Guild Wars 2

Yeah. Grenades are mostly for aoe on walls and poison/cleave on downs, and dealing ranged damage in awkward spaces. Flamethrower is too close range for a lot of situations. It is better damage, but it tends to be easily kited..

Disengage is critical because you have no sustain. Sometimes I’ll save rocket boots and sneak gyro if I think the fight is going to go long, or I’ll need to get out of range to avoid damage (reaper, warrior).

Meanwhile, power/scrapper can yolo in and constantly heal from all the self-combos.

Stats: mostly viper/sinister with some dire for survivability.

Skills: Toolkit, Sneak Gyro, Rocket boots are the important ones

Traits:
Firearms – pistol condi duration, condi damage, incendiary powder
Tools – power wrench, streamlined kits, adrenal implant
Scrapper – whatever you feel like, but I use heal, heal on swift/superspeed, adaptive armor

Runes – whatever. I like Balthazar for the burn duration so you can tag warriors with blowtorch and still get some ticks in when their 30s of resistance finally ends.
Sigils – either + condi damage/duration, or + other condi on hit/swap. Former is better for damage, latter is better for opponents with lots of cleanse.

• fights are better because the keeps and objectives are farther away / larger so it’s more difficult for players to retreat to a tower or keep like they do in ebg/abl.
• however, it takes so long to get anywhere and there are so many cliffs to accidentally fall off or get stuck on, people tend to avoid the map.

IMO it needs some one-way teleports, like free fast-travels to mid for all servers or something.

So if I’m understanding this right, if a player is on a green server that matchup, they can play in any tier on the green side, but they’re locked to that tier for the duration (6 hours) of the matchup.

Could be fun? I’m a bit curious how “fight guilds” and “ppt guilds” will find each other on the right matchup.

I definitley think shorter matchups are the way to go though.

I like solo / small group roaming on it if there are waypoints on all the keeps – see dot on sentry, waypoint and go fight them.

If there are no waypoints, it’s more like – see dot, contemplate running for 10 minutes to try and intercept them somewhere, decide not to. Alt-F4 and go play something else.

Right. This allows a bit of reaction time on the part of the defending player to use some defensive skill or dodge the head butt. That’s a good thing even though it feels slower now.

Consider: average ping is ~100ms. average human visual reaction time is ~250ms, and it takes a bit of time to see the incoming attack and process that it’s a head butt. That’s awfully close to 0.5ms. When you’re talking about a skill that results in a kill if it lands (and isn’t stun-broken), it should probably have a bit more time for the defender to play around it.

Re: Stun Breaks: They are mostly on long cooldowns – longer than Head Butt. Furthurmore, there are many skills that need to be stun-broken, and you can’t always have it up for Head Butt.

I think the primary reason they did that was to add counterplay. Counterplay is good!

• Realistically, a player with average ping cannot dodge a 0.25s skill unless they happen to be predicting an attack and basically pre-dodge it.
• A player can dodge a 0.5s skill if they’re paying attention and watch for it, but this gets harder at close range, as the animations are difficult to see in melee and there’s less distance. I think this is fair for most attacks, but Headbutt is SO powerful (basically, if you land it and they don’t have a stun-break, they are dead to the follow-up combo) that they made it…
• 0.75s – dodgeable, interruptable. Feels slow if you’re used to 0.5s, but the skill still works.

I’ve got similar stats in wvw – maybe a bit more glass. I just use your standard condi traits in Firearms, Scrapper for Sneak Gyro and Function Gyro, and Tools for toolkit.

Heal Turret (rip..), Rocket Boots, Grenade Kit (or some other kit), Toolkit, Sneak Gyro

Magnet, Pry Bar, Static Shot, Rocket Kick, Blowtorch, darts/grenades/glue and someone is going to have a bad time.

I used to run rifle for a long time in wvw. The range on auto is nice, but it leaves you so vulnerable it’s not worth it. To do real damage, you need to put yourself in melee range, and you have no defense.

• Hip Shot is all right. The damage could be a bit better, but it works
• Net shot is still tough to land, and it doesn’t do much when it does land. Single-target short immob? meh. Now, if that immob’d like even half an Ancient Seeds, then it’d be powerful.
• Blunderbuss is good
• Overcharged Shot will get you killed more often than not. If it hits reflect, you’re dead. If it hits an on-cc trait like Last Stand, you’re probably dead. If a druid shoots you while you’re knocked back from your own attack, it procs Ancient Seeds, and you’re dead because now you can’t clear it with Overcharged Shot. Etc. Etc. It used to be a very powerful attack and basically THE reason you would choose rifle, but there’s just way too much defense out there since HoT power creep. It’s not worth the risk any more.
  Jump Shot doesn’t evade, so you’re going to hit cc + damge when you use it to engage. It is nice for repositioning though, and has some niche gap-crossing ability.

I switched to Pistol/Pistol condi because it’s better for 1vX roaming fights. On rifle, other players are going to take advantage of your lack of defense and your self-cc from Overcharged Shot. I find condi helps to keep up the pressure against multiple players while still having range.

Block is not very reliable for preventing damage. You’re likely to eat a DH spear or a necro mark or thief basilisk venom hit or warrior signet attack or…

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unblockable

Besides, blocking attacks has never been part of the necro playstyle. It tanks damage itself or through minions. There are things that will help you with that like Spectral Armor and Infusing Terror.

It’s more that the timing is inconsistent. The overcharge activation seems to vary between 0.75s and 1s after the heal. Previously, it was always 0.75s and you knew when it activated because YOU activated it.

..so, any attempt to learn the timing is pretty frustrating when it’s not always the same. See that video posted on another thread where it’s 50/50 overcharge vs not when the button is held down. Some consistency there would be appreciated.

Basically, if it were working correctly the way you describe (“l2p and don’t blast it early”) you wouldn’t have to wait out the water field after casting healing turret. you could just hold down the button and blast the turret. Instead, what we have is this awkward variable time overcharge that sometimes has a field and sometimes doesn’t.

Again, I argue that you should never be able to blast it without the field:

• you shouldn’t be able to detonate a turret that has not deployed yet
• overcharge is instant, and happens automatically on turret deploy
• therefore, if the turret has deployed and you can blast it, it should have already overcharged.

But if they want to allow blasting while it hasn’t deployed, that’s fine. I would be happy with a consistent way to blast other fields and a reliable timing for heal+overcharge in combat.

Also, if they want to put it back to 0.5s, that’d be cool too. Just sayin. They’ve nerfed scrapper sustain a ton since then. I think 0.5s would be fine.

Previously, you knew exactly when you could blast it because you used the overcharge skill, then could immediately use the detonate, knowing that overcharge had gone off. Currently, it’s really inconsistent and doesn’t always overcharge at the same time it’s deployed, so you have to divert some attention to looking at your turret and trying to figure out whether it’s overcharged or not (not easy in chaotic combat situations).

Personally, I find it takes what was a ~0.75s heal and turns it into a 1-1.25s heal. Huge nerf. If they just fixed that bug, I’d be fine with it. I’ll paste my logic here again..

• you shouldn’t be able to detonate a turret that has not deployed yet
• overcharge is instant, and happens automatically on turret deploy
• therefore, if the turret has deployed and you can blast it, it should have already overcharged.

Yet, for some reason it’s still possible to ‘miss’ the overcharge and blast it too early.

I have been asking other engineers I see in WvW (admittedly, there are not many out there) and all have complained about missing the turret a lot in the last week. See also: that straw poll.

https://youtu.be/-Rd7u9jAuS8

That’s indended behavior? Same input, different result 50% of the time?

Looks bugged to me..

https://youtu.be/-Rd7u9jAuS8

Did you watch that video? Does that look like a skill that is working properly? Same input, different result ~50% of the time?

It’s clearly bugged. I have had it fail in combat, gone back and reviewed the video and found that it doesn’t go off consistently. Sometimes it’s slower, so you basically have to wait 1s before you blast it. That turns our 0.75s heal into a 1s heal.

To be fair, at least in the case of healing turret, that’s all it was used for – either deployed and blasted to blast another field, or quickly deployed, overcharged & blasted (or picked up) as a regular heal.

I’d be happy as long as the latter worked reliably. It doesn’t though…

Sviel.7493:

If the keep is upgraded, it’s worth dying for in terms of score as well.

Is it?

I can think of quite a few X/Y/Z matchups where X and Y have an equal or greater share of the PPT score, but are both losing to Z by more than double because Z is farming them for PPK.

I think that’s a pretty clear sign it’s bugged. It ought to at least be consistent one way or the other. I’d prefer always getting the overcharge+blast and not being able to screw up the heal by tapping the button too early.

In practice, I find “having to wait” for the overcharge causes the heal to take 1-1.5s rather than the 0.75ish it used to be. It’s not what I want to be thinking about in the middle of a frantic zerg fight, or a 1v3 situation.

Supply Crate toolbelt skill aoe heals condi now, but it’s still on a very long cooldown. You wouldn’t rely on that as your condi cleanse in a fight.
AED – situational, cooldown too long, cast time too high
Purge Gyro – requires scrapper

So your condi cleanse options (for base engi) are limited to a single build style (elixirs) or the (now broken) healing turret.

The thing is, you can miss now. If you hit it in the few ms after the turret goes down, but before the burst goes off (shouldn’t even exist because the overcharge is supposed to be instant), you can blow the turret and get no overcharge field.

Pre-patch, as long as you had tapped again for the overcharge, you were free to blast the turret because you knew 100% that the overcharge had gone off. Now we’re stuck waiting awkwardly for the turret to do it automatically. Sometimes it’s instant. Sometimes it’s a bit late and you miss 2/3 of your heal + condi cleanse.

See examples: https://youtu.be/-KNeJwMlYwk

You shouldn’t be able to fail 2/3 of your heal because you pressed the detonate inside a ~50ms window. That’s a bug.

I run Sinister/Viper on my p/p Engi. It is super squishy, but pretty deadly. You tag with condi bomb, then gtfo before they can hit you back. Repeat until they’re dead.

I do swap in more toughness+vitality when running in larger groups though. Sinister doesn’t survive in big fights when you’ll get 1-shot by a random CoR or other aoe.

I gotta say, it feels really bad to use your 25s cooldown 2s immobilize and have it just broken instantly by a thief or warrior with a dodge or movement skill. It’s like .. why do I even bother?

The immobs were mosty designed back when the game launched and you had to use a condi cleanse to get out, or else wait the full duration (and they aren’t very long).

Please yes.

They need to do something about that delay. No other class can ‘miss’ their heal by pressing a button at 749ms rather than 750ms (it’s actually a bit more than that) with no obvious tell.

Considering this is the ONLY way to cleanse conditions on some builds, I really think it should be more reliable.

You can tell they tried to prevent this by adding a 0.5s lockout. It just doesn’t go long enough. Cleansing burst NEEDS to go off before you can detonate the turret. Logically, there’s no way you should be able to miss it.

• You shouldn’t be able to detonate a turret before it has deployed.
• Cleansing Burst is instant and happens as soon as the turret is deployed
• Therefore, you shouldn’t be able to detonate before cleansing burst goes off

Q.E.-kitten-D.

kind of like when they nerfed Healing Turret (0.5s -> 0.75s) to try and address Scrapper sustain and it hurt core engi builds even more than scrapper.

.. or when they nerfed Gear Shield (3s -> 2s) and it hurt core engi way more than scrapper.

.. or when they just broke healing turret altogether in the last patch and now you fail the overcharge half the time when you use it in combat.

I believe at some point she is at Vorgas Garrison (possibly after it’s secured), then walks back to her starting point by the waypoint.

At the time, she was definitely stuck way southeast of it, as Heliocredo.7012 can confirm. We met up in game, tried everything we could to get her to move, but she was bugged.

Try detonating the turret without getting the overcharge+blast when out of combat. It’s almost impossible to do.

Then try again in-combat – happens pretty frequently – maybe 50% of the time depending on how fast you’re detonating.

If that’s not a bug, I don’t know what is.

Difference is, when you activated the overcharge skill before, you knew you could immediately detonate the turret. Now, you have to guess at when the overcharge skill has gone off (it’s slower in combat vs out of combat – try it!) then detonate. This slows down your heal combo considerably.

Try and detonate the turret without causing a water blast when out of combat. Then try again in-combat. It’s almost impossible to do it out of combat, but it happens pretty frequently in-combat. That sounds like a bug to me.

leviathan.2148:

santenal.1054:

Well in certain situations you want to be spamming your healing skill to be sure that it starts as fast as possible (eg. just after an animation that doesn’t allow you to activate non instant skills like healing turret or after a daze, … ) , while keeping your eyes somewhere else than the skill bar/healing turret, but now that detonate is on the same keybind as the healing skill the possibility of detonating as result of the healing skill spamming and only getting like 2700 healing is a newly formed problem.

And I get it but the delay of HT giving the water field has been there always and if you spammed the button you didn’t blast it consistently all the time. Nothing has changed in this terms.

IMO, it was nearly impossible to mess up the sequence pre-patch because it didn’t involve any counting of milliseconds after activation. You deployed the turret, you activated the overcharge, then as soon as you hit the button to activate the overcharge you could destroy the turret, knowing that it had gone off and the water field was there.

Currently, there’s this awkward pause waiting for the overcharge to go off, and wanting to blast it as soon as it’s ready, but not having the tactile feedback of pressing a button. It’s easy to accidentally trigger it early when there’s lag or cc or just chaotic combat in general.

You can tell they didn’t want this to be a thing because they added the detonate lockout shortly after the balance patch. Also, it’s kitten near impossible to trigger a non-overcharged blast when you’re out of combat. They just didn’t get the lockout quite long enough. Deploying the turret seems to take slightly longer in combat, and this exceeds the lockout duration.

• Cleansing burst is instant, and it should be the first thing that happens once the turret is deployed (overcharge happens automatically when turrets are deployed).
• You should only be able to detonate a turret once it has finished deploying
• Therefore, if you can detonate the turret, cleansing burst should have already activated.

If that doesn’t happen, then something has gone wrong in the skill queuing.

Well yeah. 5 years of muscle memory from how it used to work. Also, I tend to mash because sometimes it doesn’t go off if the game is being laggy. The first or second or third or sixth press is sometimes the one that goes through.

Yeah. Obtena is a pretty obvious troll.

For example, in WvW, the commander might say “stack might”, and everyone will drop fire fields and use blast finishers.

Engineers would drop healing turret, and destroy it after it deploys for a blast. Now we don’t get that option. If we deploy our turret, it drops a water field and ruins everyone else’s blast finishers. Alternatively, we could drop our turret first, but that forces your squad to wait an extra second or two for your water field to go off first – not viable in fast-paced wvw.

Edit: It’s not viable because the squad simply does not have time to wait an extra 2 seconds. kitten happens fast. We need to be able to keep up, and we need our blast options to work.

They actually removed choice. Previously, we had the CHOICE to blast our healing turret on another field, OR overcharge it for a water field.

Now, it automatically overcharges – except sometimes it doesn’t because it’s bugged.

It’s that “wait” that is just not doable in a pvp situation.

If you accidentally detonate it at 749ms rather than 750ms you get a tiny 2.5k heal and no blast.

They were clearly trying to prevent this situation with the last hotfix patch that locks it out for 0.5s. Problem is, the turret takes 0.75s to deploy, so it’s still possible to screw it up and miss your heal+condi cleanse. It needs to be locked out for the full 0.75s or just reverted to the way it was before.

https://strawpoll.com/3yy194e

Seconded /15

Getting 2.5k heal and no condi cleanse because you pressed it at 749ms rather than 750ms really sucks.

It’s hard to get the timing right through lag. The overcharge isn’t obvious enough, and it adds precious milliseconds onto your heal combo, making it closer to a 1s interruptable heal rather than a 0.75s fast combo. If they’re going to stick with that, IMO it could use a buff to compensate.

santenal.1054:

schloumou.3982:

just because people refuse to do precise inputs instead of just spaming keys.

Sometimes milleseconds count (when being ganked) and I like to spam instead of trying to do “precise” inputs but with the recent changes the certainty of a decent heal is gone.

Id be happy to settle for the following solution however:
If they transfered all the healing, regeneration and condi cleanses of “Overcharge Healing Turret” to the “Healing Turret” skill + remove the detonation delay.

I’d support that change! So the initial heal deploy would do all the healing + condi cleanse, and the overcharge would just be the water field.

You can’t really be super careful when you’re in Stonemist fighting a 40v40v40 and the game engine is lagging so much that it only registers half your button presses.

I think we can all agree that it was better the way it was before.

Also, healing turret is the only usable one that clears conditions without speccing HGH. (not counting AED as usable because .. well, it isn’t)

There’s just no good option for it right now:

They remove the delay, and you end up not getting the overcharge when you activate it in combat (or you have to be SUPER CAREFUL to not double-tap heal, or you get nothing but a weak 2k heal, no condi cleanse, and no field – sometimes you need to spam the button when the game is being laggy).

They increase the delay, and you can’t healing turret to blast other fields. It was better the way it was before.

I feel like that’s an unintended bug considering it’s next-to-impossible to detonate it without the overcharge out of combat, but it happens pretty frequently in-combat. You shouldn’t have to count 0.75s in your head and then be punished with ~4k less healing and no condi cleanse if you get it wrong.

Theonord.6359:

Then just w8 that milisecond. We did it before and it was no problem. I actually find the the Cleansing burst is much more consistent now than before. It activates instantly.

I’m not sure if you pvp or wvw much, but that’s really not an option in the heat of combat. You absolutely do NOT want to be thinking about “did I wait 0.74s or 0.75s?” before you detonate your turret. It just needs to work.

We can debate the effectiveness of the turret change (I’m personally not a fan), but this post is pointing out that it’s actually BROKEN in its current state. It does not overcharge when used rapidly in combat. See the linked videos for examples.

Stop complaining? It’s broken! It does not work in combat half the time.

I need my heal to overcharge correctly and go off in the correct sequence. I will continue complaining until they fix it.

I’m not the biggest fan of the change, but it’s actually broken right now and that’s the problem.

It’s bugged. See examples: https://youtu.be/-KNeJwMlYwk

Overcharge does not apply after dropping it, or detonate happens too soon. Either way, it’s waaaay too broken to be using in combat.

https://youtu.be/-KNeJwMlYwk

Example ^

More video proof: https://youtu.be/-KNeJwMlYwk

I can’t rely on my heal at all when it only gives me 2.5k and no condi cleanse half the time.

Confirmed the overcharge thing is a problem. I jumped in WvW was at low health, mashed the heal button. Detonate went off before overcharge. I got 2.5k heal instead of ~7k heal + condi cleanse. I died.

Went back and reviewed the video – sure enough, overcharge isn’t going off before it’s destroyed.

This doesn’t happen every time. It’s maybe 10-20% of the time I heal in combat, but it’s common enough that I have to slow down my heal a lot and it’s getting me killed.

Edit – Video Proof: https://youtu.be/-KNeJwMlYwk

santenal.1054:

Patch note says:
Turrets: Added a 0.5-second recharge delay to detonate-turret skills, when a turret is first placed, in order to prevent accidental detonation.

Well they ALMOST solved the problem of detonating before overcharging but I can still manage to detonate before the overcharge kicks in when I spam the healing button
if anyone knows how to inform the devs about this that would be cool because now is the time that most of such issues will be resolved (patches)
Video Proof

(posting it here 2 for more exposure)

This is important. Maybe submit a support ticket?

Spamming the button should give you overcharge before it detonates. You shouldn’t be waiting for x milliseconds after you cast the thing for it to deploy and overcharge, then be punished by massively less healing if you guessed too soon.

Zivilyn Bane.6520:

coro.3176:

I don’t know. I’m glad they’re trying to fix things, but I’m a bit sad that it removes some active gameplay from turrets.

Eg. You can no longer deploy healing turret and blast another field without overcharging it. That was a very very important use of the turret and now you can’t cast it without ruining someone else’s fire field.

Actually, if you mash the skill (or are quick enough) you can just detonate the turret and it won’t have time to overcharge, thus no water field. Contrary to popular belief it does not instantly overcharge when you drop it, it just attempts to do it automatically and has a short cast time.

Ugh. noooo.

So now in the heat of combat, you’ll press heal twice and get half a heal instead… I liked it the way it was before.

Okay, but what about the Cleansing Burst water field? Why does it matter if you’re blasting on Regenerating Mist vs blasting on Cleansing burst? Either way, you’re deploying the turret and blasting it. Also, does healing turret not do Cleansing Burst on deploy any more? If not, that’d be a massive nerf.