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Mechanist Feedback Thread


Fire Attunement.9835

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Just a few thoughts; 

Mace feels a little clunky and should have a trait alongside it - or perhaps associated with a passive 

J-drive feels the way to go due to signet focus; thusly, the other GM traits feel like they need extra oomph of some description 

A way to hang off the mech would be rad; using it as a health barrier - though, this would take some effort when it comes to animation and perhaps changing skills while 'mounted'. Though, that'd be a future hope.

Signets and the interplay between mech and player are fun and interesting

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(WvW player)

The lack of toolbelt is way too punishing. Most of engi skills are designed with that duality in mind, and without that there's a lot of skills that are just not worth taking anymore.

* Most of the elixirs (U is okay-ish, B is useless, S is hardly worth it, R is just a laugh, C is okay-ish but still only half of its functionality is available, lack of boons on H, X is fine coz it's balanced for Holo and Scrapper already),

* kits (nades are okay-ish but lose the spike, bomb looses the blast&knockback, elixir gun looses stun break - hardly worth taking, toolkit is okay-ish, medkit is ??? lack of actual healing skill? Wtf is that?),

not even gonna bother going over gadgets and turrets coz they're mostly trash to begin with.

I tried using elixir U but traiting for HGH for half of a skill feels like a waste. Also signets don't have any associated traits, just like Exceed skills on Holo. Engi lacking synergy between skills and traits is getting tiresome.

 

Also read this thread coz this guy has a lot of good points 

 

Edited by Samug.6512
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After playing a few games of sPvP here are my first thoughts.

  • The damage on the pet might be a bit too strong, I wouldn't mind loosing some of it to gain back more utilities on the player.
  • The pet path finding is just as bad the the Ranger's, which is an issue because kitting is important, particularly at high level, and the pet can't keep up and sometimes take forever to get back to you, something annoying since the signet work around it. I would recommend to move the Crash Down/Recall Mech to F5, and add a F4 ability to shadow step the mech back to the player.
  • Talking about Crash Down, the skill shouldn't root the player.
  • Mace felt good, nothing to say on that front.
  • The pet doesn't use some of its skills very well and they'll miss quite often, Jade Mortar being of of the worst offender. I suggest making those skills ground targeted to avoid the pet missing.
  • For the Signets, as I talked before them being used on the pet is an issue when it went chasing someone or is stuck somewhere. I'd suggest having the Signet working on both you and your pet, but reducing the area of effect, but if your pet is down increasing the area of effect, right now they feel a bit underwhelming because of it. 
  • Not having a tool belt feels really bad, particularly when the pet is down for a 100 seconds, furthermore as it has been discussed in length already the engineer was always designed and balanced with the tool belt  in mind, without it a lot of skills lose a lot of power. Bring back the tool belt when the pet is offline, which also means making tool belt skills for Signet, another way to make them a bit more compelling too.
  • I'm not sure how I feel about the break bar it's a really strong defensive tool, probably doesn't have a place in sPvP. On the other hand the pet clearly lack other defensive tools such as condition cleanse, only though Crisis Zone which has long cool down, or a dodge, Guild Wars 2 is a game about avoid damage not being a sponge for it. I'd remove the break bar, and maybe give the ability to dodge in place (like a Mirage) when the player dodges to the pet (it'd also bring more synergy with the explosives trait line for explosive entrance). Furthermore maybe speed up some of the pet animations in order to avoid being stunned to easily, again this would come with a reduction of its damage.
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Mace seems weak, even weaker then pistol. That's should be telling enough.

  • 1 is weak, confusion doesn't synergize with firearms DoT duration for bleeding/burning and thermal vision
  • 2 has a very short ranged (esp. when compared to sword/holo leaps)
  • 3 even though it stuns, has a pretty long CD and low damage
  • very little synergy with the explosion DoT traits (which seemingly is wanted with 1st row grandmaster). all mace skills should be explosions

Little synergy with trait lines outside of explosion and firearm:

  • Tools: Mech Commands are fewer then toolbelt skills and have longer CD - a lot less benefit from all toolbelt focused traits. Also doesn't help that the tool line is power focused
  • Alchemy: only works with Inventions for the condition removal traits via protection/shield. Medkit is bad because of no F1
  • Inventions: Only really useful when you run mechanist 2-2-2 to provide more boons.

Master traits:

  • Master traits are picked based on your gear
  • Master traits due to the stat increase force you into their respective line, esp. for power and condition builds. I'd move all of the inherited stats into baseline mech, and have these traits give a static x cond/exp, hp/conc, and power/ferocity to the mech, in addition to whatever it inherits.
  • Channeling Conduits has some synergy with Mace/Engineer, while the other two Master traits offer 0 benefit to the engineer. Some static stat boosts to the engineer (which then are inherited by the mech), would help here.

Specific traits:

  • Jade Dynamo seems totally out of place in it's position. J-Drive and Barrier Enginge give benefits to the engineer, either via boons/barrier or signets, while Jade Dyname gives a condition mech traits from a primarily power focused traitline.
  • You can move Jade Dynamo to the Jade-Cannons traits, increase the chance for explosion to 100%, and with the lovely explosion minor trait of steel-packed-power, get a pretty similar effect on what it currently does. Even the name "jade canons" works with the explosion theme.
Edited by kaesebrezen.3104
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Okay so I'm not an engi main but I have probably a little over 500 hours on the class. I also mainly play PvE.

First of all, the golem looks nice and has cool animations.  That's really the only good thing I have to say about the Mechanist sadly.

The lack of toolbelt skills really hurts the class.  My suggestion would be to either buff the stats of the engi when the golem is unavailable (similar to soulbeast merge perhaps,) or to give mechanist access to toolbelt skills when the golem is unavailable.

The golem is pretty terrible in PvE.  It's very unresponsive and will often ignore orders.  The weak breakbar is pretty bad, and the golem would honestly function better without a breakbar period.

The mace is okay.  It's not great, doesn't feel fun to play, but doesn't feel bad.  Weapon swap would also be nice on Mechanist taking into consideration the many toolbelt skills that are no longer accessible in Mechanist.

I guess don't really care if the class is fixed or not, because I don't play classes that rely on derpy AI to function well.

Bottom line is, Mechanist takes away too many things from Engineer without offering enough in return.  Engineers deserve better.

Edited by Thanatos.2691
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Toolbelt:
The Core toolbelt needs to comeback, being mechanist feels hollow when our Jade Mech is not available. We also need an F4 Button call back our mech if its melee build + its too far from us + F5 button to swap to core toolbar ability.
The whole elite spec heavily relies on buffing the jade mech + giving it abilites but we don't have anything to sustain if our mech is stuck in cooldown for repairs

Jade Mech:
Cooldown for the maximum needs to be down to 30 while the minimum cooldown needs to be removed
We need a better breakbar for PvE, it's soft as paper fighting in high level zones especially against HoT condi mobs.
The dismissal of the mech happens when after we dismount then we get hit by another cooldown, that needs to go.
Some of Jade Mech abilities shouldnt  be really needed to be rooted including the Crisis Zone ability when I need to give alacrity for party members.
The AI for the jade mech needs a better improvement, there are times when I want to use Barrier Signet but its too far from me or trying to use it abilities but it cancels out itself.
We need support skills for our jade mech to do the same stuff as heal scourge, support scrapper, support rangers to go towards downstate allies and be able to revive them.

Signets:
All the signet needs a buff,each signet needs to be more powerful and needs an additional feature when we have our jade mech active
Healing Signet: We need another pulse radius when we have our jade mech active it also heals small portions to our allies
Barrier Signet: Needs to extend from 5 players to 10 + cleanses conditions or give us stability
Force Signet: Damage output needs to be more and it needs to have blast finisher
Superconducting Signet: Please buff this one give it alot more condition as a nuke button, the whole signet needs to be changed to something else or buff the base damage from conditions.
Shift Signet Needs a change it should give us an option to teleport back to our position and instead of shadowstep from point A to point B it should work like a portal similar to sandwell portal like scourges.
Overclock Signet: Its in a bad underwhelming spot that needs a big improvement, whatever grandmaster trait it also benefits from it. Lets say we the jade dynamo active, it also burns the enemy + field, if its the barrier engine not only the beam outputs a barrer but it also cleanses conditions but if its the J-drive it also launches enemy targets in its cone.


Traits:
The biggest problem with the whole traitlines they do not have an ounce of benefit towards the engineers themselves, we are handicapped without our mech on the field.
Mech Fighter + Energy Siphoning that buffs both Vitality + Toughness stats feels a waste, they should be together into 1 while we get other stat inprovement for the jade mech
J-Drive improving signets + Overdrive Signet is underwhelming please make it either a passive traitline or give it a better bonus + better reduction of cooldown
Sky Circus is just a bad trait when dismissed or away for repairs, that part in-particular shouldn't be a grandmaster trait, that overall should've been in the grandmaster trait
Sky Circus Aerial Bombardment is asking for a downgrade when you don't have jade mech active on the field and it doesn't much since there isn't any other traits in the elite spec that can synergized for engineers
Jade Dynamo trait needs its explosions to be improved above the 33% + give us more condi power.
Core Shot Reactor is still underperforming for power builds, they need to be more than 60% for our mech.
Barrier Engine + Crisis Zone abilities should not be locked to 5 Number of allies when appling boons + support they should be available for raids.
Support traitline abilities could've been given to us the ability similar to scourges / scrapper to to revive them with our jade mech.

 

Builds: (Noted it's just exotics + just using whatevers available in the beta pre-sets, don't have full legendaries to be flexible)

Power PvE:
It's underwhelming with explosions build, I'm having hard time trying to be consistant to get to 30k benchmark, the power signet is just stuck in a weird justoxposition with no combo finisher and m/p feels underwhelming comparing to its rifle power

 

Condi PvE:
They are just straight downgrade comparing to core engineers + holosmith condi
P/P weapon set still does better output dps than mace/pistol
confusion dps doesn't help much if im fighting agaist high end with breakbars broken

 

Support Pve:
It has great potential to be either diviners/harrier buildset for perm alacrity buffer or heal support.

We are in a dire need for another ability to condi clease our party / raid members apart from Crisis Zone.

We also need another support ability that can either give us stability or break stun for our allies.

Jade Mech could've been par with other heal support that revives downstate players but they don't do enough apart from being a buff bot + barrier. The barriers they output is still underwhelming comparing to scrappers + scourges.

Ventari Alacrity Heal set 2.0

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Overall I'm actually pretty happy with the Mechanist. However I do have two small suggestions:

 

  1. Show the Mech's stats in the Mech naming screen (preferably including derived stats so you see both Expertise and Condition Duration)
  2. Make at least one of the Mace skills an Explosion (preferably either the 3rd skill of the auto chain or Energizing Slam, though thematically Rocket Fist Prototype makes the most sense).  
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I will skip the stuff that has allready been said. You can't play this as condi spec imho and i really dont know why they glued the upper gm to the explo line. The pet itself does allmost no condi dmg even in full dire/trailblazer. The autos tick for like 150 dmg and have no duration to even build up stacks. Forcing it to be meele adds to the problem because how easy it can be kited. The old problem of condi engi shows itself once more that we have no real good condi line and for sure its not explo. The new mech line falls in this departement too. What was their plan? Explo/mecha/inventions? You have no dmg at all. Explo/Firearms/mech? You have no deff on a build with severe shortage of slotable skills.

As for personal feedback, the whole concept is so passive and non interactive that it is simply not for me. I mean who would have thought engi of all professions would get the spec that has less skills to press than all the core specs. If i buy eod i will problably switch to ele main since i liked the old dd/bruiser gameplay with its combofields.

Edited by schloumou.3982
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@Fire Attunement.9835 Here is my feedback for the Mechanist.
First of all, I do like this spec a lot, but there are a few things that bother me and I deem them "need to be changed".

 

1. Mech Interface & Tool-Belt

Instead of a copy-paste of the rangers pet interface, the mechanist should get access to the "Mech-Belt".

It is the "Tool Belt", though instead of getting utilitys solted there, you can choose 1 of 3 skills for F1, F2, F3, and F4.
F5 will be summoning your golem.
These abilties have to sides, one is the "tool belt", but once you summon your golem they become the golem skills.

The F2, F3, F4 are our Golem skills we have right now, the F1 will be a "support/heal" type (so we can use the med kit if we want to...)

This would make the mechanist working even if the golem is down.

The other idea is, that you can push your golem towards range/meele and so on via the mech-belt skills, without directly comiting to condi or power damage (that you due via traits).

 

2. Stat Conversion

this is the thing, I do not understand: Why do we have to trait for the mech to pick up certain stats?

They use _our_ stats to convert from, so we can only use the mech for what we play (support/boon, Condi, Power).

So why not simply through in the minor adept "100% all stat conversion". Then we can pick and choose more freele in the master traits and we can get more interessting master minor and grandmaster minor, as those two feel very redundant.

 

3. Traits

This is more of a "consequenz" for moving the skill choosing to the mech belt, then a necessary change
The traits should still focus on boons, condi or power, but instead of giving attack, they should change them, so you could play a ranged condi mech.

Even better, if those traits affect your weapon as well
=> e.g.Mech Arms: Single Edge Cutter becomes "Sharpened Jade": Mech atacks apply bleeding, as do your attacks.

For the new minor traits there could be some stat bonus for using the mech, as well as one for not using it.

As you still have access to Mech-Belt abilities without the golem, this would be doable.
=> e.g. "Adaptable Programming": When your Mech is summond, gain Power, Concentration and Condition Damage. When your Mech is offline, gain Vitality, Healing Power and Toughness.

 

4. Grandmastertraits

All GM traits should be like the "Jade Dynamo" and have syngery with one of the core engeneer trait lines.

Barrier Engine could use alchemie, while J-Drive could interact with Firearms or something.

This would provide better snygery with the rest of the class and could lead to more interessting builds.

 

 

These changes would be, what I consider "necessary" for the class to truly take of andbe great.

 

 

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For the love of god Anet, why did you think this would even come close to working in WvW? I know no one cares about WvW, that's been apparent for like 4 years but my god, outside of a 1v1 situation the Mechanist is absolute garbage.

 

When I look at it from a design perspective I get that you were replacing the profession mechanic with another profession mechanic (Toolbelt yeeted, ranger pet in), but to lose so much utility and synergy just to get a dopey AI mech that summons itself half the time without you asking it to and then dies instantly to even a modest group dropping AoE seems utterly mad.

 

List of WvW cons:

-Summon F4 AoE is tiny and does no substantial damage or CC.

-Mech randomly summons itself at times. Dunno why but probably spaghetti code.

-Getting on your WvW mount will automatically put the mech on a 10 second cooldown. Once dismounting the mech will sometimes summon itself and sometimes won't.

-Mech will spaz out when going through keep portals. Makes using it very hard when you push out an objective's portal to bomb a zerg. Sometimes the mech stays behind the wall/gate. Sometimes it comes through with you if it teleports to you before combat begins.

-Having the Mech on anything other than 'Avoid combat' is asking for it to dumb run into AoE and insta-die.

-Condition based traits for F1 and F2 are melee, which once again is a death sentence for your Mech vs an enemy zerg.

-Support based traits really rely on your Mech not spazzing out and dying during pushes. Unless you are playing the most pirate ship, concrete feet meta builds imaginable your Mech will almost never be where it needs to be to give allies boons and barrier.

-Your Mech is gone for 100 seconds when it dies, which leaves you basically as a worse core engi until cooldown is over.

-Toolbelt skills were available (F1 through F4) in other elite specs and the F5 was the new elite mechanic (Function gyro and Photon Forge) There was hardly a penalty for taking these elites over core. No toolbelt at all is a huge loss in potential for Engi. So many stunbreaks, condi clears, stealths, superspeeds and synergies are lost without toolbelt. At the very least give us access to F1 through F4 toolbelt while the Mech is not on the field so it's not a giant nerf to your flexibility.

-Signet skills are very underwhelming when Mech is on battlefield, and are mediocre at best when used without Mech.

     -Rectifier signet is plain and basically has no use in a game mode where you are taking large damage spikes, not NPC auto attack pokes.

     -Barrier signet is useless for fine control when Mech is on the field, as the AI is dopey and your Mech just runs around. Has some utility when the dome follows you, but a scrapper does barrier application better with Bulwark gyro and they can choose when they want the defense field dome placed down instead of it being tied to the utility skill. 10% strike and condi damage reduction is fine.

     -Force Signet's Passive power is fine, but kind of meh. The enemy push back is pretty useless in most cases as your Mech needs to be in melee range for the knockback/cripple to work, and that means your Mech is 100% dead to AoE. With Mech not on the field it's an okay stunbreak and knockback, but is out shined by other stunbreaks available to engineer.

     -Superconducting signet is a mobile lightning field and pulses vulnerability and confusion. May have limited use as a condition stacking tool to stop boon conversion being as successful. Once again is useless on Mech as it's 240 radius and will kill your Mech if you're using it that close to AoEs.

     -Overclock signet is pretty bad just given how useless the recharge to signets are when they themselves are hardly useful in a zerg fight. The fact that it can remove the cooldown on your dead Mech with a 90 second recharge is pretty much a waste as your Mech undoubtedly will dumb AI walk though the same AoE patch and insta-die again. If for some reason you can actually get the buster cannon to go off while your Mech is still alive it's decent damage and a few burn ticks, but mortar kit auto attack is way better when you think about it and it's spammable.

-

 

List of WvW pros:

-F1 power trait skill can pierce through a zerg. That's at least a bit of damage

-Channeling Conduits trait line is actually awesome. If you can give barrier to allies via your Mech and yourself you can give an absolutely insane amount of alacrity to your party. Too bad your Mech likes to go hang out in the enemies AoE all day.

-Incredible brain dead roaming option if you have no friends and love flipping camps all night XD

 

In conclusion, Why play a nerfed core Engi with a dead Mech in zerg fights when you can play anything else.

 

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

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From a Wvw perspective the mech is clunky AF. Additionally the mech doesnt seem to know when its in range for a command or not - an example of this is the different behaviour of using "jade mortar" and "crisis zone". If ur not in range of the target and use "jade mortar" the mech will fire it in the random direction its already facing, whereas using "crisis zone" out of range of ur target makes the mech run toward the target and popping the skill at melee range which is completely useless if the engineer himself want the cleanse/boons.

The lack of toolbelt skills when the mech is down is exactly as bad as I and many other suspected previous to the beta - this mostly bcs the entire trait section is based around buffing the mech and not the engineer and bcs much of a core engineers power package comes form the toolbelt skills both in terms of dmg and support, but also survival.
 

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My very quick feedback on the Mechanist :

- In PVE, it's got to be the funniest class I've ever played in GW2. I love having to seek shelter behind my pet. I love that it's easier to manage than most classes which requires you to play piano to get things done in open world. It's packed with every tools needed to get though open world parts easily. And I loved that I'm able to tune it the way I want (I liked the 2/2/2 or 3/2/2 traits).

- In WVW, I saw my mech melt countless times in Aoes without even understanding where he was standing as he can move quite far and chase a target. I've had to bring in the shadowstep signet just in order to manage my mech erratic behavior (I used the signet to get it back to where I wanted instantly). Seems like Mechanist is going to be great in general PVE and subpar in competitive modes. Yet again, engineers have already two very strong specs in these fields so...

 

Edited by Neva Eilhart.5347
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First 1 major concern that must be solved:

- When your golem is on cooldown mechanist is weak being relegated to be a core engineer whith just 2 traitlines cause golem cd is too high. Something that can be done easily to solve this problem is just adding powerfull spells for f1, f2 and f3 toolbelt abilities that sinergyze with your traits choice.

 

Second add some pet comands like the ones on ranger.

 

Third but less important add customization for your golem, being able to dye it would be nice. Also i would love to get at least some skins for it by doing some missions, pvp or wvw tracks.

 

With that being said i love the concept but it needs some work to make it relevant. Signets are well rounded but i think that the damage signet outshines the condition signet and the mace is just ok, being able to evade with 2 skill on mace or adding some barrier it would be nice.

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Disclaimer : I'm not an engineer user.

I liked the specialization so far. However, not having the toolbelt felt a bit lackluster. Maybe give the engi access to that toolbelt whenever the golem is off ?

Specters have gained access to ally targeting.
Is it possible to add the ability to move the mech by clicking on a destination (like in Diablo) ?

Edited by Tabootrinket.2631
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I will preface this by saying that I play PVE and my comments are regarding playing it in OW/raiding environment.  My initial feedback having only played with it for a short time is:

 

1) The cool down on the F skills are very difficult to see.  The F icons are too 'busy' for lack of a better word, and contain a lot of black and white so the small white numbers for the CD as well as the blacked out area that ticks away are just very difficult to see.

 

2) I used the mech on Vale Guardian and it died pretty fast.  Not sure if it was to the Greens exploding, or dmg from the floor, or what.  Will try to use it more to test out, but dying very easily to mechanics where you have to stand in a specific place to avoid dmg (such as VG floor, or MO floor etc) is a problem when you can't easily position the mech.  

 

3) which brings me to another point, I wish we were able to better control where the mech positions itself.  It makes for clunky gameplay when the mech is standing too far away for the signet actives to help me out when I am in melee range. And the unpredictability of that is a bit of a pain. 

 

4) If you want to set it up for Condi damage in PVE, so far it seems like engis are still gonna need to use nades, bomb kit and mortar kit for high DPS.  I mean, it would be nice to have some gameplay that is different from what is the current condi dps set up.  I feel like ANet wants us to use the signets with the mech, but doing so doesn't seem to be optimal in terms of DPS.  Also, if we do go condi dps, we have zero stunbreak cause the stunbreak is on the passive power signet.  Give us another stunbreak option pls. 

4) for a support oriented spec, if we take med kit we lose our self heal.  This feels really bad. 

 

I'm not sure about the Mace atm.  I really would have liked Anet to have broken another rule for this elite spec and allowed mace to be used in both hands.  Maybe as a power dps weapon.  Cause mace/shield doesn't feel great as a DPS, and Rifle just isn't strong enough.

 

Edited by tetmikem.5608
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After playing it in sPvP for a while:

I came to settle on a build+tactic quite fast. You send in your golem to chase someone, and you kite spamming grenade kit. It's way more effective than anything else... and that's not a good thing.
When the enemy mechanic did exactly this, it became a quite  -REDACTED- game of tag.

While the damage is fine, too much of it is tied to your golem. If your golem gets caught in a teamfight, or by a trapper ranger etc... you can resummon once, then you're in for a 90+ seconds timeout. If the enemy mechanist is ever so "dumb" as to send its golem into harms way, you just focus down the mech and enjoy a 4v5 for more than a minute.
Killing the golem actually takes precedent over killing the mechanist because of this timeout prison.

So while the basic idea might seem like fun, this spec won't be viable in sPvP. I don't even need to go into details on traits and whatnot, ranger specs have ways to keep their AI companion alive, while mechanists do not. (You can put it on peaceful mode and let the signet tick its health slowly up, lol what even is this)

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Mechanist needs a serious rework.

 

Lore wise, it is super cool and I love it but sacrifing a whole traitline and all toobelt skills for a single golem does not worth. Engineer do not have wepaon swap with toolbelt being removed, a traitline heavily tied with golem and having low synergy within and with other trailines making Mechanist feels so limiting when playing.

  

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A lot of the skills create bright flashing lights that are painful to look at, especially if the camera gets close in the middle of a fight. I find it as bad and unplayable as Holosmith. As with all the other painfully bright flashing effects this game spams, I'm sure Anet doesn't give a kitten, though.

Edited by BlueJin.4127
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