ejax.5170

I am appalled that Anet decided it would be fine to release the Mechanist elite specialization with Jade Mech being completely unusable underwater. The Mech Support: Depth Charges underwater skill, the only F skill Mechanist's get underwater, is a complete joke. It feel like merely a quick, band-aid solution that they tacked on at end of development so that Mechanists have AT LEAST something underwater, and, at risk of sounding like an entitled consumer, players deserve better than this.

Engineer Flamethrower—Napalm: Burn duration applied per pulse decreased from 3 seconds to 2 seconds. Scrapper Impact Savant: The percentage of strike damage dealt that converts to barrier on yourself has been reduced to 5% in PvE only. These changes feel so unnecessary. Nerfing napalm... why? It's not like napalm is broken, and I rarely even see any Condi engis/holos these days. Scrapper definitely felt beefy with Impact Savant, but was it so broken that it needed to be nerfed down to 5%? I am so tired of these arbitrary balance changes that seem to be only implemented for the sake of change and not to address the actual balance issues that Engineers have.

Well said.

Not sure if intended, but in open world my mech has ~46k health but in WvW (using same player gear and traits, mind you) my mech has only 27k health. Doesn't seem to make much sense, because you would expect the mech to take more dmg in PvP-oriented content.

I came to the sameresults in my brief testing. If anything, Mechanist might be viable as a support/alacrity bot in high-level PvE content. In all other regards, it's pretty subpar; not impressive sustained dmg in PvE, too squishy for WvW, and its inherent AI flaws makes it laughably unreliable in PvP.

Regarding high-level PvE viability, Mechanist only seems worth taking for its support/alacrity bot. I did some brief testing on DPS golems and the pDPS and cDPS it offers with the slightly adapted meta builds (full ascended vipers and berserker) was not competitive with Holosmith. Can't say yet how this will perform in real content like fractals and raids, but if the mech dies even once in a fight and you have to wait the 100 sec cd, then even simply playing core Engi with its toolbelt and tools trait line would likely yield better DPS. There might be a case for a running a support build in PvE. The Mechanist can quite easily maintain 100% alacrity uptime and 25 might on a 5-man party, and if you throw in infusion bomb, rifle turret, and thumper turret (with the experimental turrets trait) you can quite easily maintain 100% uptime on fury, regen, protection, and vigor as well.

That's an interesting take, but what happens when your mech dies? A long 100 second wait before you can crash it down again. Meanwhile, you're essentially a core Engineer with no toolbelt and 1 ineffective trait line. You definitely don't want to leave it out long enough for it to take too much dmg or die. Maybe crash it down, spam its cc/dmg skills, and immediately recall it. All depends on how quickly of a beating it takes, and I can't say I'm too optimistic.

I share this thought. For this thing to be at all relevant in a competitive setting, the mech needs to be way over tuned in dmg and utility. Otherwise, the tradeoffs that come along with the spec simply make it not worth playing.

I am curious to see how it plays on Tuesday, but given what I've seen in the livestream I have very ambivalent expectations for this new spec. The spec is cool in design, but actual implementation seems to have glaring issues. And this isn't a first for the Engineer... Hello, 2015 Scrapper's wonky mobile gyros! From a balance standpoint, the total removal of the toolbelt (Engineer's defining mechanic) seems very poorly thought out. These toolbelt skills heavily factored into play in all modes, and without them Mechanist could very well struggle to be competitive with other classes. Additionally, can you imagine running with this thing in a WvW zerg (especially if they decide to give it a CC bar in this mode)... It's a dumb, giant moving target that will get nuked instantly in zerg fights. Hello, perpetual 100 cd on mech. I can only hope that the mech gets so over tuned that it still performs okay despite its likely clunky AI and to make up for the awful tradeoff that is the toolbelt removal.

That's fair. 31k is respectable. I think I was just trying to get at how there was a time when condi engi was the one of the best if not the best condi dps (making it desirable in high-level content like raids). This was immediately post-HoT irrc. I particularly enjoyed having my DoTs appreciated in raids 😄

I speculate engineer is getting either scepter or mace. Either could make thematical sense.

I feel like I am reading a post that was made 8 years ago when dungeons were still relevant. In the past couple of months since I returned to the game, I have not been booted once from a party/squad for playing engi. However, I admit it's true that the expectation is that if you're playing engi you're specced with holo, which is unfortunate--I do miss when condi core engi still offered competitive dmg in PvE. I disagree that playing engi requires "perfect keyboard piano" play. From the perspective of someone who was pretty hardcore with power/condi core engi back when it was relevant, playing holo in PvE has noticeably lower skill floor and less micromanaging. I've mained engi for 7 of the almost 9 years I've played GW2, and I would argue that engi is currently in a good spot regarding all game modes. As far as I am aware, we're meta in WvW and PvP, and while we may be off-meta in PvE there really isn't a significant gap in dmg in real settings. We still offer great dmg, great burst, excellent CC, and some of the most reliable vuln stacking in the game. Honestly, anyone not accepting a competently played engi in PvE (barring record runs) is just an idiot who probably has never even touched the class.