Guild Wars 2

I just reached level 80 with 300 gold and do not know what items should I buy to optimise my engineer for PvE. I’ve been saving all my money till level 80 to buy armour and weapon, runes and sigil that wont be changing anytime soon. After reading up here and there, I realise it’s not so straight forward. I’m currently running a bomb grenade rifle condition build. I just restarted playing the game after a year and i’ve really lost touch with the game.

Firstly, I recall (unsure if it is accurate) that stacking power wont affect damage on bombs and grenade and that’s why I went the precision condition build; using runes of eagles and sigils of corruption. As for the armour, I just bought the most expensive exotic with precision and condition which is rampager’s armour.

I thought I was done but then I saw many with cool backs and people farming for exotic armour and weapons and stuff. Now I’m completely lost on what to do or buy as I dont know what I dont know lol. So I started by searching which is the best build for PvE to reconstruct my armour and weapon with ascended rarity and even that is unclear.

Legendary items are obviously out of my budget, so what should I invest on with the amount I have now. Should I max all my crafting to get those ascended items or can they be bough? My only maxed crafting profession is cooking.

You may be interested in this.

Buy level 80 masterwork Berserker armor and trinkets in the trading post or craft them yourself.
Buy a level 80 exotic Giver pistol in the trading post.
Go to Explorer Gavbeorn Serpentslayer and buy the breathing apparatus with karma.
Buy 7 Superior Runes of the Flame Legion.

All the above should cost you only 6-8 gold.

Start doing Citadel of Flame, path 1 and 2 are very easy, and even with PUGs each only takes about 10-15 minutes. Do both paths daily, and after 11-12 days you’ll have enough tokens to buy yourself a full exotic Berserker armor in Lion’s Arch.
Buy 6 Scholar runes for your exotic armor, maybe a 7th one for your underwater headgear.
Do CoF a few times more to buy yourself an exotic Berserker Rifle.

To speed getting your exotic armor and Rifle up you can also do Crucible of Eternity daily. Path 1 is easy if you stay close to Alpha, path 2 and 3 aren’t much harder once you’ve learned to time your dodges. Again you can trade the tokens in Lion’s Arch for level 80 exotic armor and weapons.

Don’t bother with exotic trinkets, go straight for ascended ones: Ascended equipment
You can get all trinkets with Laurels.
It’s a little faster to get rings by doing fractals and accessories by doing Guild Missions, though.
The easiest way to get an ascended backpiece is by doing fractals: Prototype Fractal Capacitor

Get your Huntsman crafting discipline to 500 and craft yourself an ascended Berserker Rifle.
If you’re planning to do a lot of high-level fractals get your Leatherworker crafting discipline to 500, too, otherwise exotic armor is sufficient.

The 6/6/0/2/0 build is very newbie-friendly and good for any dungeon, once you have more experience you can change it to your needs:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUlUUpEr9ZxdLseNSbBB6IOi2KqM+5CEgjC-TRRBwAX3fU+dT9H86AA8AAMrEEA-e

harryexe.5617:

Firstly, I recall (unsure if it is accurate) that stacking power wont affect damage on bombs and grenade…

This is inaccurate. Grenades and Bombs scale well with power.

Personally, ascended armor/weapons are not worth the investment if your budget is low. Excluding account-bound materials, it is at least 50g’s worth of materials per piece of armor and about 100g to get 0 to 500 in Leatherworking. Huntsman is about 190g for 0 to 500 and also at least 50g per weapon.

Sources:
Leatherworking Ascended Armor Costs
Huntsman Ascended Weapon Costs
Crafting Totals

Hi! Every skill in GW2 scales with something. There is NO base damage in GW2 on power based skills. The damage you see already is the scaling of your power.

As for a build – the simply best pve build nowdays is 6/6/0/X/X like already mentioned. 0/2/0 for vigor and 0/0/2 for speedy kits.

SentinelArk.5109:

harryexe.5617:

Firstly, I recall (unsure if it is accurate) that stacking power wont affect damage on bombs and grenade…

This is inaccurate. Grenades and Bombs scale well with power.

Personally, ascended armor/weapons are not worth the investment if your budget is low. Excluding account-bound materials, it is at least 50g’s worth of materials per piece of armor and about 100g to get 0 to 500 in Leatherworking. Huntsman is about 190g for 0 to 500 and also at least 50g per weapon.

Sources:
Leatherworking Ascended Armor Costs
Huntsman Ascended Weapon Costs
Crafting Totals

First of all, thank you guys for all your help! Such a helpful community haha. As for the link you posted, those weapons are exotic right? I searched on TP for ascended rarity and it seems they dont sell any on tp probably because it’s soulbound once acquired or sth. Am I wrong? Are ascended items a special kind of exotic or will the word ascended be placed in their rarity status?

Ascended gear is account-bound on acquire, meaning you must craft it yourself if you want to have it.
However that means that any other character you have can also equip ascended gear you crafted, on condition that they can use the weapon respectively armor type.

Since april patch i only use 6/6/0/0/2 for PVE full zerk scholar rife – grenade,bomb or tool kit, elixir gun. I find it maximizes dps as an engi while maintaining that unique 25 vuln on the enemy.

There is no ascended Giver stat weapon. You will want Berserker ascended pistol once you can afford it later anyway though, the extra 20% vuln duration isn’t worth the DPS loss when you are running with Ascended stats.

If you’re gonna buy some expensive runes, go for strength. Scholar are an illusion, especially on engineer since you are most of the time the first priority target for the AI. Also you are a might stacker – 29 seconds instead of 20 seconds might make a huge difference for the pt.

Get ready to get underappreciated and undermined often in dungeons a lot for PvE. A lot of people just don’t understand what the engineer is capable of or what they bring to the table. You can give up to 18 stacks of might with a triple turret build, However, it is a thankless job. I’ve been in runs where heavy classes like guardians for example put up a light field on top of my fire field so when i blast turrets i give retaliation instead, and I cannot say anything for fear of being booted. I have been in runs where the elementalist who wasn’t even dropping a fire field got credited for the might stacking I was doing. I have even been in runs with 4 warriors where I got booted for supposedly not might stacking because they believed they were empowering themselves through EA alone. The ignorance in dungeons is widespread and a major deterrent to playing an engineer. However, I will say it is one of the most fun open world classes to play and is absoultely great at tagging everything in huge zergs.

DesertRose.2031:

Buy level 80 masterwork Berserker armor and trinkets in the trading post or craft them yourself.
Buy a level 80 exotic Giver pistol in the trading post.
Go to Explorer Gavbeorn Serpentslayer and buy the breathing apparatus with karma.
Buy 7 Superior Runes of the Flame Legion.

All the above should cost you only 6-8 gold.

Start doing Citadel of Flame, path 1 and 2 are very easy, and even with PUGs each only takes about 10-15 minutes. Do both paths daily, and after 11-12 days you’ll have enough tokens to buy yourself a full exotic Berserker armor in Lion’s Arch.
Buy 6 Scholar runes for your exotic armor, maybe a 7th one for your underwater headgear.
Do CoF a few times more to buy yourself an exotic Berserker Rifle.

To speed getting your exotic armor and Rifle up you can also do Crucible of Eternity daily. Path 1 is easy if you stay close to Alpha, path 2 and 3 aren’t much harder once you’ve learned to time your dodges. Again you can trade the tokens in Lion’s Arch for level 80 exotic armor and weapons.

Don’t bother with exotic trinkets, go straight for ascended ones: Ascended equipment
You can get all trinkets with Laurels.
It’s a little faster to get rings by doing fractals and accessories by doing Guild Missions, though.
The easiest way to get an ascended backpiece is by doing fractals: Prototype Fractal Capacitor

Get your Huntsman crafting discipline to 500 and craft yourself an ascended Berserker Rifle.
If you’re planning to do a lot of high-level fractals get your Leatherworker crafting discipline to 500, too, otherwise exotic armor is sufficient.

The 6/6/0/2/0 build is very newbie-friendly and good for any dungeon, once you have more experience you can change it to your needs:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUlUUpEr9ZxdLseNSbBB6IOi2KqM+5CEgjC-TRRBwAX3fU+dT9H86AA8AAMrEEA-e

Thank you for your input! I’ll be doing more dungeons and fractals now haha. Didnt know the rewards were so much. Anyways, why get those runes you mentioned? I see a lot of people preferring rune of strength but I’m sure u have a reason for your choice of runes right?

Hello frands! Vee Wee here, #1 Engi NA and world first rank 80!

Flame Legion Runes are very good if you have a lot of burning! Guardians, Engis, longbow Warriors, and Eles all benefit from these runes! The 7% bonus damage is a lot and more than Strength Runes! Best of all these runes are dirt cheap! Strength is really good if you can stack might but these runes are very expensive! If you stack might, use Runes of Strength but if you can’t afford them then get Runes of Flame Legion in the meantime!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

With Bomb Kit #2 you can keep Burning on foes almost constantly, and Rune of the Flame Legion gives you a 7% damage boost against burning foes. In addition it costs only 20s per piece or so. Basically it’s a low-budget Scholar/Strength.

Strength is the best allround, and with a Sigil of Strength in your weapon you’ll pretty much always have the 5% damage boost. However it’s also expensive as hell, one piece costs almost 15g. Imo it’s better to spend that much gold first into an ascended weapon and maybe ascended armor before spending it on runes.

Scholar is cheaper (~4g per piece) and potentially more powerful. Iirc you only need to be above 90% for 1/3 of a fight for it to out-damage Strength. In my experience in open PvE an Engineer will rarely drop below 90%; with the Blind from Pistol #3, Grenade Kit #3, and Bomb Kit #4, the knockback from Shield #4, Rifle #4 and Bomb Kit tool belt skill, the snare from Rifle #2, Grenade Kit #4, Bomb Kit #5 and Elixir Gun #2 mobs in open PvE are rarely even able to hit me.

Ranger is almost as good as Scholar if you’re willing to carry a minipet around with you.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Ranger is almost as good as Scholar if you’re willing to carry a minipet around with you.

Rumor has it this was fixed/patched.

Stallerenox.1295:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Ranger is almost as good as Scholar if you’re willing to carry a minipet around with you.

Rumor has it this was fixed/patched.

Can someone say anything on that?

I can say that it was only mentioned to also work with phantasms and illusions, yet it works also with minipets so – yea, pretty sure it gets fixed “soon TM”.

Actually for Engi only Strength is really good. Pack, Scholar, Ranger, Ruby, all the same. Fire for really poor guys,. I’d say Fire into Strength. Or Ruby into Strength.

I set a buy order and waited overnight and a work day. I got 6 flame legion runes for a grand total of 40s, that makes them basically disposable when I get the money for something better. I put them on exotic zerker armor I got from badges from just following a zerg around eotm. Took under a week to get enough badges for a full set of armor and a rifle (I spend most of my time in a kit of some kind and just pull out the rifle when I need a net or something)

How about Superior rune of the Eagle?

Just hit level 80 on my engineer. Lots to read up on and think about. Is the info early on in this post still accurate?

Also, at the time of this post it’s only 18 days away from the patch that’s supposed to update engis. Should I hold off spending my laurels and WvW badges on gear until the meta shifts? Or will the patch largely leave gear choices unchanged?

Eliteseraph.4970:

Just hit level 80 on my engineer. Lots to read up on and think about. Is the info early on in this post still accurate?

Also, at the time of this post it’s only 18 days away from the patch that’s supposed to update engis. Should I hold off spending my laurels and WvW badges on gear until the meta shifts? Or will the patch largely leave gear choices unchanged?

Yes it is. If you’re not in a hurry, waiting is better, since they could ( unlikely, but who knows) get for instance a precision boost with a trait or a power increase, making berserker or assassin balance different. It shouldn’t affect your gear choice at all, it’s just a being cautious matter. Engis should be buffed relatively in pve in a few months.

How about getting gears on ferocity and accuracy like runes of the eagle and sigil of accuracy?

I’m wondering if with the recent change of the flamethrower just pure-damage-wise it could be better to use said flamethrower instead?