Guild Wars 2

I’ve searched the depths of the forums looking for the best way to utilize the flamethrower in pve like dungeons and overall farming/exploring(I find grenades boring and bombs a death sentence) and if you engineer pros could help me pick the best from what I’ve found.

Specs: 10/30/0/30/0
-Incendiary Power for more burns and take advantage of 10% more dmg from flame blast

-Precise Sights for vulnerability
-Fireforged Trigger for faster cooldown
-Juggernaut because it makes the flamethrower

-Fast acting elixirs for faster cooldown a.k.a more might
-Deadly Mixture for 15% more dmg
-HGH for might

Skills: Elixir H, Elixir B, Flamethrower, Elixir U/Elixir C, Supply Crate

Armor: Some people say berserkers+berserker jewels, rampagers+rampagers jewels, berserkers+rampagers jewels and vice versa

Runes: I use x6 Sup Rune of the Flame Legion, but others say utilizing runes that aid in might stacking or overall boon duration

Weapon: Rifle offers CC, snare, and a two gtfo distancer and syncs well if going full power path(berserkers), P/S offers more conditions and more protection for dungeons, etc and syncs well if going conditiony path(rampagers), and I havent really seen much love for P/P but it would fall under the rampagers category if anything.

Sigils: For Rifle either sigil of strength or sigil of earth, for p/p or p/s sigil of earth, sigil of force, etc?

P.S please no hur dur grenades are much better cause flamethrower sucks

Now, my perspective is almost entirely PvE, not even WvW. Seems pretty standard flamethower build. In groups there’s tons of ways to build might so I tend to back off HGH, and just take CF409 for the grandmaster trait. I usually carry Elixir B and Elixir R so there’s condition removal there, and healing turret also provides condition removal and AOE effects. Clever use of healing turret for area healing or area might works pretty well.

That being said, I still have things up for might persistence, which means 2x runes of str/hoelbrak/fire on gear. Probably another reason why HGH doesn’t really give me much of a boost. I get my might on, and it doesn’t really ever go away.

I have seen variations where if you don’t want CF409, you can skip grandmaster alchemy entirely and put 5 points down in tools. I think you still want that 25 point minor trait though for the extra damage.

Gear… I tend to run with mostly knights with bits of beserker mixed in. Entirely beserker jewelry. If you have a higher risk tolerance, switching out kit for beserkers is more damage at higher risk of getting smashed into paste. Entirely personal preference I imagine.

Personally I like pistol/shield, but if you do more 1-on-1 PvP, I have heard rifle is awfully good for the number of control options it provides (see nakoda’s articles on FT/Rifle for sPvP). Pistol gives me a little something I can do at range if I need to get out of FT range (plus the 10s of poison is good, and while not as good as it used to be, the confusion is not too bad). Shield gives me reflect (situationally useful), and area might detonation in fire fields.

The thing to remember is that flamethrower, by and large, is not a condition build. There’s really only one condition that we care about and that’s burning, which doesn’t stack in intensity, but rather duration. So going nuts with condition damage gear doesn’t buy you a great deal in my opinion. Better off to work off the power and crit potential of the rapid ticks of flame blast.

Sigils, just one sigil that crits and one that buffs. I think I have might on crit, and then force for the 5% damage. You could go for the precision buff too, but honestly with 30 in the precision tree and lots of precision from gear, I was over 50% and felt like more oomph was more valuable. If you found yourself still maxed out on might, switching to a crit proc on fireblast or something might be cool.

Hope that helps, it was kind of rambly but there you have it.

Very good advices. You can follow other conversations on the same topics:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/About-to-hit-80-PvE-dungeon-gear/first#post1927118

For PvP, I recommend starting here for inspiration.