Guild Wars 2

Just FYI before this gets closed as a matchup thread..

Mag has been boycotting WvW the last few weeks. Most WvW players were either not playing or were playing EotM exclusively.

• projectiles… These will be reflected by Scrapper’s Defense Matrix (5 full seconds of point-covering aoe reflect) or Hammer 2, or Mesmer reflect or traited Warrior Shield or hit a druid wall or .. Basically, projectiles are kitten right now. Waiting 5-10 seconds to attack is a huge deal in a teamfight. 5-10 seconds of you not being able to attack is the difference between winning and watching your team lose the fight because you couldn’t do anything.
• Warriors will eat you alive with their long pulsing stability and resistance. Pistol, Rifle, and grenades were designed to use their hard & soft cc skills as survivability vs melee. You want to knockback an attacker, or blind them, then chill & immobilize to buy you some time and create distance. All of that is completely useless vs Zerker. You can’t stop them with cc. You can’t burst them dead thanks to invulns. They passively out-heal your damage while you’re running away/dodging their attacks.
• Condi clear is a problem. You need tons of it in pvp right now. 2 or 3 per 20s from Healing Turret (which takes almost a full second to cast now) is not enough. That means speccing elixirs and/or dedicating a skill slot to condi clear like elixir c or purge gyro.

It basically only works with single-target toolkit skills. With any aoe or pbaoe, it’s too slow and too inaccurate to ever hit.

Also, it’d be awesome with Throw Wrench, but it takes up the same trait slot as the Toolkit trait…

I’m also not 100% sure they fixed the skill queueing issues that existed for years.

Overall, seems like a wasted trait because it doesn’t work with half the skills.

Just put evade on Rocket Boots and make it go a bit farther.

But yeah. Sneak Gyro was already not great because it only protects you from targeted attacks and only if you aren’t in the line of fire between your opponent and the gyro itself. It’s also a giant target that screams “AOE HERE”.

To add further insult, bouncing attacks that hit sneak gyro will bounce off and hit you while you’re in stealth…

Yes, this new sigil hurts stealth a bit, but on a long enough cooldown, on a pretty small radius, and at the cost of a weapon sigil. I think it’ll be fine. I doubt it’ll see too much play. However, it could be a problem for the game if people see thieves/mesmers on the other team and all put on this sigil to completely counter them.

I don’t think it’ll be a huge issue for engi, but I guess we’ll see.

Those defenses don’t work vs condi after you’ve been tagged. With power, you get hit, you react, you don’t die. With condi, you get hit, you react, but you have to have a cleanse or resistance. If you don’t, you’re dead.

That feels … unbalanced. Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying tagging people with a single Blowtorch+IA+IP hit, then watching them melt but .. .. it’s not the interactive back & forth Guild Wars 2 combat I have come to expect.

Fair point, but it’s not as bad with power builds. A power build at least gives the opponent a chance to dodge out and pop defenses. Sure, you might hit someone for up to 10k with a full-glass nade throw or something, but that’s the MOST you’ll get out of one skill. After that, they have a chance to react – dodge, LoS, move out of range, use blocks, invulns, defensive skills, counterattack with CC, etc.

Condi.. well, not every class has on-demand cleanse every few seconds. If I happen to catch someone with their cleanse on 4 to 5 s cooldown, they essentially get 1-shotted by condi-burst. There’s nothing they can do about it except hope a nearby ally will rez them once they go down.

(off topic: Why is “4dash5s” with a – instead of “dash” a censored word?

I used to play Power Rifle engi, but switched to condi because I was tired of losing.

It’s ridiculous how much easier and more effective condi burst is with p/p + traits (compared with Rifle, which is borderline unplayable). If it’s not cleansed, pistol 4 does literally 20k damage on its own. When you factor in Incendiary Ammo, Incendiary Powder, and other sources of condi, you basically melt people in 3-4 ticks.

If you catch a class with their cleanse on >5s cooldown, they are dead. Even if they DO have a cleanse available, sometimes it takes 2 or 3 seconds to move into a safe position and use the skill. In that time, they’ve lost 75% of their health.

IMO, this is too good for landing basically 1 skill without an obvious circle or tell to dodge.

Condi shouldn’t be burst. It should be attrition. I miss pre-condi patch combat, but .. what can you do? If you can’t beat ’em. Join em…. sigh.

I’d call builds “cheesy” if counterplay is much more difficult than the build in question. A “cheesy” build succeeds by exploiting some mechanic and would not be considered a good “all-round” build.

A cheesy build doesn’t seek to engage in normal combat, reacting to other players’ skills and choosing what to do based on the situation. It just tries to do its thing (which is often very very effective). Eg. Dodge-spam thieves, The old Ham-Bow warrior build.

LilBiM.3581:

Alright. I have played for a bit and here’s my feedback:
1) Unlike the others that frequent this forum I do not support any high damage skill carrying evade frames, players should not have relative immunity while preparing to land a devastating hit (I feel the same for thieves as well). If you commit to these types of skills you are saying that I want to take BIG RISKS for BIG REWARDS.

I agree with you in theory, but..

• Why doesn’t that apply to everyone else?. Rocket Charge on hammer comes with built-in evades. Vault on daredevil. Whirlwind Attack on warrior. The entire Berzerker spec is about dealing ridiculous burst while being invulnerable to damage, immune to conditions for up to 20s, with perma-stab all while healing 1k/s passively. Where’s the risk there?

• Rifle is a 50% close-range weapon, so it needs some built-in defense, and Overcharged Shot doesn’t cut it because half the time it’ll eat stability, reflect, or a passive on-cc trait. Net Shot has the same problem except it’s also countered by resistance.

• Yes, Jump Shot deals high damage (up to 10k!) if you spec full glass. That’s already pretty high-risk when you consider Rifle’s lack of defense (see above). It is not spammable, it’s pretty slow and easily dodged. IMO, if thieves can spam 10k vaults, Engis ought to be able to do one evasive 10k movement attack on a 20s cooldown.

Yeah. That’d be nice, but if they haven’t fixed it in 5 years, I doubt they’ll start now.

It’s been ~2 years since I’ve been able to play my Rifle Engi in competitive pvp.

I miss it..

I guess to simplify a bit:

If you want to be competitive, you need a lot of on-demand condi clear. On engi, that means elixirs or purge gyro. Purge gyro doesn’t do anything else and pathing/aoe can be a problem, so it’s usually not worth wasting a skill slot on. To this end, I’d like to trade my elite for a regular skill (and our elites are really good! I just need another skill slot for condi clear if I want to survive). The alternative is playing Alchemy & Inventions, like every other PvP build.

I’d personally like to play Rifle in competitive pvp again (it’s been like 2 years..). I’d like to spec Tools and use some gadgets. I’d like to see duels that are more like a chess match on a point rather than playing the rotation (scrapper) or sorta-cheesy tag and harrass (condi p/p).

You’re right though in that it’s getting better. 2 viable builds are better than 1, but we’ve got a ways to go.

Yeah. Toolkit is almost mandatory with Rifle because it has no reliable defense. That recently nerfed 2s block on Gear Shield is a lifesaver.

It combos well too:
Overcharged Shot – Throw Wrench
Magnet – Pry Bar – Blunderbuss – Overcharged Shot – Jump Shot

Toolkit is just a good all-round flavourful engi utility kit.

I play rifle a lot, mostly for WvW. Rifle needs some serious balance touch-ups to make it playable (evades on Overcharged Shot and Jump Shot) and generally needs another kit to cover for its long-ish cooldowns. It’s not a weapon you want to camp in all the time – hence grenades. They combo well with Overcharged Shot and Net Shot, which want to keep your target at range and cc’d.

That said, if I had to swap grenades with anything, it’d probably be..

• Flamethrower – not as good with Rifle as it used to be now that it’s a condi weapon. You’d sort of be forced to play a hybrid/cele build. Still, the Juggernaut combo with Scrapper makes for some easy might stacking and good access to stability. That puts you in Firearms and Scrapper. It’d probably best to take Alchemy and go for the HGH / elixir condi cleanse to round out the build.
• Throw Mine – I’m not sure if this still works, but there used to be a full-glass zerker engi build using Throw Mine and its toolbelt skill for ridiculous close range burst. If you’re going this route, you’d probably take Toolkit, Rifle Turret, and the Static Discharge trait. I haven’t tried this build in a long time, but it was hard mode for sure.

Yeah.. I’m somewhat disappointed because I want more build diversity, not less…

We already rely SO MUCH on elixirs/egun for everything in pvp. It’d be nice if you could run like .. gadgets or something, but you can’t spare the skill slots when you need all the elixirs you can get to cleanse condi burst.

Honestly, I’d like to trade my elite skill slot for a regular skill slot. Then I could run a fun gadgets/rifle/scrapper decap build and use Purge Gyro for condi cleanse. It’d still suck compared to the meta builds (condi cheese, etc.), but at least it’d be playable.

Sigh.. too late. Someone moved it to the post graveyard engineer forum.

What do we have to do now to get someone’s attention? I propose racial slurs and swearing until a mod notices.

I like this idea.

EotM is a fun map. For me, this outweighs potential colour balance problems. Those can be fixed later.

But.. I worry that the average WvW-er is a brainless zergling and wouldn’t be able to handle change.

I (rifle engi) am happy to run across a fresh air ele or power mes in wvw. It’s always a fun fight decided by which of us dodges correctly or blocks the other’s burst. I don’t mind losing to that at all. It’s skillful. Waaaay more enjoyable than condi mes + bunker/healbot ele.

WTB evade on Jump Shot, Overcharged Shot (evade backward instead of self-knockback), Rocket Boots.

That would do wonders for Rifle survivability and would reduce the pain of Overcharged Shot-ing into a cc-proc trait or Jump Shot / Rocket Boots -ing and hitting some random cc mid-travel.

Rifle:
* Damage on Blunderbuss is nice, but would prefer power damage over condition
* It also doesn’t address the main weaknesses – risk vs reward on Overcharged Shot, Unable to land Jump Shot due to lack of evades. I’ve said it a million times, but Overcharged Shot can’t remain the way it is when there are auto-proc-on-cc traits out there like Last Stand.

Power/Condi:
* It’s really unclear how to optimize for damage given the number of hybrid skills we have.

SD buff is okay, but it still doesn’t work on any toolbelt skill that isn’t a single-target ability.

Rifle 5 needs needs needs a godkitten kittening EVADE. It’s such a high-risk skill right now because it’s a long animation and is interrupted by cc the whole time.
Evade backward instead of self-cc on Rifle 4 would also go a long way to making it playable. It’s even worse than Jump Shot. If you Overcharged Shot a Warrior with Last Stand, for example, you are just dead. They are not stunned. They get instant stability. They follow up with CC, burst and kill you while you’re knocked back.

SD would be nice if SD actually worked with half the skills. Good luck ever landing it with, say Orbital Strike, or Grenade Barrage. It just shoots into the ground most of the time unless you’re using Throw Wrench or Surprise Shot.

These changes don’t help with all the projectile hate in the game which, IMO is the main thing keeping non-hammer-scrapper engi out of pvp & wvw. All your attacks, grenades, elixir throws, etc. are still reflected, blocked, and nullified.

Still waiting for evade on rifle Jump Shot and Rocket Boots.

The goal is to create fun gameplay for both roaming thieves and other players.

This means the other player needs to feel that they have a chance to win the fight. If the other player can never kill the thief even if they’re winning the fight, they’ll just be frustrated and bored.

When I meet a non-thief class roaming, I know the two of us are going to have an exciting duel to the death. If either of us tries to flee, the other can reasonably give chase and use cc abilities to stop the runner.

When I meet a thief, I don’t want to fight because we might have an exciting duel for a few seconds, but I can’t win unless I happen to burst them 100-0 before they can teleport away. They’ll just keep escaping to 10k range, then return until I make a mistake or my cooldowns are up. This is pretty lame, so I leave. Now neither of us are having fun.

Last night during “late NA” hours (~7-9 PST), there were times when TC owned nothing – not a single objective. I imagine that is pretty demoralizing and leads to people just not playing. This isn’t fun for anyone. I don’t know what the solution is, but the Full numbers must be off somehow.

It’s not that the classes are OP. It’s that the fight isn’t fun.

Thieves in particular are able to harass, then escape whenever they feel like it. It’s exciting when you get jumped by a thief, then are able to turn the tables and counterattack. It’s demoralizing when you realize that you can never catch them. You basically have to hope that they’re careless or bad and accidentally let you burst them 100-0 before they dodge/sb/shadowstep away.

Even if you correctly predict the direction they’re going while stealthed, they just move too fast for any class to catch. Even if you land a stun or immobilize, they can break it on a much shorter cooldown than your cc.

So at this point, you realize that you can’t win. The thief might not be able to win either, but if the fight starts going badly for them, they’ll run. If it goes badly for you, you’ll die.

Frustrated with the asymmetry of this (and with nothing else to do on an empty borderland), you quit and go play Overwatch.

Re: roaming

The top tier roaming builds are too good at what they do:

Condi mesmer, Stance Zerker, Thief builds, etc. A player with a “normal” build can’t engage these and have a fun fight or even have a hope of winning, so they don’t engage unless they outnumber the target. This is no fun for anyone and leads to the ganking / running situations described above rather than the fun 1v1, 2v2, etc. fights that used to exist in this game.

FYI, the devs are doing a Reddit AMA right now if anyone wants to direct their attention away from the fluff (lord faren…) and toward the things that matter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5svug8/the_head_of_the_snake_devs_here_ask_us_anything/

Some perspective on Rifle:

I don’t know if any damage buff will compensate for the fact that the cc that rifle depends on just doesn’t work any more.

• Vs Warrior – Can’t Overcharged Shot because they’ll stunbreak and kill you while you’re self-cc’d – or Last Stand will proc Balanced Stance if they’re running it. Can’t Net Shot while they have resistance or stability, which is nearly always. Can’t Net Shot when they don’t have resistance or stab because movement skills break immob instantly on a shorter cooldown thatn net shot. Can’t Overcharged Shot while they’re in Zerk mode because of Eternal Champion. Etc. etc. You have range – yes, but they have a reflecting block and mobility. They can be on point and attacking much longer than you.

• Vs DH – I think this matchup is winnable for Rifle engi, though still unfavorable in a pvp situation because Guard/DH dumps traps on point and controls it, meaning you’ll lose the point for too long before you eventually win. Rifle Engi would like to OC shot them off the point, but can’t because of long-lasting DH blocks/aegis procs, and the fact that OC shot will launch you backward through Test of Faith, taking damage.

I won’t go through every class, but hopefully you get the idea. Rifle cc is ineffective and high-risk, therefore rifle is ineffective.

IMO, it would have to be a significant damage buff to compensate for that fact.

I don’t know what the solution is.. maybe unblockable Overcharged Shot? To me, that’d be a bit OP though considering it’s an instant CC. Backward evade on Overcharged shot could work. Jump Shot definitely needs evade.

Sigh.. It used to be before HoT power creep happened.

You could either run it with Kits (typically Grenades, ToolKit, etc.) or you could run HGH elixirs instead.

HoT and other updates killed build diversity.

• If I want to be competitive in pvp, I have to play the same (or 95% the same) build as everyone else.
• The top tier wvw roaming builds are too good at what they do compared to “normal” builds.
• There are too many passive traits that do too much now: cc-cancel traits (eg. Hunter’s Determination, Last Stand), Adrenal Health, to name a few.

In general, I used to like the pvp, because it was fast-paced act-react style combat. Now it just seems to be: spam all the things, rotate through all the defenses, repeat.

Vagrant.7206:

A fundamental difference with engineer is that we have to use slot skills for absolutely mission critical kit skills. No other class has that problem.

They tried to address that with the hammer, but the result is that in PvP, hammer is the only viable meta build, and the rest of our few weapons have been left in the dust.

They should have realized this when they designed hammer. We’ve only been complaining about it for a year and a half now and they still haven’t done anything to bring pistol/rifle/shield up to being playable.

Yeah. Great post, but it takes literal years for them to make balance updates to address these things, and they never get to the roots of the problem: projectiles vs projectile hate and underpowered forgotten skills & traits.

Ranged/Melee:
Rifle was designed around being hybrid melee/range, with cc to support that playstyle and act as defense vs a single opponent. That cc practically never works vs anyone now (reasons listed above), which makes Rifle nearly unplayable.

Power/Condi:
At launch, most weapons were designed with condi + power elements. Over time, and especially with HoT, anet has been designing pure power and pure condi weapons, and updating old weapons to be pure power or pure condi (see Warrior Rifle, for example). Engineer Rifle is long overdue for this sort of rework. You can bet that if Rifle had been designed in the last year or two, the Blunderbuss damage would be all direct.

Yeah.. Rifle was meant to be a mixed-range weapon but that was back before HoT happened.

In theory, what you wanted to do was something like:

Jump Shot on top of an enemy, surprising them; dodge their counterattack; hit them at close range with Blunderbuss, then dodge again if necessary and hit them with Overcharged Shot to cc them and put some distance between you; Net Shot to keep them there and keep pew pew-ing until you can repeat that.

(obviously, other skills go in there too depending on your build. Eg: Magnet-PryBar-OverchargedShot-ThrowWrench-NetShot-GrenadeBarrage, for example)

But it’s really difficult to get any of those combos off any more. CC was supposed to be Rifle’s utility and defense, but it no longer works. Overcharged Shot is more likely to hit defense like block or aegis or reflect, or a projectile wall than not. When you do land it, your opponent is likely to have stability or have the cc canceled by a passive trait. Net Shot is a pretty weak cc to begin with, but it’s almost insulting how easily it’s countered by thieves and warriors’ immob-breaking traits.

You mean the Rocket Boots damage buff that no one wanted, or the Rocket Jump “buff” that was actually a nerf because it took guaranteed damage from the start of the skill and moved it to the end of a near-1s travel animation with no evade?

IMO, it’s not really the aoe that causes zerging. It’s the reward structure.

If 5 players kill 1 player, they all get rewarded. It’s faster and safer and there’s no real downside. It’s boring, yes, but running back 5 minutes across the desert borderlands because you died in a 1v1 is boring too.

Things I find to be too good:

• Ancient Seeds – Very strong trait if the target doesn’t have a condi clear ready. Then, if they do clear the immob, they get snared again unless they manage to move away quickly. Considering this is on a 10s cooldown, that’s a little low for such a potentially fight-ending trait. I would increase the cooldown or lower the snare duration.
• Adrenal Health – heals more from one trait than from most classes’ active heals + sustain skills combined. When you take into account this goes on a class with heavy armour, long invulns, and resistance, you’ve got an OP healing machine.
• Eternal Champion – long-lasting, high-uptime stability is dumb.
• All the traits that cancel cc. These are usually on a <1m cooldown and passively swing fights wihout the user really doing anything. The attacker sees a window and goes for their big cc move, only to have it blanked by a passive trait. These might be more balanced if there was an indicator on the status bar so the attacker could use a lesser cc first.

Yep..

* turret engi – unplayable: nerfed hard back when it was meta. Arguably a good thing, but sad that they’re so useless now

• power rifle – very bad: I have run this build for years and still use it. Not enough damage to justify the risk. Too much projectile hate. Not enough sustain/evade to keep up with HoT
• scrapper hammer – good: anet has been chipping away at this build since HoT was released and it’s (IMO) nearly balanced. Needs trait reworks for the ones they killed.
• condi p/p – decent: depends on the opponent’s condi clear. Risk/reward ratio still not great. Projectile problems.
• condi p/s – bad: shield still not good enough
• hgh – works, but throw elixir being a projectile is a problem when there’s reflect everywhere

Crinn.7864:

coro.3176:

I have video of a fight where I take 13k!!! ticks of condi. I immediately start casting my heal (only clears 2 condis ’cause lol engi, but gotta try, right?). My heal is 75% of the way through casting when I take the second tick and die.

13k ticks would be the work of 5 or so sources in most cases.

Do you realize how hard 5 or power classes would hit you?

You can see power damage coming and dodge or block it (with the exception of insta-teleport thief steal+venom combos). You can’t be constantly clicking on allies to see which have conditions on them. Furthermore, it’s very difficult to tell when one near you is being epi’d and whether you’ll take a few conditions and not care, or take 13k ticks and die instantly.

Stance Zerker is a prime example of this.

I barely know how to play it, but I can charge in and 1v3 people, bursting people down, cc-locking, getting kills + stab stomps relying almost entirely on passive traits. My gameplay is basically: spam all the weapon skills, zerk, burst, attack, burst, attack, burst, maybe run away a bit. Repeat. I feel like a beast that only sustained pressure by 2+ people can take down. Last Stand, Defy Pain, Eternal Champion, and Adrenal Health are doing all the work for me.

Meanwhile, on my off-meta Rifle/Nades kit engi, I know every button press. Every skill I use is with purpose. Thousands of hours on it – It’s my main, and I’m playing the keyboard like a piano.. Yet.. I feel really weak. I can’t take any meta builds 1v1 in a reasonable amount of time. My escapes and sustain are sub-par. I’m reduced to +1-ing fights, but even there I’d be better off playing a HoT meta class like Scrapper or DH with lots of passives and built-in attack/defense skills.

Why would I play a high-skill, high-risk no-reward build when the HoT elites just do it better and easier?

It’s fine with low numbers of conditions, but the fact that you can stack so many on lords, downed players, etc. means that you can burst people down in 1-2 ticks. That’s too powerful.

I have video of a fight where I take 13k!!! ticks of condi. I immediately start casting my heal (only clears 2 condis ’cause lol engi, but gotta try, right?). My heal is 75% of the way through casting when I take the second tick and die.

There’s no counterplay to that really. There’s no obvious tell on the player being epi’d. Maybe if there was an orange circle under them, it’d be fair, or if there was a limit on the number of stacks being transferred. Condi shouldn’t be burst.

All the usual power burst is dodgeable and there’s an obvious animation or red circle to dodge – not so with epidemic.

They both need evades. Consider other HoT movement skills like Rocket Charge (deals damage, evades, moves) or Ancestral Grace (long, fast movement, blast finisher, evades), or SotM (evades, deals damage, long fast movement).

I think it’d only be fair for Rocket Jump to evade while moving.

..but those are weapon skills. Rocket Boots is a utility slot skill. If we’re going to dedicate a utility slot to an escape/movement skill, it needs to be as good or better than the skills listed above. Otherwise, what’s the point? I can’t count the number of times I’ve Rocket Boots’d away only to be hit by cc mid-air, or killed during travel, or used Rocket Boots, only to be caught by a thief that can just spam sb5 or other classes with better movement skills. IMO, it should go farther, faster, and evade.

All of the passive traits that trigger on cc can kitten right off. I’m with the OP on that one. Remove them all from the game.

Example: Last Stand

I’m using Engineer Rifle facing a roaming Zerker coming at me. The warrior doesn’t have stability, so I go for Overcharged Shot to knock them back. But wait! The warrior has Last Stand proc which gives them stability. Since I’m self-cc’d from OC shot, they rush in and kill me.

There’s no icon on their bar for Last Stand. There’s no way I could have known about that trait aside from just assuming every warrior is running it (which they are, but .. come on). There ought to be reasonable counterplay to things.

I honestly don’t play as much as I used to, though I have thousands of hours on my Engi and it is my most-played class. I dislike the Scrapper playstyle, so I stick with Rifle but it isn’t viable any more.

I know every button press, every trait, every skill on my build like the back of my hand. I know my kit cooldowns instinctively. I know my matchups with other classes and how they should be countered.

… but for all that, it doesn’t help at all vs the meta builds. I can’t beat a stance zerker with my rifle engi unless they are absolutely terrible at warrior. Can’t cc them. Can’t out-damage their healing – just have to run.

I fold to condi mesmer because my defense is all button-presses and mobility, which takes double damage from torment and confusion.

I die to thief because Basi Venom goes right through my Gear Shield even when I anticipate the Steal.

This is frustrating. What’s more frustrating is that I can hop on Warrior (which I barely know), spec Stance Zerker, and go wreck people 1v3 without even paying attention to my health. I can jump on DH (which I also barely know), spam allthetraps + virtues and get easy kills.

Stand The Wall.6987:

net shot – speed up the projectile a bit
blunderbuss – fine as is
overcharged shot – self cc is weird but changing it would mean changing the skill completely. maybe add an aoe effect?
jump shot – add evade frames, no aftercast, instacast, maybe add a blinding effect to the first attack and a daze to the second.

Net shot – they already did this. You can hit people with it now, but the problem is, most of the time you shouldn’t, as they have Block, Stability, Reflect, Projectile shield, or evade.

Yeah. I think with Overcharged Shot, a backward evade instead of self-knockback would suffice, as long as the animation is smooth. But it’s also countered by the ubiquitous block/stab/reflect/projectilehate, or auto-proc-on-cc traits.

Jump Shot 100% needs evades + less vulnerable cast animation to be competitive.

I miss Engi Rifle in pvp…

Net Shot – is a pretty short snare to begin with, so landing it isn’t exactly game-changing. I mean, compare with Ancient Seeds on Druid. That’s a trait. This is a weapon skill. Besides that, it will often hit reflect or other projectile hate, and if you do land it, your opponent probably has stability or long-lasting resistance.

Overcharged Shot – used to be the reason to pick Rifle, but now it is near-unusable because you have to wait SO long to find a window to use it, plus you’re self-cc-ing, and if your opponent has reflect or stab, or an auto-proc-on-cc trait, you’ve just screwed yourself over and will probably lose the fight or have to disengage.

Jump Shot – Is really hard to land. It’s a long animation that leaves you vulnerable to damage and cc and gives your opponents plenty of time to react. At least hammer’s Rocket Charge provides evades so you can dive into the fray without immediately dying to damage or a knockdown. Rifle is a weapon that also needs to get in close to deal damage, so it needs the defense to match.

Sure. That’d be nice. However, I’d like to play the game sometime this year.

As it is, I haven’t been playing as much because the lack of build diversity has made it uninteresting. I know I’m going to run into the same zerker build on every single roaming warrior in WvW. Every Scrapper in pvp is running the same thing. Same condi chrono. Same DH with traps/symbols, same Druid (you can’t even play base ranger any more it’s so bad).

I much preferred pre-June2015 where non-meta builds could hold their own against the rest. Sure, there were eras where certain builds got out of hand – (turret engi, hambow, cele), but on balance, you weren’t forced to run any particular spec if you wanted to be competitive.

I mean specifically the complaint that base traitlines are not as good as elite specs. That is, almost every single pvp build uses the elite spec and most classes don’t have competitive non-elite spec builds. If they are indeed balancing things, they’re sure taking their time about it. It’s been this way for well over a year now.

It’s more the free-stacking conditions + epi that results in 1-shotting people without an obvious tell to dodge.

IMO, it should absolutely transfer every condi on a thing to its targets, but it shouldn’t transfer more than a few stacks of each. You shouldn’t be able to wipe 5 people instantly because you epi’d a down or lord with 100 stacks of bleed.

The Elite spec balance issue has been discussed since HoT, but as far as I know the devs have been silent on it. It’s weird because you know they must be reading these comments. They reply on other topics, and “HoT powercreep” has got to be the most common phrase on the forums. It kind of makes you wonder if it is really a conspiracy to sell expansions.