With the introduction of Support Shortbow, now would be the time to rework Engineer weapons in general.

[Atmaweapon.7345]

Currently, Engineer has 2 Power melee weapons, 1 Hybrid melee weapon, 1 Power ranged, and 1 Condi ranged weapon, along with 1 (soon to be)hybrid off-hand and 1 defense off-hand that becomes support with a trait. With Shortbow being a dedicated support weapon, now's the time to rework Engineer weapons so that we can have a defined niche for each weapon.

Ideally we have :

• Hammer- power melee
• Rifle - power ranged
• Mace- condi melee
• MH Pistol- condi ranged
• Sword- hybrid melee
• OH Pistol- hybrid ranged
• Shield- Defensive support melee.
• Shortbow-  Offensive support ranged.

 

A couple of weapons should be reworked/buffed a bit and several traits should be altered so that playstyles are a bit less restrictive. For a trait example, Over-shield could just affect the 4 & 5 skills on every weapon, there's really no need to limit it to just Shield and it's kind of dumb that the playstyle involves tapping your blocks and then going back to what you were doing just to apply boons.

 

 

[Alcatraznc.3869]

Yeah huh last time Anet reworked a weapon on Engineer it was the rifle. On rework, rifle was very strong, and maybe too strong on Mechanist. Then Anet nerfed rifle, then Mechanist then rifle again. Fast forward today, Rifle is an underwhelming power weapon for PvE, powercreeped by Hammer since it's available for everyone (granted you have SoTO) and in WvW/PvP, rifle is in an even worse state than its pre rework version.

 

So excuse me if I am very very very sceptical about anything with the words "rework" and "engineer" in the same sentence. To me that just sounds like killing a weapon that doesnt see a lot of uses. 

[foxtrot.6902]

Ya! Need to pick something that can't be made worse by "fixing"...like most kits lol. 

Think there might be little less upheaval on bow being advertised as support at sake of dmg if we at least had a decent damage kit to fall back on that offered more than a swap into for ~1-2 skills. Since locked into one weapon.

 

There's grenades but man I'm sick of chucking those for past 10yrs as only decent dmg kit, as well maining grenade kit sounds, not fun lol. I think bomb aa are still decent? But doing squats nonstop in front of a boss doesn't sound particularly fun either.

Edited November 18, 2023 by foxtrot.6902

[Icefyer.9208]

3 hours ago, foxtrot.6902 said:

Ya! Need to pick something that can't be made worse by "fixing"...like most kits lol. 

Think there might be little less upheaval on bow being advertised as support at sake of dmg if we at least had a decent damage kit to fall back on that offered more than a swap into for ~1-2 skills. Since locked into one weapon.

 

There's grenades but man I'm sick of chucking those for past 10yrs as only decent dmg kit, as well maining grenade kit sounds, not fun lol. I think bomb aa are still decent? But doing squats nonstop in front of a boss doesn't sound particularly fun either.

Grenades are one of the few good kits, alongside medkit. When's the last time you swapped into elixir gun for the auto attack, or the glob shot? I don't see anyone running bomb kit or tool kit.

[Bomboed.5697]

Anet also should rework Bomb Kit into long-range Rocket Kit.
Bomb kit is the most awful kit in the game, it is barely used, it has the ugliest animations, and all skills are the same.

[Nanoir.2315]

9 hours ago, Alcatraznc.3869 said:

Then Anet nerfed rifle, then Mechanist then rifle again.

But hey there's no problem with ranger longbow and deadeye rifle.

Sometimes I genuinely wonder what in the actual ever loving fuxk goes thru their heads when they pull cràp like this.

[Bomboed.5697]

30 minutes ago, Nanoir.2315 said:

But hey there's no problem with ranger longbow and deadeye rifle.

Sometimes I genuinely wonder what in the actual ever loving fuxk goes thru their heads when they pull cràp like this.

Pure hatred towards engineers. Anet hates us. Maybe our class is a testing ground for their interns.

[Calen.8945]

They need to rework kits into another traitline and give us real weapons.

[Doggie.3184]

2 hours ago, Bomboed.5697 said:

Anet also should rework Bomb Kit into long-range Rocket Kit.
Bomb kit is the most awful kit in the game, it is barely used, it has the ugliest animations, and all skills are the same.

I love the idea of Bomb Kit, I just wish the animations made more sense (the bomb you place is smaller than what you're holding and always remains in your hand like it's pooping out baby bombs). Should probably be a Bomb Bag and you take a bomb out and plop it slightly in front of you instead of directly blowing up your legs or tiring them out from squatting.

Then maybe Michael Bay it up a bit with more damage and oomph. Big Ol' Bomb is the coolest explosion it does but locked to toolbelt. As of now it's just a Fire Bomb for Condi.

My issue with Kits overall is how frequent we have to swap to them just to use 1 skill from it. Could use either more of a reason to actually stay in them or have those few skills more impactful on higher, matching cooldowns.

1 hour ago, Nanoir.2315 said:

But hey there's no problem with ranger longbow and deadeye rifle.

Sometimes I genuinely wonder what in the actual ever loving fuxk goes thru their heads when they pull cràp like this.

Engineer literally uses Deadeye's Rifle for some reason and it's a far better design overall. It's easily fixed by just tweaking numbers~ nothing mechanically needs altered other than Rifle Burst should go back to it's previous animation. The excuse for changing that was weird cuz it was same character animation as DE Rifle 3.

If anything, Engi Rifle should be buffed to DE Rifle damage and then given to Deadeye, and Engineer should get their Shotgun back with new Shotgun oriented skills.

 

[Nanoir.2315]

1 hour ago, Bomboed.5697 said:

Pure hatred towards engineers. Anet hates us. Maybe our class is a testing ground for their interns.

Somehow not surprised.

Balance as a whole on this game recently is something else. Feels so lazy,

Mesmer overperforms in confusion build? Let's just nerf confusion as a whole rather than tweaking numbers. Mace feels so eh atm due to that.

Rifle was too strong oh let's nerf it to the ground and not make any compensation.

People cried about mech so let's gut it and add such mechanical genius.

The damage on the mech is honestly so little now that the nerfed rifle auto overtakes it by a large margin.

Also what's really funny is how third party bots have better pathing than whatever garbage anet uses.

Meanwhile we have willbenders atm in full marauder/zerk gear wrecking havoc with tons of mobility and survival.

Mesmers sitting inside distortion consistently, not a mesmer player but the constant iframes make it feel like a cheat or something.

Scourges with a ton of barrier application is still untouched, played weaver last night and all I was hitting was barrier rather than health.

What's the point of making a spec then proceeding to making it so useless? If mech didn't have alacrity then we would not see any use for the whole spec.

Would like to note that majority of these is from a wvw experience.

Thank you for coming to my rant and pls dm me if anyone has found another game mode like wvw in any other game.

[Perceptor.7189]

Scratch the "weapon" part and switch it with "kit" and you got yourself the main reaason on why the engi balance sometimes it's lacking. Reworking the kits (and into something simple, like clear efect and purpose instead of the "this it's gonna have all the things in 5 keys") would be the key for future weapon balance, since it's the main mechanic of the class, and, sometimes are even more important that the main weapon.

[Bomboed.5697]

1 hour ago, Doggie.3184 said:

I love the idea of Bomb Kit, I just wish the animations made more sense (the bomb you place is smaller than what you're holding and always remains in your hand like it's pooping out baby bombs). Should probably be a Bomb Bag and you take a bomb out and plop it slightly in front of you instead of directly blowing up your legs or tiring them out from squatting.

I just think that Bomb Kit is not needed at all. I mean, it is a purely melee Kit and we already have to many melee options of weapons and kits.
While our ranged options are lacking. Rocket Launcher Kit would be so cool.

 

1 hour ago, Doggie.3184 said:

and Engineer should get their Shotgun back with new Shotgun oriented skills.

So you want Engineer to have literally no ranged option except clunky ground-target kits like grenades and mortar?

 

[Doggie.3184]

3 hours ago, Bomboed.5697 said:

I just think that Bomb Kit is not needed at all. I mean, it is a purely melee Kit and we already have to many melee options of weapons and kits.
While our ranged options are lacking. Rocket Launcher Kit would be so cool.

 

So you want Engineer to have literally no ranged option except clunky ground-target kits like grenades and mortar?

 

You don't seem to understand how amazing ranged cone skills are, it's why they removed Guardian staff 1, lol. So they'll never give Engineers a Shotgun anyways since it'd be too powerful/useful. It's a common Engineer theme though so it'd be nice to go back to Hip Shot and make it function like an actual Shotgun instead of stealing Thief weapons.

Most Engi builds are left with Mortar kit for lack of options and the fact that it easily covers ranged situations when you're stuck with a melee weapon and not using grenades. Pretty much already a rocket launcher. It's not clunky, it just requires aiming and timing, if you want to see clunky try playing Deadeye with your Auto Attack not toggled off.

They could be improved though I'd actually like if they gave the Shortbow treatment to Mortar and Grenade kit and made the first skill a targeted auto attack while the rest remain ground target. I don't think ground target should be a thing for #1 skills.

[Alcatraznc.3869]

1 hour ago, Doggie.3184 said:

You don't seem to understand how amazing ranged cone skills are, it's why they removed Guardian staff 1, lol. So they'll never give Engineers a Shotgun anyways since it'd be too powerful/useful. It's a common Engineer theme though so it'd be nice to go back to Hip Shot and make it function like an actual Shotgun instead of stealing Thief weapons.

Most Engi builds are left with Mortar kit for lack of options and the fact that it easily covers ranged situations when you're stuck with a melee weapon and not using grenades. Pretty much already a rocket launcher. It's not clunky, it just requires aiming and timing, if you want to see clunky try playing Deadeye with your Auto Attack not toggled off.

They could be improved though I'd actually like if they gave the Shortbow treatment to Mortar and Grenade kit and made the first skill a targeted auto attack while the rest remain ground target. I don't think ground target should be a thing for #1 skills.

We dont have the same definition of clunky if you think Deadeye is clunky. When I take out mine it is a lot more smoother to play than Engineer as a whole. The only thing that can mess up the deadeye is poor timing with the rifle.

And no, I hope Anet does not turn grenade and mortar 1 into auto attack unless they drastically buff the velocity of the projectile and automatically adjust the projectile so that it follows the target like other projectile. For PvE it doesnt matter for in PvP and WvW mortar is already very easy to dodge and requires actual aiming and prediction. Grenade forces you into speccing Grenadier trait anyway but it still requires you to lead. 

[Bomboed.5697]

3 hours ago, Doggie.3184 said:

Most Engi builds are left with Mortar kit for lack of options and the fact that it easily covers ranged situations when you're stuck with a melee weapon and not using grenades. Pretty much already a rocket launcher. It's not clunky, it just requires aiming and timing, if you want to see clunky try playing Deadeye with your Auto Attack not toggled off.

I hate ground-target weapons and will hate them no matter what.
For me Rocket Launcher kit should be more like Longbow, but with some splash damage. No ground-target, full homing rockets.
For me, Grenades and Mortar are not fun to play. And not only for me. Unluckily, they are our most powerful ranged options.

As for shotgun, we already have flamethrower for that.

Edited November 19, 2023 by Bomboed.5697

[Zzik.5873]

Or anet could make all our skill ground targeted. Engi should only have aoe. No more animation, no more variety, ONLY AOE... thats the vibe the new shortbow give me... If shortbow is only a mortar 2.0... can we at least have weapon swap... also, give me back my golem...

[Stx.4857]

I really want pistols to be better.  The auto attack is lame, it doesn’t even have an explosion, and the aoe effect doesn’t apply the bleed even though it’s a Condi weapon.  #2 should be renamed toxic barrage or something, and give it a better sound effect.  Why is a pistol skill darts?   #3 could use a buff since confusion damage got nerfed.  #4 is horrible to use but it does a lot of damage so honestly I wish they would just rework it and make it so it can do max damage from range or melee.  #5 I like, it’s useful and the theme works. 

[Curennos.9307]

I think engi suffers from the same problem ele does - it has access to a large amount of very different skills at any given time and it's really hard to prevent them from slotting them (i.e. making it worth taking something else). Ele ends up with situations like power builds using 1-2 skills from their 'off' elements (like staff zerk ele water 2 being the only water damage skill, the rest are support skills and since you don't have any healing power...). Then engi can just slap on a medkit and that needs to be balanced somehow. And then you just end up swapping into a bunch of different kits for the single skill in there that's useful to your build's stat combo and everything else is either actually useless or severely diminished (ele staff water 5 is lovely cleanse and I still use it in wvw, but I'm certainly not using it for the regen heals, same for medkit cleanse).

Part of the difficulty is that kits are more a collection of themed skills than something more coherent, like a well designed weapon, so stuff like bomb kit is 'meh' because it has heavy overlap with everything else and it does...okay, some damage. I'm cautiously optimistic, though - anet seems more interested in giving weapons their own, dedicated sub-mechanics. Maybe we could see something like that in the future to improve all classes' weapons, and engi kits to boot? Not that every single kit needs a thorough, complex mechanic to justify it, but something extra would be nice. Just touch up a 2-3 underused skills per kit, including the AA, etc.

I enjoy bomb kit, for example, but it's still basically useless except in pve scenarios where the boss stands still (which oddly enough, is less and less often with all the champ mobs that like to zoom around and puke out crap on the ground...). Heck if they just copied the shortbow mechanic and widened the aoes a little bit - maybe upped the aoe cap on the kit, since heck it's a huge bomb - that'd be cool. I'll take what I can get.

[zeyeti.8347]

I would say every weapon should need tweeks as anet adds special interaction with the new weapon set , i mean a portal gun !!!!! whoever is gonna go back to boring mesmer staff or sword ? 

Some of you more experienced in engi could be kind enough to enlightens me about the shortbow , i feel just like it is combo area with option to detonate them for more combos ? If it's that it's quite sadly underwhelming...

[Bomboed.5697]

Yes, it is time to rework Engineer weapons.
And the first weapon to be reworked should be a Shortbow. This trash is beyond redemption.

[Okhu.7948]

On 11/18/2023 at 1:23 AM, Alcatraznc.3869 said:

Yeah huh last time Anet reworked a weapon on Engineer it was the rifle. On rework, rifle was very strong, and maybe too strong on Mechanist. Then Anet nerfed rifle, then Mechanist then rifle again. Fast forward today, Rifle is an underwhelming power weapon for PvE, powercreeped by Hammer since it's available for everyone (granted you have SoTO) and in WvW/PvP, rifle is in an even worse state than its pre rework version.

 

So excuse me if I am very very very sceptical about anything with the words "rework" and "engineer" in the same sentence. To me that just sounds like killing a weapon that doesnt see a lot of uses. 

Rifle wasn't too strong. Anet just capitulated to people who don't play Engineer crying about it and did the thing they normally do. Ruin something that didn't need to be ruined.

[WhoWantsAHug.3186]

On 11/18/2023 at 7:57 AM, Icefyer.9208 said:

Grenades are one of the few good kits, alongside medkit. When's the last time you swapped into elixir gun for the auto attack, or the glob shot? I don't see anyone running bomb kit or tool kit.

Elixer gun is still good in sPvP. Could def use some minor tweaks though. That being said, It's gonna have great synergy with the Relic of Vass buffs.

[Icefyer.9208]

1 hour ago, WhoWantsAHug.3186 said:

Elixer gun is still good in sPvP. Could def use some minor tweaks though. That being said, It's gonna have great synergy with the Relic of Vass buffs.

How so?

[Nanoir.2315]

12 hours ago, Okhu.7948 said:

Rifle wasn't too strong. Anet just capitulated to people who don't play Engineer crying about it and did the thing they normally do. Ruin something that didn't need to be ruined.

Meanwhile ranger longbow with 1500 range hits hard and deadeye rifle in the same boat but hey let's nerf engi and nerf tf outta mech too while we are at it.

Edited November 28, 2023 by Nanoir.2315