Guild Wars 2

So i’ve always liked the Shield/Pistol weapon setup, but I also don’t like a bunch of turrets. Could the flamethrower and alchemy pistols carry my through pve? Is there another better setup that still uses shield/pistol?

Pistol/Shield is your defensive build. You’re giving up the control/burst of rifle, and without offhand pistol you’re giving up a lot of condi damage. You gain a reflect/block/stun though.

Flamethrower is kinda /meh, good for if you’re in a zerg of people killing swarms of enemies that you just need a tag on though.

Generally speaking you want bombs or grenades for your main damage (when using the 1 skill because everything else is on cooldown), with nades though you need the grenadier trait, so I’d probably suggest bombs just from the vibe of your post.

Everything in this game is about synergy, if you go condi you’ll want to keep static shot on cooldown, use bombs for fire, maybe toolkit crowbar for confusion, and then nades for bleeds and poisons on pistol/nades. You’ll want to be in nades for your autos with “shrapnel” trait.

For Power build you’ll want bombs main, could use nades for freeze/shrapnel but up to you on if you’re willing to use nades (they can be a pain).

You still could do FT in a power build and just hit em up, use juggernaut and maybe HGH trait to keep might up and do decent damage for a solo situation, but then we’re talking a bit less optimized build, but surely an option.

Open world PvE or Dungeons?

You generally don’t want to rely on conditions to do your main damage in PvE if you want kill things quickly. Condi is especially bad on world bosses because they can easily be overwritten or pushed back. It looks like this may change though in the new xpack. I’ve run Pistol/Shield before with Bombkit and Flamethrower but only for the blast on the shield and a bit of utility.

To do decent ‘dps’ you wanna hit as many high damaging abilities as you can as often as you can. FT can be decent if you compliment the damage with other weapons/kits/traits. Static Discharge w/low cooldown toolbelts help to add ‘dps’. FT2 is good burst. Bombs are good. EG4 is great if the target is stationary. Grenades 2, 4 n toolbelt. Rifle 3 n kitten hard. Etc..

Key to engi is to cycle through the hard hitters because we don’t really have a weapon swap cooldown. Never just camp a weapon or kit in PvE if you want to do the best you can.

Solo open world you can do what ever you want.

Zerg open world you will have to hit stuff and defense is not required since everyone mindless tries to tag everything wich dies anyway :P So you can keep your pistol + shield, yet you wont use it, that much. Nades, bombs or the flamethrower are best for tagging.

In dungeons pistol + shield is viable and it’s good. It’s less dps (slightly) for more utility. You get blind, interrupts and a blast finisher. Yet you should never ever use skill 1 or 2. You sill should use nades, bombs, flame thrower, mines, elixier gun + situational stuff and use the meta build.

It is viable i tend to use pistol/ shield when soloing arah and i want to keep my might up and above 10stacks at all times and it also helps me with stealth runs as for anything outside dungeons pve related i guess it doesnt really matter because lets face it if you keep dying in open world you might need to go back to basics……. OH and world bosses you are in a zerg anyways.