stone cold.8609

In my experience, the condi beserker spec warrior (not spellbreaker unfortunately), almost anything guardian (including firebrand), power or condi Tempest are specs to try. Also, the new holosmith spec looks like it might be good to try as well, but I need to play it more before being sure.

I only play PvE, so my comments only apply to this game mode. Before the demo, I played 4 classes - elementalist, guardian, warrior and thief. After playing the beta demo, of the classes I would have voted for holosmith first, with weaver and firebrand a distant second and third. I thought holosmith had a pretty cohesive and unique spec and was very excited to try it. I liked it so much that I spent the time between the demo and the patch leveling up a new engineer to play it. I thought weaver had potential, but needed some buffing to the attunement cool downs and barrier for it to really be good and worth the added complexity. I frankly was worried about firebrand, because the tomes felt very clunky and didn't mesh well. Also, the mantras were way too small. I strongly suspected that spellbreaker would be underpowered and outclassed by the condi beserker, but was hoping it would perform better when it when live. I totally did not like the deadeye concept and had no interest in playing it.

After playing the release specs, I voted firebrand first, with holosmith a close second. I found that the changes that Irenio and team made to firebrand that incorporated some of the player feedback during the demo really made using the firebrand tomes feel much better and less clunky, to the point that it became my favor spec. Great job! I liked the holosmith just as much as I did pre launch and think it is a very strong, fun build. The weaver felt just a clunky as it did during the demo and no really player suggestions were taken into account that I could tell. Frankly the tempest feels better to play right now. Unfortunately, the spellbreaker was just as underpowered at release as it was during the demo. Again, there was a lot of player feedback to help address this that I didn't see reflected in the live spec. I unlocked the deadeye, but didn't play it at all since I don't like the whole sniper play style.

So for me, the clear winners of PoF are firebrand and holosmith.

I guess spellbreaker was meant to be a PvP/WvW spec, because it feels very weak in PvE. Upping the damage on the daggers and reworking/increasing the burst damage would be good first steps. As much as I wanted to like it, it really is underperforming compared to condi beserker.

The dual attunement is a great concept, but in it's current form feels clunky in PvE. Making the global cool down reduced to 3 sec if attuning to different elements and reduced to 0 if you are attuning to the same element would go a long way to smoothing this out. This change, combined with an increase to the amount of the barrier, would go a long way to improving this spec.

Really like it! I'm currently in all vipers gear and am doing extremely well in PvE. Kind of surprising, since I thought Holo would be better with power gear. I think that something like Grievers may be the right stat for this spec (anyone know where to get it?). Both PP and SP work equally well with this condi set up (Firearms/Tools/Holo, all Holo utilities). Lots of damage, however, still trying to see if the sustain/survivability is enough. Be warned, it plays nothing like the base engineer and feels a lot more like playing a warrior, a flashy techo-warrior! My Asura definitely approves.

I just wanted to thank Irenio and team for listening to the player feedback during the beta. This is the one spec that I played were I was able to see that it was noticeably improved from beta to launch by incorporating player feedback. I was not a big fan of how the spec played during the beta, but after the changes it has become one of my favorite PoF specs. Much of the clunky feel has been smoothed out. I really like the feel of the axe and tomes together which take guardian in a very interesting new direction. Great Job for what you've done so far!