draxynnic.3719

Yeah, it's pretty clear what's going on when you step back and look at it holistically. Spellbreaker has spent years being handicapped by the warrior weapons available. Condi spellbreaker just isn't a thing and rifle is bad outside of gunzerker and core warrior killshot memes, and warrior didn't really have any weapons that offered sustain either apart from a few blocks. So spellbreaker had to survive as a profession that had to be in melee to do anything, didn't have a lot of sustain from its weapons, and until the defence rework spellbreaker didn't really have a place in PvE either, so it would look bad if spellbreaker was pushed out of competitive as well making it uncompetitive everywhere. Solution? Put enough sustain on spellbreaker that it at least had a chance to survive as an obligatory melee build without much in the way of defensive weapon skills beyond the shield block and the greatsword spin. Then staff comes along, and warrior finally has a good self-sustain weaponswap option. Spear comes in, and spellbreaker has a ranged power weapon that's actually effective. On top of all the spellbreaker self-sustain that was needed when spellbreaker had to facetank everything. Of course it's going to be super-strong. The problem is that when new options are introduced and something breaks, the natural tendency is to place the blame on the new content (since obviously the old content was fine before!), and not consider whether the new weapons had simply filled a role that was missing, and maybe it's better to nerf the stuff that was needed back when those options were missing. Since there's a very real sense in which spear and staff were... basically just finally giving warrior weapons of similar utility to what most other professions have always had. The real problem is that spellbreaker has been balanced around not really having any good weapon options for years.

Bladesworn is basically warrior taking engineer as a secondary profession.

I think another issue there is that even the Flame Legion fanatics have accepted that the titans weren't actually gods. In EotN, they'd abandoned the titans (even though there was one still around) and were looking for new gods and chose destroyers... but even then, they were primarily looking to be in control themselves and the Destroyers were primarily intended as something they could present to the other charr as gods that granted the shamans legitimacy. On GW2 release, they were trying to ascend one of their own as a god. In short, even the shamans had decided that the charr shouldn't be turning to non-charr for leadership. The distinction was that the shamans still wanted a theocracy with themselves on top, while the other legions preferred secular military government.

I experienced this myself. Started taking it on, there was about a party's worth of players around, and it was just barely taking any damage at all. Around five minutes in there was an unspoken consensus that it was going to fail and everyone just abandoned it. And then when it did fail, I somehow got credit for Central Janthir Syntri anyway, so yay for bugs I guess?

I think there's a mismatch in interpretation here. A lot of people simply use "core profession" to simply mean the profession without elite specialisations, without distinguishing between expansion content for the profession and base game content. You might not like it, and it's probably a holdover from pre-soto when elite specialisations were all you got from expansion content, but you're literally arguing semantics here.

I put it to you that if you're saying that it wasn't too much of an issue before mechanist, then it's still not too much of an issue. Mechanist leans heavily on signets because it's almost a different profession entirely, and even if hypothetically the other utility skills were given some compensation for losing the toolbelt skills when playing mechanist, it'd be hard to compete with signets because, at the bottom line, signets were designed to work and synergise with mechanist and the other utility skills weren't. Really? Flamethrower is a few burn stacks, and in competitive it's on a long cooldown. Elixir gun is a stunbreak and a bit of regeneration. Throw Wrench is nothing to write home about. Big Ol' Bomb is a nice area CC but on a long delay - if you're not using the rest of the kit, there are far better options. The exceptions are medkit (because the toolbelt skill is essentially your self-heal when using medkit) and grenades (oh, look, grenades are overtuned, hands up who's surprised). Turrets have weak toolbelt skills because the turrets themselves were supposed to be really strong and as important to engineer's identity as kits, but they were destroyed in 2015 and have been left in that state since. And that really is a big part of the issue. Gadgets and elixirs are mostly intended for utility - they get used in competitive and in PvE situations where you need that utility, but your standard Snowcrows max-DPS build isn't going to have them by default, at best they'll be something you substitute in if you need a bit more CC or whatever. The DPS utilities for core engineer were supposed to be offensive kits and turrets, but when turrets do no damage, that just leaves offensive kits. Which is probably a large part of the reason why the utilities of the elite specs lean towards having a few DPS options - they're making up for the lack of such options in core. I don't have that idea - my comment was more of a footnote that wasn't in my original draft, but I realised I hadn't commented on turrets and I should. However, as described above, the state of turrets is a big part of the issue. Fixing turrets and then seeing how the profession feels with actually useful turrets should probably be prioritised well over a complete redesign of the profession that would make people who like how it plays now unhappy. Quite frankly, I think that someone who admits that they just don't like the way the profession plays at the moment probably shouldn't be in charge of redesigning it. Here's the thing - while absolutely recognising that engineer has problems, I like the base design. I like being able to choose between having lots of kits or having none and going all-in on the base weapon and elite spec mechanics (although it would be nice if there were more options for ranged base weapons). I like the toolbelt mechanic and building around Tools to make more use out of it. Your proposal feels like it would be throwing out a lot of babies with the proverbial bathwater. There's also no guarantee that the result would even be mechanically better - profession reworks much less ambitious than what you propose have usually been followed by months if not years of balance churn as the devs try to get the profession back into a proper state. Things like a turret redesign would be necessary (even if ArenaNet doesn't want to touch them) with or without your proposal being implemented. I think that at the very least, beyond possibly a few simple numerical buffs, a turret redesign should be the first thing that gets done, because maybe turrets actually being good (even if made substantially different so they don't become abusive in conquest and afkfarming) would resolve a lot of your issues by providing a solid set of non-kit, DPS-oriented utilities where most of the power budget is in the base skill rather than the toolbelt skill. And if your proposal was to be implemented and that we put aside any subjective opinions over what playstyles and mechanics people like and don't like - it's still a bad thing to have an entire set of utility skills that are just plain bad, and the resources that would be demanded to both implement your suggestion (basically reworking pretty much everything in engineer and creating a whole new set of utility skills to replace kits) and to get it back into a balanced state afterwards would probably delay a turret rework for years.

Yeah, I think people in this thread are using "core" to mean "accessible to the core profession without an elite specialisation" rather than "core game without expansions". I don't think anyone expects anything being discussed here to be added to the base game.

It's a bit of a blink-and-you-miss-it, but either Crecia or Malice do describe Efram as the Flame Imperator in Janthir Wilds (I think it's in one of the optional conversations prior to one of the Tyrian Alliance meetings). I suspect they both have an attitude that if the Flame leadership is genuine about reforming and reintegration, they'd rather keep the legion intact than trying to disband it and possibly stirring up resistance to the attempt.

Can't help but feel like "a traitline that's unique to the core profession" basically means an elite specialisation that doesn't change the profession mechanic. Which would have its benefits, but it's still essentially an ersatz elite specialisation in all but name.

"Lies, (structure for holding back water) lies, and statistics" is an aphorism for a reason. Numbers might not lie, but they can absolutely be used in a misleading fashion, particularly when important context is ignored. Warrior spear got nerfed because the 3v3 tournament had a lot of teams that were two spellbreakers and a support. I think they missed the mark and nerfed (probably overnerfed) the wrong thing, but there is evidence at a high level of play that spellbreaker is overperforming to a degree that it didn't seem to be prior to spear's introduction. It would probably be a fairer assessment to say that spellbreaker was the real problem and it just needed warrior to get a decent power ranged weapon to break out rather than spear itself being the problem (something predicted by, for example, Captain Crabface - replace that b with a p if you want to search him on Youtube), but apparently the balance team didn't look that deeply into it. If we have a tournament where more than half of the players in high-performing teams are playing mesmers, I'm sure we'll see a similar process of nerfing everything except the actual problem before they finally identify the real problem, nerf it, and fail to consider whether they should revert the other nerfs they made along the way. It's happened before. It will probably happen again.

No thanks. Here's the thing: Engineer's design is about getting more from their utility choices than other professions. This could be weapons, in the form of kits - but the function of the toolbelt is that even non-kit utilities are a two-for-one deal. The toolbelt skill sometimes being better than the actual utility skill is not inherently a problem (except for mechanists), what's important is that the combination is worthwhile. This is why the toolbelt skills on kits are typically a bit weaker than on other utility skills, and why mechanist signets are so strong (they have to be good enough to compete with a kit without a toolbelt skill). Turrets are their own issue, but turrets having been destroyed nearly a decade ago and never revisited is a reason to redesign turrets, not the entire profession.

Nobody: ArenaNet: We removed pretty much all of the "press the skill again to detonate a moving projectile" mechanics from the game because they're basically impossible to time correctly unless you're basically sitting on top of the server, but somehow we decided it was a good idea to not only reintroduce it, but combine it with a phased charge-up mechanic that makes it even more awkward to time appropriately.

Yeah, holosmith is really just asura holotech from the core game and season 1, they just brought in the 'powered by Zephyrite sun crystals' to give it some link to Elona. I think ArenaNet has been moving towards adding magitech to core, based on the theme of shortbow, it's just that even post-rework shortbow is still a little weird, and everything else that's been introduced since the original mostly-non-magitech-using theme of engineer has been a melee weapon. Which, since the kits are also non-magitech makes it hard to really lean into the magitech angle without ending up as a full melee build.

I think the extra boon coverage offered by Glint is also a big part of that. When a quickherald wants stability, it's usually Shiro that gets traded for Jalis rather than Glint. Jalis does have lower DPS than Shiro but if that wasn't the case, Shiro would never be used.

If anything, even quickness untamed might be more forgiving than power soulbeast burst. One thing that makes untamed a lot easier to deal with, if you haven't already, is that you can set any, or even all, of the pet's skills to autocast. If there are any that are specifically CC-oriented or otherwise best used in specific situations you might want to keep those in reserve, but it can reduce your skill activation intensity by a lot if you can just leave the pet to do its thing.