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Scrapper is All Wrong.


DrDoctor.8091

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This will be a pretty short thread. This will be me ranting about how ArenaNet says Scrappers are supposed to be tanks, basically, but they really aren't... Well, they are but they aren't a viable tank.

So basically, the normal tank is Chronomancer who can give out Quickness and Alacrity very frequently. A supposed-to-be tank is Scrapper that gives out protection, cleanse (which can be turned into boons if you have the "Purity of Purpose" trait.), and a unique damage reduction buff to others while the Scrapper has Bulwark Gyro activated.

Scrapper really gives nothing beneficial except for the damage reduction. Assuming the Scrapper is a full on tank and support, you would have already 2 healers in a raid group and 1 for fractals that can cleanse conditions from the party so you wouldn't really need the extra condi cleanse and the protection that "Reconstruction Field" (tool belt skill of "Medic Gyro") has a pretty short duration (It can also cure conditions with the "Anticorrosion Plating" trait.). There's also Blast Gyro that gives might to the surrounding allies, and turrets that can give boons with the "Experimental Turrets" trait. The big thing missing from Scrapper is either giving allies Alacrity and Quickness, or giving allies a unique buff, like the Bulwark Gyro's "Watchful Eye" buff.

I think I would know how Scrappers would give out Alacrity and Quickness. Here's the traits I would change.

Gyroscopic Acceleration - this ability grants increased area of effect for all gyros and also grants superspeed to allies on the last pulse. - Since this is the only way to give AoE superspeed, have the superspeed grant Alacrity to allies or even quickness, though I would advise against putting this in PvP, make it a PvE only thing.

Applied Force - You gain quickness when you gain might at or above the threshold. When you have quickness, it grants you extra power. - Make the quickness from this trait be an AoE, you'll be constantly at above 10 stacks of might in raids and most of the time in fractals, so you will constantly be giving quickness to your allies while also giving yourself extra power.

Object in Motion - Gain a 5% damage increase when you have stability, superspeed, or swiftness, this stacks up to 15% if you have all three. - This one will be the more controversial one, I'd say because the 5% damage increase per boon is amazing, but rework this trait to make it so you increase the damage the Scrapper does when you have a certain barrier threshold. It'll kinda be like how "Laser's Edge" works now. The more barrier you have the more damage you will do. You can also keep this trait and rework "Expert Examination" which gives weakness and vulnerability to foes that you stun or daze, to the damage increase based on your barrier level.

Scrappers are truly only useful for a side healer and nothing else. I hope ArenaNet makes them a more viable tank or even damage.

These are my thoughts. Tell me what you think!

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As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

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@Obtena.7952 said:As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

Oh it's definitely cool by concept. But generating barrier in PvP is not easy, it's also in very low amounts, cancelled pretty much by retaliation.

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They made it a tank for PvP... I mean hello? In case most people haven't figured out, they're usually thinking of PvP when doing these reworks...I haven't played chrono in a while, but i'm also pretty sure it got quite the nerf with these changes as well...

Also, Chrono is the "best" tank because they can tank AND support, but that doesn't mean that a pure tank isn't a tank, it's just not as good for the group, and you'll need other sources for boons (which actually exist). So maybe, this might allow for more variety? (Not really because, psychology, and it's GW2, things don't move fast enough in the developer end for proper change).

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@MrForz.1953 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

Oh it's definitely cool by concept. But generating barrier in PvP is not easy, it's also in very low amounts, cancelled pretty much by retaliation.

Or kiting. That's all an enemy has to do now, especially if they're condi.

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@Vagrant.7206 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

Oh it's definitely cool by concept. But generating barrier in PvP is not easy, it's also in very low amounts, cancelled pretty much by retaliation.

Or kiting. That's all an enemy has to do now, especially if they're condi.

Fair enough ... I can see these are limitations that severely hamper everything that Anet put into the class when they started fixing it 6 months ago. A shame they reverted almost everything they worked on.
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The only neat thing this update was easy access to superspeed on any builds. But everything else was totally gutted. Nothing on engineer does very much damage outside of rifle 3/5 and holo mode (holo mega nerfed btw). Even grenade barrage has to be traited to be useful, which is why you never see grenade kit.

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@Obtena.7952 said:As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

They made our barrier generation greater and we have less damage, what are we supposed to be in group PvE, we can still tank in PvP all we want, but PvE we're just better off as a support and most likely not using our ability to generate barrier and take damage like a boss, I mean in open world its pretty fun, but we're near useless in group PvE.

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@"TheWeirdoNik.6247" said:

@Obtena.7952 said:As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

They made our barrier generation greater and we have less damage, what are we supposed to be in group PvE, we can still tank in PvP all we want, but PvE we're just better off as a support and most likely not using our ability to generate barrier and take damage like a boss, I mean in open world its pretty fun, but we're near useless in group PvE.

Who can still tank in pvp?I could tank/support.Now, not so much.

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@"TheWeirdoNik.6247" said:

@"Obtena.7952" said:As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

They made our barrier generation greater and we have less damage, what are we supposed to be in group PvE, we can still tank in PvP all we want, but PvE we're just better off as a support and most likely not using our ability to generate barrier and take damage like a boss, I mean in open world its pretty fun, but we're near useless in group PvE.

I don't know what you are supposed to be in group PVE ... but to be honest ... no one is supposed to be anything. The game isn't designed to make someone something. You play what you want ... and it works.

Now, if you want to tell me your a meta pusher and don't see scrapper being meta in PVE, my response to that is "This isn't a problem".

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@"TheWeirdoNik.6247" said:

@Obtena.7952 said:As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

They made our barrier generation greater and we have less damage, what are we supposed to be in group PvE, we can still tank in PvP all we want, but PvE we're just better off as a support and most likely not using our ability to generate barrier and take damage like a boss, I mean in open world its pretty fun, but we're near useless in group PvE.

It's actually the reverse. Open world PvE(where it doesn't matter anyway) scrappers are in some ways better farmers/tanks because AI enemies heedlessly run at you and then dogpile you and that seems what the change to damage feeding barrier generation was aimed at -for making liberal use of buttons two and four on hammer when enemies are packed around you. Even then it doesn't help when against single bosses or unique elites whose DPS will still overcome that of your barrier generation. In PvP, as was mentioned here before, enemies will simply starve your barrier generation out by kiting and ranging you.

Losing the three hundred vitality makes this even worse in all situations because what essentially happens is that you activate barrier via damage and apart from a few special circumstances you're treading water at where you would have been without the barrier had you just had that three thousand odd life back. When you're starved or when you're up against one of the newer scripted enemies that keeps its distance and ranges you then you're not even treading water and you're running a constant deficit compared to what you once had.

Edit: and then you have to factor in all of the sources of health regeneration we also lost, because barrier isn't healing.

It's a change that's 'cool' on paper but rubbish in implementation. And even if we had the three thousand health given back Impact Savant's value/utility for anything outside of an open world farming spec would still be highly dubious.

Edit perhaps if they'd lowered the barrier generation a hair but allowed us to keep at least some of that health regen we'd have more a chance at recovery during the luls/ability downtimes for our oponents in combat. But as it is, from the moment combat is joined, health-wise we're just circling the drain now hoping that our enemies -most of which have much better access to health regen now- won't out heal our damage.

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Personally, if I would surmise my complaints into its purest form, it would be the lack of damage. From the PVE side, the -300 vitality isn't that big of a deal. I sit at about 14k health, and the 7k continuous barrier makes me nigh invulnerable to anything that can't one-shot me. Normally you'd think that is a good thing, but if I wanted to be completely indestructible regardless of damage output, I would've put on a Nomad set long ago.

The problem is that damage is king in this game. It's how you get things done. Knowing this, it forever perplexes me why Anet makes no attempt to normalize damage across the board. In a game all about killing stuff, designating a specific profession to be bad at killing stuff is going to forever leave it to poverty, feebleness, and socially ostracized. It is extremely counter-intuitive to make somebody bad at the one thing you do in this game. Currently, the Engineer is forever relegated to the role of "incompetent" due to these changes.

It is bad. Worst I've ever seen it. The engineer isn't just bottom of the barrel. It's a hole-in-the-floor bad. If you see an engineer, there's a 50/50 chance they're just trying to antagonize you with their presence. I'm not the best at benchmarks, but all the strength and energy I could muster only brought me to the 20k DPS mark with hammer scrapper. That's the lowest it has ever been, by far. On something like the thief or the rev, I can maintain 26k DPS just by spamming one skill and auto attacking. Know what this means? Other professions do more damage by accident than a scrapper can ever accomplish on purpose. The holosmith has a similar problem, in that their sword builds now rest at the 27-28k mark. Which still, by far, makes them the lowest DPS profession in the game, but at least you might fool somebody unfamiliar with holosmiths for awhile if you play one.

Another thing that is annoying the hell out of me is that all of the weapons are bad. The engineer is the only profession where you're not supposed to use your elite spec's weapons on the elite spec for ANYTHING. All power builds are rifle + bomb kit + grenade kit, have been for 7 years, and will be for the next year until GW2 eventually shuts down. Even the holo sword, who's only job is to do damage, does less damage.

I'm considering deleting my engineer again, because they feel so terrible to play now. Core and condi engi is extremely failure prone, and it hurts my wrists due to the ridiculous rotation needed. Scrapper's feel like I'm walking around hitting people with a foam sword. Holosmith just gets me killed by regularly locking me out of my skills for 16 seconds and blowing away 1/3rd of my health.

Now I know this isn't so much of a consolation for WvW and PVP, but let me pose this question: would the vitality loss be so bad if the scrapper got a 40% damage increase from where it sits now? If holosmith got a 20% increase from where they sit now?

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@"Blood Red Arachnid.2493" said:Now I know this isn't so much of a consolation for WvW and PVP, but let me pose this question: would the vitality loss be so bad if the scrapper got a 40% damage increase from where it sits now? If holosmith got a 20% increase from where they sit now?

For WvW the answer is far from that simple.

In a way, yes it can help. In fact that number is almost exactly what I've had to boost my sustain scrapper to (burn on blowtorch went up from 20k->28k, or 40% lol) because I could no longer compete on sustain with anything at that "low" damage. So I had to go all out condi tard. Even more damage on top of that always help to overload the enemy.

But that damage boost doesnt really change the fact that your sustain is deleted and you cant survive anything that get bursts in, you cant survive extended fights due to heals and the top tier sustains beat the snot out of you there because other sustains can build for numerous healing sources and passively regenerating hp. That's what make them sustains.

Ultimately, what I've said in other threads - the -300 vitality is pretty much irrelevant. That isnt what destroyed the scrapper specs. The trait kittens did.

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Impact Savant -> Adaptive Regeneration-300 vit, you get a moderated Rapid Regeneration effect (20% less health per second now only works with superspeed)Adaptive Armor -> Gyroscopic PrecessionWells affect more allies (5) and give barrier when they end, you receive 20% less condition damage when you have barrier.Kinetic Stabilizers -> Impact SavantYou gain stability and barrier when you CC, when you interrupt you inflict confusion.

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@Obtena.7952 said:

@"TheWeirdoNik.6247" said:

@Obtena.7952 said:As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

They made our barrier generation greater and we have less damage, what are we supposed to be in group PvE, we can still tank in PvP all we want, but PvE we're just better off as a support and most likely not using our ability to generate barrier and take damage like a boss, I mean in open world its pretty fun, but we're near useless in group PvE.

I don't know what you are supposed to be in group PVE ... but to be honest ... no one is supposed to be anything. The game isn't designed to make someone something. You play what you want ... and it works.

Now, if you want to tell me your a meta pusher and don't see scrapper being meta in PVE, my response to that is "This isn't a problem".

You playing 'contrarian' again?Stirring the $ shit hit more like it.

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@EnderzShadow.2506 said:

@"TheWeirdoNik.6247" said:

@Obtena.7952 said:As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

They made our barrier generation greater and we have less damage, what are we supposed to be in group PvE, we can still tank in PvP all we want, but PvE we're just better off as a support and most likely not using our ability to generate barrier and take damage like a boss, I mean in open world its pretty fun, but we're near useless in group PvE.

I don't know what you are supposed to be in group PVE ... but to be honest ... no one is supposed to be anything. The game isn't designed to make someone something. You play what you want ... and it works.

Now, if you want to tell me your a meta pusher and don't see scrapper being meta in PVE, my response to that is "This isn't a problem".

You playing 'contrarian' again?Stirring the $ kitten hit more like it.

No, that's just the truth right there. Game isn't designed for classes to 'be something' in PVE and not everything needs to be optimal in every game mode.

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@Obtena.7952 said:

@"TheWeirdoNik.6247" said:

@Obtena.7952 said:As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

They made our barrier generation greater and we have less damage, what are we supposed to be in group PvE, we can still tank in PvP all we want, but PvE we're just better off as a support and most likely not using our ability to generate barrier and take damage like a boss, I mean in open world its pretty fun, but we're near useless in group PvE.

I don't know what you are supposed to be in group PVE ... but to be honest ... no one is supposed to be anything. The game isn't designed to make someone something. You play what you want ... and it works.

Now, if you want to tell me your a meta pusher and don't see scrapper being meta in PVE, my response to that is "This isn't a problem".

You playing 'contrarian' again?Stirring the $ kitten hit more like it.

No, that's just the truth right there. Game isn't designed for classes to 'be something' in PVE and not everything needs to be optimal in every game mode.

Meta Pusher isn't a term that applies to people who played pve Holo before the patch because it was no where near Optimal

@Obtena.7952 said:As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

Lost some dps... some

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

Oh it's definitely cool by concept. But generating barrier in PvP is not easy, it's also in very low amounts, cancelled pretty much by retaliation.

Or kiting. That's all an enemy has to do now, especially if they're condi.

Fair enough ... I can see these are limitations that severely hamper everything that Anet put into the class when they started fixing it 6 months ago. A shame they reverted almost everything they worked on.

Back pedaling contrarian.

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@EnderzShadow.2506 said:

@"TheWeirdoNik.6247" said:

@Obtena.7952 said:As always, I will play the contrarian.

Barrier triggering on damage is the best thing that has happened to this class. It's changed the feel to live up to its name. I WANT to be in the fight and stick in there. Sure we lost some DPS ... well, it's pretty obvious why.

They made our barrier generation greater and we have less damage, what are we supposed to be in group PvE, we can still tank in PvP all we want, but PvE we're just better off as a support and most likely not using our ability to generate barrier and take damage like a boss, I mean in open world its pretty fun, but we're near useless in group PvE.

I don't know what you are supposed to be in group PVE ... but to be honest ... no one is supposed to be anything. The game isn't designed to make someone something. You play what you want ... and it works.

Now, if you want to tell me your a meta pusher and don't see scrapper being meta in PVE, my response to that is "This isn't a problem".

You playing 'contrarian' again?Stirring the $ kitten hit more like it.

No, that's just the truth right there. Game isn't designed for classes to 'be something' in PVE and not everything needs to be optimal in every game mode.

Meta Pusher
isn't a term that applies to people who played pve Holo before the patch because it was no where near
Optimal

Nor sure what you point is here. I wasn't defining what a meta pusher was. You asked me if I was playing contrarian on that post. I wasn't. Seems like you are confused based on all the posts you linked that have no context standing alone. Maybe that's 'you thing' when you don't have a point to make?

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The words you used don't apply to the situation that is being discussed.

Optimal-Holo Group Pve DPS was not optimal before the patch and now it's non existent.No Group PvE Holo was a 'Meta Pusher' before or after the patch.

While classes might not be meta or optimal in every game mode, the game is changed by devs to strive towards that balance.The game is absolutely changed for classes to be able to do any content, including end game group pve.

No holo is complaining about being optimal or meta.They are complaining about be excluded from pve gameplay because the changes were so detrimental.

I'm not confused but you're definitely gaslighting.

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