Nade engi

[Sleepwalker.1398]

2 hours ago, Scavarius.6059 said:

if i can just stroll up to you and drop supplycrate+barage on you, you deserve to die.

but i agree, its op. but knowing  anet they would nerf it into the ground. maybe the announced balancepatch post eod will do something.

Why would you use supply crate when Rocket+Barrage will give a better result.

[The Boz.2038]

31 minutes ago, Sleepwalker.1398 said:

Why would you use supply crate when Rocket+Barrage will give a better result.

...which you can do from a long stealth...

Honestly, supply crate?

[solemn.9670]

8 hours ago, Scavarius.6059 said:

if i can just stroll up to you and drop supplycrate+barage on you, you deserve to die.

but i agree, its op. but knowing  anet they would nerf it into the ground. maybe the announced balancepatch post eod will do something.

I'm hoping so.

I'm less concerned about the braindead combos than I am just the constant near-unavoidable damage (I don't have infinite reflects like the nade engi has infinite grenades). Every one of those skills do far more than they should and the auto attack is, well, an auto attack it never goes on cd.

It's just like the "how to fight a shadow arts thief" meme; you don't, you just die because regardless of player skill it's going to win over your build unless you're using something equally untouched by balance and broken, and lord knows there are many builds like that right now, but for those of us hanging onto honour builds it's not so fun lmao.

*hits a 14k nade, instantly 50% of my healthbar has become barrier*

(I would post the braindead meme image here, but I'm afraid it's not exactly appropriate for gw2 forums and the mods give me enough spanks as is)

[Jski.6180]

I am still confused why eng kits have no cd on there swap it seems like there a real place where anet can balance eng kits effects by just adding in a risk of jumping out of there kits like every thing else is balanced base off of the risk of swapping out.

[LilBiM.3581]

Can we have a conversation that would result in Core Engineer being playable after these changes. I know that most players who don't play Engineer don't care at all but perhaps some of these recommendations are more harmful to the class, and it's dwindling player base, than the number of players who find this particular problem challenging to deal with?

[Stx.4857]

Please whatever you do to grenades make sure its pvp only.  

[Arheundel.6451]

11 minutes ago, Stx.4857 said:

Please whatever you do to grenades make sure its pvp only.  

All professions except the usual ones : Engi-necro and Rev, all of them have been nerfed with the same intensity both in PvP and WvW, the same nerfs got applied in both game modes....why should it be different for engis?

[Stx.4857]

20 minutes ago, Arheundel.6451 said:

All professions except the usual ones : Engi-necro and Rev, all of them have been nerfed with the same intensity both in PvP and WvW, the same nerfs got applied in both game modes....why should it be different for engis?

WvW is pvp is it not?  You are fighting other players.  Just keep the nerfs out of pve, where engineers are not one of the top classes.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

1 hour ago, LilBiM.3581 said:

Can we have a conversation that would result in Core Engineer being playable after these changes. I know that most players who don't play Engineer don't care at all but perhaps some of these recommendations are more harmful to the class, and it's dwindling player base, than the number of players who find this particular problem challenging to deal with?

Sadly, it's what the forums does.  

Speaking from WvW standpoint...

From my limited exposure to playing engi and somewhat greater exposure to fighting the grenade variety in WvW, I think all we need is some rings to tell where the grenades will be.  If really want to mitigate stealth then just make the rings appear slightly before explosion happens--even if engi is in stealth--I dunno, quarter second explosion delay if that's possible.  

I mean, if it's the damage that bothers everyone, how many of you get owned by the keep lords that use Call to Arms which will do 10k+ and isn't exactly easy to spot if there are a group of people there? Should we nerf keep lords now too?

I guess I just personally don't find engineers that dangerous in general.  Most classes can be dangerous in group settings, and there are classes with a lot more evasions and stealth access that are far more difficult to deal with than engi, at least IMO.  

Edited February 3, 2022 by Gotejjeken.1267

[Alcatraznc.3869]

I've never lost a fight against an engineer camping grenade kit so I dont know where's the problem with that.

 

Actually I know that barrage grenade does a lot of damage but the issue comes from it being used in combo with stealth. I'll say the same thing I said in another topic : I dont mind Anet nerfing the kit however before nerfing the kit they should address everything that involves stealth like the thief backstab or the mesmer surprise burst.  Because in the end of the days, if stealth wasnt there, there would be less complain about these stuff and maybe the thief section would be filled with "thief now unplayable".

[Scavarius.6059]

On 2/3/2022 at 9:48 AM, The Boz.2038 said:

...which you can do from a long stealth...

Honestly, supply crate?

thats the fun part. nobody expects the crate. and nobody epxects an engi to just stroll up to you. got a bunch of thiefs with that.

[Kuma.1503]

In PvP? 

By do something do you mean make Grenade barrage deal less power damage than Shrapnel Grenade and make Freeze and Posion grenade deal less damage than the auto attack?

If so, been there done that. After every nerf people develop amnesia and pretend nades haven't been touched yet because somehow, the build keeps killing them, yet it's never nade Scrapper or Core nades are meta. It's always the Holosmith nade builds that seem to be doing it 

(Hmmm... this would almost suggest the problem isn't nades at all, but rather Holo being so much stronger than the other engi specs)

If I sound sarcastic here it's because I've had this conversation so... so many times on the PvP forums. Core engi ain't broke it's the elite that Anet refuses to make substantial changes to. 

 

If we're talking PvE...

No. Holo is precicely where a DPS should be. Specs like Firebrand, Scourge, and Renegade that can pull as much dps as a Holo (or other generic dps option)  in realistic scenarios while also bringing insane utility are what need to be toned down. These three have a stranglehold over the fractal meta right now. 

 

If we're talking WvW... 

There are better roamers. We have immortal deadeyes, sic em soulbeasts that can one shot you off of your mount with a single rapid fire, daredevils with their infinite reset potential, trapper dragonhunters. 

And then sitting roughly on the same power level as holo there's herald (Power and condi with cele gear and tormenting rune),  Renegade (Cele and Power), Various Weaver builds. Trailblazer Druid, Trailblazer/cele core necro, And some lesser known stuff that can actually snap holo in half if played well like Cele Firebrand.

There's also the rare power block mirage that you don't see often because it's hard to play, but very strong in the right hands.  

 

WvW roaming is surprisingly well balanced due to the sheer amount of diversity there is between classes.  Ranger and Thief are obviously kings of roaming, while Firebrand and Scrapper are kings of squad fights, but as far as everything else goes, the only real limit is your own creativity... 

Which is why I personally love WvW. 

If I were to buff/nerf anything there...

I'd give warrior some much needed love. 

If I were to nerf anything on the roaming end, it would be thief/ranger. Nerfs on the squad end would be targeted at Scrapper, Firebrand, and scourge. 

I'd give Chrono distortion back because this spec needs it. 

If I had to nerf nade holo in a way that would actually be felt. I'd increase Holo leap's cooldown to 4 seconds like it is in PvP. Give slower builds a better shot at locking it down. 

 

 

Tl;dr:

Everywhere but PvP: Nade engi is fine

In PvP: Only nade Holo is strong. If we are to nerf anything nerf Holo. 

 

 

Edited February 5, 2022 by Kuma.1503

[schlop.2873]

Cross post from the celestial forums. Yes the players aren't as good as him but that fact that he took out a zerg:

 

[TrollingDemigod.3041]

13 minutes ago, schlop.2873 said:

Cross post from the celestial forums. Yes the players aren't as good as him but that fact that he took out a zerg:

 

"NaDeS dOn'T nErFs, ThEy'Re BaLaNcEd!"
What a joke...

[Kuma.1503]

12 hours ago, schlop.2873 said:

Cross post from the celestial forums. Yes the players aren't as good as him but that fact that he took out a zerg:

 

Hmmmmmm... I'm in the process of trying to reverse engineer his build. (Ha get it, engineer)

And there are a few things I've been able to figure out so far. 

He's bleeding and crippling with his nades so he's running Shrapnel. He has 25 might stacks constantly which initially made me thing he was running the Shrapnel + Sanguine Array combo, but 20 sec cooldown on Elixir H deconfirms that. He's definately Alch/Explosive/Scrapper.  

Nades on heal, so he has Grenadier. 

Explosive Temper buff.

So he's Explosives 1-2-2

In alchemy, HGH is a given. That accounts for some of his might but not 25 stacks worth

He heals and instantly gains vigor so he has Invigorating speed. 

Last trait is hard to notice, but Elixir E is standard so I'm going to assume he has that. 

So he's Alchemy 1-2-1

Finally for Scrapper traits. 

He gets quickness on heal meaning Kenetic Accelerators

Large wells + superspeed so he has Gyroscopic  Acceleration

Which means he can't be getting might from Mass Momentum. 

Final trait, if I had to guess is Object in motion. It makes the most sense for his build since he has such high swiftness/superspeed uptime.  

Now this begs one simple question. Where the heck is he getting so much might?

I know he has battle sigil. He dismounted at 4:58 and instantly got 5 stacks of might. Then it goes up to 11 and he gets fury and vigor. 

So he has Fireworks rune. 

But that's still only 11 might every 20 seconds. 

He never shows what food he has, but he's using nades which hit 3 times each and he's attacking a lot of targets... 

He only has food effects left to get might from sooo. 

He's running Plate of roasted cactus... Or golden dumpling for a cheaper option. I went ahead and tested it and there is, in fact, no ICD on how often you can proc the might, so hitting a full zerg with nades... it makes sense that his might is so high. 

The one thing I'm not so sure about is his final sigil. With the might accounted for, I'm unceartain what it is. Cleansing? Strength?. Personally I'd run cleansing for those moments when my elixir C is on cooldown, but I'll let you guys be the judge. 

Well there we go. If anyone wants the full build here you go: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PegAo6lFwwYaMH2JOSTZtWA-zxIY1oh/MKVB0rEQxzyYnRA-e

Have fun :')

 

That was way more effort than needed to be expended, buuuuuut I was curious and bored.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 7, 2022 by Kuma.1503

[LilBiM.3581]

 

9 hours ago, schlop.2873 said:

Cross post from the celestial forums. Yes the players aren't as good as him but that fact that he took out a zerg:

 

He's kiting like a boss, only one ( maybe two? ) ranger(s) in that group actually are spec'd to do him damage or with the mobility to keep up. My guy blocks at the right times and kites them out like a boss. You can see he moves really well too, forward and back to get into range, pulling and pushing out of combat.

 

Well played to him, reminds me of old school engineer roamers out there. He's on those grimy, filthy, cheese filled WvW streets jumping into groups without a stun breaker. Very well done, impressive.

 

Having said that CC, boon strips, projectile hate and somebody shooting him in the back while he was kiting would have ended this man's 'rein of terror' and prevented the yeeting of nades. But the most important question here from this display is; Is it really just grenade kit allowing him to get away with these shenanigans though? I know that it appears that way from the video but is it really just grenade kit?

Edited February 6, 2022 by LilBiM.3581
Removed unnecessary quote

[schlop.2873]

2 hours ago, LilBiM.3581 said:

 

He's kiting like a boss, only one ( maybe two? ) ranger(s) in that group actually are spec'd to do him damage or with the mobility to keep up. My guy blocks at the right times and kites them out like a boss. You can see he moves really well too, forward and back to get into range, pulling and pushing out of combat.

 

Well played to him, reminds me of old school engineer roamers out there. He's on those grimy, filthy, cheese filled WvW streets jumping into groups without a stun breaker. Very well done, impressive.

 

Having said that CC, boon strips, projectile hate and somebody shooting him in the back while he was kiting would have ended this man's 'rein of terror' and prevented the yeeting of nades. But the most important question here from this display is; Is it really just grenade kit allowing him to get away with these shenanigans though? I know that it appears that way from the video but is it really just grenade kit?

 

I'm going with it isn't just the 'nade kit and a combination of a few things. 😛 

• He has very good movement and play. I quickly just poked around his twitch stream and and he constantly checks what enemies there are before engaging and swaps skills and traits accordingly. He kites sooo well. (And opposing team comp, as you pointed out.)
• Celestial allows for the boon spam which adds tons of might and incredible sustain. Zerker-ish scrapper can be tanky, but not this tanky. 
• Nades. With the boon-spam is any other class able to kite and pump out that much AOE damage all while sustaining?

 

Remove any of these three and I feel the results would be quite different.  I don't play engi so I could be missing something huge. 

[inci.3705]

13 hours ago, Kuma.1503 said:

 

The one thing I'm not so sure about is his final sigil. With the might accounted for, I'm unceartain what it is. Cleansing? Strength?. Personally I'd run cleansing for those moments when my elixir C is on cooldown, but I'll let you guys be the judge. 

 

He has a 25 stack buff on his bar. I'm willing to bet it's Star sigil.

[LilBiM.3581]

12 hours ago, schlop.2873 said:

 

I'm going with it isn't just the 'nade kit and a combination of a few things. 😛 

• He has very good movement and play. I quickly just poked around his twitch stream and and he constantly checks what enemies there are before engaging and swaps skills and traits accordingly. He kites sooo well. (And opposing team comp, as you pointed out.)
• Celestial allows for the boon spam which adds tons of might and incredible sustain. Zerker-ish scrapper can be tanky, but not this tanky. 
• Nades. With the boon-spam is any other class able to kite and pump out that much AOE damage all while sustaining?

 

Remove any of these three and I feel the results would be quite different.  I don't play engi so I could be missing something huge. 

Nades are great to punish groups of mobs so his opponents bunching and face tanking everything helped him to build a ton of might in this scenario (thanks to sigils). I haven't watched his streams but I am curious to know if he can actually build that much might in a 1v1.

 

Very good points all in all but some traits in Scrapper allow him to do well with this however I don't think this is a feat that most players can emulate, perhaps engi mains out there can prove me wrong on this. You would need to know your match-ups well and like you said, change your traits on the fly accordingly as well as to be constantly hitting your targets to sustain (which is made easier by having quickness). A regular engineer would certainly find this impossible to do.

 

Another thing that he does well in this is to focus down all the match-ups that counter him. He and his friend focused all the rangers, all the necros and all the eles out of that train which meant that later on he could just keep running and kiting his opponents. Really it's great situational awareness from him ( to find them all in the first place ) and outstanding knowledge of what's a danger to him and what he can kite out.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

On 2/6/2022 at 7:08 AM, schlop.2873 said:

Cross post from the celestial forums. Yes the players aren't as good as him but that fact that he took out a zerg:

 

 

Hate to be a downer here, but from that first nc clip basically it's just being intelligent vs a bunch of pew pew bots.  No one got close or pressured, so of course he can win by attrition.  There's also a thief in there ganking which is non-trivial addition.  

 

The warrior forums might be with me on this one after some of my other less than popular opinions; but, if you'd actually fix warrior this montage wouldn't exist.  Even in current game if you get a good melee ranger or thief this doesn't happen--because from all I understand counter-pressure and kiting is the bane of this nade engi build.  

[Stx.4857]

What's funny about people who post clips like that is..   they just point to the grenades and cry.  Like there's absolutely nothing else in that guy's build that could potentially be the issue.  Not scrappers high barrier or superspeed, not Celestial stats, not the terrible players who don't focus him..   it's the grenades!

[Stalima.5490]

The grenade kit has always been a problem since the release of the game, the main 2 issues on it are how fast it attacks and the fact it puts 3 vuln on every time it does, in my opinion they need to normalise steel-packed powder with a flat stack value with cooldown, this would grant the trait a more equal power level across all builds that use explosives.

 

In fact I think I just noticed half the problem with engineer... While the 1 attacks are nerfed on all of the base weapons in pvp, none of the kits have their attacks nerfed which is obviously going to cause build diversity issues relating to the use of them, this seems like a pretty bad design flaw if you ask me.

[Alcatraznc.3869]

On 2/10/2022 at 9:03 PM, Stalima.5490 said:

The grenade kit has always been a problem since the release of the game, the main 2 issues on it are how fast it attacks and the fact it puts 3 vuln on every time it does, in my opinion they need to normalise steel-packed powder with a flat stack value with cooldown, this would grant the trait a more equal power level across all builds that use explosives.

 

In fact I think I just noticed half the problem with engineer... While the 1 attacks are nerfed on all of the base weapons in pvp, none of the kits have their attacks nerfed which is obviously going to cause build diversity issues relating to the use of them, this seems like a pretty bad design flaw if you ask me.

 

And yet no one really complains when a core engineer kill them with grenade. In fact people says core engineer is lackluster.

 

But once you throw Scrapper or Holosmith at them suddently the grenade is the issue. It's almost as if grenade isnt the issue actually... People says grenade haven't been changed and yet it suddently becomes a problem even though it got no buff or nerf ? 

Edited February 12, 2022 by Alcatraznc.3869

[Stalima.5490]

2 hours ago, Alcatraznc.3869 said:

And yet no one really complains when a core engineer kill them with grenade. In fact people says core engineer is lackluster.

 

But once you throw Scrapper or Holosmith at them suddently the grenade is the issue. It's almost as if grenade isnt the issue actually... People says grenade haven't been changed and yet it suddently becomes a problem even though it got no buff or nerf ? 

That's probably because the holosmith and scrapper are simple outright better than the core profession, there is almost no real trade off to either one, scrapper loses some base health but quickly just gains it all back from barrier and all holo really loses out on is the fairly weak elite toolbelts while gaining a whole kit worth of extra abilities, some of which are just as strong as, if not stronger than those toolbelts.

 

People do not complain about core grenades, because nobody plays core grenades when there is an outright better alternative, it was complained about all the time prior to the elite specialisations and is just further excessified by them being introduced and gradually power crept.

[ThrakathNar.4537]

8 hours ago, Stalima.5490 said:

That's probably because the holosmith and scrapper are simple outright better than the core profession, there is almost no real trade off to either one, scrapper loses some base health but quickly just gains it all back from barrier and all holo really loses out on is the fairly weak elite toolbelts while gaining a whole kit worth of extra abilities, some of which are just as strong as, if not stronger than those toolbelts.

 

People do not complain about core grenades, because nobody plays core grenades when there is an outright better alternative, it was complained about all the time prior to the elite specialisations and is just further excessified by them being introduced and gradually power crept.

Even if there were profession mechanic tradeoffs put in place, Scrapper and Holo would still pretty much remain flatly better than core - a significant part of the issue comes down to trait and utility balance.

 

Comparing Kinetic Battery in the Tools traitline to Kinetic Accelerators in Scrapper (both GM traits), there is a clear difference in power level. By using all 5 of your toolbelt skills, Kinetic Battery will give you, and only you, 5 seconds of quickness and superspeed. By using the same number of skills with the scrapper trait, you can give up to 5 targets 12.5 seconds of quickness each, in addition to the flat power->concentration bonus you get. The power difference between these two traits is incredibly apparent.

Granted, that alone is not proof of anything, since I just selected two GM traits that had similar effects. However, by just going through the list of Engineer traits, specifically in Tools and Inventions, there are just so many of them which are... bad. Between them, Scrapper and Holo only have two traits I would consider bad (Damage Dampener and CC:Storm), and the wealth of good options you have more than makes up for these.

The point being, both elite specs are not stronger by design, rather by the numbers of balance.

 

On the whole, Scrapper and Holo utility skills are better than core as well. Turrets suck, gadgets are niche, and elixirs are only strong in competitive. Meanwhile wells and exceed skills are reasonably useful everywhere. Kits are definitely a core feature that is strong, but as you yourself pointed out, they use PvE coefficients in WvW/PvP, and if they all had a 33% damage nerf they would not be so strong, and most of them would be dead again.