Guild Wars 2

Well lets just say its a bit insulting when they do solid nerfs, and then improve “diversity” by changes such as increasing the direct damage of fire bomb by 10% or increase damage of rocket boots by 25%. Its like buffing the damage of astral form by 250%. It does nothing to improve its purpose and is ultimately just a safe way of padding patchnotes with meaningless cotton and to dilute the nerfs (not in actual effect but in text) without actually having to worry about balancing a diverse meta. Because a one class one build meta is easy to handle.

Poor gear shield. Anyone else get a feeling arenanet live in a separate timeline? Cos i didnt see all the toolkit engis in the esports scene where everyone was running elixir gun. And its one of the core defenses the vanilla engineer got.

Also stop buffin things. Cause you cant do meaningful changes and it only looks silly.

Also what nonsense is “purity of purpose?”.

Was it because it was too much of a problem to fix how experts examination works?

Here is your “purity of purpose” done right:

Take for example rocket boots.

1. Ask what is this skills purpose? (Hint: It got something to do with mobility and escapes, not damage).
2. Is this skill providing enough of that resource. Enough to actually be taken.
3. If the answer was no, increase the effectiveness of its PRIMARY purpose, which is to gain mobility.

This is the same thing that makes us spit out our coffee when we see you buff the direct damage on firebomb by 10%. Whats next, 1% direct damage increase on box of nails?

I swear every patch makes it harder to log in. Its not that the game is unplayable but it sure feels as getting on board Titanic II with every nonsensic update like this.

What does this even mean?

I really would like an explanation cos this sounds like artschool level of presentation.

If you cant word the reasoning better than this what makes you sure of this change?

Just keep in mind that hyperbole, while adding that extra spice to an argument is a bit like salt. A bit of it makes the dish taste more, but too much and it ends up disgusting.

Krysard.1364:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Let’s see when I get hit by an Engie on average non crit is over 4K on a crit 7k.

Gimme some of that crack man, a scrapper crits for 4k in perfect conditions, and usually hits for 1~2k without crits

It is because he, as many others, looked up the wiki instead of checking their damage log or even better try recreating it with a scrapper of their own (at the very least against dummies).

Thus you get damage values that are off by at least 2-5 times.

This is exactly why i gave my flamethrower example above, because most people whip out their calculator (if even that) and start theorizing without doing a reality check on something familiar.

For a thief example lets take pistol whip, which would then provide equal or more damage than his theorized 20-35k damage thunderclaps. I think people would have noticed 30k+ per pistol whips and flamethrower autos in tanky gear.

My entire point is that we see a ton of this stuff popping up with the scrapper balance discussions and as i said above that leads to errors of a magnitude 2-5x wrong.

I dont know if its because few people got an engineer on their account ( more classes than baseline slots), but please be resonable people.

Yes, a scrapper is a very tough fight for a thief (or daredevil) going power.

I think i said this long ago about engineers vs thieves- “Its mighty glacier vs fragile speedster”.

If you stand around for the full duration of thunderclap and dont take a single step backwards when shock shield is used you will have a bad time. But as an offensive bruiser (less focus on team support etc.) its expected to make short work of a full glass player brute forcing the situation in the optimal engagement range of that player (which is very, very short). Now the thing here is that one of the prime resources of the DD/thief, namely mobility fails to deliver if you want to take a point fast from a scrapper, the odds are stacked against you from the core design of these professions, one rely on people getting in your face and recklessly assault, the other require mobility to survive. If we balance the scrapper (or the engineer) on the basis of 1vs1ing a glassy melee thief on point there wont be anything left in that smoking crater unless they entirely revamp the scrapper to fill another role.

Its a bit like when, say a profession relying on boons to stay alive meets a necromancer.

P.S. Also this is why i hate conquest being the focal point of all balance, the engineer always end up as the bunkery/bruisery node control guy which fits perfectly in a mode about controlling nodes. And then they nerf us everywhere for that. Until recently at least.

For future discussion regarding damage coefficients, examine this claim:

The engineer got a super overpowered attack with (10x) 890 base damage and a 2.5 scaling!

WITHOUT RECHARGE!

And it cleaves!

And it applies 2 seconds of burning!

And it does 10% more damage against burning targets!

And it got 450 range!

Now guess which skill im talking about. Also try remember the last time you ever where killed as a result of this skill and how widespread its use is. Now ask yourself why? Apply this reasoning when discussing the damage on the hammer.

Dawdler.8521:

The question isnt why superspeed doesnt stack.

The question is why gameplay breaking boons in WvW such as quickness and resistance still hasnt been done exactly like superspeed.

Complaining about superspeed, hahahahahaha… Surely this is a joke topic. And I say that as someone that main an all gyro scrapper relying heavily on superspeed.

Scrappers have some good use of it thanks to rapid regeneration (which promotes camping fields, making it useful in spvp for certain), but lets be honest thats why you bring super speed on a scrapper. I cant remember anyone in any mode ask for super speed. Okay once when we where doing a golem rush due to how it interacts with golems. But that was just that. Once.

But im okay with your solution of having resistance, protection, quickness, stealth, alacrity work in exactly the same way (popped a 10 second quickness and someone overwrites it with 1 second. Its fine!)

And regarding the guardian/mesmer example of the above poster. One build which doesnt use that increased mobility all that well just blew all of his traps at once. And he got a long term stealth. Now which factor here cause you the most concern (not even going to mention that we shouldnt balance a mechanic around a rune instead of vice versa). Same thing for the mesmer. He blew all his pretty long recharging skills to make his team member a bit faster? I would be more worried about the resistance and quickness but i have gotten the impression so far that super speed is rated at resistance and quickness level of strength so theres that i suppose.

And yes i know there are some uses of super speed, ive been running with slick shoes since heart of thorns and then went gyro scrapper. But from my experience the true gamebreaking strength of super speed lies not in the effect itself but in rapid regeneration (which have recived a healthy nerf).

And i also asked for a maximum duration to avoid 1 min + super speed stacking (like stealth it might stack a certain number of times and then refresh the lowest stack).

But if it is true that super speed is amongst the strongest effects in the game by such a margin i suppose i will have to let this request die and continue supporting my teammates with it.

But even so, is the effects of super speed so much stronger than say stealth or alacrity that we cant have it stack in duration?

And if it is cant we tweak the application of it instead of having an insane amount of it which doesn’t stack with itself?

From the scrapper side a few things.

Allowing super speed to stack (as it should do).

Making all gyros pulse their effects like the sneak gyro and bulwark does (no more requirement to stand still just to have the gyro cast a skill) in a decent aoe.

The scrappers hammer is strong but the gyros and traits leaves much to be desired (stuff like shocking speed, applied force (go on see how many skills quickness affect on hammer!) or even to a lesser degree mass momentum (with no boon duration a 5 stacks of might for maintaining one of the rarer boons in this game permanently, sure it synergizes with juggernaut but even 25 stacks of might fails to make the flamethrower impressive imho) but at least that got a conversion effect even if its boring.

EDIT
Some things would have to be changed like reducing the number of cleansed condis per pulse to 1 etc.

As the title suggests, why doesn’t super speed stack (in duration)?

We have alacrity stacking, stealth stacking and now invulnerability stacking for warriors so it cant be because its not a boon.

Also the problem goes deeper than this. Not only does super speed not stack but the newest application overwrites the older. This means that if someone gives me 5s of super speed and i happen to touch a final salvo field directly after i will get 2 seconds super speed instead of the 7 or at least 5 seconds i should have gotten. This includes loosing the 4 s of super speed granted by decisive renown minor trait from touching the field of the very gyro triggering the trait in the first place. It also leads to traits like shocking speed feeling laughable since outside of thunderclap the fields you interact with overwrites the already minor effect of the trait.

It is heavily overloaded (and overrated for anything but personal rapid regeneration fuel in my humble opinion) on the scrapper/engineer (although there are plenty of other classes as well with this effect).

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superspeed

Not that super speed is much sought after in the first case as far as i can see but then there is even less reason not to have it stack. Add a maximum duration if you have to although i find it hard to see why.

Final salvo do currently not grant stability to blast gyro, neither does it grant stability to the user when activating function gyro.

The later is probably more well known but the former impacts the mine sweeping capabilities of blast gyro (triggering traps and marks) and has some impact as well.

Xyonon.3987:

Killjoy? Never! Every input it a good input!

That “increased damage boost thrown upon the pile of stuff” isn’t really important, but the source of it is. If it means that everyone gets 5% more damage if there is 1 Engi in your party, that’s amazing. It’s even better if it doesn’t matter how many Engis there are, so you aren’t forced to pile em up. It’s the desire for max dps that dominates PvE, that’s the reason for the change.

Now let’s see about PvP. 5% damage is equal to vuln, so that’s fine. So you say the 5% dmg decrease are too weak. So how about the unique 5% dmg debuff + weakness? That’d be the same for PvP as it is now, just that it’s like “up to 30 stacks vuln” for the target. How about that?

The idea with the function gyro is also very nice! Altough I don’t really see that big problem like most other players with it. I really like FG :< But yea, sure also an option.

---

Greez!
- Ziggy

Yes i suppose that change would sit better with me than the original version, weakness is an incredibly powerful condition in pvp and the ability to easily apply it to multiple enemies or to stack up a bit of it on one target is potent. We only need it to apply on gyro detonation as well.

I was highlighting is that the nature of pvp is vastly different to that of 10 people focusing dps on one target for minutes. And when i mean throwing upon the stack i dont mean stacking with itself. If we can avoid furthering the icon chaos for simple damage boosts when we already got boons and conditions for those exact purposes i would prefer tweaking how the boons/conditions works on bosses rather than to reinvent the wheel (and slap it on the old one) yet again. Perhaps if we removed the 25 vuln cap from bosses but had it act logarithmic instead of linear above the threshold instead? I think that if we are to introduce new effects we should ask ourselves “could this be a boon or a condition?” or even better “IS this a boon or a condition? why is it not working?” and reserve the unique effects to things that would be hard indeed to classify. Stability and quickness got changed into boons and for the better id say, it allows you to manipulate them for better or for worse.

I do wish arenanet had stuck more to the boon/condition system with more focus on tweaking traits (like having regeneration on engineers give bonus healingpower for everyone, still encouraging a varied team composition) instead of adding 25% movement speed (when we already got swiftness) or increasing the damage on a foe (when we have vulnerability and might). But alas its too late for that.

Regarding stacking vulnerability as opposed to non stacking 5% unique damage boost, the later is only more useful when you are stacking more than 20 stacks of vulnerability which also happens to be the expectation on a thing being attacked by 10 dps oriented players but not necessarily when you are fighting players. Now i will say that exchanging vulnerability for 5% damage buffs have less of an impact than that of the weakness to 5% damage reduction, one change gets you killed the other reduces a possible 15% damage increase on 5+3 combo to 5% guaranteed. And engineers already have a lot of ways to stack vulnerability anyhow to make up for that.

As for the function gyro the problem is that if we are talking about raids, if 5% more damage on an enemy is enough of a deal to suddenly make scrappers attractive- is a mechanic that only is usable when someone screws up attractive? In the dream raid team should the function gyro be deployed even once?

In pvp it works better as a concept because its balanced around the expectation of 50% failure/win chance (just to illustrate my point, this is not true for all fights) and then you expect it to be deployed every now and then as long as the fights are not pure 1vs1. And it has a function even when you are not currently loosing the battle which is stomping. Of course i do not consider the gyro reliable enough to be consider good (id stick with niche for now) but in theory atleast it has an expected higher impact in pvp.

I hate to be a killjoy but-

From a pvp/wvw perspective i much prefer the current function of the trait. The problem with 10 man dps focused content is that this might as well be 1% increased damage and it would still be yet another unique boost to throw upon the pile of stuff. But in a pvp context 5% damage increase (instead of vulnerability 5x application for both condi and power) and 5% damage decrease (instead of super strong weakness which also reduces endurance gain) makes it a bit too much of a massive nerf to a trait that is already not exactly meta material if im not mistaken.

If you want something like this why not make it a pve mechanic of the function gyro (which already lacks half of its mechanic in pve) so that you can “send your function gyro to harass the enemy, dealing minor damage and bleeds while also increasing the damage the afflicted enemy takes” (similar to the bird attack on ranger warhorn but with a gyro buzzing about and debuffing).

If you want to make scrappers more attractive in pve why dont we start with the elephant in the room (our primary mechanic) instead of making revamps affecting all modes for the sake of giving us the golden ticket for dps rac- i mean raids. People complain about nerfs in pvp affecting pve right so lets be better than arenanet and not make the same mistake.

Speaking for one of the 2 modes where it can actually do its job in theory:

Not nice, but niche. Its a hit or miss mechanic with an excessive amount of miss to a few hits. Does it feel great when the stars align and it actually turns the battle around in your favor? Yes. Did i once manage to survive a suicide mission in wvw by last second throwing out a function gyro on the necro that i downed in a group of enemies thus rallying myself? Yes. But for every such moments there are hundreds of activations where either the gyro did not matter (the battle is already over, or its a 1vs1, or its an ele, thief or suchwise), did not work or the odds for it to be able to do any of its 2 jobs are made impossible by its frailty and its single stability stack (when traited with a grandmaster mind you). A lot of the time when it actually works i cant help but notice that the enemy didnt even seem to know what it does (players continuing to bandage self when they haven’t used their interrupt etc.).

I use it mostly as a daze bomb, some minor damage and an interrupt for "free"* on a enemy, if i can target it in time.

And some extra healing is also nice (due to grandmaster trait and a master trait).

*Its not, this takes the place of whatever mechanic we would have gotten otherwise.

Its amazing how they killed the kit they reworked to increase popularity. From having been a survivalist and hit and run tool it went to become a package of support so incredibly mediocre its hard to see what went on in their heads. Especially with the healing specs introduced with HOT. And those specs heal more and do more in a AOE. They totally reworked it and introduced new assets and then they just let it rot. That is some hilariously badly spent working hours.

But the thing with arenanet is that they would rather buff things thats not too bad off instead of fixing the truly messed upp things, thats why pistol offhand got a buff but not the shield and thats why elixirs got a buff but turrets, gadgets and medkit is still considered a series of jokes. Because its easier to do and less likely to break something.

Also this might sound crazy, but speaking of medical dispersion field….

What if it was: “You heal yourself for 20% less. Outgoing healing is improved (50% (or whatever))”

This means that at the cost of increased self risk you can push your healing up quite a bit.

Its still a boring trait yes, but atleast it would be impactfull, especially with the medkit trait.

Deployable mortars could be a very nice addition and while a lot of players instantly react with the “no moar siege warfare, we need moar pvp!” they might not consider the actual role such a siege weapon would fill.

One of the most annoying things in wvw is the arrow cart spam. With long range, big aoe and lots of damage with only a few skills (like meteor shower) exposing them to harm its no wonder a lot of servers have towers and keeps with row upon row with arrow carts. The idea behind a deployable mortar should be that it counters otherwise impossible to hit siege like arrow carts and trebs on gates. The counter in turn to these mortars should be ballistas/cannons or shield generators or to send parties out to raid these exposed siege weapons. The end result would hopefully be to encourage MORE fighting and less hiding behind siege because just draining 1100 supply on arrow carts might not cut it anymore. And about the winning server thing, guess which server keeps a tier 3 border filled to the brim with AC spam?

For this feature to be implemented properly it would probably need to exhibit the following properties:

-Charge and direction mechanic like the current mortar.
-Shorter range than static mortar but longer than arrow cart range.
-No knockback or other CC on hit, possibly it could stun people struck while operating siege, but the focus should be on countering the siege itself.
-Slow fire rate, it should be a weapon of attrition.
-Low damage vs players, higher damage vs siege.
-Supply should probably be somewhere around 50 supply, cheaper than a trebb, but costlier than a ballista.
-If there could be a limit on how close these could be built to each other as to not encourage mortarclusters that would be nice as well.
-And most importantly the hallmark feature of this siege should be a ridiculous arc. This is why this siege fills a purpose, it should be designed to hit almost vertically, wearing down clever siege and forcing a response from the defenders.
-Low hp. The siege should be quickly brought down if attacked by actual players, encouraging offensive pushes.
-Possibly a resistance to other siege weaponry other than ballistas and cannons.

The mastery skill could be a pulse shot that reveals all siege in 1500 radius of the shot, showing icons similar to the new commander markers (with icons showing the type of siege) on the map and on the screen through walls and everything. Possibly it could apply the sentry mark but thats not relevant to its primary function.

I do not see the same need for deployable cannons, the only thing i could see happening is to further invalidate ballistas.

I have said it before and ill say it again. Turrets should become weaponry emplacements with a remote control, that is to say they would become semi-kits. When you have placed a turret the skill swaps over to “control x-turret” which gives you a remote control, essentially a kit with the twist that the skills do not originate from you but from wherever you placed the turret. It can still be destroyed but now we can pack some serious heat into these things. Your rocket turret is now a full on missile silo, that net turret sure does fire more things than just nets etc. Of course this would mean reworking healing turret as well, but lets be honest its functionality could more or less be implemented on elixir H instead (except for the blast) so that the toolbelt heals aoe, is a water field and cleanses conditions.

Furthermore one could then allow allies to walk up to them and use them (the owner takes priority similar to siege weapons in wvw). With stats affecting them this means a power engineer could for example let a necromancer use the condition intensive skill.

The current playstyle if it could be called that could be preserved by allowing them to fire their current basic attacks when not in use if you trait for it.

The end result would be the final vengance of the turret engis, allowing them turn the tables and laugh at the easy to play 4kit builds.

Also since our class is based on the idea of kits it makes sense to make turrets more kit like in function.

Dwayne.6904:

Only what i hate on this update was nerfing rapid regn. 
Wich was great and allowed you to use more build diversity i still say they shud have nerf elixir gun not rapid regn. Everything else was good

They should have removed the swiftness healing on rapid regen instead of lowering the super speed heal. 1/3rd of the scrapper tree is based on the premise that super speed is a valuable resource.

As of now they would need to increase the super speed duration on stuff like shocking speed and final salvo by one second to actually improve their value as a mobility buff (2 seconds of super speed is not a impact full mobility buff).

Also a lot of the gyro toolbelts are based on the premise that you have 3 consecutive leap finishers (as you do not get blast finishers etc from the gyros) on the hammer. So gyros like shredder, med and purge gyro feel this nerf as a collateral damage. Either one could improve the actual effect on some of these (making the purge field more than a posion field to finish for example) or one could improve the amount of finishers on the gyros themselves (like making blast gyro actually blast).

For the later idea i wonder what would happen if the shredder lasted much longer but could be repositioned like the old tablet of ventari where the reposition was a leap finisher for the gyro (so you could skill shot daze with your shredder through lightning fields for example or give it a fire aura if you charge it into a fire field).

Mostly i want the scrapper to remain relevant as it functions as a sanctuary from the… interesting state of some core engi trait lines since the specialization patch for me.

It can crit but using its own stats which are unlinked to yours, you will do the same damage and crits in soldiers as in berserker.

I actually got in touch with a dev about this, and they are working on a fix. I mentioned the final salvo and bulwark bug for good measure.

I am very pleasantly surprised by the developers, especially given that this was during a dev visit to us in the EU!

Keep it up!

So outside of not having the final salvo trait actually deploy a super speed field (with the healing nerfed as well) apparently blast gyro now only dazes and does not do any launch.

Are you even trying to sell us on the gyro concept?

Well if we want a substantial buff to outnumbered how about all supply is twice as effective? Meaning its easier to both defend and build against a larger force (easier to gain a foothold and initiate sieges, faster to counter siege and easier to sustain).

While there are big issues on the scrapper lets calm down for a second.

The engineer was intended as a class with incredibly strong utilities but weaker weapons (that being non kits). Of course not all utility skills are strong (cough turrets) but at its best this holds true. The scrapper on the other hand goes against this with a very strong main weapon, and weaker utilities (blast gyro, shredder gyro, cleanse gyro). The result of this is naturally that players cherry picks the amazing utilities like slick shoes, elixir gun etc. and run it with the hammer. I believe that the base engineer is balanced, i also believe that the base scrapper (meaning a gyro user) is balanced. What needs to happen is that if stuff like removing leaps on rocket charge happens we need to move that power over to the gyros.

The thing with rocket charge for example, outside of the chained daze combo being a cornerstone in the design of the hammer (like having backstab but no cloak and dagger or blackpowder) is that a lot of the gyros toolbelts essentially only serve as combo initiators (despite mortar being a thing…). Medic gyro creates a water field, cleanse gyro create a poison field, shredder creates a lightning field (ha ha………). So if we nerf rocket charge to one leap for example how about we make medic gyro pulse healing, poison field causes weakness and lightning field-…. i dont know about that one cause shredders so bad anyway it wouldn’t matter.

Another thing is that the trait rapid regeneration should not heal on swiftness. In a battle of endurance the healing provided by this is substantial and has even less thought behind it, even if super speed healing is a more noticeable burst. And when it comes to SS slick shoes is the villain here with the short, short cooldown on its stunbreak, upp that with a 5-10 sec combined with swiftness healing removed and the meta scrapper sees a nerf to its sustain (not a nuke it from orbit nerf mind you) while the scrappers relying on scrapper mechanics and sacrifices to provide super speed (after which it is balanced for) is unaffected.

As for perfectly weighted this trait should maybe have its cooldown and duration increased instead, less spammy and allowing for a larger window of counterplay for stopping easy might stacking. What needs to be understood is that all the scrapper tree consists of three paths to choose from: damage mitigation (prot matrix, Ex Ex, AA), super speed and regeneration(shocking speed, rapid regeneration, final salvo) and stability to offense (perfectly weighted, mass momentum, applied force). Breaking the synergy entirely instead of tweaking stuff like duration is probably not the best way to handle this.

But i completely agree about the sneak gyro, its not meant to be a panic button like blinding powder but a tactical stealth like shadow refuge. An activation time preserves the intended use of this skill and prevents panic buttoning out of well placed focus.

And about the function gyro. Its all it does. During the entire fight the entire new mechanic of the scrapper only does this. And it barely does it well with it being glassy, susceptible to CC and stupid Its a severe case of “you had one jobb”. Its not a time traveling mechanic or a scythe demon form or an extra dodge but a situational utility. It might be strong when it sees use and it is a deal or no deal (which is when its the most humiliating as well). But think of it as a mechanic that could otherwise have been used during the battle to get you down in the first place or prevent his ally from having to be revived it makes more sense having it the way it is.

TL:DR Engineer is balanced, scrapper is balanced. Scrapineer is not. Balance accordingly.

“Gyros now start their cooldown upon summon rather than upon gyro death. Medic, Shredder, Purge and Bulwark gyro now have a 35s cooldown, up from 30s. Sneak Gyro needed a cooldown that was longer since it would otherwise have potential 100% uptime, so it now has a cooldown of kitten , up from 30s (its 30s duration remains). This should encourage players to keep them around to gain their benefits for longer.”

From the sticky “Post BWE3 Scrapper Changes”.

While they apparently thought simply lowering the cooldown on the gyros would work, the one frequently used gyro is now going to experience a doubling in its cooldown.

So can we maybe bring this up again? Regardless of if the noncommunicated change of plans occurred because of lack of time or if they considered it to be the superior option i personally think it should still be still on the table for discussion.

For example this means that the new 40 sec cooldown on sneak gyro would not affect as heavily the ones who uses it in situations where it would actually survive for a while (smart skirmishing), while still punishing place and explode panic button usage where it becomes troublesome (if you are getting a lot of focus and need to gtfo you always get the 4 sec stealth/ 20 sec cooldown as of now which would then be 40 sec cooldown). And it would leave the pve people largely unaffected.

The current cooldown mechanic also extends to other factors.

The grandmaster trait and only gyro affecting trait we got encourages place and detonate gameplay (hello healing “turret”), with more uptime if you destroy everything on placement. Of course this only becomes a factor when you got the master trait to make it usable but still lets say you want to use this trait. If gyros cooldown started on placement the number of final salvo uses between the one using his gyros and making sure they stay alive and do their thing would be the same as for the one detonating them for dazes and damage.

In extension this also means that it is really tempting to detonate med gyro just like healing turret for more dps, dazes, super speed regen, protection uptime, condition clear (via traits) and rune effects than leaving it out and hopefully catch a pulse or two of healing.

It also means that the frustrating sluggishness of the blast gyro results in that every second it gets second thoughts and run back and forth is a second longer cooldown on your launch skill.

Anyone else thinks its reasonable to have the cooldown start on deployment?

Whatever happens i hope they actually buff it this time instead of nerfing aim assisted rocket by 30% instead like last time.

And if the opponent is using conditions that elixir proc instead very well might kill the engineer and work the other way when it comes to AMR due to the disabling of our skills while in that form. So its fair right? Besides it got a 90 sec icd.

This is going to be an entertaining read isn’kitten

Btw why is there never talk of removing the swiftness healing of rapid regeneration but always the super speed? Following the Energy Amplifier argument this should be the thing to get the axe right?

Arimas.3492:

KayCee.4653:

break bulwark gyro too? Not like I use it for anything.

Scrappers really don’t have many other skills that help survivability. I mean hammer has a block and a reflect, but if you going to do anything to them then beat the living daylights out of druid staff and revenant hammer. Hay, all’s fair in balancing professions like these.

They are probably going to reduce the effectiveness of come traits, like Rapid Regeneration. At the moment with swiftness its a constant 102 base heal per sec, and with superspeed its 500 per sec, I assume they will nerf the superspeed to like 200-300 per sec. Because at the moment the Engi with the right traits can heal for upwards of about 650 health per second not including regen and on top of that the effectiveness of HT makes the Engi very survivable.

I hope they don’t touch the Adaptive Armor trait because its in a good spot.

The correct way to nerf this is to remove the heal on swiftness part. Do not touch the super speed regen. Its an entire staple of the spec with damage mitigation, healing/SS or stability being the pillars. The regeneration caused by swiftness alone in the meta builds is nothing to sneeze at. Super speed on the other hand is handled like its some kind of all mighty cure it all on the scrapper (a finisher through the rarest field in the game, securing a stomp or shiver running a gyro build) which it only becomes with rapid regeneration. The main source of super speed on the meta builds are slick shoes super speed which in itself might use a 5 sec more cooldown given that its a stunbreak and its gadget is very powerful. Final salvo and rapid regeneration is one of the redeeming graces of anything with gyros and to see it go the way of the dodo in favor of even lamer perma swiftness healing (which has even less thought behind it) would be a tragedy.

This at least is the first step.

If we consider the scrapper tree itself there is a focus on three things, stability, damage reduction, regeneration/super speed.

Adept: Stability on function gyro (meaning 20 sec cooldown, requires down state enemies/allies), protection on heal, super speed on lightning field finisher (10sc icd).

Master: Stability grants might and 10% toughness to power, dazes and stuns causes weakness and vulnerability, super speed and swiftness pulses healing.

Grandmaster: Gain stability on successful evade (5s ICD) + 10% hammer damage ,Gain toughness on being hit and a condi damage reduction, gyros causes lightning fields on death that pulses a short super speed.

Do note that super speed as opposed to alacrity do not stack in duration and in fact a long duration super speed from slick shoes can for example be cancelled by a short 2 second super speed overwriting it.

The main source of super speed in the meta builds is super speed from slick shoes, a stunbreak not designed with rapid regeneration in mind. The traits granting super speed on the scrapper as it is now handles super speed very carefully, having it dependent on gyros (with only the sneak gyro seeing serious use) or leaping lightning fields (the lightning fields granted by final salvo already grant super speed that overwrites it, leaving it with thunderclap). Also during the cooldown of super speed a lot of health is potentially gained through swiftness in that time, a boon that is anything but rare.

So if we are to do some tweaking other than the healing power dependency (a small shave to begin with, not 50% or something like that please) i would suggest the following:

Super speed CD increased to 30 seconds.

Healing from swiftness removed entirely on rapid regeneration.

Also about the scrapper in general just keep in mind its going to be hard to balance. Its a tankline with a melee weapon added to a class that already got at least 2+1/2 tanklines and ranged weapons. If they were not tankier from running scrapper its ineffective and unnecessary and the engineers already did tanky builds pretty well.

And mostly the scrapper rise and fall on hammer, the mechanic while sometimes handy is hardly a reaper form or continuum split gamechanger, and the utility type goes unused (due to design and massive buggs (Did you know that medgyro and purge gyro are deactivated and wont do anything but stare at you? And there is more.) outside of the sneak gyro trend.

The hammer is balanced around the scrapper, just not the engineer and therein lies the problem.

It might actually be faster to cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with a herring rather than using the shredder for that purpose.

Though i rather smiled at that bit, pve roleplaying in a presentation about profession balance? Well we just have to wait and see as usual. Who knows maybe medgyro and purge gyro return from their holiday, maybe bulwark transfers damage correctly and maybe blast gyro stop exploding at the closest target, maybe the function gyro can reliably resume trying to stomp after a knockback/launch/fear/pull/etc rather than just hang out and chill from a distance?

Xyonon.3987:

I think the purge gyro actually removed condis in an aoe at launch (a small one).

About the shredder, im just being saltier than the dead sea sorry. I meant in a hyperbolic fashion that the impact it would have on a pvp game as of now would be less than the impact of running a cow finisher or something since that at least had a small chance of making your opponent rage and make further mistakes.

About the function gyro. Ironically enough it seems to work best in pve since the damage reduction makes it unkillable. In any kind of wvw skirmish involving more than one enemy with a brain the gyro very rarely gets it job done due to how frail it is. And for a frontlinish build its more or less a ranged interrupt the majority of the time (deploy and half a second later it is destroyed, meaning it will daze aoe) which when i think of it is not that shabby i suppose. But for it to actually stomp you do need the stab trait which still does not help its low hp and nonexistent armor. Tricks include using sneak gyro instantly after function gyro to stealth it (this goes for stealthed blast gyros as well).

Bulwark gyro i’ve been on about since launch. While “rise” and phantasmal defender splits the damage evenly 50/50 (but before protection) the bulwark gyro transfers half of the potential damage before it is fully calculated, ignoring your toughness, armor and so on. This means it uses its own defenses to calculate the damage. And if i remove all armor and toughness and traits in pvp i still take a little less damage than the gyro. Gyros got nothing for armor. In effect depending on if you are running zerker or toughness gear it will take 2-3x the damage you do. So instead of 50/50 its 50/150. At launch the damage it transferred to itself counted as non directed damage in pve, reducing it by 90%. This have now been fixed. Later it got a big health boost in pve (somewhere around 40k from 16k if the expiration damage numbers are to be believed and this compensates a lot in that gamemode. But in wvw and pvp it still got its old 16k which melt incredibly fast, especially if you consider that this number is split by the number of entities affected. It is annoying that this feels like an antisynergy with other gyros. How often do you want your bulwark to sacrifice itself for another gyro instead of having it applied to you? Still as far as i can remember from our testing at launch the buff applied by it lasts for however long it was going to last regardless of if the gyro dies or not meaning that if you intend to use it to prevent damage for your allies you can still get a few precious seconds off even if its instantly vaporized.

The sneak gyro works better with swiftness, if you apply super speed it will catch up only to wait a second or two when it does so, leaving it behind again. Doesn’t the ranger pets try to constantly position themselves alongside the ranger or even a bit ahead of them if they are running? I got to check that again, but that would be ideal for the sneak gyro.

Xyonon.3987:

Anyone else slooowly getting tired of medy and purgy still being bugged after such a long time now? ö.ö’’

Oh but surely gyros are in a good state?

Healgyro: Inactive, the gyro does nothing.

Purge gyro: Inactive, the gyro does nothing.

Bulwark gyro: takes 2-3 times the damage it should take (depending on your toughness). Does not work like similar damage transfers like “rise!” and phantasmal defender for a disadvantage.

Blast gyro: If we turn a blind eye to the wonky tagging system and pathing we are still left with a gyro that is sluggish to react, slow and that frequently detonates on targets you did not even tag (hit a ranger a 600 range away, the gyro instead explode his pet standing next to you slowclap). And the detonation area is often walked out of even if it reaches its target, so can we increase the area a bit. It does have a short cooldown but with all the requisites for it to hit you would think this would hit like a fatman.

Shredder gyro: I wish this was a finisher animation instead. It would be more useful. The extra rage gathered from your opponents would help you more than what this skill would. I know gyros are not meant to be our best skill type and im okay with that. But this is taking it a bit (a lot) too far. Its hilarious that it even got a cast time. The sad thing is that this skill preforms exactly as well as could be expected. It whirls.

function gyro: Useless for some parts of the game, unreliable for the rest. Unless you spend yet another trait on this thing its more or less a taunt kill. And even if you do, its hardly impressive for a specialization mechanic in my opinion although the extra stability every now and then can be nice.

Sneak gyro: This thing is very good. Honestly its really good. Solid. Good work.

So the elite is nice.

But hey we got the hammer so scrappers are fine. ^^

I have had a lot of fun with scrapper but most of it is due to hammer. Ive been running around in wvw with gyros and toolkit and the hammers is strong enough to make it work.

Med gyro and cleanse gyro are passive when summoned and stare blankly at me for their duration without using their heal or condicleanse once. Been doing it since wintersday i think.

I think making med gyro and cleanse gyro work would be a good step in the right direction. since wintersday patch the gyros themselves do nothing and just follow you passively (meaning they just stare blankly at you and then explode). the reason i have waited so long before talking about this is partly because i think it would be interesting to see how many that actually uses the things also check if they are having an effect at all (meaning they are more of a fashion statement than a impactful part of the class) and partly because i already detonate the medgyro on placement (better uptime super speed fields and procing traits more often and thus i am not that affected by it. Hello healing turrets daft brother.

The bulwark armor bug is somewhat compensated in pve by the increased pve health (around 40k) while in pvp it really get creamed faster than lightning.

Shredder gyro is as good as can be expected with all that it implies. We saw this one coming.

Blast gyros detonation area is often walked out of and it got trouble catching up even with super speed not to mention it exploding on closest target instead a lot of the time.

Function gyro in my humble opinion is a neat trick sometimes in pve due to it being essentially unkillable there, very situational in pvp unless further traited (upon which it becomes situational) and really, really worthless in wvw (i might use it as an extra daze bomb or super speed field but the odds of it ever doing its job is so minimal that if i created a drinking game where every time it stomps or revive someone during actual combat i drink, i would be sober the entire night.

Sneak gyro is very, very strong and an actual rival to X, crate and mortar.

Also can we please stop minions and pets from picking up medkits, the alchemy grand master stimulant is ruined by your healskill stealing your heal (try it, its fun).

Bulwark needs to work like its cousins Phantasmal Defender and “rise”. That is i would be very happy if the damage was divided between me and the gyro. In a build with toughness it takes around 3X as much damage as it should. This is the primary reason it absolutely explodes even from low pressure. PD and rise both divides the damage as it should (even split) while bulwark divides it before it calculates it fully, meaning armor, toughness and protection is ignored and instead the armor level of the gyro is used to calculate how much damage it takes (so instead of 50/50 its 50/150 etc) which is hilarious since the “tanky” “bulwark” gyro got about the same armor as i did when i took of my armor and used zero toughness on a level 80 character. The low armor on the gyro was done so as to not make it “not too oppressive in 1vs1”and make it squishy if focused which backfires greatly as it also affects its role as a damage sponge. As of now its more of a super speed battery if traited by a grandmaster that essentially only gives super speed and lightning fields and a nice reflect.

^The problem arises when that blob also consists of about 75% or more revenants. At that point being within 1200 range is death. And they do have a projectile block for stuff over 1200.

Its sad to see the absolute majority of many groups consisting of the same profession, build, weapons and hugging glint like a teddy bear. Worst part is when you do manage to split them up, corner a rev in melee and only kill him due to him forgetting he got stubreaks, evades, blocks, teleports etc in his other weapon/stance set.

I don’t think they created the hammer rev to shake up wvw. I think they took a look and pondered “now what role shall the revenant fill in this mode”. Then they figured that hammer train had been popular and now pirate ship was all the rage. “so how do we combine the two? Also what does G,W,E and N really do?”. It almost feels a bit like every skill reflect that.

cgMatt.5162:

Loosmaster.8263:

cgMatt.5162:

Tempests, Scrappers, Mesmers have traits and utilities that grant AOE super speed. It’s not the consistent 25% movement speed you’re used to, but it’s something! Bring lots of these classes and you might have a higher super speed uptime.

Golems are unaffected by speed buffs, hence the use of Travelers runes.

Please try it! Apply super speed to a golem and see that it works. If this was not the intent then it is a bug and should be reported as such.

I’m on mobile at the moment so maybe will do it later. Also if there was just a patch and it stops working before the time of my post, it’s possible a dev already saw it and hotfixed it.

Ive done this for some time and to be honest i would like if this remained a thing, instead of a boring slap on your everyday speed runes. This actually puts a value in super speed (scrapper otherwise got a bloated amount of super speed). Keep a scrapper or similar class with your golems to drive them way faster. This also means that the progress of a golem train can be slowed by focusing down the people outside of golems boosting them with super speed. Its a neat teamwork synergy. If anyone wonder a super speed scrapper gives a bunch of golems close to 100% super speed uptime which cause them to move at speeds identical to players with swiftness out of combat. And if you don’t feel like including scrappers in your train you probably have enough glint revenant’s already to give them a fairly high up time of it . Yes believe it or not but they got other skills than COR and passive boonstacking.

As for if it is intended or not, they are not immune to super speed due to the mastery granting them super speed after breaking a gate.

I would prefer if instead of a series of aoes its a cone version of dragons tooth, meaning the ground glows a second before the impact. This solves the double hit bug as it is now a single aoe and it gives a better visual feedback in big fights.

If we want a low recharge aoe stealth elixir S (and smoke bomb) is also a thing. And the former is the toolbelt of an excellent invuln skill that’s frequently used (HGH + tools reduces its recharge massively). Think of it as an elite version of elixir S without the invulnerability skill to go with it. Its very good. It’s just that in pure gamewinning power, crate and elixir (and mortar (cant say tar and d next to each other) depending on your taste) offer a lot, and in conquest these might be preferable to stealth.
Regarding stats for the gyros itself if left out its about 10k, the same as for the other gyros except bulwark last time i looked. And the armor is very much far from impressive. It counters ranged, non aoe weapons but it shows the general trajectory of the engineer to allow you to cleave.

But given that this thread has happened i will address whoever is reading this and who is currently working on the nerf i would suggest maybe not letting it pulse directly on placement, requiring 3 seconds before kicking into effect to address the issue of placing and detonating (or you could maybe have gone with the gyros recharging while out and tweak the numbers after that). Small mechanical tweaks before boring number games please.

And i think that if there’s stuff wrong about the scrapper i would not look for it in the gyros.

Either it takes half of the damage you would have taken, that is the damage that would otherwise have been dealt to your healthbar (the preferable version in my opinion, lets call it model 1) or it takes the damage before anything else is considered (model 2).

From our testing:

-The bulwark got, very, very, very little armor (like someone naked without toughness?).
-The damage is divided in two before anything else happens, following model 2 and this is then dealt to the glassy gyro.
-The critical hits are calculated separately (you can take a non crit while the bulwark takes a crit and vice versa, this is also true for phantasmal defender which blurs the line between the two models)
-phantasmal defender follows model 1 and takes half of the damage actually dealt to you otherwise (following model 1). This means that the difference hangs in the wording incoming damage taken or incoming damage transferred. As a result the damage taken by phantasmal defender is lower.
-Protection on you has no effect on the gyro or phantasmal defender.

Things i have yet to test:
-protection on phantasmal defender vs protection on bulwark
-more to be added(?)

Once again it is possible that they are supposed to use different models and that the damage transferred and damage taken is entirely different, in which case i criticize that decision, if nothing else then because of the confusion when going from one to the other.

And the reason this is a PSA regarding the 95% damage reduction in pve is that there is a playerbase that have been fooled in its effectiveness due to the bug and they might not realize what is happening. Due to it also not being in the patchnotes.

But id argue that the second issue is more important due to it affecting pvp as well.

Okay thats all for now, sorry for the wall. There might be a lot of errors and brainfarts, ill come back and clean it up in a while hopefully.

Basaltface.2786:

Ahhh yes the nerfing continunes. First AA…then my beloved HGH and now the bulwark. Good sooo… lets see. Ah yea the hammer still is viable.. better get to it ireno, it aint gonna nerf itself….

Yeah, given that the hammer is essentially what makes the scrapper strong at the moment it will probably be next on the chopping block. This is what happens when you give a class notorious for its sustain a specialization focused on sustain. Either we become even tankier or we do not, and then the spec is pointless. At the moment the hammer alone carries the spec to a high degree (and the protection on heal which is better used with healing turret than with gyros).

And some of the traits are only strong because they stack with traits of similar purpose.
Speedy recovery stacks well with backpack regenerator and other regeneration traits for example, and should we really be surprised of our might generation capabilities when we got lots of firefields, blasts and 3 traits for might stacking (not including hidden flask and similar minors)? And with hammer might on autos.

Miltek.2104:

And here it goes, my only reason of playing Zerk Scrapper in PvE goes away (besides hammer).
Brb, going to respec to Sinister/Viper Condi engie.
GJ Anet!
Limiting build diversity is what we need, especially in PvE!

So i take it the new stats have been fixed then?

wolfyrik.2017:

The 95% damage reduction on pets/summons was only intended to protect them from cleave and AoE. It’s a (poor) solution to the pets lack of active defence. Bulwark was only ever meant to absorb 50% damage from players near it, the 95% reduction was bug.

Bulwark is now functionally terrible? Working precisely as intended.

And thats the sad part, they did not see any conflict in making something supposed to take hits for you unable to take hits for you, not to mention anything in its aoe.

One solution i suppose would be to have it be very glassy (heck its already very glassy, in toughness gear as in the op picture it took 3 times as much damage as i did) and have it apply a pure damage reduction to non bulwarks within range, meaning you deal with it in exactly the same way you deal with phantasms. Kill them.

This would help it in all gamemodes. Of course i know scrappers are extremely tanky, but most of those builds have nothing to do with gyros do they? They slap on the hammer on our other good base utilities and traits and work from there.

Since our new mechanic is hardly something very exciting we end up as engineer but with a hammer, and on a profession thats supposedly all about utilities and less about weapon set its not bad, just sad.

I also noticed my sneak gyro taking agro from npcs in wvw as well. Have this been changed too?

EDIT: I then tested against pve mobs, its seems separate. In pve it did not take aggro.

Its a bugfix so to say, sadly this was actually something unique we could have contributed with in say, whats the name again? Oh raids, yeah that’s it.

As if the dps mentality and enrage mechanics didn’t already force engis into burn builds for that one already.

But the armor bug applies to pvp as well, this needs a change asap.

I really like playing support and i really like playing bruisers but this gyro isn’t support, its not even noticeable solo.

Currently i would much prefer if it simply dispensed protection aoe in a way similar to stealth gyro. The damage reduction you would gain both in solo and group play would far outmatch this current state in all game modes. The damage absorption is very much a gimmick when the gyro itself is so easily brought down.

So with this patch the bulwark no longer takes 95% less damage from transferred damage in pve. So if you find yourself wondering why it exploded on placement, even before it rendered properly its because someone somewhere was tickled or someone sneezed.

Just a heads up for people who used it for things other than the toolbelt.

So now the question is have they fixed the bug where the damage is transferred before armor calculation meaning it will take way more than half of our damage. Any bets?

Ill be back soon after some quick testing in the lobby.

EDIT: So of course they haven’t fixed that, still seeing numbers like this:

EDIT2: on second thought the title should be PSA- Bulwark, as the toughness bug applies in all gamemodes, if there is a mod around i would appreciate an edit in the title.

Bulwark gyro no longer gets a 95 percent damage reduction from transfered damage.

I realize this is a bug fix but it makes the bulwark horribly worthless even in pve.

Absolute trash.

And no the toolbelts are not what i roll gyros for.

I mean how much hp does this thing have? 2k?

Okay so far.

In pve gyros works okay due to the massive damage reduction. This also means that bulwark works very well, providing you with a combo to (in conjunction with medigyro) reduce damage by roughly 2/3 of its normal level in an area. The problem is that in pvp the damage done to the gyro takes no consideration whatsoever how much damage you actually took, meaning a hit that you barely register, a slight breeze or a cold instantly massacres your gyro, often not even having time enough to render the darn thing. The damage transfer have to happen last in the damage calculations! This is absolutely critical, as they gave it the armor levels of wet tissue paper, heck tissue paper that have been left at the bottom of a pond to disintegrate over the course of a century. And allowing it to draw from your toughness and protection by placing the damage transfer last allows tanky characters to get a powerful tool to further enhance their role while not changing much to glassy builds which would not be carried defensively by this.

Blast gyro is a okay heavy CC skill and the toolbelt is a aoe stunbreak with decent recharge, it just needs to reliably move towards its intended target at speed without exploding at the first thing with a healthbar on the way. Oh and it should share the stats of the player. If phantasms do, this need to as well because they are similarly designed, a fancy way of landing one attack. Also maybe a blast finisher pretty please?

Cleansing gyro i have no experience with as i find the gyro to be situational and the toolbelt lacking.

Shredder gyro have no point because whirl finishers have no point because of random targeting and that projectile finishers have little point (outside of certain multi hitting attacks like wrench and sneak attack) having a little bleed on every whirl or have the whirl finishers from this be amplified would maybe polish this…. kitten?

Sneak gyro allows you to pull off some neat stunts like more stealthed magnets, invisible blast gyros, invisible function gyros etc. And it got a very short cooldown. Neat.

Final salvo needs at least a 3 second duration for its super speed if there is going to be any point to it outside of hugging it with rapid regeneration. 2 seconds along with that your gyros are always behind you unless you detonate them on placement means that the mobility factor as of now is negligible. I mostly use it due to how boring AA is (and now not even that spectacular) and when my gyros expire i can at least get a pretty lightshow out of it.

Loboling.5293:

Nina.4317:

Nerfing automatic response while creating diamond skin?

Being immune to conditions whenever you are about die is very different than “deal 1.6k dmg before you can apply conditions”. If your team can’t deal that much damage, you deserve to lose. It’s called coordinated spike damage, and it is how any good player is killed when running even slightly tanky builds.

Being immune to new conditions when you are about to die from the ones already on you (the ones bringing you down to 25% health in the first place) is also is not always the bees knees either. Still at least now its properly gone and doesn’t have to waste a trait slot. We got iron blooded for that.

To clarify neither of the traits where well implemented.

Bulwark is much more useful in pve than in pvp given that it is essentially guaranteed last its full duration as long as its not targeted itself (as its damage absorption is also reduced by 95%). In pvp the transfer really need to happen last in the calculation, meaning after toughness, armor and protection etc. Its torture to get tickled by a stray attack only to see your gyro take a 7k crit and loose half of its hp. It vaporises instantly in a 1 vs1 and it might as well not be there at all in anything larger. Having toughness increase its EHP this way would buff it for tanky builds without further increasing the effectiveness of glass stats with defensive gimmicks.