Janthir Wilds Spear Beta Event Feedback: Engineer

[Ruufio.1496]

10 hours ago, Dark Red Killian.3946 said:

I thought the same thing after seeing ranger ranged/melee. It is the coolest, and no reason why it couldn’t be done for engi spear. I second this.

Interesting. I just checked out ranger spear after you wrote that... didn't even realize they already did it lol... yeah no excuse for making engi spear so bad then.

[Teletric.3821]

Aesthetics Perspective

The aesthetic component was what I was mostly looking forward to myself as an engineer main. Every time engineer has received a new weapon proficiency, it has felt like that weapon always had some kind of techy flair or twist that made it unique and gave it a distinct identity: a rocket-powered hammer, a laser sword, a mech-tech mace, and a shortbow that fires elixir-dispensing arrows. However, it feels like the spear lacks that kind of flair/identity, being used as a regular spear for the most part.

Aesthetically, the lightning rod is a fun idea but it feels disconnected from the spear – like it could work as a gadget utility skill instead (might even feel better as it would save you the step of unequipping your bundle to use the skill). However, I think there is a simple solution to this: have the spear itself be the lightning rod which gets charged and thrown rather than being a separate entity that floats next to the engineer.

(Plus, I would totally love to have the lightning rod as its own spear skin, the art team really cooked!)

Edited Friday at 01:51 PM by Teletric.3821
wording

[Ovalkvadratcylinder.9365]

If you really wanted to give engineers adifferent playstyle from what we got you should ve made this spear akin to what elementalists got. A ranged area denial weapon with hybrid dps as focus. Despite having several ranged options, non of those truly adhere to playstyle when combined with actual traits, utilities and weapons combos.

This is what I had hoped the short bow would provide to some extent before it turned out to be a support weapon.

[eXistence.3876]

It feels too isolated for PvE. For pvp and wvw that's fine. For PvE you should be able to focus more than one enemy (maybe have 2 be AOE focus in a small area) so 5 can land DPS on more enemies. Just a thought.

[Bigbizz.9406]

My thoughts on engineer Spear in WvW.

Spear 1 and 2 are fine. I would like more range on spear 1. Considering the CD and dash range spear 2 is basically on-line with other weapon mobility skills.

I'm neutral on spear 4. I'm not sure what it's purpose is for the spear other than to take up a skill slot on the weapon. Getting into close range makes it difficult to land.

Spear 5 is very slow. A 1 second channel with an after cast animation makes this thing very difficult to land as part of a spear 2-5 combo. You basically need your enemy slowed via cripple or immobilized to land this thing.

Spear 3 I think is what's holding the entire weapon back. Electric artillery has a shorter range than a handheld pee shooter. The number of restrictions on this skill makes it basically unusable which transfers to making other spear skills useless. 600 range is too short. Needing line of sight where the terrain itself will disrupt you feels awful. Needing to look at your target for a skill that shoots down from the sky feels bad when you're in melee range trying to immobilize your target and the enemy just walks through your hotbox behind you, causing the skill to cancel and letting you down yet again. If you can't get the immobilize off on your target you're definitely not going to hit spear 5, and attempting to do it anyways means you've wasted a good 2-3 seconds doing almost nothing inside the kill range of another player. Remove the front facing requirement for electric artillery and remove the line of sight requirement or drastically increase the range of this skill.

The worst part about the weapon is how I feel punished for getting into melee range. I can't use electric artillery in melee, too many restrictions and the skill auto cancels. Spear 4 is harder to hit the closer you are to the enemy. Spear 5 needs setup from spear 3 or 4 to land, and I'm not entirely sure how effective it is once you land it. Right now I'm using grenades to compensate for the spear's self imposed conditions and waiting to land electric artillery (I'm basically using this skill for the immobilize only. Easier to hit outside of melee and the extra stacks aren't worth the risk of auto cancels) before going in with a focused spear 5.

I don't like how this weapon feels in a player vs player environment. It's a cool weapon design but it needs functionality improvements.

[ukuni.8745]

well weapon looks sick but mechanically we got some problems.

 

Conduit surge is to janky it needs to be far more reliable in hitting its target,  the skill has 2 parts a dash and a leap, the dash is slower and is only 450 range and the leap is vastly faster and seems to activate when your within a certain range threshold of the target and adds that extra range to make the whole skill have a total range of 700 the leap finisher is also only on the second part of the skill so no target no leap finisher, I understand what anet was trying to accomplish in making the skill function like this but I feel it would be better if the either made it 2 skills rather then 2 animations baked into one skill and gave us a bit more control or and probably the better idea is just used the second part of the skill only that would make it likely much more reliable at connecting.

Was the original idea for Rolling skies to launch the focused target out of position?  And then followed up with devastator, feels like that was the idea at some point.

Devastator feels pretty good except for the landing portion of the animation, speed that up and I just know the devs made it slower because of devastator nade barrage combos

lighting rod feels alright but electric artillery is kinda janky make it an aoe and make a decision on where you want to put the cast animation, it seems like you wanted electric artillery to be instant cast but thats not so good for very obvious reasons so you slapped a cast time and immob and hoped for the best.

overall I feel like this weapon from a PVP perspective at least was modified after it was made to compensate for the constant balance problem that is grenade kit, if it wasn't janky id expect it would very quickly get nerfed.

 

[Kris Knives.8513]

7 hours ago, HnRkLnXqZ.1870 said:

Focus Mechanic: Interesting approach. Looking good. Could use a visual indicator on the mob.

I've seen a number of people mention this so maybe this is bugged for some people. 

I see a weird electric dome or cap over an enemies head when I mark them, so I'm pretty sure they did make a visual marker it either is just too subtle or not working for everyone.

[Markos.9523]

26 minutes ago, Kris Knives.8513 said:

I've seen a number of people mention this so maybe this is bugged for some people. 

I see a weird electric dome or cap over an enemies head when I mark them, so I'm pretty sure they did make a visual marker it either is just too subtle or not working for everyone.

I just noticed that little electric thingy over the enemies and i was playing it for quite a while now. Yeah is too subtle to notice will all those crazy effects flying around.

[coro.3176]

3 hours ago, Bigbizz.9406 said:

The worst part about the weapon is how I feel punished for getting into melee range. I can't use electric artillery in melee, too many restrictions and the skill auto cancels.

I mean, we've been dealing with that with Blowtorch (meant to be used in melee) for twelve years. If your target moves through it, or if there's a little variation in terrain, it goes on cooldown and you miss. At least with artillery, you get to try again immediately.

And also, I feel like Artillery isn't meant to be used at point blank, and if you're trying to do that, you're using the skill wrong.

It definitely feels like it should be a much faster cast time though.

Edited Friday at 06:01 PM by coro.3176

[Adamantium.3682]

I think overall the Engi spear has a consistent theme and the skills fit together, but needs some cleanup. I like the mobility and the aesthetics are great. I think each skill serves a good purpose I wouldn't suggest changing the function of any of them. Engi weapons have always been more of a utility than a main weapon and I think the spear fits in that, the skills are all useful in various ways as utility or burst damage setup.

Brief comments on each individual skill below, in summary I think the spear is pretty close to being ready for prime time I would just like it to play a bit faster than it does.

Auto attack: underwhelming, but it's an auto. Can't really expect to camp any main hand weapon as an Engi, and while the refresh of Focused is a nice idea the auto attack chain overall feels weak even with that. Maybe another bleed or two later in the chain would incentivize using the AA chain help even if it applies to Focused target only.

Skill 2: Covered quite a lot already, it needs to stick to your target. Going through the target isn't going to work. I didn't quite understand why this sometimes didn't even take me all the way to a target when the skill said it was in range, and then sometime shoots me all the way through them. Overall quite a messy ability currently. Also the Focused status is really hard to see. I don't want it to be lost in the buff bar but it would be nice if it could be bigger, brighter, and/or a shape that's more noticeable.

Skill 3: I like this ability a lot but it's so small. Maybe this is in line with other skills of this nature but on Engineer it feels small when I can swap into bomb kit and have 240 radius.

Skill 3 spear flipover: This is also a cool ability but seems clunky and inconsistent on when or if it lands? Also seems really slow when throwing it feels like it should hit before the damage actually lands like there's some kind of delay. Can't throw backwards which combined with all the movement on the weapon causes problems. There will be lots of times you're not perfectly facing your target and this skill should still be able to work. Charges timer and duration of this skill being available feels good.

Skill 4: Cool ability but again feels a bit clunky. It's long cast time makes it hard to land an interrupt, maybe intentional because it's quite a lot of CC but it feels slow to me. It also seems to miss a lot and the hitbox feels much smaller than the animation.

Skill 5: Satisfying to use but really slow and too much aftercast. I would like a slightly longer leap but the biggest issue is how slow the skill is.

[Stalima.5490]

In my opinions the spear is quite good with the only real issues being animation based, that and the 2 skill does not combo if you are not in combat for some reason.

Besides this, the skills mostly feel good, there is a bit of slowness to some of them but that is not an issue if they adequately powerful and a 3 second knockdown is quite powerful indeed. it is very rare that we get slower weapons built for significant individual output.

[MagicBot.1570]

I have been testing Spear in PvE so my feedback will be 100% related to PvE.

In terms of damage, Spear is a very balanced weapon. It currently benches at least 43.2kdmg (with good RNG), which is the same DPS as the current Pistol/Pistol benchmark.

 

I would argue the weapon needs a few changes, however.

- Devastator does not feel very impactful. It's a very slow ability, and I think it should be faster. The damage is alright, but the rotation heavily depends on fitting as many damaging skills as possible and Spear5 makes it harder to keep up the pace.

- Conduit Surge is good, lowering the CD to 5 seconds instead of 6 would make things even smoother because it could be timed perfectly with Shrapnel Grenade.

- Electric Artillery (the flip over) feels clunky to use and perhaps a bit slow too.

- There's no indicator that can be tracked easily for the focused effect. It does not matter very much because it lasts 10 seconds but it's not ideal. The mechanic also feels a bit uninspired, most of the time it manifests as condition duration increases, but personally I don't mind.

- I don't think it's fun that Electric Artillery can only stack up to 8 on a single target. Perhaps other skills should add a few stacks while Lightning Rod is active? What if every explosion added an extra stacks, with a 1s internal cooldown? That would be pretty interesting.

 

Anyway, that's all for me. This weapon is a big win for PvE Holo, just needs some fine tuning!

[Lionwait.4815]

From a WvW perspective:

 

Skill 1: Good

Skill 2: Good

Skill 3: It should hit a target to get Electric Artillery. As it works right now, people can just pre-cast the skill for the immobilize that can be a bit overpowered when running down people. Because the class has a lot of mobility already. 

Skill 4: Good

Skill 5: Good

 

Overall, its good and it is something to look forward too. So far, I've reviewed guardian and engi and both seem to have so much mobility but the revenet spear is a nightmare not in a good way. How can you guys fail so much on the revenant and get all these other class spears working great? What every team that is working on the revenant needs to take pointers from the guardian and engi spear teams.

[Matt H.6142]

After changing out that terrible starting build, this became very fun.  The dash is everything, but I don't think it recharges every time it should when the focused target dies.  Otherwise that mark needs to be more clear.  The finished lightning rod is missing some impact.  Even just a (better) sound effect would improve that.

Was the lowest dps spear of the bunch (didn't swap out the carrion stats from the starting build though.)

Edited Monday at 07:05 PM by Matt H.6142

[Dark Effectz.8205]

I am going to keep my pretty simple.

I engi main and the spear was nice to use. I enjoyed it alot

on top of the other stuff that's been said...i wanted to ask if we can get heat lvl's damage when i am in holo like the sword does and for the other weapons as well

The other ask is...can we get the hybrid weapon spear as well, make it like 900 range with no auto attack chain on auto skill 1 

Edited Saturday at 06:09 AM by Dark Effectz.8205

[Squigglez.1236]

Just wanted to say this weapon feel slow. Skill 5 feels like your character is jumping through syrup, and skill 3 flip skill doesn't feel great with its casting time. I do like the theme of electricity and it's kind of neat being able to have the bullet things spinning around you while swapping to your kit skills.

Edited Saturday at 05:59 PM by Squigglez.1236

[ShadowInTheVoid.9183]

Seeing the other profesions that got 1 attacks that have ranged and melee modes was so great.
Then Engi, who has no weapon swap in combat and would benifit most a dual mode weapon and we get stuck with a melee only weapon?

Hammer and Mace are great for what they are but having to decide if you need to take a weapon kit to cover lack of range or just stick to a ranged weapon instead. It would be nice to have a melee weapon without having to worry about that.

Obviously it's far more of an issue on Mechanist where you have no toolbelt skills and Overclock Signet is pretty much a mandatory skill.

[Fueki.4753]

Overall, this spear was fun to use to me, but I think it could be changed to feel a bit more fluid.

Amplifying Slice, Rolling Skies and Devastator could be a bit faster. Conduit Surge could have 900 range.

Edited Saturday at 09:29 AM by Fueki.4753

[Ale.3280]

This is my feedback as a decade engi main:

After all i say positive as a beta, but those are points to improve:

• 1 skill - why should we finish the autoattack chain, for another 1 bleding and a bit of strike damage? i usually never finish it --> you can add another bleeding or a burning or a defense boon to let us want to end the chain;
• 2 skill - i can't see with more foes the one that is focused --> improve the focus symbol to identify the focus enemy, and it could be an exsplosive;
• 3 skill - the skill ithat is not cool to use, need a lot of work...too low damage on aoe and not a cool damage of Elettric Artillery, anothe vulnerability again? --> add some damage on  Lighting Rod skill on elettric Artillery a defence boon or more damage or it could be a different skill with only a ranged elettric attack;
• 4 skill - cool but long casting time and when i use it i usually have to step backwards;
• 5 skill - too long casting time and too low range, it should be at least as conduit Surge;
• Low defence in general, as a melee weapon --> you can add a protection boon somewhere or for using in scrapper you can add barrier in Impact Savant also for a small ammount of condi damage (not only strike).
• Low strike damage overall, compare with other melee weapon (es: mace), i know is hybrid weapon, but 200-300 base attack is too small for a melee weapon;
• 130 range autoattack too short, it a 2h weapon! 
• No combo field;
• Another idea, add the skill1 attack to be also ranged, as for the ranger spear, we should throw elettrick bolt/beam from 1200 range 😉 

I'm going to try engi again till the end of the beta.

Edited Saturday at 11:49 AM by Ale.3280

[Nero.7369]

WvW / General Feedback

The whole focus mechanic is absolutely bs from a wvw / pvp perspektive.
Impossible to quickly switch targets. Relies so much on that buff and it hurts a lot if you'r focus gets eaten up by a dodge, block or blind.

First that stupid shortbow combo mechanic and now this bs -.-*

You want a fast action combat and then you create stuff like this.

While i can see a burn build working out, this weapon itself lacks on cover condis. Luckily i guess Tormented Sigil Doom Sigil / Relic of Vass could make up for that. And we still got some vulnerability, criple and bleeding. Tho it doesnt feel good. Burn Burst has been a thing with pistol off hand already. And i am really annoyed that only get melee damage weapon since the first expansion. Hammer, Sword, Mace and now Spear. Shortbow is the only ranged, a support weapon tho.

I chose to mainly test the weapon in wvw roaming as core condi engi and hybrid holo. And i think it can work out somewhat. 

1 - Auto Attack

• Please add a ranged attack, a melee and a ranged attack should be available to all spears. It's a really nice thing.

2 - Conduit Surge

• Good Animation
• Smooth
• As mentioned before get rid of the focused mechanic, if you are going to stick to that crap, please consider giving this skill a second charge and maybe only 6sec cd. It could be also considered to apply focused to the prime target and two nearby targets. Would improvbe the cleave a bit.
• Could apply swiftness
• Overall seems okayish and will be fine with power number adjustments
• A cleanse of immob could be great on this one.
• Often the animation bugs and it seems to port, i like that 😄 tho it often misses then. seems to depent on quickness / swiftness / superspeed. the fast speed really feels good.

3 - Lightning Rod / Electric Artillery

• Good Animation
• Lightning Rod itself lacks a damaging condition
• The Ramp up for Electric Artillery doesnt feel good, this is kinda one of the main damage sources on the weapon and nothing you can open with. This really hurts a condi core engi and probably also other kitless non-holo-engies. With holo i just opened up with 2->3-> Holoform most of the time.
• Charging it up in a small player environment is meh, against a single focused target you can get 8 charges if you manage to hit them all time which will not be the case. I'd say get rid of the charging mechanic. Maybe scale it of the time instead of hits.
• Increase the power Damage of Electric Artillery
• Increase Range to 900

4 - Roiling Skies

• Lunching focused foes and stunning others, the tooltip also includes a knockdown. And actually this skill Knockdowns focused foes and stuns others. At least in WvW.
• Actually hard to land in melee due to the cone and slow cast time. This should have a similar aoe to firebrand mantras, so it will hit around you as well as in a cone.
• This weapon lacks personal defense so far, i'd suggest to add a 1sec block here as well.

5 - Devastator

• The high damage burn skill, burn spike is really strong against focused targets. i like that.
• The animation is not smooth tho. First the leap then it stutteres and the players freezes for 0,25 sec at the end location before playing off the aoe animation. Get rid of the freeze and reduce the cast time to 3/4 sec
• Increase the power damage

Edited Saturday at 02:15 PM by Nero.7369

[Limbo.4087]

Spear 2 working only like leap, if you use this without target, not a good design. And sometime you're flying through the sky when leap on target.

Charged spear 3 (Electric artillery) is not intuitive and goes into a short cd if your character not looking on enemy, good choice if you make this skill ground target (or pierce?). Plus in my opinion spear 3 (lightning rod) need bleeding stacks instead of vulnerability. Spear 4 good, but slow. Spear 5 good, but need more range or lower cast time.

Edited Saturday at 12:31 PM by Limbo.4087

[Aalter.2950]

Strong Condition-based weapon, would be nice if it had a bit more defensive utility to make it more viable in PvP. Also seems to lend itself to Holosmith much more than the other Specializations, but that may be less of an issue with the design of the Spear itself and more of an issue with the design of the other specializations, particularly Mechanist (which could already use some help being more viable in PvP).

Desgin-wise, really cool and fun to play. I like the Focus mechanic and have no complaints with the weapon conceptually. Great work guys! ❤️

Edited Saturday at 01:20 PM by Aalter.2950
Design feedback

[Tofu.1865]

On 6/28/2024 at 9:14 AM, Tofu.1865 said:

PVE Condi Mechanist Spear can hit 34k DPS bench at Golem but it takes at least 2 minutes to hit 34k though (very very slow and low btw)
Pistols are still better because they can hit 38k DPS in a minute and the Range is also an advantage

-Spear 1 (auto attack): could use some range buff? why is the auto attack range as small as a dagger?
-Spear 2 Conduit Surge: Very fun skill, perfect
-Spear 3 Lightning Rod/Electric Artillery: Lightning Rod maybe put a little bit of confusion damage, Bugged atm because it wont trigger Rocket Punch
-Spear 4 Rolling Skies: hella good because Condi mechanist has been begging for a defiance bar skill for a long time but misses sometimes because it won't lock on target
-Spear 5 Devastator: 1 second cast time and 240 AoE radius but only 1 target... why?

and on PVP...
-Decent weapon for PvP Mech... not a good duelist but good being a +1 on fights and dcapping/roaming
-Gonna be hella broken/OP in the hands of a Holosmith

the SFX is very good, but the gameplay feels very heavy and slow.

My suggestion to fix is this is to increase spear 1 range, Spear 2 make focus symbol bigger or bolder, Spear 3 Lightning Rod Put Confusion damage / Make Electric Artillery instant cast
Spear 5 needs an animation improvement and reduce the cast time... also make it atleast hit 5 targets kitten.

[bruakumfd.4817]

The only issue I found was with the 5th skill. Traverse seems like an odd word to use when the skill range isn't even 600 yards. Also, I don't know if it was me or not; I found the lightning effect underwhelming compared to the trailer.

[Mafuh.1293]

I don't think my playstyle was the target audience. I'm comparing it to hammer which is a really good weapon and has block, evade, ranged stun, reflect, high damage.

I played spear for less than 2 hours in WvW. Because it has practically no defense, and engineer has no weapon swap to have as backup weapon to try and escape with. It wouldn't be competitive in open field against anything that's been designed as solo roaming, and especially not against focused ganks. Even with the more defense weapons and multiple defensive utilities, willbender and thief with their multiple teleports just train things to death, because those two classes are just not balanced for how much speed and burst they have in open field (they can overextend/commit and still run far away).

So I tried to hide the individual weaknesses of spear in group combat. Which means running mortar kit as weapon swap, and running jade mech for a tanky teammate with cc and stability, and the mech is able to hit things while constantly running away from everything that can melee train a target. The 700 range dash is okay for running through groups of people with no defense up that happen to be clumping outside of a larger zerg. In big blob fights its actually better to run through things, compared to the comments of people wanting the dash/leap balanced around pve boss fights. The 450 range leap seems weak compared to the other engage abilities like rifle jump stomp and hammer rocket charge, both of which have evade on them and go much further.

Then there's the telegraph of casting the 3 on spear, and I couldn't actually tell if that was doing lots of damage to groups that had all boons. Probably didn't do enough damage for the time spent between waiting for all engage/disengage cooldowns to come back up. I tried to compare that to something like elementalist or berserker that just blankets AoE on the ground but people can just walk out of it (stuff like 6k meteor showers on base armor), but because its PBAoe, the engineer has to stay on the target, but most engis are used to that style of play with holosmith/scrapper anyway, of having to overlap PBAoE pressure into an explosive entrance spike. I'm not a zerg-holo main, so I don't know how it compares. But I was running celestial with spear, which wouldn't work on zerg dps holo but gave it some survivability.

And the ranged spear finisher on 3 was almost never in range of anybody except a stunned/down, because of the lack of defense and having to keep away from groups. And then the spear has a stun on 4, which gets eaten up by stability stacks in WvW, and it has no damage on it. So that's what I was using it for, to eat one stability stack for other teammates, rather than expecting to harm anything or win a fight with it. The range is also kind of short on the stun compared to the range that other characters can burst from. And engineer doesn't have viable enchant strip either in the utility abilites. And then most melee classes that don't have lots of burst, probably would want enchant strip/steal anyway.

So the weapon is low on utility and defense. And somebody else would know better if the AoE damage was enough to compensate. Somebody that is always in a perfectly stacked melee group for boons and synergy.

I wasnt able to optimize the focus target thing in group combat because of how the engineer has low defense and loses a 1v1 dps trade whenever a burst class is hitting at the same time with no dodges. But from reading the comments, the focus thing seems necessary for PvE, and would be used on champs and bosses all the time. Whereas in a pvp mode it's about looking for something low health or with its defense window down.

Wish list: an evade on something, maybe a stack of stability, enchanted foe hate like damage or a strip, etc.