tyrellian.3706

The author's clearly put a lot of work into the artwork and feel of the class - but I can't support it as an elite spec. It's got a lot of issues - some minor, some major, some fundamental. ## Fundamental * It's yet another minion spec. We've had too many of these before - turrets from base and gyros from Scrapper (before they got completely reworked to be wells). Players don't like them - the AI tends to be terrible, the minions themselves are too squishy, and the gameplay is too passive. Anet eventually came around to this viewpoint too, gutting core turrets and reworking gyros to be non-minion-based. Minions - especially mechanical ones - are often touted as 'cool' by those who've not played engi much. Those that have, hate them. * There's no clear purpose of the class. Its power damage is poor. Its condi damage is poor. Its support is negligible. Its mobility is non-existent. It's not a healer. It's not great at debilitating opponents. It doesn't have the defences to be a tank (other than hopping in the golem, and that's got a huge CD). What is it supposed to be used for? ## Major * The cast times are far too long on all the skills that have them. A long, interruptable channel on the auto-attack is particularly yikes from a competitive POV - but honestly all of the non-zero cast times are far too high here for everything except perhaps the elite. * Conversely, a zero-cast time on a CC is a no-no balance-wise - they need tells. So scepter-2 needs to be non-instant. * The cooldowns are excessive - especially on scepter 2. * The damage output is far too low. To give an example, scepter-1's tooltip DPS is 114/s, lower if it has any aftercast. Contrast that with pistol-1, arguably our weakest current attack, whose tooltip DPS is ~178/s including aftercast, and not including the extra from the bleed. * The elite transform's skills are copy-pasted straight from the alpha siege golem. Quite aside from being disappointingly unoriginal, most WvW players will tell you that the alpha (and for that matter the omega) is actually really poor at fighting anything other than siege. Players have no trouble beating these up if they're not escorted, and they're particularly prone to condi. The only thing they have going for them is the large hitpoint pool - but that's not transferred to this elite spec (nor would it sensibly be). ## Minor * Break enemy targetting's kinda pointless on a skill that stealths you, as that'll break targetting anyway. This would only be useful in the extremely niche situation where the engi is already revealed. And 2s stealth isn't really enough to do anything useful. * It's unclear what benefits allies receive from shared salvage. * It's unclear how much health all the summons have. * The available combo fields are lacking, as there's only one and it's light. Similarly, there's only one finisher, and it's a leap.