The Engineer is a high skill cap, high reward, highly versatile class… it holds both the most difficult rotation yet highest DPS potential in the game, but still allows for very effective “sub-meta” builds with intelligent planning. Honestly, the Engineers biggest problem is having TOO MANY good skills. We continuously juggle between high DPS and high utility, with most utilities being strong stand alone, but the kits being too adaptive to give up. Seriously; with only a few tweak to a couple skills, they could theoretically do everything in one build.
Solo, we have high survivability through trait support, with good to exceptional DPS with our offensive kits. In group comp, we can do anything from condi clear, top tier condi DPS, vulnerability and condi stacking, blasting, spike damage, sustain damage, boon piling, and now world class CC breaking with the Scrapper. The only area we fall behind is the Guardian’s unmatched in-line damage mitigation; but its more then made up for with highly adaptive strategies to fit any situation imaginable…. and several you couldn’t imagine if you never played an one.
Now playing an Engineer has a little bit of learning curve. Its not difficult, so much as you have unlearn rotation behavior used by other classes, and expand your pattern memory to include another 15+ skills that has to be shuffled on-demand. Unlike most classes, the Tool Belt class mechanic is integral to both offensive and reactive, and contains some of your strongest skills on low cool downs.
The most useful utility skills, by far, are the Kits. Every build tends to incorporate at least one for the extra diversity, but many will run 2 or even 4 (cuz we have elite kits as well) just due to how powerful they can be in so many situations. In fact, they interlace so well with most builds, we end up thinking of our main weapon set as another kit.
For WvW, the Engineer will give you the widest build potential, utilizing the most diverse set of prefixes then any other class to date. Favored for WvW and PvP are Knights and Celestial for the mixed in defensive stats, complimenting our high sustain damage setup. Crit chance only needs to be around 40-50% base, as we have a lot multi-hit skills combined with some extremely strong proc’d traits, and relatively easy access to fury. Surprisingly, most of the boon giving skills are a slot machine, and don’t give 100% uptime for anything except a moderate amount of might….. but this ultimately is not a problem with the amount of sustain built into the baseline.
For comprehensive guides on WvW, http://wolfineer.com/ is the Oricalcum standard for build comprehension. The builds presented are NOT cookie cutter. They’re extremely well thought out, built around practicality and survibility, and openly encourages you modify them to match your specific playstyle. In fact, I use these guides to balance gear stats in PvE, as they’ll work on pretty much any skill combination that matches the damage type.
And if your doing weenie hoard farming (Mad Realm, Orr, and Tyria events), the Flame Thrower and Grenade kits Tag like nothing else in existence. It even makes the Guardian loot stick look like a single target weapon.
Though, the two posts I’ve written myself have different points. One is general feedback, and thoughts, while the other is suggestions.