Y'all ready for the scrapper's nerf hammer?

Almost 22 months ago, my beloved Scrapper received its first among many balance adjustments that reduced the spec's capabilities and what became its death knell for me. Back during PoF demo and release, I felt that Holosmith was to good of a spec, something I'm not used to as an engineer. Good dps, easier playstyle, fluidic combat flow, still quite survivable if you know what you're doing. I feel like we engineers are not properly designed/balanced at the launch of things, so part of me is anticipating we might begin to see the first of many new reductions to our beloved elite spec as some sort of wonky expansion tradition.

What are your thoughts and anticipations for tomorrow's balance patch?

Holo needs some heavy work. The spec weapon is absolutely thrashed by rifle and/or bomb kit in PvE and PvP. With that said I feel way more effective with my Holo in PvP that I ever did with scrapper and the clunky gyro mechanic. There are trait conflicts (explosive projectile trait that's completely inferior to grenade autos for example), no heat interaction with anything other than sword, subpar DPS compared to the majority of PoF DPS specs, which I don't think is a bad thing since you could say every other DPS spec is just doing too much damage right now.

@Nate.8146 said:Almost 22 months ago, my beloved Scrapper received its first among many balance adjustments that reduced the spec's capabilities and what became its death knell for me. Back during PoF demo and release, I felt that Holosmith was to good of a spec, something I'm not used to as an engineer. Good dps, easier playstyle, fluidic combat flow, still quite survivable if you know what you're doing. I feel like we engineers are not properly designed/balanced at the launch of things, so part of me is anticipating we might begin to see the first of many new reductions to our beloved elite spec as some sort of wonky expansion tradition.

What are your thoughts and anticipations for tomorrow's balance patch?

The class is actually well designed..... better then half the Core Classes due to its extremely diverse utility. The problem comes with its middling damage, and how very little game play outside of WvW (where per player damage is less relevant) rewards less then high end damage. Turrets were clunky, but the kits were extremely powerful in how each one offered a variety of offensive, defensive and supportive options; and how any 2 kits (aside from healing kit) always had a response to 95% of the situations you find yourself in. The conversion of Mortar kit also gave them a missing long range component to use against static targets. Combined, this gave Engi sustainable offensive, sustainable defense, and high utility, but was tempered by a lack of heavy bursting. But again..... very little of day to day game play would reward those traits.

What Scrapper did was streamline some of the defensive sustain, and paired it with a burst oriented weapon. This had to be done to compensate for Engineer trait division, as the class's power is heavily tied up in high impact Trait combinations. The nerfs were largely a response from PvP players not knowing how (and definitely didn't like) to fight a build with a reliable lock down combo. And the only reason it got justified is that Engi still had access to high durability from Elixirs (plus reflect on Bulwark), enabling them to counter incoming damage dumps, and then follow up with burst attacks of their own. Since most non-bunker builds don't perform well in protracted fights, its not surprising that Scrapper got popular in lower tiers, due to its forgiving sustain, despite not reaching the burst highs of other builds.

The reason Engineer's hate the term "purity of purpose", is because the Designer in charge of the class interprets that to mean "one trick pony". And for a class that has a very wide range of utility, the very idea of being pidgin holed into a specific tactic for any type of rewarding outcome is down right ludicrous. Sadly, I won't be surprised by any nerfs in the long term, because Holosmith does the same thing that was considered "a mistake" with Scrapper..... and thats front loading a lot of functionality into the Espec, so that supplementing trait lines don't fall apart in practice. Core Engineer is the ONLY class that requires a 3 trait line synergy to make the primary aspect of a build to make sense..... but we've avoided the pit falls of many of the other classes, because theres always 2 or 3 other utilities that will play well with those traits, and fill in a few gaps for us.