Hi Irenio,
First of all, thanks a lot for your work on either the scrapper or the druid, both adding cool and refreshing mechanisms to the game.
I play mostly engineer and mesmer, so I spent most of the beta with scrapper and chronomancer, and touched a few minutes revenant, reaper and daredevil. All of them in pvp only.
On a general note, I’d say the scrapper feels rather well balanced : well played it’s amazing, badly played it’s rather low-damaging and you die as you deserve it. That’s how things should be.
The flavor of the specialization comes from the hammer and the traits, which isn’t the case for many other classes. Gyros and the utility gyro don’t weight a lot in the feeling of the scrapper.
Now in details.
Hammer:
Very enjoyable. It allows to make a great use of the numerous close range options of the class like bombs or slick shoes (with #3 it’s really funny). It feels like having the toolkit as a main weapon.
I hardly use #1, by habit, as I don’t expect auto-attack to be strong in general. Other skills deal decent damage and strong survivability when put in good use. Survivability is the thing here
Rocket charge feels odd at first, but you eventually get use to it and it’s great for repositioning. Yeah, it’s random. So your ennemy can’t anticipate the landing either. Some leaps however, first one in particular, go in the opposite direction of the target and it doesn’t feel like the expected behavior. Leap combos only work on landing and not at start.
Gyros:
While I don’t see them useless, they clearly need some rework. Especially on movement and positioning. Scrapper got a lot of access to superspeed, so gyros struggle to catch up. It’s illogical.
Bulkward gyro is the easier to use, in the sense of if it dies, it often means it did its job… well, except if caught in aoe.
Blast gyro is fun to play in a 1v1 scenario, but I expected it to run as soon as summoned. Its inner delay makes it harder to use well.
Purge gyro, well, although it could be the best condi cleanse of the class, it’s not interesting to play right now. Scrapper isn’t really designed for condition, so the poison field is of little or no use. Plus, in a condition-free situation, it’s a lost utility (a daze on a long cooldown is a lost utility). Make it a stunbreak maybe, using smelling salts on the Master? It’s a small change but it would really give a value to it : stunbreak, condi-cleanse and a daze, it’s now competitive with other utility options.
Shredder gyro… the problem with this one is that whirl combos aren’t that great. And a 12s duration is pointless as most of the fields last shorter, do we really want to use several fields to get random bolts? That is, if it ever survives this long… A recursive combo blast makes more sense, if giving the engineer more blasts isn’t an issue. That or recursive 100% projectiles.
Haven’t tried the healing gyro, so I won’t comment much on it, healing turret seems more reliable.
Sneak gyro, main problem is movement and struggle to follow.
All in all, gyros are good for their toolbelt skills.If I ever pick one, it would be for the toolbelt mainly. Purge gyro is the exception there.
Utility gyro: my main concern as a pvp player. Currently very buggy. Went to help a downed ally while I asked it to finish a foe… then I went down, and it switched to help me and ran out of fuel… ended up badly, while a good stomp would have done the job right. An other time, stomp animation went in a loop and the foe never got finished. Most of the time it’s better and quicker to do it myself.
Some ideas to make it interesting without a complete rework :
- reduce cooldown. 30s for a clunky gyro is way too much as it is.
- when off cd, allow the player to use it somehow. Stunbreak on F6, thus giving stability if traited? Using its batteries as an AED and putting it on cd Would be good for pve, which has no use of it right now.
- if off cd and the engineer goes down, make it pop and rez the Master
- more hp as it may stay for a long time rezzing a friend
- when summoned, make it pop at the target and DO THE JOB, don’t allow it to switch through priorities
- faster stomp. Yes.
- faster recharge when the scrapper stuns/interrupts a foe.
Traits:
I haven’t tried all of them, but I’m rather pleased with the choices we have. I wish superspeed could stack in duration, but while playing it wasn’t really a problem, you just have to use combo or skills right. Actually, if it stacks, rapid regeneration would be too strong.
Impact savant is my only concern. Stun reduction is good to have, but the stun increase makes little sense in a spec that gives more dazes than stuns. Worked well with supply crate though. Why not to try something like confounding suggestions, converting daze to stun?
Thank you for reading!