Ideas to make Kits more valueble

Hi,as we all know, kits and core engi are left in the shadow of the holosmith. My idea is to rework the tools traitline to give kits more value and passive nerf holosmith for pvp/wvw.

Optimized Activation: instead giving vigor it now will reduce cooldowns of toolbelt skills by 10% when switching to a kit.This has an ICD of 1 sec.Example: grenade barrage has 25 sec CD (untraitet) and every time you switch to a kit, CD is reduced by 2.5 sec.

Excessive Energy: instead giving 10% extra damage when you have vigor it will now give an unique effect that increases damage and condition damage by 10% when switching to a kit. This effect will last 3 sec and can not be stacked in duration or effectivness (like the thermal vision effect)

Streamlined Kits: it always bothered me that this have different effetcs depending on the kit you use. Swiftness became more meaningless with the introduction of mounts in pve and wvw.The new trait will break CC when switching to a kit. This trait will only trigger when you are affected by CC. This has a CD of 25 sec.

Kinetic Battery: This is a very strong trait but only when used with low CD skills. My idea is to its current effect to give kit switching also one stack with an ICD of 3 sec.

Adrenal Implant: To its current effect, switching to a kit will fill endurance by 25% with 5 sec ICD.

Please note that activating holo mode is NOT meant to be kit switching. And This rework will not affect meta pve holo because it doesnt use tools.

These are interesting, i like that it rewards kit usage without buffing specific kits. I'll probably comment later as well, but here's one concern about your version of Optimized Activation:

Let's use "Toss Elixir X" as an example which is a powerful skill on 120 sec cooldown. If you use the trait ideally, you recharge this skill 13 seconds per second (10% plus the second that actually passes) so you can turn people into moas roughly every 10 seconds (120/13) if i understand the trait correctly.This is quite powerful for every long cd toolbelt skill, and it doesn't make a difference between using just one kit or using 5 of them.I'd tweak that idea so that kits have individual inner cooldowns for this trait (10-15 each) meaning if you use a lot of kits, you can make better use of this, but it's not as spammable.

Okay, so with Excessive Energy mainly rewards piano play, this one's pretty good as it is

As for Streamlined Kits, this traitline already has a stunbreak so i'd do something else with it. The swiftness portion is nice for places where you can't use mounts, i wouldn't remove it. As for the effects, toolkit superspeed or medkit reflect can come pretty handy, the problem is that you have little control over when these activate (if you use kits actively). I'd instead make these effects deliberately activatable, maybe with dodges. It'd be like evasive arcana but with kits instead of elements, each effect with a separate cooldown.

And as for Adrenal Implant, i'd handle it similarly to Optimized Activation, separate cooldown for each kit, but they only give 10%.. tops.

The question is, i suppose, is it justified to make this traitline centered around kits?

Optimized Activation sounds exploitable as cat

@mov.1246 said:

Streamlined Kits: it always bothered me that this have different effetcs depending on the kit you use. Swiftness became more meaningless with the introduction of mounts in pve and wvw.The new trait will break CC when switching to a kit. This trait will only trigger when you are affected by CC. This has a CD of 25 sec.

I like the stunbreak idea (I also still want the perma swiftness though!) I wonder how many stunbreakers an average WVW roaming (non core engineer) build has? its probably closer to 2 stunbreakers than 1 ? When you currently slot 2 stunbreakers on a core engineer you will lack damage output, this suggestion would partially fix that (kits will still need damage buffs and Grenadier/Short Fuse need to be made baseline) . The tools traitline would become a mandatory one for core engineers, that's not something I like but it is way beter then what we have now (no builds at all).