Guild Wars 2

engineers agree

why is first place recruiting. ?

doesnt matter

what matters is your brain and your dexterity

Skarloc.2569:

It’s nice to have a balanced tier again. Not as much action on the forums, but the game play has been much better.

forums are for when youre disgruntled. short thread = were happy

although i AM sad that the jump puzzles no longer seem to be a (mostly) safe haven… one thing to miss about the kain/dr/ferg matches.

cute

please also join ET of SF at about an equal rate, this tier is a pretty even match and i think everyone would enjoy at least a couple more weeks of having a match that isnt a roflstomp one way or another! (cuz you know… its been months for at least 2 of us, i dont really know SF’s history)

dungeons arent single player…

raced ET into their overlook in EB, and we defended it beautifully thanks to SF leaving full supply… but… you claim youre outnumbered and suddenly a 40 man zerg! and then we cant defend both the keep and our borderlands when some of you scatter and SF wakes up

…was honestly taken aback at how many red names i saw that late at night. (green names too actually)

Aequitas.6402:

For a second there, I thought ET was a guild, and thought “stop advertising your guild, there’s a subforum for that”.

I feel stupid now.

if its any consolation, they prolly have about as many players as a large guild on one of the bigger servers…

havent heard about any alliance…

LieutenantGoogle.7326:

Avoid using the MISSthrower in wvw, elixer gun will tragically serve you better with the correct specs. Even when using flamethrower against enemies behind a gate, as soon as they get a retaliation buff, you kill yourself faster than you kill them.

omnom pie/ghost 2 win
laugh at retal

@ elixir build:
for world exploration you dont really need elixir C… id go S or R if you find yourself taking too much damage or … well i dunno, maybe a specific kit for its 2/3/4/5 skills. in dungeons id definitely have R most (if not all) of the time for its toolbelt.

@ underwater:
if you hate harpoon gun, grenades autotargets. its lame untraited, but its an option. otherwise ive found harpoon gun to do just fine damage, especially when 2 hits all 3 shots (melee that kitten). in fact… harpoon gun does better (single target) damage than rifle. underwater combat just sucks balls.

Cactus.2710:

Catisa.6507:

it’s working as intended, nothing wrong.

It may be working as intended, but if you knew anything at all about the Glicko-2 system you’d recognize that it was never designed to be applied to tiered competition. It was designed for open field competitions like chess and tennis, and it was statistically invalid for ANet to have chosen it for WvW. Go look it up on WikiPedia if you don’t believe me. You don’t even need to follow the math … just read the description.

wrong. its designed for larger populations than 24. chess and tennis still have finite populations with a conservation of rating points law… they just have rather large populations. when you drive the population size down to a number you can easily comprehend, you run into weird cases like current tier 8 where matches become repetitive enough amongst all players so the lack of diversity translates into a positive feedback loop or a trap instead of a measure of skill. glicko isnt designed for 24. its designed for 1 thousand. or 1 million.

nah, the lack of response just suggests the devs dont actually respect the community enough to stay in touch. its reminiscient of maplestory/nexon and d3/blizzard. and the opposite of lol/riot.

if they loved the game, theyd post. theyd be visible. to them its just a job.

organize an event to bring a zerg thru the jump puzzles. abuse portals. have them drop you their siege. theyll thank you for the badges (well, prolly not). thank them by using (some of) the golems for something right then. you know… something fun.

suddenly youre only spending anything on upgrades.

Risingashes.8694:

insanemaniac.2456:

for one thing, just 1, and its on the supply escort issue because its the most unreasonable….

you fail to consider the bottom half of the rankings with this idea. its ridiculous to assume all servers can field enough people to have escorts. this would flip the tactics of the lower tiers to the upper and vice versa. the inability to complete upgrades foments a zerg mentality. there is no point to defending when you can take 2 towers in the span of time it takes to defend 1 unsuccessfully. the lower tiers dont have the manpower to babysit upgrades, so none would ever be completed.

in the upper tiers however… you achieve the desirable gameplay of eliminating zerg mentality (to an extent).

i would argue that having desirable gameplay in the lower tiers instead of the higher ones creates a better overall experience. because you snowball towards equal distribution rather than superservers.

You should have taken the time to actually read my post past point 1 and you’d see this has been totally addressed.

One of my suggestions was that keeps should start fully upgraded. ‘Babysitting upgrades’ no longer happens. All a losing side needs to do is have a few people escorting the Dolyaks, have everyone bound to their few keeps and teleport back once one of them is seiged.

Due to the Dolyak mechanics the losing side will be able to commit more people to defense and the keep will have all defensive upgrades available as the losing side will only need to have escorted a few Dolyaks to maintain maximum supply.

These changes help all levels of play. It means that lower tiers will always have clear points of interest that they should be focusing on, and that each member will be making a real (and noticeable) contribution to their side by choosing one of many playstyles which will have a lot of variety.

it isnt the roflstomp matches i care about, where having an immediate fully upgraded keep would be a great benefit to the underdogs… but also a curse to fight against. its the lower tiers. the fair matches in the lower tiers often have long periods of time where not a single invader will enter a map, because there are only like 10 people total online for the server. youre making a manpower quota (by adding a deterioration mechanic) that the lower tiers cant meet. expecting those 10 people to all go roaming around in order to keep supplies topped off and keep walls from deteriorating is completely unrealistic. it would be boring. it would be frustrating. when i have a goal of holding the fort, i wont necessarily have a goal of fighting people… which is what wvw is about. objective oriented fighting/outsmarting on larger scales than solo. you would drive people away from servers that cant handle the quota, and into servers that already can.

honestly, i skimmed most of your post after reading about the deterioration. because i think that would be silly.
for what its worth, since these were short and autonomous of the general idea of adding deterioration to splinter zergs:
6a is a 50/50 design decision up to the devs. they want to cater to everyone. more methods of doing anything caters to more people.
6b is something ive always thought was ridiculous to not be included already.
7…. downed state and in-field rez’s are major issues. spying… whatever. real world analogue of spying is military grade spy satellites. you pretty much always know where major enemy forces are irl and in game. an enemy eye is something you just have to work around. or deceive. theres no such thing as a surprise queen in chess.

i dont think op realizes that a class that supports siege better than any other, supports zerg/counter tactics at least as good as any other, breaks defenses as good as any other, AND can spec for roaming as good as any other… is broken.

i mean really…. what other role is there? supply running and aoe damage?

well then, its similar to dominion in league.

in fact, licensing the modified elo system from riot would be an excellent way for anet to quickly implement a proven ranking system.

Sirakou.8170:

I don’t understand anything of what’s being said, except for “League of Legends” and “system”. I don’t see how any type of system could correctly transfer from a “MOBA” to an RPG. They’re two different genres, with two different playstyles. That’s like trying to add FPS elements to a platformer.

what? spvp IS a moba. the comparison is quite relevant. its not like youre playing the rpg part of the game in there anyways, upleveled to 80 with free access to all stat combos and traits.

whats a queue
we dont have those in the boondocks

(last friday — 5 min eb queue on fc, first in months. sf had a queue as well)

for one thing, just 1, and its on the supply escort issue because its the most unreasonable….

you fail to consider the bottom half of the rankings with this idea. its ridiculous to assume all servers can field enough people to have escorts. this would flip the tactics of the lower tiers to the upper and vice versa. the inability to complete upgrades foments a zerg mentality. there is no point to defending when you can take 2 towers in the span of time it takes to defend 1 unsuccessfully. the lower tiers dont have the manpower to babysit upgrades, so none would ever be completed.

in the upper tiers however… you achieve the desirable gameplay of eliminating zerg mentality (to an extent).

i would argue that having desirable gameplay in the lower tiers instead of the higher ones creates a better overall experience. because you snowball towards equal distribution rather than superservers.

rorosupra.7603:

Holy crap we had q times for Et battlegrounds im lovein it

we did as well, and pretty late too in US. i hit one around 10 pst.

such an even match so far! loving it!

hung out in EB the past couple hours, i think my best exploit was us 4 manning durios a bit after SF zerged/abandoned it… right in the middle while 3 of us were resupplying to build a 2nd ram about 7-10 ET show up at umber. we held them off, but only just. by the time we headed back to durios our 4th guy was about 4 ram hits away from busting the door (and he was unmolested the whole time!).

current score:
sf 11514
fc 11110
et 10227
1:15 am pst

its been a REALLY long time since ive seen such a tight scoreboard

throw out the greedy, gluttonous, and whimsical overlords! vive la (résistance)!

just wait until you see a guild camping the puzzle from 2 different servers and allowing only their guild members to pass. then youll really have something to complain about. until then.. well dont even.

grenades are potent at making zergs back off and really good at walls (either attacking or defending)

however, since were pigeonholed into 30 explosives to make grenades worth using… you lose out on a survivability trait line… so you really need to stick to a fairly large group. any dedicated roamers can kill you fairly easily. and unfortunately the only large template aoe a grenadier has is ice grenades so you really only have a shot at killing poorly placed siege, unlike thieves and eles.

i wasnt able to fit turrets in anywhere. i liked them for the first month or so of playing the game, before i really tried my hand at kit dancing. net turret is justifiable in wvw. but the toolkit pull accents the zergling role too well imo (and gear shield for diving past a zerg to get in a tower), and the last slot is grenades every time so there just isnt room for more than 1 turret.

as for being useful in wvw in general… you just have to find the right niche. classes were designed so you can more or less do anything with any class.

and finally, just want to say that nothing confines you to using the same utilities in pve as in wvw. dont leave portal on your mesmers bar in pve. use something else. you need to break the paradigm that the skills currently on your bar are there permanently. especially to play engineer (or any class) well across dungeons, pve, wvw, and pvp.

not bored enough…

hmm.. lemme get this straight…
you outnumber us drastically and can easily hold 500+ ppt… and you want to camp the jp’s to annoy either 1) the players who want to either work on their legendary without bothering you or 2) the players who cant afford to buy the siege we need to put up a fight but still want to make a contribution. because surely, you realize, when you have 10x the participants… each person only needs to pay 1/10th the cost.

hmm.. lemme get this straight…
you outnumber us drastically and can easily hold 500+ ppt… and you want to camp the jp’s to annoy either 1) the players who want to either work on their legendary without bothering you or 2) the players who cant afford to buy the siege we need to put up a fight but still want to make a contribution. because surely, you realize, when you have 10x the participants… each person only needs to pay 1/10th the cost.ok.

hmm.. lemme get this straight…
you outnumber us drastically and can easily hold 500+ ppt… and you want to camp the jp’s to annoy either 1) the players who want to either work on their legendary without bothering you or 2) the players who cant afford to buy the siege we need to put up a fight but still want to make a contribution. because surely, you realize, when you have 10x the participants… each person only needs to pay 1/10th the cost.ok.honorable.
have fun.

hmm.. lemme get this straight…
you outnumber us drastically and can easily hold 500+ ppt… and you want to camp the jp’s to annoy either 1) the players who want to either work on their legendary without bothering you or 2) the players who cant afford to buy the siege we need to put up a fight but still want to make a contribution. because surely, you realize, when you have 10x the participants… each person only needs to pay 1/10th the cost.ok.honorable.
have fun.edit @ below: something wrong with posting, it shows up once when i try to edit

yeah, cuz i like grenades..

and while the targetting/leading for them sucks in all cases, at least for underwater anet had the brilliant idea of not making them kittening ground targeted.

i love it, my guildies love it

as a dps build the worst thing you can do is stop dpsing. tossing out a rez pot and returning to keeping my grenades’ vuln stacks (and their damage) on the boss is one of the better things i can do w/ that utility slot.

and in the event i draw aggro… 4 dodges lol.

i find its pretty much as good in a good party as a bad one. but in a good party people generally dont go down while its on cd.

dunno what world wasdclick lives in but…

right now engi as about as low as its ever been. hes probably right that itll be getting better. but each patch has seen the systematic nerfing of our best builds. each patch takes away another of something we are the best at and gives that title to another class.

you should really take a look at this subforum. the threads warning you away from engi have traction.

i think the problem i have with all of the idea pics provided is that while the style of victorian era fashion + brass accents, functional glass accessories, metal tubing, and goggles conveys a very steamy sort of person… thats all youre getting. not punk. punk is dirty, gritty, and nonconformist. the computer graphics images are too clean, too perfect. the cosplays have obviously been worn once or twice… instead of left in the rain so the brass can tarnish, or the fabrics/leather beaten for a couple days with a baseball bat and then thrown in a mud pit and then worn enough to keep them from being caked in mud.

ugh id be in there every day waving and bowing to our fellow honorable jump artists if we ever had our keep at this time ;(

pretty sure one of the nicer things about being in the low pop servers is that your fellow jumpers realize that buying siege is infinitely more troublesome. we dont have the zergs to portal up for free siege pot lucks, so down here theres a lot more respect since the only other way to have siege is hard earned gold or badges.

errrrr dreams of nerfs are called nightmares

our pugs in EB tend to have a strange obsession with the castle… but apart from that the only trouble i have gathering defenders is when we have 5 people on our border.

2 things

first, spamming grenades is worth it. the vuln stacks make anything go down wayyyyy faster. any grenadier worth anything would still spam 1.

second, static discharge build thread is a month old

Shea.3572:

Insanemaniac,

I have to disagree, my flame thrower engineer does well:

1.) Damage:
My #1 attack does 1,500-2,000 direct dmg from a full stream to all the targets it hits. This is followed by a burn for some more dmg.
My #2 attack does 3-5k dmg upon exploding
Traits that give me ability to cause vulnerability for each crit & cause burning.
Runes that take advantage of burning.
2.) CC:
Flame thrower #3 – Frontal knock back
Flame thrower #5 – AoE Blind
Rifle #4 – Frontal AoE knockback and gain distance
3.) Surival:
Traits that decrease cool down on elixirs allowing me to re-use them frequently.
Trait turning my small and breaking CC when at 25% for a few seconds.
Also elixir to break CC and turn me invul for a fwe seconds.
Elixir to give turn all conditions to boons.
Ability to throw elixirs and remove conditions.
Racial (Sylvari) plant a’bunch of turrets giving me more dmg in my area and also giving me those extra seconds of invul.

Now I apologize for being too lazy to look up the elixir names and I realize the sylvari elite isn’t engineeer specific, but the point I am making is that maybe some builds are broken now. Though definitely not all and I consider engineer to be a class to be reconded with.

anyone does fine in wvw when they have experience to back them up… with any build. you have the advantage of a lack of knowledge. you have the advantage of being 80 against upleveled. etc.

but try tpvp or 30+ fractals. and then this post will make more sense:

Thenoob.1480:

The basics of the engineer are: you play at 100% to match others at 80%.

as for your anecdotal evidence:
for 1, rifle auto does about 2-3x the dps. it doesnt take 2 secs to go off. it has double the range. you should be using FT auto only for crit procs and gates/thin walls. not for its damage.
for 2, you dont really need the cc in pve (or the enemy is immune), and in pvp/wvw its great against pugs but any serious pvper will have stability on demand.
for 3… yeah S is great. and i dont tend to bother with condition removal. medkits usually enough. however, requiring a 20 point trait to make tossed elixirs worth ANYTHING is ridiculous. because all but 1 tossed elixir grants a random effect. unpredictable is terrible design.

the times they are a changin

op is stuck in september(ish)
everyone else is in december

well, last patch hit the best dps build really hard, bugfixed our support into oblivion, and previous patches have nerfed bunkers and conditions to mediocrity. engis excel at nothing any more. better to roll a class that does. unless youre playing for the steampunk flavor. no other class can match the flavor of engis.

Shea.3572:

I’m biased in I think engineers are awesome, but I recommend an engineer. You can have permanent swiftness up with kit switching and good surviability from potions. There is also many CC options, myself when I use rifle/flame thrower.

now is a bad time to roll an engi. hit up the engi subforum. recent threads are mostly asking for anet’s intentions and warning people away. wait for buffs.

TheSchryvers.6540:

I always shake my head when i see a cat being hit by something in a tower and people still insist on building another one next to or in the same location as the one being hit gets destroyed.

happens during at least 75% of my ventures into wvw (or similar silly things). and its seriously not because of ignorance the majority of the time; im a good person and actually talk to pugs about the strategies when i see these things going on.

i really wonder if other tiers are any different… havent hopped around.

off hand pistol blows kitten use shield

pistol autoattack damage is crap compared to rifle

2 has ridiculous accuracy problems

BUT RIFLE DOESNT GIVE YOU 2 SIGILS!!

just tried p/p (for air + fire sigils) grenadier with something like 30/15/0/0/25… x / rifle turret / grenades… x = usually elixir r in dungeons, toolkit in worldmap and wvw.

would switch to shield cuz offhand pistol is crap, but i felt like i was doing fine sustained damage and quite a bit of frontloaded burst. nothing beats a barrage that procs air, fire, and discharge. and it should get both sigils almost every time if the other grenades dont.

but if you get bored of spamming 1 1 1 1 1 1… pistol damage is pretty bad compared to rifle. and unfortunately, grenade kit will forever pigeonhole your build to 30 explosives.

retal is in to the game to make engineers (flamethrower / grenades) and rangers cry.

seriously, what other classes can do tons of hits?

i dont think i would call this a “fun” interview

maybe “disappointing,” as a person who plays in wvw enough to think about its problems a bit when im not in it.

Kamahl.3621:

Adrenaline Implant is fine. It’s pretty strong for perma-semi-vigor, you get a strong defensive trait while getting many points put into a damage tree.

Armor mods is one of the dumbest pieces of crap ever though. Whoever put that there needs to get their head checked. Even if this POS gave perma-retaliation, it’d still never see use except in a hyper-niche situation: Like if I saw a flamethrower coming through the door on a keep I’m assaulting, so I could make that guy’s life a nightmare for a brief few moments.

fwiw, most of the people who even know that flamethrower can do that will also likely have lifesteal on crit and high crit chance… so that retal only makes you use your heal on cd at worst.

Darek.1836:

Apparently [Np] and [Envy] left FC today.

for the greener pastures of ehmry bay

i gathered chris was complaining about stagnant play and feeling like wvw was a job

dunno why envy left

if you see someone who obviously wants to pick a fight, why would you disadvantage yourself by not grabbing the nearby help?

if you spec for aoe damage, why waste your time killing 1 person instead of 5?

if youre significantly upleveled, why would you try to solo ANYTHING?

if you wanted 1v1s, why didnt you go to spvp?

before the patch i didnt even use flash grenade. you dont get more than 1 miss out of it anyways, its just a stall tactic. if your melee comrades need it to stay alive your party has bigger issues.

so why the kitten would you include it in your calculations?

poison too. honestly its really good when youre siegebreaking and useless otherwise. poison ticks suck. (the healing debuff is its only use, and its great for turning 1 downed person into 5 downed and 2 dead in wvw)

so buffing something to do worse damage than the “auto” when it wasnt used before is a really crappy way of saying “we know youll hate this and were sorry”.

why would any special skill with a cd ever do less damage than the autoattack? it has a cd for a reason. its supposed to be GOOD.

well im obviously switching to p/x instead of rifle because 2 is better than 1 when you dont use the weapon anyways.

but as for what theyll be? i like stacking (bloodlust) a lot. so thats 1. 2… probably air, fire, restoration, or earth. dont really know.

its definitely an issue on small scales, my computer is somewhat low end (now) and i see the black smoke puff well before i see the thief actually render. knowing my enemy’s bearing as he destealths is an important factor in choosing my next button. and dropping 2 grand on a new rig isnt an acceptable solution.