Mace is underwhelming, especially on other e-specs

[SeTect.5918]

Hello all,

a few days ago I came back to playing this game.
I was loving mace and i loved condi holo but i didnt really like mechanist that much.

However i saw that i can now play mace on holo and i did because mace on mechanist for condi wasnt even bad.
But then i saw that Confusion was heavily nerfed on the June 27 Update which says:

"Confusion damage has been adjusted as follows in PvE only:

• Damage over time: Increased the base damage from 11 to 18.25. Increased condition damage scaling from 0.03 to 0.05.
• Damage on skill activation: Reduced base damage from 49.5 to 16.34. Reduced condition damage scaling from 0.0975 to 0.0325."

In addition to that, mace 3 (Rocket_Fist_Prototype) triggers an attack for the mech, which inflicts burning.
But since there is no mech on holo or scrapper, the attack of the mech obviously wont be triggered.

So basically mace is totally useless as a condition weapon now. Even more if you use it on holosmith.
I know that mace was not supposed be to a pure condition weapon but also being useful for support classes, but I am also pretty sure that it should at least deal some condition damage, because why giving mace damage-inflicting conditions on each attack if its not supposed to deal condition damage you know?
I like to think that it was meant to be a weapon which kind of supports but also deals some good condition damage.

But as I said before, the confusion nerf totally killed it for me. + no mech attack on skill 3 on other e specs than mechanist.
At this point i also dont understand why sword got buffed for other e specs because of the damage increases by holo forges heat level but mace didnt even tho also having e spec special skills on it.

Mace should get either more damage dealing conditions now or other damage dealing conditions that are not confusion.

Had to give my feedback to that.
Have a good day.

[Alcatraznc.3869]

I like mace on my Scrapper. It has a leap which helps maitaining quikness. I find it ok for doing open world stuff but yeah, the confusion changes definitely nerfed the weapon pretty hard.

 

I'm looking forward to shortbow though. Hopefully it's going to be better than the current pistol

[SeTect.5918]

5 hours ago, Alcatraznc.3869 said:

I like mace on my Scrapper. It has a leap which helps maitaining quikness. I find it ok for doing open world stuff but yeah, the confusion changes definitely nerfed the weapon pretty hard.

 

I'm looking forward to shortbow though. Hopefully it's going to be better than the current pistol

Yea tho even at that point a pistol or generally better because you can keep range with it and therefore its easier to dodge attacks. 

Mace is kinda bad atm. Yea its a fun weapon as you said already and i love the skills of it but its still worse than others. In power aspect its worse than sword, hammer and rifle and in condi aspect its far worse than pistol. 

Its only the best support weapon but its not even a good support weapon. Its just the best support weapon because the other weapons offer no support at all.

[Curennos.9307]

Mace is an excellent support weapon that's gracious enough to have both power and condi damage. And a stun, and a leap! If anything, I'd rather trade the Confusion for bleed, or make the Confusion stronger as it is a little lackluster there if you're trying to fit it into a pure power or pure condi build. It's excellent for what it was intended for though - support weapon with some damage tacked on, whether condi support or power.

[SeTect.5918]

4 hours ago, Curennos.9307 said:

Mace is an excellent support weapon that's gracious enough to have both power and condi damage. And a stun, and a leap! If anything, I'd rather trade the Confusion for bleed, or make the Confusion stronger as it is a little lackluster there if you're trying to fit it into a pure power or pure condi build. It's excellent for what it was intended for though - support weapon with some damage tacked on, whether condi support or power.

What do you mean with "excellent"? Its "okay". But its the only support weapon we have.

It doesn't even have to be pure power or condi but confusion became so weak that probably even sword is a better option for condition builds than mace now since sword inflicts minimal bleeding which is a better condition than confusion now.

However i will just swap to pistol since mace is no condi option for me anymore. It wasnt even better than pistol before the nerf of confusion and it shouldn't be because of the support aspect mace brings, but it could at least keep up with lower damage. But now its damage even got nerfed. Though i dont have too high hopes that they will buff mace conditions to compensate the immense dmg loss.

I just hope at least our new weapon next year somewhen will be condition based. We have 3 power options atm and 1 condi option. 

[toorichforyou.6743]

just come to acceptance that the espec weps arent going to be good except for maybe a handful. 

Anet just threw this together in about a week. no planning or testing was done.

 

[Matoro.9708]

Mace was quickly cobbled together from the tool kit, the AA is the exact same which also means it's 2012 clunky. That being said - it has roughly the same power damage, and on hybrid builds you're basically doubling that with the confusion. 2 and 3 are remarkably overloaded, at least compared to other engi weapons, presumably because no tool belt for mechanist. 

2: movement, good hybrid damage, 2 aoe boons, barrier, 2 aoe conditions, leap finisher, that skill does 8 things lol

3: cc and ranged hybrid damage

If you compare it to just core engi, it's great. Other classes? Probably terrible.

[Curennos.9307]

On 9/1/2023 at 7:47 PM, SeTect.5918 said:

What do you mean with "excellent"? Its "okay". But its the only support weapon we have.

It doesn't even have to be pure power or condi but confusion became so weak that probably even sword is a better option for condition builds than mace now since sword inflicts minimal bleeding which is a better condition than confusion now.

However i will just swap to pistol since mace is no condi option for me anymore. It wasnt even better than pistol before the nerf of confusion and it shouldn't be because of the support aspect mace brings, but it could at least keep up with lower damage. But now its damage even got nerfed. Though i dont have too high hopes that they will buff mace conditions to compensate the immense dmg loss.

I just hope at least our new weapon next year somewhen will be condition based. We have 3 power options atm and 1 condi option. 

It does basically everything anyone could want out of a support weapon and does it in an AA and two skills - barrier, boons, debuff, stun, some damage. Change the confusion for a condi that doesn't suck and it'll be even better. The idea that a support weapon should have damage that competes with pistol, a pure condi weapon (even with the range vs melee where melee should have more damage due to being melee) is just being greedy, imo. I hope engi's next weapon will be pure condi and melee - that'd be cool.

 

[Alcatraznc.3869]

49 minutes ago, Curennos.9307 said:

It does basically everything anyone could want out of a support weapon and does it in an AA and two skills - barrier, boons, debuff, stun, some damage. Change the confusion for a condi that doesn't suck and it'll be even better. The idea that a support weapon should have damage that competes with pistol, a pure condi weapon (even with the range vs melee where melee should have more damage due to being melee) is just being greedy, imo. I hope engi's next weapon will be pure condi and melee - that'd be cool.

 

You might want to check your source because mace no longer give barrier on auto attack and instead give a laughable amount on the skill 2.

 

Mace even as a support is very very far from being excellent. It is good as of right now for the sole reason it is the only weapon engineer has that can provide support boon. In the end it ends up being a rather mediocre weapon because it tries to fill everything. It is mediocre as a power weapon because the coefficient are low. It is mediocre as a condi weapon because confusion has been nerfed. It only works ok as a support weapon because of the lack of support weapon.

 

Engineer will get a shortbow relatively soon. I am pretty certain it is going to be a condition weapon or a hybrid but I can bet it's going to be better than pistol if it's a condi or even a hybrid weapon, but also it's going to be better than mace as well.

[Curennos.9307]

46 minutes ago, Alcatraznc.3869 said:

You might want to check your source because mace no longer give barrier on auto attack and instead give a laughable amount on the skill 2.

 

Mace even as a support is very very far from being excellent. It is good as of right now for the sole reason it is the only weapon engineer has that can provide support boon. In the end it ends up being a rather mediocre weapon because it tries to fill everything. It is mediocre as a power weapon because the coefficient are low. It is mediocre as a condi weapon because confusion has been nerfed. It only works ok as a support weapon because of the lack of support weapon.

 

Engineer will get a shortbow relatively soon. I am pretty certain it is going to be a condition weapon or a hybrid but I can bet it's going to be better than pistol if it's a condi or even a hybrid weapon, but also it's going to be better than mace as well.

You might want to reread my post cause I said it gives barrier, not that it gives it on the AA 🙂 Though I appreciate the info, as I did miss that change when I returned for SOTO. I was surprised - but not displeased - to come back after a bit of a break from the game and find that they'd made that change, as it was rather OP on the AA so I can see why they did it.

What would make it an 'excellent' support weapon in your eyes, and do you mean pvp? It has been nerfed there a few times, if I recall correctly. If I were nitpicky, perhaps the boon duration could be a second or two longer baseline, but I'd really be scraping the bottom of the barrel for requests there. It's giving almost 2k barrier in my heal alac support setup in pve - how much would make you happy? At 2k every 6 seconds, two uses and you're basically doing Scourge's Sand Flare.

Ultimately, it's engineer. Doing a lot of things but not doing them to the top tierest bleeding edge is kinda their thing, and having a weapon that can do a whole bunch of things - even if individually mediocre - is still pretty darn good, all things considered. And if you invest stats into it, yes, mace is an excellent support weapon. I think the only thing really holding it back is that engi has no real support offhand - shield kiiind of counts since it can give protection (CC too, and a blast finisher to make quick scrapper happy), but eh. What does it not do that you think it needs to do?

 

Edited September 3, 2023 by Curennos.9307

[Alcatraznc.3869]

On 9/4/2023 at 10:45 AM, Curennos.9307 said:

What would make it an 'excellent' support weapon in your eyes, and do you mean pvp? It has been nerfed there a few times, if I recall correctly. If I were nitpicky, perhaps the boon duration could be a second or two longer baseline, but I'd really be scraping the bottom of the barrel for requests there. It's giving almost 2k barrier in my heal alac support setup in pve - how much would make you happy? At 2k every 6 seconds, two uses and you're basically doing Scourge's Sand Flare.

Ultimately, it's engineer. Doing a lot of things but not doing them to the top tierest bleeding edge is kinda their thing, and having a weapon that can do a whole bunch of things - even if individually mediocre - is still pretty darn good, all things considered. I think the only thing really holding it back is that engi has no real support offhand - shield kiiind of counts since it can give protection (CC too, and a blast finisher to make quick scrapper happy), but eh.

 

That would require mace to be a fully support weapon to begin with which will never happens considering Mechanist was promoted to be a jack of all trade able to do almost everything you want it to do from power damage to condition damage while also being able to do support job. That's the reason why we got the current mace. 

 

But in a world where Anet would be actually willing to rework I would add a healing on the third attack of the auto. Remove confusion from the auto attack, add fury on the third strike of the auto attack 

The second skill is fine.

Third skill, replace fire with vulnerability.

That would probably be something like that, I dont know it is hard to provide a true feedback within the class when there is only one weapon that is being used for condition.

But if we look at other class, as far as 1 handed weapon goes we have guardian mace which is ok but staff exist, warhorn for elementalist which can combo with dagger (but the bulk still comes from overload on Tempest), scepter for thief although it's limited to generating barrier on a target. The good support weapons are mostly found on 2 handed weapon like staff for guardian and druid (I guess I can include elementalist here to an extent).

[Curennos.9307]

15 hours ago, Alcatraznc.3869 said:

That would require mace to be a fully support weapon to begin with which will never happens considering Mechanist was promoted to be a jack of all trade able to do almost everything you want it to do from power damage to condition damage while also being able to do support job. That's the reason why we got the current mace. 

 

But in a world where Anet would be actually willing to rework I would add a healing on the third attack of the auto. Remove confusion from the auto attack, add fury on the third strike of the auto attack 

The second skill is fine.

Third skill, replace fire with vulnerability.

That would probably be something like that, I dont know it is hard to provide a true feedback within the class when there is only one weapon that is being used for condition.

But if we look at other class, as far as 1 handed weapon goes we have guardian mace which is ok but staff exist, warhorn for elementalist which can combo with dagger (but the bulk still comes from overload on Tempest), scepter for thief although it's limited to generating barrier on a target. The good support weapons are mostly found on 2 handed weapon like staff for guardian and druid (I guess I can include elementalist here to an extent).

I think having the AA do much more would be OP - we already started out with barrier on AA, which was bonkers, then it got moved to mace 2, and fury is already readily available from other parts of a mechanist support setup (though as another thread on here is pointing out, scrapper has more of an issue with fury, but still). Maybe some sort of trait that adds heal-on-explosion (big boomer does this, but it's limited to caster, maybe redoing an alchemy trait?), since the last hit of the AA chain is tagged as an explosion and I don't think we have any support actions related to explosions yet. I think most of what you want is already available elsewhere though, such as the medkit AA. I also don't want to rip off guardian's mace.

I just want:

1) Confusion replaced with something useful, like bleed or burn, or to get confusion buffed.

2) Slight increases to base values and durations of support parts of mace, such as boon duration and barrier, then scale it so no change if you invest in support stats. I think the weapon has been nerfed enough that it can no longer fill in as an option for players who want to trade a little damage for a little self sustain. A **little** more barrier and regen/vigor, imo, would hit a sweet spot, then do scaling math magic to make sure it isn't a buff if I have 1k+ healing power.

3) Some support option on the 3rd skill. Burn is nice, but if confusion gets replaced with something useful it will be less needed. I'm dubious about vuln though, in places where supports are relevant it usually comes from a dps spec of some sort, so this'd only be really useful for solo. That said, the burn is thematic cause it's rocket paaaaawunch and the mech punches with you if mechanist, so y'know...burn...rocket...yeah. Turning the skill into a charge attack, where the longer you hold it down the more vuln stacks it applies, would be really cool imo. I don't want a skill that's just 'press every 12 sec to get 5 vuln!', but a charge attack would be quite a new thing. Also, mace 2 already applies vuln, but not very much - 3 stacks for 5 sec, so it doesn't even stack up very high.

I'm dubious about the upcoming shortbow, since we already have a power ranged weapon and a condi ranged weapon. Maybe they'll go for some sort of ranged support weapon? I was really hoping for some sort of support-y offhand to compliment mace, since imo the main 'weakness' of mace is that it's just 2 skills (and an AA), then you have to take shield or pistol on the off hand, neither of which are really support weapons. We'll see I guess. 

[GeraldBC.4927]

The engi's other traitlines are very good for bleed and burn. So to be a viable condi weapon, you need bleed or burn, not confusion.

It COULD become an excellent condi and condi alac weapon if the confusion on 1 and 2 was replaced with bleed or burn. You'd have cc, you'd have extra barrier/alac, it would be perfect. Slapping confusion on that seems less like deliberate design and more like they just rolled it randomly. 

Edited September 6, 2023 by GeraldBC.4927

[Curennos.9307]

Just now, GeraldBC.4927 said:

The engi's other traitlines are very good for bleed and burn. So to be a viable condi weapon, you need bleed or burn, not confusion.

It COULD become an excellent condi and condi alac weapon is the confusion on 1 and 2 was replaced with bleed or burn. You'd have cc, you'd have extra barrier/alac, it would be perfect. Slapping confusion on that seems less like deliberate design and more like they just rolled it randomly. 

I always assumed it was more of a reasoning thing. Like, "Okay, what damage over time would a mace do if you whacked someone with it? Burn? No, no, whacking someone with a mace doesn't set them on fire...Bleeding? Maybe internal bleeding, but eh...Ah! Confusion". Which, thinking about it, makes sense.But yeah, we have no traits that bolster Confusion so it ends up being meh.

[Roadkizzle.2157]

11 minutes ago, Curennos.9307 said:

I always assumed it was more of a reasoning thing. Like, "Okay, what damage over time would a mace do if you whacked someone with it? Burn? No, no, whacking someone with a mace doesn't set them on fire...Bleeding? Maybe internal bleeding, but eh...Ah! Confusion". Which, thinking about it, makes sense.But yeah, we have no traits that bolster Confusion so it ends up being meh.

This is an Engineer. Mace 3 already has a rocket attack. What's wrong with a pyrotechnic charge causing burning on the AA?

[Curennos.9307]

30 minutes ago, Roadkizzle.2157 said:

This is an Engineer. Mace 3 already has a rocket attack. What's wrong with a pyrotechnic charge causing burning on the AA?

Nothing, lol. More burning on mace would be cool.

[SeTect.5918]

1 hour ago, Curennos.9307 said:

I always assumed it was more of a reasoning thing. Like, "Okay, what damage over time would a mace do if you whacked someone with it? Burn? No, no, whacking someone with a mace doesn't set them on fire...Bleeding? Maybe internal bleeding, but eh...Ah! Confusion". Which, thinking about it, makes sense.But yeah, we have no traits that bolster Confusion so it ends up being meh.

yea thoooo berserkers mace burst attack also does bleeding, 4 stacks of it.
Revenants mace does burn, torment and even poison. Imo Revenants mace is the perfect condi weapon:
It has 3 damaging conditions and some other nondamaging ones like weakness. It has a combo field, it has a combo finisher. It has a good auto attack. Low Cooldowns, short animations....
How could they do so good on revenants mace and doing to bad on engi mace...the skill 2 of engi mace literally has the same character movement animation as mace 3 of revenant, just the skill is 10x worse for what it does.

Has nothing to do with what you wrote anymore but i wanted to say it anyway:
--I dont want to say revenants mace of op because the class is still balanced because it has no kits but engi does. But pistol is also 100x better than mace.
Sure engis mace has some support on it, but its almost ineffective if you dont use the weapon as support. You can just play Support OR power OR condi OR hybrid. You cant use it all anyway. What is mean it...the support of mace is ineffective if you play mace as condi weapon (because the support part is boosted by healing power and concentration, without these stats the support is almost nonexsistant and is covered up by someone else in the group). The condi of mace is ineffective if you play mace as support weapon (well condi of mace is also ineffective now if you play it as a condi weapon but whatever). So it shouldnt be so...bad.
Scourge also offers barrier to the group and does still deal good damage. It is even in a state atm where its kinda op. Firebrand offers support too and deals good damage. + Specter + Herald (for the first time of its life actually, but still its kinda nice now)
So why not f- mace?--

I'm sure they couldve found a way to give mace burn or bleed too. But they decided to give it confusion. well to be fair confusion wasnt even bad on it...until it got nerfed to the ground at least.

Edited September 6, 2023 by SeTect.5918

[Roadkizzle.2157]

27 minutes ago, Curennos.9307 said:

Nothing, lol. More burning on mace would be cool.

The only thing I would chuckle about is the sword from Holosmith. Where all the skills are fiery don't cause burning but the Mace would.