Guild Wars 2

please let the wolves stay deadly

why is it a surprise. this is something you should have expected.

“buy to play” is a slightly different concept from “pay to win”.

it sucks for f2p players who think they stand a chance against paying players, but in general “pay to win” as a concept is something a bit more slimy than “buy the game once”.

Benjamin Arnold.3457:

Adding a tier 3 daily recommended is not out of the question however.

please do

except they do have the ability to do it well. what they dont have is the opportunity. that isnt incompetence.

incompetent? nah
malicious? lol.

…undermanned? neglectful? yeahhhhhhhh.

@title

nope.

this isnt simply rehashed, this is upgraded.

tower of nightmares didnt have any orange circles around, and the extent of the danger in progressing to the top was merely racing thru poison from 1 safe spot to the next and praying either no mobs looked at you funny or that youd be able to kill them at the safe spot. all the champs were just trash without special mechanics (only a couple new moves were added, like on the toxic hybrid [the boss at the end of the facebook trailer] which was only in a story instance).

with the fractal we can at least expect mechanics throughout the whole island, whether simple or not, thanks to what chaos fractal and the other reworks (swamp in particular) have shown us.

cant wait. might make me put down pokemon.

so back on the topic of burns on auto…

10 attacks over 2.5 sec is 4 attacks per sec. if you gave each attack a 1 sec burn, you can maintain a 4 stack of burn. a 4 stack of burn is gonna be around 2k dps with high might and near full condi damage investment. if you also max out burn duration, that can double to 4k dps.

when you think about it, there’s actually room to put the base duration at something more like 1.5 secs before you start surpassing the dps that a simple open world flamethrower camping power build does.

of course, in a pvp mode, having a condi that refreshes every .25 secs is extremely annoying and unfun to play against, cuz you can’t build a toughness equivalent to help yourself survive against a condi you can’t clear, and an autoing condi engi would be about the same thing as a reaper permanently using shroud 4. you might have fun burninating with perma stab, but your opponent won’t have fun dealing with it unless it does so little damage that you can’t kill them, the way toughness kittens over power flamethrower builds.

the other way to balance this is to make reflects less common and more strategic, thereby undoing the power creep HoT gave us.

ideal for pugging? 4 necro 1 druid.

ideal for speed clearing with your static group? 1 chrono 1 ps 1 druid and 2 of whatever is the months highest dps.

zinkz.7045:

insanemaniac.2456:

back around vanilla release it was only good in pvp scenarios because stability was op and it gave on demand stability. after juggernaut was nerfed to only provide might it was a noob trap until HoT.

Apparently Teldo didn’t get your message whilst he was winning tournies that flamethrower was a “noob trap” after the juggernaut nerf.

i seem to recall he was huge on eg/ft but nerf after nerf pushed him to something like bomb/tk/eg.

with the release of HoT flamethrower got about 5 new synergies and it hasnt lost any of them in the past year

and its still fine to take in a power build, but the build is focused on being easy to play while teaching the player something about how traits can function together and compound upon themselves to make you stronger, not on being high dps… which means its best in open world pve, not an environment with smart enemies.

back around vanilla release it was only good in pvp scenarios because stability was op and it gave on demand stability. after juggernaut was nerfed to only provide might it was a noob trap until HoT.

PierPiero.9142:

insanemaniac.2456:

f
…
but its fun. i prefer it in wvw over power. but in pvp power is better.

But condi pistol pistol is much more fun in pvp also than boring hammer scrapper

yeah if sniping an opponent gets you goin go for it, but you wont win as many matches and in the end winning matches is what does it for most pvpers

open your world

blank things are optional:

• rifle or hammer, who cares youre camping flamethrower
• U or bulwark, whatever, or ditch rocket boots to have both if youre camping in a certain spot for a while. but switch back to rocket boots when you wanna go places.
• mortar or sneak. mortar to pull everything, sneak to run past everything.
• second sigil. air, energy, force, fire, whatever.
• 2 gearing options: marauder for survival, zerk for dps
• lots of rune options focusing on either dps or boon duration

flamethrower is an integral part of condi scrapper… the burns are so strong…

problem is its an offmeta build. its fine and competitive and wins some of the meta matchups (different ones than power scrapper), but its not as generally survivable as power scrapper and has more gaps in its abilities. you can catch people by surprise once, and theyll scream AIDS CANCER EBOLA at you, but a smart player will prolly be able to avoid or nullify your damage since most elite specs are equipped to handle repeatedly refreshed burns or insufficiently covered damage condis, and then the issue becomes your own lack of sustain.

but its fun. i prefer it in wvw over power. but in pvp power is better.

guildabd.6529:

Thwacking turrets with tool kit should add damage reduction to them.
There is no point repairing already destroyed turrets…

of all the things you suggest, this one isnt crazy as usual. +1

displacedTitan.6897:

Jourdelune.7456:

Gyro nerfed should had been put on DH trap as wells.

DH Traps compare to Scrapper Gyro or Tempest Shouts.

They are instants and do DAZE with a minor trait (not a grand-master one) when they trigger.

Well you need to remember that Guardians and Elementalists have people in ANet that play those classes so they get the favortism buff. No one who works for ANet plays an Engineer so we get table scraps. I would love to know who the dev in charge of Engi is supposed to be, my guess is they literally do not have one.

lol. grouch. not balance team, but very interested.

i sincerely hope we do not get more ai and i sincerely doubt they will give us more/another kit(s).

in my faulty memory, i recall seeing 0 posts prior to HoT saying “we want ai”. gyros looked cool, but i dont recall people actually wanting ai and the reception to having ai forced on engi again was chilly.

oh right. that calculation is assuming it uses your condi damage too.

well shredder gyro would be good enough to replace even grenades in a condi build if it put out just 5 whirls / sec… but it puts out 2. we know they can up that number. theyve changed the numbers on shroud 4. why they wont change the numbers on shredder is beyond me.

run 8 different paths and choose coe tokens.

Ardid.7203:

insanemaniac.2456:

Ardid.7203:

when destroyed every X time.

personally i prefer on destroy or on summon

every X time doesnt lend itself to expendability. suddenly the life of the summon is valuable, because more life time = more fields.

That’s exactly the point: you’ll have to choose if you want to play a build focused on summoning and destroying gyros as fast as posible to gain great CC, or a build which needs you to sustain and maintain your minion working to gain boons.

Of course my examples aren’t the best, but the point stands: instead of overnerfing the only current build, they should divide it, creating opportunities for more viable playstyles.

I guess I misunderstood you. I say that as a general thing with regards to gyros since they seem to be intended to be disposable and not something that you try to keep alive.

I agree that more playstyles is good :p

Ardid.7203:

when destroyed every X time.

personally i prefer on destroy or on summon

every X time doesnt lend itself to expendability. suddenly the life of the summon is valuable, because more life time = more fields.

who, gaile? shes good at what she does

coro.3176:

Just sayin’.. if Rocket Boots had been designed for HoT, it’d break stun, grant might, evade the entire time, and bake me cupcakes.

too true, and would use for cupcakes

wait so i didnt get to see the op cuz its delete but was it like a guide for every class linking to viper horror 9 times? seems legit automatic 8/10 if this is the case

permacripple of course LOL

Rezzet.3614:

insanemaniac.2456:

people in the pvp community have been complaining about random af cc spam since hot. gyros were part of the problem.

they over buffed toolkit, but it was still out of the (pvp) meta cuz inventions with a bunch of gyros was still better than tools with kits that just don’t do as much as hammer.

but it doesn’t explain rocket boots.

yet there’s no problem with DH traps having Dazes , while dealing massive damage and granting 10+s of fury+10 stacks of might

yet theres no problem with druid’s being able to spam dazes+ heals

mesmers fart dazes as auto attacks , they have a whole traitline around it

this is clear favoritism

rocket boots was a nice addition tho , it does up to 3k damage so my enemies have to think twice before chasing me, they should ve just changed rocket boots and made it into a charge so it doesnt do the stupid pause on landing

my opinion is that dh, and prolly mesmer, druid, and warrior also have too much cc spam… :P

and also i disagree with the direction they took rocket boots lol

wolfyrik.2017:

The Kobeyashimaru was beaten, true, but by cheating. I’m not sure how that really helps in this case. I agree that the way to win is break the system, but how many times in the last 4 years have anet done something like that?

it isnt really cheating. its a subjective test so there is no wrong answer. pulling out your phaser and shooting your security officer in the back before surrendering is an acceptable response, just not the one they would look for in a captain. walking in to a situation prepared and ready to be extremely unpredictable to the opponent (whoever that may be, not necessarily the thing in front of you) happens to be a quality thats pretty good for a captain, despite the accusation of cheating and despite being flippant about everything.

anet doesnt seem to do that, but theres no reason for us to not have good ideas. they do read these forums, even if we get no overt acknowledgement. its just that most of the time the suggestions that get posted are simply untenable from either a gameplay or a programming perspective. simple suggestions that have a low implementation cost and also “correctly” steer purpose/strategy/gameplay are rare (especially when “correctly” prolly means “aligns with the dev assigned to engi’s vision for the class”). more specifically, they seem to not look for anything that requires animator time, unfortunately. if the thing youre suggest is gonna require a new animation, just throw it out (thats the majority of suggestions in this forum).

wolfyrik.2017:

Gyros are a no win scenario. They are the Kobeyashimaru of utilities and the reason they’ve just had the daze removed, is that Anet knows that there is literally nothing they can do about them. Just as the players did before the one and only beta-weekend scrapper received.

it’s funny you would bring up the kobeyashimaru, cuz obviously the scenario got beat. the conventional means to beat it were to just not crack under pressure, but obviously one could take a step back and break the underlying systems the test was constructed upon.

the same is true of gyros. but in your thoughts on the subject, you are cracking.

idk I think what’s missing from (most) gyros right now is a compelling birth/death effect. something that makes you want to use them and expend them often instead of the fire and forget gameplay they currently have that does really lend itself to being as active as the devs hoped. blast gyro is pretty much perfect in this sense, although the pathing issues it sometimes has bring it down a notch. same for medic, but even more bleah, it not only has pathing and delayed movement issues, it’s also weak to keep out.

if shredder (lolollol) and purge had some extra effect and then didn’t suck at doing what they’re supposed to do, they could be pretty good. something like aoe cleanse 3-5 condis upon summoning purge, or maybe 3-5 sec of resistance when it explodes. something slightly bigger than the effect that it gives by following you around, especially something that gives it that reason to be expended.

bulwark – you can heal it and as long as its alive, you take less damage. you want this gyro alive as long as possible.
cleanse gyro – it cleanses you and as long as its cleaning you, you are a huge threat to a condi class. you want this gyro alive as long as possible.
shredder – the longer its alive, the more damage it does (lololol). though its flawed its primary use case is still “dont pop me bro”.
blast – if you pop it, you dont get the knockback.

the only one that wants to die asap is medic and thats only cuz the heal it gives is so kittening unreliable and so kittening small that leaving it out cuts your healing per second to an unacceptably low level and it will get you killed against a similarly skilled opponent compared to taking healing turret. of course, the same is true of H and AED, unfortunately. healing turret is the only good option with the previous medic nerfs.

if gyros had some kind of “on cast” or “on activation” special thing that did more than what they do by sitting around, like what medic gyro has (a 4k heal), there would be a reason to pop them. because by popping them, you get to use that bigger thing more often. thats whats lacking here. blast kinda succeeds at it, and medic does, but the other 3 do not.

can confirm as condi necro player, though for the last couple thaumanovas ive done ive swapped in flesh wurm since 2 of the utilities i normally bring are worthless (cpc – self cripple, epi – no adds). i fortunately havent needed to actually use it, cuz a tele is really just gonna kitten me, but i havent needed it cuz ive been positioning myself properly and havent been walking the edges of floor tiles.

coro.3176:

The self knockdown on rifle used to be fair. It was a high risk, high reward skill. Plus, it had occasional use to break immob or reposition out of aoe.

In the old days, you could expect Overcharged Shot to land almost every time. A fight was a chess match with you and your opponent trading CCs Now, you’re very very lucky if you can land a hit without it being evaded, blocked or reflected, or your opponent having stability.

Just compare:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Jump_Shot
vs
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Surge_of_the_Mists

Engi gets slightly more distance and some vuln on landing. For the same cooldown, Rev gets more damage, better scaling, 9 CCs, and evades for almost the entire skill duration.

The rest of the skills are similar. They don’t do enough since HoT power creep, and they’re countered by all the HoT defense – especially projectile hate.

wouldnt it be cool if overcharged shot were a force to be reckoned with again instead of a liability.

that is what these nerfs are slowly doing. walking back the ridiculous power creep introduced with HoT.

base engi looks better today compared to scrapper than it did yesterday, and it doesnt seem to have fallen out of the meta that the nerfs are aimed at.

but its too slow. theyre afraid to change the meta at an alarming rate. multiple problems have been identified with the gameplay, but theyre addressing the problems 1 at a time over extremely long periods of time. maybe it isnt fear, maybe its red tape from higher up or quality control issues. whatever the actual reason is, it sucks.

and what sucks even more is going from the powerful state to the nerfed state, for the player. we hate having this crap taken away from us. but i have a serious question: when was the last time you were able to control and abuse the gyro dazes such that you won a fight with them? you cant control the positioning of the gyros, you cant control the damage theyre taking, and you are nearly always severely punished for exploding them (aside from medic gyro, which is the opposite). the only thing you can do is attempt to force your opponent onto a melee weapon and make them want to attack a gyro more than you, and the playstyle just isnt conducive to such a strategy. so yes, you incidentally prolly won fights from the random af dazes you got out of your gyros, but you had little or no control over that, and thats bad gameplay.

people in the pvp community have been complaining about random af cc spam since hot. gyros were part of the problem.

they over buffed toolkit, but it was still out of the (pvp) meta cuz inventions with a bunch of gyros was still better than tools with kits that just don’t do as much as hammer.

but it doesn’t explain rocket boots.

id want it, but prolly for a different reason than you, op. im not on a witch hunt for an explanation as to why things are the way they are, id merely want to see it for its value in predicting, requesting, and influencing the next balance patch changes.

displacedTitan.6897:

insanemaniac.2456:

kappre.3897:

Removing daze completely is a poor choice. They could have put it in Final Salvo. And if its addition is too much for that single trait, then switch it with superspeed. Or put it in Expert Examination. At least let us trait for it.

and then it’s a mandatory trait like dh, and we lose more build variety

LOL pretending we have build variety!

without a trait that adds daze to gyros, we have an adept choice between 2, a master choice between 2, and a gm choice between 3 (or at least 2, all the gms are not bad but clearly adaptive armor is now the least used). if you put that trait in any of those slots, it’ll overpower any of the current options and effectively delete the traits it attempts to merely compete with.

it’s not a matter of choosing a spec, which does lack diversity and has since hot. but the traits we choose in scrapper all have different purposes and do make deciding between them interesting.

kappre.3897:

Removing daze completely is a poor choice. They could have put it in Final Salvo. And if its addition is too much for that single trait, then switch it with superspeed. Or put it in Expert Examination. At least let us trait for it.

and then it’s a mandatory trait like dh, and we lose more build variety

at 3 sec, 13 sec cd, it was op as hell… but i dont feel like nerfing its duration is the right course of action. i would rather see its cd increased back to something that isnt absolutely ridiculous. i have always scratched my head at why they buffed it to 13, and even more so once they decided that 33% cdr was too much for ele, because now toolkit is in the same rut. why did they ever even buff the cdr on power wrench. both changes need to be undone, and redone in some other way that makes toolkit have a commanding presence while traited.

Rezzet.3614:

insanemaniac.2456:

lol

people complaining about nerfs being out of nowhere

meanwhile, engi was part of the cc spam problem and could thread about 5 different skills for total block/evasion/reflect time of nearly 20 secs.

now take daze off of dh traps too, anet. and druid has too much daze too. and prolly berserkers and chronos.

the complains was because engi got nothing but nerfs whereas others got teeny nerfs and decent buffs , ontop of the fact that our supposed change was supposed to be around making engineer better as overall support and dps

did you look at mesmer, rev, necro and druid.

lol

people complaining about nerfs being out of nowhere

meanwhile, engi was part of the cc spam problem and could thread about 5 different skills for total block/evasion/reflect time of nearly 20 secs.

now take daze off of dh traps too, anet. and druid has too much daze too. and prolly berserkers and chronos.

i highly recommend giving trailblazer a shot. the easiest access to it that ive found (without spending gold on lilies) is to run the HoT story over and over. each run gives you an exotic armor piece with a limited choice of stats for completing … the instance before hearts and minds (last boss).

i have 1 engi currently in a mix of rabid and trailblazer (trinkets anet, trinkets.) and i would not go back from trailblazer. i have a similar set in full viper, and its fun, but its much squishier and i dont feel like the power it gets is worth it.

my trailblazer mix engi rocks 3k armor / 2k toughness ish.

and yes there are matchups that a build like that just cannot win… any warrior packing resistance, any necro who gets 2 transfers off on you, the usual nike daredevils/druids you cant keep in combat, and the condi mesmer build that stays full hp and spams stealths. most of those are stalemates though, not straight losses, and its not your fault the other person is running a one trick build that cant kill a good player.

anyways, point is, its well worth it to move away from rabid/dire and into the HoT stats.

hammer scrapper – marauder
old style kit/rifle engi – cele isn’t worse than it used to be, you can leave your armor as is… but scrapper is a better roamer cuz elite specs op. and it’s not like a rifle/kit build doesn’t fully make use of marauder too. so either way, cele or marauder. having a couple crusader pieces makes a nice mix too, but I’d stick with trinkets to taste with that.
condi – trailblazer. viper is nice but having a tankier set for wvw with a different rune option is nifty.

Osu.6307:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

People who fractal all the time have far too many research pages.

Incorrect in my case. I do fractals daily and never get a single page because I only do T4. Now that research pages are actually valuable in that they are needed to buy ascended chests, pages should be awarded for the same fractal in each tier. Even though I could use a couple more pages to be able to buy a chest, no way am I going to go do a T1. Screw that!

when you pug a t1 as a player who can regularly pug t4s, you can carry 4 people because its so easy. those 4 people could be noobs or kittens, but, what if they are tomorrows t4 carries?

dont be afraid to give back to the community when you get something out of it.

Electro.4173:

Not to mention the fact that Scepter’s AA is the main source of its power (#2 is OK and #3 is basically just useful for a bit of life force) so it doesn’t really suffer from needing to be swapped out of to renew cooldowns. But you still swap between Dagger (for even more conditions) and Warhorn (for interrupts and life force building).

a condi necro in pve should almost always have full or nearly full life force. you really don’t want to be using it all that often, only every time 5 is off cd (and the thing to do then is 5 4 3 exit). scepter 3 is convenient for maintaining full life force, but it’s primary function is that it gives a 7 stack of torment to anything with 5+ condis. a 7 stack of torment is strong enough that you should always be using 3 on cd every time you can. when you do, you shouldn’t have to worry about life force generation.

we dont get weaker though, we have marginally different dps and have tons more defense

anet hasnt changed ascended crafting, mawdrey, ascension, or ad infinitum time gates and has acknowledged and declined to change the envoy armor gates.

they like time gates.

in fact, they like time gates that take an order of magnitude longer than ad infinitum.

is this not the proof you are looking for. theyve had this stance for literally years.

sophiewhite.3149:

id love to know how i can “git gud” on a melee class with kitten heals (warrior) when 3 hits takes most my hp and the third daze ruins any dps or might building i was going to do. let alone the fact he has to be on the panels constantly which i cannot get close enough to damage on.,

try using gs rifle instead of gs a/m so that you have a weapon swap that is useful. i mean, you are swapping your weapon once in a while, right? its one of the things you should be doing in t4 fractals unless youre playing necro.

Xyonon.3987:

neither should it be a “take it and you’ll deal less damage” option.

maybe it should be.

after all, one does not expect damage from alchemy or inventions. and if engi had a true 3rd dps line to go with explosives and firearms, that would be the go to instead of the current pick-1-of-4.

we are where we are with elite specs cuz they do too much.

build templates have been requested for years and the lesh prince has asked us what we want to see in them and weve given him excellent feedback but really its apparently a huge issue and is either still in progress or not feasible

but yes we need build templates.