phirefox.2568

The quickest "default" way would be to do as many events as possible - for the Skyscale, just joining the Dragonfall meta would help you get the XP quite quickly. A single event yields 26,670 EXP if you get gold-level participation for it. A less common (but potentially quicker) approach would be to do Adventures and Griffon Courses. Just as with the Events you get different EXP-rewards depending on how well you did (Bronze, Silver, Gold), but the way you get the rewards and the circumstances around it are what makes this approach so useful for mastery training: If you finish an adventure/course with a gold reward, you automatically also get the silver and bronze rewards on top of it, with the limitation of being able to get those default-rewards just once per day per adventure/course. As a bonus, you also get bonus-reward chests if you do an adventure for the first time ever on your account. For your experience gains that means: ▨ A single adventure (for instance the Refugee Supply Run) yields (48,006+32,004+21,336) = 101,346 EXP daily, with additional 101,346 EXP for a total of 202,692 EXP when done for the first time ever. ▨ A single griffon course also yields 101,346 EXP daily, with additional 146,685 EXP for a total of 248,031 EXP when done for the first time ever (the one-time bonus is higher here) Even if we assume that you did all of the adventures/courses at least once in the past (thus no first-time bonus), farming mastery EXP that way would be quicker than doing events as long as you can do an adventure/course quicker than it would take you to do 3.8 events - which is usually the case if you are good with your mounts. Edit: Just to make absolutely sure there is no confusion, you can get the daily reward of each adventure/course individually (getting the one in Crystal Oasis, then the one in Desert Highlands, and so on). For the core PoF maps alone that means you can do 19 adventures/courses to get up to 19 times the daily reward i've mentioned above, and it doesn't stop there - since the LS4 maps also count for PoF Mastery, there are 13 more adventures/courses for you to do. Considering this topic was created yesterday, you probably already have the Skyscale trained, but if you still need some Mastery points (e.g. for the roller beetle or maybe the "Skimming the depths" Mastery of your Skimmer), this would come in handy.

Over the years the use of commander tags (and by a lesser extend, mentor tags) has been "streamlined" within the gw2 playerbase to avoid cluttering of the minimap with mapwide-visible symbols - at least that used to be a big motivation. As a consequence a sort-of expectation developed as to what a commander tag on the symbol can mean on open world maps, e.g : ◈ Leading through a map meta event chain ◈ Leading for World Bosses ◈ Leading a HP train ◈ Leading specific kinds of farms (think for instance bauble farms) ◈ Leading a bounty train (an example for a cross-map case) ◈ Indicating single bounties that one needs help with ◈ Indicating events that are important for certain higher-tier archievements (for instance for the griffon collection) ◈ Marking the locations of Puzzles (for instance for JP-Dailies) ◈ Doing JP trains for those who don't want to deal with the jumping ◈ Parking at certain spot with a public squad to allow for self-invite-T2Fing (for instance the JP chest in Draconis Mons) In some of these cases the commander would usually either announce the purpose of the tag ("Event XYZ for Collection ABC on Blue Tag!") in mapchat and/or write the purpose as a squad message to avoid confusion. If you create an LFG entry with your squad, you would also put the purpose into the lfg as well. As long as you adhere to these rules (or the use cases mentioned), people usually don't have any problem with the use of the tag - even if it's for more mundane things. Though, if you need help with something "less important", it's nicer to use a mentor tag instead of a commander tag - while both can contribute to Minimap-cluttering, players tend to have less strict expectations when it comes to mentor tags. Commander tags were originally meant to be used in WvW, and are even more important there than they are in PvE. If you are actually playing for points in WvW, you really, really want to limit the amount of tags on the map to those who "actually get things done" - which means actually defending and flipping staff as opposed to merely "roaming" around. You tagging up for roaming itself wouldn't be that much of a problem - the problem is more that "randoms" tend to blindly follow a tag, and every random that follows someone "roaming around" is a random that's missing during attacks on- or defenses of structures. In the past (where you had one Server per side in WvW) there were cases were hostile servers had their own players transfer to other servers to "sabotage" them, and tagging up without doing "proper" zergwork was one of the ways they did it, so it doesn't surprise me that you would get salty WvWer whispers thrown at you. Don't take it too badly, if you didn't know it before, you do so now 🙂 edit: If you want to do a squad for roamers (whereas the squad chat works like a intra-roamer chat) you can do so with a private squad, and advertise it in mapchat to the roamers. As for the PvE content, its mostly about a mix of cluttering-avoidance and high expectations - a squad usually means something more or less important, and when it turns out not-to-be something important, players get miffed about the "unneeded" additional tag on their minimap. You can still do PvE roaming squads though - the way to do it would be to go private (a checkbox - will hide your tag from those not in your squad), re-enable public joining, and advertise your squad in LFG as a PvE roaming and conversation squad. You can still do that, just write in mapchat what you "apple'd up" for in advance 😛 generally players are less miffed (if at all) about mentor tags popping up, and they are regularly used by those who need help with something that isn't necessarily profitable - or in short: there are less expectations for mentor tags than there are for commander tags

Siege weapons like the Mortars, Catapults and Trebuchets use the same mechanic to influence how far you can shoot the payload and i'm quite sure that's intentional 😛 And yes, i remember the downed skill working as OP described, and asked myself the same thing when it changed. The ability to fire it off prematurely at the cost of getting fewer foes caught in the blast) can make the difference between rallying and biting the dust in some cases (and did so for me sometimes), and i didn't quite understand why the devs would remove that bit of control over the ability when it worked perfectly fine beforehand 🤔

It seems like one of the latest updates either broke or modified the sound effects of the slingshot bow skin. It used to produce different variations of a (rather comical) 'boink' sound depending on the skill used (as in #1 to #5), but for some reason it now gives off some different (IMO far inferior), inconspicuous and barely audible effect instead (and just a single one too it seems) - and if you increase the audio volume enough to be able to somewhat hear it, the other effects ingame will blow out your eardrums. Still hope the "downgrade" wasn't intentional. While i doubt this will be fixed anytime soon (or at all - not with more important gameplay and graphics bugs around), i thought i should mention it and hope for the best 😕

Yes, it's kind of lame for them to be affected by no-Mount Zones, especially when considering that (with the exception of two) you either have to raid for these chairs, or spend a considerable amount of gems on them. I get that re-using existing systems was a smart thing to do, but I would really like them to add some exceptional clauses to check whether the "Mount" in question is truly meant to be one before it prevents mounting up. Not sure if it's still the case, but when they first introduced the watchwork portal device, it's ability was clearly based on the already existing mechanic (the Mesmer Portal), too. When you put down a portal with either the utility or the device, both would go into portal-end-mode, and upon putting down said end, both would go on CD simultaneously :/ Even the Prototype Position Rewinder has some strange interactions with teleports and shadowsteps (removing its backport), but that might have been intentional. On a sidenote, the Victory Rock is apparently not re-using mount-mechanics, so you can still use it in no-mount zones. Either that, or someone actually added an exception for it, but forgot to do the same for the other chairs.

And i just did t4 fractals without a healer doing much more damage than before.Should have re-formulated into "stack on top of a boss" modes. Ofc you don't really need a dedicated healer outside raid content, but usually you don't need to be self sufficient since your party is going to pull out lots of boons anyway (both offensive and defensive). And yes, as I stated the changes are good for this type of situation.the ferocity trait is on explosions hit so a single firebomb hitting 2 targets gives you full stacks.The fire bomb ticks (counting the initial explosion) 4 times, resulting in 8 out of 10 possible stacks when two targets are present. Fair enough, though.Forge 3 with the barrier trait gives you 10k barrier inside adds which is quite a lot. capping might is also very easy. strength sigil 1-2 blasts + forge 3 does the trick or even strength runes and the sigil alone gives you 15 stacks.Yes, might capping is easy if you chose the Sigils and Runes necessary to make it so. Point being I was able to stack them fairly simple without pigeonholing myself into using default sigils and runes, which it now requires to get the same stacks. Reducing sigil/rune diversity is not always a great thing.And of course your warrior does more damage if you play with vampirism, endurance runes and sigils and just spam dodge.It's not about "just spamming dodge". For many encounters you would not even need to dodge, but for combinations of lots of trashmobs and veterans, where the trashmobs are guaranteed to add a nontrivial "background noise" to the overall damage (large, infrequent attacks can be dodged, lots of weak but drawn out or frequently occurring ones can't by normal means), the minesweeper/infinite dodging worked wonders. In some constellations, just proceeding the normal way (attack mobs by normal means to get them out of the way before your hp dwindle down too far) is okay and definitely quicker to do, in others (groups of trashmobs spread out while attacking) you would just drop before that happens. You can bridge the distances with active defenses, but most of these mean you are missing out on damage you would instead. "infinite" Minesweeper dodging reduces the required active defense (or allows you to keep it off cooldown entirely for "later" use against the veterans if you have enough trash following you through the trails) while doing damage to your foes, thus increasing your damage in these situations. And no, it's no "of course" either. You see, I never bothered equipping my Warrior fully with anything useful. At one point in the past I made a joke-build involving the rune of the pack and signets (as I said, a joke build) to get a permanent 100% crit chance without outside help, but not only did the runes change their stats since then, I also removed a backpack and one of the earrings. So the Warrior i'm comparing my engineer (and other alts) to is running around with Zerker Weapons/Armor, Pack Runes (whose improvement over Vampirism is negible in the offensive department) and a zerker/knights trinket mix with two of them missing. I think I didn't even bother putting sigils on the Weapons, either, which makes the results of the comparison even more amusing.Engineer has access to blinds so everything without a breakbar cant hurt you.And there are plenty of Break-Bar possessing Veterans in HoT, PoF and the LS maps :/holo has just insane barrier generation open world so i dont know why it should have survivability problems.holo forge 3 barrier got more than tripled, have you tried that yet?In some situations you have to stack defensive skills to bridge the distances between subgroups of foes (or individuals), with a few weak ones following you and running into your trails. In such a case, minesweeping makes sure to give you more time to recharge active defenses for the veterans while you are taking care of the trash - an example would be the Griffon-Event with Warden Jabari. Due to party size (and the event mechanics) you will have lots of trashmobs and a whole bunch of angry veteran canids spawning on top of you - each of the canids being capable of knocking you down at least 3 times in a short period of time with relatively low cooldowns (for reference: a normal fullzerk engineer would lose between 90- and 100% hp from the beating of a single canid without stunbreak). You can mitigate some of their attacks by using Stunes/Dazes (mostly useful against single ones, not 2 or 3), blocks, Smokebomb or the phosphorous rounds on your mortar, but as soon as those defenses run out, you are going to be in for a world of virtual pain. If you instead attack the trashmobs and dodge around while waiting for the next batch of active defenses, you can at least avoid their attacks for longer, and either strike back whenever the defenses are up, or handle the boss and just use the newly won active defense to stay alive while doing so. The same goes for Veterans spamming un- or hardly strafe-able ranged attacks... or groups of chaks. I usually run the superspeed trait for #2 (for getting rid of cripple or frost), but yeah, 3 does increase survivability a bit (it's like a mini scrapper built into the holo). Unfortunately it doesn't help too much in the situations described above, since even a considerable 10k health buffer (in practice it would be at most 3-4k In these situations) will melt down quickly once the veteran's or the groups attacks (or chak attacks) come in. A buffer is simply not the same as the ability to easily clear out the "background noise" until only the heavy hitters are left :(

For me it's the opposite. I don't know about "standing-on-top-of-a-boss-with-a-druid-healing-you-and-occasionally-evading-a-boss-mechanic"-modes, but for all of my open world PvE combat builds (core, scrapper and healing) the damage was reduced as a result of the completely unnecessary changes to the Explosions Traitline. One Adept Trait, Blasting Zone, used to grant +120 power and 20 seconds of Might for each of your Explosion-finishers. In my case it would usually be 3-4 Stacks (through this trait) in combat situations, resulting in 210 to 240 extra power, which translates into ~8.4% to ~9.6% flat bonus damage, seeing as how my gear (asc. zerker trinkets + ex. armor + asc. or ex. weapons) pushes the power stat to just about 2500 power by itself. With the new updates, I lose out on that extra damage. The downsides get canceled out mostly by Explosive Temper and Big Boomer (with a small net win for power-based grenade spammers), but maintaining the ferocity stacks is really annoying (you engage without them, and unless you are running grenades, you will need to hope for the Mine field to be off cooldown or camp on the bomb kit, which would ruin your damage), and Big Boomer is ill suited for open World PvE in HoT or PoF due to the damage done by mobs to anyone not running condibunker builds, WaRrIaH or GuArdiAN (my hp usually fluctuates between full and close to 50% in large group engagements since most veteran mobs have attacks that easily shave off 50% when they hit, so the bonus isn't particularly reliable), unless you are running around in a party with other players diverting attacks from you. But even if these two traits can offset the damage loss of losing out on Blasting Zone, they cannot compensate the damage loss through the removal of Minesweeper. That trait was awesome for open world PvE. In case you haven't used Sigils or Runes with a "bonus on death" effect yet: They trigger whenever a mob you striked dies at some point. Runes Of Vampirism, for instance, heal you for 10% of your hp whenever a mob tagged that way dies. The Sigil of Stamina refills your endurance completely whenever it does. These runes and sigils are relatively useless in immediate PvP situations, but the second one was amazing in PvE when combined with Minesweeper. Due to all the AoE engineers are throwing around, any group of Trashmobs you were facing became endurance, and thus Minesweeper fodder. Better yet, lower-hp Trashmobs dyeing to your Mine-fields would fill up your endurance, and allow you to put out more of them and (as a side effect) evade further cross-fire through dodging, which can (and would) put you down otherwise. That way it was possible to clear out the trash around the more durable Veterans and Elites. And unlike the sad excuse for an on-dodge trait we got now, the trail of mines persisted for a useful period of time, meaning you could concentrate and stack a few lines of them while trashmobs around you die (maybe from ranged attacks or allied attacks), making melee mobs stampeding through a highly concentrated trail-of-death. It also allowed you to damage foes following you, which was the trademark difference between the Explosive powder keg / Minesweeper traits compared to something like the Warriors damage-on-dodge one. I don't buy the "nobody used minesweeper" explanation by the devs, either. If nobody used it, they could have modified it with extra effects to make it more viable, not just remove it entirely. Seems like some dev got tired of running into mine trails when hunting down power-based engineers or something :p Even if I took up the glass cannon trait instead of the fury one (in adept explosives), it would not be able to compensate for the damage loss. And it's not like the combination was terribly OP, either - in single target engagements (like bosses), the minesweeper advantages were pretty much zero; in PvP and WvW it would be near useless (either to to the infrequency of player deaths, or due to their high passive defenses), so facing a lot of low-hp trashmobs was THE usecase for it, which would not negatively impact other players in any way. Hell, my core-shout-heal Warrior in a mix of Zerker and Knights Gear already did more consistent (and generally more) damage in most open world PvE situations than my fullzerk Engineer variants (which can and will drop the moment you stop paying attention) before the removal of minesweeper, while being far more durable and easier to play; now the difference will be even larger. As for core, I don't always run it with Minesweeper (playing power core), but mostly with shrapnel for might generation, short fuse for fury and either the grenadier or the +120 power-and-might trait. And while the new traits slightly increase it's damage, the introduced need to decide between fury (very important) and grenadier makes the build pretty unwieldy. Of course all this doesn't matter if I limited myself to playing holo, changed the build a bit (traiting for the projectile-based, explosive AA), and played "standing-on-top-of-a-boss-with-a-druid-healing-you-and-occasionally-evading-a-boss-mechanic"-modes instead. In summary, my core build became more cumbersome to use (or would be much weaker than before if i chose the grenadier trait, forgoing fury) to the point where playing it became quite unfun/sluggish feeling. It was always on the less viable side, but combined with speed runes it used to be fun at least...well, not anymore. Thanks for that, a-net!my scrapper buid got it's damage and survivability reducedmy holo build got hit the same as the scrapper variantthe changes are really only useful for my holo in a "stand-in-front-of-a-mob-with-tons-of-external-heal-and-just-dish-out-a-dps-rota" contextbonus: the bomb kit (especially Big Ol' Bomb) is really awkward to use with forcibly untraited fuse-times

True, unfortunately :anguished: Even Throw Mine is a good example - the unblockable skill fact is only displayed on the throwing skill, and not on Detonate where it belongs, so a player might assume that it is the mine-as-thrown-projectile that is unblockable (and thus can't get destroyed by blocks mid-air) instead of the explosion... It wouldn't change the number though. If the foe has one stack of stability (or two if traited - i'm not sure if the game handles the explosions sequentially or phase-wise-parallel when detonated manually, which would determine the 1 or 2 stack threshold in this case), the knockback removes it first, allowing the mine to additionally rip another boon instead (resulting in 2 removals by the U-Mine in case of 1-stack-Stability and another boon). If there is more than one stack of stability, the knockback will first reduce the stack by one (leaving stability), and the boonstrip will then continue to strip a random boon (which could be stability), thus resulting in the U-Mine "just" removing a single boon :)

It's 7 to 8 boons, not 8. Two boons ripped by the large Mines produced by Throw Mine (the Utility Skill) plus one boon ripped for each smaller Mine produced by Mine Field (the Toolbelt skill). The reason why he got 8 boons removed is solely due to the way the Utility-Mine's explosion is handled by the game: The Damage and Knockback effect is applied first, thus removing the single stack of Stability on the Golem before it's Boon-removal aspect even comes into play. If the Golem had more Stacks of Stability (as it would be the case in Zergs), this would rarely happen.Realistically speaking, it's also quite difficult to strip 5 boons from the same foe using Mine Field. Each mine has a small effective radius of 180, and they seem to be randomly distributed around the caster with a radius of about r ∈ [0,180). Basically, the only way to surely hit all 5 of them would be to lure your opponent onto the casting-spot before detonating them, otherwise the random distribution would mess up your plans real fast. It's easy to do on single stationary targets (like open world PvE NPCs) but much more difficult with moving targets. As a result, even slight deviations in the positioning of your opponents will make sure that you can forget about hitting all 5 Toolbelt-Mines on multiple targets. If you somehow manage to do so anyway, the player-area density required for this would probably be enough to create a black hole, destroying all of Tyria in the process...That being said, the Mines created by Mine Field can be blocked anyway - only the Utility Mines are unblockable :)

Let's see... Engineers, while interesting in the GW Universe (mainly due to contrast) , do not really bring anything new to the table compared to what Earthern Engineers IRL could do. Hell, even in the GW Universe, the Engineer Skillset and their Gadgets seem pretty much inferior to what the Pact or the Iron Legion created (making them seem more like hobby tinkerers than Engineers, tbh). I would rather get another profession and learn Engineering the normal way.Warriors: Same thing. Being a Warrior would probably make me physically fit, but their tools and abilities are ohterwise pretty much useless in a modern warfare context, and i don't think i could find a use for the extrafitness in everyday life.Guardians: Supernatural Abilities, including Heal. Unfortunately it would be hard to avoid exposing yourself when using them, I think.Thief: Stealth and Shadowssteps are nice, but the physical abilities may as well be learned IRL. Mesmer could do the same and more.Ranger: Treehugging Hippie with a good connection to Nature and Animals. Nothing special except for the Healing, but just as with the Guardian, that would be harder to hide when in usage. Okay, maybe it would be good for farming / cultivating plants, but that's not something I would be terribly interested in...Revenant: Dunno. Pretty versatile, but not up my ally.Necro: Summoning the dead would be fun. It would also really attract Attention from third parties.Elementalist: Probably my 2nd choice for everyday use, if it would allow for the use of elemental magic without having to use the spells we know. Being able to create Water everywhere (and heal) seems useful, doing digging work with Earth Magic is a plus, being able to warm yourself during winter is also nice, and all of it might be hidden with enough care.My Choice: Mesmer. The ability to create Copies of yourself would be helpful (depending on how well they can be controlled), and illusionary disguises (as seen in some story arcs) would be a good way to hide either your abilities, or at least who possesses them from the government or other parties that might be interested in using you. Bending time and space, teleporting, becoming invisible and turning people into birds has it perks as well.

Since I always have some sheets lying around, let me post a few autoattacks/chains for you, ordered by their DPS: Long Range Shot (0)----------- 0.7 = (0.7) / 1Crossfire-------------------------- 0.74 = (0.4) / 0.54Long Range Shot (300)-------- 0.76 = (0.7) + (3x0.02) / 1Hip Shot -------------------------- 0.78 = (0.65) / 0.83Long Range Shot (400) -------- 0.78 = (0.7) + (4x0.02) / 1Ricochet--------------------------- 0.91 = (0.8) / 0.88Long Range Shot (1500)------ 0.9 = (0.9) / 1Long Range Shot (1800)------ 0.96 = (0.9) + (3x0.02) / 1Groundwork Gouge------------ 1.00 = (0.4)+(0.42)+(0.44)+(0.88) / 2.14Slash (GS)------------------------- 1.07 =(0.64)+(0.8)+(1.3) / 2.56Slash (S)--------------------------- 1.15 = (0.7)+(0.7)+(0.96) / 2.04 There are only two AAs worse than Hip Shot (in terms of damage) Across Ranger weaponsets: One is Crossfire, which has a laughable difference of 0.04hp/s - on a weapon that's not exactly known to be a Powerhouse for non-condition based builds. The other is Long Range Shot, which overtakes Hip Shot at a range of 400 units in the damage department, meaning it is superior to Hip Shot for 66% of Hip Shots total Range (or ~77% of the Longbows total range). If you are looking for quickness, you can easily get it by using Quickening Zephyr (granting Fury and a 2x-CClear) for sacrificing one of three Utility Slots - As I already went about the Problem with Utility Slots on the Engineer, I will leave it at that for now. If you happen to play a dagger-based Soulbeast build, you get 3 seconds of Quickness and a leap in a 15 (or 12) second timeframe anyway (~5 seconds once in a while if you are using both charges). I could ask a-net to nerf Ranger sets, simply because Soulbeasts are just as (or, depending on the build, at least almost as) cheesy as Holosmiths, but I would not want that. Especially not after a-net's changes to the previously fun aspects of Sword and Greatsword (things like manually timing the AA steps of Sword for controlled evades, or the tripple-functionality of Counterattack).

The 6360 (or 318 hp/s) stem from the Healing Turret + it's self-finisher. The additional 1040 hp (the boost to 370hp/s) come from the 8 seconds of regeneration caused by that chain (so that part at least is not instant, just like Troll Unguent). Of course you can combine it with other skills (traited mines, for example), but when you take these combos into consideration, you might as well take a look at every utility and combo field based heal across all classes. Sure, it would make the tanky, spammy condibunker specs even more annoying, but engi powerbunkers were at least lacking in stopping power, and glassy engineers did not have enough defense to safe themselves with that Turret. Aside from that, 4 of the 6 other T1 heals I listed are above that 280er mark, 6 if you count their traited Variants, so there are quite a few outliners. The other two on your list are kind of bad for self-healing, but that's probably due to their (as you mentioned) support aspect. Point being: they are really only inferior to T2 skills if they are used with the wrong build, or (in case of support) the wrong context. Which in their case isn't much of a problem, since "Heal As One", the-two-warrior-T2-skills and Ether Feast are generally quite good on their respective classes. In the first place, to reach the same result as, let's say, Natural Healing, you would need 4 blast finishers (not counting the one that's already included in the chain) if you do not care for the 8 seconds of regeneration, and 3 if you do. With the Heal taking 0.75s to execute, and the time spent on BOB (3+s), Throw mine (0.5s), Jump Shot (1s) or maybe Flameblast (another 0.5 seconds) the combo of several skills would be less strong at the cost of longer total castting time. Of course you could prepare a Turret (another 0.5 seconds, and joke by itself), and use use Rocket Boots or Acid Bomb instead. Unfortunately, Turret-Utilities are kinda bad outside of SD-Builds, using Rocket Boots would mean sacrificing a Stunbreak for a Heal, and both Rocket Boots and Acid Bomb throw you right out of that Waterfield. Under realistic conditions you are not going to take that many blast finishers with you, let alone waste enough of them (keep in mind that the skills they are associated with have uses aside from blasting). The most you will expect are 3 additional finishers, if the user traited and conserved the "Throw mines" skill as well as Jump Shot (instead of using these to create gaps / increase pressure with one of the few strong hitting core engineer abilities).

Part 2 Photon Forge1] Yes, Holo Leap should be nerfed in terms of Damage, Cooldown, and probably also if it comes to superspeed. But if you think Engineers are getting "near perma-superspeed" with Kinetic Battery, I can't help but laugh. Even if you chose to play SD Holo with PBR, Rifle Turret and PW (which, thanks to the lack of elixirs, dies quickly to pretty much everything despite the OP regeneration trait), you will have a hard time getting anywhere near "perma-superspeed" with that trait. Also, if you intend to look at 10 second cycles, look no further than the two Swoops that you have. Soulbeasts in WvW can basically run into a group, down some players (or even finish one) while being invulnerable, and flee just as quickly as they arrived by doubleswooping. If you wanted to catch them, you would need a nikey warrior or a thief with a bunch of teleports - neither of which will have an easy time facing the monstrosity that is a soulbeast. 2] Wouldn't mind nerfing CB either. 3] This is probably one of the dumbest ideas I've read on this forum yet - and I look up the warrior forum sometimes, so that means a lot. Photon Forge is not a transformation; it's supposed to work like a special form of Kit or an alternate Weaponset (because unlike your soulbeast, engineers do not have two weaponsets). That it allows "Full Access" to Utility Skills is also blatantly false, and i'm kind of surprised how someone could miss something that basic. Activating PF deactivates your all of the Engineers Kits for 6 seconds, if you have any. Switching to a kit will rip you out of PF, so you cannot just switch between PF and your Kits as you would do with your Weaponset, which limits their use, since you usually use "a bit of everything" in kit-based builds. If you do not use a kit, the Photon Forge gets reduced to simply being a second weaponset (as all other clases save for the elementalist have), which by itself isn't a bad thing, and certainly doesn't require stupid changes to the mechanic itself rooted in a misunderstanding of what it is. Weapons1] Apart from you suddenly caring about stealth tracking, you can at most track someone two times - once if the target stealths during your channel, and twice (for some skills) if a second skill is "queued" behind that first one. The exception are continuous leap chains, if you count that - but that got nothing to do with Hip Shot. Yet again you intend to introduce a global nerf, this time to the only viable Power Weapon engineers have left, due to some PvP build utilizing Elixir U. Hip Shot has 1200 range, takes ¾ seconds (or rather 0.84s, according to the wiki) to execute, and got a (0.65) modifier on it. Long Range Shot got something between 1800 and 2000 range on even terrain (just compare your actual range with the one of Barrage - and this is the case for all Longbow Attacks), takes ¾ seconds (or rather a second, according to wiki) to execute, and got damage ranging from (0.7) to (0.9). Since a-net at some point removed the threshold system, I can only suspect that they went with linear scaling now (easiest to calculate), which would mean the damage would increase by (0.02) for every 100 units of distance, granting the shot at1800/1900/2000 range (0.96/0.98/1.0) respectively (though i'm still not sure if it reaches beyond the 1800 mark). Considering the gigantic range, I would say this point goes to the longbow. Even if you take the WvW nerf into account (14% for the lower limit), it would start off at (~0.6), and reach the Damage of Hip Shot at about 250 distance to the target. Taking (in addition to that) the difference in execution time into account, Long Range Shot would overtake Hip Shot at about 850 range, which is worse, but not enough for me to consider it as "weaker" than Hip Shot. You might as well nerf Longbow again - but you probably don't want that. 2] While i'm not a fan of frequent immo, the fact that we are still talking about the one viable powerweapon makes me hesistant to change it in any way 3] Blunderbuss is a maximum (1.76) attack with a 9 second Cooldown and half a second windup. While it is one of the stronger attacks for the engineer (since kit skills tend to be laughably weak), it's nothing to write home about compared to the vast majority of nonauto-weaponskills the other classes have - and that on a class which can only take one weaponset by default. In practice it will always be weaker than Ranger's Maul - a skill that has less than half the CD (and even less depending on the situation) doing basically the same damage (1.75), which you would probably be reluctant to nerf. 4] Unlike Overcharged Shot, Point Blank Shot can be traited to a 12 second CD, and does not affect the User with a self-knockback. And similarly to all the other Longbow Skills, Point Blank Shot's range reaches beyond the official 1200 units - it's range is slightly above that of barrage, putting it about 300 units further than Overcharged Shot. The projectile fired by Overcharged Shot also travels slower than the Ranger's version - at maximum range you may still evade it (though it's hard), while Point Blank Shot is more difficult to evade even at 1500 range.

Part 1 That's a pretty one-dimensional way to approach this problem. The only one thinking one-dimensional is you, in this case. I don't mind if you want to nerf other Elite specs in order to continue steamrolling on your cheesy soulbeast builds, but if you want to nerf Holo (which, by all means, please do!), then please keep your hands off the core abilities. If you would at least try to learn how other classes work, you would know that there is pretty much no place for Core Engineer anywhere already, except for a few lackluster, spam-based condition builds, which - quite frankly - are still worse than the vast majority of condition based builds that other classes run around with. To address your points: Traits/Utilities/Healing Skills/Elites1] Healing Turret is (or was) an above average Healing skill - and for a good reason. All the other Heals utterly suck in terms of self-healing, and it is Engineers only way to reliably clear conditions without being pigeonholed into Alchemy or Inventions. Back then, before a-net somehow managed to destroy the balance more and more through the introduction of elite specs, it was among the best, but now? It's core Engineers only way of staying alive. And while it is in the upper range of healing skills, it's still not "the best" - here a quick overview of similarly powerful heals: Healing Turret: [6360|7400 (with regen)] [20] . . . . . . [ 318|370]Signet of Resolve: [8150] [30|24] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [ 272|340]"To the Limit!": [9100|10100] [30|24] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [303|421]Mending: [6520] [15|12] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [435|543]"We Heal As One!":[6520] [20|16] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [326|407] (this one is for you)Troll Urgent: [8496][25|20] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .[340|425] (this one, too)Withdraw: [4766][18|14.4] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .[264|331]Glyph o. E. Har.: [6494][20|16] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [325|406]Ether Feast: [5560+X*650][20] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [278|310|342|374] Your Problem doesn't stem from the Heal, it stems from a combination of quickness and stability. You would have three options:a) tone down the holo spec itself. This would be the best option, as this is where the basic problem liesb) tone down Elixir U. The reason why Elixir U is as "strong" as it is, is because Core Engineers do not possess a second weaponset, meaning that they usually have to choose at least one Kit, all of which are somewhat lackluster in the damage department, compared to actual Weaponsets on other classes. This means the core engineer is left with two (often only one) utility slot, hence the relatively strong effect on that elixir. Nerfing it would hit the core engineer harder, but would still be a localized "solution" to your problemc) nerf the one viable heal for the Engineer profession in general. While the Holo would probably still get away with using medkit instead, you would hit core engineers across the board, regardless of how they trait. It's probably the most stupid way to go about it, unless your intend is to ruin all the specs other than Holo first, before killing off Holo later.The fact that you go for Solution c) shows just how one dimensional your thinking is. 2] I like passive procs about as much as I like Soulbeast players who somehow still fail at playing the game despite playing what they play. Do with it whatever you want. 3] Kinetic Battery is a dumb idea in general. It's not reliable (holding back Toolbelt skills to wait for the right moment would kitten you up in the meantime), and for anything but random bursts of superspeed and quickness. I'm also pretty sure that it is bugged right now, so if it makes space for another, more useful trait, then so be it. 4] Apart from Rugged Growth being part of the WS Traitline (which already allows you to shit out Fury and Condition removal in the first place), this is the only sensible suggestion you have done up to this point (especially since it nerfs only the holo). I don't mind leaving the faceroll to soulbeasts, mirages, and co, so a-net can nerf this regeneration for all I care. Of course the comparison to that ranger trait is still kitten. To get "perma vigor", the core engineer is forced to go into alchemy, slot Elixir U (there it is again), and other elixirs granting swiftness, alongside the Tool-Trait Streamlined Kits. That means one or no Kits, making the engi harmless. Of course Holos can abuse Holo Leap for it, but then again, you should be going after these skills in the first place. Your typical Holo builds also doesn't use Kits, and without the Holomode, their greatest source of damage is gone during the healing phase. 5] One-Dimensional global nerf again, instead of getting to the root. 6] The stealth is fine, considering the 6 seconds force you to go into alchemy. 3 Seconds of stealth is nothing on a profession fighting in melee-to-midrange, especially if it lacks any sort of gapopeners or teleports to get away from the engagement (Rifle #5 and Rocket Boots will expose you due to the AoE). It's not like a LB Ranger, who can keep a stealth uptime of 25% (~43% when traited) with Hunters Shot while already outside the foes range, especially if there are clones, minions, npcs or other pets running around. Again, what makes this so strong is not it's uptime, but the fact that a Holo will use it during the Cooloff period. See the problem? 7] Elixir U is as strong as it is right now for a reason. Again, Holo is the problem, not a Core Engi with Elixir U. 8] By all means.

Warriors Earthshaker is somewhat similar, at least. It stuns foes for 1|1.5|2 seconds, depending on the adrenaline level. Since Level 1 is trivial to archive for a Warrior, it's at least as effective as HSWave in that departmentthe damage modifier is (1.0), slightly above that of HSWave (0.96). Basically no differenceBoth are blast finishersEarthshaker got a 8 second cooldown. In normal combat situations (and especially if the warrior is fighting a minion user or mesmer) a warrior should be able to reach at least level 1 adrenaline during the 8 second cooldown, enabling frequent use. Whether the player actually does it, or switches weapons instead, is another question of course, but it beats HSWave in the cooldown department. Casting time is ¾, just like HSWaveThe radius is "just" 240, but unlike the nerfed HSWave it comes with a 600 range, aimable gapcloser over the ¾ seconds cast. If your aim is hitting a group of players, the inbuilt gapcloser makes it superior to it's nerfed engineer pendant - the latter would force you to "walk up" to the groups center of mass, and then activate a ¾ second ability. Against single targets the gapcloser increases it's range to a maximum of 720, which beats even the old HSWave. Unlike HSWave, the Knockdown effect is instant, and not timed to match a wave animation, meaning HSWave gives opponents at the edge additional time to react by dodging after the cast.Really, the only situation in which Earthshaker is less effective than the nerfed HSWave is given, if a group of foes are distributed evenly (at least some foes more than 120 units away from the group's center-of-mass) in the 240-300 range ring area around the player. Then there is Rupturing Smash, Earthshakers primal cousin. It replaces the originals Stun with Immobilize (2s) and Daze (1s), but increases the damage by 50% (1.5) and the Radius to 360 (!) units, making it even stronger than the nerfed form of HSWave. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for nerfing that skill (hell, I left the game for 3 years because all the cheese introduced by a-net turned dueling and roaming into "join the cheese train or die"), but I would have done it differently: Either separate the skills into PvE, WvW and PvP (leave it as is in PvE, since it doesn't really bother anyone over there), with ranges fitted to each mode (maybe keep it at 600 in PvE, put it to something between 300 to 400 in WvW, and 300 - or even less than that - in PvP)Or make use of the Wave-Attack mechanics that a-net already possesses for Bosses - the ones allowing players to jump over the attacks in order to avoid their effects. I would have defined a threshold for the wave (e.g. 300 units) up to which it may not be avoided by jumping, leaving the rest of it's range dodge-able by jumping. It would dampen the nerf, allow for easy counterplay against mindless usage on range, and - as a side effect - leave the spell untouched for PvE (since mobs don't jump, aside from cosmetic animations).

I do hope they increase it to 2%. I would need to maintain 20 stacks of vulnerability to get the same extra damage modifier (10%) as it was before. While a grenade using core engineer is good at causing vulnerability, it's virtually impossible to cause 20 stacks of vulnerability on a target under non-ideal conditions. Even if I were to spam grenade autoattacks (and the occasional grenade barrage at a lowered CD as soon as it went off CD), I would cap out at something between 13 and 16 (mostly 13) stacks - and camping grenades would be less than feasible, given the relatively low damage core power engineers (compared to most other core configurations and elite specs) cause by themselves. Although I doubt that there would be many doing it, the trait change would be almost funny for scrappers utilizing it pre-nerf; losing out on the easy-to-get 10% damage bonus, just to get the hammer skills (except for one) buffed for even less than that :)

After a 3 year break, it's nice to see how the team still tries to make WarRiaH stronger than they already are. I don't know who came up with the idea of giving the Warrior (a class with absurd damage multipliers - and loads of them, too) a 25% damage bonus for instagibs (or worse, 50% if you are a scrapper or got someone giving you 300 "hp" worth of barrier...), but it's brilliant. I'm also a little miffed about the cross-mode range reduction of holographic shockwave - I expected it to get nerfed in WvW/PvP (and for a good reason), but the update notes make it look like it will be nerfed for PvE as well. Why nerf the range for PvE as well, if you can (and do) clearly separate between the two gamemodes? The extra range was always nice given the usual distance mobs in PoF and HoT tend to have to each other, and the interrupt would give you at least a bit of breathing room which you otherwise wouldn't get. It's not like you can just waltz through enemies (as I can on my badly equipped warRiah) as an engineer . As strong as the holo is compared to core engi variants, it's at most as strong as a warrior (if you do not get attacked and perfectly pull of your rotation) while being much more vulnerable - add the needed time "wasted" strafing, evading and blocking attacks, as it is the norm for solo play, and your damage will drop dramatically compared to these heavies. Mixing in defensive gear is an option for roaming WvW (and pretty much the norm) since you will find at least a few "squishier" roamers, but not exactly viable for soloing PvE content. By the way, your last engi-related update "broke" the medkit-graphics - it's yawed 90° clockwise :p