Guild Wars 2

Hi, I’m seeking advice from fellow engineers on what kind of build is “best” for a Rifle Engineer for both PvE/WvW. I’ve been playing Condition-based builds such as P/P or P/S for awhile and now I’m bored and want to make something new so I decided to ask the community for some advice. (Pardon my grammar)

Now to break it down a little bit, I’m not planning to make any Hybrid nor condition type builds, including HgH since I’m not really looking for a boon-based builds. I’m planning for just pure DPS, but of course with the engineers built in condition traits, I’ll be using some amount of condition, but anyway… I’ve been studying some videos on Youtube about other peoples DPS rifle engineer and I haven’t had too much to work with, most people use full berserker with no defense, but they still seem to handle themselves adequately. I do have a good amount of experience with Static Discharge builds in SPvP and it works great, the dodges from both Tools and Alchemy traits allow me to be particularly squishy and yet still survive and do good damage to tanks and other DPS professions, but both PvE/WvW of course very different, certain areas require certain defense and they are all different situations for rifle-based engineers.

Do you think from your own personal experience from either PvE or WvW is best to run full Berserker? Or does a rifle engineer that plans to go full dps, need an adequate amount of Toughness? I’m mainly looking for overall rifle builds for both WvW and PvE, but any reply regarding advice is much appreciated. I’m basically collecting “data” from anyone’s advice. Thanks for reading.

in wvw you WILL need some extra toughness. in pve you should ONLY use extra toughness if you have trouble living long enough. if you are already used to surviving with glassy gear, more dps is always better. when i go into wvw, for small group fights i run full berserker with berserker/cavaliers trinkets. with that setup im at around 2.5k armor 35% crit chance and 55% crit damage. with runes of rage you can maintain 100% fury uptime so that pretty much the vast majority of your hits will be crits. all this of course with the fact that you have 2.5k armor, which actually can soak some damage.

I know what you mean by having that extra armor, I’m not too use to glass cannon, does having that much armor improve your performance in solo-play? Whenever I piece together my armor stats, I become a bit dissatisfied with either the power or the toughness, so it’s a little tricky to me.

well you HAVE to sacrifice one to gain the other, thats just how it is. i main a guardian that constantly runs over 3k armor so its definitely not going to be as tanky as that, but i do find that the cavalier trinket thing is the best way to go if you want some extra armor. thats just my personal preference though, you may have a different setup that you like