Does anyone else have the gear to test it more thoroughly. I am thinking that they fixed the 50% duration condition stacking issue. If I get my condition duration up to 88% it increases the duration on all of my conditions up exactly 88% on all conditions(intensity stacking and duration stacking.)
As some of you know I have been a very strong supporter of the 100% Condition Duration builds, but it unfortunately was debatable about whether condition damage + HGH was stronger.
Now the answer is very clear, but this little buff wasn’t in the Engineer changes. It came in the form of condition duration fixes on Giver’s Weapons. It is now possible to “double” the duration of all conditions and use HGH
I tried this build out and I have been kitten face.
All Rabid gear with Lyssa, Mad King, major Lyssa (might be able to swap out – will test)
2x Giver’s Pearl Hand cannon with Earth & Corruption/Restoration
With this I’m sitting at 107% (Not sure if they fixed the problem when the % wasn’t over 50% increments it wouldn’t count)
Basically I can get over 2k condition damage at double the duration. Pretty sexy.
I’m currently using:
P/P, Elixir H, B & C, & the amazing Pry bar that now has a 10 second confusion. If I run into a large group vs large group situation I swap Toolkit for FT. I’ve actually have had a lot of success with Elixir X, but thinking Supply Crate is still better.
Buffs:
Oil and Rare Veggie Pizza.
So yes turrets without the toughness/HP buff was a bit disappointing as well as the KR changes, but hey at least P/P HGH got a huge boost.
Finally my dreams come true.
Enjoy,
Golo
I liked coated bullets but your build works out really well. I think the most I could do is 10/30/0/30/0 just because coated bullets really helps with fighting multiple enemies and getting tags in wvw. However with only 10 in explosives you miss out on the might on heal.
EDIT: I am not sure if it is worth building a nice set of gear to go along with this build. Im sure it won’t make it 2 patches. Between Pistol 3 and Prybar you can pretty much perma confusion people with this.
Your going to need at least 15 into explosives or your going to have to use sigils/runes/traits to hit 100% with only 10 in Explosives
yep, timid: don’t forget that you need the +condi duration from the explosives tree.
If you get up to 107% with 20 into explosives, you end up with 97% without 10? I think 97% works out?
As some of you know I have been a very strong supporter of the 100% Condition Duration builds, but it unfortunately was debatable about whether condition damage + HGH was stronger.
Now the answer is very clear, but this little buff wasn’t in the Engineer changes. It came in the form of condition duration fixes on Giver’s Weapons. It is now possible to “double” the duration of all conditions and use HGH
I tried this build out and I have been kitten face.
All Rabid gear with Lyssa, Mad King, major Lyssa (might be able to swap out – will test)
2x Giver’s Pearl Hand cannon with Earth & Corruption/Restoration
With this I’m sitting at 107% (Not sure if they fixed the problem when the % wasn’t over 50% increments it wouldn’t count)
Basically I can get over 2k condition damage at double the duration. Pretty sexy.
I’m currently using:
P/P, Elixir H, B & C, & the amazing Pry bar that now has a 10 second confusion. If I run into a large group vs large group situation I swap Toolkit for FT. I’ve actually have had a lot of success with Elixir X, but thinking Supply Crate is still better.
Buffs:
Oil and Rare Veggie Pizza.
So yes turrets without the toughness/HP buff was a bit disappointing as well as the KR changes, but hey at least P/P HGH got a huge boost.
Finally my dreams come true.
Enjoy,
Golo
I liked coated bullets but your build works out really well. I think the most I could do is 10/30/0/30/0 just because coated bullets really helps with fighting multiple enemies and getting tags in wvw. However with only 10 in explosives you miss out on the might on heal.
EDIT: I am not sure if it is worth building a nice set of gear to go along with this build. Im sure it won’t make it 2 patches. Between Pistol 3 and Prybar you can pretty much perma confusion people with this.
Every weapon can be improved. Heck, everything can be improved. But an improvement doesn’t make it balanced. There are plenty of improvements that have imbalanced an item or weapon in games.
It’s not “how can we improve this weapon”, but “how can we balance this weapon” that needs to be discussed.
Well no, by definition something that imbalances it would not improve it. Improving the damage or cc, could be thought of as unbalancing it. However, improving flamethrower as a whole takes balance into consideration.
My point being, this game is developed to the point that you can survive and do at least a half kittened job of pve and pvp with just about every weapon. However, that doesn’t mean that the weapon is fine. Flamethrower is not fine.
Well they can’t really nerf HGH. It only does one thing, and the one thing it does is the directly result of a buff. They would have to remove it or replace it, but nerfing it would be like walking backward since it would just be undoing the update that made it give 2 instead of 1.
Wow, Ezriel. You just earned the kitten award. But it’s easy to be the kitten when you can’t get a fist to your face.
For the people that have used FT for quite a while, they’ve learned to incorporate it with other kits, utilities and weapons and they’ve survived fairly well.
FT has offense, defense and support. A player who knows how to use it will survive.
Anybody can “survive” with any weapon on any class in the game if they work at it enough. That doesn’t mean that the weapon can’t be improved.
Having played eng since beta I’ve seen this class become less fun with each and every patch.
Going to play my Mesmer as a main (on whom I just look at engies as free badges)
So, I heard that the giver’s stuff is fixed now. Anyone confirmation of whether that is true, and if so, would two giver pistols work well for this build?
EDIT:
Confirmed that giver’s are working correctly now. Combining two giver pistols with rare veggie pizza works out decently with your p/p, although im not sure if the drop in condition damage is worth it.
Yeah if only take the EG and time it just right every 20 seconds you can immob a whole group of ppl.
Then you will die because all you have is the EG.
I commend you for being optimistic but imo this change is just about one of the worst yet because it cleary shows Anet has no direction or clear idea of what they want to do with the Engineer.
Well no that is when you switch to p/p and shoot them.
I think turrets should be fine in a roaming build. They are still not usable for anyone that intends to participate in large zergs.
For roaming, I think a p/p build that uses flame turret and rocket turret + prybar should do pretty good in terms of burn damage and general condition damage. The prybar would help keep people in range of the flame turret.
Another bonus for the prybar is that I imagine that attacking someone surrounded by turrents with an aoe might hurt pretty bad if you are confused, although I am not sure how that calculates out.
During the past few days, I’ve been hardcore farming glory to reach my next tier.. and everyday I’ve noticed more and more engineers playing to the point where its not uncommon to have 4-5 engi’s on the same map, whats funnier is that i’m currently playing a new build i created which uses FT and some players ask me about the build while others go and make their hole version! and now, every map i join i see clones of me running around! funny how this has turn out but lets keep it up on sPvP!
PS: Personally, I’m more afraid of engi now than to fight mesmers! and im sure most everyone is starting to feel the same way!! are we the new mesmer? lol
I’ll take any build of engineer over a mesmer any day.
Well I give him credit. Unlike in the state of the game video, this guy actually seems like he knows what he is talking about, like he has actually seen an engineer before, and like he isn’t high.
Well the Engineer is apparently going to be one of the classes with a boon hate option, so I am looking forward to that. It might be possible to make an effective alchemy/mightstack free build now.
Mortar can be useful if you are not running a grenade build but you need to lay out some aoe across the top of a wall or destroy enemy siege. Very very situational, but it does have a small amount of use.
I think it is relative to how many boons you have on you at any given moment. It is going to suck for guardians since they tend to run with a TON of boons. As an Engi I can stack some stuff pretty high, but I tend not to run with a ton of different boons on.
6pc forge runes, battle (yes i’ve made the switch…it’s a pun, get it? ^.^) or strength sigil.
I’ve been slowly working on the forge runes. It doesn’t help that people, at least on my server, hate running SOE because it is unendingly annoying.
For PvE I think it’s important to share the wealth.
Run Altruism + Water + Monk for 30% Boon Duration. The reason I say that over Hoelbrak + Strength is because Drop Stimulant is ferrealz the bee’s knees with 15 seconds of Fury on a 20-second cooldown (with 20 points in Alchemy). That extra 10% in Might Duration definitely is not < 20% critical hit chance.
Or just run 6/6 Altruism and give 6 seconds of Fury to everybody.
This post is of course not talking about PvP.
Hmmm that does make more sense. Not to mention perma swiftness with drop stim.
i’ve been rocking the ft exclusively in spvp since I hit 80 on my engie. spvp was NOT effected by the food nerf, so last patch saw nothing but buffs. a patch or two ago when they fixed the cone hit detection was also a buff.
I might try out spvp if there was no food nerf. I imagine a FT engi would be pretty nasty if they were running a kit refinement super elixir build with health leech food and sigil.
I sPvP quiet a bit, so i know how much people can QQ, if a turrent hits someone for 2k.. we will get even our name nerfed..
I don’t have an issue with a turret hitting for 2k. Thieves and warriors can hit me for 18k+ in a matter of seconds, so I don’t have any sympathy for a turret doing 2k damage. If your build is entirely turret based, aka you’ve gone 30 into inventions and picked up the turret 30 point turret trait, your turrets should be useful and they should punish people that get into the range of immobile objects with limited range, aka area control.
Eh actually it depends on what your goals are in WvW. If you are running around trying to solo people, then yeh very limited unless you are very very good(the kind of good where you are that skilled pvp guy that can kill people regardless of what class or build you happen to be running). You can take out necros and rangers and maybe other engineers that’s about it.
On the other hand, it is very good at group support if you running in a roaming group and it is good at laying out a fair amount of aoe damage in a large group.
the build sounds nice on paper and I already tried it out and believe me, it is not that good.
you can get way more might stacks with HGH Pistol Elixir Build and a single Sigil of Strength.
I’m not sure I follow.
Juggernaut gives a flat 9 stack of Might with Hoelbrak/Fire/Strength.
With Sigil of Strength, that’s a total of 18.
With HGH + Toss/Elixir B, that’s a total of 25.
I’ll participate in this necro and agree with you. I run flamethrower and p/p depending on my mood. Getting mightstacks is much easier with flamethrower. Even without a sigil, you shouldn’t be below 16-18 ever.
The easy way to do this would be to at in a 30 point trait that increases the impact of turrets significantly.
As I’ve said before. They don’t move and are easily destroyed. Therefore, anything that is stupid enough to get hit by one of them deserves to be impacted significantly by it.
I’m not really complaining but does any other engineers feel like we have to “abuse” might stacking to have decent damage specs?
For one moment let’s pretend the trait HGH did not exist and might stacking runes did not exist, maybe even grenade kit. Wat do.
I feel like the engineer can’t do any amount of damage without HGH or grenade kit.
You know I never thought about it like that, but yeh you are right. It’s not required to be full throttle might stacking(every gear item, sigil, and trait that does it), but it is fair to say that if you are doing some degree of might stacking as an engineer then you aren’t being very effective in the damage department.
For one moment let’s pretend the trait HGH did not exist and might stacking runes did not exist, maybe even grenade kit. Wat do.
I feel like the engineer can’t do any amount of damage without HGH or grenade kit.
When I read posts like this and people think the Grenade Kit is all we have, it makes me sad.
Don’t assume things, I play a flamethrower tool kit build.
But yes I still rely on might stacking. So your point is still bunk.
I tried forever to think of a way to make flamethrower and toolkit work in a way that felt good to me for WvW but I couldn’t do it. I find that I am too reliant on elixir s. Congrats on coming up with a way to do it for you.
A little bird told me next patch will change game for many builds (this might be a bad thing though).
Theres good things to come and bad things, but the majority of things got me excited if they get implemented as rumoured.
I’d estimate about 30-40 bullet points (and thats not only tooltip or bug fixes!).
We need to stay flexible though and it won’t solve all of our problems, but some labour is being done behind the curtains.
Of course not everybody will be happy and never will.
Im not so worried about builds becoming obsolete as long as they don’t break the class so that there are no viable builds.
Flamethrower is functional in pvp now, although still somewhat weak with a huge lurning curve. You’ll learn to like it in zergs due to the massive amount of bags you’ll get. With so many hits, it is pretty easy to tag just about every enemy before they die.
Like Soon says, you can get some good results running it as glass cannon, but I don’t recommend it since flamethrower is probably the lowest damage glass cannon build of all classes. Glass cannon build versus glass cannon build in 1v1, your gonna lose against ele, thieves, warriors, and other engineer glass cannon builds of the grenade or rifle variety. As a glass cannon, you aso won’t put out enough damage to quickly burst down someone that is highly defensive. You’ll also destroy yourself when confused or fighting someoen with retalation. However, you’ll be highly effective in like a 3v3 roaming group.
On the other hand, I think you can be highly effective in all situations if you are running high toughness.
You would have to severely nerf all the turrets to the point they are worth one utility slot.
I take it th at you believe that turrets are currently worth more than one utility slot? You should took a look at the engineer forums. Most engineers don’t view them to be worth one at all. Even the healing turrent comes in lackluster when compared to healing kit or healing elixir.
just wondering – who have asked for turrets buff? don’t they see we need something another?
I agree with a lot of the gripes, but I cannot agree with this one. If there is something so horrible about a class that people aren’t even asking for it to be fixed, it makes them look very bad. The state of turrets make ANET look like they haven’t thought about turrets since Beta Weekend 1 or even before beta. Turrents currently function in an alpha state not a beta state.
It does make sense that they would want to fix them regardless of who is asking.
My main concern from a pvp perspective is that turrets are unreliable in there targetting. Rifle turret can do all the damage int he world if its shooting mesmer clones or necro minions.
I agree. In fact, I challenge the guys at arena net. Actually make a change that makes turrets useful, because I don’t believe it is possible or that they are capable of doing it. Go ahead Anet, surprise me.
Love my engineer since release, adapted every HUGE cough nerf (really, the sea of tears after every little change in this forums is downright ridiculous ) and looking forward for the patch. there will be plenty new builds available if they fix turrets! I like the idea of a turret-kit!
Keep up the good work!
Honestly, I’d equip and play around with a turret kit. However, there is no change they could make to turrets as they are that would cause me use them other than net turret occassionally. It would have to be turning them into a kit. If they doubled the damage of every turret, grenade kit, bomb kit, and even flamethrower would generate more damage and also provide some mobility.
So ANET has to do one of two things to turrets to make them useful.
1. Add some measure of mobility.
2. Increase the damage significantly…like reeaaalllly significantly(not like 10%)… since something that can be oneshot destroyed and is completely immobile should legitimately punish the person stupid enough to be hit by it.
But doing that would require massive changes to engineer traits and I don’t see them doing that.
Why is it that the devs feel the need to nerf and do away with 100nades, but not all of the other classes that can just as quickly/easily kill people in as many button presses? What exactly made 100nades any more powerful than the other classes doing the same things?
Sure, it could potentially hit more than 1 person. But there’s no way to keep more than 1 standing still with 100nades, so that’s not exactly a reason.
With the Thieves doing 2-shot backstabs it was a “l2p”. But no, not with Engineer. That’s broken and OP. I don’t get it.
Because they have a vision for the engineer, and 100 nades is far from it.
Im not sure about this vision thing. The most they could do was read the class description and wait for the moderator to move to a more fun topic for them like mesmers.
I like their reasoning for toning down the RNG actually applied to having ANY rng. They said something to the degree of "we’re making less options for it to not do what you want it to do, because its really upsetting when you use it to give a shield wall but it gives you something you dont need instead…..except it will still do that.
I agree it seemed like there was a smoke break before the engineer talk session and they all came back high.
Also, why would he compare turrets to signets. Turrets are immobile and fairly weak, thus causing almost no player other than the casual pve soloer to use them. They don’t begin to compare to turrets since the cooldown + immobility makes them undesirable.
So I went over some of the interview, and I picked up that they wanted to add some things that give some hard counters to boon stacking builds. Now as this was mainly aimed towards elementalists, I’m sure our elixer drinking engineers will also feel its effects.
Yes, you know how thieves kill you in 5 seconds? If you have boons it will be 2 seconds.
Well this is good news. It doesn’t even matter what they said in the interview to me. As long as they have noticed that, while it can be made to work, the class functions like something from a beta right now.
I have an issue with thieves on the pistol build or really any build. The thieves that are built to be able to constantly in combat stealth. On GW2, unlike other games, they are allowed to in combat stealth so many times in a row. After about 3 of them your out of ways to mitigate the burst they pop out of stealth with.
I had to give you rep because this is exactly how I feel whenever I play my warrior. The only thing I can do without getting owned is equip a bow/gun and fire at people off of a wall. I can’t find a single build that works well for me.
Perhaps try something like I linked? It works well for me and I felt similar about my warrior for a long time.
Your build looks like you couldn’t damage your way out of a wet paper bag, but you definitely will not get owned running that build by anything short of a zerg. Even the Zerg would be annoyed after they finished with you. Im usually not one for tank builds, but I might just give it a try.
Can you imagine my face when I get my warrior to 80 and go to PVP/WVW him only to realize that, other than some lame greatsword burst damage build, a guardian does everything we do better. It’s like warriors are guardian light + some easily dealt with burst damage.
Fortunately, CoaxialMazer, your build gives me hope. I will be logging into my warrior, whom I had given up on, to try this build.
Probably the best thing about the build is that it uses the same trait point setup as my pve hgh might stacking flamethrower build, so I get to avoid any cost when swapping into pve mode. I just have to swap a few traits and gear around.
I don’t want to hijack the thread, but please do share! Weapons, utilities, gear stats, runes, sigils and major traits please! Just a link or a PM will do.
I don’t want to hijack Mask’s thread, so I’ll pm you it.
Could you set up a seperate companion thread? I’d be interested in seeing it as well! Also Mask, awesome music, that kitten song has been my earwig all week.
First you must understand that I am not a build maker, like Mask, but I did throw this together so you could get the general idea(Also this isn’t my idea, someone else posted a variation of this somewhere else.) The gear isn’t min/maxed in the link above and it can be changed around significantly to get a better balance of stats.
-high might uptime. Should be 18-25 stacks most of the time if you pop your potions due to juggernaut giving you 9-10 free off the bat due to the runes.
-Good toughness due to juggernaut.
-decent self healing from omnombettery pie and sigil of blood, although that was nerfed recently due to the cooldown on the pie. May be better to just go with sigil of air or fire if you want more damage.
-Crazy amount of vulnerability stacking due to the large amount of times that flamethrower hits in one channel and the vulnerability on crit trait in the firearms tree.
-good toughness and vitality, although has to much in the above build and you could trade out some for more damage.
-Ideally, this build works better with 10 in explosives or tools, but the point is to swap straight to this out of masks build on the fly with no respec.
Eh, really wouldn’t like to discuss this to much here. Im just giving you a general idea of how I swap to flamethrower on the fly from masks build, and how it actually isn’t a bad build if you play with it to get the gear right.
I had to give you rep because this is exactly how I feel whenever I play my warrior. The only thing I can do without getting owned is equip a bow/gun and fire at people off of a wall. I can’t find a single build that works well for me.
If you want to max your condition damage out at the sacrifice of some precision, then go Rampager or Apothecary for armor (and weapons), then choose Rabid for trinkets.
This nets you the most conditions without sacrificing too much precision. Rampager will add a bit more power and precision, but Apothecary will add some healing and toughness for survivability.
With my setup of Apothecary/Rabid (in rares, mind you) I have approximately 1200 condition and 37% crit chance (42% with Accuracy).
I have a curiosity, what if you go Carrion + Rabid trinkets? since we are trying to use the FT as a condition applier using bleed+ inc ammo + burns from traits, wouldn’t you get more dmg at the cost of some crit chance? I’m wondering, does anybody has a proven answer? I would really like to know the result.
While it is a bit underpowered atm, you can deliver decent sustained damage if you go for power. You can do that at the same time as having a great deal of survivability.
On the other hand. Of all the ways to go about being condition based, using FT for it is the worst way possible.
What you said, for me would be taken as a possibility not a real deal since I would love to see numbers as Phineas Poe said. Numbers show the reality, because to be honest, I tested the golems in sPvP and Carrion would take out more than 95% out of a golem (using inc ammo), than Berserker’s did (with inc ammo). But as we are debating right now, we know that numbers are different in PvE, so that’s why I’m wondering and not just me, we would like to have some screenshots + numbers to know between Zerker’s , Carrion’s, Rampager’s what would do the biggest ammount of dmg (cond+direct dmg altogether) in the “shortest” amount of time (yeah because if we go veggie pizza + durations then thats another story).
I’m not saying Carrion’s better but I wanna see numbers even screenies if its possible, thanks
Oh, no doubt that incendiary ammo would be extremely powerful on a condition flamethrower build. In the instances that incendiary ammo is up, you will definitely melt some faces. It just isn’t available enough to be viable/sustained IMO.
Also, numbers are always nice. I would like to see this as well. Do we have any math people in the engi forums?
I can live with Arena Net doing away with all oneshot builds. However, the engineer version shouldn’t be singled out. Particular since the versions that other classes have require much less skill to actually pull off.
It’ll probably happen tomorrow, but to this date, I’ve never had an engi to pull off the 100 nades combo on me. If you can’t come up with a way to stop a class from standing DIRECTLY on top of you(literally inside of your character), then you deserve to be oneshot.
If you want to max your condition damage out at the sacrifice of some precision, then go Rampager or Apothecary for armor (and weapons), then choose Rabid for trinkets.
This nets you the most conditions without sacrificing too much precision. Rampager will add a bit more power and precision, but Apothecary will add some healing and toughness for survivability.
With my setup of Apothecary/Rabid (in rares, mind you) I have approximately 1200 condition and 37% crit chance (42% with Accuracy).
I have a curiosity, what if you go Carrion + Rabid trinkets? since we are trying to use the FT as a condition applier using bleed+ inc ammo + burns from traits, wouldn’t you get more dmg at the cost of some crit chance? I’m wondering, does anybody has a proven answer? I would really like to know the result.
While it is a bit underpowered atm, you can deliver decent sustained damage if you go for power. You can do that at the same time as having a great deal of survivability.
On the other hand. Of all the ways to go about being condition based, using FT for it is the worst way possible.
I was testing Elixir S for a while now, and yet there is something that I don’t understand: when u activate it, all of ur skill disappear and u become invulnerable, BUT u can still switch to 1 kit (granades for example) and attack while u are tiny.
Now is it a bug or is intended?
This will probably be nerfed at some point, although it won’t really matter since elixir S is very strong without that.
!
