Do people actually want a pet spec from engineer?

[MrForz.1953]

56 minutes ago, mortrialus.3062 said:

Well there's clunk

And then there's game breaking unviable.

Ranger right now is the former and has been for a long long time.  Clunk and jank can be dealt with.  As long as the fundamentals are strong it is still viable.  So lets hope Mechanist is the latter. 

I don't expect the holy grail of pet improvements to be just around the corner. Besides, if it's only delivered to the Mechanist, Rangers are going to riot. 🙃

[mortrialus.3062]

10 hours ago, Amadeus.5687 said:

And? Ranger's could be walking gods and still have major Pet AI issues, which is the point. Not "are rangers viable in PvP"
That said, the only Ranger spec that's doing very well and where the pet plays a major role is the Valkyrie GS A/D duelist, which abuses the River Drake and it's broken overtuned tailswipe. Which is entirely a different discussion. 

There is a massive chasm between "pet issues" and " being unviably broken".  Sure rangers have pet issues.  Anyone on the receiving end of a hound or smoke scale knocking you down as you've safely avoided the ranger's downstate thunder clap can tell you.  But ranger right now is one of the best classes for ranked right now after Necromancer, of which minionmancer is straight up meta with almost full AI in both ranked and winning MATs back to back, and guardian and holosmith.  As much as people complain about AI "clunk", rangers are excellent right now.  It really just depends on what the skills of the golem exactly are. 

You're suggesting we ask ranger how they feel.  Well rangers right now are rolling around with pets that crit for 12k in a meta where most primary damage skills hit for 4-6k  on berserker amulet alongside having the best representation outside of necromancers for top 100 in ranked.  I'd say their exact sentiments aren't really prudent tbh. 

Edited October 22, 2021 by mortrialus.3062

[Kodama.6453]

6 hours ago, Ehecatl.9172 said:

You're asking a question of theme and then trying to answer it with a gameplay discussion. That might be what is making it difficult to understand the other side's opinion.

 

Having a huge robot that your character built and can customize is a MASSIVE chunk of the engineer fantasy that hasn't been made playable yet. People who play engineer for the theme of the class rather than purely the gameplay are going to be excited to be able to explore another avenue of that class fantasy.

 

It is as simple as that. It isn't a matter of "more experienced engineers will hate it" or "only noob engineers want this". It is a matter of what the individual plays the class for in the end. Theme or gameplay. Which itself is a spectrum. I am sure there are tons of engineer mains who are excited for the new theme but are wary of the potential for the gameplay to be bad and thus fall somewhere in the middle of your two poll options.

I play engineer mainly because of it's theme.

For me, this spec fails on both sides, theme and gameplay. We already explored the "building buddies to help in a fight" theme of the engineer, we have turrets and Anet tried to give us gyros (which failed).

That fantasy is already well explored for me, so I hoped that we would actually see another facet of the engineer thematically than just redoing what has already been done over and over.

[Nate.8146]

Overall I find it kind of neat, and funny. FF14 Machinist profession also has a mech (Automaton Queen) and I see some similarities here 🙂

 

These days I like to play my engineer main casually. Flamethrower Juggernaut + Scrapper is a solid combo. However, I'd be interested in changing things up if the mech is a useful ally that can replace the Bulwark and Function gyros. The mech is AI controlled and I'm fully expecting the AI path finding to be pretty rough, and the mech will likely chase/attack wrong targets. Still, if it's a perma summon, then I would dig having it out and about. However, if it's a temporary ultimate summon like Supply Drop, that would be a no-no for me. I'm not interested in a 20 second summon with 2 minute cooldown kind of thing. Hopefully it's not, but the trailer does show the pet being summoned.

 

[wolfyrik.2017]

14 hours ago, Terrorsquad.2349 said:

Not an engi main here but did play a lot of it.

Honestly it seems quite interesting but gotta wait until next week to test it.
However, Im quite against any AI-related builds; it fails in some context but OP in another.

Exactly this. The track record on pets speaks for itself. If you've played ranger extensively, you can see why this is a bad idea. If you played Engi during the launch of HoT, you can see why this is a bad idea.

 

The model is an issue too. There was literally a thread discussing the problems of other peoples cosmetics, the photo for which showed a large character with massive wings taking up an obnoxious amount of space. This golem appears to do that by default.

[wolfyrik.2017]

43 minutes ago, Nate.8146 said:

Overall I find it kind of neat, and funny. FF14 Machinist profession also has a mech (Automaton Queen) and I see some similarities here 🙂

 

These days I like to play my engineer main casually. Flamethrower Juggernaut + Scrapper is a solid combo. However, I'd be interested in changing things up if the mech is a useful ally that can replace the Bulwark and Function gyros. The mech is AI controlled and I'm fully expecting the AI path finding to be pretty rough, and the mech will likely chase/attack wrong targets. Still, if it's a perma summon, then I would dig having it out and about. However, if it's a temporary ultimate summon like Supply Drop, that would be a no-no for me. I'm not interested in a 20 second summon with 2 minute cooldown kind of thing. Hopefully it's not, but the trailer does show the pet being summoned.

 

I see potential issues in either state. If it's permentantly out then it will need nerfs to the pc to balance. There are also areas of the game where pets are a hinderance. It also means it will be killable, which will render it worhtless in a lot of content.
If it's temporary but the trait-lines modify it, then when it's stowed, those traits will do absolutely nothing unless they overload the traits with effects. What's teh pet's downtime? Just how many traits will be doing absolutely nothing while it's down?

Anet have almost always failed when it comes to pet balance for the player and the opponent.

 

This worries me.

Edited October 22, 2021 by wolfyrik.2017

[wolfyrik.2017]

3 hours ago, mortrialus.3062 said:

There is a massive chasm between "pet issues" and " being unviably broken".  Sure rangers have pet issues.  Anyone on the receiving end of a hound or smoke scale knocking you down as you've safely avoided the ranger's downstate thunder clap can tell you.  But ranger right now is one of the best classes for ranked right now after Necromancer, of which minionmancer is straight up meta with almost full AI in both ranked and winning MATs back to back, and guardian and holosmith.  As much as people complain about AI "clunk", rangers are excellent right now.  It really just depends on what the skills of the golem exactly are. 

You're suggesting we ask ranger how they feel.  Well rangers right now are rolling around with pets that crit for 12k in a meta where most primary damage skills hit for 4-6k  on berserker amulet alongside having the best representation outside of necromancers for top 100 in ranked.  I'd say their exact sentiments aren't really prudent tbh. 

Isn't that an example of the problem tho? You've seen yourself how bad the balancing issue is, shouldnt that mean that for the good of the game, no more pet specs should be introduced until it can be fixed?

Ranger is unavoidable to a degree, though i'd argue that the Untamed is a bad idea for this very reason. Pets are already a problem in every format of the game, now they're going to make them even more problematic?

It's hard to trust that anet will find a way to make it work, when they've singularly failed to do this for 9 years.

[Ehecatl.9172]

3 hours ago, Kodama.6453 said:

I play engineer mainly because of it's theme.

For me, this spec fails on both sides, theme and gameplay. We already explored the "building buddies to help in a fight" theme of the engineer, we have turrets and Anet tried to give us gyros (which failed).

That fantasy is already well explored for me, so I hoped that we would actually see another facet of the engineer thematically than just redoing what has already been done over and over.

 

Understandable for you. For a lot of people though there's a pretty big gap between turrets and drones and a full sized mecha you can command. It is kind of like the difference between Batman and Ironman. Batman has a toolbelt with gadgets and a cool car. Ironman wears a suit of flying power armor. 

[Dracomet.3648]

It looks cool. I like cool. Unfortunately I also remember my gyros getting stuck all over the place and being trash. I think Anet reallly really wanted to give Engie like a proper summon type thing for years. They failed turrets by nerfing them to oblivion and still not fixing them. They failed gyros cause they're just bad until made into wells, and now.... third time's a charm?

Edited October 22, 2021 by Dracomet.3648

[azarhal.3086]

Ex-Engie main (played it from headstart to about 6 months after HoT released). I had to move to lower APM classes because of physical pain (I had to stop gaming for 6 months actually and Engineer keyboard piano is directly to blame for it). I still try to make Engie work because it's my favorite class and I tried Holosmith and Scrapper over the years since. But Holosmith was too much and while Scrapper cause less physical stress, I still can't play it for long.

 

I like the new spec because with Signets and a pet that would mean lower APM requirements technically and I could play Engineer again. I only do story/open world stuff so the downside don't bother me that much. Actually, the fact that I find all full pet builds* in the game boring to play is probably a bigger issue with it...

 

*Minion master on Necro and I can't get Ranger to stick...

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

Almost 9 years Engineer and Scrapper main since HoT. I'm aware of the AI mess of the past. But I am not going to rant about it before I have seen it and was able to test it.

I hope we get a little more control over the mech, more than what Rangers can do with their pets. Preferably a ground-target option to deploy it. Normally when we get stuff from other professions it is either a downgraded version with an extended cooldown or a completely different thing that basically shares the concept with the original. Looking at the trailer, I bet for the 2nd. A ranger-main may have serious issues playing the Mechanist. 

We may probably lose our precious toolbelt-skills as a whole, at least while the mech is deployed, which might be a real trade-off for once. We have annoying builds, with certain specializations, that just use the toolbelts and ignore the real skills behind them. Which caused a couple of annoying nerfs for Core. 

Looking forward to test it. And I am also looking forward to the first 'NERF Mechanist' thread in the sPvP section, which may pop up before the beta-test.  

[Aedil.1296]

22 hours ago, Terrorsquad.2349 said:

Not an engi main here but did play a lot of it.

Honestly it seems quite interesting but gotta wait until next week to test it.
However, Im quite against any AI-related builds; it fails in some context but OP in another.

Next week? Isn't the beta today? 

[Aedil.1296]

21 hours ago, mortrialus.3062 said:

I think having a golem or robot, or mecha is an important part of the engineer class fantasy and it's actually odd that it has taken so long for the game to add that.

True! 

Golemancers are well known since GW1. 

Not sure why they called it Mecha though. 

According to lore this should be just called Golemancer no? 🤷‍♂️

[Terrorsquad.2349]

6 minutes ago, Aedil.1296 said:

Next week? Isn't the beta today? 

No, today is the stream preview (21.00CEST), test is officialy next week

[Aedil.1296]

1 minute ago, Terrorsquad.2349 said:

No, today is the stream preview (21.00CEST), test is officialy next week

Nooooooo I thought it was today 😭

[Dadnir.5038]

Well, the poll is already useless since you should have as many "blank" in "main" as there is answer in "non-main" and vice versa.

 

[Undo.5091]

When I first saw the intro video for mechanist, I had some serious flashbacks of watching my blast gyro do three consecutive 360 spins while on its way to its target at the middle node on Foefire.

 

The spec looks decent visually, but I don’t expect to use it in either WvW or sPvP considering how unreliable the AI in this game is. I can’t defend any AI-based mechanics when I’ve personally witnessed my sneak gyro running off into the sunset and exploding when I needed an extra pulse or two of stealth. That being said, there are obvious work-arounds for the AI that players can use as they adapt, but the issue is still there.

 

Overall, I’m interested by the aesthetics of the spec, but I fully expect to avoid all forms of stairs in the future.

[Bish.8627]

As someone who has mained both Engineer and Mesmer. I hope it goes more the way of mesmer where the mech attacks based on abilities, like phatasmal swordsman for example, or the defensive focus one I forget the name of. Rather than like a ranger pet where you are reliant on it doing its job and sometimes it doesn't or dies etc. Initial Scrapper bots were awful, especially stealth, they refused to follow half the time, but the improved ones are good, so I hope that is kept in mind.