Guild Wars 2

On the plus side, when I last entered the queens pavilion there was about 10 people in my shard, so there was always a free gauntlet room open – let me get that new liadri title without having to wait between lag death attempts.

This set should have been attainable somewhere in game (other than spvp) since launch along with those other armor pieces still left in the same state.

I basically levelled a second ele just to use it after I unlocked it in spvp and I’d love to see it mixed into more folks costumes around the game world.

It seems quite difficult to reliably dodge roll, about face at the end of it and not take at least one step in the wrong direction before acid bomb activates. This could be due to my added latency though, which fluctuates between 200 and 300 ms or so.

What’s more while the activation time is listed as 1/4 sec on the tooltip, the activation and animation time of the skill of acid bomb from testing is closer to 5 times that (somewhere between 1.5 and 1.7 seconds. Dodge rolling has an innate .75 of a second activation and animation time which means that assuming your method works perfectly the total combo time is going to be a minimum of 2.25 seconds from start to finish, albeit the dodgeroll component is at least moving in the right direction.

Meanwhile blinks such as steal or lightning flash have no animation time whatsoever, the only real delay being latency, while gap closers such as savage leap have an animation time of around 1.2~1.3 seconds while covering a slightly longer distance than acid bomb.

For reference, a player can cover 210 units of distance within one second in combat with no speed buff and most players will at minimum have +25% speed increase for 262.5 per second.

So assuming perfect execution of acid bomb combo (0 skill latency, no walking in wrong direction at any point in the combo) and enemy player at +25% run speed, within the activation time/animation of acid bomb someone will cover the same distance or slightly greater than acid bomb simply by running forwards. If the enemy has swiftness this is compounded very slightly.

That’s not taking into account the fact that at the end of the acid bomb combo your character/camera will be facing the wrong direction, incurring an additional delay to you actually using more skills on your opponent.

Flamestrike is even more op – permanent burning without a single trait point!

Impossible to outskill!

Engineers? (Or are you counting kits?) Elementalists? (Or are you counting conjures?)

That aside I still think necromancers need a cleaving weapon, 2 handed would be fine.

Perhaps spears or tridents could be used if they don’t want to add new weapon models :p

Closing gaps with stealth relies on your enemy staying in an area rather than moving away, though opening into combat from stealth can certainly help to gain combat initiative.

Jumpshot has a long animation and is ground targeted rather than player targeted so is very easy to avoid. Rocket boots is the best engineer gap closing skill available but is again non player targeted, has a long and obvious animation, and prevents you using your other skills for a longer period of time than most other leap type skills due to the rolling component at the end of the leap.

Elixir bomb is useful for gap creation but not for gap closing – in the time you’ve stopped moving, rotated 180 degrees using your turn around button and then activated and completed the skill animation another person running next to you using no skills whatsoever will have covered the same distance.

None of these skills are really comparable to real gap closing abilities available on other classes like steal, blink, lightning flash, or flashing blade, or even to skills like savage leap or swoop in my opinion.

I never did go back and do a proper tally. I’d guess in the $1200 range. Anything I felt like buying… bag and char slots, tabs and stack size increases, loads of transmute stones, skins etc.

I’ve bought and played perhaps one other game since GW2 came out, in the long run I’m not sure if I’d have spent more less if I wasn’t playing it. I don’t see myself buying any more though.

The more significant concern is the ridiculous amount of time I’ve spent on the game which would be a massive $ value if I’d spent it on something actually useful like overtime or whatever.

Wiki page is still accurate for base damage AFAIK. Remember to multiply by 3 if running grenadier.

See list of thief base co-efficients for sword (only thief AoE weapon) if you feel like comparing here.

Gotta love these UI/scripting bugs. I especially liked the one that let you jump shot to the location you had targeted with your grenade kit. The animation bugs that let you flamethrower forever, spin forever with a greatsword etc were also pretty fun.

Oh well, now that you’ve posted about it this should be fixed in the next few weeks.

As I’m sure you are aware engineers have some bursty (mostly short range) options but no useful gap closing abilities. Without fast or instant teleports, leaps or other means of quickly and reliably shortening your attack range you are left with:
-Grenades
-Autoattacking with rifle, elixir gun, pistol
-The channeled and well telegraphed toolkit pull
-Turrets

Engineers and necromancers are both in the same boat in this respect imo in that in 1vs1s you generally need the enemy to come to you or for them to stay and fight if you are building this way.

Wyrden.4713:

well necros and mesmer dont have rly great acess to stability either

Power break is pretty good, especially traited. One foot in the grave gives decent personal uptime with enough lf generation but can be hard to make good use of (also expensive to trait for).

Toss elixir B is kind of weird, since generally you need another stunbreak on your bar to make good use of it personally – duration is too short to be useful for precasting and it’s generally not useful in team situations due to small radius and long aim/cast time plus cooldown.

Thieves have it the worst though.

Blizt.3086:

I somewhat missed the old day when Juggernaut provided Stability, and both Elixir R and Rocket Boots were stunbreaker.

As long as rocket boots aren’t reverted to “rocket your face into the dirt boots”.

Aedrion.6483:

Nobody wants to see a grenade engie who, when you catch upto him as any close range class, picks up the FT and just wrecks you with it up close.

Not sure what you mean by this. Right now grenades are far more effective than the flamethrower is at all ranges for damage.

Penguin.5197:

It should at least last a few seconds for the flamethrower to fully vent, doing multiple blinds during the process.

Be cool if smoke actually vented from the gun or backpack in a cloud that lasted a few seconds and obscured vision. Though it’s not that anyone wants more particle effects in the game anywhere and it might just end up looking like a weird version of smokescreen so maybe not.

It doesn’t exist any more but if it did I’d take it over minefield that’s for sure.

Here’s what I’ve been running as of late.

I always thought that out of all the classes, engineers could probably make the best use of celestial gear so this was my attempt.
Basically I play it in 2 modes:
Damage mode:
-Stack your 12 mittys at the start of each fight, and whenever your cooldowns are up. Might duration from the runes means those 12 stacks can be kept up permanently.
-As you’ll be using your heal skill as part of the rotation you’ll have an extra 3 stacks up on yourself around 50% of the time.
-Always animation cancel your acid bomb to stay in the stack, unless you actually need to get away for some reason. This may actually happen occasionally since this build has no sources of vigor or endurance regen but I haven’t had any problems in fractals or dungeons thus far without them running this build.
-Spam your nades for bleeds and vuln at whatever range your party is fighting in
-Drop your fire field on cooldown if your target isn’t already on fire (occasionally happens)
-If your target regenerates, hit it with poison nades. If you have group members using their own combo fields, use your pistol volley instead.

Sustain mode:
If you find sustain is becoming a problem, it’s time to switch gears:
-Ignore the grenade kit except for 2 and 4
-Use your elixir 5 and elixir toolbelt and bombspam to keep your teams health up as much as you can.
-Instead of building your might stacks, you may want to save your finishers for a quadriple water blast which is a fairly potent burst heal. Alternately you can leave your healing turret up for permanent regen, if you can find a safe spot for it. If you can only time for 3 blasts off your turret overcharge, don’t forget that the toolbelt skill gives you a another water field for your 4th!
-Remember that you can target your supply crate into all sorts of interesting places without traits. While some monsters will still attack them with ranged attacks others will ignore them meaning you can drop your crate somewhere out of the way and keep up your regen for the duration of the drop (make sure you’re still inside the dropped heal turret radius!). Of course you can also sacrifice the turrets for the health packs, though most people don’t bother picking them up so you may end up just taking them for yourself.

Variation examples:
-You can swap out forceful explosives for incendiary powder if you are ranging a boss and burns aren’t covered.
-You can drop shrapnel for enhanced performance if you are staying in melee and want the extra might stacks, in which case you can also drop grenade kit and pick up something else (minekit for example)
-You can quickly and easily swap out elixir infused bombs for fortified turrets. I’ve found this trait surprising useful when the party is light on mesmers and guards – just sub in two of your kits for rifle and flame turrets and you’ve got pretty good reflect uptime (although it’s much more fiddly than your usual reflect classes, you’ve got to pick up your turrets each time to keep the cooldowns low). It’s also pretty neat to see all the bubbles appear when you drop supply crate.

-You can bring an alt weapon with a superior sigil of life if you want a bit more healing. This will bump up your bomb heals by about 15%.

-You can ofc drop grenades for flame turret if you need the second blind field and do other such things

-Strength runes would be a better option for direct damage, though I’m pretty happy with aristocracy runes myself.

This build does a lot less direct damage than a full berserker build, but it’s actually not as bad as you might think once you factor in the extra damage on condition procs.

I’ve personally found it a lot more fun to play then my usual berserker build as well, though ymmv of course.

You could run a similar build with zealots gear, though in that case I’d probably be tempted to drop grenades and focus more specifically on bombs, maybe run rifle for range…

The problem with healing power lays in both skill design and scaling.

I see healing power as the opposite of power as a stat, in that power is a useful stat in almost every situation regardless of equipment, traits or utilities while healing power is only useful with a few specialized builds (many classes have simply too few methods of applying it, other than their healing skill).

Healing power also has extremely low scaling for the point investment compared to any of the offensive stats, and is less useful for survival in short fights than direct defensive stats (it pulls ahead of vitality in longer ones though).

I think rather than flatly increasing healing power scaling, it’d be better to give it a secondary effect or synergy with another stat. Preferably something that brings value to the group, be it a modification to mob behavior, damage boost, skill recharge increase, or whatever. It’d be better if this was active in some way – for example if your healing gave you charges you could then use for some other purpose like damage or boons, or if it gave an extra effect to your healing skill like a weak version of a rune-set. I dunno, maybe that’s too much effort.

Or alternatively to couple a scaling increase with a cap so that investment beyond a certain point is less worthwhile – so that mixing in some healing power became more worthwhile and going all in was discouraged (as opposed to simply discouraging any investment in healing power at all as it is for many classes/specs at present even for healing themselves). If for example if healing abilities didn’t scale but could instead crit, and 600 healing power was 100% crit chance then there would be no point in further investment.

Anyways my ideas are dumb but you get the idea. There’s no reason healing power can’t be reworked a bit without totally changing the game, destroying everyones builds or flippping SPVP/WVW upside down.

A cleaving melee weapon for necromancers seems unlikely after all this time. But I’ve never seen an official response about it. I’ve always wondered what the official reasoning behind this decision was.

I haven’t been able to reliably play GW2 in weeks – been getting frequent drop outs and packet loss. Don’t know if it started with the April 15 update but it seems to have gotten worse since then. Also in Sydney.

Interestingly I’ve noticed the same issues while connecting over VPN to an educational network and via a proxy tunnel including via a server in the UK(which normally gets around any issues with international peers with my ISP TPG). I haven’t noticed any issues with any other network services in Australia or internationally so I’m guessing it’s a border router somewhere closer to ArenaNet’s datacentre in Texas. Keeps coming and going so I haven’t been able to track it down any further yet.

I’ve been avoiding dungeons and fractals more often for that reason (I hate dragging a group down with drop outs and disconnects). Last week or so I gave up and just did some map completion instead.

BTW, you might want to update your link to this one as yours seems to require a facebook login.

Alt-F4.

I’d love to see this implemented along with a CC immunity system (even if the immunity only lasts a few seconds) so that CC has to be used more strategically instead of chaining it without consequence.

Quite a lot of monsters in PvE already make extensive use of CC requiring stunbreakers if caught by it (in dungeons particularly) though obviously such a change would be felt more strongly in PVP.

Kit damage tooltips are bugged, see previous thread

They changed underwater nades quite a long time ago, as far as I recall? I think it was back around the sigil change/30% AA damage reduction.

Underwater barrage is hilarious – you are more likely to hit your target by aiming at them with your buttocks.

Flame jet and fragmentation shot damage are roughly equivalent damage per second.

I guess pistol autoattack needs to be nerfed now.

Tooltip scaling appears to to be bugged – displayed damage values are changing based on power stat, but not on weapon rarity or weapon strength.

However kit power damage does appear to be scaling with weapon strength, at least for bombkit auto (haven’t tested anything else). I’ve done a few short tests vs lvl 80 risen putrifiers in orr below, tested for 50 attacks or so each which is enough to get a general picture:

Naked character, no traits or buffs etc, Bombkit autoattack damage:
No weapon equipped:
Damage range 205-224 (407 shown in tooltip)

Level 1 blue krytan rifle equipped (wep strength 151-185):
Damage range 294-343(407 shown in tooltip)

Level 70 exotic rifle (wep strength 834-1019)
Damage range 386-424 (407 tooltip)

Level 80 exotic rifle (wep strength 986-1205):
Damage range 470-502

For a direct comparison between an 80 exotic and ascended rifle, I ensured that I had the same power bonus from both both via some trinket mixing(total character power 1095 for these tests), as I couldn’t be bothered crafting an ascended rifle without a power stat bonus (previous tests were done with weapons without a power bonus):

Level 80 exotic rifle (wep strength 986-1205)
Damage range 470-502 (486 tooltip due to extra power)

Level 80 ascended rifle (wep strength 1035-1265)
Damage range 487-586 (486 tooltip due to extra power)

I haven’t been able to tell whether there’s any damage difference between a p/s and rifle setup so far due to variance in damage – if there is a difference it seems likely to be small.

oZii.2864:

They will never give a general 45% set because it competes with all the runes and automatically becomes the defacto rune to take.

People take rune sets for different reasons:
-Statistical bonuses affecting damage or resilience
-Sets which effectively give the player an extra skill, by tying a special effect to a condition such as hitting an enemy, taking hits, health dropping below a certain amount, and heal or elite skill use
-Sets which modify other skills which additional effects, or grant some kind of passive benefit
-Skills which increase the duration of particular boons, which serve different functions

A full boon duration set would be sacrificing the other utility potentially provided by other rune sets (stats, special effects, skill modifications etc) in order to specialize in dispensing boons.

For example I would imagine a great many people running power builds would choose runes of strength over a general boon duration set for the 175 power alone, let alone the 7% damage bonus under might stacks.

Can’t see this trait being very useful for the most part, the turret itself will in most cases be getting blown up almost the instant it is put down – you’re likely to only get 1 cast of any of these boons at best before your turret skill is on cooldown. This is especially true in dungeons, fractals and any kind of vaguely challenging content

Turret cooldowns are quite long considering the duration of these boons. Keep in mind that general boon duration via runes is seemingly being nerfed in the upcoming patch as well.

The exception to all of this is probably rifle turret – assuming you take this GM trait along with runes of altruism and always pick up your turret as soon as you deploy it:
-Rifle turret cooldown 20s – when picked up, 16 secs. 7 seconds of fury generated with altruism runes and 30 points in alchemy.
-Altruism runes – cooldown 15 seconds. 7 seconds of fury generated as per above. You could trigger this with either heal turret or medkit, probably doesn’t make much difference provided again you always pick the turret up.

This would give you roughly 93% fury uptime for your party, not considering cast times and stuff.

If you took elixir gun and bombkit in your other slots, and ran pistol shield, you could keep up 12 stacks of might or so along with the fury above which isn’t too bad although as usual you’d be quite a busybody.

To be fair, many fringe builds across the classes will be hit by these changes.

I generally think of engineers as an underdog – something you play just because – for the novelty value.

Because of this I feel it doesn’t really matter what positive or negative changes are made to engineers, because no one ever relied on them for anything specifically in parties or groups anyway.

Well, people have been asking for stuff like account bound dyes and a wardrobe system since beta and before, and it seems like those features are now being added. Perhaps something will be done about this in another year.

Here’s a few suggestions for tweaking grenades and some other traits in this tree:
-Only 1 grenade is thrown at a time, range stays at 1500 regardless of traits. Base damage increased to around 275% of current base. Helps to reduce some screen clutter among other things. Maybe increase the explosion radius slightly.

-GM Grenadier trait is replaced by “Demolitions Expert”. This trait triples the chance for on-hit effects to proc for any explosive attack, meaning bombkit, minefield etc are now also useful for proccing on crit effects and the like.

-Reserve Mines trait deleted and replaced with Explosive Powder.

-Pistol auto-attack changed back so that is actually counted as an explosive attack.

Skill damage co-efficients have never made any sense when you start examining them across weapons and classes.

It’s like the design team decided on the rough damage amounts for each skill while completely ignoring the amount of time it takes for the skill to be:
-positioned/orientated
-whether or not the skill roots you or changes the enemies or your own positions
-windup, execution and after-cast time for skill animations

There’s quite a number of skills with long channel times compared to their auto-attack chain and over the course of the channel these end up being a damage loss to simply auto-attacking (often by a large margin). I don’t believe this was intended behavior. Channeled attacks and non-autoattacks generally should be several times stronger than the damage inflicted by autoattacks because:

-They have a cooldown
-They can be interrupted/put on said cooldown
-They tend to be flashy, may having rooting animations, or are signature skills of the weapon skill-bar

FWIW, last time I tested in game I calculated flamethrower AA damage including conditions over time and it was roughly equivalent to pistol autoattack within a small margin (around 2 DPS or so from memory).

The flamethrower and pistol AAs are actually not a bad case for how autoattacks should work, as are ele attunements. The problem is that most other weapon bar skill sets in the game don’t work this way which is why we end up with this huge disparity in performance.

There are problems with the core design of some weapons (engie rifle is a good example) where the skills themselves don’t lend themselves too well to this kind of adjustment however.

But frankly I think these problems should have been fixed back in beta or even earlier. These aren’t the kind of changes I would expect to see rolled out 18 months past a games launch date.

Our class icon is a grenade, I think.

The little thing coming off the side is the safety lever. You’ll notice that the bomb kit icon doesn’t have a safety lever, otherwise it’s the same.

There’s a cork in the top because engineers fill their grenades and bombs with different substances in order to produce the conditions needed.

The elite skill slot has always been a bit of a strange beast. I kind of wish the elite slot could be optionally ditched for a utility skill due to the big disparity in cooldowns and usefulness of the elite skills available between classes.

A pocketknife is arguably more versatile than a chainsaw. But cutting off a tree branch takes a long time with one of those tiny serrated blades :/

TBH I’d rather they just change how blast finishers work. Symbols aren’t the only offender in that respect.

I think it would be nice to have a toggle option for character vs account bound binds.

Regen on staff 2 is the other thing that come to mind.

I don’t see zealots being a useful stat combo generally in PVE.

I haven’t tested this in a while – does the sceptre AA still replace 1 out of 3 phantasms (if all have been cast) on autoattack?

If it does, I’d suggest that the 3rd chain of the scepter autoattack be conditional.

If 2 or less illusions exist ether clone is cast filling the 3rd slot. If 3 illusions exist a new skill called “ether surge” or similar is used instead which does extra damage and applies vulnerability to the target.

Then again, I’m sure this type of change has been suggested many times already.

You could just bind the ’ key to your utility slot… although it would mess with you on your other characters.

Couple of things to keep in mind here insane:
-I believe infused precision is being nerfed in line with invigorating speed – at least I think I read that somewhere in the profession balance forum. So 10 seconds of swiftness when you crit, 10 second ICD.
-50% uptime on vigor is about the same endurance recovery over time as adrenal implant
-adrenal implant has no conditions for improving endurance recovery – it’s always on. This can be more valuable than some give it credit for.

With the upcoming completion of nerfs to vigor generation across classes, adrenal implant seems a reasonable trait choice in any case. Then again I’ve been running 30/10/0/0/30 for an awfully long time so I’m probably biased.

Xillllix.3485:

If I had designed this game the strongest class would be the slowest and not the fastest.

Mm, I think that’s what they were going for with necromancer. Whether you think they’ve succeeded or not is of course debatable.

I’d take an ammo toggle over the current blunderbuss… slugs for long range piercing line attack as per current, and shells for short range cone AoE.

It all comes down to the tools in your toolbox. Guardians and Mesmers both have lots of useful tools for dungeons and fractals. Every other class has either less access, more difficult access, or no access to some of these tools.

It’s just an unfortunate fact that so much of the PVE content has been designed with an emphasis on having the above tools in your parties lineup to reliably succeed.

Still, thieves are at least in a better place than engies, warriors, necros or rangers when it comes to party wide projectile absorption/reflection skills and reliable long duration stealth is still an asset in various times and places so it’s not all bad news to be fair.

If you sit on point then the enemy on farpoint will go mid, if you leave home then someone will come and decap.

You can always drop a portal at home and go help at mid I guess :p

clipnotdone.9634:

Using DE offensively is a great risk/reward mechanic, you give up dodges for extra offensive power.
It promotes active, skilful and thoughtful play from a Mesmer.

Yes and no. Creating a clone when dodging backwards away from your target means that single target projectile skills are blocked by the clone. This gives you a larger margin of error to avoid skills like throw bolas, overcharged shot, point blank shot, spectral grasp, scorpion wire etc – you can dodge considerably before the shot would have hit and still avoid the attack.

In addition both diversion and distortion can both be used defensively as well as offensively so it’s a bit more complicated than just swapping dodges for damage.

Even if you changed rush so that it’s cooldown increased when missing a target (like RTL) I still doubt you’d catch a warrior who wants to leave (when traited/geared to be good at it) if they are any good.

Personally I think the nerf to RTL should be reverted rather than the inverse.

They may add a slot1/slot2 global sigil ICD to replace current sigil type ICD. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

They may also be removing the passive stat bonus given by sigils when the sigil is no longer equipped (so your 25 bloodlust stacks disappear when you de-equip the weapon, or when you swap weapon until you swap back again).

Since they are doing a big rework, they could be making all sorts of changes. We’ll have to wait and see.

He’s looking at it from a direct damage+damage mitigation perspective, since healing power and condition damage scale poorly generally. It’s a reasonable point of view.

I personally don’t think celestial is a very good set generally because most trait/gear setups require specialization to shine, and because the power stat is more important than any other stats for direct damage builds which make use of crit damage.

I still have a full set on my second engineer though, just for fun…

Necros need a whip as an AoE weapon. It would fit a few other classes too but none better than Necro.

Various skills go through blocks, including traited necro staff marks, certain ele skills, any warrior attacks with active buff from signet of might, etc. I don’t think a Guardian can hit through blocking skills though… I think he just means that the aegis would be stripped as soon as you got it.

Here’s my main. I’ve changed looks a bunch of times, eventually settled on current theme because it goes with the emissary of the mad king.

There aren’t any sylvari racial skills that I would take over class ones, although I have on rare occasions taken grasping vines for the block toolbelt skill (only one that we can use while carrying a bundle, even though the duration is quite short).