Guild Wars 2

I’ve seen a lot of post about the badness of the engineers, so right now I am just trying to use things that are cool and fun to use. I’m not going to look into PvP too much and I am mostly doing PvE and using skill builds that are really cool to use.

One I tried is the Flamethrower/Tank Engineer. This guy maximizes his toughness and vit. his abilities maximize the Flamethrowers damage, recharge rate, and give you an extra i think 200 toughness and the passive buff to not be able to get knocked down. I invested more into the regen when using a kit and made it so when I crit, it gives the person vuln. This is a very good dps support build. The Napalm bomb crits for 2-3k for me on spvp if not dodge/used correctly. Basically if its a group of friendlies vs a group of enemies, i am very useful. One round of my auto attack, and almost everyone in the enemies group would have been hit, might have burn, and vulnerability. I just spam that and do close to 2k damage per attack. I am also very hard to take down. I’ve survived a considered amount of time 1v5. Even though I lose, it still takes them a while which is also funny. I have yet to try it in WvW, but it will probably do amazing.

I tired a full tanky/turret build. This is mostly for PvE. But I built my guy to be able to take a lot of damage and block a lot while my turrets output DPS. Though it is not good, still an interesting change of pace.

A build I want to try is the pvp support. With exilier guns auto attack making it so they done recharge endurance fast, i think it would be very useful.

It is true, engineers are underpowered. But it is like this a lot at launches. It’s always going to be like this. One class will be op, another will be up (underpowered). They will buff the up and he will be op now and the op will be up and another will be op. Rinse and repeat. So until they buff us, just try to have fun in PvE or join WvW where you follow the zerg and just leech of them.

I have no idea how Engineers are in PvE as I’ve barely touched it, but, after about 100 sPvP hours clocked in, Engineer is far from underpowered, I’d put Engineer in my top tier, with Mesmer and Thief, Engineers are just a lot harder to play on the same level as other classes. Anybody who tells you otherwise just doesn’t know how to play one

One of the few people who gave me problems was an engineer, the damage he was pumping rivalled that of a theif but he had a ton more survivability. He was getting about 8k damage out of his hip shot in 4 hits and the other abilities also resulted in a ton of burst. Maybe he was just running a counter build to my mesmer but I found the three people I’ve had problems with to be him, a theif and a guardian.

This is a really cool post, thanks
I’m looking at engineer for my next PvE character for excellent support and flamethrower use. Tanky flamethrower sounds great. I’ll have to check it out for pvp too ;D

Started out with my engineer and loving it. Was using a flame build, but at level 20-40 I didn’t have a great deal of trait points built up though I would still run around doing a crap load of aoe dmg.

Switch to dual pistol with elixirs…holy shizzle my burst dmg is extremely high, my bleeds / poison hurt a lot now (high +con dmg) in both pvp / pve. So yer, engineer high dps? I don’t die easily in pve, I’m crap at pvp but still manage to kill people one on one or one on two. (some terrabad’s out in WvW!) So I think engies have pretty high dps if you play them right. Just need to figure out what your play style is I guess.

The tanky Flamethrower build is an idea I’ve often thrown around in my head, and is probably something I would consider if I became consistent with sPvP. However I just can’t go past my Power/Precision/Crit Dmg% build for Rifle/Grenades. Especially since I spend majority of my time farming Karma or crafting materials for selling.

I’m wearing the Vigil armour (Power/Tough/Vit) and filled them with Divinity runes (A cheap stop-gap filler whilst accruing money – stats + crit dmg% each stack of the rune) and my 42k Karma chest and it seems to keep me fairly well alive in WvW engagements, even when I’m drasticly outnumbered or surprise ambushed. I run the following:

• Med Kit

• Grenade Kit
• Goggles
• Net Turret

• Supply Drop

This is for both WvW and sPvP. It works for me. It might not for you. I run around with high tough/vit and still maintain 45% crit/46% crit damage. With intelligent traiting and trait slot choices I can’t see how people can lavishly tar engineers are too underpowered. My only gripe realisticly is rifle range and the fact that 3/5 skills are melee range oriented.

Engineers aren’t bad, there’s just a single difficult piece of the class. You have to switch back and forth between kits frequently. This is the biggest strength of the class; there’s no cooldown on kits.

Flamethrower is a great weapon because of its utility, not its damage. You switch to the flamethrower, use the knockback, and then switch back to your weapon. NO OTHER CLASS CAN DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT.

Trying to play a “tanky flamethrower build” is thinking about it wrong. The stability/toughness you get is good for little situations, not all the time. You can switch to flamethrower and then stomp someone while you’re impossible to stun. If you’re really good, you can switch to it while a stun is on the way and avoid it. Stuff like that.

The same thing is true of other kits. You rarely want to melee with the tookit (though melee does decent damage), but you can switch to it for a couple seconds and use the block to avoid deadly damage.

To reiterate, engineer is fine. The problem is people not using kits how they should be used.

Engineers are very confusing to me, not that the skills are complicated or the class is complex, more that I decided to try one out in sPvP and I’ve been doing amazing. I haven’t lost a single 1v1 fight, I actually managed to win a couple 2v1s (something I could never do on my necro), frequently #1 overall, and I still have no idea really what I’m doing with the class. I don’t use turrets, not sure what my build is, just something about it seems surprisingly… easy.

p.s. yes I realize sPvP is not exactly full of awesome, skilled players