10-1 Engineer changes

From this thread: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/88470/upcoming-balance-notes-10-1-2019

Highlighted stuff I think is kind of a big deal.

@"Irenio CalmonHuang.2048" said:

Engineer

When the scrapper's profession ability was changed to an F5 skill, the tool belt skill from Sneak Gyro, Detection Pulse, was replaced. That skill was sorely missed as it provided useful and skilled counterplay if well timed. As the profession mechanic needed to remain on the F5 key, we looked elsewhere and saw that Purge Gyro, an inherently defensive and utility-centric ability, had a tool belt skill that did not fit its intent. Scrapper is also getting a bit of a tune-up with its hammer skills and a reduction to the vitality loss of the Impact Savant trait, which was leaving them a bit squishier than we intended for a bruiser style of play.

• Equalizing Blow: Increased damage by 9%.
• Electro Whirl: Increased damage by 9%.
• Rocket Charge: Increased damage by 10%.
• Shock Shield: Reduced recharge from 20 seconds to 18 seconds.
• Thunderclap: Increased damage by 6%. Reduced recharge from 24 seconds to 20 seconds.
• Corona Burst: Reduced might gained in WvW to the same amount as granted in PvP. Reduced the damage of this skill by 20% in PvP and WvW.
• Holographic Shockwave: Reduced range from 600 to 300.
• Function Gyro: Increased damage by 100%. Increased land radius to 240 and underwater radius to 360. Added clarification to skill description to clarify that function gyros are destroyed when their skill is interrupted. Reduced recharge from 30 seconds to 25 seconds.
• Shaped Charge: This trait now increases damage by 0.5% per stack of vulnerability instead of by a flat amount.
• Solar Focusing Lens: This trait now also grants 2 stacks of Afterburner when deactivating photon forge. Increased stacks granted from overheating from 5 to 6.
• Chemical Field: This skill has been replaced by Detection Pulse as the tool belt skill for Purge Gyro.
• Detection Pulse: This skill replaces Purge Gyro's previous tool belt skill, Chemical Field. The radius of this skill has been reduced from 1200 to 900, and its targeting has been improved in large group settings.
• Purge Gyro: The tool belt skill for Purge Gyro has changed from Chemical Field to Detection Pulse.
• Sneak Gyro: Increased the cooldown of this skill from 45 to 60 seconds in WvW.
• Med Kit: This kit can now be used underwater.
• Med Blaster (Med Kit): Increased healing to match tooltip.
• Cleansing Field (Med Kit): Fixed a bug that caused this skill to remove more conditions than intended.
• Elixir U: Fixed a bug that could cause this skill to give endurance.
• Supply Crate: Fixed a bug in which the Healing Turret created from this skill would not overcharge.
• Health Insurance: Updated description and tooltips to accurately reflect the functionality of this trait. This trait increases incoming healing by 10% and increases outgoing healing by 20% while using Med Kit.
• Mechanized Deployment: Fixed a bug that caused this trait to grant less than the listed 15% recharge reduction.
• Mass Momentum: Increased stability duration from 3 seconds to 5 seconds.
• Impact Savant: Reduced the vitality loss from this trait from 300 to 180.

My takeaways:

• Great, they're reinforcing that function gyro is not actually intended to function. Only ele and thief cannot interrupt f-gyro when downed. And they still haven't done anything to improve its health.
• Photonic Blasting Module still eating dirt
• Impact Savant still does not use condi damage.
• Healing builds got a slight boost.
• ... and apparently my Surprise Mechanic build is getting more dangerous.

All of the changes are good. The adjustments to hammer now make our damage pretty much what it used to be which is excellent. Scrapper will now be in a better spot than it's ever been. (For those who did not go full healing power boring-style. And it's still good now anyway)

The 60s sneak gyro is fair, honestly.I always wondered why supply crate would rarely stealth instead of heal.Chemical field was garbage trash filler on purge gyro from day 1 and you all know it. They didn't know what else to do until now.The holo "nerfs" are good. Radius was way too big on shockwave.Slightly reduced hammer cooldowns are nice - exactly what's needed to survive at times.

The only thing that will probably still suck is function gyro insta-dying.

Meanhwile in warriorland:

"Warrior's Cunning: This new trait increases damage by 25% against foes with health above 90%. Additionally, it increases damage by 50% against foes that have barrier. These bonuses do not stack."

This essentially translates to: "deal 50% more damage to scrappers" since unless the scrapper afk, or just spam medkit, he is going to get constant but useless barrier spam translating 10k hits into 15k hits from this trait alone.

And thats a core master trait.

But go ahead and buff hammer which is the one thing already working decently. Back to buffing blowtorch i guess. Instead of fixing the mess you created with the scrapper tree...

Oh and a damage buff on the function gyro OF ALL THINGS. Do i really need to start linking this again, pane 4 in particular ?

That thing is years old by now, from 2016 in fact. Also if you are a dev, read that comic carefully. Multiple times. Meditate about it on a mountain. Do you see it? Do you see the irony of purity of purpose while buffing the damage of an escape/mobility skill and a heavy condition damage skill? Utter the words "Increased the damage of box of nails by 1000000000000%" and reflect on the meaning of this. Good. You can breathe out now. This concludes todays sermon.

@"miriforst.1290" said:Meanhwile in warriorland:

"Warrior's Cunning: This new trait increases damage by 25% against foes with health above 90%. Additionally, it increases damage by 50% against foes that have barrier. These bonuses do not stack."

This essentially translates to: "deal 50% more damage to scrappers since unless the scrapper afk, or just spam medkit, he is going to get constant but useless barrier spam translating 10k hits into 15k hits from this trait alone.

And thats a core master trait.

But go ahead and buff hammer which is the one thing already working decently. Back to buffing blowtorch i guess. Instead of fixing the mess you created with the scrapper tree...

Oh and a damage buff on the function gyro OF ALL THINGS. Do i really need to start linking this again, pane 4 in particular ?

That thing is years old by now, from 2016 in fact.

Is that warrior kitten for real? LOLScrapper vs warrior was already a fight you didn't want to take unless you were specifically built for dealing with them (still hard).Now warrior is basically a hard counter to scrapper LOL

Edit: Those warrior changes are kitten nuts holy kitten wtf

@Ruufio.1496 said:

@"miriforst.1290" said:Meanhwile in warriorland:

"Warrior's Cunning: This new trait increases damage by 25% against foes with health above 90%. Additionally, it increases damage by 50% against foes that have barrier. These bonuses do not stack."

This essentially translates to: "deal 50% more damage to scrappers since unless the scrapper afk, or just spam medkit, he is going to get constant but useless barrier spam translating 10k hits into 15k hits from this trait alone.

And thats a core master trait.

But go ahead and buff hammer which is the one thing already working decently. Back to buffing blowtorch i guess. Instead of fixing the mess you created with the scrapper tree...

Oh and a damage buff on the function gyro OF ALL THINGS. Do i really need to start linking this again, pane 4 in particular ?

That thing is years old by now, from 2016 in fact.

I propose a trait for engineer that gives us 50% more damage against enemies under the effect of stability. So what, stability is handed out less freely than barrier so whats the problem? And we need a counter to boon spam don't we? Or we could get +100% damage against enemies with resistance since that is so rare of a boon! Those resistance spamming classes had it coming!

I'm starting to think barrier and super speed was just a white elephant.

@Ruufio.1496 said:

@"miriforst.1290" said:Meanhwile in warriorland:

"Warrior's Cunning: This new trait increases damage by 25% against foes with health above 90%. Additionally, it increases damage by 50% against foes that have barrier. These bonuses do not stack."

This essentially translates to: "deal 50% more damage to scrappers since unless the scrapper afk, or just spam medkit, he is going to get constant but useless barrier spam translating 10k hits into 15k hits from this trait alone.

And thats a core master trait.

But go ahead and buff hammer which is the one thing already working decently. Back to buffing blowtorch i guess. Instead of fixing the mess you created with the scrapper tree...

Oh and a damage buff on the function gyro OF ALL THINGS. Do i really need to start linking this again, pane 4 in particular ?

That thing is years old by now, from 2016 in fact.

Yeah, I saw that and was like... wow. Warriors are designated scrapper murderers now, apparently.

I mean that trait will probably help one shot Weavers or Sanctuary Rune users since the barriers are waaaay weaker.

Yeah, that warrior trait is the opposite of balance.How about changing it to do +50% damage to the barrier, instead of +50% damage to the player?
That way it keeps its intended effect without brutally punishing a class that cannot sensibly avoid constantly having small amounts of barrier.

wow so lets say u have 50 barrier on u and get hit by gunflame for 19k? jokes on u its 28k because that barrier shouldve protected u well enough

edit:oh and that function gyro thing... guys just chang eit into a purely dps centric abritrary boring skill atleast then it will be reliableI mean these changes are supposed to be WvW centric? And you couldnt figure out why its such a !"#¤%& useless skill?

@"cgMatt.5162" said:I mean that trait will probably help one shot Weavers or Sanctuary Rune users since the barriers are waaaay weaker.

Aye, but they don't generate barrier constantly. As soon as a scrapper hits someone, they are guaranteed to generate barrier, which means that trait is effectively a 50% damage boost against scrappers. That's MASSIVE and will translate big hits (10kish) into death blows (15kish hits). The only way scrapper won't be impacted by that trait is if it isn't attacking anyone. Effectively a "tanky" scrappers' existence will be nullified in PvP if a warrior takes this trait.

This is also ignoring the 1 barrier bug that scrapper seems to have. If that bug is active, they will always hit you for an extra 50% damage, regardless of what you're doing.

People seem to forget that few if any run scrappers anymore. So its a scourge murderer if anything.

Mechanized Deployment: Fixed a bug that caused this trait to grant less than the listed 15% recharge reduction.

OMG FINALLY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS!

Cleansing field on med kit being a bug is news to me. I thought they were nerfing anti-toxin runes, so if they bugfix med kit as well it will be a large reduction in effectiveness.

@Dawdler.8521 said:People seem to forget that few if any run scrappers anymore. So its a scourge murderer if anything.

A scourge can (more or less) stop spamming barriers as far as i know (outside of a zerg, in a small scale scenario). The scrapper can't stop if he fights back at all thanks to the same mandatory trait that still reduces our vitality. While it might be invented to counter scourge i don't think they even realized what this means for a scrapper. It aims for the scourge but hits him in the leg, after passing through the brains of a hobo scrapper. Honestly i don't know why they don't keep it at 25% damage to enemies above 90% health or with barrier. That would still mean big hurting for the scrapper but not as insane as this.

The problem is also that 25% more damage against enemies above 90% health is a decent trait enough for a core trait in its tier. So its not like you would use it like old lock on which you might only switch to when you got fed up with that ghost thief trolling and stalling your teammates when they should be heading back to the squad. You might actually have this on your bar for general use.

@Dawdler.8521 said:People seem to forget that few if any run scrappers anymore. So its a scourge murderer if anything.

Scourge can avoid using skills that generate barrier. Scrapper cannot, because any attack scrapper makes will generate barrier.

Why is there so much hysteria in this thread about Warriors vs Scrappers? Warriors with the tactics line equipped are not going to be 1v1'ing Scrappers. They will still be 99% Def/Disc/X and that X is not going to be tactics. Tactics still won't be taken by damage-built Warriors in roaming, small scale, or sPvP.

@Turk.5460 said:Why is there so much hysteria in this thread about Warriors vs Scrappers? Warriors with the tactics line equipped are not going to be 1v1'ing Scrappers. They will still be 99% Def/Disc/X and that X is not going to be tactics. Tactics still won't be taken by damage-built Warriors in roaming, small scale, or sPvP.

I tend to agree, but it's possible tactics which just got fully overhauled will find more applications in sPvP. It ain't our grandpa's traitline. It might go into a one shot build between leg specialist and that 25-50% damage boost condition.

Overall no reason for alarm yet.

Also Scrapper in WvW will certainly feel like they are squishier when they get rolled over by a warrior train.

I really think nerfing the range on holographic shockwave from 600 to 300 is a bad idea, it's too heavy of a nerf to photon forge. I think 400-450 would be more appropriate and still retains the holos unique feel and small group battle "uniqueness" over things like warrior. Change to corona burst is good. These changes won't be the end of the complaints though; the issue people have with holo is the combination of it's sustain, easy access to forge that has high burst and the ability to sustain it in conjunction with "Thermal Release Valve". If you overheat and get locked out of your forge, can't use your toolbelt skills, all while taking high personal damage - it usually means you'll die to any competent opponent.

What I can predict will happen over time, is they will tone down the sustain and what we'll be left with is holosmith with a crappy warrior-melee-range forge that offers nothing other classes can't do better. If they keep holographic shockwave at 450ish and instead do something in regards to thermal release valve, the way heat is generated it would be better for the long term health of holosmith.

The other thing is increasing damage on scrapper is not needed. I know a lot of you like that, but you don't need more damage - you need something unique to bring to the table. The function gyro sucks since they removed it from the "F" skill, the wells are a good improvement, but that came at the cost of butchering the entire traitline so that there is no meaningful things to take. I feel like I could run the scrapper traitline with nothing selected and be just as effective if I chose the best in slot.

I am currently sitting on the floor, typing this. Fell of my chair when I read the Warrior stuff with + 50 % damage boost on Scrappers.The secret message I get from this: Do not play Scrapper in WvW or PvP. You are not welcome here!

Maybe they just gave up with the balancing of Scrapper for competitive at this point. One variable out of the equation. Mission accomplished, I guess?

The other notes look nice. Looking forward to test those. Sadly my doubts about the Impact Savant condition feature were justified.

I don't understand why they would increase the scrapper's hammer damage. The whole point of a tank is to endure the damage, not endure that damage and be able to deal a noticeable amount of damage. Reducing cooldowns sure, but increasing damage on a weapon that's designed for tanking? I just don't get it.

This is the third time scrapper's been the main focus in a balance patch. There are still no buffs core engineer buffs and no reworks for certain kit skills or even the turrets. The only changes that I am happy with is making the med kit useable underwater and the nerf to holosmith's holographic shockwave.

@Hoodie.1045 said:This is the third time scrapper's been the main focus in a balance patch. There are still no buffs core engineer buffs and no reworks for certain kit skills or even the turrets. The only changes that I am happy with is making the med kit useable underwater and the nerf to holosmith's holographic shockwave.

It's really not the core focus. Warrior and Scourge were.

@"Hoodie.1045" said:I don't understand why they would increase the scrapper's hammer damage. The whole point of a tank is to endure the damage, not endure that damage and be able to deal a noticeable amount of damage. Reducing cooldowns sure, but increasing damage on a weapons that's designed for tanking? I just don't get it.

The problem came with tying our barrier generation with outgoing damage by Impact Savant. The -300 vitality was probably only introduced to limit the maximum barrier we can acquire during the fight, as due to the barrier-mechanic, the pool can only be 50 % of the maximum HP. I think they have expected the barrier-generation to be a lot more effective, so the loss of "just" 3000 HP could be totally ignored.

Sadly our game-play experience proved otherwise. The barrier-generation was in most cases too low to keep us in the combat, let alone sustaining any real damage. Due to the drastic HP loss, we became a lot squishier and in my opinion easier to kill by everyone/everything.

Reducing our damage-multipliers in the same update was a genius move, in terms of promoting the tank-status. But you cannot do that when you pair outgoing-damage with active defenses. So as a reaction to our feedback, they decided to increase the vitality-pool to increase our maximum barrier-pool - silently hoping that it will be enough to fulfill the tank status. By increasing the base-damage of the hammer-skills they do not return our damage-multipliers. So this time they only promote playing the tank-scrapper with the hammer. Just to avoid, we use the Scrapper multipliers on kits or other weapons again.

However I fear, the barrier-generation will still be too low. Why? The barrier we generate during combat against serious threats, few targets with good damage output, is in most cases lower than a single hit of them. Damage skills deal a devastating amount of damage to us, pretty much ignoring the barrier completely. Increasing the storage capacity only makes sense if we have the ability to fill it, which is not the case. Especially against players you cannot reach the maximum capacity.

In the end, we need to try it out.

@Vagrant.7206 said:

@Hoodie.1045 said:This is the third time scrapper's been the main focus in a balance patch. There are still no buffs core engineer buffs and no reworks for certain kit skills or even the turrets. The only changes that I am happy with is making the med kit useable underwater and the nerf to holosmith's holographic shockwave.

I was specifically talking about scrapper being the main focus of the entire engineer profession. Every profession gets buffs and nerfs and all engineer got was buffs to the scrapper's hammer, some tweaks to the scrapper traits, nerfs for holosmith (which is great) and nothing for core engineer.

Warrior already hit really hard to begin with, especially since most warriors run the strength tree. I am not 100% sure on this, but I am thinking Warriors are going to start letting go of Discipline to take Tactics for the damage buff modifiers for even more damage. In terms of defense, not sure if they will really feel it, as they also get a new trait that grants more health gained when gaining might. This could be a huge mistake on Anet's part.

@Ghos.1326 said:Warrior already hit really hard to begin with, especially since most warriors run the strength tree. I am not 100% sure on this, but I am thinking Warriors are going to start letting go of Discipline to take Tactics for the damage buff modifiers for even more damage. In terms of defense, not sure if they will really feel it, as they also get a new trait that grants more health gained when gaining might. This could be a huge mistake on Anet's part.

Well over on the warrior side of the forums the pvpers are scoffing at the idea of anyone dropping defense or discipline, but you are right about Menders Might. It is going to be high sustain. Shrug it Off is going to create great sustain as well, but it competes with warrior's cunning.

I think a phalanx strength warrior in a team fight is going to be hard to put down...