping 5k autoattacks
Jump Shot into the fray – hits a pile of CC and damage. oops. dead.
Jump Shot away from the fray – gets a DH spear in the back and pulled. oops. dead.

Blunderbuss is okay I guess, but it’s still wasting half the damage on condi when it should be power.

To fix gadgets in general: cleanse a condition (or two?) on activation with the gadgeteer trait.

Currently Elixirs outshine gadgets because condi cleanse is so necessary in any kind of pvp, so engineers can’t afford to NOT take an elixir that could provide two cleanses (throw and consume). They might need to make it even better than that because HGH also provides good might stacking as well. If gadgets are ever going to be useful, they need to be at least as good as elixirs

I’m playing Condi Engi right now, which ALREADY requires 3 stats to be effective:

Condition Damage, Expertise, and Precision (needed to proc on-crit burns/bleeds from Incendiary Powder and Sharpshooter, which are a large part of its damage).

The build is already full glass and high-risk high-reward. It’s not a high sustain bruiser like most scrapper builds, and it’s far from OP. Changing condi in general to require another stat would be a straight nerf.

My suggestion would be to instead make other condi builds similarly reliant on precision for their damage. ie. move some guaranteed condi application from skills and traits to on-crit procs.

What exactly is killing you?

You can avoid pretty much everything with some well-timed dodges and good positioning.

Engi is a very active class – probably the hardest in the game next to Ele. You don’t have the survivability or passive defense to tank hits like a Warrior or Guard. You don’t have minions or pets that will hold aggro away from you like Necro, Mesmer, and Ranger (you can slot turrets for this, but they’re kinda bad).

You have to make up for it in other ways. These include: Chaining water/heal combos for sustain. Keeping up high endurance via the Tools traitline, or bunker traits in Inventions and Scrapper.

If you need more, you can slot some defensive skills. I like to run with Toolkit to Gear Shield block heavy attacks rather than dodging. It just takes some muscle memory and practice. Elixir gun is also good for another blast on your water field and a stunbreak+heal.

Hammer comes with a block and reflect – make sure you’re using those and not wasting them.

I think I suggested a perfectly reasonable solution for guilds… no?

Each player gets to pick 1 guild – the currently active guild on the last character a player logged in with before the rebalance

Players that insist on staying together in wvw could form guilds and invite their friends (up to the maximum guild size).

Now keep guilds together when rebalancing servers

babazhook.6805:

Finally , just as I can dodge or block that incoming 10k unload , you can do the same for Condition attacks bringing the same payload of potential damage.

For the most part, the condi builds people complain about are NOT as easy to block as power builds. Condi mesmer is constantly applying condi. Condi thief is spamming condi while evading. Condi reaper is getting ‘free’ condi spam with aoe shouts that are fairly difficult to avoid.

Well, it would be more ‘guild wars’ if they shuffled people around the servers on a regular basis but kept guilds together.

Something ought to change in any case. Whether through skill or numbers or coverage or leadership, the top servers continue to be the top servers and it gets stale after a while.

Taking it offline for a week wouldn’t be necessary. Hell, ‘servers’ practically don’t exist any more. They’re just what team you play for in wvw. Everything else is megaservered.

It would solve lots of problems. In one swoop, it could balance active populations, off-hour activity, and shake up stacked servers/stale matchups.

Nuke it.

Keep guilds together (guild you’re currently repping on the last character you logged in with).

Now redistribute players + guilds to create servers with balanced activity + time zones.

And the problem is, it has to be instant or else it doesn’t work. The existence of good condi cleanse on a lot of builds means condi builds need to either be very spammy (condi mes), very bursty (burn guar, condi engi), or both (thief).

Then, these builds completely overwhelm ‘normal’ builds that have an average or poor amount of condi cleanse. Then people come whine about it on the forums.

It’s no fun if the losing team quits for the week because they can’t get participation. I mean, maybe some people like sitting on empty borderlands T3-ing every tower, but that’s definitely not what I come to wvw for.

Besides, if the losers don’t want to play, who will flip the camps back so the winners can keep up participation?

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

I think some people are confused and think that whenever you do something that gives participation it adds to the decay, which has not been and is not the case. For example when you take an objective, it gives you 10 minutes before your participation will start to decay; then if you kill a guard it will only reset to 2 minutes if you have less than 2 minutes left otherwise it won’t affect the timer. This is how it has always worked; the only thing we have changed is the reset time for each action.

The reset times are as follows:
• Killing a Player – 10 minutes
• Killing a Caravan – 2 minutes
• Destroying a fortification – 5 minutes
• Killing a Guard – 2 minutes
• Killing a Lord – 5 minutes
• Killing or reviving a merc npc – 1 minute
• Repairing – 5 minutes
• Siege Damage Wall/Gate/Player – 1 minute
• Destroying Siege – 5 minute
• Killing a Veteran Creature – 5 minutes

These happen on event completion:
• Defending a Caravan – 2 minutes
• Completing a Merc Event – 5 minutes
• Completing a Defend Event – 10 minutes
• Capturing an objective – 10 minutes
• Capturing a Ruin or Shrine – 2 minutes
• Capturing a Sentry – 5 minutes

It is still possible that we will tweak these numbers going forward.

This is actually pretty great. I was initially unhappy on the ‘1m reset’ people were posting about in this forum, but having actually played, it seems fine. I haven’t lost participation when actively playing.

One thing I would add is: “dying in combat with another player” – maybe 5m?. I know it’s counterintuitive to reward dying vs getting kills, but I think it will help roamers keep participation up if they lose a fight, and also incentivize other players to fight them (rather than running back and hiding in a tower or w/e).

Still getting occasional lag spikes. Also, even when I’m not getting lag spikes and my ping is in the normal range, everything feels slower somehow.

It’s like my skills are sticky. Like, when I go to swap kits on engineer, it holds on the original weapon for maybe 50ms extra. It’s not much, but it’s annoying and it affects gameplay. I need to be able to swap kits and use the flipped skill as fast as possible in order to be competitive. Eg. I see an attack incoming. I use Toolkit, then Gear Shield … except Gear Shield doesn’t go off because Toolkit was just a bit slow in activating. I’ve been playing engineer a long time, so I know the timings and it’s definitely been slower overall since this lag started.

What I’d do:
at a pre-announced time…

• unlink all servers
• rebalance all players across servers randomly by activity* except..
• guilds are kept together (based on currently active guild on the last character a player logged in with)

Just burn it all down and start over. Prevent transfers for some time afterward (maybe 1 month).

*activity measured before the announcement to prevent gaming the system

… but that’s why I’m not in charge of wvw I guess..

I mean.. it sucks that they can’t seem to reward ‘actual play’ compared to tagging mobs and/or zerging. I’m not looking forward to running around constantly searching for something to tag to keep participation up.

… but

We used to pvp for NOTHING. Remember Glory? You were pvp-ing because you liked the gameplay. That’s all.

We used to roam wvw for NOTHING. Before reward tracks, you’d roam wvw for the excitement + challenge of small fights. It was just fun.

I think people in this game are a little too hung up on rewards. Play because you enjoy it?

Condis do get blocked if the skills that apply them are blocked.

IMO, the problem is when those skills are unblockable, spammy or apply too much condi too easily. It’s a problem with a few broken, unfun builds. Fix those and people would stop complaining so much.

These suggestions would only exacerbate the condi arms-race between builds with constant condi application (thief, mesmer, necro, etc) and builds with lots of resistance/cleanse (warrior, ele, etc).

We need less spammable condi and less spammable cleanse.

Condi builds – the ones that are viable now (thief, mesmer, necro) – all have one thing in common: They kitten out condi indiscriminately and constantly. They get in combat, do their thing, and watch everyone around them drop.

Targeted condi application (ranger, engineer, warrior) tends to be more of a skill-matchup in that you’re harrassing your your opponent trying to force them to use their clears + resistance at the wrong time, then follow up with condi burst once those are on cooldown.

Because the former are so prevalent and so effective, the latter are forced to play very heavy condi-burst to make the most of those gaps in condi clear. Thus, cele doesn’t work as well as it used to. Most opponents’ builds pack enough condi clear to negate half your damage without breaking a sweat.

Just personal preference. I like having those tools at my fingertips. Blind on downs. Chill on runners. Bleed and Poison nades are good aoe damage too.

It sucks that they’re slow nades, but what can ya do.. I’d probably sub elixir gun or purge gyro there if I didn’t like grenades so much. I would not play FT – too easy for good players to avoid its damage. Also, its toolbelt skill is on a pretty long cooldown.

Don’t know about them, but I used to run this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFAUlUUh+uYJWwkLQ7FLbGF9YX2r94DUABw36kb9GA-TJBHwAd2fAwDAoZZADXAAA

Stats: Mostly zerker, but sub in soldier trinkets as needed to survive zerg fights

Opening combo was something like:

Magnet – pull in close
Pry Bar – hit for some damage + confusion
and/or Jump Shot – takes slightly longer, but more damage. sometimes save this for escape if needed.
(dodge any counterattack)
Blunderbuss – more close-range damage
Overcharged Shot – cc them away
Throw Wrench – two hits with good damage and it slows them a bit
Net Shot – bit more cc
Grenade Barrage – hit them with huge aoe burst while they’re stuck at mid-range
other skills (grenades for aoe + soft cc, rifle auto for chasing, etc).

Elixir Gun can go in place of Rocket Boots for more sustain + a stun break, but you can’t chase or escape as easily. You could also use Elixir B for some on-demand stab, which helps with Jump Shot, or Elixir S which helps stomp.

Change Mortar Kit for Sneak Gyro in small groups.

I would NOT recommend this build unless you’re comfortable with all the skills and can use them with proper timing. If you Overcharged Shot into a cc trait, you’re gonna have a bad time. If you shoot or throw nades into reflect, you’re gonna have a bad time. If you Jump Shot over a trap or cc line you’re gonna have a bad time.

Edit: oh, and you’ve got no condi clear except 2 per ~20s on Healing Turret. Have fun! Blast lots of light fields!

Last time I checked, Grenade Kit is still best with power. Toolkit is good with power – pry bar will hit for a decent amount and magnet sets up combos with your other attacks. Mortar kit is kinda meh, but it’s definitely a power kit.

Rifle was fine. It was actually the #1 weapon for pvp and wvw engi. Then HoT happened. That’s a clear sign that the problem lies with power creep and defenses that were added with the expansion.

If they’re not going to do something about those (and .. it’s been like 2 years at this point) then they should change rifle so that it’s not shut down so easily. IMO, the biggest weakness is the self-cc on overcharged shot. Changing that to a backward evade or something would do wonders.

IIRC, they are affected by might and quickness, so you can stack buffs and do much more damage. They are also very fast, unlike golems. It’s a good tool for a small coordinated group. It just sucks waiting so long for a claimed camp.

Condi works, but IMO it’s not a ranked-viable build.

You can put out some very good condi burst, but there are drawbacks.

• not enough sustain to sit on a point under pressure like scrapper, so you have to play off point and surrender the cap more often than you’d like. This is a big deal in a point capture game.
• reflect is annoying (especially on pistol 3).
• You can’t touch certain builds until you exhaust their condi cleanse/resist. This can take too long. Eg. Warrior pops berserker stance. They will die, but not until they force you off point for 12s.

Also, I’m not a fan of FT. You have enough burn from Blowtorch and IP. I’d rather take Grenade Kit for more cover condi and more sustained aoe ranged pressure.

Defense slot, I use Rocket Boots (because the damage is good in this build, and you need to gtfo pretty often) or Purge Gyro for team support and aoe pressure.

Overall, I find this build racks up kills, but doesn’t hold a point well – fills the same role as thief, but without the mobility.

Mistress Elemental.3750:

I am disturbed by many of these comments. Everyone is basically saying:

“to $#@% with people who don’t like pvp but want the chance to get the rewards”.

Yes, and?

Mistress Elemental.3750:

Just because I don’t like your style of game play, does not mean I should be excluded completely. I already feel excluded because there is no way for me to get any of the Mini Llamas without playing a part of the game I hate making it impossible for me to ever complete the mini collection.

Do you feel the same way about raids? I mean, I’d love some legendary armour, but I know I’ll never get it because I don’t raid. That’s fair.

Good.

People in this game are far too focused on getting rewards.

Back in the good ol’ days we pvp’d with no rewards except Glory!

Evidently not….

Re: invuln. yeah. It’s dumb. Downed state + stomping has never been balanced and probably never will be. On the other hand, they are burning a long-cooldown skill to get that invuln.

Re: Stability – it does work that way now. Use enough cc’s to deplete your opponent’s stab stacks. Then cc them. Alternatively, corrupt/steal/remove the boon first.

I find it’s not that bad in pvp. It’s pretty broken in wvw thanks to certain stats/sigils/runes/food, but I can actually fight back in pvp because they don’t have that.

ThunderPanda.1872:

+ The shear amount of random condis that comes with the burst, on a shorter CD than many cleanses. Should I get more cleanse? Yea, playing a build dedicated to cleanse is so much fun, right?

think you might be missing the point. The more cleanse that exists, the more bursty/spammy condi needs to be to keep up. It’s an arms race, and the losers are builds with “normal” condi cleanse.

To fix it, we need a condi rebalance, and this requires less cleanse overall, not more.

posted this over on the pvp forum, but it applies here:

We currently have an arms race between cleanse and condi spam.

DoT (in most games) is something that builds up .. “oT”, Over Time. The longer the fight goes, the more advantage a DoT player has.

GW2 has so much cleanse that this can never work. Condi builds only work if they have spammable stacks of high-damage condi. Other builds only work if they have boatloads of condi cleanse and/or long-lasting resistance.

IMO, the only way forward is to tear it all down and admit that it’s broken. Tone down cleanse to a normal level (say, current Revenant amount of cleanse). Remove cleanse from traits, sigils, etc. Put it on heal skills and maybe a few other support skills.

NOW tone down condi stacking so that it’s DoT not burst. No more 12x confusion stacks. No more 30-bleed-in-2-seconds. No more poison spam.

Agree with the general sentiment that the whole system is broken. We currently have an arms race between cleanse and condi spam.

DoT (in most games) is something that builds up .. “oT”, Over Time. The longer the fight goes, the more advantage a DoT player has.

GW2 has so much cleanse that this can never work. Condi builds only work if they have spammable stacks of high-damage condi. Other builds only work if they have boatloads of condi cleanse and/or long-lasting resistance.

IMO, the only way forward is to tear it all down and admit that it’s broken. Tone down cleanse to a normal level (say, current Revenant amount of cleanse). Remove cleanse from traits, sigils, etc. Put it on heal skills and maybe a few other support skills.

NOW tone down condi stacking so that it’s DoT not burst. No more 12x confusion stacks. No more 30-bleed-in-2-seconds. No more poison spam.

At the rate they fix/balance stuff, they’re very very lucky there aren’t any other comparable games out there. If there were, I would have left long ago.

It’s sad that we talk about balance changes and class updates in terms of years rather than weeks or months.

Play Necro like a walking bomb. Get in the middle of everything. Deal massive aoe damage. Make sure when you go down, you’ve taken a few with you.

Best way to do it IMO.

Tried it. Meh. Whatever. It works.

I get that it’s a bit better than TS, but IMO it’s not enough better that you’ll have any luck getting people to switch. If I were making a game community chat for a new game, I’d probably choose it over TS3, but the fact is, all these TS servers already exist and have large communities built up.

I predict you’ll have no luck getting a critical mass of people to switch unless the existing servers shut down or are unavailable for weeks.

HoT brought power creep, projectile hate, and better options. Rifle just doesn’t measure up any more. (goes for a lot of pre-HoT things actually..)

I quit using it after a year of it being severely outclassed.

The need to do something with it.

It’s a short immobilize and immob is shrugged off by most classes these days anyway. It’s a slow fairly close-range projectile and it’s tricky to land without exposing yourelf to a lot of risk.

Ancient seeds, a druid trait that procs every 10s (20 in pvp) is waaaay better than our longest cooldown cc weapon skill. I’d like it to be at least that good. I’m thinking something more like the repeating immobs from that, but no damage – purity of purpose See also: Hammer 5 – long cooldown repeating cc at range.

It’s a bit ridiculous in its current state. Tick ends, everyone hops around to find an outnumbered map, then goes back to whatever they were doing. I mean, for most players that’s more than double their pips for the tick if they manage to get the buff when it rolls over.

possible solutions:

• lower outnumbered pips so that people are less tempted to map-hop
• only apply outnumbered pip bonus if you’ve been on a map for the full tick, or always apply it if you were on an outnumbered map at the start of the tick.
• rebalance servers based on active population to reduce queues and outnumbered situations

Agree with most, but I would bet that blob-zerging gives better xp than small groups. From what I’ve seen, most NA hours are full map queues blobbing around,and no small group or roamer would be able to engage them.

Sly.9518:

coro.3176:

Except it’s more like: “tick is about to end. Quickly hop around to all the maps to see if any are outnumbered so you can get an extra +5”

and not at all like “fighting overwhelming numbers”

Yeah totally bouncing around maps when almost all servers are Perma queued currently especially during any meaningful time periods

Meh. Those will go down in a week or two. I don’t care though ’cause I play late NA.

Also, you’re obviously not going to have outnumbered when the maps are queued.

Except it’s more like: “tick is about to end. Quickly hop around to all the maps to see if any are outnumbered so you can get an extra +5”

and not at all like “fighting overwhelming numbers”

Twigifire.8379:

Rifle needs quality of life changes not a complete overhaul. It’s a very fun risk vs reward playstyle at the moment with a little too much risk involved.

There’s a lot of risk you can’t mitigate with smart play. Specifically, if you hit someone with Overcharged Shot, and they have an on-cc trait equipped, you usually lose the fight or have to disengage.

Last Stand procs – Warrior hits you with cc burst chain instead. You die.
Shared Anguish procs – Ranger hits you with staff or bow to trigger Ancient Seeds while you’re knocked back from your own attack. You would normally clear immob with OC shot, but you can’t because it’s on cooldown. You die.
etc. etc. (although, those 2 traits are the worst offenders)

See also OC shot into unexpected reflect, Jump Shot over traps or guard lines, Net shot just being completely ignored by Warriors & Thieves.

Well, that’s how elite specs were supposed to work. They’re supposed to change the playstyle, not be a strict upgrade. Unfortunately, of all the elite specs, only Reaper actually accomplished this because it takes away Death Shroud and replaces it with Reaper Shroud. (actually, I guess you could argue DH did too, but the DH F-skills are way better than base Guard’s)

To avoid power creep, they need to take away something in before adding another thing. Otherwise you just end up with a Druid situation where the elite spec is just always better than the base.

Nikkinella.8254:

I like when pve guilds come to wvw. You get to make dank montages of 1 vs 10 and kill them all. And the hate whispers you get while they tell you to F off cuz they’re just doing dailies, are just icing on the cake. Its especially satisfying killing the ones in legendary armor. Not as easy as fighting scripted AI is it buddy?

No way any PvE player would even figure out how to hate whisper.

I will enjoy killing hunting legendary armour though.

lol

Medic gyro isn’t worth keeping out because it lags so far behind you. It’d be a decent heal if it cleansed a condi or two, but otherwise doesn’t quite measure up to healing turret.

Purge gyro is great at what it does, but is only necessary in PvP, I find.

Shredder gyro is purely for speeding dolyaks with the superspeed trait. It’s terrible even after they buffed it by like %1000.

Blast gyro is good cc, but IMO it’s not worth a skill slot because it’s slow and pathing doesn’t always work.

Sneak gyro is 100% worth it and the best of the gyros. It’s great utility for wvw roaming, pvp engaging & escaping, and generally having the upper hand on a 4s interval through a fight.

What I said was that it’s the worst “elite spec mechanic” as in, there’s next to no gameplay in it. It’s situational – you might use it in raids or in fractals, but ideally you won’t have to. It might be okay if we got some kind of buff while it’s not in use, but then that’s power creep so .. I don’t know. IMO, it should be able to res dead npc’s or harvest nodes or other things as well.

Compared to Druid, Reaper, etc. It just feels a bit .. lacking. It’s like they didn’t get around to designing anything good, so they gave us a res button.

Despite that, it’s really good in pvp/wvw. Hence why I said it was ‘all but mandatory’.

They probably will do it differently this time. As others have said, they’ll likely change or replace the toolbelt skills with the new spec.

The Scrapper traitline is all but mandatory for pvp/wvw – even for non-hammer builds. If you don’t take it, you’re at a huge disadvantage losing access to function gyro. It is by far the worst elite spec mechanic – useless in pve, but good at what it does in competitive game modes.

It also comes with some decent defensive traits and gives you access to sneak + purge gyros.

Since you care about ‘dps loss’, you are probably doing pve. Isn’t tools meta for that anyway because of the 10% damage trait?

Honestly, I only use Rocket Boots because it’s my favourite skill. I am under no illusions that it is good. It isn’t. If it had been designed for HoT, it’d break stun, evade the whole time, heal at the end, and bake me cupcakes.

I mean, this is something that competes with Elixir Gun for a slot. Elixir gun heals, blasts, breaks stun, escapes, cleanses lots of condi, damages/debuffs enemies, buffs allies, and has range all for 1 skill slot on short cooldowns. So .. why would anyone take a single skill over all that?

Gadgets need to be at least that good to be regularly chosen for competitive gameplay.

Elixirs do see play, but only because they are literally the ONLY method of cleansing enough conditions on base Engi. Practically every competitive engi build runs Alchemy for this reason, and most run as few elixirs as they can get away with.