Guild Wars 2

After playing for a few months and maxing out my first character, an engineer, I saw a series of nerfs that left the class quite hurt. It ended up being a PvE support class. Discouraged, I moved on to other games. I was asked to come back, but I’m curious if the class is more sound and playable now than when I left.

A friend asked me to come back, but I’m curious if I should try my engineer again or if I should just roll up another character. Did Grenades ever get un-nerfed? Did turrets ever get more useful? Did the effect additions to engineer skills actually help? I see mixed threads in the forum, so I’m not sure if things actually got better or if they never really did. Because when I left, the only really interesting engineers were a sort of uber-bricky Elixir-S spamming retaliation tank. There were legendary videos of people epically rifling it, but they tended to be the “Hey check out my gear in WvW pretty sweet right? Oh crap here comes a _!” where _ was an equally geared non-engineer.

What’s up? Has this changed?

Imo engineers are currently fine. The only things not playable right now are bugged turrets and the forever unloved by anet mortar. I feel that one of the best things to happen to us recently was having rocket boots launch us forward, which is great in wvw for escaping or chasing

So what’s the modern role of the engineer in PvE, WvW, and sPvP?

engineer was never bad in the first place.
same role as everyone: dps (one of the best aoe dps classes) + vuln (best vuln stacker) and might stacking.

in wvw you kill stuff in hgh builds.

If more effort for similar or lesser effect made you feel superior, you probably wouldn’t have left in the first place. This may be the underlying answers you will get on this forum, from people still or newly playing engineer.

If you felt engineer is still quite unfinished, with a few odd combinations that almost randomly work, but overall the engineer vision is inconsistent, unfocused and poorly realised, then not much has changed.

Last couple of patches were a bit better, so some cause for cautious optimism however in the big picture changes are still slow and we still get inconsistently taxed multiple times:

1. HGH nades is still powerful for certain types of fights providing you can survive the retaliation damage.
2. Overall turrets are still rubbish for anyone not involved with node-play or duels and heavily bugged.
3. P/P is rubbish since elixir S & R were ruined and confusion halved in damage. It’s never ecovered from the overnerf in beta1 e.g. skill1, which also STILL bugged and fires as slowly as rifle.
4. FT & EG are still confused what the hell they are supposed to do well is it power, condi, support, cc? Also sadly lacking in finishers/field like all kits.
5. Bombs still don’t have needed radius/fuse/proximity detonation to reliably hit anyone who isn’t immobilised or unaware of them.
6. Rifle/SD still offers less burst than a thief with none of the survivability.

Rocketboots would be a nice change if they fix the bugs on it, healing turret would also be nice if it survived long enough to even trigger the second part of it’s now multi-press timing heal (horrible to use in wvw skill lag etc) and so on. We still desperately miss reliable stability (since it was deleted from juggernaut and not put back anywhere else). No stability is a crushing handicap for any class.

Wait..pistol 1 “Still” fires as slow as rifle 1?