Guild Wars 2

QuadJunky.2736:

nofo.8469:

Something off about the system, as there are a few servers who are borderline ghost towns and are still marked as full.

My guess is they tuned it to stop people transferring off servers to the more popular ones.

Besides, how can a server be more “full” than another one?

Its off because at any given time Anet can change what those meaningless indicators of low, medium, high and full represent. If they wanted full could mean 10 players.

I’m sure as the population decreases in the game they adjust the values for each level of population to give the impression there are a lot of people playing.

And why wouldn’t they? New player buys the game logs on to pick a world and 2/3 are low and the rest full. Not a great sign for a 2 month old game. Now if they “adjust” the indicators then that same new player see a different picture.

What is funny is 3 weeks ago I saw more people activily playing through the world, in towns, in wvw when the server had a medium pop than I do now that my server is full.

Anet must have borrowed some phasing tech from blizzard and I am on a different phase of the server than the rest of them.

They also can fiddle with them to keep people from transferring to specific servers just by setting a server to full 24/7.

This sounds much more likely than the capacity being based on registered users.

mjharrison.3209:

FYI Anet recently said server pop classification (full/high/medium/etc) is only due to the number of accounts registered there, no the number actively playing. So a server could be listed as “high” but still be empty.

Then why on earth was my guild transferring over to a full server during the off peak times when I last played? Because every other time it was full.

If it was based on number of registered accounts it wouldn’t fluctuate like that.

I don’t like the quaggan and would love to invest in Tixx’s company.

Please implement this ASAP anet. TY

Something off about the system, as there are a few servers who are borderline ghost towns and are still marked as full.

My guess is they tuned it to stop people transferring off servers to the more popular ones.

Besides, how can a server be more “full” than another one?

ZeroArmada.9426:

I seriously am at a loss when it comes to engineers. Currently my engi is 61, and I’ve tried 2 builds so far. pistol/shield elixir build, and Juggernaut build. I’ve enjoyed using elixirs, but when I saw the trait of Juggernaut I thought it HAD to be a massive powerhouse. So I’m currently using it, and it hasn’t disappointed yet.

Now, I get on the forums and I see everyone posting about how FT is the worst kit there is, and how bombs/grenades are really the only way to go to get a powerhouse build. I don’t like using the grenade kit because of the constant ground targeting, bombs don’t really appeal to me, I don’t want to make a support build with the elixir gun as I already have another support toon, and honestly I really like the thought of mowing enemies down with the FT. Some of you guys aren’t wrong, with how Flame Blast (skill 2 on FT) sometimes doesn’t work, the auto-attack for FT sometimes misses, and how the rest of the skills don’t really do much damage.

Are grenades/bombs honestly the only powerhouse build engi’s have? Because if that’s the case, I’m just going to stop leveling my engi and keep it there until another balance patch comes out and try again. I really love the FT, but seeing as how a lot of people keep saying FT is garbage, I’m having second thoughts of using it.

I don’t mind using the elixir build I use to run, but I run dungeons quite a lot and pistols barely do anything to things like burrows or those gargoyle heads that spit fire at you.

You can win without using grenades/bombs, it just takes a lot longer.

So in answer to your question, if you want to be a powerhouse (or the closest engineer can come to being one) then yes you basically need to use grenades and/or bombs.

If being a powerhouse is what you want though you are better of rolling anotherclass, engineer is mediocre at everything except CC.

Wrei Mors Les.8406:

nofo.8469:

Wrei Mors Les.8406:

nofo.8469:

Dogblaster.6713:

This never happes.

The arenanet is company, can you tell me why they should give their hard made product to someone for free?

Yes there are free to play mmorpgs, but they had low developing costs and anyone would even buy them money.

Guild Wars is on pair with the best pay to play mmorpgs there is no reason to go free to play ever. And no .. Arenanet would never benefit from this ..

Players that are not willing to buy game for money WONT ever spand money on gems. So what Arenanet have from this? Just more bots and more loaded servers.

You would see 100x more bots, gold sellers, trolls, etc.

Planetside 2.

What is Planetside 2 besides one big persistant FPS WvWvW? GW2 has that PLUS dungeons, sPvP and more. Different gameplay modes to suit a diverse community.

So because you say guildwars 2 specialises in nothing its better than any other MMO that focuses on something?

Guild wars 2 > EVE because EVE doesn’t have dungeons and suit everyone?

No, whether you like it or not there are good F2P MMO’s out there that had a development budget comparable to guildwars, which was the point of my post.

What guildwars has is a diverse and very fragmented community at the moment.

If guildwars perfected dungeons, SPvP and WvW then I would agree with you, but as it stands at the moment its pretty much sub-par in every regard, only reason WvW is successful is because they literally have 0 competition for that kind of gameplay atm.

Please re-examine the little illogical interpretation spin going thru your head when you wrote that. The fact that the focus of one game is but only one of many other focuses in another game does not imply one is better than another. The main point is that Planetside does not need to split as much resources over various different gameplay modes than GW2 thus GW2 would probably require more revenues to maintain and improve beyond initial developement. You can’t seriously support a F2P model using ‘Planetside 2’ as an example when the circumstances between PSide2 and GW2 are so different.

Do you have any idea the point you are arguing anymore?

Planetside 2 was not an MMO with cheap developing costs, which was the point of my initial post.

You are right though, guildwars 2 requires more revenue to maintain and improve now because they went the PvE progression grind route.

They are different yes, no kitten.

However I will iterate this again for you, the poster I was responding to said there are no succesful F2P MMO’s with a decent sized development budget, which planetside 2 contradicts this.

What point are you trying to argue exactly? I don’t think gw2 should be a f2p game I don’t have the faintest idea why you are even trying to argue with me.

Hey they released that interview thing recently.

If that doesn’t constitute pretending to care I don’t know what does.

Wrei Mors Les.8406:

nofo.8469:

Dogblaster.6713:

This never happes.

The arenanet is company, can you tell me why they should give their hard made product to someone for free?

Yes there are free to play mmorpgs, but they had low developing costs and anyone would even buy them money.

Guild Wars is on pair with the best pay to play mmorpgs there is no reason to go free to play ever. And no .. Arenanet would never benefit from this ..

Players that are not willing to buy game for money WONT ever spand money on gems. So what Arenanet have from this? Just more bots and more loaded servers.

You would see 100x more bots, gold sellers, trolls, etc.

Planetside 2.

What is Planetside 2 besides one big persistant FPS WvWvW? GW2 has that PLUS dungeons, sPvP and more. Different gameplay modes to suit a diverse community.

So because you say guildwars 2 specialises in nothing its better than any other MMO that focuses on something?

Guild wars 2 > EVE because EVE doesn’t have dungeons and suit everyone?

No, whether you like it or not there are good F2P MMO’s out there that had a development budget comparable to guildwars, which was the point of my post.

What guildwars has is a diverse and very fragmented community at the moment.

If guildwars perfected dungeons, SPvP and WvW then I would agree with you, but as it stands at the moment its pretty much sub-par in every regard, only reason WvW is successful is because they literally have 0 competition for that kind of gameplay atm.

Ryuujin.8236:

Mutiny.4180:

I love people who tell others they make exuberant amounts of gold by “playing the market.” Good to know, but too bad for the rest of us who’d rather play the game and still be able to afford cool things.

Ask yourself this:
How does an adventurer make gold?

Answer:
He sells the loot he finds in his adventures.

A savvy adventurer will always get a better deal than one who just sells for asking price; this isn’t unique to GW2. Whether it be selling an item on auction in WoW or Allods, making an appraisal throw in Dungeons and Dragons, or taking ranks in speechcraft in Skyrim.

If you’re not willing to shop about for the best deal and be savvy with your gold in GW2, don’t be surprised when you find yourself having less than the next guy.

Personally I love this aspect of GW2, it isn’t a matter of grinding up and vendoring items, the civvie side of life is a mini-game of it’s own; the greatest PvP arena where the stakes pay out in gold.

Gilosean.3805:

Do you help with mobs when you see that? If you see someone doing that, ask them if they want the mobs or if you can take them. Easy 5-10s for, and they can harvest in peace.

I do actually – I’m like “Thanks for rounding them up for me” and murder them all with mind bullets. I do wonder why someone would risk training so many mobs though if they won’t survive it if something went wrong.

This is not what people mean by playing the market.

I quit with about 600g mid november and I guarantee you it wasn’t because I was a good adventurer.

Dogblaster.6713:

This never happes.

The arenanet is company, can you tell me why they should give their hard made product to someone for free?

Yes there are free to play mmorpgs, but they had low developing costs and anyone would even buy them money.

Guild Wars is on pair with the best pay to play mmorpgs there is no reason to go free to play ever. And no .. Arenanet would never benefit from this ..

Players that are not willing to buy game for money WONT ever spand money on gems. So what Arenanet have from this? Just more bots and more loaded servers.

You would see 100x more bots, gold sellers, trolls, etc.

Planetside 2.

Lack of a /who command or something similar makes me facepalm.

Ualtar.5047:

nofo.8469:

The silent majority have already left this game, assuming we have 1 million players that would mean on average a bit over 19k players per server. (Assuming 52 servers)

Now from what I have observed, there is nothing close to 19k players on any server that I have played on.

The 1 million player count assumes half the players that purchased the game have already dropped it.

You can observe every section of every server at ever second of the game? That is a pretty cool ability to have.

The vocal minority likes to think they speak for everybody, but I am sorry to say we here on the forums do not speak for everybody.

I disagree on the forums being a good source of community opinion just like you. It is however a good source of information on what people have issues with.

But are you seriously trying to tell me that you think servers have 19k+ active players on average? You don’t need to observe every section of every server at every second to realise how unlikely this is.

Do you know what causes companies to do a large turn around in their design direction for a game after launch?

Ditton.3149:

No, I said put up the money to start a server from them and that would be paid completely by you and your group, the moment its not making money, its dropped. This venture would take an entirely new team, if there are so many of you out there..should be easy to pull up the amount needed for a new server and team right?

Do you really think ANet is going to let some of their consumers have the source code to this game? Serious changes to this game would be necessary to make a PvP server even remotely viable.

The only way for a FFA server to exist would be to start an illegal private server which is not a good idea because even if you were so inclined, there are better MMO’s out there to use as a base.

The silent majority have already left this game, assuming we have 1 million players that would mean on average a bit over 19k players per server. (Assuming 52 servers)

Now from what I have observed, there is nothing close to 19k players on any server that I have played on.

The 1 million player count assumes half the players that purchased the game have already dropped it.

Eugenics.6953:

nofo.8469:

Because PvP is a side activity to PvE.

As someone else said, patches do not lie. If you are after an MMO designed for PvP this is not it.

The PvE isn’t much better.

Never said it was, just saying this isn’t designed to be a PvP game.

Because PvP is a side activity to PvE.

As someone else said, patches do not lie. If you are after an MMO designed for PvP this is not it.

PvP is a side novelty in the direction this game has taken.

For an MMO to have a functional FFA server it has to be designed ground up with PvP in mind.

This game was not designed in such a way.

Arenanet will likely make it part of the recipe required to make the ascended necklace.

They would be silly not to.

Basically you have a choice between JQ, SBI and BG.

Last time I played (mid november) everyone was jumping to those servers and I doubt the trend has discontinued.

Warriors being better in PvE than pretty much every other class is nothing new.

PvP, most warriors don’t know how to use a rifle and zone engineers so be thankful. Though if they try to melee a good engi down they will probably die.

Engineer rifle being terrible for doing damage is a problem inherent with the way the class is designed.

Yes.

Emo chump in a suit of armor needs to die.

Syktek.7912:

nofo.8469:

If they are after PvP I would recommend EVE

No, you won’t recommend that boring kitten game to anyone. I played for three years before giving my character, RiskyFrisky, away. He’s now in nullsec with a terrible pilot having his track record destroyed.

I flew with Suddenly Ninjas, Brick Squad and The Skunkworks for the more noteworthy corporations and as proof that I did play.

I helped SN blow up Chribba, the master of Veldspar, etc. etc. etc.

I would never recommend EVE to anyone. Why? Because the game is too slow. You can’t hop in and expect anything. PvP is all but ruined in highsec and nullsec/lowsec are just crap.

Never in your life should you ever recommend EVE to players. Let them find EVE themselves if they are looking for something like that.

I agree, its not my cup of tea either, but it has better pvp than this.

I played EVE for about 2 years before I got bored for the same reasons.

I played GW2 for about 3 months because I got bored for the same reasons.

I wouldn’t recommend EVE because its a great game, but because literally its the only modern passable PvP MMO.

mulch.2586:

Karizee.8076:

ANet has steadily expanded server capacity since launch.

The queue times for WvW are biggest reason not to increase server caps any more than they already are. As you may be aware, only 2,000 players from each server may participate in WvW at any given time and some servers have very long queues, especially after WvW resets on Friday evening.

It’s 2000 players from all 3 servers, just 500 total per map.

And they sold over 2 million accounts for 52 servers, so there’s an average 40,000 accounts per server.

If they even had 20k per server now I would be very surprised. Maybe on the t1 servers.

If its the type of friend that likes loot grind WoW or rift does it better than this. Or borderlands/torchlight if they aren’t into MMO’s.

If they are after PvP I would recommend EVE or to stay away from the MMO genre until CCP releases their new MMO because they seem to be the only well funded MMO company not making PvE MMOs.

If they are after epic story telling, bioware is still king imo.

So in short, no. This game is a jack of all trades that doesn’t do anything particularly well and that is something very hard to recommend to anybody.

Shootsfoot.9276:

Gohlar.3671:

Well considering the nose dive the population took I think it’s safe to agree most think it’s a bad game.

The classes are incredibly shallow btw. It’s such a giant step backwards for the genre, it’s like mmo lite. There are no rotations because the classes are too dumbed down to have one.

I have a level 90 hunter and a level 90 paladin in WoW.

Those rotations (priorities, now) aren’t exactly rocket science.

Guild War’s 2 isn’t exactly rocket science either.

Even the arguably hardest classes to play (engi and ele) aren’t overly difficult just require a lot of button presses to achieve the same thing other classes can with 6 buttons.

1. Uninstalled game, still visit forums because I had great fun with the game while it lasted.

2. Lost shores ascended gear announcement, tried dungeon once then didn’t log in again, just wasn’t feeling it anymore.

3. Don’t really like the gear treadmill type of MMO. Better games out there that do the same thing if I wanted it.

For a game marketed as a PvP MMO this didn’t deliver, it has about the same quality or less PvP than WoW does and that’s not a good comparison to be making if you set out to make a PvP MMO.

Shootsfoot.9276:

Graill.8596:

@shootsfoot

YOU need to understand YOUR view is also irrelevant seeing what you tried to do to those two folks. YOU need to understand that MMO does not mean people have to group, it is a choice, the same goes for soloing. If you need your hand held because you are incapable of performing simple or complex tasks by yourself or the game has a certain group mechanic then that is your choice, do not ever state MMO means the game is all about grouping…it is not.

MMO means, and this is to educate you, a game with masses of people online doing what they enjoy…….not doing what you think they should shootsfoot.

LOL…ok.

At least now I can see why you do most things solo.

Building an MMO around solo playing is rather stupid.

There are far better genres around for soloing.

Not saying people should not be able to do anything solo, but having so the majority of activities are solo friendly does not help foster a community.

Drudenfusz.2971:

I see no reason why they should do it, they can implement new weapons, utilities, and what have you without any problems. They just can add another race more zones and all that stuff which don’t need more levels. So I hope they stay away from that, never liked it in other MMOs.

I’m glad they didn’t.

The new changes are excellent and necessary to stay competitive in the current MMO market.

I would say engineers, grenade spam so hard.

They changed alot of things based on feedback. That is evident in how they changed Halloween item drop rates. We could go through tons of changes and shoe you how many were changed based on feedback. Not sure that would help anyone who rage post about something as insignificant as the hipshot animation.
Besides that. Many fail to realize that they get opposing “Constructive criticism or suggestions”……..Whose “suggestions” do they take? Doesn’t matter, because the other side will rage about it.

How is Halloween fluff any more insignificant than hipshot animation?

I never said they didn’t act on feedback, I said they didn’t act on constructive feedback. How many changes have been implemented based on constructive feedback?

Thief BS/PW where the core issue still stands (haste) and they basically rendered a build useless? That’s kneejerk reaction to whining not well thought out response to constructive criticism.

The latest patch, 150 odd pages of criticism, some of it constructive most of it not, most the constructive threads got merged and chucked into the damage control thread. When a company blatantly silences any argument to their design direction it’s appalling to put it bluntly.

And they implement based on feedback I have never seen? I never saw a constructive pro-treadmill thread since this game’s release. That’s a kneejerk reaction to financial crisis not feedback.

I’m glad they improved Halloween drops rate though.

Cato.3547:

nofo.8469:

Constructive criticism or suggestions has shown to have no effect on ANet’s design direction.

I hope to hell the company you work for is better than ArenaNet.

Here’s some constructive criticism ArenaNet:

Communicate with your players, we are stakeholders too.

Do not give expectations than shatter them.

Get your priorities straight. Adding progression and seasonal content over fixing the broken kitten in your game is all sorts of asinine.

How the hell this company came in charge of delivering a AAA title is beyond me.

This is good example how not to do complaints, 0 content only immature raging, exaggerations and insults.

Do tell which points were exaggerations?

Constructive criticism or suggestions has shown to have no effect on ANet’s design direction.

I hope to hell the company you work for is better than ArenaNet.

Here’s some constructive criticism ArenaNet:

Communicate with your players, we are stakeholders too.

Do not give expectations than shatter them.

Get your priorities straight. Adding progression and seasonal content over fixing the broken kitten in your game is all sorts of asinine.

How the hell this company came in charge of delivering a AAA title is beyond me.

Can I get some vasoline next time?

Will it work in PvE? Kind of if you want to farm Orr. If you want to progress through FotM? No.

Your choice of spec will output minimal damage without bombs/grenades or power. Rifles are better suited to power builds anyway.

As it stands at the moment, Engineer main weapons are not even close to optimal for damage as most of their abilities are utility oriented, if you want to be useful in dungeons you need a damage kit.

If you are hell bent on using rifles the majority of the time, go for a power based rifle elixir build, still far from optimal but should perform ok.

As for WvW, well if you are just running around with the zerg grenades are basically a necessity if only to tag people.

If you are roaming or doing small scale pvp then you will need a stun breaker of some sort.

Salt.6794:

nofo.8469:

Salt.6794:

nofo.8469:

How hard can it be to store in a variable the stats of your main weapon, its level and its rarity. Then apply that to kits whenever you equip them?

It would not be difficult to implement in any programming language. Unless this game was written in a scripting language or something (even then, most of those would allow this) this shouldn’t have made it out of beta in its current state.

God Arenanet I know you have quality programmers this is a 1 hr fix max.

Except that’s not how programming on a large scale works. Fairly certain GW2 is written in C++ (source: http://ch.tbe.taleo.net/CH05/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=NCSOFT&cws=1&rid=898). Given that it’s based off an OOP design, it wouldn’t simply be a change of a “variable” but rather a change of multiple classes which could have far reaching effects on other aspects of the game. Do I agree that it shouldn’t have been included from the start? No, but I’d rather seen it done properly and without breaking other aspects of the game.

tl;dr: It’s more complicated and I’d rather them take their time than rush and leave something else FUBAR.

Yes, I’m a C++ programmer myself, and yes it is slightly more work than I made it, but not much.

Putting a variable container into whatever class(es) they use to store current weapon information for use in kits would not be difficult nor would it have far reaching effects on the game unless they really kittened up their OOP approach to design.

I’d guess that kits are considered “pick-up” weapons and it’s possible they just don’t want to give stats/sigils to every pick up weapon in the game. I do have to agree it wouldn’t be a terribly difficult fix to implement. Little, simple fixes would honestly do them a lot more good in calming/appeasing the playerbase than focusing solely on the larger issues (not that the larger problems aren’t important; larger problems just mean larger amounts of work). Here’s hoping it’ll be sometime soon.

Yeah I guess, can’t really see any pick up weapons that would be OP with the sudden inclusion of weapon stats but meh, not a major issue.

Engineers aren’t a major issue definitely, its not like its hard to level up another class regardless. If ArenaNet was making any moves to fix the major issues with this game I would be satisfied.

All I see is fluff and grind content to keep people hooked until the next fluff event comes though.

Here’s hoping, don’t see it likely however.

Salt.6794:

nofo.8469:

How hard can it be to store in a variable the stats of your main weapon, its level and its rarity. Then apply that to kits whenever you equip them?

It would not be difficult to implement in any programming language. Unless this game was written in a scripting language or something (even then, most of those would allow this) this shouldn’t have made it out of beta in its current state.

God Arenanet I know you have quality programmers this is a 1 hr fix max.

Except that’s not how programming on a large scale works. Fairly certain GW2 is written in C++ (source: http://ch.tbe.taleo.net/CH05/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=NCSOFT&cws=1&rid=898). Given that it’s based off an OOP design, it wouldn’t simply be a change of a “variable” but rather a change of multiple classes which could have far reaching effects on other aspects of the game. Do I agree that it shouldn’t have been included from the start? No, but I’d rather seen it done properly and without breaking other aspects of the game.

tl;dr: It’s more complicated and I’d rather them take their time than rush and leave something else FUBAR.

Yes, I’m a C++ programmer myself, and yes it is slightly more work than I made it, but not much.

Putting a variable container into whatever class(es) they use to store current weapon information for use in kits would not be difficult nor would it have far reaching effects on the game unless they really kittened up their OOP approach to design.

edit: There is no reason that getting the stats from your main weapon should be difficult as I would be very surprised if they didn’t have a method for storing that data already. They wouldn’t even need to store the current weapon stats, they could even calculate the difference once a kit is equipped then reapply it. Wouldn’t be the most efficient way but it would be better than nothing.

The only things that I can reasonably see taking significant time to implement would be kits scaling with weapon level and quality, and also sigils.

Aelelan.1639:

SonicTHI.3217

Please spare me diplomatic spin crap. I already heard that from ANET PR guys. What we want is actual reasons and justifications for those actions not some watered down text that has no real answers and just begs for more questions. Saying legendaries are too grindy so we ll introduce more grind for stats so you actually need to grind is ridiculous without first justifying stat grind in the first place.

If you wanna assume I support Ascended gear, be my guest. I’m not going to tell you not to. I can just tell you that I honestly don’t think it was a good idea and think there are other better ways within the anti-stat boost framework to give the middle ground they seek. Whether you accept that as truth is your problem.

They listened to a portion of their playerbase – great. They put a plan into action to solve it – also great, but they didn’t put a necessarily effective one in. No reason to leave the game altogether. You call it departure from principles, I call it experimentation with solutions outside of the restrictive guidelines that they set forth pre-launch. The reason I make the distinction is because departure from principles implies that this is something they are doing consistently – adding gear statistically better than our current gear to give progression. To pretend that because they decided in one patch to introduce something outside of their conceived realm of possibility for the game is reason to jump to the conclusion “WELL kitten I GUESS THATS IT FOR ME. THEY’VE GOT A GEAR GRIND” is just straight up ridiculous. I’ve said it before – there was a problem, they gave a solution. This isn’t a precedent by which to dictate future decisions. They didn’t say kitten I GUESS THIS WHOLE COSMETIC THING DIDN’T WORK OUT. OH WELL BACK TO STATS FOR THIS GAME". There just isn’t nearly enough evidence to support that this is the new norm for this game. I’ll be happy to eat my words when there is because when you’re wrong you’re wrong even when I’m the one that’s wrong.

Do the math for how long it’s going to take to get new gear set.

Then get back to us on the lack of evidence this game is becoming a gear grind.

Most of us are smart enough to know when the ship is sinking because of the abundance of washed up WoW players on it.

Ostra.3927:

at best average 10 minute runs.
Each run average 10 fractals.
Total fractals needed for 1 item ~2500
250Total FoTM runs per each piece of gear.

total time spent running the new dungeon. 40+ in game hours. This is a LOW number and for only the FIRST level (blue) of the items.
LOL

Sucks to be you guys.

Kromsin.6359:

I’ve totally got my money’s worth. Good for them on making money. They have families to feed as most of us do.

That’s not to say I’m totally pleased. But meh I’ve dropped 60 on worse things..

Very true.

Thanks for the fun thus far ArenaNet.

Best of luck in the future.

PotatoOverdose.6583:

coglin.1496:

Everyone who hasn’t leveled another class will be in for a nice shock when they discover other classes have just as many issues.

This.
Many classes got hit much harder than we did (e.g. mesmers). We actually received some interesting buffs (e.g. grenade barrage, magnet) along with a few modest nerfs.

This has nothing to do with who got nerfed the hardest, I don’t think engineers got nerfed much at all.

It’s just the changes were not meaningful nor helpful in the slightest when the class has lots of broken skills and traits.

And to all other classes having as many broken skills/traits, no.

This is from my experience of playing mesmer/thief/guardian/engineer. Nerfs aside, these classes are far more polished than engineer.

Natural part of item treadmill.

Catch up or get left behind, your call.

NaughtyProwler.8653:

Any game that’s willing to throw their current playerbase under the bus for hamsters and locusts deserves to tank. SWG NGE comes to mind, although this is not even close to that big of a disaster (yet).

Yep.

This game is in serious trouble.

Grenades/Bombs/Stunbreaker is generally the best thing to go in my experience if soloing. Gear is up to you because that spec is very versatile and will work with basically anything.

Reason being, is in solo and small groups bombs are insanely good during the fight and also makes it very hard for people to chase you /or your group. Also provides excellent damage when taking camps etc.

Grenades are the best damage the engineer has access to at any range hands down, however you need to be good at landing immobilises to effectively use them against other players.

Stunbreaker is self explanatory.

Tool kit doesn’t really bring anything to the table aside from the grab to be honest, the block is ok but its usefulness is outshined by basically any other kit for roaming. I do like it in sieges however.

As for elixirs, they are ok but don’t have the damage or utility that a spec that revolves around abundant kit use has. (in my experience)

Although for my build i do use elixir H and R with elixir CD reduction trait and cleansing. But I don’t have all utils assigned to elixirs which is common to elixir builds.

As for armor I use carrion with 2 pieces of power/tough/vit for the toughness mostly. For runes I use orbs and weapons p/p.

Disastro.4086:

nofo.8469:

Agreed, but their priorities are a bit skewed at the moment, and their methods of balancing is questionable at least.

When its blatantly obvious that some classes get far more attention for polish than others, and those classes are the ones that are already rather polished it begs the question how competent the development team actually is.

I can’t argue with that statement in the least. However from a business point of view If you had 2 choices at any given moment based on your current man power and resources available you could make 95% of your customers happier or make 5% of your customers happier which would you choose?

All be I’m sure we’re much smaller than 5%. There are not a lot of engineers we’re such a minority that I’m sure that is to some level a contributing factor to us being lower on the priority list.

It’s all purely conjecture but even if the above were completely true I couldn’t personally argue with that logic since we’re not being “completely” ignored and have a couple builds that work well enough. Does it make me happy though? Hell no.

Very true, I don’t blame them from a business point of view for shafting engineers, we are a tiny minority.

Saying that though, its unethical and a bad sign of things to come.

The patch’s content alienated me enough without my class being basically ignored for 3 months as well.

Arius.7031:

Shayde.2564:

marianitten.1247:

Amazing! another “quoting ANET people” post! we need more of this.
/sarcasm

The new dungeon is not out, the new gear is not available. WAIT to see how they managed this, and then take conclussions.

The new gear is out: http://www.gw2db.com/items?filter-item-rarity=8 Look at it and then tell yourself it’s not necessary to remain competitive.

Not much different than rare versus exotic. Yes, you’ll have to grind—but not much. It’s still not a lengthy gear treadmill like in other games. It’s a very short gear treadmill, and even then, you can still play in top notch PvP without the ascended gear—just not the Fractals dungeon.

From what I understand this gear treadmill is set to be implemented in such a way that would make Blizzard blush.

5 tokens per 15-30 min run.

~500 tokens per item?

From what I read somewhere, going ahead with this would be absurdly stupid however and even though I’m not a fan of ANet atm, I have a little more faith in them than that.

CJAncients.6907:

Zipper Fairy.9804:

I’m not sure you understand what a “treadmill” is.

Having a sense of character progression, and NEEDING to get a new tier of gear every 3 months are completely different things.

I’m not sure why so many people don’t understand that.

Vertical progression IS gear treadmill.

Not necessarily.

DAoC had vertical progression in the form of realm ranks for example.

It is heavily associated with gear treadmill however and may as well be synonymous because of all these greedy incompetent developers trying to get a piece of WoW’s consumer base.

coglin.1496:

Kuruptz.4782:

Well they are 2 ppl only who is working on so much

though they should hire more people i mean we payed didnt we?

Where was this information posted?

I’d be happy as long as they posted something like “we acknowledge the problems with A,B,C,D”, “Fixes are in the work some require major code changes and may take longer than others” etc.. Wouldn’t take long and they probably all ready have these lists compiled.

I can agree that updates would be nice.

My issue is with folks claiming they never posted about fixing or adjusting this or that, when they actually did. Some here simply assume that a post never existed, simply because they didn’t see it, because it was buried among one of the several repeat threads we always have.

I believe the 2 employee response is from an ANet dev in the merged patch response thread.

It’s been a long time since we have had any ANet communication on the engineer forums, its long overdue.

marianitten.1247:

Amazing! another “quoting ANET people” post! we need more of this.
/sarcasm

The new dungeon is not out, the new gear is not available. WAIT to see how they managed this, and then take conclussions.

Sure, I would love to watch them butcher the game and then say something.

Or I could do my best to say “Hey wait a second, what the kitten are you guys doing?” and maybe even stop them from butchering it at all.

Bombs are generally better against thieves in my experience as you can force zone them. Grenades do too much single target damage in PvE (they are supposed to be an AoE weapon) but why they nerfed their SPvP capability is beyond me, only time you can use grenades in SPvP is when you have your target immobilized.

But yes, ArenaNet needs to hire some new class balance, or at least bug fixing devs, AND make at least one of them play an engineer a few times a week.

Its blatantly obvious neither of them play this class, almost all of the fixes in this patch are completely irrelevant to the majority of engineers, and none of the meaningful things have been mentioned let alone fixed.

Oh and ANet, if you do read this post don’t think I’m asking for a grenade PvE nerf and calling it a day either, if you do nerf grenades give us another source of single target dps thanks.

Coyote.7416:

tigirius.9014:

meanwhile warriors can still one shot enemies with rifle and have multishots, guardians can stack buffs, eles were given buffs on their weapons when equipped, yet engi rifles don’t have multishots, the toolbelt healing abilities turret and pots do not stack and are all the same regen buff (cept #5 EG), and kits not only don’t buff but they don’t scale with the equipped items.

I will say this argument is being very selective in how it is looking at this patch. Here, you are notiing the buffs to other classes, but completely disregard any nerfs that happen on those same classes. I main an engineer, but I am a self-admitted alt-aholic, and some of the things that you are pointing out here ignore both the buffs to engineers (some turret improvements, admittedly small, among other things) but very much focus on the bonuses to other classes while completely ignoring some of the real hits they have taken (eles might have gotten a buff to conjured weapons, but took a big nerf with evasive arcana). I understand that you want the engineer to be better than what it is, and admittedly, we have some decided weaknesses compared to certain other classes. But as far as I can see, we are nowhere near in the worst shape, and while I’m looking forward to adjustments, I can see that they have a lot to do on a large number of classes.

Glance around the other classes forums, very few are shouting “hooray!” for this patch, and yet to read this particular message, it looks like engineers who are the only ones dissapointed.

And I am dissapointed, mind you, but I also am trying to keep a certain amount of perspective involved :-). I try to recognize that while there are certain classes that are in better shape than us, that there are still a few that very much could use some help :p

Blah, that’s enough out of me for a bit.

Yeah, I think rangers got shafted more than us.

The developers hinted good things were in store for us, but for rangers they outright told them they had things to look forward to, and their notes were similar to ours.

Still, this patch makes me really question what ArenaNet is doing behind the scenes, because at the front it looks really bad.

Hope they step their game up soon.