Engineer is not doing nuff damage
The rifle is pretty good for small groups. For bigger groups I bring a toolkit. I personally prefer the flame thrower, but i heard the grenade kit is better (though I dislike the way you need to operate it).
If you don’t have the flamthrower yet you might use a more protective skillbar by going pistol/shield.
Arise, opressed of Tyria!
hey, thanks for the reply, i use flamethrower and grenade kit. should’ve mentioned that earlier i guess. the problem isn’t defense, i can dodge and avoid most attacks and take a few hits no sweat, its just the amount of damage. when questing alone especially it can take a dumb amount of time to kill basic creatures. the flamethrower has been a godsend. definitely one of the best things about engie
Don’t forget your Thumper. You can drop it and it will tank while you take care of business (at least most of the time).
Upgrade your gear.
For story, your gear needs to be close to your max level. That beside, depends on what you’re doing. Pve, you should probably go for bombs or flamethrower for damage and blinding. For weapons, rifle is more damaging and has plenty of control, pistol pretty pathetic unless you trait for it, but the utility is nice. Mob farming at high lvls, the easy/lazy way to go is speccing for grenadier(this alone pretty much outclasses every form of dmg engi does) and do whatever with the rest of your traits, works decent enough in dungeons. WvW grenades are fine and dandy for zerg and wall control, nothing else. Spvp, the grenadekit itself is terrible, hits slow yadda yadda.
For easy low level PvE you want to use Thumper Turret, pistol/shield and elixirs.
You should know kits get much stronger at later levels once you have more traits so you could leave them for later.
I did the same thing early, took rifle and got into kits as fast as possible, but it`s not the best way at low levels.