Ghos.1326

so, mainhand engi pistol autos will still be shooting with a .9s cast time, instead of the tooltip's .5s. yep, another wasted opportunity.

I'll say that mech is fine due to the fact that taking mech eliminates your toolbelt skills so you really only have mech's skills and autos and then your own. (yes this is an old thread just wanted to put my stinky two cents in) buff engi peestol pweease

Sorry, I lied. They should also get their overcharge abilities back in general instead of only on deployment. Just tie the overcharge abilities to a cooldown, higher or lower depending on the ability.

All turrets need is a big increase in health and/or defense. They're stationary, so making them fragile when they're supposed to be items that are out in play in one spot to do X or Y is going against the whole concept of a stationary summon.

Who's the botter? I'll also report the dude too.

This is the way.

Between horrible balance decisions and blatant favoritism of some professions, as well as the aforementioned bot issues, it's why I've given up taking ranked or ranking seriously nowadays. Play for the ez gold and try to have some fun. Honestly, because of the balance issue, it's why I've pretty much quit the game and just play unranked a few times when I'm bored.

1s CD * swap

So I've been coming up with an idea to keep the developers more on track for certain aspects of their game. The idea I've come up with is actually quite simple: Categorization. What I mean by this, is every utility in the game and every trait should be categorized into different sections depending on the devs' intended purposes for said skill/trait. Categories such as DPS, Utility, Control, Defense, Support, etc (can be shorted or lengthened depending on the intentions of the directions for skills/traits). This would not only help the player determine what traits and utilities they should take for their builds, but also help devs keep on track with the original design philosphy for the traits and skills in the game and keep them on that intended path. We've seen so many times over the years the design philosophy drastically change for some things, Scrapper being one of the most noteworthy. It went from being a bruiser style elite spec to then being a tank and to now being a support. This causes mass confusion for players, even more so when your "intention" for the spec or utility/traitline/etc is one thing, but then do other things that totally go against its original design philosophy (defensive utilities doing offensive things, jack of all trade utilities doing everything disproportionately at higher than intended levels, etc). Something to think about, Anet folks. EDIT: Sorry, back from a restroom break. To add onto this, after this is implemented, please then re-examine the traits/skills and stop overloading/bloating them. This issue is what kills and overpowers skills and traits. If you're going to support a duality style in trait lines, do those to smaller degrees. Let this also reflect in the trait choices. For example, a trait line that's dedicated to doing sustained DPS as well as control, trait choices should focus on one, or the other, and should rival each other choice (example if i want to take a trait that does control, don't add damage to it, vice versa for damage and control). IF, however, you want to put in a trait that does focuses on both damage AND control, they MUST MUST MUST do those things to lesser degrees, otherwise you'll cause that specific trait choice to be THE go to and will invalidate the other trait choices. it's as simple as being smart about the approach and making sure that benefits are not too high for each trait choice, and not too high for duality style trait choices, but when focused on in the trait line will have a great impact on your playstyle as a whole (and also determines your role).

Some time back, they made pistol mainhand somewhat of a hybrid option. Some coefficients in the power category were increased to reflect this. However, Engi pistol mainhand suffers from one thing that prevents it from being good, in general: the auto attack. Currently, tooltip says it's a .5 cast time. In reality, it's closer to .9 seconds cast time. They need to fix this ASAP. Anet doesn't listen too well to great feedback, though, and will instead cater to people that want to create a busted game. So we may be SoL folks.

I kinda like the pistol 3 being the confusion aspect with the blindness as well. Though they could speed up the projectile speed, and fix the bug that causes the skill to miss at point blank range. Pistol 4 should be some kind of ranged skill though, agree with that, or increase the range of the burning cone to 900 range so it can dual function as either close or long range. And yes, pistol autos definitely need to be the .5s cast time that it's supposed to be instead of the .8 or .9 that it is now.

Yes sir, that would be right.

The trait line scrapper itself along with its utilities and heal skill are not condition damage clears galore, if that makes more sense. The many condition mitigation tools you get are from other sources within the core kit, like elix c, healing turret, the inventions trait line, medkit, etc. it's argued, however, these all of those clearing options are on higher cooldowns and do not clear as many conditions in one go, save elixir c, but that has a higher cd still. The only clearing things directly in the Scrapper arsenal is purge gyro, and the only mitigation in the trait line is adaptive armor.

Facts my friend. However, Scrapper itself only has purge gyro for condition removal, and Adaptive Armor for condition mitigation, so it itself doesn't have too much in terms of condition removal.

yo, guys I gotta share this. "Scrappers are support-oriented engineers with access to gyros and a plethora of other cleansing abilities" PLETHORA.... lel this is funny, very comical. By the way, this came from the wiki. we're doomed.

Yep, either the folks at Anet changed the wiki description or someone else changed it. Anet can't make up their minds when it comes to the path they want Scrapper to take.

Nerfing classes isn't the problem. If we only buff, then we get to a point where any and every skill will one shot everything. That's not fun. Now, what is the problem, is nerfing/buffing the wrong things, and ignoring the things that should be payed attention to.

Lets not forget folks. These ground targeted AoEs disappear after a few seconds of their deployment. Meanwhile, necro's marks last until the earth is swallowed by the sun (billions of years).

Yep, you pretty much summed it up. Give it some time, they'll come crying with their little buzzwords. Unfortunately, Anet seems to pander to these people. It's like I said before, I value the input of good players but that doesn't mean that they can't have horrible ideas or be extremely biased for/against professions. In a sense, I feel bad for Anet because they're being yanked in many horribly wrong directions, but then don't because they chose to be yanked in these directions instead of listening to truly sound feedback. Then the question could arise, I suppose: what constitutes as sound feedback? In which I would answer this: suggestions for changes that do not bloat/starve or overload/underload any one particular skill/trait/utility/etc in proportion to other information for said skill/trait/utility/etc, including but not limited to cooldown time, cast time, added effects like stun or daze, boon/condition generation and/or removal or conversion, nature of how many times the attack procs damaging frames, so on and so on. EDIT: sorry to add on and be annoying brother/sister, but a good example here would be turrets. Stationary summons that were meant for point control and added extra effects, whether that was applying damaging conditions, applying light CC conditions (net turret), extra proccs of smaller direct damage, hard CC (through overcharge with longer cooldowns for said overcharge) like a knockdown or stun, and others. Because turrets are stationary items, their health for sustainability should be much greater than say a mobile item like a pet. And because some of the extra effects could be potentially way too powerful, lessen those effects either with longer periods between casts from their auto attacks, or numbers nerfs. So what do they do? They made most (besides thumper) turrets EXTREMELY frail, take away the ability to overcharge save for initially laying down the turret, and also lessen the effects (lel). The true definition of one of the most popular buzzwords to these little "balance enthusiasts": gutted.

Stealth for Engineer makes sense, since it is supposed to be a jack of all trades, master of none profession (and, fun fact, its earlier concepts were to make it a heavy armor soldier profession that was more an actual soldier than an inventor).

this would be a good change if scrapper could actually survive. like a....tank....should? i'll repeat it again, my fellow engineers: NO HOPE, NO COPE

I'd have to agree with you on most of these. Very solid analytical observation brother (or sister).

Reflecting a bit after the fact: Adding condi removal to the tool trait line is a pretty solid change. Adding more functionality to the gadgets too, is also a solid change. The Engineer, as some of us may know, was designed originally to be the jack-of-all-trades profession (not master-of-all-trades). Tools affects its main mechanic, the toolbelt. So it's only natural that the tools trait line be more of a jack of all trades trait line, and the affected utilities, gadgets in this case, be more jack of all trade-ish as well. So once again, solid changes for Tools. I still would also like to see more condition removal added as well to Alchemy, since that trait line is, per original design concepts, supposed to be the trait line for granting boons and condition manipulation (whether that's removing conditions or converting them). But this is a good step for Tools and Engineer in general. My views still stand, however, about the rest of the changes. Both negative and positive. Just wanted to share this reflection.

So, condition rev. It's pretty much only underperforming because everything in the current meta has 100 million and 1 condition clears. tldr; they're still going to be underperforming because you haven't done much to reduce the amount of clears some of these things have, and in fact have increased the amount of clears in some instances. Warrior, you buffed call of valor. why? it's already a very strong defensive tool on a relatively low cooldown, and now you've made it stronger. does something like scrapper get the same buff? bulwark gyro is on a what, 35s cd and only gets around 3k-3.5k barrier. Engineer, kinetic accelerators....removing the quickness. why? This was a good trait that competed with the others. You had a choice between being defensive, bursty with kinetic accel, or sustained dps with applied force. I dunno man. Impact savant. ok? so you got rid of the reduction to vitality. and? scrapper, which was supposed to be a tank (which i can now also see you're changing to mention that scrapper is meant to be a support), can not tank. gyro changes. not too fond, but might be alright in the long run. will need to test. Defense field. ok, not too bad, considering it grants stab and is a large anti projectile dome. Mechanized deployment. um, ok? i guess it's fine, but that "remove one condition when you use toolbelt skills" could have easily went back into Alchemy.....which is supposed to be the trait line dedicated to boons and manipulating conditions....my how far we have fallen from the founders' original design concepts.... Utility goggles, pretty cool. nice change, though the immune to blind for x seconds was a pretty cool little niche thing for it. considering blind spam is, ya know....a thing. Still nothing done about Inventions and how utterly crap it is. Main hand pistol autos still have a total cast time of around .9s instead of the advertised .5.....that's cool. Scourge, pretty cool changes overall. Very nice. Thief changes, pretty cool. Nice. Ele changes, not too bad. Might need to see it in action first, solid change to staunch auras. Others, I'd need to see to know whether or not the changes made any kind of difference, good or bad. but, all in all, a few good changes. The rest....yeah, no.

I agree here. Many people don't realize that the passive traits also kinda set the direction of the spec (or trait line), so they completely undermind or ignore them. Holo's passive traits consist of an offensive and a very weak defensive, the latter being you gain health while dissipating heat. Then there's the first passive, which allows the engineer to use the sword. While it may not seem like an offensive trait, looking at the sword skills, all of them gain some kind of damage boost from higher heat levels, and we all know that higher heat levels increase your damage thanks to the other offensive passive trait. Spot on brother.