Basically the idea behind this is to block in order to apply burning. You have two sources of blocks: gear shield on 16s cd and aegis every 15s. Survivability comes from those and leech sigil heals. It’s sort of susceptible to burst so I’m still not sure if I should take Elixir S over slickshoes, atm I just love to use slickshoes as it’s a bit refreshing.
It’s interesting for sure, but in almost every case will result in your enemies being less crispy than if you used Balthazar Runes. And not to mention without Alchemy, your survivability will tank.
Forum Lord Chaith
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Hello frands! Vee Wee here, retired #1 Engi NA and world first rank 80!
Going full Tools just for an extra random Aegis proc every 15 seconds for that extra 1 second burn isn’t worth it at all to me! You’re basically devoting 30 points to apply a 1 second burn to a random target at a random time! Better off going Alchemy! In Vee Wee’s opinion, Alchemy is one of the best trait lines for the Engineer and probably one of the best trait lines in the entire game! Out of every class!
Actually you simply could run Runes of the Guardian instead of balthazar in the 2kit meta…
You’d get a nice offensive / counter-method in case you need to block, but loose overall burning duration, which only is applied now by IP (5.2 sec every 10sec) and unknown amounts of burn every 16sec…
balthazar on the other hand offers 175 more condi-dmg, 45% longer burn duration and a nice 3.9sec burn proc every 10sec (in a 360 radius, I believe) + quickness for 5 below 20% health
so yea, for the condi-meta, balthazar is the way to go, but if you run a celestial rifle build, guardian actually could be a viable choice for a more tanky approach.
Burn will hit less hard and for shorter durations, but is applied on a (in my opinion) more vicious way. Pew pew rangers, or GS mesmers actually will hate it.
