Guild Wars 2

Ive only unlocked medic gyro so far, but at least for this gyro the recharge is now 20 sec and starting after destruction. So have there been a change of plans about recharge starting on deployment, was there not enough time or is my memory faulty? I thought there was to be a incentive to keep it alive for as long as possible?

Zodryn.4216:

miriforst.1290:

Also keep in mind that when the gyro is destroyed it will deal damage to enemies in the area, this reveals the engineer. So killing the gyro while next to it negates the impact of the elite.

This was particularly annoying during the beta where it would kamikaze anyone dealing damage to it (broken AI thinking it has a weapon when it does not).

Hmm…you tested it and it reveals you? Most damage not dealt directly by the player (i.e. clones, minions, turrets) won’t reveal you, so that’s interesting. If it stays that way, that’s at least kind of helpful sometimes in PvP.

Still doesnt change the fact that thief is more skippable in PvE content thanks to it’s one semi unique function being performed better by a class that doesn’t have “master of stealth” in it’s description. Want to skip some stuff in CoE or TA? Would you rather have 15s of stealth that pugs will always fail using because they walk outside of refuge revealing themselves, or 44s with no such issues?

Actually i went along with my thief partner in crime and made a duo attempt at arah as a scrapper to get the feel of the abilities, and for the longer skips a combination of refuge and gyro was very useful, the gyro forces you to progress much slower (about walking speed) while its up if you want to maintain the stealth or risk missing out a pulse(shadow refuge has an initial wait followed by all the shadowstepping or leaping that you want) and when its duration is up (30 sec) or if destroyed by something it will explode in a large area, revealing you if anything is nearby. The kind of players that walk out of shadow refuge will also walk out of this, drop from stealth and risk harm to the stealth gyro if they try catching the next pulse (every 3rd sec). I can agree that its odd that most enemies have a tendency not to attack it, but i will have to see the next iteration to able to say if it would be usable in a scenarios where everything focus it down.

I was very pleased to use it in 1vs1 skirmishing, using the stealth mainly to disorient for a second every now and then helps you to keep them from focusing it down to much, ideally you need to defend it as much as it defends you. Now the engineer does not have a separate set of stealth skills, but key abilities that benefit from usage in stealth include (on top of my head) magnet (we all love stealth pulls don’t we?), blowtorch (requires good positioning or it have a tendency to “dud”, thus stealth gives you a chance to position youself correctly) and blast gyro (activate this directly after your marker hit and your gyro have enough stealth to stealth bomb).

I can also say that it is very fun duoing up with a thief with this. this allows us to pump out stealth benefits to builds that do not incorporate frequent restealthing (for example allowing staff DD to get off hook strikes much more frequently in a melee brawl).

On a final note, the reveal skill have a good tell, its similar to the mesmer mass invisibility both in animation and in fx so it can be dodged if you are looking out for it.

Thats at least my experience from the sneak gyro during the one (/salt) beta weekend we have had to test it.

Yes they will probably stay this way for a long time.

Gyros selling point after all is that they are at least not turrets.

/salt

Seriously though they could do with a big overhaul, make them remote stationary kit emplacements or whatever and let them be our heavy artillery.

Dano.5298:

miriforst.1290:

Pardon me if im wrong, im more of a roaming person, but doesn’t a lot of this boil down to static field and similar unlimited target ccs?

Its a decent range aoe trap that can not be dodged through, the problem being that it can be very hard to avoid it when its spawned on top of you in large quantities.

What could be considered is making this (or other similarly problematic skills) into very fast projectiles, meaning their deployment is no longer unconditional and that a melee train can cover up their charge by maintaining aoe projectile blocks like the guardians shield (which you can now move when channeling if im not mistaken?). Lightning fields can then still be deployed but will have to be placed in front of the charge in order to halt it, allowing for the frontline to avoid it, putting emphasis on redirection and division.

A lot of the ranged combat in this game is projectile less, projectiles feeling almost like the exemption than the rule in some cases.

Yeah you have a real good point here. And that would definitely be a solution to at least some of my complaints here. If the frontline could use a skill for instance to block CCs other than using stability, that sounds like a good idea.

I will say though that statics weren’t the only problem, that was just one example.

My suggestion goes for other crowd controls that functions similarly as well (unlimited cap+ ranged placement without setup first). Things like PBAOE CC and target capped CC is probably not the main villain here.

Also keep in mind that when the gyro is destroyed it will deal damage to enemies in the area, this reveals the engineer. So killing the gyro while next to it negates the impact of the elite.

This was particularly annoying during the beta where it would kamikaze anyone dealing damage to it (broken AI thinking it has a weapon when it does not).

Pardon me if im wrong, im more of a roaming person, but doesn’t a lot of this boil down to static field and similar unlimited target ccs?

Its a decent range aoe trap that can not be dodged through, the problem being that it can be very hard to avoid it when its spawned on top of you in large quantities.

What could be considered is making this (or other similarly problematic skills) into very fast projectiles, meaning their deployment is no longer unconditional and that a melee train can cover up their charge by maintaining aoe projectile blocks like the guardians shield (which you can now move when channeling if im not mistaken?). Lightning fields can then still be deployed but will have to be placed in front of the charge in order to halt it, allowing for the frontline to avoid it, putting emphasis on redirection and division.

A lot of the ranged combat in this game is projectile less, projectiles feeling almost like the exemption than the rule in some cases.

Chaith.8256:

miriforst.1290:

And with all these fancy new UI elements with flames on berserk mode, the celestial avatar, the revenants energy bar and so on, would it really hurt to have a bar indicating the status of our function gyro? For this gyro to be useful in multitasking situations it would be helpful to know the hp of your gyro while its reviving someone off screen by looking at a bar over your toolbelt skills or something. Maybe even show the active action so that you know how far it is in the stomping process/if it have been interrupted etc.

On a sidenote, it would be interesting to be able to send out your function gyro to refuel other gyros, sort of like a tanker plane. And thus the fuel would actually be fuel…

Maybe it could even be used to repair some structures? Oh well, time to stop dreaming and be realistic.

Really, yes, all that’s needed is for the Scrapper design to sell the f-gyro better. A ui, slightly increased depth, mechanically, and it can work. The exclusive class mechanic needs to be desirable and a little flashy.

The fact that we are shown the availability of the gyro exclusively through a trait icon and that the skin is the only non unique gyro we have screams “we had another idea in mind about a fuel system for the gyros but then realized that it does not apply at all to scrappers who choose not to use a single gyro for various reasons so we threw together something at the last minute to work as an arbitrary mechanic to show off. Oh darn, we better apply a arbitrary max duration to the gyros now that we lack a fuel system as a limiter”.

Similarly how the druids glyphs interacts with the druids primary mechanic (changes functions) without leaving the druid mechanic unusable without glyphs, couldn’t the same be done with a fuel mechanic powering stomps/revives and gyros?
A scrapper who do not use any gyros or who choose not to refuel them got more fuel left for reviving and stomping (or whatever), and for an engineer using gyros it becomes a resource management game where you prioritize what gyros to extend.

And visually you could do amazing things with a engineer mechanic such as indicating recharges, fuel and health with gauges and similar instruments on your skill bar.

And with all these fancy new UI elements with flames on berserk mode, the celestial avatar, the revenants energy bar and so on, would it really hurt to have a bar indicating the status of our function gyro? For this gyro to be useful in multitasking situations it would be helpful to know the hp of your gyro while its reviving someone off screen by looking at a bar over your toolbelt skills or something. Maybe even show the active action so that you know how far it is in the stomping process/if it have been interrupted etc.

On a sidenote, it would be interesting to be able to send out your function gyro to refuel other gyros, sort of like a tanker plane. And thus the fuel would actually be fuel…

Maybe it could even be used to repair some structures? Oh well, time to stop dreaming and be realistic.

We had more or less one boss fight. With an enemy only vulnerable to conditions. And on a arbitrary time limit (cus we need moar reason to max our dps mentality). The sinister engineer have for some time now been considered the top dps build for an extended fight and this also happens to be a condi build. Its not surprising to see people bringing lots of engineers for this first go we have at the first of three raid bosses (without trash/filler encounters). Of course i don’t think this is healthy, but id argue that we do need to see the complete raid before we start nerfing professions based on this one encounter. Just as easily as there was a boss immune to physical damage there could be enemies immune to burn or have other similar gimmicks (take the flamethrower lady, throw in a lot of spawning fire elementals immune to burn which will overwhelm your party unless destroyed quickly etc).

They are clearly experimenting with how to encourage us to use tools not frequently utilized in pve (boon strips, healing for example) but i do hope that they give us a little bit of wriggle room for the “enrage” mechanic so that the optimal route will not always be to fill the free spots with as many of whatever class happens to be the top dps at the time. I think “soft-enrages” like giganticus is a better option to hard time limits, players can choose more defensive builds, but that means it gets harder to stop grubs in time until the stacks on giganticus have built up to outweigh whatever defensive bonus you got and might encourage more crowd control etc.

For the raids we can have a boss that uses a heal skill regularly for example. A straight up maximum dps team can outpressure that heal but become more vulnerable to damage themselves while a more defensive, slow-but-steady team might be unable to outpressure the healing unless they make sure to bring other tools for the job like making sure that every single heal is interrupted through the breakbar in time and stripping valuable boons frequently.

Kidel.2057:

Other condi damage classes should be as effective as Scrapper, otherwise every group will run 4-5 scrappers to kill red guardian fast.

Similar problem with Druid and healers. Druid has the best sustained and burst heal in the game.

This is what i don’t get, people complain about a number of things on the scrapper, many of them being part of the original engineer and not the scrapper. Heck, a lot of the people you encountered in pvp where not using any of the gyros at all and the mechanic is only rarely available and effective.

You see people complaining on the pvp forum how scrapper is too strong against conditions when most of this comes from alchemy. Then you see others claiming it has too much support which is once again mostly part of the original class. As for the damage the might stacks from mass momentum get impressive only when you combine it with the juggernaut trait which is a grandmaster in a offensive tree, or alchemy which is a boon focused tree.

And this tree have very, very, very little to do with condition builds.

Its a tanky/bruiser tree, and if our existing options become too strong with yet another defensive tree (but remember that it is already less supportive than both alchemy and inventions) is another question.

Before we start throwing pitchforks on the things that actually work smoothly with the scrapper lets consider how this can be tweaked to conserve peak performance but increase play and counterplay.

The first option should not be to reduce the maximum toughness stack, this just makes its peak performance worse without actually adding any play, and for a elite specialization grand master that’s not really optimal.

The first course of action in my opinion would be to increase duration and internal cooldown, further promoting burst builds to actually burst down the scrapper before he reaches his maximum amount of toughness and rewarding the scrapper who can take hits in a controllable fashion during an extended fight. This puts emphasis on the scrapper as a mighty glacier, once he gets the ball rolling it will keep moving for quite some time.

And as for the people aghast over how passive the scrapper is, i don’t really see it.

From playing around with the blast gyro i can tell that it have a tendency to blow up prematurely as long as there is a target near it. This means that if you tag a ranger shooting you at 900 range while his/her pet is adjacent to you your gyro often blow up on the pet instead of at the marked target.

For defense field the visual effect does not last for the duration of the actual effect.

It seems like the hammer 3 skill leaps you straight ahead in the direction that you are facing with the initial leap, meaning it does not leap towards your actual target.

This leads to the first strike missing a lot of the time and displacing you.

And the function gyro (okay most of the gyros) are just laughable. As expected. I use it more like a gw2 version of team fortress taunt kills as of now.

Just a little feedback concerning the targeting of the function gyro, reviving allies is easy because we can just walk up to them and press F, when doing this at range in a chaotic environment it costs us time to properly target them.

The thing with gyros in general is the triple limiter mentality that have gone into them. Short duration, destructibility and long cooldowns do not work well together if the effects are not absolutely spectacular.

About their AI, despite the many valid complaints about nonsensical copy and paste mechanics leading to stealth gyros believing it can attack people and so on i do see the vision here, the heal gyro provides a initial decent heal and then it acts like the condi cleansing gyro and zipps along to a wounded ally to heal them up while also healing itself. It also heals other gyros meaning it could keep you and your bulwark alive a little longer. Its fun standing still in the training areas of heart of the mist and deploy them to see how they act. But they do not last long enough (even if not destroyed prematurely) to fill this role. And even if longer lasting they would still be destroyed quickly.

Also on a side note i would recommend making the cleansing gyro AOE similar to the healgyro so that it can also cleanse itself.

^Thats the thing, the few moments you actually use it, you dont need it and its more of a fancy “tauntkill”. Most of the time you just stomp as normal and move on because thats more reliable. And then it still got that horrid 30 sec recharge.

Atleast for reviving it gets to work, stomping is out of the question as of now

In my opinion it’s perfectly acceptable to rely on people to learn that if they are wounded they can walk through your medkits to quickly recover. This was sort of how the old medkit worked, and compared to the current state it was in a good spot (or at least better).

The problem isn’t that your allies have to adapt their playstyle a bit to reap rewards, the problem is that the rewards as of now are worse than ever and that the low profile of the packs make them hard to spot even for the player aware of them, which i think could partially be solved with my beam of light and hoovering ankh idea giving everyone looking over the battlefield an idea of where they are in case they need them

simply making them pbaoe means it has to more or less compete with healing turret. I would prefer if we had healing skills that excel at different roles, medkit ideally being reliant on coordination and focus but with big rewards for being properly utilized. With the craze of implementing outgoing heal coefficients we can make a medkit that have the potential to burst heal allies who need it with short cooldown without us being unkillable monster bunkers and without the effects having to be balanced about healing everyone.

I think your second idea holds a lot of merit though, and this should not only be implemented to medkit but to skills like elixir F and similar skills as well, any projectile that affects allies should be able to target allies. It would open up a whole new range of skills, not to mention a whole new way of playing. That they like to show off their new movable fields and boast about all that other new tech while still not having implemented proper allied targeting is rather strange, especially given how much they want to “support support” in the expansion so to speak. It would be nice to see you drop the medkits at your feet without a friendly target and throw them at your friend otherwise.

I think the medkit should keep its packages, just not in a throwable fashion.

I would like the medkit to remain unique among the engineer healing options and to serve as a focused healing option while healing turret should be our area of effect healing/condition cleanse, elixir H should be our selfish heal and AED should be our high risk/high reward heal.

Among the problems that arose with the medkit update was not only the mandatory throw effect (this trait was only taken because it provided a solid 25% boost to medkits, meaning you could get a nice addition with small amounts of healing power) but also their heavily shortened duration to compensate for the added resistance and condiclears. In pvp you could drop a set of medkits out of combat while capturing a node and still have them available if the enemy response arrived. In pve you could do the same before an encounter. Now it essentially forces you to throw the medkits at the player when he/she needs it instead of already having them available. This change was implemented to prevent you from having 10s of condiclears stacked along with a long resistance boost available if you have camped a point for a while.

I would suggest the following:

-Stimulant supplier now doubles the health received from medkit drops on other allies.
-health insurance buffed to 20-25% (keep in mind you are only healing others extra while in medkit, meaning you do no/little damage)
-Medblaster applies “overheal” for 2-3 seconds (not stacking) which increases all healing that ally recieves by x%, meaning timing a medblast on someone who is going to use his/her healing skill increases that healing. This could possibly be an additional function to medical dispersion field.
-Medkits lasts for a longer duration, but once deployed the skills are swapped to a detonate function, this allows for preparatory healing while still preventing massive stacks of medkits on a point. The recharges should still be happening while the medkits are out, meaning they should not work like gyros do now cough, meaning redeployment is easy.
-The resistance duration of the last skill should last a bit longer on other allies, short duration resistance is primarily for covering cleansing during condibursts /CC and medkits will never work as a panic countermeasure.
-Increase the scaling of medkits and healblaster.
-EDIT: I almost forgot, give the kits a thin, tall blue beacon of light (possibly with a hovering ankh) signaling where they are, even in a graphical mess. Heck if i had it my way we should see them on the minimap.

This way we have a quite unique healing option, without the hassle of having to balance it around healing 5 allies at a time.

Morpid.3659:

no idea if it has been posted but here it is Strange behavior with AimAssistedRocket in Explosive trait line.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Explosive-trait-bug/first#post5547048

Check takedown round as well. It does not look like a 50% increase if they even touched it at all.

I suspect aim assisted rocket may have gotten a damage reduction instead of takedown round getting a damage increase.

Or am i simply remembering wrong?

Ive noticed that, and to top it off i am not noticing that much of a damage boost on takedown round as well (50% is rather hard to miss).

But they couldn’t have misscommunicated and agreed that takedown round needs to do around 50% more damage than AAR without agreeing if you should nerf AAR or buff takedown round. And then the team implementing the change couldn’t have nerfed AAR instead of buffing takedown round as the patch notes suggests.

Right?

But this is kind of important, remember how well scope worked?

-Im using turrets other than thumper as a reference, as that has health levels similar to that of the “tanky” bulwark. Do the entire hp bar of a rifle turret or rocket turret sound frightening? A smaller cooldown means that while your stomp attempt/revival attempt may have failed your specialization mechanic will not be disabled for another 30 seconds for reviving AND stomping. If you need to stomp an enemy (so far no option to control whether to stomp normally as it replaces your F key while not on cooldown) even if you could easily succeed normally (like FT smoke with juggerscrappers) you will then not be able to help your ally with it 20 seconds later (which is ages in combat). You know in a way kind of similar to kit refinement.
-It got 750 range.
-Once again it is not free. Its our specialization mechanic. Think of it as an invisible slot where the developers could have chosen to add something to get our enemies down faster in the first place or to keep our allies on their feet anyway.
-Are revive skills frequently used then? Should we use them as the ruler to balance our class mechanic or maybe it is time for a re tuning of them. (yes banner sees some use, but a aoe rally (not manual revive) with additional benefits for a long duration is kind of miles away). Many supportive skills are way under tuned in the first place (look at medkit).
-Yes there will be bugs. (Seriously this have no impact on the balance of the mechanic)
-What does the raid boss length have with it (i just wonder which way this argument goes)?
-It should probably go back to stomping, im more concerned if it will be stationary given its spawning on top of your foe, that is to say will it stomp thieves, mesmers, guardians, necromancers, revenants and elementalists. I will assume that it does.

And when i say cooldown reduction im talking a 10 seconds cd/duration, if you let the scrapper summon another gyro during that time to stomp your teammate maybe you should have gotten him/her up a bit earlier. But the engineer will still have it available when a window of opportunity opens for both of its purposes. Im also against it being summoned on top of the enemy/ally as i can see this being used to revive allies in closed of locations like behind keep walls and other similar exploits, but instead summoning it from the engineer and making it move to your target like blast gyro increases its telegraph (this is a good way to balance powerful skills), goes well with our speed boosting abilities, allows for a balanced way of increasing its range and so on. It also introduces an element of aiming the gyro which at least makes you think on how you deploy it while still rewarding the ones who do. Looks like a win win but i can see if you don’t consider it that way.

We are discussing the specialization primary mechanics use in all gamemodes.

If anythings over the top on the scrapper the function gyro would be the least of the problems (*cough*hammer*cough).

Dahkeus.8243:

miriforst.1290:

Dahkeus.8243:

People think that PvE will continue to be just like speed run, EZ-mode dungeons and they expect Function Gyro to be another clone of “Search and Rescue”, so they’re discounting it right off the bat.

But I expect people will be glad to have it when raids come out…

And in PvP, I fear it may be something so OP that it gets nerfed. I mean, being able to instantly stability stomp, regardless of any CC or distance from an enemy may not leave enough room for counterplay. Course, this may just make stealth rezzes that much more important.

I think people expect that if the new content is so hard that it becomes useful, its in an environment where it will be useless/heavily neutered. Situations like “I cant revive you but my gyro can!” require the gyro to actually handle whatever hazards making you unable to do it yourself. Of course there is a trait that gives you both stability when you start your revival, but then give that trait the 30 sec cooldown instead of the gyro.

I really don’t buy that though. It’s not supposed to be a guaranteed, perfect rez, regardless of how much bad AoE your ally died in and it doesn’t need to be in order to be a clutch ability. If it was, it would pretty much just be a warbanner on a 30 second cooldown without the cost of your elite skill slot.

It will double your rez speed, allowing you to rez before bad stuff lands or at least allow you to rez if there’s bad stuff between you and the ally, but not directly on top of the ally.

The thing is, 30 seconds cooldown is still a bit much for such a niche mechanic no?

Think of our mechanic distributed over the course of the fight, while others might have a more even distribution of special mechanics which remains useful in a manner of different roles (like continuum shift allowing both defensive and offensive play in other ways than F pressing), ours is only available in very special situations. Then it needs to compensate for not being available during the rest of the fight. Another thing is that as far as we know (they haven’t actually demonstrated it, probably because its not even implemented properly) you can not choose when to activate it? That means that we will waste a lot of gyros when we do not need it and then have them under cooldown in situations where they do matter.

I like the idea of the mechanic, but it needs to be very strong or at least polished.

And its not close enough to a “free” warbanner to be that afraid of improving it. And the slot it occupies is our specialization mechanic + another minor trait (outside of the first minor). Its more of a free single target elixir R toss on a shorter cooldown but which does not clear conditions, nor serve as a field, got shorter range and is destructible as well as crowd controllable, meaning it can’t be used in skirmishes where pressure is going out reliably. Or it can be used in pvp and wvw to hopefully land a stomp against enemies who got a down state vulnerable against stability (if you add another trait), if the enemy is not in an area where splash damage or an ally is nearby, meaning out of the actual combat. It will be fun to gatestomp eles in wvw ill grant you that though.

So i think we can still improve it in ways without having it end up a free warbanner. Making it not port but originate at the engineer, decrease cooldown and increase range would be a start. It would even synergize with our super speed.

Dahkeus.8243:

People think that PvE will continue to be just like speed run, EZ-mode dungeons and they expect Function Gyro to be another clone of “Search and Rescue”, so they’re discounting it right off the bat.

But I expect people will be glad to have it when raids come out…

And in PvP, I fear it may be something so OP that it gets nerfed. I mean, being able to instantly stability stomp, regardless of any CC or distance from an enemy may not leave enough room for counterplay. Course, this may just make stealth rezzes that much more important.

I think people expect that if the new content is so hard that it becomes useful, its in an environment where it will be useless/heavily neutered. Situations like “I cant revive you but my gyro can!” require the gyro to actually handle whatever hazards making you unable to do it yourself. Of course there is a trait that gives you both stability when you start your revival, but then give that trait the 30 sec cooldown instead of the gyro.

The healing is strong in this one, on top of the delicious blocks, evades and reflects. We are going to be nigh indestructible.

I know what you mean, but at the same time most time you saw turret builds they where indeed using more than one turret. They where investment heavy.

And i do remember the time before turrets where used in spvp, that’s why we find the incident so interesting. They where considered a joke in wvw and pve the same way a wammo was considered a joke in gw1 with no one taking them seriously and suddenly pvp tells us they are overpowered. It turns out the gamemode and meta can make all the difference in the world.

As for protection and regeneration you had the equivalent of permanent protection (on top of crit and condi immunity) from one trait and permanently regenerated a lot of health from another (with the option to restore 10% of their health per swing or wrench), both these traits considered a requirement if using your turret for more than a blast finisher.

The bulwark gyros interaction with protection (in that it works first on you (if you have prot) and then on the gyro (if it has prot)) is interesting, on the top of my head does that not take us from 11k maximum negated damage (divided by the number of players) to 18-19k or something? That is if nothing ever hits the gyro itself of course, but its a noticeable difference. But half of that protection might have to be attributed to the protection itself i suppose so more like 14k.

And about experiences, anyone remember ( not such a long time ago, last year maybe?) when rocket turret where bugged to only fire overcharged knockdown rockets at its normal firerate? I expected chaos in wvw but it didn’t find any. :/

Morfedel.4165:

Manuhell.2759:

We already tried it. Every time we left turrets out in the field and they were destroyed in few seconds. And that’s with traits making them sturdier – something that gyros even lack.
And unlike most turrets, those are meant to be used in melee, since that’s where the scrapper should be.
How can you even think that the results will be different?

See now I want to go try it out for myself. Engineer is tied with Necromancer for my 2nd favorite slot, but Mesmer has been my main pretty hardcore for the last three years, just playing necro or engineer when I needed a break from my mez, and the other professions even less so.

So it’s rather amusing that my only engineer build I made before this last major patch… was an elixir bomb build. Since then I’ve been experimenting with other things, but I never really used turrets too much.

So now I suppose I need to go try them out for myself.

But are you saying that turrets are useless in every game format? PVE, PVP, and WVW? fractals, dungeons, and open world?

And another question… Do turrets, like mesmer illusions, adopt their stats in part from the user? If so, and if most engineers go full offensive stats (Zerker etc) then isn’t that kinda making your own problems?

Let me give an example. Often I see people in the mesmer forums posting that so and so illusion is worthless junk because they just cant live long enough; but lo and behold, I take gear with more defensive stats, and sure enough, my illusions survive much better than what these others were reporting – which makes this a STAT issue rather than an issue with the skill itself.

Case in point: Precisely because of this discussion, when I went home for lunch from work, I took my mesmer into pvp, with the Mental Defense Trait, Signet of Illusions, PVT gear, and the Inspiration line with the first two traits set to increasing phantasm survivability.

I also took several skills that gave me blocks and dodges – I was doing other stuff with the build as well that triggered some effects based on dodging, blocking, etc, but I also wanted to test the pDefender.

Over the course of several battles, I was constantly summoned the pDefender because of the Mental Defense trait. People had reported it died instantly, in ANY format, and thus it was worthless.

Mine did not die instantly. It didnt survive all that long, but seriously, 50% damage reduction effectively would be way too powerful if it lasted too long. It was enough that the pDefender lasted a good 5, 10, sometimes 15 seconds; and since when you have retaliation on your phantasm from the inspiration trait, and pDefender splits all damage, it triggers retaliation twice, once from an illusion and once from the Defender itself.

Note that this was merely verifying what i knew to be true with the mesmer; been playing it since bwe2 of the core game, I’ve played similar builds in every aspect of the game.

The point being, the usefulness of various mesmer illusions depends heavily on the traits of the user itself. I am not aware of whether or not the turrets and gyros adopt their stats from yours, but it seems likely and, if so, it may well be that the average user has been going heavy offense and low defense, thus meaning turrets, and gyros, simply would not have the CHANCE of surviving because, if they could survive well with zerker stats, they would be seriously OP.

Understand here, before you flame me on this: I’m NOT saying this is the case. I know my mesmer very well, but I fully admit not being an expert on the engineer. I’m SPECULATING… but based on my experiences with mesmer and the naysayers there who also run full offensive gear as well, my suspicions are that this might possibly be the case here as well.

And so when I get a chance i’m going to go try some turret play with my engineer. I’m willing to be proven wrong. I want to see how it goes and see if I AM wrong or not.

Turrets do not inherit stats outside of condition damage and healing power (for the longest of times our healing turret provided a 5hps regeneration which overwrote actual useful regeneration). This was the problem with the turretpochalypse. Turreters saw no reason not to go full defensive since it still didn’t affect their damage output. On the other hand the turrets surviveability where also based on having what amounts to permanent berserkers stance and stone heart.

And do not base your judgement on open world. It is probably possible to kill stuff with hidden flask procs in open world without much sweat.

We just had a specialization specializing in mobile robots. Lets try keep them distinct. Of course i would like to see a massive rework to the very fundamentals of turrets, but the mobile minions/robots are taken for now.

Besides the idea i think is that turrets should serve as artillery pieces (think 25pounders and what have you in CoH) and not robots, something i think should be embraced instead of moved (literally) away from.

Something that allows engineers to designate rocket strikes of various kinds while near their rocket turret for example, meaning that they still serve to give the engineer superior firepower while near his “base” (imagine doing a creeping barrage while defending in wvw).

The thing is that we got a rather hefty cooldown which starts when they are destroyed. And then we have a rather limited duration. And then they are rather frail and can be destroyed. That’s a lot of limiting mechanics.

Id argue that one have to go, meaning:

a) Long/infinite duration, long recharging, destructible (making the virtue of looking after and maintaining your gyros important).
b) Short duration, short recharging, destructible (meaning a frail and short duration but frequently available gyro, similar to phantasms in play)
c) Short duration, long recharging , invulnerable (fancy stances or signets with positional elements, allows for usability even in the thickest of battles)

Personally i would prefer a or b to c, allows counter play but also rewards good play from the engineer.

Morfedel.4165:

miriforst.1290:

Morfedel.4165:

Killyox.3950:

Lemondish.3268:

Morfedel.4165:

dancingmonkey.4902:

I am seeing post upon post in the other subforums about how they are taking the feedback from a BWE and using it to significantly change aspects of the ES’s. To call it a waste strikes me as disconnected bias.

The only thing confirmed about BWE was 3 invite only betas. As we had at release. Which then included some additional open betas. So trying to imply we will only have one test for feedback strikes me as crying wolf in that reguard. Sure, I would have preferred they announced them all at once, in the first week, but that doesn’t justify irrationally declaring the testing we will have as “a waste”.

Agreed.

Moreover, as stated, just because BWE3 is the last beta weekend doesn’t mean beta testing is over. It COULD mean that. It could also be that they will have some open beta time where the entire world can play. After all, they had BWEs for the core game AND open betas at the end before the game went live.

Granted, they haven’t told us either way, but the point is we don’t really know yet, do we?

Even more important is that everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that balance and changes will not end when HoT launches.

I don’t think this is the issue people are getting at.

Imo it has more to do with the fear of being left after the release and ANet not doing big enough changes at that point and focusing more on fixing maps/raids/other stuff.

I can understand that fear that there won’t be enough attention to Scrapper/Druid.

I understand, but I don’t think it’s valid. After all, they’ve been doing balance fixes since day 1.

The problem is when they don’t fix something, or balance something, that the community has an issue with; for example, it took them three years to fix a bug with Phantasmal Haste; and Rangers have been always complaining about their pet (I’m not sure how valid it is, I only dabble in ranger, but right or wrong, the complaints persist).

But I have no fear that they will continue to balance things.

People are worried it will turn out like the “biweekly” balance patches after the specialization update, the single largest remake of the trait system yet. At least we got rifled barrels and bombs fixed after a lot of complaining. Now we are waiting for medkit and medical dispersion field. And where did the pistol main hand go?

But this was for all professions, not a lot of updates for anyone. Though they managed to squeeze in a mortar and some mesmer nerfs.

I suppose. I think my real gripe is people are complaining before even trying it out. Sometimes things play differently than they look on paper. Yeah of course sometimes they play exactly like they look on paper too, but I feel we should at least give it a shot before we start complaining about these things. And then if it really does suck and then we complain about it lol

Well, consider them words of advice from a concerned, and in some cases more experienced userbase. Our words are not law, but so far shouting seems to be the way to get heard. And we do not want to start the last beta as a wreck that could have been avoided if someone had just gotten feedback in time. We can argue about the color of the car or the amount of horsepower at a later date but we do know that it needs wheels.

The introduction post of the scrapper saying in essence that the scrapper gives the engineer a close combat option as if we are some kind of longbow ranger convinced me they do not grasp the notion of what our role is in the first place.

iKeostuKen.2738:

wolfyrik.2017:

iKeostuKen.2738:

So its basically, burst group healing with 1 protection vs sustained group healing with 2.

If its really 2 seconds per interval on medic gyro heals, i think it would be pretty balanced in which one you want to use.

Looking a bit more into the scrapper traits. Im seeing Final salvo + Rapid regeneration as a pretty nice combo if you plan on using Medic gyro + 1 or 2 more gyros and wanna squeeze a bit more into some team support.

With just medic gyro exploding, final salvo will cast 2 seconds of superspeed ticking 2 heals of 470 each. 940 additional healing for a 30 second cooldown, providing a mere 31 hps in addition to it’s main heal from termination to reactivation. And still no condition cleanse.

Well Whoopee do, you sure convinced me.

[/sarcasm]

Reading the tooltip for the skill. Superspeed lasts 2 seconds but pulses 3 times. Thats basically 6 seconds of superspeed that is being dumped into Rapid regeneration. Rapid Regeneration also scales with healing power.

6 × 470 = 2820 Minimum if you only have superspeed without healing power
6 × 105 = 630 Minimum with only Swiftness.
2820 + 630 = 3450 Minimum if you have both on at the same time.

What gives superspeed?
Every Gyro.
Blast gyro utility.
Slick shoes utility.

So if you roll with medic gyro, your burst heal wont be as high. But you get a potential.
2590 + 3826 or 5880 (Depending on ticks) = 6416 or 8470. + 2820 = 9236 or 11290.
If we throw in swiftness, that would be 11920

This is base with no healing power ontop of having a good amount of protection uptime.

As far as i know super speed does not stack. Yet.

It would be lovely if it would though, maybe it could happen with the expansion given the widespread amount of aoe superspeed being added?

Morfedel.4165:

Killyox.3950:

Lemondish.3268:

Morfedel.4165:

dancingmonkey.4902:

I am seeing post upon post in the other subforums about how they are taking the feedback from a BWE and using it to significantly change aspects of the ES’s. To call it a waste strikes me as disconnected bias.

The only thing confirmed about BWE was 3 invite only betas. As we had at release. Which then included some additional open betas. So trying to imply we will only have one test for feedback strikes me as crying wolf in that reguard. Sure, I would have preferred they announced them all at once, in the first week, but that doesn’t justify irrationally declaring the testing we will have as “a waste”.

Agreed.

Moreover, as stated, just because BWE3 is the last beta weekend doesn’t mean beta testing is over. It COULD mean that. It could also be that they will have some open beta time where the entire world can play. After all, they had BWEs for the core game AND open betas at the end before the game went live.

Granted, they haven’t told us either way, but the point is we don’t really know yet, do we?

Even more important is that everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that balance and changes will not end when HoT launches.

I don’t think this is the issue people are getting at.

Imo it has more to do with the fear of being left after the release and ANet not doing big enough changes at that point and focusing more on fixing maps/raids/other stuff.

I can understand that fear that there won’t be enough attention to Scrapper/Druid.

I understand, but I don’t think it’s valid. After all, they’ve been doing balance fixes since day 1.

The problem is when they don’t fix something, or balance something, that the community has an issue with; for example, it took them three years to fix a bug with Phantasmal Haste; and Rangers have been always complaining about their pet (I’m not sure how valid it is, I only dabble in ranger, but right or wrong, the complaints persist).

But I have no fear that they will continue to balance things.

People are worried it will turn out like the “biweekly” balance patches after the specialization update, the single largest remake of the trait system yet. At least we got rifled barrels and bombs fixed after a lot of complaining. Now we are waiting for medkit and medical dispersion field. And where did the pistol main hand go?

But this was for all professions, not a lot of updates for anyone. Though they managed to squeeze in a mortar and some mesmer nerfs.

iKeostuKen.2738:

miriforst.1290:

-snip-

Im honestly not sure what your getting at here. Is it how powerful they used to be before they were buffed into a overpowered brainless build.

Im addressing the point you made that they are apparently frequently used somewhere in pve and wvw (okay, used is one thing, i have activated avatar of grenth once to see the effect, that does not mean its “used”).

Then i do my best to explain why people don’t and i explain the reason for them being viable at all in pvp, and which strengths does not carry over to wvw. This is more directed to the specific quote provided and can be considered nitpicking. But the turret catastrophe and the analysis thereof serves (or should serve) as a grim reminder how to make these kind of skills work in different environments and how not to make them work. That is why i try going over them strength by strength and gamemode by gamemode while also making a comment on why it was just then (turrets really hadn’t been that buffed and the buffs that where like the reflective shields where not used in the version frequently complained about) that the thing became popular (more widespread celestial builds amongst other things). I am sorry to have gone so off topic, i guess i “trigger” to easy when people discuss turrets in general.

We stand here with a new utility type which share some similar traits and we can’t help but cross compare a bit. And while these are more mobile (with the exception of shredder) they still have long recharges, are as killable statwise as the turrets that are not considered for serious use at the moment and have a duration slapped on just in case people didn’t figure out you can kill that spinning bot over there.

And the reason we are loud are because we want to show that we care, and that there are other options. Silence can be taken as acceptance when it comes to development of things such as these, and that’s why people (me included) get on a bit of an offensive when the wait and see argument come up when we have a lot of the numbers, we have a lot of experience with similar mechanics and we are afraid that its going to end up like the biweekly balance patches after the single greatest revamp of our character building system yet. Like medical dispersion field. We said it was ugly and it was. Now we have proof of the other professions receiving lots of updates during this rare period (and some professions will have gotten twice or triple the number of public testing opportunities) and we naturally want an equal piece of the cake when it comes to feedback because we don’t trust arenanet to keep this up after the scrapper is shipped, and we would rather have blatantly obvious design misses addressed before the weekend to not waste the very precious time we got.

On an unrelated note for people who are interested in why i considered turrets stronger before they were buffed to brainless levels or whatever, here are some things that had been tweaked down long before turrets where literally all the rage, some compensated with the targeting fixes (which worked to varying degrees, and foremost against professions like mesmers):

Net turret immobilized for 3 seconds.
Net turret overcharge fired 2 nets.
Rocket turret fired 2 overcharged shots.
Rifle turret overcharge bled instead of vulned.
Rifle turret permanently firing faster when activating overcharge on deployment.
Rocket turret burned (for a little while even in a big aoe, one of those rockets could strip a lot of hp)

Concerning the blast gyro, it is in fact a launch despite the tool tip claiming knockback. The mixup in tooltips between launches and knockbacks as well as daze and stun is surprisingly common.

I can actually see that gyro being usable due to its fast redeploy rate compared to other gyros.

What i hope to see for scrapper is:

1) The cool down of gyros starting in the background when deployed (this was done with mantras, if only for a while) so that the longer you keep it alive the shorter the downtime.

2) Massively increase the healing on healing gyro, id almost go so far as letting it tick almost much as it does now every second, or increasing the strength of the ticks the longer you have had it out. Keep in mind that if this is strong, people will start counterplaying you with killing/cc locking your gyro. And for allies to participate in the full heal they need to hug you for the full duration (if it heals 600/second it will pass one deployment of the healing turret after about 5 seconds of being alive with twice the cooldown (that is if we start the cooldown at deployment as suggested), without the conditions cleared and in a much smaller aoe)

3) Shredder uptime is increased. Here i would say 100% uptime. Its a frail stationary deployable which does whirlfinishers (which you have to feed fields to be useful). There are three limiting mechanics in place outside of arbitary durations and cool downs here. Health, fields and placement. If a shredder is bothering you, kill it. If you want to use its potentially massive uptime of whirls, you have to bring the fields to use it and place them at your already deployed gyro (keep in mind that the gyro might not always be in such a position that the enemy is truck by both the gyro and the fields). If the combat moves on, you have to destroy it in any case.

4) Either super speed needs to stack or the cooldown on the super speed combo have to go. Lightning fields are a rare resource as it is (outside of gyros which can be traited to provide aoe lightning fields on death which themselves already provide super speed which do not stack already stack). I wonder a bit, outside the engineer who benefits from the healing with the right trait, whats the idea behind short, short duration pulsing super speed fields when super speed do not stack? For the engineer that’s fine, he can stay in the field and benefits from lots of healing but the mobility is kinda lost when you keep circling around in the aoe. If super speed do not stack i would recommend removing the ICD for the minor lightning leaps to aoe super speed. This increases not only synergy with eles and other scrappers but with the jalis revenant as well (which in turn can provide us with aoe stability for mass momentum and etc).

5) Reduce cooldown on function gyro. By a lot. We should still be limited to one at a time, and keeping some short recharge of 10 second tops would be reasonable. To compensate the gyro might no longer be deployed on top of your enemy/ally but instead originates at your location similarly to blast gyro. This means that the enemy have a greater chance to react, that we have to consider our pathing to the target (avoid sending it through aoe hell) and that we have a higher uptime on our special mechanic in one of the two situations where its even available to us. Further we can then increase the range, possibly all the way to 1200 as this is offset by the time it takes for it to reach its target ( a competent team might have already revived their ally by then) which in turn increases internal synergy with super speed sharing as well as granting your gyro some initial stealth from the sneak gyro.

6) The clearing gyro needs to clear conditions from itself as well when clearing allies. In a condibomb your gyro might not even last a couple of seconds (your condition clear dying to conditions), and counterplay to the gyro would include hard and soft crowd control to keep it from the engineer (it needs to touch an ally to clear him/her) long enough or until its dead

7)Something done about the bulwark (this might apply to IDefender as well). Lowering the damage reduction to 30% and then removing the transfer part means that it scales better as a non selfish support tool, and once again forces the enemy to rethink and refocus on the bulwark (instead of continuing to fire on you and kill your gyro in any case). Now you want it to live as long as possible instead killing it for doing its job. I say this because the alternative would be to buff the bulwark up to over the top levels to remain useful in a team, while this means its useful on your own as well as in a group (sort of like how water fields healing is not divided by the number of players affected).

These tweaks and the scrapper would look a lot more attractive. Of course the hammer and a lot of the traits already are, but utilities are what defines us, and i do not want to wait until the next expansion (if there will be any) and hope that this time we will have better luck this time. We have been using these other skills for a long time by now, and while the engineer is still jolly good fun, a bigger repertoire would be appreciated.

iKeostuKen.2738:

Saying no one paid attention to turrets is a bunch of load. Maybe no one paid attention to them in SPvP, but im sure they were used in WvW and even in PvE.

On the contrary, they were at their strongest in pve due to some of the following factors:

1) Condi immunity. Condiplayers did close to no damage against them meaning the engineer did only need to worry about himself. This is also true in wvw, but well get to that later. In PvE mobs rarely deal any threatening amount of conditions.
2)Crit immunity. 2 of a glassy players stats down the drain when targeting turrets.
In PvE mobs are based around hitting hard and slow non critical attacks against sluggish targets, with their performance dropping heavily against people on the move.
3)Killzones. The most point blanch of the bunch, that being the thumper turret still could be upgraded to attack in a big area, but the second shortest upgrade was 750 range in a wide cone, meaning you could drop them out of the aoe hotspots and still secure hits against people in the killzones made up by the controlpoints with the enemy being afraid to leave the cap to wipe them out depending on their focus on close ranged combat. In WvW even the smallest of camps had means of staying out of the line of fire, and in sieges where more narrow killzones like gates exists the turrets wont last long.
4)The goal. Related to killzones the largest measurement of success was not in the number of players killed but in how long it took players to wrestle that point away from it and take it for themselves. This often boiled down to fights against one or two players, where your CC combined with that of the turrets could make life hard for the player you focus. In wvw fights are either way too mobile or end up with enough aoe pressure to ruin your turrets without effort.
5) The meta. The bulk consisted of decently rounded build that where not glassy enough to gank the engineer, and not bunkery enough to sustain against the turrets. This was the primetime of celengis and celes.

And here is the twist. I have played a lot of turret engineer, in pvp as well as wvw (really there was not much of a point of them in pve). No, not the throw-up-your-rocket-turret-on-a-ledge-and-go-afk kind but ironically by using them like they seem to want us to use gyros, like deployable gadgets. No greater feeling than saving an ally in down state by running up to him while 2 people are finishing him/her and the rest are cleaving the downed body in melee and using flameturret->overcharge FT->thumper turret->overcharge TT->detonate TT->detonate FT and securing a impossible stealth revive that would have made any thief green with envy. And i always had to judge if it was best to pickup/detonate my turrets for blasts/reflects/final burst or whether to leave them out to squeeze every drop of pressure i could. It was a interesting play style i will fully admit. But for one thing i knew this wasn’t optimal, i knew that the majority of the time i could simply finish fights way quicker and securely by using parts of our more reliable kitten nal.
And this even though we had bigger trait support as well, the traited turrets reflected when deployed, knocked back when they died or where detonated, gave blast finishers when they where detonated and pulsed boons like protection in a aoe. They could even be repaired with toolkit and got a cooldown reduction if you pick them up.

Now over the course of these 3 years how many turret engineers outside of healing turret and supply crate did you see in wvw? (For that matter how many engineers did you see in wvw compared to other classes? But that is not the focus of this discussion.)
Have you tried playing dungeons or fractals with people not already on a friendly basis and deployed a turret? And in pve the nerfs haven’t hit them nearly as bad as in wvw and pve so why do we not see more turret engineers in pve (indeed the developers response was that they didn’t think it would affect pve that much anyways)?

My experience through the years, most of the time you see turrets deployed its in some open world area, and they usually belong to someone yet to be 80 in a pirate hat.

And i am not i assure you a “read it on metabattle” kind of player. I’ve tried a lot of ridiculous builds since the betas, you have to if you stick to a profession as much as i have done for the years since. What do you think about a full gadget P/S barbarian engineer for example? Been there done that, but i never had any illusion of it being good. Even i gave up on medkit after the patch despite liking the supportive role and nothing have so far convinced me that medical dispersion field is good (a trait we could see from the preview would be bad, and turns out it was).

I realize that this is off topic and focusing on turrets as opposed to gyros, but i have to wonder if you are secretly a thief that has come to bring vengance for the sneak gyro or if you are a time traveler sent back from a dystopian future where the war with the gyros have all but wiped out humanity in which case i better go rehearse my Schwarzenegger quotes this very minute.

And say that the gyro is under tuned and under the radar at release and that arenanet slowly buff them up until people start noticing them actually meaning a difference between victory or death in combat. Upon which the complaints roll in. Do you not think arenanet will find it easier to wipe them out and let them once more go so low under the radar that you will have to search for them with a shovel than to balance them properly because they weren’t important anyway and none cared?

The turrets where wiped out because none cared before about them in any gamemode before so it was easy to just go back to “no one uses them” since they only saw use from spvp anyway. It wasn’t worth the effort to balance them and simply going back to null was safe and tried. They were under the radar as a sort of gimmicky minipet before and there they were sent back again. So now its back to being a neat flavor thing.

Had turrets been “over the radar” since launch had things been different? Possibly. Strong turret builds are nothing new in conquest modes like we have in teamfortress but there you expected turrets to defend a point with ridiculous firepower and you had characters who excelled at taking them down (take demoman and switch it for an ele). But its hard to tell i suppose.

If its an important mechanic for the scrapper and really have a heavy impact on the fight at release (and we do not mean once in a blue moon, do not balance reflects around reflecting kill shots) arenanet sends a message that this is a mechanic you have to play around both as the enemy, the engineer and the ally. You tell people that the shredder is dangerous, bring reflects and try to kill it safely. You tell people that you need to really need to watch out when people drop because that scrapper will really lay down pressure and just cleaving a bit like usual wont keep you safe. Killing the function gyro should buy you seconds, not half a minute because this is the timescale of downed fights. Focusing the bulwark, medic or cleaner needs to be a priority and not something that just accidentally happens.

I hope the chances are arenanet will be more gentle with tweaking it down if it is important than if its no big deal anyway so why bother making an effort? “Its a neat flavor thing” or what ever.

But what is funny is that every once in a while even now after the turret nerf you can still find players clinging to their turrets insisting that they are useful. Good thing they are under the radar now so they wont get nerfed.

iKeostuKen.2738:

Adamantium.3682:

iKeostuKen.2738:

Adamantium.3682:

I still think you’re off on some of this.

1) I don’t need to play it to know that 12k health for the tankiest gyro is bad. They follow us into battle, or in the case of the Shredder we place them directly into battle. They will die instantly. I’m okay with the intent to be short term bots that have a meaningful function, but that currently isn’t the case.

2) In your analogy the manufacturer has asked for feedback on the features of the car, not how it feels to drive. We’re telling him the body looks great, the seats are comfortable, but the sound system sucks really bad.

3) All you see is talk about how fast they will die because that’s what matters. It doesn’t matter how cool they are if they can’t live to be cool. I don’t see pessimism to be honest, and I made a post just a few days ago saying these forums really seem to be going downhill. This was after the Wednesday article when it was pure conjecture and doom and gloom. What I see now is most people agreeing the hammer is awesome, the traits are pretty solid, but the gyros are terrible. I see a lot of constructive posts. I don’t see pessimism I see a lot of helpful suggestions to make gyros not suck.

1)If your using a hammer sure. But what about if your using a rifle or pistol? Or even Elixir gun. The chances of them dieing from cleave will be reduced greatly. As for the shredder, place it somewhere that can benefit teammates or even behind the enemy. From what your saying, your placing it right ontop of the enemies aoe.

2)If you werent inside the car and was just a outside observer, you wouldnt know 2 of the 3.

3)There is pessimism because people arent even trying to see the good in it. All they complain about is its health but dont try to see ways of using the thing without saying. “Itl Die fast cause cleave and aoe”. thats literally all minions, but these dont have the whole, chase down enemy concept to charge through enemy attacks. You have a chance to defend some of these and i honestly doubt they will be targeted over a number of teammates constantly in there face.

Alright, one more try.

1) The Scrapper is designed to be in close combat. The gyros need to survive in that environment, period. Saying they’ll work at range is not a solution (and still not true as 1 AOE circle is likely to kill them — they don’t dodge).

2) kitten man, it was your analogy! We have seen enough of the Scrapper to be able to provide some feedback, period.

3) 2/3 parts of the Scrapper are good and most people here seem to agree with that. It’s the gyros that are bad. This is not pessimism. I don’t get why gyros dying so fast is not a big deal to you, that literally trumps anything else they can do. If they’re not alive they can’t do anything. The tankiest one has 11k health. The tankiest. This is supposed to absorb damage from our whole group. 11k.

1)Ok, as i said it offers a diversity when it comes to play. Tool belt skills are close range skills. Gyros can function at any range but longer range is a bit better. They hit it so it wasnt locked down to just one style of play. What aoe is doing that much damage to you? If this is PvE i can understand but if its PvP and WvW then i doubt anything but a meteor storm will be a problem for you.

2)The feedback being provided isnt good feedback. If youve only viewed them then saying they die to fast so they are useless isnt very constructive. Wait till BWE to try and tell its worth because theres a chance we all dont know how it will be performing in true combat situations.

3)A mesmers clones can also die fast but a lot of the time theres still 2 or 3 up for a while. Which may also work for these gyros. As for bulwark, if its a 2v2 and theres a thief backstabbing a mate for 3-7k, thats multiple times this thing can be useful. Its good for team support in its own way.

Id rather keep them under the radar to avoid the nerfs, instead of having them buffed and nerfed to hells pit later on. (Turrets) They are fine the way they are right now. Until we test them there is no need to say they suck because there could be one build where there entirely powerful and people just dont see that yet.

1) in pvp fighting on point is rather important for a melee based elite spec (and the spec is melee based, given its weapon, its stability options, its toughness and that given that your drones are supposed to offer aoe support which also need to be on point with the limited range they got). While it might not be 1 aoe dealing 11k damage (unless hello reaper, you know that other specialization that becomes a powerhouse when people are down or just hurt? One strike and all your drones currently in greatsword range are done for, including your heal or stomp/revive “special” mechanic) the sum of aoes quickly whipe out anything glassy that can not dodge out of it or position itself with precision. Also from our core specs we have always been the guy on the node (unless static discharging (which also got its optimal range up close) or if one is the kind of player who thought spamming nades from 1500 (now 900) was efficient). We aren’t longbow rangers or staff eles at a ledge. We have succeed in earlier metas because we got the tools to stay on the point ourselves and prevent others from doing so while dishing out diverse punishment close and personal. This spec just accentuates it to an even higher degree (weapon wise and traitwise).

3) A mesmers clones are also generated on:

*Autoattacks (if scepter)
*Usually the shortest recharging weapon skill
*Dodges
*Stunbreaks
*Shatters (with chrono)

Etc.

Of course i expect you mean phantasms, but while they tend to have a low amount of health their cooldowns start immediately, are a lot shorter (with traits to further reduce them), a lot of them are ranged and have no duration (unless their targets die).

You will notice that the primary reason for the amounts of illusions up at a given time is not a result of how tanky they are but because of the steady generation of them. We are not talking about 45 seconds between illusions here. This is not complaining that the mesmer clones and phantasms are superior, its just illustrating that basing the survival of our long recharging/short duration short range low hp gyros on the number of illusions that a mesmer have up at a given time is futile. One common complaint about the mesmers illusions is that they are easily destroyed by any kind of cleave and that they often die before getting their effects off. How many mesmers do you think would sign up for a phantasm based heal (as in summoning a phantasm and letting your heal depend on its survival)?

Nilix.2170:

Foefaller.1082:

Nilix.2170:

Liewec.2896:

were you watching the same stream as me?
triple leap finisher evade,
block attack, reflect attack,
tons of daze from lightning fields

500 health per second from super speed (and lads of access to it),
250 per second from swiftness
(lets hope they stack!)

tons of stability

lets not mention that every 30 seconds you and your finisher bot can both stability stomp.

its gonna be very fun trying different builds!

It was 105 for swiftness and 470 from superspeed and yes, they do stack. So if you’re running Streamlined Kits, and swap to Tool Kit, you’ll get Swiftness (10s) + Super Speed(2s), and you’ll get a +575hp for the first two seconds, 105 for the rest.
He did say that it scales with healing power, but you know how healing power scaling is.

The Master traits look really nice on paper so far. I’m probably going to be running Expert Examination over Rapid Regeneration or Mass Momentum (All that alliteration…)
9s of weakness + 5 stacks vuln with no ICD? That’s like an immediate buff to Supply Crate.

Forget supply crate, You know that the leap finisher combo for lighting fields is a 1s daze right? And with all those lightning fields, we’re getting a skill that’s 3 leap finishers in a row.

Yes. And Thunderclap -> Supply Crate is a 3.75s stun (3s + 25% from minor trait) + 18 seconds of weakness and 10 stacks of vuln, which you can then follow up with Rocket Charge leap finishers and increase the vuln stacks to 25 and apply even more weakness.

Since there’s no ICD, this means that all of your stuns and dazes do this. Which means your AoE Supply Crate drop stun is also AoE weakness + vuln. Chaining stuns and dazes and not letting enemies regain their dodges is very very rude and I’m going to enjoy it very very much. It’s no surprise that Sigil of Paralyzation has shot up from 6s to 40s since the traits were announced.

I really don’t see why that sigil would be so impressive, the stacked increase with the minor still means a minor stun goes to become a decent stun (1.5 or 1.75?) and the increase on our two minute elite is probably not something you would give up a fire, air, energy or what have you sigil. We got rather few stuns of decent duration that’s worth increasing with paralyzation. In the same way we did not go for paralyzation with our shield i don’t think we will here either, even with a 25% increase from traits.

But yeah, we will have loads of dazes though, and that means we will proc the weakness a LOT. The rocket charge through a lightning field which already procced weakness is just mean.

Adamantium.3682:

miriforst.1290:

If i get a 100 killshot warriors to line up on a row and reflect them it does not mean that the reflect skill should have a cooldown based on “this skill once downed a 100 warriors”.

The gyro already got a limited health bar and needs yet another trait to gain stability.

I think it would be better to balance it around having to actually get to its target to:

1) better telegraph whats going on for the enemy team.
2) increase the synergy with our shared super speed.
3) be able to increase the range, the range being offset by the time it takes for the drone to travel.

I think what you said is very important. I don’t think the gyro should appear right on top of your target either. Anet’s favorite buzzword is counterplay, where is the counterplay in that? I actually think the fact that it just appears on your target might be a big part of the ridiculous cooldown.

Make the Gyro appear at the Scrapper and immediately move toward the selected target (here’s your counterplay). Up the range to 900, if not 1200 (more range, more functionality, more counterplay opportunity while it’s moving toward target). Remove the cooldown. Using the Function Gyro destroys any currently active Function Gyro.

Indeed, more play for everyone.

Engineers get to use it more often (still not that often), enemies have a big window of counterplay still. High risk high reward.

Though the devil in me wishes to at least secure one post gate stomp on suicide tower mistform-through-gates-cos-balance eles in wvw.

If i get a 100 killshot warriors to line up on a row and reflect them it does not mean that the reflect skill should have a cooldown based on “this skill once downed a 100 warriors”.

The gyro already got a limited health bar and needs yet another trait to gain stability. Not to mention that this is what defines all scrappers. You are free to equip rifle, you might never want to touch a utilitygyro (understandable) but you will have the function gyro in the same way that you always have your toolbelts or a reaper will have reaperform.

I think it would be better to balance it around having to actually get to its target to:

1) better telegraph whats going on for the enemy team.
2) increase the synergy with our shared super speed.
3) be able to increase the range, the range being offset by the time it takes for the drone to travel.
4)Prevent possible abuse like reviving people in enemy keeps etc.

Morfedel.4165:

And what you missed is that this only added and took nothing whatsoever away. All it did was give options. And even revives area at times necessary in PvE, saving you time to fight while you’re function gyro does the revive.

Furthermore you can trait your gyros to have effects upon death.

So really its at least mediocre if not good. Boring whatsoever wrong with it

Mediocre, i like the sound of that! Ill remember that when other elite specializations dodge 3 times in a row baseline, fire exploding sniper rounds, charge around swinging scythes the size of streetlights and travel back in time.

Jokes aside i do like the idea of the gyro, although i do completely understand people arguing that you wont see it in action for most of your combat and if its really needed it might not be enough. PvPers might find it handy in team fights or XvsX+Y, {X,Y>=1} in general where you need to simmultaniously fight and stomp/revive but there is a thing called downed cleave, and with the “tanky” gyro going down in seconds, does this look good for the function gyro? And then you need another trait for it to preform its task reliably. Think about it, one gravedigger and your 30sec cd “special” mechanic is gone, and the gravedigger is recharged.

Lets consider the gravedigger. Its a spinning attack that easily crits for 10k+ without effort (statwise that is). Its primary function is to execute multiple low health targets and as such work excellent for downed cleave. It had its cool down decrease upped to a 100% for this role to really shine. We need to provide something of that caliber given that this is our continuum shift, reaper form, berserk, triple dodge or what have you. The more situational, the bigger the impact when the criteria is met. A extra dodge have lots of uses during the entire fight, especially with the dodge traits, berserking and pulsing stability is also highly useful during the engagement and a necromancer have to use its reaper form or die trying to get into it (oh dear but when they do…). We need for someone to go down on either side to even show our new mechanic. Of course it should be strong, it might even have to be very strong because thats its one jobb. So massively reducing the cooldown (10 sec max) and limit the drones to one at a time would be a start. I might even suggest increasing the range but let the drone originate at your location to allow for reactive counterplay and increase the importance of aoe superspeed.

And this is from a pvp perspective, in pve half of the mechanic is gone. And so that impacts all of the related traits as well. Including 2 minors. And when you really need your scrapper to save you, now that its finally time for him to unveil his mechanic, consider what got your teammates down in the first place? Either you are in a low risk or a high risk situation. In a low risk situation your gyro might have no problem reviving that ally. But then a lot of the time then neither would you. Sure you might save a second or two, but the gyro wasn’t really needed was it? It was more fancy sure but on a total combat contribution how high would you rate it?

Then we have the high risk situation. Okay all bells are ringing, your allies are down and this isn’t just a matter of timesaving anymore its full whipe alert. But then something managed to take down a few geared characters (a situation where the gyro actually would be needed). So if it can take down that player how long is your frail little bot going to last? This is where 30 seconds of cooldown does not help. Who knows it might actually revive someone but in situations where the gyro is needed (not only usable, needed) the odds of another revive being needed within 30 seconds (or heck 45 sec if it works like the utilities does) is not insignificant.

In the end you need to fulfill a few criteria for it to even be theoretically usable, and then the actual contribution is filtered through layers of potential potential potential potential uses.

All in all a large reduction in cool down is a good way to start. And that change need to happen before the last beta weekend.

Im sorry for sounding grumpy, but know that i am a support oriented character who like the goal of this thing, i always run a duo with another player so the amount of time that i can even use it is above average. So if i am skeptical, imagine then players who do not have the luxury of always having a potential potential potential use?

And yes eles i do feel sorry for your singularities.

Sorry, i rant when i am tired.

Cooldown starts after the gyro is destroyed.

And its 500 toughness, notice max 5 stacks.

EDIT: And almost 2 sec stun? Its 1+1/4th second (the last part thanks to our grandmaster minor, of which this is among the only skills to affect). Call me a pessimist who thinks the glass is half empty, but 1 second stuns on a decent to long recharge aren’t exactly what you would equip paralyzation for is it?.

All in all i agree that the hammer allows us to ease up a bit on the kit usage, removing the need for toolkit above all. But my theory is that we will not see gyros but instead gadgets like slick shoes (which synergize both with super speed traits and the melee playstyle) or rocket boots (even moar mobility and blasts), elixirs and field generating or ranged kits like the mortar and elixir gun.

^Healing turret heals more, heals in a bigger area, heals faster(burst), clears condis, got 2 water fields on a shorter recharge, is not exposed and destructible if you pick it up or explode it (yes the skill itself includes a blast finisher as opposed to the gyro) and i don’t think the protection trait pulses when you have the gyro out, only when you use it (meaning on summon/detonate) like our other “on heal” effects and thus healing turret, elixir or medkit would be more ideal.

I think a lot of stuff on the scrapper is better if you do not use gyros necessarily.

I never expected it to rival healing turret, but can it at least not look like a joke compared to any of our heals?

Aye, it will only be on the table at all when you play with someone and then it would only be usable if things go south (or in pvp when you have an opening). And then it really needs to be a powerhouse. If reviving (or in pvp stomping) is our mechanic then we really need the scrapper to be your go to choice for the task.

Similar to how they made the gravedigger a 100% reduction if filling the criteria (meaning that when it works it WORKS with capital letters, and gravedigger isn’t too shabby even when not fulfilling its more easily fulfilled criteria) as soon as people are down the scrapper should really get to work. Of course limit it to 1 at a time though.

As for the stab trait, i feel like quickness would have been more universally useful, both giving your bot a surprise element and yourself a possibility to snowball the fight further.

Ye, it feels like there wasn’t enough time for them to design a fuel system without making it only useable with the scrappers bots so they slapped on a finisher/rezbot which they still have not demonstrated in action. “TBD”.

A resource management game for the engineer instead of a short limited duration would have been interesting indeed.

I would still allow them to be damaged though, just as long as toolkit heals them and they get a major stat boost.

IDefender got a 25sec cooldown base with a reduction trait available, mesmers got more traits to synergize with phantasms since they where designed with them in mind, mesmers are more based on evasion, meaning fewer hits to actually tank, the cooldown starts right away, it does not need to hug you and take your cleave.

And its still not considered viable. So as much as i would like this to be good (being a bruiser/support player at heart) i remain skeptical. I like the goal of the skill, but just like IDefender would need it one wonders what would happen if its a straight up damage reduction and not transfer given that it can be destroyed quickly if focused (and it really is the only thing the drone itself does) or even accidentally cleaved as it does hover close to you. Not to mention that it is indeed limited in duration.

Kodama.6453:

Haralin.1473:

Thats what i want to say

Scrappers seems to be developed in a hurry to have something to show, for me the results are very disappointing.

Exactly. Am I the only one who thinks this elite spec got a complete rework a few days before? The icons from the new toolbelt skills for example. They don’t match for what they are actually doing.

The reflection bubble has a bubble icon with the aegis symbol on it.
The aoe superspeed from the explosive gyro has an explosion icon.
The poison field has an icon with flying shields.
The shredder gyro toolbelt skill even hasn’t an icon, they used BoB for this.

And there were some datamined icons, which wasn’t there. Like the one with the gas mask wearing engineer under a bubble.

I guess they were in hurry.

And the trait that said reduced damage after heal skills grant protection, why not simply say it gives you protection?

They probably where going to add some unique 20%ish reduced damage for a few seconds but ran out of time.

Of course this protection on heal trait is very good still. Just not with the specialization heal but with our favorite heal, the healing bo- turret.

The 30 sec cooldown on the mechanic i really hope is just a temporary thing.

And super speed will need to stack.

If you look at the trailer they appear to be purely a visual effect, and my guess is that the only thing nailed down by then was the hammer rocket charge idea. I mean thunderclap really?

Also looking through the data files you can find the super speed to healing trait but nothing about gyros last time i looked. You do however find some other interesting things. Like a merged stabilized armor and cloaking device, a slow on hammer crits/chill on hammer hits (one could be for rev and one for engi i suppose) trait and a turret shield + regen merged trait. There where probably a lot of back and fort in the specialization patch about which traits would be staying. I would have preferred cloaking device to a lot of traits we got now. Also quickness syringe on medkit :/.

What i was expecting was to have a toolbelt like the turrets are now and then unique detonation skills for each (for example the detonation for the splode gyro could be the very skill it is now) while they are in use. The active skill would be repositioning them and giving them tasks (for example shredder would normal follow you and bleed/cripple with the “overcharge” causing its current behavior at the designated location while the splode gyro would preform bombing runs in a line, the bulwark creating a ring of wardingesque ring at the targeted location, the cleansing gyro creating a field of short duration resistance, the sneak gyro slowly moving to an area and opening a miniportal there and at your location that have a cooldown between each port etc.)

If we are to consider using these instead of entire kits they need to offer a lot of flexibility and usability, including overcharges and implementing unique detonations might do just that.

Also to consider that they will take a lot of cleave, given that this spec is melee based. So if a warrior or something is landing hits on you your “tanky” bulwark will take 150% damage and you 50% until its destroyed, which with 150% damage and thumper turretish attributes wont be long. Would have been interesting if advanced turrets worked for gyros though… Or for that sake wrench heal. Ofc. their duration is so limited it wouldn’t make a big difference.

Sigmoid.7082:

ALL THE GYRO COOLDWON STARTS WHEN THEY ARE SUMMONED!!

this would be very unlikely to happen because of how pretty much all other summons in the game start cooling down when the summon dies. Even mantras just got changed so they cooldown only once all the charges have been spent.

Except for phantasms, which seem to behave a lot like this new utility type does (use for a few seconds and blow up).

^It’s not 800 hp/sec, its 800 hp/3sec.

good fun eh?

I find it hilarious how i struggle to find a way to utilize even a single one of the gyros without thinking “Hey or i could just use X kit, gadget or elixir instead” (okay, not turret. I’m not THAT mad) while it seems like every class is complaining how we are better at their job.

Thieves: Better at stealth! (understandable)
Guardians: Better guardian (including spirit weps)
Mesmer: Better IDefender!
Ranger: Better petclass! (including spirits), Better “GS”!
Elementalist: Better lightning! (yes im serious).

Heck sometimes people even forget that engineer was the original “super speed profession”.

I’m surprised i haven’t seen “Better Minion Master” yet.

I do not dare to think of the nerfs that will follow if we actually are as good as people claim that we are.

And the engineers utility slot are indeed important and they need to be good, they are what defines us, more so than some passive movement signet or what have you.

But i am putting this out yet again, excellent job with the hammer! Now i might not feel like i absolutely need toolkit, or heck i might use toolkit for even more blocks!

But the gyros feels like a failed and sad attempt at going “oh im so sorry we removed turrets from realistic play in all gamemodes, but heres our second pass to try to make them work. And its your specialization!”

I missed the stream and only saw the tooltips.

First i was lukewarm around it, some of the gyros could be pretty powerful i supposed. Then i noticed the 30(!) second cool down on our already highly niched mechanic (which in turn puts a cooldown on the traits interacting with it.)
Its a case of “You Had One Jobb”, it really needs to be excellent and available if rezzing and stomping is all it does (considering its still a npc that can be killed and CCd). If it takes this long for the devs to realize that maybe not having a cooldown on a “every x crit slows your enemy” is a bad idea you would have thought they wouldn’t slap cooldowns on things that are already limited in other ways. For example super speed does not stack in duration and you either sacrifice drones with a grandmaster (which already gives you non stacking super speed) or use your rather long recharging lightning field on hammer. So why slap on a 10 second cooldown on the leaps and blasts to 3 sec super speed? Oh but i forgot we had thermobaric detonation and medical dispersion field so maybe thats our thing.

And then i realized the cooldown on the drones starts when they are destroyed.

So we still got hammer i suppose (which is awesome don’t get me wrong).

But even if the cooldown started when you spawn the darned things its 50%ish uptime on most of them, and that’s if they are not destroyed! They work like longer recharging but fancier phantasms so let them share the ability to start recharging immediately.

And that might when under stability trait? Okay if you combine if with strength and juggernaut camp, but otherwise how much might is this, even with the grandmaster stability? The traits this trait is competing with are very goood.

Oh and i find the increased stun duration odd, we got loads of launches and knockdowns but rarely any stuns that could synergize with this. We got the thunderclap but is 1/4th of a second longer stun really that impressive? I suppose most of the power lies in stacking the reducing effect together with melandru.

Okay enough ranting for now.

But don’t overdo the double dipping in duration, cooldown and healthbar please. Its called burning the candle at both ends, and with such a limited testing time left it does not look good.

dancingmonkey.4902:

ThFH.6048:

dancingmonkey.4902:

Basaltface.2786:

BuddhaKeks.4857:

I don’t mind it (especially since I will mostly see the translated version ingame) but I think it’s a bit odd that they chose a term that is already used in lore. See Scrapper.

“applied as a label for any warband which is consistently insubordinate, unreliable, or troublesome. These warbands are low within charr society and are commonly given little respect.”

Yea.. thanks i guess >_>

That is a unrelated definition. It refers strictly to charr and their ranks in a greater warband, in a greater army, it isn’t really relevant to the ES of its namesake.

I do not agree ANet says that taking an Elite makes you change your class form Engineer to Scrapper and says you are a Scrapper when having the line equiped.

Since I like to do some roleplaying my Charr a proud Centurion of the High Legions does not like the Idea of being compared to the most trashies of warbands the High Legions have walking around.

Talking about Forge this would indeed only work when if the hammer attacks would be themed around Fire.

So? That is your perception, and your comparison you are personally drawing. The Norn, Humans, Asura, and Sylvara are not concerned with a term that means something with a negative connotation to the over grown alley cats.

There are plenty of names that have both negative and positive connotations, depending on the context they are used.

^Like there is a major difference between a cleaner and a cleaner. One cleans your room. One makes the mess.

But more on point.

A scrapper fits well with the survivalist theme of the expansion, a scavenger using whatever pieces he can find from the wrecked armada to create ingenious contraptions like eh-… robots?

Its not strictly charr related. Its just that noncombatants in the super militaristic society off the charr have a tendency to get looked down upon, especially if they are put on the sides for a reason. The actual work done is a way to still have use of the dishonored individuals without letting them join the front lines.

And for that matter you can still create a charr elementalist or an asura warrior despite the former being a magic user (which they not only look down upon but actively distrust) and the later clashing with the asura mentality of not getting themselves close and physical in such unrefined ways as chopping someones head off with an axe.