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Mechanist starts to repeat the mistakes of the minion gyros


Kodama.6453

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The community has foreseen this to happen once we got shown that we get a pet focused elite spec, but there was some hope that we won't have to go the same miserable path again.

Remember when gyros were a minion type in the first iteration of the scrapper? Some of them had a pulsing beneficial effect around them, like purge gyro cleansing conditions from allies every 3 seconds or bulwark gyro applying a damage reduction buff on allies from time to time.

Back then, everyone told you, Anet, that the pathing of the minions is simply not good enough for such a mechanic. You run around with a purge gyro, which needs to keep up with you, but now and then, it will make some weird movement and you are outside of it's buff radius for a short time. Which is enough to miss out on the pulse and therefore lose the benefit of the gyro. This mechanic felt clunky and miserable, you had to bite the bullet and admit that this minion playstyle didn't work out and they got reworked into wells eventually.

And what is currently going on with the mechanist..... we have a pet, which is now pulsing a buff around it every 3 seconds. If we don't get this pulse in 6 seconds (which is just 2 pulses, mind you), the mech loses half of it's stats. We have some additional "control" over the pet with the come to me command and such, but these are just doing what the gyros did by default (trying to stay close to the engineer) and in environments where we have to be constantly on the move, we have to also lose one of the main benefits of the mech, which is their auto attacks (since we have to constantly tell it to follow us).

I hope that this mechanic can get thought over once again and that we find another solution to make mechanist more demanding to play. But this one.... feels just as clunky now as the gyros had felt during the release of HoT. I thought we learned from the mistakes of the past, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

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I mean, I saw this coming. This was wholly predictable from the get go. Just be prepared to accept the ruins left back from it once it gets distilled down to nothing.

 

On the plus, after Mech gets dunked on they might start considering making scrapper and core engineer more competitive then. Haha, who am I kidding?

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3 hours ago, Kodama.6453 said:

The community has foreseen this to happen once we got shown that we get a pet focused elite spec, but there was some hope that we won't have to go the same miserable path again.

Well the issue here really is just A-Net not having the resolve to stick to their initial design goal of the spec, why do people constantly complain about rather basic things no one would bother to make a big fuss about in most other MORPGs? Because they know that it works and A-Net will buckle under the pressure.

But it also seems like that some of the devs are working against each other, on one hand saying stuff like "fun is the most important factor" and everything should have a "well-defined identity" and that there should be a really good reason for a change to undermine that just for them to throw a wrench into it by coming out with patch notes which essentially state "the sniper rifle is going to get its range axed" and that mech is going to get a change which pretty much everyone instantly recognised as "annoying to play around".

3 hours ago, Kodama.6453 said:

I hope ... that we find another solution to make mechanist more demanding to play.

The solution has already been pointed out as you're not playing the mech but the mechanist (which is the whole point of this kind of spec) so if the goal is to make the gameplay "more demanding to play" then the PC is the actual thing to focus on.

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9 hours ago, Kodama.6453 said:

And what is currently going on with the mechanist..... we have a pet, which is now pulsing a buff around it every 3 seconds. If we don't get this pulse in 6 seconds (which is just 2 pulses, mind you), the mech loses half of it's stats. We have some additional "control" over the pet with the come to me command and such, but these are just doing what the gyros did by default (trying to stay close to the engineer) and in environments where we have to be constantly on the move, we have to also lose one of the main benefits of the mech, which is their auto attacks (since we have to constantly tell it to follow us).

I hope that this mechanic can get thought over once again and that we find another solution to make mechanist more demanding to play. But this one.... feels just as clunky now as the gyros had felt during the release of HoT. I thought we learned from the mistakes of the past, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

 

I think a lot is depending on the kind of build you actually play.

And I think, there is a huge difference between intention and result.

 

As a condi-mech, it is natural to stay toe-to-toe with bosses. Because many skills from rotation needs you to be close, such as pistol 4 or flamethrower 1,2,4, to benefit from full bonusses.

Since the mech is melee as well, it doesn't change anything for me, since I'd need less than 360 range anyways.

And HAM? I think I hardly need to explain.

 

For rifle mech, it is a wholly different matter.

And I can totally understand the intention behind the mechanical genius change. It is, to prevent from tanking while dealing tons of damage from afar without putting yourself in danger. That itself is true, and no one can deny that it made plenty of situations far easier than supposed to be. For example putting your mech far away to tank.

But there is a big problem in that logic, and that is the result.

And the problem is, that the mech attacks at maximum range. So either you stay at maximum range, or you might lose your bonus as well, which I'd be calling unintended behavior, because many usual situations, where you have to be close to the boss, or switch between ranges, become a lot more messy like that.

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