Deniara Devious.3948

Then we should improve core engi's condition damage... alotWe just have 1 single trait line for condition damage, firearms, and it isn't really good at it.Then we are also lacking utility skills to deal condition damage, most utility skills from core engi are power damage focused.Also mainhand pistol is still pretty bad and needs improvement. And not just 1 more stack poison here and 2 seconds more bleed there. I feel core engineer should be true jack of all trades and master of none. So it should NOT be forced to be condition only, but working with direct damage, hybrid e.g. celestial or rampager and full condition. Core engineer should have good (but not the best!) power burst and sustained power. Currently rifle just hits like wet noodle. Considering the trait offs e.g. rifle #1 is single target in most situations (piercing), rifle #2 is slow speed 1 target and rifle #4 does basically no damage and causes self knockback, it is easy to see why core engineer is in trouble. Just compare that with holosmith photo forge. I agree that firearms trait line is currently bad, but so is inventions and tools as well. Even the explosives trait line has major design mistakes/issues e.g. grenadier trait gives a useless grenade barrage after performing a healing skill. In reality all or almost all of the grenades will miss, even if you are inside enemy mob/zerg (in other game modes). Instead if should give grenades higher range e.g. 1200 (grenades used to be 1500 range when traited). Another issue is Aim-Assisted Rocket, which has 450 minimum range requirement. This makes it useless with bombs and even with grenades and their slow projectile speed and mere 900 range it is very situational. It works the best in pve and with mortar. Big boomer is grandmaster trait, but heals only about 120-130 hp/second with celestial stats. That is even less healing than Backpack Regenerator, which is major trait in alchemy line.

My mistake. Holosmith trait called "Crystal Configuration: Eclipse" used to give stability with corona burst, but that was changed in Feb 2020. The trait is still good and gives ~700-1000 barrier per hit. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Crystal_Configuration:_Eclipse

No. Just merge several underpopulated servers and get rid of the linking system, which just leads to bandwagoning.

Core engineer has NOT been meta since HoT came out. That is already 5 years! Core engineer has been sub par in EVERY game mode. Yet, how did once again Arenanet "balance" the overpowered holosmith? Yup, by nerfing core and doing just one change to holosmith. What core engineer is supposed to use for damage? Rifle hits like wet noodle especially considering those skills which hit just one target and it is slow and unreliable. Pistol has never been competitive. Bombs explode with 1 s delay and require melee range. Both mortar and grenades have slow travel speed, meaning it is easy to kite them from distance. Tool kit has always been more about utility than damage and flamethrower just doesn't cut towards good players. Arenanet should revert several of the core nerfs and instead tone down the sustain holosmith elite spec offers:stabilitybarriercondition-to-boon conversionmight generation and boon spamming Holosmith was supposed to be very hard hitting, yet lacking in sustain. Now the holosmith trait line + photon forge just offer too much and many skills have very low cool downs to make matters worse. Engineer has several lackluster trait lines: firearms, inventions and tools. Probably the weirdest is inventions. It doesn't even much make sense without an elite spec? Why to design core trait line so that it lacks synergy with core, yet works better with elite?!?

That was funny. Core engineer has been garbage tier since HoT came out. In most of these years core engineer has been arguably the worst core spec among the 8 core professions. The meta for engineer has been either scrapper or holosmith. Basically Arenanet is telling either play holosmith or scrapper or delete your engineer. I am afraid Arenanet will once again balance overpowered holosmith by applying nerfs to core engineer skills and traits, thus sinking core even deeper. They should instead shave the sustain holosmith has. I understand holosmith should by design very hard hitting glass cannon. Now holosmith traits offer everything from stability to barrier, condition-to-boon conversion, leap, boon generation etc.

Is core engineer too overpowered? If NOT, then fix holosmith. Holo > core for multiple reasons. It offers pretty much everything in one package:great damagemight generationsustainmobility If you make a core only build, you can pick some of the above.

For the technically minded: I thought the player amount and required computations would scale by square (power of 2), but it seems to grow cubic (power of 3) when 3 blobs are near each other. Let me illustrate:if the previous map cap for borderlands was 50 players, the worst case for computations is 50 3 = 125000 (imaginary computational units)if the new cap for borderland maps is 7 players less or 43 players, the worst case for computations is 43 3 = 79507 Let's imagine the servers can do maximum of 100 000 computational units per frame of calculation. With the previous map cap of 50, this would mean constantly going above what the servers can process and causing massive lags and drop outs. Reducing just 7 players from each side would reduce the amount of computations needed by about 37 % and the amount of amount would be always 20 % lower than the server capacity. So there would be rarely ever any noticable lag. I might be wrong in my calculations as I have no insider information of the algorithms and data structures used.

Give us at least possibility to store them in the material storage for free and also possibility to sell to emblems to vendors e.g. 50 silver per emblem. That would have minimal effect on the gold income.

We also need storage for siege blueprints. They take up a lot of inventory space if you also carry the non-superior versions (sometimes non-superior are better if you are solo capturing things or just need to build something fast. If wall is already down to 15%, a normal catapult will also do the job fast).

The grenadier trait in explosives lines is even more bugged. When you activate healing skill with the trait equipped, there will be so called lesser grenade barrage centered around you. Almost always every single one of those barrage grenades is guaranteed to miss. I have tried this inside pve and WvWvW mobs as well. Even with lots of enemies, lesser grenade barrage are going to miss. I would rather see such useless effect removed. Besides using a healing skill to trigger mass attack makes no sense.. Instead the trait should give grenades longer throw range 1200 or 1500, as they used to have, but that is up to Arenanet to decide.

Condi revenant is a broken build. I don't understand why Arenanet doesn't nerf at least some parts of the build. Let's face it: With most other builds you are NOT going to win 1 vs 1. So retreat and call in your friends.

Permanent stealth simply should not exist for any profession in a competitive game mode. The max. duration of stealth should be capped to, let's say 15 seconds or so and after that there should be automatic 4 s reveal. I never understood why reveal is 3 s in pve and WvWvW and 4 s in spvp. Stealth is far more useful and overpowered in WvWvW. The keeps have tons of hiding places. Reveal skills don't solve the problem at all. The desert borderland keeps are massive in size. Ayna / Deniara

You are going to hate me, but I have all the WvWvW legendary tier 3 armor sets (heavy, medium and light), the Warbringer and Conflux. And I still have tons of gold left and ~8k unused tickets. This is all from WvWvW. It is possible do this with full time work, wife, lots of small (and very demanding) kids and less than 10 h free time per week. Let me explain how I did it: Always do the WvWvW dailies, unless you can only play like 5-10 minutes that day (then need to optimize to get 3 dailies done. My fastest 3 dailies in 3-4 mins).Always keep your participation at max, even when you need to go AFK (I need to do that all the time, like change diapers, feed the kids, check them etc).Get yourself a commander tag. Tag up. You get way more pips if you have a public squad with 10+ players and your server benefits.Flip lots of camps , sentries, heal team mates and kill enemy players. Capturing just one camp or killing just one enemy player will keep your participation at max.Always carry full supplies and full selection of siege blueprints (they are cheap at trading post, buy them with gold). You will need these to take down enemy siege and to solo build siege.If you need extra pips, play on an outnumbered map. If you server doesn't offer outnumbered maps on your play time, maybe you are playing on wrong (too full) server. I don't do this, because I get enough pips for full diamond almost always anyways.Learn to flip ANY objective alone. Yes, even keeps can be soloed and you can do that using sub optimal core build. I almost fully play only my own core builds. I even use core food, since I am cheap and I like core. Stone Mist Castle is theoretically possible to solo, but in reality enemy defenders will come for you before you get to solo down the legendary castle lord. So basically you need some allies for the big shiny castle and I would recommend that for keeps as well.Learn to tag enemies, enemy towers, keeps. You will get participation even if you don't alone do the job.Use experience boosters e.g. a birthday booster. Don't forget to use consumables (I'm fine with cheap core foods).Play a build you like to play, even if all others tell you it is not good and you should play meta. This must be fun or just quit the game.Learn to do things others generally don't do, e.g. roam without ANY stealth, teleports, block, evade or no other easy "get free" card and go behind enemy lines, fight outnumbered, dive into enemy zergs alone without stability, blocks nor evades. This will keep the game fun and challenging, instead of boring.Basically you can get last diamond chest in about 10 h of play per week if you are efficient. That is only about 1.5 h gaming/day. Not bad for an ONLY hobby (I can afford). Ayna / Deniara

Voting is already closed. It is not difficult to guess that guardian will win. Guardian has the highest amount of play hours among all the professions (15.53%). The smallest play hours are: thief (10.10 %), engineer (5.91 %) and revenant (4.08 %). Revenant is probably the least popular choice, because it is not a core profession and requires paid expansion. Engineer is by far the least played core profession. Guardian has meta since this game has been released. It is really the golden child of Arenanet. Surely it is also sometimes nerfed, but not as heavily handed as other professions. As guardian you play firebrand, which are always wanted in zergs and most commanders choose this one. Firebrands are most requested in team/map chats to join the squad. Dragonhunter is solid at roaming and very easy to play choice for flipping camps. Core guardian is also viable, which cannot be said about many other professions. In other words guardian offers good amount of choices for several play styles, where many other profession force the player to play one spec or be just not viable.

When it comes to gameplay and replay value, the original core Tyria maps are superior to both HoT and PoF. PoF is slightly better than HoT due easier navigation and lots of secrets in those maps.

Agreed. Core engineer is an awful mess and Arenanet should do something about it! The crazy amount of nerfing on core engineer is the main reason. Arenanet have always "balanced" engineer that instead of nerfing the overpowered holo or sustain monster scrapper, they swing the nerf hammer at core. Engineer is by far the least played core profession (elite spec or not) in the game. Guardian has almost 3 times more play hours (!). https://gw2efficiency.com/account/player-statistics

This would even more just make all warriors choose greatsword (GS) over other weapons. GS is the only weapon which has two movement skills: whirlwind attack is also an evade. GS has already amazing synergy in Strength line with forceful greatsword and might makes it right. Strength is the best or 2nd best core trait line. Where are defense line now feels it is nerfed to obvlivion in WvWvW and pvp. I play mostly WvWvW. Almost every single warrior I encounter is using GS. If we want to see better balance, Arenanet should bring more rarely used warrior weapons to same level. The priority must be other weapons first, not GS first. Berserker specialization is badly designed. None of the minor traits has any use outside berserker mode, which reduces thoughness by 300. Almost everybody is playing spellbreaker, because durabality > burst damage. I can imagine berserker has uses in pve, but it is not viable for current pvp meta. Head butt is a joke elite now. It can often miss target. Does less than 10 damage and 50 % more damage (LOL) if stability was removed. The damage is joke considering it is also 1 s self-stun.

What reset queues? According to Arenanet Desolation is full. Yet we manage to fill just one map out of the four. Often on prime there is NO queue to any map, but it seems enemy servers have more players, but not interested to win PpT. Ayna / Deniara

You were yourself advocating on these same forums that Desolation would be better off without a link. I already was then warning that we would be outnumbered on 2-3 maps at same time. We can barely generate a queue on 1 map at same time. Yet Arenanet thinks we are full. Desolation without a link means outnumbered fights and Desolation with a link means Desolation + link will win Points-per-Tick (PpT) race. Anyways, 5 tiers in EU is not a good idea. Also having so called "full" servers, where nobody can transfer is a stupid idea and yet allowing people to cheaply transfer to a winning linked server just promotes bandwagoning.

I am NOT that interested in theoretical ability to pump out conditions. The fact is that at least here in EU top tiers guardians and necromancers are generally the most popular professions in organized large groups (blobs or zergs or however you call them). Theoretically engineer can pump a lot of conditions, but no serious commander will build his squad around condition engineers. If you see engineers in an organized squad, they are most likely either medkit heal/cleansing bot scrappers or bomb kit DPS scrappers. Roamers tend to be holosmiths. Neither of them is a condition build. Necromancer is needed not just for those AoEs, but AoE conversion of boons to conditions (this generations massive amount of new conditions) and necromancers are also masters of condition transfer. For example while condition mesmer is a viable small scale spec, it is not effective in zergs, due low access to burn (the most important damage condition, conditions are generally removed fast by good opponent groups). Mesmer relies too much on illusions, which will die in big blob fights before you can even shatter them. Burn guardian would do better DPS wise. I agree that condition revenant is a broken build and Arenanet should address is asap, but in large scale fights revenants tend to use other builds. If everybody would just have small scale fights scattered around the map, then lag would not be an issue. Lag becomes bad when two big blobs fight each other. Three-way blob fight is unplayable.

I teach game programming and design and I am almost certain that it is server capacity issue. Everytime when there is blob vs blob fight the server needs to do enormous amount of computation. The amount of calculations done increases if it is a 3-way fight. Especially problematic are skills which affect 5-10 allies/enemies at same time. Basically I am talking about AoE boon application, AoE attacks. Conditions require much more computations vs direct attacks. If conditions are cleansed quickly, there is less to compute. Huge boon and condition stacks is basically what brings the servers to a halt. Clients start dropping out and the lag becomes unbearable. I try to now illustrate this using lay man's terms. If there is 1 vs 1 player, there is just 1 computation unit needed for attacks. If it is 5vs5 and everybody is within same AoE circle, then each attack will need 5 computations and 5 players generate 5 attacks, thus you need 25 computation units. With 50vs50 and tons of AoE, you will need 50x50 = 2500 computation units. So in worst case the number of computations grows to the power of two per number of players in a blob. In three way fight it it even more. This is not just a programmer issue, but partly because of failed game design. Mass boon application (boons applied to not just yourself, but also your allies) and AoE conditions should be toned down. Many players will cry, because over the years they are used to this kind of meta, but maybe shifting the meta would do healthy things to a game? I don't think it is healthy to see enemy players in a blob and have almost every boon in the game on them. Then everybody is just spamming 1111, because besides auto attack almost no other skills work reliably. This just promotes bad player and let the bigger blobs have advantage to win. Now the standard setup what most squads use is at least 1 guardian and 1 necro per 5 man group, but seeing even more guardians and necros in blobs is not unusual. In some cases these two professions alone make half of the zerg! The amount of boon spam and condition spam is just ridiculous. Arenanet has for years refused to properly nerf the overused builds and the WvWvW skill "balance" is still mostly centered around spvp.

If mortar is nerfed, what core engineer is going to use? Mortar is very situational weapon. If an enemy is shooting you from long range and strafing, you are not going to hit him with mortar as the projectile travels so slow. But if you fight in a tight space and stay inside mortar fields, then it is going to hurt you (same could be said about necro wells and marks, which can be even made unblockable and many other AoE skills). Both the rifle and pistol auto attack hit like a wet noodle. RIfle is single target (piercing isn't that useful in spvp). Grenades are slow, have pitiful 900 range (nerfed from 1500 range years ago) and good way to kill yourself when enemy has retaliation. Bomb kit hits with a 1 second delay, making it easy to kite them. Bomb kit auto attack is very strong though, probably the strongest auto attack in the entire game. For many years Arenanet has been nerfing core engineer to make it the worst core spec in the game. IF holosmith is still overpowered, nerf the elite spec, don't nerf the core. Healthy core spec means there is more room for viable specs to play.

Which server? No queues on prime time. Outnumbered almost all the time on Desolation, which is supposedly "full" server (Arenanet should change their metrics or update them more often).

Skill lag in prime time = yes. No queues on Desolation, more likely outnumbered "buff" on multiple maps. That's EU tier #1 for you. :-)

Must be complete different meta there? I play in EU tier #1 and engineers are the least played of all the 9 professions. Bomb kit looks good on paper, but in real life, not so much. The explosion comes after a significant 1 second delay, it is melee range and it is super easy to kite it. Making it basically not usable for small scale, unless you want to just flip camps, which you can do with tons of others skills as well. Previously the short fuse trait made it possible halve the bomb kit explosion delay, but that effect was removed from the trait (thus nerfed). And even with the old trait, I didn't see almost anybody use the bomb kit, because it was so bad. Big'old bomb lost the damage. So in other words. The Feb 25 2020 update nerfed the bomb kit in several ways and it didn't get any buffs. In fact all engineer explosives, grenades and mortar are also easy to kite at range. Retaliation and reflects also hit hard. Bomb kit is of course no at affect by reflects. Theoretically bomb kit is very high DPS in a melee range blob, but at least in EU tier #1 the basic counter against enemy melee blob is clouding meaning spreading around like a moving cloud of flies and attack mostly from range and melee attacks are hit and run. Your tight melee blob can only hit few enemies at time, meaning that bomb kit 240 radius skill will most likely just hit 1 opponent, not many. With proper clouding and picking the weak links of the blob bomb is basically an almost useless skill on your skill bar. Are you sure this is a not learn to play issue? What would stop enemy blobs from clouding? If engineers were as powerful as the poster would claim, we would see much more of them.