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Would be great if the bubble would work in wvw against enemy siege, just like the bubble on traited catapults (= without reflect).
This would give Engis a niche place in organized wvw-zergs, though specialized like Mesmers for vail and still not in gvg.
Well, of course it will not work that way but sweet dreams . . .
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I can see their intentions to buff weak utilities/weapons (Ranger longbow, turrets) and consider it a very bad idea to do it that way – as it obviously will fail if they don´t improve the core-problems of longbow and turrets (and no, fixing the turret-bugs won´t do it).
It will bring even more disbalance against these classes as other traits seem universally usefull, not bound to special weapons or utilities, not very situational or depending on cooldowns.
Ok, we have only seen a small part of the traits but the way they seem to think here makes me shake my head.
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You don’t try to balance the health discrepancy with a GM trait.
The health discrepancy is there for a good reason – atleast so far.
Low health is one of the weakest spots of Guards in wvw and it certainly is usefull in spvp.
And compare that with Ranger and Engi which are only usefull while taking special weapons/utilities which are widly considered weak (and still will be), much more situational and bound to cooldowns.
So on the one side we so far have seen traits which are universally usefull on good/rather good classes and a waste on the weak ones.
In my opinion it seems like our famous devs almost look for further unbalance.
Like the Engi’s complaining they have nothing to do. Wth guys? Why aren’t you packing elixir gun, support turrets, elixirs, med packs? Be a team player for phase 1 and then do what you do on phase two knowing, without you there more people would be downed or dying in one stage and the other would take forever.
Except being a team player to support some other ignorant players won´t get the Engi the boss-tagging to even get loot (and probably scale the event up)
Most stuepid mechanic ever (maybe except the Champion in the western part with a canon on his shoulder).
We really should be glad that there are no raids in this game, Anet would kitten them up greatly.
I almost feel sorry for you, guys. So much work and thought put in here, but it seems all wasted for me.
The main point beeing: I don´t see why that changes should promote taking an engineer in a group instead of a second Guardian, a Warrior or another Ele in the raid.
The healing from bombs is so much less what a Guardian can heal with much lesser trait-investment, while a Guard also offers a ton of easy and precious boons to the group, groundcontrol, . . .
Engi waterfields are nice to have, but also not needed with a few Eles.
Even with heavy traiting for bunker in the end an Engi will still be more a liability to a melée-group than a gain compared to Guard or Warrior.
In reality all wvw-Engis can expect is incoming nerfs due to decap-Engis and critdamage-changes (how I hate that balancing based on that odd pointholding-gamemode).
I dunno, isn’t that the point of counterplay though? Instant skills take the risk out of casting in the first place. Don’t get me wrong; they have their place; but with effects as powerful as Magnetic Bomb and Glue Trail I think opponents absolutely should get the chance to interrupt us.
Lol, typical Engi-thread:
Engi A: “skill x is now useless”
turns into
Engi B: “but this part of the skill is still somewhat strong, would deserve further nerfing”
“•Bundles from player skills (engineer kits, elementalist conjured weapons, warrior banners) now have base damage that is consistent with the highest rarity weapons available at the level of the player.”
This is a quote from January 28th patch notes.
I wouldn´t call it a good fix as it´s also unfair to have ascended weapon strength on kits with a green weapon equipped, nevertheless that´s what they gave us as a solution for kit-damage – and didn´t stick to it.
well tell me where we got a box of piranhas
i didnt see it on my engy
= underwater skill replacing box of nails.
“In a decent place” is a matter of view though or even more what part of the game we´re talking about.
My WvW-guild decided to go “pro-mode” and engis (together with rangers) are excluded now from dedicated guild-raids. And I can´t even really argue with them as I see what my guard can do and how much I lack stability on my engi.
Concerning the changes: spvp-balancing ftw
And AED will stay a bad joke, the least they should do is make it instant
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Imo the class absolutely lacks stability for melée-combat.
Maybe with an evade- and gap-closing weapon-skill though . .
If they do it like they said in the livestream, Celestial will lose much more crit damage than Zerker.
A mediocre set will take a harder nerf than the set intended to nerf – good old Anet-balancing.
But what happens when you replace the fire bomb in that sequence with HT overcharge or smoke bomb?
Smoke bomb is just another example: Mesmer veil is 1 button and has no Aoe-cap
Engineer may have more options, still these are not efficient if you have room for specialized classes.
You realize that Big’Ol’Bom -> Fire Bomb -> Heal Turret -> Shield 4 -> F1 -> Elixier Gun 4 grants 12 stacks permamight?
Very good example: while an Engineer needs combofields, special utilities and 5+ buttons, a Guard gets 12 stacks of Aoe-might with 1 button-press on a simple weapon-skill + heal on top of it.
This class is so much less efficient than specialized classes when it comes to support, it´s laughable.
Also, I suspect they forgot about celestial armour when they worked it out. The nerfing of crit dam% on any other amour set then berserker works out at far bigger a nerf.
Actually they even mentioned celestial in the stream: probably it will receive the same amount ferocity as it has from other stats.
As I expect to be ferocity the same as precision (21 points being around 1%) this is going to be a heavy nerf to celestial, as crit-damage is the only really good stat on it.
Excel-sheet balancing ftw!!!
As far as I have seen Crytalline Ore didn´t come with the patch and also is not needed for ascended armor-crafting.
And lvl 450 for armor-crafting is pretty much the same as in weapon-crafting: you can refine ascended mats from 450 on.
It´s +5%, just like the increase on base weapon damage on ascended weapons.
If it also works as a multiplier (like base damage on weapons) we should see 5% less direct damage taken with a full set – which would make it clearly the main advantage of ascended armor (besides possible benefits from future infusions).
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There are also wvw-infusions and we´ll get better than blue ones for sure in the future (which probably will also cost a lot to craft or buy).
I also think Anet lowered the basic defense-stats against their first intentions as the data-mined chat-codes a few months back stated an increase of +5% defense compared to exotics.
Edit: obviously the increase in defense is still 5%. If this base defense works the same way as base weapon damage (multiplier) you can expect to take around 5% less direct damage in a full set.
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The basic defense-/armor-value should be higher on ascended
I don´t understand why it would be so hard to code some kind of a weapon-check:
if an ascended weapon is equipped, base weapon damage of kits goes up 5%
The most frustrating is, that even with all their glorious talk about communication with players and about balancing on 10th December + many threads about the problem, there hasn´t been even a single word of proper justification or explanation for months now.
I wanted to play a MMO for WvW and open-world Pve, not an awfully bad, boring and long lasting singleplayer-game (don´t like dungeons either though).
I guess we can agree #2 is one of the bad ones.
What concerns me more though is #1 which is even a lot less usefull most of the time.
Grenades have to be manually aimed while also having an extremely slow travel speed.
Bombs don´t have to be aimed but have a very short range + a long delay before the explosion.
Speaking about the way the damage has to be applied, this makes grenade-kit the worst weapon in the whole game, followed with bomb-kit being the second worst.
This is by far not so much an issue in spvp where people want to stand on a point or in a static pve-encounter but in any dynamic fight this is already a very huge tradeoff.
So if you try to balance these kits only on an excel-sheet comparing damage-numbers you´re doing it incredibly wrong.
(moreover grenade-autoattack is already overnerfed in my opinion and doing very lackluster power-damage)
Lol, Adamantium, don´t you even consider power-builds would still exist?
Didn´t you hear that power-builds will receive a great buff – with Blunderbuss max-range going up to 500 (talking about throwing a towel on a drowning man . . . )?
I also would like to use a shield in a power-build, but mainhand-pistol simply makes this a bad idea.
Yes, as we start running out of easy changes we can start addressing those that are more difficult . . .
JonHow about fixing Ascended and Legendary weapons so they impact kit damage? This would be a pretty big impact. You have added some nice power creep to all over professions and left Engi’s behind.
I´m still getting angry thinking about that, the biggest addition to the game within the whole current year and they exclude almost a whole class from it without giving even a short statement how to solve that. Moreover when we already in 2012(!!!) said here in the forums that it would be a problem.
What´s so hard in giving +5% base damage to kits whenever ascended weapons are equipped? The engine already takes the additional weapon-stats in account, can´t be so hard to code something like that.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Antitoxin-Spray-doesn-t-heal-allies
It heals only allies with the stated conditions on them (for some 500 hp per condition).
So we´ll see more Elite in game because Vets are to easy for full ascended players?
Is this the start of the powercreep?
That´s what they did to WvW:
Introducing this WvW-Meta achievement together with the leagues was a big mistake in my opinion.
Just look at the scores: not one of all the servers which were rated as the highest in their league before will win it´s matchup this week – because they were flooded the most by achievement-hunters.
Last week I would have said:
- Gold
SFR
Vizu
Riverside (as RS had beaten Piken in the last direct matchup)
But achievement-/reward-hunters have a lot more impact than I expected: Vizu seems to have better organization and use for these players, Piken seems not to be effected that much.
Now:
Vizu
Piken
SFR
I´ve never been into bombs because of the tiny range and the long delay until they finally explode.
But this week I tried power-bomb-builds with elixirs while running with my WvW-guild on borderlands: the traited range is still practically only twice meleé-range but decent enough for zerg fights.
We´re fighting EU rank 1 and rank 6 this week and while I´m rather tanky (incl. 3 sources for protection) and did fine against our rank 6 enemies and even had a blast on eternals, I died more often than ever and often as one of the first against the rank 1 borderland-zergs.
Most times I found myself stunlocked in the middle of a red sea which meant fast death or not enough hp to get out alive.
Reasons: Elixir B simply doesn´t deliver in those cases as the stability-duration is so short and hard/slow to reapply (even more with skilllags). Elixir S has an incredible long cooldown while the toolbelt-skill turned from random into a waste for zerg fights.
I won´t give up that fast on bombs, more practice and tinkering around with gear might help.
But on todays reset-evening I will run with my Guard again who once more proofed to be much more efficient this week.
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Nice to see you beat up Piken Square. Wrong vid?
I´m very suspicious about polls and majorities – because I obviously took a minority-class on release (Engi).
I´m also very suspicious about Anet´s communication:
“•Bundles from player skills (engineer kits, elementalist conjured weapons, warrior banners) now have base damage that is consistent with the highest rarity weapons available at the level of the player.” (taken from update notes January 28)
With introduction of ascended weapons base damage from engi kits was increased for 5% which would fullfill the statement above – for a few hours, until:
“•Fixed an unintended damage increase that caused engineer kits, elementalist conjures, and warrior banners to deal more damage than intended.”
There were several threads and postings in the Engi-forum about this, the only related answer came on the Ele-forum:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/RIP-conjure-builds/first
So tell us, Mr.Whiteside, where is your communication concerning a problem which negates the biggest addition of this year so far (ascended weapons) for almost a whole class?
And how can we rely on your communication when that statement from January obviously wasn´t true (as the problem with ascended weapons and kits was already discussed before)?
And yes, I´m angry and I think, I have very valid reasons for that – but still I´m only part of a minority.
. . . and all the way into the very, very, very late night.
Baruch Bay already had a bad rep as a server with night-capping karma-train blobs of upleveled a few months ago, looks like they want to build on that tradition (no pun to the good BB-guilds intended).
And yes, Baruch is ticking around 500 in the night, funny thing though RS is still 30k points ahead currently, probably because we´re weaker in primetime also, makes sense . .
And not that I would care about that playstyle, it just makes your rants look a little . . . foolish?
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Now, if we had to go back to a trainer to reset our utility skills each time we wanted to switch out, that would be a severe detriment to the on-the-fly versatility inherent in the utility skills, including kits.
Basically you have to go to a trainer to make many utility skills worth the slot, probably even more than on other classes.
And what keeps other classes from changing their utilities on the fly? And what keeps them from changing their weapons on the field, which gives them a lot of new options just like our kits?
I still wouldn´t want a complete revamp as suggested in the OP, that bares to much danger. But Anet probably wouldn´t take that much effort for engineers anyways.
And ellesee, bring your s/tpvp-arguments over to that other minority-forum (every second post from this guy – pure troll-posts included – makes me look for the down-vote button)
Is Anet regularly commenting in other profession forums?
That´s not about regular comments but still a good example:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/RIP-conjure-builds/first
Elementalists received an answer about conjured weapons with ascended weapons, Engi – where atleast one kit is in most builds – not.
It also shows for me where the problem rather is: we´re probably not left behind as a class on purpose but Engi is so different that Anet can´t find good solutions without much extra effort and always fears to create something overpowered (see also: damage-tax on main-weapons).
But why they would choose bomb- and elixir-builds to buff, which aren´t in such a bad place anyways – no idea.
After the achievement and attraction of new content has run out there won´t be enough people – because it´s simply not worth the time and frustration.
Will Anet ever learn from Grenth, Balthasar, Southsun?
I also find it ridiculous how some loud-mouths cry for raid-like difficulty in an open world event.
In addition to your arguments the game-engine is much to limited, add this to your list:
- no cast-bars on boss-abilities
- no tuning of optical effects possible
- condition-damage is screwed with the cap
- skill-lags
- crap rewards compared to raids
Basically it´s like Anet tries to arrange a Formula 1-race with trucks – in a water-park
anyway as for healing turret are you seriously going to cry about pressing two buttons for a 15 sec cooldown heal that also heals your party and removes multiple conditions and is a blast finisher and provides a water field. TWO BUTTONS kitten BUFF ENGIS
My Ranger probably would, at least in WvW (skill-lag ftw)
Phineas, how many of the 25 stacks might on you will be from a guard´s staff 4? And compare your screenshot with the one in the OP here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/PvE-Dungeon-Speedrun-Zerk-Build/first
@ Sylentir: there is a very good trait for improving a guardian´s staff, though staff is not mentioned in it (Permeating Wrath, ironically can give staff what flamethrower should be doing but can´t achieve = perma aoe-burn).
And which good on-crit procs don´t have an internal CD already?
If it´s used as an Aoe-skill (and not on single targets) staff 1 blows flamethrower 1 out of the water, even more when both are traited.
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As the travel time of grenades is so long auto-targeting would simply kill grenades in all forms of pvp. Moreover, versatility- or whatever funny Anet-on-Engi-tax would hit harder if it wasn´t a skill shot.
An autoattack onto the position of the mouse-cursor could be good though (if it could be toggled off).
Now the big question is:
is the ascended rifle worth the effort damagewise?
And I don´t consider the rifle-model ugly, more the opposite, only the colours and skin are a little lacking imo.
According to my formula:
1) (751(min)/918(max)+916)/Armor *251 * 916/916 = 191 (191 according to your measurements) —> 2191 – 2410 Armor
2) (812(min)/992(max)+916)/Armor *251 * 916/916 = 207 —> 2095 – 2314 Armor
3) (873(min)/1067(max)+916)/Armor *251 * 916/916 =222 —> 2023 – 2242 Armor
4) (986(min)/1205(max)+916)/Armor *251 * 916/916 =251 —> 1905 – 2121Armor
So either your measurements are incorrect or the numbers or the formula.
What Blood Red Arachnid seems not to understand is – as the armor of course should stay the same – that this only proves that either the formula or the measurements are not correct?
What I don´t understand: isn´t this an argument against your formula?
Also weapon strength seems to have not more or even less weight in your formula than additional power which contradicts statements concerning ascended weapons/the short-time boost to kits.
Besides that I´m with Brew Pinch (and Phineas´ logic clearly has some flaws).
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Here´s a quote from Update Notes January 28:
“World Polish – Other
General
.
.
•Bundles from player skills (engineer kits, elementalist conjured weapons, warrior banners) NOW have base damage that is consistent with the highest rarity weapons available at the level of the player.”
Reading this, I rather would understand “from now on” instead of “only now/until we decide something else”.
As it stands, ascended weapons are useless for most Engi-builds because of the way Anet handled kits and conjured weapons with this “fix”.
I guess here is the answer:
The damage from conjures and other weaponry of the like had an unintended increase from the patch on September 3 as a side effect from another change, so this fix was just to correct that bug. It’s not to say we’re against increasing ele conjured weapon potential in the future.
Cheers!
-Karl
I would say this goes against what they told about scaling of kits according to the rarest weapon-type available:
Patch Notes Janury 28
World Polish – Other
General
•Bundles from player skills (engineer kits, elementalist conjured weapons, warrior banners) now have base damage that is consistent with the highest rarity weapons available at the level of the player.
But probably they didn´t really mean it the way they wrote it . .
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Taking the effort in account, armour- and weapon-crafting professions are similar up to 400 and we must assume they will be similar from 400 – 500 and even on 500.
If crafting 1 piece of ascended armour finally really takes about the same time/money/farming as 1 ascended weapon most of us won´t run out of grinding to the bone – until Anet increases the level-cap.
And they probably will make us want better-quality infusions somewhere inbetween.
Given the current system the only chance to not go completely overboard with ascended is to add other, much more easier and still reliable ways to get them (which would make crafting them obsolete).
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Ascended and legendary weapons have 2 infusions slots – nothing new.
But do those infusions work when in a kit? Are the stats from the infusions carried over to the kit?
And before someone jumps in, saying those low stats wouldn´t matter – that easily can change in the future and can also hurt today in high level fractals.
I don’t see why kits don’t assume the power of whatever the engi has equipped ? Is there some kind of crazy math going on that prevents this from being The Thing To Do ?
I think every engi would prefer that to a preassigned weapon strength on kits.
But unfortunaley we rely on Anet who made it that way, maybe because of technical reasons, maybe because of big differences on weapon strength from pistol to rifle – or maybe because it was the cheapest fix to a stepchild-class.
50 basic damage was very very noticeable.
Weapon strength obviously has a higher influence on the final damage-output from different weapon- and kit-skills than some added +power stats – I guess we´ll see when fighting enemies who have an ascended in WvW!
The weapon-strength on engi-kits was 969 (average of an exotic pistol + an exotic shield), this was brought up to 1017 with the patch (+5 % up from 969).
As the difference in weapon strength from exotic to ascended weapons is also 5% this was somewhat ok (it still didn´t completely fit the quoted text about “highest rarity weapon available” as even exotic rifle has 1205 weapon strength).
With the hotfix it´s obviously back to 969.
I hope that is due to a bug as the weapon damage was also increased for kits in the spvp-lobby.
Otherwise engis are screwed twice as I don´t think kits will get the stats from infusions on ascended weapons.