Guild Wars 2

Hey friends,

I’m still thinking of which class to main, even if I lved my thief, 2 engineers, guardian, 2 elementalists, mesmer and warrior up to 28-34 lv. I know it’s not high enough, but I can say which class I like more. I’ve tried every single weapon and I’ve also tried wvw to see how those classes work in different scenario.

So.. My favourite is engineer, even if skill cap is very high. I’m only scared of the fact that engineer is said to be one of the weaker class. Of course I understand it’s more about player skills more than class, but I have to be sure that it is rewarding to master engineer.

Pve isn’t important for me, but I’d like to be something more than just a trash that noone wants in his party. How’s engineer in pve in comparison to thief?

Pvp – I’ve heared engineer is a pvp class, but is that true? Can I support my team? What about solo roaming? Can I have a little comparison to thief?

I’d be grateful for little comparison between engineer and thief in terms of pve, tpvp, wvw. I know there are so many builds that we can build warrior to be trash in pve and at the same time we can build engineer to be top tier dps or amazing bunkering class, but let’s say we have optimal thief and engineer builds, who shines more at pve and pvp? Who can support team better?

Why you level 2 engineers and 2 elementalists?
This is waste of time If you are not a role player.

That’s a good question. I couldn’t decide which class fits ele and engineer better.. Lv 30 is so easily reached that I didn’t waste much time.

I’m not kind of player who play every class, but I stick to one class and try mastering it. That’s why I created this topic – I enjoy engineer and thief, I like their playstyles, still can’t decide.

With recent buffs, engineers became an excellent pve class.
Their damage, which was what they where lacking before, got buffed huge. Rune of strength works also well on them and they still have all the good stuff from before. Crazy vulnerability stacking, crapton of explosion finishers and all the nice stuff on demand like reflection, smoke field etc.
The sad thing is, most players still dont know this, so you will most likely not be welcomed by most pugs(=random people from the lfg menu)

Kibazuka.1390:

With recent buffs, engineers became an excellent pve class.
Their damage, which was what they where lacking before, got buffed huge. Rune of strength works also well on them and they still have all the good stuff from before. Crazy vulnerability stacking, crapton of explosion finishers and all the nice stuff on demand like reflection, smoke field etc.
The sad thing is, most players still dont know this, so you will most likely not be welcomed by most pugs(=random people from the lfg menu)

Pretty much this. Most of the engineer hate you’ll get, if any, will stem from one of several things:

1) “Most engineers are bad so I’m not going to take any chances on this one” (see also: rangers, mesmers)
2) “I don’t know anything about engineers but I heard they were bad” (see also: #1, above)
3) “My guild of hardcore dungeon runners is going for a dungeon clear record time and I think that we can shave four seconds off the clear time if we use an elementalist to kill this one boss instead of an engineer.”

The gist of it is that engineers are rarely played, poorly played when played, and the situation MAY mean that a strictly minmaxed group is sometimes better off just bursting with an elementalist rather than going for higher sustained DPS using an engineer. That said that only applies to strict record runs; engineers will actually speed up pretty much any run that isn’t strictly minmaxed point for point and once Anet finally gets around to nerfing Fiery Rush, they’ll be good for everything, period.

For whats it worth, I tried playing 6 different classes (all but guardian and engineer) and just couldn’t find a class that I loved. I walked away from the game. Then one day I had absolutely nothing to do and rolled an engineer for kicks and loved it so much that it brought me back into playing actively.

Also a note: I truly believe that playing an engineer has a higher skill cap than most professions, and therefore I was forced to learn the game mechanics in such a way that I didn’t have to when playing say a warrior (not meant as a shot at warriors, they’re just a different play style in my limited experience). And learning those mechanics has made me better at the game and also caused me to be able to enjoy playing other classes much more.

I main an engineer in a guild that runs dungeons on a daily basis and honestly it’s a really good class to have in a party. As said above one nice thing is that you have a bunch of different stuff to offer, be it fire/smoke/water fields to blast, a metric ton of blast finishers, a LOT of vulnerability which will make bosses go down easier and faster, good mobility, even a reflect/projectile block which is always good to have.

Personally I like engineer over thief because thief feels much more ‘specialized’, ie are basically just stealth+high single-target DPS focus with little variation, whereas engies are extremely versatile, and while they don’t have quite the raw damage of thieves their use to the party overall can be extremely high.

I also play engie in PvP and can confirm it works really well, in a variety of roles, thanks to that versatility. For example, I tend to go with a bunkery build to hold close or support mid, am pretty durable with water fields + blasts + shield while being able to kill or outlast the other person in a 1v1 most of the time, and if not I often manage to stall enough for my team to come and finish it before we lose the point. But it’s also very valid to play a decap engineer, which are really frustrating to be against if they’re played well and can often be a huge hassle and stall points gain. I’ve also seen a bunch of more offensive, roamer-type engineers although they’re much rarer, but they can work pretty well too.

Compared to thief again I think it’s the ability to fill in a lot of different roles that differs. A good thief roamer is awful to fight against, but hell, I’ve fire-bombed a good dozen of them while doing my bunker thing simply because I know how to dodge and thieves can be pretty one-note.

So, it is rewarding to master engineer, isn’kitten I mean, every class is worth it, but engineer’s skill cap is higher, so is reward also higher?

Also, I’ve read that dmg engineer can perform is one of tle lowest. On the other hand there is one quite fresh topic in which I read engineer is top tier in terms of dmg. Any class can be built for dps, I know this, but how’s engineer’s dps if built properly?

jackaljag.8637:

I main an engineer in a guild that runs dungeons on a daily basis and honestly it’s a really good class to have in a party. As said above one nice thing is that you have a bunch of different stuff to offer, be it fire/smoke/water fields to blast, a metric ton of blast finishers, a LOT of vulnerability which will make bosses go down easier and faster, good mobility, even a reflect/projectile block which is always good to have.

Personally I like engineer over thief because thief feels much more ‘specialized’, ie are basically just stealth+high single-target DPS focus with little variation, whereas engies are extremely versatile, and while they don’t have quite the raw damage of thieves their use to the party overall can be extremely high.

I also play engie in PvP and can confirm it works really well, in a variety of roles, thanks to that versatility. For example, I tend to go with a bunkery build to hold close or support mid, am pretty durable with water fields + blasts + shield while being able to kill or outlast the other person in a 1v1 most of the time, and if not I often manage to stall enough for my team to come and finish it before we lose the point. But it’s also very valid to play a decap engineer, which are really frustrating to be against if they’re played well and can often be a huge hassle and stall points gain. I’ve also seen a bunch of more offensive, roamer-type engineers although they’re much rarer, but they can work pretty well too.

Compared to thief again I think it’s the ability to fill in a lot of different roles that differs. A good thief roamer is awful to fight against, but hell, I’ve fire-bombed a good dozen of them while doing my bunker thing simply because I know how to dodge and thieves can be pretty one-note.

Engie actually has better DPS than thieves, thieves are just good for speedruns because Shadow Refuge makes some stuff really easy. Engie can stealth through most stuff but thieves are the only ones who can really stealth through all of Arah P3 without ever entering combat, which makes them really good for speeding the part after Lupi and opening the WP, as well as for getting through the gate before the Crusher without fighting anything.

For everything else engie stealth gets you through just fine, especially given that Engies move really fast.

I haven’t played my thief in ages, and never quite as much as my engie so I’m willing to believe that, Guanglai, although it seems to me that to get good engie DPS some skill is definitely needed vs thief where it’s fairly easy to dish it out even if you’re not that good or perfectly traited?

@Hattoni: yeah engineer requires a bit more investment in practice/skill than most other classes I find, but the DPS is very solid so I don’t think that’s a worry. (Plus with the vulnerability you’ll be stacking on enemies will also increase overall party DPS by quite a bit so it’s a win-win.)

I love my engineer, and honestly even though they are hard to play you can get away with spamming abilities in PvE. You can deal great damage by spamming abilities through each kit.

Engineer is secretly the best class in the game. Grouchy makes sure of it. >.>

Seriously though, engie can keep perma 25 stack vuln on all the mobs with grenade kit. Makes killing faster in dungeons. They also have the widest variety of combo fields and blast finishers. You got aoe heal, might, and stealth.

Engineer seems to be a good pug class as well as an okay speedrun class, if you didn’t have an ele or a thief, since an engi kind of combines both of their roles (ie blasting fire and smoke fields for might and stealth, which eles and thieves do better, but engineer can do both, which frees up a party slot). I don’t really PvE anymore, so idk how right I am lol.

Thanks for replies, you all helped me a lot.

I have got one more question – what makes engineers such a controversial class? You know, they are said to be either op or up. There are people who say engineer is the worst class to both pve and pvp and others say that engi is one of the strongest class, who can 1vX while still being able to help team in dungeons a lot.
Is it about skill cap, which is very high for engineer and simply majority of people don’t know how to play it or something different?
Elementalist is also very complex, it has even more skills than engi, but ele was easily judged to be op after those new patches and before them it was quite weak. I can’t understand why is engineer such an unique class that so many many DIFFERENT statements were made about it.

I think the skill cap has a lot to do with it, since it means that a lot of people you see playing engineers may not be very good, or that people who have tried playng them but not ‘clicked’ with the class can dismiss them as useless when they just haven’t gotten around to using them properly.

I also recall how a few months back Anet showed some stats that showed engineer was the least played profession along with mesmer (10% of characters only, something like that?) which might compound the issue, as rare engineers + skill threshold means less chances of having known someone who ckittene them well and so them getting a bad rep.

I do understand why mesmer might be the least played class, but I can’t get what’s wrong with engineer.. I’m only lv 30, I’m quite new to GW2 and in my opinion engineer isn’t that hard.. I’m using 3 kits + healing turret at the moment, the only difficulty might be to remember which skill is responsible for blindness, which causes burn etc.
But, yea – in comparison to warrior or guardian engineer might look complicated to control him.
Ok, wish me luck in learning engineer, it’s going to be a long road tho.

My engineer was my first character and I never had problems with it either, although for some reason I hated kits for a long time and used mainly turrets to level. (I now know better, although turrets in PvP = love :P) But eh, everyone’s got different tastes and it definitely might look like a weird class coming after warrior or ranger which I think a lot of people use as first characters while they learn the ropes.

But props to you for wanting to stick with the best class and good luck! It is rather long but it’s fun and filled with the sounds of your enemies being blown up, which is the best kind of road in my opinion.

Hattoni.8597:

I do understand why mesmer might be the least played class, but I can’t get what’s wrong with engineer.. I’m only lv 30, I’m quite new to GW2 and in my opinion engineer isn’t that hard.. I’m using 3 kits + healing turret at the moment, the only difficulty might be to remember which skill is responsible for blindness, which causes burn etc.
But, yea – in comparison to warrior or guardian engineer might look complicated to control him.
Ok, wish me luck in learning engineer, it’s going to be a long road tho.

1) High-level engie requires TONS of button pressing.
2) No 1200 range auto-attack for AFKing world events.
3) None of the “I’m a cool medieval knight with a big sword” RP factor.
4) Lots of bad engineer players give a bad name.
5) Strong builds aren’t super intuitive (see also #4).

I don’t think it’s really so much that engineers are “controversial” for anyone other than a few naysayers, it’s just people aren’t really willing to take a risk on an unknown.

You might be right, especially with #3.. I love my female asura engineer, she’s so cute, but this might be true that most people prefer more traditional class look, which is, in example, norn guardian or sylvari ranger..

Another thing might be that not everyone prefer challenge if they can take warrior, which is said to be op in.. everything.