Guild Wars 2

censord.8679:

With the current rate of the inflation of items, i can’t see how causal and new players will every catch up, dungeons was always a good way to keep up with the inflation. So my questions are: 1)How do you plan to counter this without forcing people to do fractals, raids champ/Event farms and SW chest farm? 2) Will the rich get richer and is the poor going to have a hard time to keep up?

Not sure you know how inflation works. Adding gold to the game through dungeons makes it go up while adding mats that you sell on the TP makes it go down. So this is actually a positive change for new and returning players because it will keep their items and gold valuable. This game has seen very low inflation and even some deflation over the last year on core goods. I really wish people would go look at prices over time on gw2spidy before coming here and shouting about rampant inflation and gold farm.

Ohoni.6057:

Hence if a player let S (the set of activity that they do not enjoy) to the entire game except for the reward part, (which by all legal definition such S allows to exists). Then you can trivially say the entire game is grindy. True nevertheless but also pointless.

If someone does not enjoy any of the game then they should not be playing it at all, and presumably won’t be. The reason people put up with portions that they do not enjoy is because it allows them to access the portions that they do enjoy. That is why the goal of good game design is to allow players to pursue the parts they do enjoy as much as you possibly can, while minimizing the time they’re forced to spend doing things that they do not enjoy, and since each person’s favorites are different, this means giving players as much consequence-free choice as possible.

So you DO understand that sometimes you have to play things you do not like, you are just quibbling about specific numbers (that you made up in your head at this point)?

After reading your posts its pretty clear you want the game to reward whatever YOU would like for the type of content you are currently doing. Forget specific rewards being tied to certain places or of difficulty at all. As long as it fits what YOU want it to be then its ok and all other implementations are silly grinds or worse. Where are you alternatives? I keep seeing you complain in thread after thread about design decisions but you never posit a solution you just keep complaining.

Spurnshadow.3678:

sicsempertyrannis.3510:

In this new age of MMOs, when the cash shop has replaced monthly subscriptions, you should assume that matters of the in-game economy, gold sales, etc. should take priority over player content.

Incentivizing HoT-exclusive content and encouraging gem purchases to acquire gold (as a means of circumventing increased grind requirements) are necessary measures to keep this product profitable.

This. Amazing how so many of you don’t get it.

Its amazing how some of you don’t understand the basic economics of reducing liquid gold from a single part of the game world. He made it very clear that overall player income isn’t going down but they needed to make slack so that new content can be rewarding without massive inflation. “New age of MMOs” makes you sound like an elitist kitten who thinks they alone see the truth. Take off the tinfoil please.

If some of you have never played games with terrible inflation then I can forgive the ignorance but any of you “veteran” gamers should be ashamed for going chicken little on a change like this. Look at inflation in other game worlds and how quickly people have to resort to bartering with other in game items because the currency of the world is useless.

I am hard pressed to think of a single other persistent game where the gold generation hasn’t gotten so out of hand that even basic items start costing thousands or millions of in game gold. Look at FF14, a competently made game, the in game currency there is borderline worthless and EVERYONE complains about the insane prices on goods because inflation is so high. How about WoW? Vanilla gold had meaning and even a couple gold was a lot of money, now players sling tens of thousands around like its nothing.

Also, if you think for a second about the lack of sub you realize that it leads to people taking a break and coming back to the game so you have to KEEP INFLATION LOW so that when these players return THEIR GOLD STILL HAS VALUE.

So did the OP and other people miss the part where they said that the PvP and WvW portion could be purchased on the TP or did they just instantly kneejerk and post here?

ITT: People who like to use the word meta as if its a static thing that changes only right after a patch or something.

The meta evolves and changes as people realize what is going on in the game and react to what others are doing.
The reason bunker builds are being played more is BECAUSE power got such a huge buff in the last patch. Everyone tried their professions version of glass cannon when the patch hit and just as quickly realized that not much had changed. Mes/Teef are still the kings of zerker burst and Mes especially holds down other glass cannon professions/builds.
So what do you do as the non Mes/Teef when you see glass cannon zerker not working? You build bunker and see if that works. Its really not that hard to grasp.

Velimere.7685:

Domino.1359:

On top of that, these keys are meant to be bought in the gem store for profit. This is a free gift to you.

It didn’t used to be that way. I used to farm a key in the span of 15 minutes until ArenaNet took that away. After that, I was able to farm one for every 8 Tomes of Knowledge I earned in PvP until ArenaNet decided to take that away too.

Now I can only farm one once a week.

Sorry, but I don’t consider something “a free gift” when it’s something I used to be able to get a lot very easily and very quickly. If they wanted everyone to pay for keys and not be able to farm them, then they shouldn’t have made keys something that people can farm in the first place. They literally just set themselves up to kitten off a bunch of people.

In the first place, the Black Lion Chest key itself is unarguably a statistical scam. No matter how many keys you buy, you will statistically never have spent less gold or gems than if you were to purchase whatever desired contents directly.

The entitlement is strong with this one.

ANet decided that keys were undervalued because of the ease with which they have been farmed up in the past so they made them harder to farm. Does that really require these tinfoil hat conspiracy theory type threads? If you don’t like the chests then why are you complaining about keys at all?

DresdenAllblack.1249:

Just. Another. Time. Gate

The absurdity of this statement in an MMO forum is awesome.

The blog post makes it sound like there aren’t more ranks but that you unlock a Reward Track for each 10 ranks you already have.

Next people are going to ask that Raids be able to be completed with 1-2 player parties because “its still a party, this game is play how you want”.

ANet has decided that 1-2 people is NOT a Guild for the purposes of favor generation. Rational people would say that of course 1-2 people is not a Guild anymore than they would call 1-2 people a group. Some serious SJW style arguments going on in this thread.

Turbotef.9203:

Eh, I find that its mostly the wannabe hardcores and tryhards that make these kind of arguments and assumptions tbh but I’ll bite still.

Cleared 10 and 25-man Ulduar and ICC on my enhance shaman in 2009 and 2010, I then main tanked (after my one main tank quit the game) and cleared heroic 10-man Firelands, Dragon Soul, and the first three conjoined raids of MoP, then switched servers and switched back to my shaman as melee and did the rest of the expansion in the 10-man heroic and stopped at Heroic Garrosh pre-nerf. I stopped raiding in WoW with 3 Mythic bosses under my belt and almost all of heroic BRF done. Came in the top 10 10-man DPS parses a few times as well. But that’s cool guy, you keep making assumptions.

I just don’t like raiding anymore with a static group and just prefer the randoms now. I do fight the non-DF (their version of LFR which is actually way harder than WoW’s) bosses on FFXIV here and there though. Its gets old after doing it with various groups over 10+ years, and yes, its still raiding regardless of what you say or any other salty individual wannabe hardcore says on other forums.

There is nothing wrong with options is all I’m saying and it will not hurt the game to have them no matter what anyone says. I still however think its stupid shoehorning raiding of this sort into a game like this though. I bought this game because it didn’t have this type of content in it. This I cancelled my preorder of HoT. I’ll snag it on a $10 sale later after they wise up or fail.

I have never seen someone simultaneously call others out for being tryhards/hardcores while flaunting how hardcore they themselves are, gratz on that cognitive dissonance.

Also FF14 is not the best example of a well designed game currently. Heavensward had so little content outside the new Alex raids that people are already bored af and its been less than two months since they launched the xpack, lets see if 3.1 gives some real content back to that game.

ANet has not “shoehorned” in Raids, they listened to their player base who wanted “challenging content” and decided Raids would fill that void in their game world. Heart of Thorns has plenty of other content for the more casual crowd to enjoy without ever having to go into the Raids.

I will probably never do enough Raiding to get the legendary armor as I enjoy sPvP and WvW much more than PvE content. However, I also do not feel the need to come here and tell others that the content they enjoy should be watered down or that the rewards from that content should be made trivial out of some misplaced need for my own kitten enlargement.

This skill costs us an entire utility slot, has an absurd cooldown, is AI controlled AND you need to hit with a pre-skill first. For all those drawbacks this thing should be the hardest hitting attack in the entire game. Any amount of damage under 10k is too low for all the things you give up to take this garbage.

You can make a really strong pvp build with Firearms/Alch/Inventions.

Take P/S, Healing Turret, Bomb Kit, EGun, Elixer B, Mortar Kit.
Cele Amulet, Pack Runes
Firearms (2,1,3). Alchemy (2,3,1). Inventions (1,3,2)

You are extremely tanky can easily handle conditions from nearly all other builds. Fields for days, easy might stacking, high fury uptime, HPS is nuts with Super Elixer + Backpack Regen + Regen Boon + Elixer Shell on a point. Its something like 1k HP/s with all of them ticking. The real weakness of the build is that you CANNOT lock people down or chase them but for conquest its incredible. You can also blind spam with Flash Shell + Smoke Bomb + Static Shot.

I think it should be clear to anyone who has tried Scrapper that its in an Alpha state design-wise and that something else existed VERY late into development of HoT and got removed/reworked at the last minute.

Think back to the reveal stream where they DIDNT EVEN SHOW the class mechanic of Scrapper or to the initial reveal trailer where the G(yro)arbage floated around the Engineer’s head. My guess is at during the livestream reveal Function G(yro)arbage wasn’t in the game yet and only the placeholder “Gyro Smash” text existed. This whole thing stinks of poor project management.

Plok.5873:

Toolbelt skills still kitten up ability queuing; choosing the once so popular Static Discharge trait further deteriorates it.

Hey Anet, engineer skill chains are difficult enough without this issue.

HOW IS THIS NOT FIXED!?!?!

Seriously it has been messed up since June, this is not a small issue or a little bug. It makes static discharge builds basically unplayable and makes using any toolbelt skill that has a cast time a total chore.

ANet fixed the skill queue bug in Rev the week after it appeared and yet in the LIVE game they let this linger since June!

Pathetic.

It would be awesome and flavorful if you used the fuel mechanic as a reset of cooldown.

The way it would work is that if your Gyro survives (lol) for its full duration and its fuel runs out then it “flies back” (please not actually as the AI has a hard enough time) to the Scrapper to be “refueled” by resetting its cooldown.

Blast and Shredder wouldn’t work with this but they are so bad that unless they are reworked entirely ANet may as well just delete them from the game since ZERO people will slot them.

Rev Hammer AA hits from 1200 range (more than grenades) for massive damage as well. Hammer 2 (Coalescence of Ruin) hits for something like 4k – 9k depending on double hits from the same range.

Git gud bro.

Why would someone take Iron Blooded AND Elixers anyway? HGH is better in every conceivable way if you are also slotting Elixers on your bar.

This highlights everything that is wrong with Iron Blooded right now, you need Elixers to get boons but without HGH the uptime is too low to matter.

Also, that Engineer is literally doing zero damage so just kill his team then focus him down.

lorddarkflare.9186:

Ricky Rouse.1583:

lorddarkflare.9186:

Engie DPS rotations do not look like that. At all.

Have you ever seen “The Rotation” for burn Engineer that spans 45+ skills?

It is exactly that, down to what I said: Shrapnel, Barrage, Blowtorch, Poison Darts, Fire Bomb, Concussion bomb, ect ect ect with grenade auto attacks in between. It is using high damage skills off cooldown with no thought involved. Blowtorch shows up like 4 times in the rotation because it’s literally just using them as they come up off cooldown.

Also, i’m talking about PvE, not PvP.

Look at what you originally posted and what you just said now.

That rotation at most requires you use two skills from one kit back to back. It is pretty involved, requires good knowledge of cooldowns and most importantly: does significantly less damage if you cannot keep up with it. The power rotation is more forgiving in this regard.

Now, after you have mastered it, it is certainly ‘mindless’ but nowhere near as much as just auto attacking.

And by the way, unless Hammer AA somehow manages to severely outclass skills 2 – 5 on every kit, optimal DPS will STILL require long rotations that at most use hammer AA like like it does grenade AA.

The point is this: Kits would need a massive nerf or Hammer AA severely overpowered (to the point of outclassing all weapons and kits) for kitless builds to be optimal. At least in PvE.

You are talking about semantics and not his actual point at all. If they leave the damage as it is now, Engineer DOES NOT CHANGE when taking Scrapper. You will still use the same rotation except slot 2/3 hammer skills into where you used to use rifle for the same overall effect. Scrapper does NOTHING to up our build diversity which was supposed to be the point of Elites. Scrapper was SUPPOSED to be a lockdown melee bruiser but what we got was just another version of rifle. In fact I think the “lockdown” on rifle is far better than what we see on hammer.

Right now Scrapper fails its primary task of giving us a new playstyle. Releasing it like this will change NOTHING about how engineer plays. It makes no utilities worth taking over kits, the class mechanic is flat out broken both in programming and in gameplay.

Moving some of the damage to the AA and giving hammer a reason to be camped with some synergy between its skills would let us take gasp utilities other than kits. Gadgets, Turrets, Gyros and Elixers (not S or X) would actually make it on to our bar.

Where is the LOCKDOWN on the LOCKDOWN spec?

Function gyro and the minors are just hilariously bad. I understand why they didnt show it on the stream. They KNOW its not acceptable right now but they waited far too long to get this spec programmed and designed.

Good:
Hammer – Acceptable damage and utility. However, if the plan was to let us camp a weapon and not HAVE to take kits then it fails. This needs a ton of additional synergy with other skills and itself to be worth using for more than a quick rotation and back to kits.
Non-minor Traits – Overall pretty good, some are very good and some are just OK but thats all lines in general.

Awful:
F-Gyro – NOT A CLASS MECHANIC. All there is to say really, its underwhelming in its objective as the class mechanic AND its horribly programmed and balanced right now. This is 100% fail.
Minor Traits – For a “lockdown” build none of these do anything for your lockdown. 25% duration increase to our TWO available stun skills is just a joke right? F-Gyro being useless makes the first two minors even more hilariously bad than they already were.
Gyro Utilities – Some cool ideas buried in total trash execution. Bulwark, Shredder and Purge could all be good if they were not tied to AI with zero hp AND low durations AND high cooldowns. How strong do you think AI is in this game? Have you ever used it? WE ALREADY HAVE TURRETS THAT SUFFER FROM THE SAME FAILURES WHY REPEAT THIS!?!?!

I love engineer and the flavor of scrapper is great but the execution right now is just sad. Engineer already suffers from being underpowered compared to other classes right now and Scrapper does nothing to address this. For the supposed lockdown build we have very little actual lockdown and since super speed doesnt stack and is a pain to generate it barely feels like a theme.

Did they fix the SD // Bunker Down skill Q bug yet?

The knee jerk QQ in this thread is just glorious.

The salt is real. Also paragraphs are a thing.

I must play a totally different game than everyone else. I occasionally see a full premade, maybe every 20 games or so, MUCH MUCH more often I see duo/trio’s together. In fact if you see a full premade in your game as a solo Q then they are all individually poor players since teaming up gives your an artificial MMR boost in the system. I wish ANet would just show MMR and teams the same way DOTA2 does at the end of a match. Letting people think the opponents are always a “full guild premade” just encourages the QQ.

People really need to accept that sometimes you lose and it IS you. Sometimes you could have played better and it wasn’t unfair, you just played poorly or need to get more skilled.

ITT: People who have never played a MOBA long enough to realize that MMR systems are inherently “streaky”.

The matchmaker tries to force your overall win/loss to 50% over time. So in some games, yes, you have less than a 50% chance to win on purpose. HOWEVER, if you do win them then your MMR increases at a greater rate than it would for a 50+% chance to win match. This is how your MMR will increase over time until you hit a wall of skill and stay at 50%.

The real problem is that people blame “premades” and “unfair matches” rather than their own failures or misplays.

Just take a look at the person posting their stats on this thread, they have an 80% winrate in custom arenas, i.e. not matchmaking games that they clearly stack with friends against hotjoiners. This same person has less than 50% win in unranked/ranked, meaning that they think their losses are to “premades” but more likely the losses result from bad habits picked up playing EZ custom games.

I have been running an very similar build with more condi focus: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-ZRw;2Z;09-f6FQFx0;9;4jlk;0138056057;4Vo0;3l6Uwl6Uw0j

Mine focuses more on sustain through Elixer Shell + Super Elixer + Backpack Regen + Regen Boon and damage through Condi.

I would like to replace Inventions with Scrapper and take hammer and regen trait from scrapper along with the defence GM.

Flumek.9043:

Hello.
I dont want to whine,
especially when Reaper AND Scrapper are designed as melee brawlers and therefore have great sustained options to back it up.

If its fine, then fine, just a heads up warning. Ofc everything else will also get adjusted on our BW3 feedback. Agree/ Disagree ?

Lets wait and see how it shakes out in game. Engineer is pretty weak overall currently, especially in mitigation of damage. Its the reason people take TK and Elixer S and the Alch traitline and/or Soldiers.

This spec is designed to be melee and like you said, needs the toughness if you want to stand in the middle of a fight.

Function Gyro is an insane new mechanic. Its simple but awesome and opens up tons of new gameplay.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Much to your dismay, Revenant’s do need a weakness.

“Much to your dismay, Revenant’s do need a weakness, unlike Ele’s who have no weakness and are perfect.”

FTFY

Ventari is awesome in concept and terrible in practice. Summoning the tablet every time you swap to the legend quickly feels like a chore. Moving it around with you while you travel IS a chore. The whole thing is just poorly thought out from a mechanical perspective.

I think the tablet would be much more useful if you could have it move on its own in some way. Maybe it circles around you, maybe it sits in a fixed position as you move. You could turn this function off if you want to have it stay in a single location on the ground but as it is, the game has too much other things going on to try and wrangle a slow moving tablet that has a cast time to move it.

This whole debate sounds like people complaining about the Stealth mechanic.

ANet not only allows stealth but buffed it massively on Mesmer in the last patch, why is this skill somehow more OP?

All of the same arguments work against stealth skills, there is no counterplay to a stealth burst. You survive and keep fighting, same thing with UA. At least I can SEE the Rev before he uses the skill. Let me know when they actually nerf Mes/Teef stealth and we can talk about skills like this being OP.

Isn’t non-stat or gear based progression exactly what the whole community wanted? I know that I love the new mastery system and am really excited to see what else it has in store for us, in the small section of VB alone there are tons of things you can do with the masteries that aren’t just MOAR POWER!!!!

Ya the mobs are very fun actually and require at least a modicum of thinking.

The new map was confusing for a couple minutes but once you follow an event chain you understand it.

Not sure if people are actually just terrible at playing the game or what but the new mobs are a refreshing change of pace. You actually have to press more than a single button to kill them and manage gasp your healing skill.

Zalavaaris.5329:

Yea unfortunately all of my wow raiding friends left wow when they more or less disolved 10 man heroic raiding guilds. I tried to recruit them over here as i’m an avid player of both games. Instead they went to ff14 and they said there’s so much to do that they refuse to even try the free version. The time spent away from ff14 when they could be raiding isn’t worth their hard drive space. It’s sooooo sad because raiding with gw2 combat is going to truly be a unique raiding experience. And collecting legendary precursor armor that leads to an epic journey to craft the ultimate godly looking gear is going to make it even better.

Interesting how different people can be. My friends who play FF14 were complaining that the Xpack didn’t really add a whole lot once you level up your primary Job. It was a level grind through some new zones that consisted of the same linear fights over and over to level. Then new raids which are slowly being phased in like the GW2 ones will be. Right now they all do their one raid a week for the new Alexander raid and then go back to twiddling their thumbs or playing other games (like GW2).

StarCraft 2 is so eSports that Blizzard had to make the game AI crappier so your APM was higher just to make it “competitive”. RTS is dead and SC2 is a prime example.

MOBAs are eSport because they are slow as balls and easy to watch. Same with CS being eSports. People fail to mention that all games that are actually watched as eSports are ones that are slow and SIMPLE visually to understand. GW2 is AWFUL to watch if you don’t already know what all the moves are and even then its a glitterfest during fights with more than 2 people. DOTA2 is also starting to fall into this with Valves horrible art style immortal sets cluttering everything up with glitter.

That said, ANet does have a ton of balance work and backend systems that need to be added if they want the sPvP scene to take off.

I am hard pressed to think of a single class based game of any genre being eSports outside of MOBAs and they get around it by having a max of 4 active skills on any character.

SH is awesome and i basically only pvp these days.

ITT: people with rose colored glasses about GW1. Best PVP EVER!! Yes thats why almost no one played that game… Stronghold is casual and too much PVE… LETS ADD DRAGONS TO A GAME MODE!!!!!

Phineas Poe.3018:

displacedTitan.6897:

Alchemy is far and away the best line and is mandatory, Firearms is almost mandatory on power or condi, Tools is OK but the best GM trait breaks the minor (wtf), Inventions is just bad Alchemy and Explosives is 100% trash.

It doesn’t take much to figure out why devs don’t comment here often. Some people just clearly don’t understand this class and its design. It must be so emotionally degrading reading people clearly having no vision for what they’re trying to do with the profession and yet bashing their work anyway.

Inventions as a tree is very, very strong if you just sit down and look at the traits. It offers huge defensive increases that Alchemy can’t cover. Alchemy does offer a lot, certainly, but it does so more in the form of condition removal through Transmute and Alchemical Tinctures.

Sometimes I feel like we are playing a different game Phineas. I love Inventions and used it both pre-patch when it really sucked and post-patch when it is just bad Alchemy.

You talk about these traits like we live in a vacuum where other professions skills and builds don’t matter. There is a reason the meta builds are all taking Alchemy and HGH: condi clear/might/invulns and invis are just better than what Inventions gives you. I love me some Mecha Legs and Bunker Down but it cant compete in the current meta with Elixer X’s ability to shut people down OR Elixer S’s ability to get us out of a jam. The problem is that Inventions doesn’t help any of our utilities, it TRIES to help turrets but since they are AWFUL and the two turret traits are also AWFUL it just becomes a worse version of alchemy.

Hell Alchemy suffers from the problem that it has TWO minors that HGH benefits and synergizes with which causes the other two GMs to be completely passed over.

The Devs SHOULD feel bad about the lack of synergy in our traitlines. Why does a Tools GM break the first minor? Why in Alchemy can you not take HGH with Iron Blooded since, you know, Elixers are our only boon source? Why does Explosives revolve entirely around grenades? Where is the Med-Kit trait that makes it useful? Where is the cross spec synergy, if you look at other professions they have traits that synergize across specs which make builds better. Engineer has almost ZERO synergy outside of Alchemy with HGH + Hidden Flask and Alchemical Tinctures.

Engineer during the original spec preview stream was half built and you can tell they rushed to finish the class given all the bugs and the total lack of synergy. We have so many traits that do not deserve to be standalone or that are just poorly thought out.

I thought the “vision” for the Engineer was a “jack-of-all-trades, master of none” kind of thing but then I saw Ele and realized that they have THE SAME vision but also get MASSIVE synergy. If they want to differentiate the two classes they need to give Engi a niche. Make us have ZERO synergy as a DESIGN but make all of our Specs have AWESOME individual traits. This half measure just highlights the fact that ANet has no idea what Engineers are supposed to be right now.

Skill queuing on Bunker Down and Static Discharge still around I imagine?

Its not like this makes builds with either of these traits an exercise in frustration or anything…

GrandHaven.1052:

displacedTitan.6897:

A small range increase does not make up for the fact that you are totally vulnerable in the middle of a fight with bombs.

This does nothing to solve the problems Engineer currently faces. I am glad they fixed it but we are still SOL as far as professions are concerned. Once they nerf Ele and Mes we can talk about viable builds again. As it is now, Engi just doesn’t cut it. Alchemy is far and away the best line and is mandatory, Firearms is almost mandatory on power or condi, Tools is OK but the best GM trait breaks the minor (wtf), Inventions is just bad Alchemy and Explosives is 100% trash. Forge better bring some serious buffs.

Also, what about all the utilities that are totally useless right now?!?! Gadgets are total junk and so are Turrets (other than HT).

Please elaborate on why firearms is mandatory?
I feel like explosives is mandatory even though its a weird unsynergetic bunch of majors.

I think you just explained it, the major traits range from the are you kidding 5% extra dmg if they have vuln to the WTF were they thinking Short Fuse. The adepts are garbage, garbage, Grenadier (if not nades then also garbage). GM traits are OK if you have mortar, 15% are you kidding and WHY DOES THIS HAVE AN ICD???

I guess I should have said with Nades you can go Explosives and for anything else Firearms.

Firearms has traits for everything. Two condi traits in the 50% increase and increased condi dmg., 10% crit chance + 20% crit chance in the bottom two. The middle two traits are iffy, rifle recharge and 10% attack speed is mediocre and the procing vuln/swift is good for the combo with Invigorating Precision. The GMs are also pretty solid, Jugg is fun if not amazing, Modified ammo is good for a power build in a group with condi users and IP is obvious.

A small range increase does not make up for the fact that you are totally vulnerable in the middle of a fight with bombs.

This does nothing to solve the problems Engineer currently faces. I am glad they fixed it but we are still SOL as far as professions are concerned. Once they nerf Ele and Mes we can talk about viable builds again. As it is now, Engi just doesn’t cut it. Alchemy is far and away the best line and is mandatory, Firearms is almost mandatory on power or condi, Tools is OK but the best GM trait breaks the minor (wtf), Inventions is just bad Alchemy and Explosives is 100% trash. Forge better bring some serious buffs.

Also, what about all the utilities that are totally useless right now?!?! Gadgets are total junk and so are Turrets (other than HT).

Wow the state of Engineer is just so sad right now. Nearly every build in this thread has the exact same trait set ups, ANet really screwed the pooch with the spec update for Engineers.

Just another broken buggy Engineer skill that ANet has overlooked for weeks. Good thing we can run builds without TK /s

How is this not fixed yet?

No reason to play right now as an engineer and hardly a reason to play anything outside Ele/Mes which is why more and more games are filling up with those classes. Every build I see posted is Alch, Tools, Explosives/Firearms and take TK and Elixer S. OMG the DIVERSITY.

ANet is just awful with balancing in a timely manner OR bug fixing so I would expect the situation to be bad for another 3 months or so.

TGI FRIDAY.6275:

Nothing. I didn’t pre-purchase because I don’t think everything they’ve shown/announced is worth the 50$. Kudos to the easy to please. Major kudos to the people who shelled 100$ for the gems. You must really love this game.

WOW SO EDGY I THINK I JUST CUT MYSELF ON IT.

In a more serious note, I will be rocking Stronghold on the Rev and hoping they are good now. The visuals/flavor for them is just awesome.

I think the problem is that the “hardcore” WvW crowd does not want the same things from WvW that ANet does. If you look at most of the complaints they boil down to two things -> Too much PvE and an emphasis on siege warfare with this map.

The too much PvE is totally justified, I am not sure why ANet wants to fill these maps with so many mobs when the focus should be on large scale pvp.

That leads to the second point where I totally disagree with the “hardcore” crowd. At this point its fairly obvious that they want zergball fights and ANet is letting them have those fights within their Guild Halls now. WvW is for siege warfare NOT for zergball open ground fights.

ANet needs to bite the bullet and compress the current servers down to a much smaller number according to their current WvW active population. This removes the population problem and will let people play the map the way ANet intends at least. Now if people don’t like the siege based gameplay they can go and zerg pvp in Obsidian Sanctum or in Guild Halls but should stop dragging that stuff into WvW proper.

I think that Elixer H also causes the skill queue bug when traited with HGH.

I love the game and will certainly be back but I have basically quit pvping for now since its awful. Mesmer is just broken AND they lowered the skill floor for them drastically. D/D Cele Ele is actually unkillable by most classes and is so far and away the best 1v1 class its not even funny.

Ranger/Engi/Non-Rampage War/Teef are all just sub par at this point. Guards/Necros feel like they are in a good spot.

Also its been a month without any real balancing OR BUG FIXING. THERE ARE SO MANY BUGS STILL WHAT ARE YOU DOING ANET!!!!!!?!?!?!?!

Synosius.9876:

after experimenting with just about every trait/utility/weapon combination I feel like it rly doesnt matter what build we use.

sure you can go firearms IP to boost burning dmg, or explosives for grenadier but those traits arent even necessary.

the core nature of engi is to be hybrid, with the way condi dmg scales now cele doesnt give enough offensive stats to be very effective. Cele did not receive a stat boost comparable to the other amulets, its still pretty much the same while every thing else is running 3k power with zerk.

with the current mesmer meta FT is the best anti clone weapon and you can run this kit just fine with out juggernaut. you can run FT in a power or condi build and back it up with alchemy traits for condi clear. next decide if you want your speed boost from inventions or tools? put in your tool kit for the blocks and youre pretty much done.

at this point you can just pick a random random amulet/sigils/runes/weapons and get about the same performance. oh yeah, standard healing turret and what ever 3rd utility best suits your preference.

edit: try this random build I put together
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-ZRR;2cPFw0f6sTkw0;9;4klm;0257146247;4Eo0;35NV05NV00g

This is the right answer. Engineer is just in a bad spot right now compared to some of the other classes and its only getting worse as more and more people bandwagon to the OP ele/mes builds.

Without ElixerS or Tool Kit we are totally useless and without Alchemy we have too little condi cleanse.

Very very little build diversity, ANet dropped the ball really kitten this trait rework and has been so lazy that our skill queue bug is still around making SD almost impossible to play.