Guild Wars 2

Marsuew.8216:

And Rifle has both launch and immobilize since released, so is AR (thought it’s bugged at first). Engi didn’t got any buff like warrior’s healing signet, so decap engi should have existed for a long time, but becomes a issue just recently.

Engineer’s sustain wasn’t even close as it is now, which is relevant since we are considering a bunker build running on cleric most the times.
Elixir-Infused bombs got a quite good buff to healing power scaling.

Accelerant-Packed Turrets was moved to adept, which is an insane buff to decap bunker engis since you couldn’t take it before along with Elixir-Infused Bombs and Automated Response.

Snoozey.2790:

Sadly I need the runes not for my wvw set :/

Divinity are extremely expensive.
I’m running full boon duration, with water, monk and traveler.
With 30 arcana, you’re going to have overall +75% boon duration, which is quite nice.
Boon duration means more regen uptime, more protection uptime, more might stacks, more fury uptime, more vigor uptime and more swiftness uptime. This also applies to any ally you’re giving boons to (since almost all the boons are AoE).
Pretty much what any elementalist needs.

Dredd Spirit Caller.4082:

never played GW1 Hero Ascend??
not all builds was maded for killing

In GW1 it was possible to build full healer too. Other than that, any build either dealt damage/support the damage or was full healer/support.

Decap engi isn’t neither support nor damage.
It’s like bringing a full smiter monk in HA just to overload of enchantments the ghostly hero in KotH maps. It didn’t make any sense then because it was completely useless in other maps while having also an easy counter (enchantments removals).
The difference is that decap engi hasn’t easy counter (just warriors with stability spamming in some extents) and abuses the only PvP gamemode.

Chaba.5410:

Now you’re just reading too much into what was written. In no way did I present those comments as proof that the engineer is fine. They were presented as an alternate strategy for dealing with the current state.

Here’s the comments again from Yamsandjams that promoted this tangent:

“Another way to deal with a decap engg is just to ignore it. If they want to take your home point on rot on the node, let them. Now you can play for the other two points and fight the enemies 5v4. The decap engg then has to choose whether to abandon their node or leave their team at a disadvantage. If they leave their node, it can be backcapped. These “bad players” you speak of will likely just sit around and not contribute much to their team since they’ll only be thinking of pressuring the enemy home node, then perhaps blame the rest of the team if they lose.

Additionally, both teams could employ the same strategy with this sort of engg, so it would have somewhat of an equalizing effect.

So even though this build can be a strong asset, it will largely depend on the rest of your team. If your team can’t maintain control of the other two nodes effectively, then being a decap engg won’t allow you to win anything."

Of course decap engi isn’t OP to the point that he can carry a whole team by himself, but moderately skilled players with a decap engi are more likely to win against moderately skilled players without decap engi.

The simple fact that the only reasonable counter is to just avoid to contest a node against him says that something is horribly wrong about that build.

Chaba.5410:

Exactly. If he moves off your close point to help his team because your team is winning mid and far (should be winning if you outnumber them, then you have higher point gain from two nodes), according to what you are saying, you are no longer at a disadvantage.

I am at disadvantage. If I play two points, there is no reason to think that you can win the fight before the engineer comes to help, neither that you can reliably hold them as the engineer can just come and decap those nodes as much as he do on the close point.
As long as you left a node to your enemy without fighting, you have lost. Period.
The enemy is making points out of that node, you are not.

I don’t know how you can say that completely avoid the node in which the engineer is on can be a good tactic and it is a valid proof of Engineer being fine. It’s like saying that if there were a godmode profession it would be fine because you can just avoid to engage it. Working as intended.
How stupid is that?

Chaba.5410:

The time it takes to get to far only seems like an issue if your team is having trouble holding mid and far with a numbers advantage, assuming the decap engi stays on your home.

Only a stupid player will just sit on close point. Fact is that if as soon as he push close, you are forced to play mid+far and you are in disadvantage.

That obviously assuming that you’ve already won the mid and far fights without the engi coming to help.

Yamsandjams.3267:

So why is your team fighting the decap engg instead of 5v4ing the rest of the enemy team? You seem to operate under the assumption that you must have the close node in order to win, which isn’t true. It doesn’t matter if the decap engg holds that node if their team doesn’t hold the other two nodes. If the engg leaves the node to help them out, then you can just back cap it. It’s not like the decap engg can be on all the nodes at once.

Secondary objective can also come into play. On legacy of the foefire for instance, the one person that would normally fight the decap engg can go attack the lord. So either the decap engg leaves their node to defend the lord, at which point it can be backcapped, or someone else from the team has to go defend the lord, meaning the rest of the team is disadvantaged on the other two nodes. Otherwise, the person can go in and kill the lord for free.

So are you suggesting the final counter to everything? The almighty “just don’t engage” tactic?

As I’m under the assumption that I must hold the close node, which is kinda natural since fighting far+mid is in most cases a bad choince due to distance, you are under the assumption that once you leave the close point to the engi and the rest of the team is doing nothing.

If the engineer is forcing you to play mid+far, he’s winning because getting on far takes much more time than getting on close, thus it is waaay harder to hold.

Manuhell.2759:

First, the “decent protection uptime” is there only if they’re costantly disabled. Otherwise it is 3s + boon duration every 20s.
Also, the build you talk of is using cleric gear and 60 points on defensive stats. I would say it is supposed to have sustain and bunker, given those stats – it would be useless if he wasn’t able to do so. But it is still prone to burst damage (no blocks, 2 blinds) and control skills – it has no stability at all and a single stun breaker on 40s cooldown. Especially if it counts on actively using AR, thus staying under 25% hp (and with only the vitality given by the trait tree, it isn’t much high). And their damage is pitiful.
Sure, they can have a lot of control if they choose to, like in this build (obviously they don’t get them for free…either they get those or they get defensive skills, they’re all in different kits on purpose). But guess what, having “a lot of control” is exactly one of the strong points of the engineer as described in the balance philosophies (along with using boons to stay alive, by the way).
Basically, you’re complaining about what the class is supposed to do by design, about what a bunker is supposed to do by design.

No, I’m complaining about a stupid build whose only purpose is to decap a node.
It doesn’t matter that he deals no damage, any bunker deals no damage. The point is that while any other bunker, take for instance a bunker guardian, can only survive and perhaps support allies, a decap engineer can also take a decap on a node, being extremely useful offensively without killing enemies.

Take a bunker guardian and send it to a bunkered far. Unless their far defender is utterly bad, he will just waste time and eventually die. Not only enemy still get the points because a bunker guardian can’t properly decap a node, but they also get the kill points.

Now, take a decap engi and send it to a bunkered far. He will decap the node and if no one comes to help the node defender, he eventually get even a full cap.
No matter what you do, the decap engi has won. Even if help comes and you manage to kill the engineer, you have lost points because you had the close point decapped and you are probably losing the other teamfights because 2 people are needed to kill the engineer.

For the last time: a profession with 3000 armor is not prone to burst damage.
Also, a profession who gets protection on CC and eventually also 20% less damage while stunned or knocked down is still not prone to control skills.

I really don’t know how to make you understand that. Perhaps, you should play some PvP sometimes.

Manuhell.2759:

Neither is the fault of the engineer if the enemies don’t use power classes, though. In a balanced meta, there wouldn’t be problems at all.

What part are you failing to understand about the fact that decap engineers are bunkers?
They have 3000 armors, decent protection uptime and a lot of sustain, along with high amount of CCs.

A single power based profession can’t kill kitten. Two power profession will eventually kill the decap engineer, but not fast enough to don’t let the engineer’s team win any other fight because of numerical advantage. Same applies to a power profession and a condition profession.

Even if you manage to kill the engineer, it is a matter of 15s that he will be right back on the node keeping it white, meanwhile the teammate who helped you is locked on the close point if you want to get any points out of it.

So either you fight the engineer 1vs1, which will eventually lead even to a fullcap on the long run from the engineer or you fight him 2vs1 which leads to failure to any other teamfight and the inability to kill since he’s keeping 2 dps occupied, assuming you’re holding close point with a warrior (otherwise you aren’t even able to hold it white) and the roamer (assuming thief).

I can’t see how people can argue that decap engi is fine, it is clear as sun that it is plain broken.

Mesmer vigor is broken.
Thief evades are even more broken, though.

Nerf both and we are all happy.

SoloQ is unplayable.
Played two matches, both temple and both can’t be played because of insane lagg, rubberbanding and being kicked out of the game. Lost two games because of me crashing and my team playing 4vs5 or even 3vs5.
I’ve probably fell off a lot in the leaderboard :/

Then tried a couple of hotjoin matches in non-temple maps and everything is fine.

Please, fix this issue asap.

Sizer.5632:

Yes I get all that but the point of burst damage is to kill him before he can cc you and take advantage of all of his regen. If the fight is over in <5 seconds then backpack regen/vigor/AR/ect. arent going to do him very much. If he survives that then it might be very difficult to kill him, but isnt it also difficult to kill a bunker war/guard/ect. with just one person

It is.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, but the purpose of bunkers is to survive and they are quite good at that.

You can’t just jump in and one shot an engineer with 17k+ HP and almost 3000 armor. That’s pure fantasy.

Manuhell.2759:

Except that vigor access got nerfed, that the bomb skills you’re talking about have both a 25s cooldown with the build you’re mentioning (can’t have good sustain without 30 points in Inventions, can’t have AR without 30 points in Alchemy, thus not enough points to get Short Fuse) and getting other control skills apart from the rifle requires the engineer to not get either a condition cleanse beside the turret or a stun breaker – there are simply not enough slots.
Thus all this “knocking down” either is limited to a launch/self-knockback every 15s and a launch every 30s (and easily dodgeable, since it is clearly telegraphed). You can add a 15s knockback or a 25s launch and give up a condition removal or a stunbreaker, sure. It is more risky, obviously – AR protects under the threshold, but you can still be condi-bursted while above it (and we can’t rely on passive removals…transmute is quite useless in that regard).
While it could have power shoes, such a build has no access to swiftness or any skill to escape whatsoever (jump shot is too slow for that purpose, and it isn’t even traited for range).
Also, either it works nicely with AR, has high sustain or has high armor – can’t do all of them together. You would need both healing power, toughness and vitality. And there is no gear with a similar stat composition.

Vigor access got nerfed, but it is still over 50% uptime.

Other then that, I don’t know what all this post is about. It has no point whatsoever and leads to no conclusion at all.

Sizer.5632:

I still dont get all the complaints about AR, it is powerful and could probably be changed, but how many 100% condi specced people are on one team in a spvp match. And how can a power thief/war or a ele/dps guard be utterly unable to kill an engy, is protection every time they get cc’d or 120hp/sec from backpack regen so strong they will never die?

The amount of knockbacks seem like the bigger problem and a lot of that probably has to do with flame kit having one every 15s, that cd go up, plus accelerant packed turrets is another kb every 20s. But youre specced for control and regen so your damage is mediocre and your survivability vs burst damage is also mediocre, plus you have 1 stun break every 40s and no stability. If an engy wants to spec that way why shouldnt he be good at fighting around points.

How can survivability vs burst damage be bad when you have insane armor and sustain?

Also, keep in mind that a CCed enemy is an enemy who is not attacking.

Of course, if the engineer is standing still eating all the damage he won’t survive only thanks to protection and passive regen.

In real life situations, the engineer is dodging (and a lot thanks to vigor), he’s using bombs applying blindness, cripple and immobilization, he’s kiting, he’s knocking you back and down, all of this added to high armor, high sustain and condition immunity on low HP, which means that the engineer can just disengage when he’s on low health since you have no way to immob/snare him, heal and then come back on the node keeping it neutral.

Since when we are in condition meta?
Condition meta is over ages ago, the only leftover is just a couple of Necromancers playing conditions, which are instantly destroyed by the over-abundance of warriors.

The problem is that this specific build can be completely selfish and designed only around self-survivability while still being extremely useful to the team because of the decap/cc potential.

Insane survivability, over-abundance of knockbacks and conquest gamemode. One of those things has to be fixed.

Marsuew.8216:

glaphen.5230:

I never said they use them all together, the skills themselves are overpowered on their own for the fact they are instant with 0 counter play. Look at solo queue, 75% of Engineer are using bomb, grenade, and Tool Kit with a pistol/shield and spamming every skill possible. The other 23% is using Decap with rifle, flamethrower, bomb, and either Tool Kit or Throw Mine. 1.9% are using Accelerant-Packed Turrets and the other .1% must be non-existent since I just needed a percentage for the ones I haven’t seen. The age of Engineer taking any skill at all to play is over and now the spam and non-aggression play styles reigns supreme.

A [Bomb-Granade-Tool] 3 Kits engi is easy to counter, range weapon, condition(especially confusion), CC skill, and area retaliation, all of them works. It’s not that strong if he just spam skills. But that’s not important since this is a decap engi thread.

Those CC skills, you can dodge, evade, around-the-back, block, blind, stability, stay range, or CC the engi faster(if they don’t get BS skills), there’s a lot of way to counter play. Only if you don’t know what to do, just stay front of him and being controlled, then you feel there’s no counter play.
And the most important, there’s other class to do what decap engi could, like bunker ranger, get CC skills as much as engi, but with stronger condition removal and more protection by dodge, ranger even get more, 12 secs cooldown block from range, and Drakehound area immobilize every 16 secs with knockdown every 36 secs. Since the game mode makes us need to defend nodes, every bunker with decap skill should be involved.

Edited:
What decap ranger I said is just like this.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQJARTjEV91JWCWg2Bi2jMZJM9e0qY1eXhRVwmK-TgAgzCmIASBkDIDQyds7A

Greatsword is hard to counter, auto-attack got free evade. Counterattack (GS#4) is 12secs cooldown, if you attack in melee will being kicked out node, if you stay range, it will be a 3secs block, while pet keeps attacking you. Point Blink Shot (LB#4) is 15secs cooldown hard-to-see knockback skill. If he feels pressure, Ranger can use Hunter’s Shot(LB#3) to gain stealth and run. Krytan Drakehound area immobileze every 16 secs, Wolf area fear every 36 secs, and they both have knock down every 36 secs. This ranger clean a condition and trans 3 conditions to pet every 10 secs , hard to use condition to burn ranger’s HP. Trans CC skill to pet every 90 secs. Got passive heal and self-res, what more? You can gain protection from dodge and rune. It’s much harder to counter than a decap engi.

If you feel decap engi is ridiculously strong in conquest game mode, then every bunker with decap skill should be involved, not only decap engi.

lol @ decap ranger.
Have you at least tried what you’ve suggested or you’ve just came here, made up a build out of nowhere and claimed it is better than any meta decap engineer?

How can people still fail to see how stupid that build is.

1. First off, there isn’t a single “decap engi” build. Each engineer has his own version with his own utilities and any of those builds have insane amounts of CCs: at least two knockbacks coming from Flamethrower, Big Bomb and Rifle/Shield on really low cooldown, along with high immob uptime and kittenload of survivability. Then there is a free slot and a couple of traits to play with to have further knockbacks.

2. You can’t burst an engineer down alone as long as he’s a bunker. If you haven’t stability on, it is the more time you’re CC’ed then the time you’re putting pressure on your enemy. Automated response is also a pain in the kitten because it makes pinning down the engineer impossible, so he is free to escape as long as he’s on low HP with, of course, perma swiftness. The issue is that while average bunkers are good only to defend nodes and to give buffs, that engineer is capable to run farpoint and contest it for the whole match even against 2 people. Now, have two engineers in your team camping the close node and the far node and you’ll realize that the match is won, unless the enemy team is made of 5 warriors, which isn’t usually the case.
3. The decap engi is pretty much the next FotM build. Run a couple of SoloQ matches and there are as much engies as there are warriors. That build is just insane and unhealthy for the meta, because it encourages people to play warrior for double stability even more, like they needed further encouragement to be played.
4. Other then CCs, the issue is that engineers can easily immobilize you offpoint with ease-to-access immobilization through rifle. Same applies to Supply Drop, which gives insane amount of immobilize thanks to net turret.

If you have no clue on how PvP works but you’re here just to defend your beloved profession, then just leave this topic.

Liza.2758:

engi / guardian decap , regen bunk warrior, evade thief ..

all the dumb builds that have no will to fight are as dumb as thief permastealth in wvw

Those build aren’t there because they have no will to fight.
Engi decapper has the will to fight, but he has also the will to not dying at all and to not allow you to step on the node.

They are also extremely useful in teamfights because the insane amount of CCs is extremely useful for defensive purposes too, not to say the AoE healing.

Dahkeus.8243:

Let me parse this down for you:

I never said it was hard to play. I specifically said that it is not hard to perform well without understanding the intricacies of the class/builds.

I said it is hard to play well, meaning that there’s a high skill ceiling. I’m not arguing the low skill floor.

Even if entry level decap isn’t hard, perfecting the play is much harder than most builds out there.

Playing well means being successful in my vocabulary and I think in most people’s one.

It doesn’t matter how you can refine your style of play if you can win by just spamming CCs against most people, that’s the point.

It is the same about hambow, you can refine your style of play as much as you want, but if you are a bad player, you’re still a pretty good player if you play that specific build.

Dahkeus.8243:

I give up. Reading comprehension must not be a strength of people on these forums. Third time someone’s argued a point I’m not making, lol.

No, what you’re failing to understand is that “hard to play” doesn’t necessarily mean “hard to understand”.
Engineer is a profession which is hard to understand, pretty much like Elementalist, because of the tedious class mechanic, but it isn’t necessarily hard to play overall. Once you get used to the profession mechanic, which usually takes just a couple of games in hotjoin if you’re not new to the game, the profession is baseline as easy to play as any other profession.

A profession is hard to play when it is unforgiving, thus making a single mistake the cause your death. Glass Elementalist, for instance, is an hard to play professions and Thief in some extents. Glass Engineer or triple kit engineer (with 30 Explosives) can be considered hard to play.

Decap engineer is by far not hard to play.

Dahkeus.8243:

Seems to be a lot of people here who probably have never played an engi, but feel like they can evaluate the skill required to play one based upon Auto Response.

Yes, auto response does reduce the threat of conditions, but there’s so much decision making involved in everything else an engi does, it blows most other classes out of the water.

On most classes, if you need to heal, you press your heal button. There’s a few exceptions where current conditions suffered and such are considered, but that’s mostly it. For an engi, you consider what your current health is, then weigh that against whether you detonate your healing turret, whether you blow other CDs for a blast finisher (Big Ol’ Bomb, Shield #4, etc.) to get extra healing, or whether you just pop the turret for the base heal and pick it back up for a reduced cd. A good engi will know exactly how much to blast for extra healing and when to save cooldowns.

And that’s just the heal. Engis have a lot of combo fields, which means that knowing what combo finisher to use at the right time adds another element to gameplay, and that’s before you even consider all the extra potential actions to take with the extra skills that kits provide.

So if you want to claim that engis are overpowered, go for it. That’s a valid argument. If you want to say that engis require no skill just because you’re frustrated at losing to a strong class, then just stop and go educate yourself.

Just jumped on an engineer, never played it before, not even in PvE.
Played a couple of hotjoin matches just to have a clue of which button to press and how to use the turret heal, jumped in SoloQ and kept far decapped against 2 people for an insane amount of time while my team got the other two nodes.

That build is braindead and you don’t really need to be an engineer pro to be way more useful to your team compared to an extremely good Elementalist or any other build (yes, hambow too).

leman.7682:

Inb4 Grouch appearance.

Yeah, game’s pretty kitten atm, that’s not an opinion, it’s a fact.
Most friends left, balance is non-existent and Jon&Co keep pumping cheese into the game.

Also, where is the balance preview?

No Grouch anymore, he’s now on WvW.
PvP is left to die for good now.

Dawdler.8521:

The PvP population skyrocketed? Since when? Every day I see less and less people in the mists, last time I ran through it there was like 5 people there in the middle of primetime, lol. That’s far, far less than a year ago.

Its just to face facts – GW2 PvP is boring. Its not bad per say and tbh I think the balance between the classes with the more “moderate” stat builds are far better than the inflated PvE/WvW stats but its still a Sumo wrestling match, literally. And not many people find that fun in the long run.

WvW isnt going to kill PvP, Anet are killing it perfectly fine themselves without WvW getting in the way. Personally I think that it should be about actual PvP. Not trying to knock out your opponent from a ring to win.

Yes, it did.
Queue time went from minutes long to almost instant.
PvP population isn’t based only off the lobby popularity anyway.

About the PvP fact, being only simple PvP will get boring extremely fast and will create a lot of frustrations, since some professions are designed to be a pain in the kitten to fight against in a simple deathmatch mode.
And, by the way, you don’t just win by knocking out someone off a node if he just walks in right after. You have to fight sometimes and the node is there just to not make professions with insane escapes (see Thief) extremely frustrating to fight against, it is something that forces people to play risky in order to win.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Of course. That’s because Anet balances with only sPvP in mind.

No, because WvW uses PvE stuffs and PvE balance, not because ANet balances with sPvP in mind.

gpassucc.5961:

Uh… add more power and you can easily get that on a warrior in pvp… I know I have one.

Instead of making a “balanced playing field” gearing issues hold back a lot of builds that can utilize a diverse gear set. For example I absolutely love my d/d ele in wvw but would never play it in spvp simply because its impossible to get adequate stats. What it does do is make classes with high baseline stats (i.e. warriors) ridiculously dominant.

You simply can’t get that situation in PvP. I dare you to make a screenshot with these kind of stats in PvP.

D/D ele is viable in WvW just because of the sharpening stones, otherwise it would be completely and utterly useless.

Warriors were not dominant before the buffs, while they still were extremely strong in WvW, so your point doesn’t make that much sense. PvP is not about tankiness as much as WvW.

style.6173:

@OP: This is the worst post ever. WvW has gotten basically nothing in a year. Some new ranks that no one wanted? A league that was a bad idea?

PvP has gotten 3 new maps in the same time period.

The better question is why hasn’t WvW gotten more than PvP given that it is more popular than PvP?

PvP had 3 new maps, which 2 of them flat out suck and aren’t used in tPvP.
Other than that, we’ve seen a leaderboard that barely works and a SoloQ plagued with leavers and bad matchmaking and after a whole year, a NPC that sells useless skins at insane prices for a dedicated PvP player and Tome of Knowledge to level up characters in PvP and finally some ways to make gold, whose ways went away along with the Winterstay Gift glory vendor.

WvW had all of the new gear coming from PvE updates including new runes, new stat combos and new skins, WvW ranks, WvW perks, season one, Bloodlust buff, Obsidian Sanctum arena and new Badge vendors.

PvP isn’t unpopular because it is bad, it is unpopular because it has so little features that only dedicated players care about. A PvE/WvW dude will do PvP only if he can use its PvE skins and make gold out of it. In fact, it is not a casualty that PvP population went skyrocketed when they added a profitable way to make gold in PvP.

Liza.2758:

Stats wise is pretty fine
it just requires you to use some more brain to build up your build or fight with other builds … not just picking up braindead amulets.

i dont think perplex is an issue anymore though

Sure man, “pretty fine”.
That’s why in PvE/WvW you can build having pretty much everything with no drawback whatsoever.

Fixed amulets are there for a reason, not because PvP players are dumb. They are there just to avoid unstoppable warriors with 3000 armor, 50/60+ crit dmg, 2000+ power and 24k HP.
Oh, and of course Thieves spamming interrupts with perplexity runes and dire gear, because, you know, they are not an issue…

And don’t let me even start talking about food buffs and conditions duration.

Juba.8406:

dude you cant be real.

just be thankful that Crit isnt getting nerfed in PvP, they r nerfing it in WvW because of some PvE dungeon boss, yeah kitten logic.

That’s the drawback of having silly PvE gear and runes, like Dire gear or Perplexity runes.
Not to say that Crit Dmg in WvW is just insane and that the maximum amount achievable on PvP is about 60% with no defensive stat whatsoever.
In PvE/WvW you can have 110% crit damage while having hight toughness and high vitality thanks to valkirye and cavalier, while still having high precision because of the food thingy.

WvW balance flat out sucks. Period.

Flumek.9043:

sorrow.2364:

Fun fact. The Sizer you are probably referring to is Sizer.2654 (not Sizer.5632).
That guy has a whopping amount of 13 matches played overall in Team Arena.

thx for the hint. how do u even notice that?

Maybe a 2nd account? The post is well written , decap engie isnt a problem a hotjoiner would care about and the argument “just send a warr over” sounds like CM to me.

Yeah, “send a warr” sounds a lot like CM, but it’s probably just a casuality.

I don’t think that Sizer would admit that he’s not a good player in PvP when he’s actually No. 4 in the leaderboard. That would sound stupid at least.

So I checked the full name of Sizer, and he had different digits. Then I searched his name on GW2shack and found out they are completely different people.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I believe the problem with elementalists and their sustain is that, with the high skill ceiling of elementalists, the top tier players are able to string together all of their boons and heals really efficiently. Elementalists end up being balanced around that skill level, and the casual elementalist gets shafted because of it.

The obvious solution to that problem is, unfortunately, not a very satisfying one. Basically it involves reducing the skill ceiling by locking attunements and buffing their individual actions in them. This, of course, kills the diversity of the elementalist, so it is less than ideal.

Anyway, one of the reasons why Elementalists have low HP is because of how well they could originally do everything. Eles have a lot of AoE damage and boon support, and also they had a lot of versatility and mobility. In sPVP this doesn’t show up much, but in group battles in WvW the elementalist is a frightening force to be reckoned with. I’ve seen entire zergs slaughtered in static fields and meteor showers at choke points.

Two flaws with this. First, as I mentioned above, all of their mobility and sustain is nerfed due to how effective they can potentially be. Second, all of their AoE skills (and many of their attacks for that matter) have long delays with extremely visible cues, meaning that actually hitting with any of these high damaging skills is nigh impossible. It is this large delay that made me reroll the ele when I first started playing the game. Sure, I get a bunch of big damage and flashy effects, but what good are they when opponents can just casually walk out of the way?

I don’t know about making any changes to HP tiers. Guardians and thieves are intimidating enough with just 10k base HP. If anything, I’d rather just buff Eles to be more frightening than increase their HP but leave them kitten in the end. The HP tiers themselves are set around the downed state, and it is important to note that GW2 is assumed to be a team based game. Because of this, high damage bursts from enemies are assumed to be easily mitigated by having teammates rez you from the down state.

Elementalists are bad in high level play as much as in low level play. They just flat out suck in any competitive environment at any level.

And, by the way, in PvP you usually don’t even bother to ress or to stomp an ele. A couple of AoE skills on the corpse are enough to kill him from downed state and to out-perform the ress healing.

Flumek.9043:

Today summary:

@Sizer:

Im probaly more than 3 steps behind your levels of play , but if the only counter to these decappers is to:
-become top competitive
-perfect VoIP synced team , even with the recent addition to maps showing enemys , which was obviously aimed at pug play
-run 2x warr setup

then, i think i have the right to complain.

And ill even play on the “im a casual , this is not fun” card, if it gets me better treatment from Arenanet. Im aware of the nerfs and i hope more will come. To all professions… Gotta start somewhere

Fun fact. The Sizer you are probably referring to is Sizer.2654 (not Sizer.5632).
That guy has a whopping amount of 13 matches played overall in Team Arena.

BurrTheKing.8571:

You’re incorrect about the order that Warriors received buffs. This is important because the received the trait changes and Zerker Stance buff BEFORE the healing changes(June 2013). Before the healing buffs Warriors were still not considered viable. It was only the healing buffs that made them viable and it was almost a month before any builds surfaced. So yes, nerfing healing may significantly impact Warrior’s viability. Now 8% may not be that bad but we can’t know until we play.

As I said, the problem is the synergy between HS and invulnerabilities, not to say that warriors were considered still bad even after the HS buff for a whole month. Then people have discovered a build that was crazy OP using the buffs they received (hambow with unsuspecting foe) and they become popular all of a sudden.

redslion.9675:

That’s why warriors were so good before buffs, right?

The above average argument doesn’t work well: most used healing skills are ALL above average (mostly with their added benefits).

Withdrawal has a lower cooldown. And considering the obscene condi meta that stands now, 3 conditions cleansed is not enough. Traiting Mending sure removes a lot of conditions, too bad that most of the time you’ll have to cleanse movement imparing effect before you need to heal, not after. If a necro forces you into healing before you can get to him, you have already lost, unless you are cc heavy. This means you’ll need other ways to get rid of conditions. And even then, we all saw how costant streams of condition removals are better than once in a while heavy cleanses. Most conditions are reapplied really fast, and some of them can completely shut you down (cripple, chill). So you need to take Cleansing Ire. Making Mending redundant.

Mending and surge can be useful if you can down someone with warrior in seconds, which is achievable is the enemy is less than rank 10. Maybe.

Mending and Surge were buffed in the same patch of Healing Signet, if I’m not wrong, along with Berserker Stance, Cleansing Ire, Dogged March and all the kittens warrior got.
Warrior were not bad because of the heals, warrior were bad because they had no condition removal whatsoever in a condition heavy meta.

Mending was a mediocre heal when it removed only 2 conditions on a 25s cooldown and with lower health, while Surge was still an extremely good heal even before they buffed it further.

What the developers did, instead of just fixing the condition removal issue and making Healing Signet somehow viable instead of crazy OP, is throwing every buff they can at warrior. They made them literally immune to conditions, buffed their control potential, buffed their burst skills, buffed their adrenaline regen, buffed their damage and buffed their sustain.

All your theorycrafting is based on the assumption that you can’t take both Mending and Cleansing Ire because it is reduntant. True, you need to take also cleansing ire other than mending because how good that trait is, but the true problem is that you don’t need further condition removal because of Berserker Stance.
With that skill, all you have to do is press it, cleanse the conditions with cleansing ire and, thanks to healing signet, you have a cheaper, uncounterable, completely automated and better version of Mending.
Cleansing Ire alone will never make you survive to condition bursts, especially on a profession which is designed to just facetank hits.

The issue is the synergy of Healing Signet with complete immunities, not that Mending or Surge are bad healing skills. All the buffs to warriors were cheap solutions to a tough issue, placing it on the completely opposite side of the spectrum.

Proven.2854:

Alright, then say that instead of the ignorant sounding post you made before. And then tell me how practical it is to have more than one balance team in a single game.

It is called pararrelization of the work and it works in any kind of task that can be divided in simplier ones.

It is not only about balance, but also about features. Balance is game wide, PvP features are related only to PvP and we’ve seen only a couple added in one year.

Mending is good.
Withdraw heals for less compared to Mending and does not cleanse any damaging condition, while mending does.

Since damaging conditions are usually the ones more frequently applied, it is most likely that mending cleanse one of those. If you couple it with Restorative Strength, Mending is pretty much the equivalent of a full condition cleanse plus healing on 20s cooldown.

250 hps is not low.
http://i.imgur.com/hFxaCeB.jpg

As you can see in this spreadsheet, 250 HP/s, even without considering the condition removal, is way above average.

Proven.2854:

You do know that there are 4 Living Story teams, they each have three to four months to plan and develop the content for one month of Living Story release, and they each share the help from a pool of content makers (artists, writers, dungeon designers, sound engineers, etc.) around the building, right?

Sure, now tell me how many PvP teams are there to balance the game and release PvP contents, then tell me everything is fine.

mini.6018:

Or maybe the other heals are just crap ?Did that ever occoured to you ?How come Warriors were asking for some decent heals for the last 15 months before the HS got buffed?

Of course they are crap… In comparison to Healing Signet.
Mending is extremely good. It has insanely low recharge and good condition removal, while healing for quite a lot.
Surge is one of the best healing skill in the game based on sheer amount of health given.

But yeah, healing signet is still better in any situation, so…

Lupanic.6502:

With scepter+schield you can pushback+ immob very easy. Hammer prevent reenter the point = decap. Launch is slow but still usefull. Rest could be like for Bunker build and this means you are harder to kill as the engi

Not true at all.
First, if you run scepter+shield and hammer, you have no swiftness, meaning that you are extremely slow to get on points.

Secondly, the cooldowns are extremely higher.
Net Shot is half the cooldown of Chain of Light.
Banish is on 25s cooldown, while shield knockback is on 40s cooldown, compared to 15s and 15s on engineer.
Not to say that you’re not considering Big ’ol Bomb.

They are nowhere comparable.

mini.6018:

So many bad ideeas and poor to no knowledge of the game.

If your ele is broken or have l2p issues ask to fix ele not cry about nerfing warriors

Warriors are a lot less powerfull than they were before december and they need to spec berserker to do damage.If you can’t do more than 400 dps on a berserker than just reroll.

All i see is bunker easymoder crying they can’t do enough damage wich is ridiculous since they already put out too much for their risk/reward ratio involved.

mini, just quit arguing.
It is quite obvious you have no clue whatsoever.

Dojo.1867:

Honestly I think you are completely wrong. The problem here is that it kind of counters the current meta including bunker guardians. If guardians would take the stunbreak teleport more often for example they would counter this quite abit. Also you can totally kill those engis with 2 competent people.

No, no no.
A stunbreaker really isn’t enough at all. The only real counter is high stability uptime.

Anything the engineer do creates a knockback.
You have a knockback on the rifle (15s cooldown), a knockback on Big ’ol Bomb (30s cooldown), a knockback when you use your elite and any turret is killed (120s cooldown), a knockback on Flamethrower (15s cooldown) and a knockback on healing skill (15s cooldown).
If you take Thumper turret, you have another double knockback (when activated and when destroyed).

That is an hell lot of CC, which can put any profession without good stability uptime in serious difficulties to stand on node or even just put enough pressure on the engineer to kill him. It is still a bunker build, which is extremely tough to kill considering also the insane amounts of CCs it provides.

You just can’t kill the engineer alone unless you’re a warrior with double stability, while still struggling to do so.

Qaelyn.7612:

The first post is very hard to understand.

I’m a new engineer and am curious exactly what sort of build is being discussed here, can anyone link one that’s relevant? Thanks.

I don’t know exactly which build is, but it is all about being as tanky as possible while having loads of knockbacks coupled with immobilize.

I’ve seen many variants and, depending on the build, but most of them run with Acceletant-Packed Turrets, Bomb Kit (with Elixir-Infused bombs), Flamethrower and Rifle as weapon. Some of them even use Thumper turret for even more knockbacks or Elixir Gun for extra survivability.

The point is that you can’t even take a step on the node if you don’t have stability.

Prince.7198:

Welcome to what thief has been through for the last year. A tip: reroll warrior or guardian!

LOL
Thief has always been extremely strong.

mini.6018:

I didn’t know a 3 second posion existed in the game? Last time i checked thieves necros and engies could stack perma poison at e reaply rate of under 10 seconds.

The point is poison actually counters HS and doesnt do anything to other heals except if the target is braindead and doesn’t remove it before heal.Hence HS is far more susceptable to poison than any other heal in the game.

Let me get this straight.
If someone does not remove the poison before the heal, even if it is applied during the heal (which happens quite often with choking gas), it is braindead and deserves to get stomped, so it deserves less healing compared to a warrior which sits into choking gas the whole time without triggering cleansing ire once or using berserker stance a single time.

Your logic leaves me speechless.

Wow.
Is that some sort of justification from your side because you’ve always abused the treb/door bug before it was fixed?

Then I have no mercy for you.

Decap engi are a serious problem to be honest.

Unless you have a warrior defending the close point with its crazy stability uptime, you just can’t prevent the engineer to get a decap or even a full-cap. Even if someone comes to help the close point defender, you take an insane amount of time to put the engineer down to the point it is not even worth the time to defend the close point.

When there is a decap engineer assaulting a node and we have no warrior available, the best thing to do is to just leave the point to the engineer which is pretty sad.

Divus.3175:

Wait a minute, you forgot that you’ve got one bursty condition already, which is terror? All these comparisions to engis are stupid. Engi is close to necro if we talk about spamming, but it got only one burst condition and half that much cc. Just find new builds, experiment a bit more, istead of whinning on forums.

PvP shouldn’t be balanced around top200 or top300 players. It’s just ridiculous. You’re forgetting how strong necro is on lower tier games.

Engineer have two bursting conditions too, which are Burning and Confusion.
If Dhuumfire takes a change, it would make sense that also Incendiary Powder take a similiar change.

When was the last time any of you have seen a competitive warrior using any heal other than Healing Signet?
Yet Surge and Mending are amazing healing skills.

I want people to think about it before saying that Healing Signet is not OP.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

What I just read? Tell me how you dodge reaper’s mark and doom? You can’t dodge that. If there were obvious animations that could be dodged I wouldn’t say anything.
However, I agree on the random proc, which is a bad design. But burning is making the necro still viable . . .

Actually you can dodge reaper mark since it has a whole different animation compared to other marks.
Can’t say the same about doom, but you can at least predict it since it can be casted only in Death Shroud.

4 months to push out a balance patch while the Living World team delivers contents each two weeks is kinda sad imho.

I mean, do they have only 4 people working on the PvP team?

Wait a sec.
Having more control on burning procs with increased duration is a nerf in the mind of someone?

Then I might understand why this game is all passive.

lordkrall.7241:

sorrow.2364:

More people -> more visibility -> more bought copies -> less queue times -> even more people -> more money

Toxic people are there anyway, so I don’t really se the point.

Not necessarily.

People might be turned off by the very toxic environment. And it will not lessen with F2P, quite the contrary. Just look at games like HoN, LoL and DotA2.

While more player and more money is good, the risks of this making them lose out on money probably outweighs the possible benefits.

LoL, HoN and DotA are making an hell out of money and are way more popular compared to Guild Wars 2 while being not even close as the fun GW2 provides.

Why would ANet lose money? People who wanted to buy the game have already bought it, people who aren’t interested that much would probably download it if PvP was F2P and perhaps get involved and eventually buying the game for PvE and WvW and ending up spending money on the gem shop for aestetics.

But, probably, it is not safe to make the PvP F2P right now, there are still an hell lot of features missing.

lordkrall.7241:

I would say no to this.

The behavior of (some parts) of the PvP players is already bad enough. Adding the ability for every troll on the internet to join it for free will just make it worse.

More people → more visibility → more bought copies → less queue times → even more people → more money

Toxic people are there anyway, so I don’t really se the point.

LOL
This guy doesn’t even know how he jumped on first position.
Like, he won one single match and climbed about 3500 positions.

Just tell us the trick already.