What if Kits become core mechanic.

[Bomboed.5697]

Revenants have freedom to choose their legends and their legends are filled with everything they need.
Elementalists have all 4 stances all the time and they are free to choose their utilities.
While Engineers are in weird position: they have very limited pool of weapons, which is kinda compensated with  Kits, but they have to choose between Kits and Utilities. More to say, Engineer abilities have very strange power distribution between non weapon skills (healing, utility and elites) and their Tool Belts skills: it is always a good Utility paired with almost useless Tool, or bad Utility with great Tool, or both are mediocre at best. It is never the case that both are good. So in a lot of cases Engineers have a dead weight of bad abilities on their skill bar or tool belt, while all other classes can freely fill their skillbars with everything they need. And in a lot of cases (especially in sPvP), players want to fill all very specific needs (like Stun breaks, condi removal etc.).

In result we have a class, that supposed to be the most customizable by its theme and nature, but very restricted in reality by its own complexity.

So a have a suggestion:
Replace Tool Belt skills with Weapon Kit Slots and integrate old tool belts kills into their their utility skills or weapon kits to make them more impactful.
For example, Engineer could have like 3 slots on F1, F2 and F3 keys, which can be filled with kits of player`s choice, while F4 is reserved for Elite Spec Mechanic. Or maybe even 2 slots are enough.
Yes, this is a very radical change that will require a lot of reworking of abilities and traits, but Imagine all possibilities for customization if there is no need to sacrifice utility skills for kits and vice versa. And in environment where skills and kits do not compete with each other, it will be WAY EASIER to balance both of them.

 

[Infusion.7149]

Sounds like a balancing nightmare waiting to happen, you wrote weapon kit slots plural.

Every other class has 2 weapons or 4 attunements with drastically lowered abilities (which is why elementalists need to use more than one skill to do the same thing as other classes).

P.S. overheating would be incredibly bad with such a change.

Edited September 7, 2021 by Infusion.7149

[Dracomet.3648]

I’ve seen this suggested before, problem is far too big of a change to implement now. Perhaps during the days of Vanilla GW2, but now that especs are all out you have to think about how that all balances out.

 

This would be a very cool thing to implement but sadly I think it is very far from being a practical solution. Engie as a whole was designed around a lot of gimmicky mechanics that sadly took years of community outcry before Anet did anything, and even now we still have some completely redundant, broken or useless skills. 

 

To be fair to Anet, they fixed a lot of things as well, Minion gyros, RNG gimmicks on elixirs, and med kit from being literally useless to one of the best heal skills.

 

A simpler fix is to make other utilities a hell of a lot better to justify taking 2 skills vs 6. One solution suggested was to put cool down on kits to incentivise taking other skills but a lot of piano players do not like that. 

 

TBH I think it is fine where it currently is, and more effort should be put to making other utilities much stronger.

[Bomboed.5697]

1 hour ago, Dracomet.3648 said:

One solution suggested was to put cool down on kits to incentivise taking other skills but a lot of piano players do not like that. 

Another problem is that most Kits have like one or two actually useful and powerful skills.
It is a balance nightmare now, because it is literally impossible to make 1 button Utility skill to compete with complete set of  weapon skills in Kits, while making both useful.
 

1 hour ago, Infusion.7149 said:

Sounds like a balancing nightmare waiting to happen, you wrote weapon kit slots plural.

Not much more difficult than now, considering Engineers already can take 3 weapon kits together. 4 with Mortar Elite.
Actually it will be much more easier, because in that case they could balance weapon kits separately from utility skills, withput considering them to compete with each other.
TBH, I think 1 weapon + 2 Kits would not be that difficult to balance, especially when we already have a balance abomination like Weaver Elementalists with their 4 attunements and combo skills.

[Dawdler.8521]

Anet already missed that train. 

They could have used the secondary weaponslot as a class unique kit slot. Some drawbacks compared to a "utilitykit" - same 9s cd as a weaponswap (when you are in the weaponslot kit you would swap between that and a utilitykit, until you weaponswap) and no Fx skill - but in return you free up a utility slot.

Every engineer would have a "free" kit selected.

But nope, they gave us a useless out of combat weaponslot instead.

Edited September 8, 2021 by Dawdler.8521