Pet changes for group content.

[Levetty.1279]

Is an engineer really here trying to argue that Mechs have it harder then Rangers? Talk about being delusional.

[Abyssisis.3971]

Anet won’t make any changes to pets to make them useful in wvw. All we can do is hope that the 4th elite spec is a designed with wvw in mind. I’m thinking condi sceptre sceptre focusing on burns, barriers and boon steal, consecrations for wvw zergball content and ground targeted summoned spirit pets that are immune to damage that actually pulse a little aoe damage when active, instead of regular pets. I’ve got some ideas I’ve been working on during my long 10 hour drives between towns for work, how early is too early to submit a suggestion? Lol

[Beddo.1907]

9 minutes ago, Abyssisis.3971 said:

how early is too early to submit a suggestion

There is a lot of Espec ideas (looking at you LB ele) so go ahead. Honestly we probably wouldn't get another support spec so Druid changes are the only thing that can help in WvW.

[Abyssisis.3971]

12 hours ago, Beddo.1907 said:

There is a lot of Espec ideas (looking at you LB ele) so go ahead. Honestly we probably wouldn't get another support spec so Druid changes are the only thing that can help in WvW.

We haven’t got a wvw support spec or a main hand ranged condi weapon, so either one or both is on the cards imo. Druid changes aren’t ever going to happen, it’s not one of the holy 3.

Edited July 20, 2022 by Abyssisis.3971

[kharmin.7683]

16 hours ago, Abyssisis.3971 said:

Anet won’t make any changes to pets to make them useful in wvw. All we can do is hope that the 4th elite spec is a designed with wvw in mind. I’m thinking condi sceptre sceptre focusing on burns, barriers and boon steal, consecrations for wvw zergball content and ground targeted summoned spirit pets that are immune to damage that actually pulse a little aoe damage when active, instead of regular pets. I’ve got some ideas I’ve been working on during my long 10 hour drives between towns for work, how early is too early to submit a suggestion? Lol

Probably one of the least populated game modes, and you want Anet to develop around it?  Clearly, they get more revenue from PvE which is why most of their resources are more dedicated to that format.  Good luck with your suggestion, but I cannot see Anet making such a change with so little benefit.

As I remember, pets in WvW were nerfed because of the complaints that players there thought it was unfair and didn't like dying to pets (which are AI controlled rather than losing to an actual player whose skill is the factor).  Boosting pets for WvW would just bring all of that back and I'm not sold that Anet would want that all over again.

[Kodama.6453]

18 hours ago, Levetty.1279 said:

Is an engineer really here trying to argue that Mechs have it harder then Rangers? Talk about being delusional.

I guess you are referring to me.

And no, I never said that mech has it harder than ranger. I am saying that mechanist is a complete design fiasco which just leaves 2 possible outcomes: the spec is either broken OP or useless.

And Anet is currently keeping the spec rather OP than useless. All the stuff mentioned here like the mech having a locked breakbar in PvE and shift signet is busted are bandaids to ensure that mechanist is able to succeed, which, as already said, means it will be OP.
The dev buffing shift signet even admitted that the skill is kept absurdly strong, because it is basically required to be in your build and he hopes that players won't feel bad to be forced to take a skill if this skill also happens to be stupid strong.

So my point isn't that mechanist has it harder, the point is that these tools are there so mechanist can function at all in PvE, since way too much of it's power budget is loaded on the mech. Meanwhile Anet doesn't really care about the ranger pet as much because the ranger pet just makes up a tiny bit of the entire power of the ranger.

Mechanist is bad design and the mech being overpowered is a direct consequence of that. And I have been very vocal in this forum here how mechanist is badly designed (not in the sense of "poor mechanist", but in the sense of "this thing will never be balanced").

Edited July 20, 2022 by Kodama.6453

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

3 hours ago, Kodama.6453 said:

I guess you are referring to me.

And no, I never said that mech has it harder than ranger. I am saying that mechanist is a complete design fiasco which just leaves 2 possible outcomes: the spec is either broken OP or useless.

And Anet is currently keeping the spec rather OP than useless. All the stuff mentioned here like the mech having a locked breakbar in PvE and shift signet is busted are bandaids to ensure that mechanist is able to succeed, which, as already said, means it will be OP.
The dev buffing shift signet even admitted that the skill is kept absurdly strong, because it is basically required to be in your build and he hopes that players won't feel bad to be forced to take a skill if this skill also happens to be stupid strong.

So my point isn't that mechanist has it harder, the point is that these tools are there so mechanist can function at all in PvE, since way too much of it's power budget is loaded on the mech. Meanwhile Anet doesn't really care about the ranger pet as much because the ranger pet just makes up a tiny bit of the entire power of the ranger.

Mechanist is bad design and the mech being overpowered is a direct consequence of that. And I have been very vocal in this forum here how mechanist is badly designed (not in the sense of "poor mechanist", but in the sense of "this thing will never be balanced").

Mechanist could very easily be balanced by toning down how much each individual trait does (good God that's a lot of text- it shouldn't be this much text per trait) and by nerfing the mech (and in turn giving back some damage to mechanist mace). Cut down the additional stats from the mech via trait lines, and maybe boost some of the base traits from the initial minor to ensure the mech isn't just dead weight. It's already extremely modular in terms of role fulfillment, it's just broken OP and does too many things at once, from a trait basis. I genuinely think mechanist just needs nerfs and not reworks, it's just too good. Turn down the mech numbers, turn up the mechanist numbers a little bit, and it'll likely perform perfectly fine- not firebrand standards, but if that's your go-to standard, don't talk about balance.

 

If shift signet is so mandatory, then why doesn't untamed have anything remotely like it? It's a pet centric elite spec for the core pet class. Their thoughts on people thinking it's mandatory are just flat out wrong- ranger specs that use pets don't take nature magic just because of fortifying bond (untamed doesn't even take it because of fortifying bond, they take it for alacrity because that's where the trait for spirits is).

[Kodama.6453]

1 hour ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

I genuinely think mechanist just needs nerfs and not reworks, it's just too good. Turn down the mech numbers, turn up the mechanist numbers a little bit, and it'll likely perform perfectly fine- not firebrand standards, but if that's your go-to standard, don't talk about balance.

I genuinely don't think that works.

The major problem is that the mech is replacing the toolbelt. The entire toolbelt of the core engineer. People have warned repeatedly for good reason that replacing the entire toolbelt as a trade off for a spec is a bad idea. Because we are balanced around having it in core and the toolbelt holds some crazy amount of our power.

Without toolbelt, we are losing so much stuff. One of our healing skills (bandage self), gone.
Half of our core stunbreaks (thumper turret toolbelt, elixir gun toolbelt, slick shoes toolbelt), gone.
Many of our best damage skills for dps builds (grenade kit toolbelt, rifle turret toolbelt, bomb kit toolbelt...), gone.

Let's look about numbers. There are 27 different toolbelt skills in core engineers arsenal (4 from healing skills, 20 from utility skills, 3 from elite skills).
Do you know how many different skill combinations are possible with that system? I did the math. It's 13680 different combinations.

The toolbelt is STRONG. And it gets completely removed for the mechanist. The mech needs to make up for this power loss, otherwise it is not worth using.

This is also the reason why they added a stunbreak to crisis zone, for example. Because people were pointing out that losing 3 core stunbreaks by picking mechanist really hurt the spec. So the mech has to make up for that and they introduced a stunbreak to crisis zone as a result.

They have replaced a really complex and strong mechanic with a fairly simple mechanic in exchange. And now the individual components of this new mechanic have to try to keep up with the power loss. Giving away the toolbelt has been the harshest trade off they ever did in this game. There is a reason they didn't try this before and they just always replaced the F5 of the toolbelt for scrapper and holosmith. Now they tried and it starts backfiring.

You say just shift that power from the mech to the mace... again, we have to compensate a huge power loss here. Do you know how ridiculous mace needs to be for that to work? Hell, did you LOOK at current mace? It is already really strong, because just as mech, it makes up for stuff lost because of the trade off!

1 hour ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

If shift signet is so mandatory, then why doesn't untamed have anything remotely like it? It's a pet centric elite spec for the core pet class. Their thoughts on people thinking it's mandatory are just flat out wrong- ranger specs that use pets don't take nature magic just because of fortifying bond (untamed doesn't even take it because of fortifying bond, they take it for alacrity because that's where the trait for spirits is).

And with all the things mentioned above, it is really easy to explain this here. Ranger has a different balance history. Ranger has been balanced around a weak class mechanic for years now. Pets are not a new thing it gained, it works with pets from the start. Sure, they could completely rework ranger to shift more power from the class towards the pet, weakening the ranger themselves in the process, but there is no reason for them to do that.

Hell, many players don't want ranger to be that reliant from the pet and just want it to be a small add on.
And that's what the pet currently is, a small add on. Pets don't have the damage scalings a mech has. A mech is making up like 50% of the damage of the mechanist. Meanwhile the pet of the ranger is maybe... 10%? Slightly more?

Because it got balanced that way. The pet not having boons is not such a big deal like for the mechanist.
Additionally, engineer got balanced around having these toolbelt skills which scale with their boons by default. The mech doesn't do that anymore. We are giving our scalings out of hand. And in most cases, that is a bad thing as long as you don't have an easy way to pass on these boons. Ranger got balanced around this fact from the start.

Ranger and mechanist have completely different relationships to their pets. Without the mech, a mechanist is nothing. If it's dead, you are basically just half a core engineer, if even. A ranger pet being dead is not decreasing your efficiency as much, you can still fight really well even without a pet.

You simply can't compare ranger and mechanist like you are doing here. They are from different classes with completely different balance backgrounds.

Edited July 20, 2022 by Kodama.6453

[Abyssisis.3971]

7 hours ago, kharmin.7683 said:

Probably one of the least populated game modes, and you want Anet to develop around it?  Clearly, they get more revenue from PvE which is why most of their resources are more dedicated to that format.  Good luck with your suggestion, but I cannot see Anet making such a change with so little benefit.

As I remember, pets in WvW were nerfed because of the complaints that players there thought it was unfair and didn't like dying to pets (which are AI controlled rather than losing to an actual player whose skill is the factor).  Boosting pets for WvW would just bring all of that back and I'm not sold that Anet would want that all over again.

Wvw is the cornerstone of gw2…. 😂

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

2 hours ago, Kodama.6453 said:

I genuinely don't think that works.

The major problem is that the mech is replacing the toolbelt. The entire toolbelt of the core engineer. People have warned repeatedly for good reason that replacing the entire toolbelt as a trade off for a spec is a bad idea. Because we are balanced around having it in core and the toolbelt holds some crazy amount of our power.

Without toolbelt, we are losing so much stuff. One of our healing skills (bandage self), gone.
Half of our core stunbreaks (thumper turret toolbelt, elixir gun toolbelt, slick shoes toolbelt), gone.
Many of our best damage skills for dps builds (grenade kit toolbelt, rifle turret toolbelt, bomb kit toolbelt...), gone.

Let's look about numbers. There are 27 different toolbelt skills in core engineers arsenal (4 from healing skills, 20 from utility skills, 3 from elite skills).
Do you know how many different skill combinations are possible with that system? I did the math. It's 13680 different combinations.

The toolbelt is STRONG. And it gets completely removed for the mechanist. The mech needs to make up for this power loss, otherwise it is not worth using.

This is also the reason why they added a stunbreak to crisis zone, for example. Because people were pointing out that losing 3 core stunbreaks by picking mechanist really hurt the spec. So the mech has to make up for that and they introduced a stunbreak to crisis zone as a result.

They have replaced a really complex and strong mechanic with a fairly simple mechanic in exchange. And now the individual components of this new mechanic have to try to keep up with the power loss. Giving away the toolbelt has been the harshest trade off they ever did in this game. There is a reason they didn't try this before and they just always replaced the F5 of the toolbelt for scrapper and holosmith. Now they tried and it starts backfiring.

You say just shift that power from the mech to the mace... again, we have to compensate a huge power loss here. Do you know how ridiculous mace needs to be for that to work? Hell, did you LOOK at current mace? It is already really strong, because just as mech, it makes up for stuff lost because of the trade off!

And with all the things mentioned above, it is really easy to explain this here. Ranger has a different balance history. Ranger has been balanced around a weak class mechanic for years now. Pets are not a new thing it gained, it works with pets from the start. Sure, they could completely rework ranger to shift more power from the class towards the pet, weakening the ranger themselves in the process, but there is no reason for them to do that.

Hell, many players don't want ranger to be that reliant from the pet and just want it to be a small add on.
And that's what the pet currently is, a small add on. Pets don't have the damage scalings a mech has. A mech is making up like 50% of the damage of the mechanist. Meanwhile the pet of the ranger is maybe... 10%? Slightly more?

Because it got balanced that way. The pet not having boons is not such a big deal like for the mechanist.
Additionally, engineer got balanced around having these toolbelt skills which scale with their boons by default. The mech doesn't do that anymore. We are giving our scalings out of hand. And in most cases, that is a bad thing as long as you don't have an easy way to pass on these boons. Ranger got balanced around this fact from the start.

Ranger and mechanist have completely different relationships to their pets. Without the mech, a mechanist is nothing. If it's dead, you are basically just half a core engineer, if even. A ranger pet being dead is not decreasing your efficiency as much, you can still fight really well even without a pet.

You simply can't compare ranger and mechanist like you are doing here. They are from different classes with completely different balance backgrounds.

You can't compare ranger and engineer, but you can compare untamed to mechanist.

 

Untamed, as a pet centric spec, fails. Entirely. There aren't enough defensive tools to make the bruiser 'setting the pet up' aspect work, and there aren't enough pet tools to make the pet centric part work. Not only this, but there is not a single pet improving trait in the whole spec. There's traits for the unleash skills, sure, but those are actually considered ranger skills by the code, and not pet skills- they cool down with Fervent Force and scale with your stats. Cantrips are bad, and don't provide enough impact despite being relatively difficult to use (baby gate in my experience is annoying to use, corrupt traversal or whatever the shadowstep is sometimes fails and you just fart and waste it, Exploding Spores is only truly good in PvE for spamming Fervent Force on condi alac unt (which is carried by Fervent Force, as is everything else with this garbage spec), mutate conditions is decent in pvp as you can decently quickly cleanse the vuln if traited (as if healing spring doesn't exist or something), perilous gift is too short to be made useful imo, and forest fortification is the only truly good one, specifically because you can cool it down insanely quickly). 

 

Mechanist, on the other hand, has everything going for it for a pet spec. The mech, while not exactly perfectly synergied in terms of attacks, does extremely well due to its modularity, which even an untamed pet duo cannot manage- most support for pets comes only from their F2, and cooldowns for pets are oddly high anyways, so damage tends to go out the window too- not to mention quickness and alacrity bugs with them- allowing the mech to easily slot into whatever the mechanist needs specifically. Signets for mechanist are incredibly strong in their own right, with no signet being useless in a vacuum (don't argue 'force signet is bad with condi' that's dumb). Not only that, but mechanist has many traits that do multiple things at once, most notably traits like Mech Frame: Superconductive Alloys, where they do both stat sharing AND add a new attack that works with the stats they gain.  While the mech does need some modularity due to there only being one, they gain too much with each trait in general. Losing toolbelt skills isn't really that much of a tradeoff here, it's an upgrade, and trying to act like it isn't is just putting a bag over your head to become blind like a bird.

 

I honestly wouldn't mind if the mech was really strong in one and only one direction, and then make untamed the other side of that- if mechanist is offensive, make untamed have better support. If mechanist is supportive, make untamed have better damage. But mechanist has their cake and can eat it too.

[Kodama.6453]

25 minutes ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

You can't compare ranger and engineer, but you can compare untamed to mechanist.

No, you can't compare untamed to mechanist. Because mechanist is truly a pet centric spec, while untamed is not.

How you can claim that untamed is a pet centric spec in the first spec is weird for me, considering how you list all the stuff which is increasing the power of the untamed and not of the actual pet. The unleashed mechanic gives you damage reduction or a damage buff, but not the pet. None of the utility skills work with the pet. None of your weapon skills work with the pet.

Untamed is balanced the same way as core ranger. The big majority of power is hold by the untamed, not the pet. This is not the case for mechanist, a big amount of power is transferred over to the pet and taken from the mechanist.

25 minutes ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

Not only that, but mechanist has many traits that do multiple things at once, most notably traits like Mech Frame: Superconductive Alloys, where they do both stat sharing AND add a new attack that works with the stats they gain. 

Are you kidding? It works that way to be a limiter.

We usually have full control over the skills we have in our toolbelt, seperated from the traits we run. Which means that we have way more freedom in combinations. The system is tying specific skills to specific traits, so we can't chose freely. If we want to use a power specced mech, we have to use core reactor shot. Believe me, mechanists would love to be able to use crisis zone while having  a power mech in PvP. But we can't. If we want to use crisis zone, our mech can't be specced for damage.

25 minutes ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

Losing toolbelt skills isn't really that much of a tradeoff here, it's an upgrade, and trying to act like it isn't is just putting a bag over your head to become blind like a bird.

Losing toolbelt isn't that much of a trade of... ok, you don't play engineer at all and it shows. It is a huge trade off. Many skills in our utility bar are just desirable because of their toolbelt skills. Many important functionalities are tied to the toolbelt.

It's straight up insane to me how losing access to 27 skills from your core can not get considered a big trade off.

25 minutes ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

I honestly wouldn't mind if the mech was really strong in one and only one direction, and then make untamed the other side of that- if mechanist is offensive, make untamed have better support. If mechanist is supportive, make untamed have better damage. But mechanist has their cake and can eat it too.

And here you are finally honest. This whole discussion here is just you being jealous of mechanist's overperformance going on currently.

I am pissed about mechanist being too strong, too. Especially because I see this as a major design problem which will not get solved as easily. At least not in a fair way for engineer players, but as you have shown here, you would probably be fine with the mech just getting nerfed to garbage. Because it performing better than untamed is all you actually care about.

Edited July 20, 2022 by Kodama.6453

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

36 minutes ago, Kodama.6453 said:

No, you can't compare untamed to mechanist. Because mechanist is truly a pet centric spec, while untamed is not.

How you can claim that untamed is a pet centric spec in the first spec is weird for me, considering how you list all the stuff which is increasing the power of the untamed and not of the actual pet. The unleashed mechanic gives you damage reduction or a damage buff, but not the pet. None of the utility skills work with the pet. None of your weapon skills work with the pet.

Untamed is balanced the same way as core ranger. The big majority of power is hold by the untamed, not the pet. This is not the case for mechanist, a big amount of power is transferred over to the pet and taken from the mechanist.

Are you kidding? It works that way to be a limiter.

We usually have full control over the skills we have in our toolbelt, seperated from the traits we run. Which means that we have way more freedom in combinations. The system is tying specific skills to specific traits, so we can't chose freely. If we want to use a power specced mech, we have to use core reactor shot. Believe me, mechanists would love to be able to use crisis zone while having  a power mech in PvP. But we can't. If we want to use crisis zone, our mech can't be specced for damage.

Losing toolbelt isn't that much of a trade of... ok, you don't play engineer at all and it shows. It is a huge trade off. Many skills in our utility bar are just desirable because of their toolbelt skills. Many important functionalities are tied to the toolbelt.

It's straight up insane to me how losing access to 27 skills from your core can not get considered a big trade off.

And here you are finally honest. This whole discussion here is just you being jealous of mechanist's overperformance going on currently.

I am pissed about mechanist being too strong, too. Especially because I see this as a major design problem which will not get solved as easily. At least not in a fair way for engineer players, but as you have shown here, you would probably be fine with the mech just getting nerfed to garbage. Because it performing better than untamed is all you actually care about.

1. Untamed was advertised as a more pet centric spec, going through the initial reveal trailer and the initial gameplay reveal stream for the medium armor professions. They discussed how things might synergize with the pet, ending it basically with 'Who uses moas anyways'. It has throughly missed the mark. They are fully aware of the flaws and did not take the time to correct them, whether it be flaws from core that are exaggerated by an elite spec needing the flawed parts or flaws with the spec itself.

 

2. You seem to forget those rifle changes. Those very potent, very overtuned rifle changes. If they nerf the mech, they can easily buff the weapon skills (kit or otherwise) that need it, even if it's just put in a minor trait to compensate for potential lost power from the toolbelt (which isn't too impactful in the grand scheme of things- it's more of an extra casting of a skill you already had, and plenty of them arent good enough to even compare to mech commands).

 

3. You have a pretty good amount of control over your skills with the mech, too. Sure, the skills are tied to traits, but most skills are very useful with the mech traits. Why would you specifically want a support skill that you can also effectively take via a very powerful signet? You can either choose to beef yourself up, or beef the mech up, or even both, due to the signet not being required to take a trait for it to give the bubble and barrier? You've got too many move syndrome, and almost if not all your choices are good (even if worse than some of your other choices).

 

4. Again, your skills with the mech are way stronger than they'd need to be to justify loss of tool kit skills. Tool belt skills, individually, aren't that impactful. In essence, they're an extra use of specific skills or a self targeted/originating use of some skills (i.e. turrets). The mech does insane damage or support. You might lose the option to have 27 often mediocre skills (i.e. most turret skills), but you also have... oh wait, 9 incredibly powerful skills to replace them. The tradeoff is there, but again it's so skewed towards mechanist that it's effectively an upgrade- 5 VS 3, but that 3 also has a strong AI partner with it.

 

5. I wouldn't say I'm jealous of mechanist's power level. I'm miffed that they a. Didn't take the time to make the EoD elite specs as well thought out as mechanist (for example, catalyst has the exact same problem druid has- its an energy mechanic slapped onto the core profession. At least pcata both can function post 28th nuke and has something else in its kit that works with its energy mechanic, or spectre basically just getting shroud and single target healing despite GW2 not lending well to single target healing), b. Didn't take the time to properly balance some of them, and c. Haven't really fixed any of the major issues with the problematic specs, untamed, mechanist, or otherwise (why is willbender still just a better pre-nerf bird soulbeast??? It moves way better than one and birdbeast was considered a problem).

 

6. I wouldn't care about mechanist if it was a good, but not OP, spec. But it's insanely OP, and claiming 'it needs to be this way otherwise it falls flat on its face and is bad' is just a bad way of thinking about balance, or a poor excuse to save face. It does everything except quickness in PvE- power dps, condi dps, power alac, condi alac, heal alac. Nothing else in the game has that much of a stranglehold on a profession's roles. It's worse than Firebrand, and that's a really hard bar to beat- firebrand vomits out the 'cheese boons' (aegis and stability) while also providing other important boons with little to no effort on their part. I don't want to see firebrand get nerfed to the point where it's unusable, and I don't want to see mechanist either. But mechanist is a such a significant balancing issue that needs to be taken care of, even if it means nerfing it a bit too hard while trying to fix it, firebrand, mechanist, or otherwise.

 

I couldn't give a crap if untamed didn't perform better in a general sense than mechanist. But it's such a large divide for 2 very (supposed to be, anyways) closely related style of spec (pet oriented), and mechanist is way too OP to just stick your head in the sand and go 'it can't be fixed!', which is basically what you're doing right now. Untamed might need major reworks, but mechanist needs fine tuning (which, granted, isn't anets specialty). But it can't just sit as it is.

[Abyssisis.3971]

2 hours ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

and mechanist is way too OP to just stick your head in the sand and go 'it can't be fixed!', which is basically what you're doing right now.

Being a member of the holy GEN, that’s what anet will do.

[enkeny.6937]

16 hours ago, Kodama.6453 said:

A mech is making up like 50% of the damage of the mechanist. Meanwhile the pet of the ranger is maybe... 10%? Slightly more?

You know where it hurts....
Yes ranger pets has no way to do high dps, And I'm not the only ranger wants a working pet oriented build. but we can't do it.

I think the mechanist is ok. It is a compact complete package. that is why it is good. 
Rife damage is not the mechanist thing.
Group heal also not from the mechanist.
Well, it gives barrier, alacrity, other boons. Crisis Zone is a bit over performer.

Shift Signet as mandatory as Sic' em for power soulbeast. maybe

And untamed as a pet class:
- hammer has no pet skill 
- cantrips doesn't effect the pet (except heal skill)
- the unleash mechanic only effect the pet, by removing their skills (unleashed pet skills are your skills, using your stats, if I remember correctly) 
-- Vow of the Untamed is not apply to the pet.

so the only really pet aspect is: Ferocious Symbiosis
That's it, 1 GM trait, instead of Fervent Force. 

You have more control for pet.  You have a shadow step, but only if you have a target, can timing the skills. 
Core ranger has a stronger pet as a pet build. 

[Levetty.1279]

On 7/20/2022 at 2:13 PM, Kodama.6453 said:

I guess you are referring to me.

And no, I never said that mech has it harder than ranger. I am saying that mechanist is a complete design fiasco which just leaves 2 possible outcomes: the spec is either broken OP or useless.

And Anet is currently keeping the spec rather OP than useless. All the stuff mentioned here like the mech having a locked breakbar in PvE and shift signet is busted are bandaids to ensure that mechanist is able to succeed, which, as already said, means it will be OP.
The dev buffing shift signet even admitted that the skill is kept absurdly strong, because it is basically required to be in your build and he hopes that players won't feel bad to be forced to take a skill if this skill also happens to be stupid strong.

So my point isn't that mechanist has it harder, the point is that these tools are there so mechanist can function at all in PvE, since way too much of it's power budget is loaded on the mech. Meanwhile Anet doesn't really care about the ranger pet as much because the ranger pet just makes up a tiny bit of the entire power of the ranger.

Mechanist is bad design and the mech being overpowered is a direct consequence of that. And I have been very vocal in this forum here how mechanist is badly designed (not in the sense of "poor mechanist", but in the sense of "this thing will never be balanced").

Oh boo hoo poor Mechanist it can only do literally everything, meanwhile Ranger has been stuck with a dead weight for a mechanic since launch and is still waiting for their EoD elite spec to be added.

[Kodama.6453]

1 hour ago, Levetty.1279 said:

Oh boo hoo poor Mechanist it can only do literally everything, meanwhile Ranger has been stuck with a dead weight for a mechanic since launch and is still waiting for their EoD elite spec to be added.

You didn't even read a single sentence I wrote, did you?

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

7 minutes ago, Kodama.6453 said:

You didn't even read a single sentence I wrote, did you?

You're still making excuses for why it should be op... when it shouldn't.

[Kodama.6453]

5 minutes ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

You're still making excuses for why it should be op... when it shouldn't.

I never made an excuse why it should be OP.

Mechanist needs nerfs, obviously. My point is that I think it won't reach a balanced state and will keep swinging between being OP and useless without finding ground in between these 2 extremes. I am pointing out what I personally consider to be a design mistake, this is not me saying it should be OP.

Please try to actually read what I am writing instead of making up headcanons.

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

On 7/20/2022 at 2:40 PM, Kodama.6453 said:

I genuinely don't think that works.

The major problem is that the mech is replacing the toolbelt. The entire toolbelt of the core engineer. People have warned repeatedly for good reason that replacing the entire toolbelt as a trade off for a spec is a bad idea. Because we are balanced around having it in core and the toolbelt holds some crazy amount of our power.

Without toolbelt, we are losing so much stuff. One of our healing skills (bandage self), gone.
Half of our core stunbreaks (thumper turret toolbelt, elixir gun toolbelt, slick shoes toolbelt), gone.
Many of our best damage skills for dps builds (grenade kit toolbelt, rifle turret toolbelt, bomb kit toolbelt...), gone.

Let's look about numbers. There are 27 different toolbelt skills in core engineers arsenal (4 from healing skills, 20 from utility skills, 3 from elite skills).
Do you know how many different skill combinations are possible with that system? I did the math. It's 13680 different combinations.

The toolbelt is STRONG. And it gets completely removed for the mechanist. The mech needs to make up for this power loss, otherwise it is not worth using.

This is also the reason why they added a stunbreak to crisis zone, for example. Because people were pointing out that losing 3 core stunbreaks by picking mechanist really hurt the spec. So the mech has to make up for that and they introduced a stunbreak to crisis zone as a result.

They have replaced a really complex and strong mechanic with a fairly simple mechanic in exchange. And now the individual components of this new mechanic have to try to keep up with the power loss. Giving away the toolbelt has been the harshest trade off they ever did in this game. There is a reason they didn't try this before and they just always replaced the F5 of the toolbelt for scrapper and holosmith. Now they tried and it starts backfiring.

You say just shift that power from the mech to the mace... again, we have to compensate a huge power loss here. Do you know how ridiculous mace needs to be for that to work? Hell, did you LOOK at current mace? It is already really strong, because just as mech, it makes up for stuff lost because of the trade off!

And with all the things mentioned above, it is really easy to explain this here. Ranger has a different balance history. Ranger has been balanced around a weak class mechanic for years now. Pets are not a new thing it gained, it works with pets from the start. Sure, they could completely rework ranger to shift more power from the class towards the pet, weakening the ranger themselves in the process, but there is no reason for them to do that.

Hell, many players don't want ranger to be that reliant from the pet and just want it to be a small add on.
And that's what the pet currently is, a small add on. Pets don't have the damage scalings a mech has. A mech is making up like 50% of the damage of the mechanist. Meanwhile the pet of the ranger is maybe... 10%? Slightly more?

Because it got balanced that way. The pet not having boons is not such a big deal like for the mechanist.
Additionally, engineer got balanced around having these toolbelt skills which scale with their boons by default. The mech doesn't do that anymore. We are giving our scalings out of hand. And in most cases, that is a bad thing as long as you don't have an easy way to pass on these boons. Ranger got balanced around this fact from the start.

Ranger and mechanist have completely different relationships to their pets. Without the mech, a mechanist is nothing. If it's dead, you are basically just half a core engineer, if even. A ranger pet being dead is not decreasing your efficiency as much, you can still fight really well even without a pet.

You simply can't compare ranger and mechanist like you are doing here. They are from different classes with completely different balance backgrounds.

 

1 hour ago, Kodama.6453 said:

I never made an excuse why it should be OP.

Mechanist needs nerfs, obviously. My point is that I think it won't reach a balanced state and will keep swinging between being OP and useless without finding ground in between these 2 extremes. I am pointing out what I personally consider to be a design mistake, this is not me saying it should be OP.

Please try to actually read what I am writing instead of making up headcanons.

Hmmmm.