Guild Wars 2

Trying to figure out which armor type to run in PvE dungeons/fractals/Living Story for my support Bomber.

Torn between Cleric’s or Apothecary’s armor. Heck, maybe even Soldiers or something else. I’m currently using Superior Runes of Altruism

Also what skills would be suggested? atm I’m running Bomb Kit, Elixir Gun and the final skill changes depending on the situation.

I’m open to suggestions as well!

If those are your two options go Cleric. Condition damage is sadly pointless in PvE. People are going to answer you with Berserker even though you didn’t ask and you said you wanted a support build. Just know that DPS is king in PvE right now. If you want to support go for it, just letting you know what to expect. Knights would be a nice middle ground between tanky and DPS. Healing Power does give a nice boost to your bomb healing, but overall it scales horribly so something like Knights would work for you. Berserker’s trinkets + Knight’s/Soldier’s armor is a decent mix of tanky/damage as well.

I believe your skill setup is good. BK+EG is a good combo (make sure you can cancel the leap of Acid Bomb so you don’t drag mobs all over the place) and it leaves room for a nice flex spot. Elixir R if you expect people to go down in dangerous places that need immediate revives, Elixir U for reflect, Mine Kit for more AOE and blast finisher. Those are my usual choices with BK+EG.

You can get it to work with apothecary armor as well depending on your skills, but if you want to focus on PvE primarily then clerics would probably be best.

If you did go with apothecary’s gear, you might consider using the flamethrower. This allows you to set an additional fire field (though bomb kit can probably handle that well enough), and you get some mid ranged AoE damage as well as a bunch of burning from incendiary ammo. The knockback can be useful, but you might not end up using it a lot in PvE since it’s better to keep mobs clustered. This also works well with the fireforged trigger or deadly mixture traits since you would receive the maximum benefit from them… although you might find it hard to take those compared to the other good traits in those areas.

If you go deep into explosives, you can also just use the grenade kit for a long range option. Another option is the toss mine as you can use this for more blast finishers and some extra AoE damage, although you just have to be careful not to knock all the mobs all over the place.

Runes of altruism should work well, although you should consider runes of the water too. Runes of the water actually allow you to pump out additional healing to your group, so if you don’t feel the extra fury and might are doing much then those might be worth it.

If you do go clerics, you could also opt for a rifle since you’ll likely get better DPS out of it than p/p or p/s, although the shield is definitely helpful for water blasts and some extra defense.

An apothecary build I’ve used before is as follows: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vcEQJAqelUUpPr1axdLseRiE6hEaYqFoC1lIFXWj9pgcB-zwBBYiChUDgE1BJNtIasVXFRjVPjIqWfEjQAfXDA-e

Some of the defensive traits you normally see aren’t in there, but you can swap them in if you want. It reduces all cooldowns on elixir gun and shield to maximize the number of blast finishers you get (useful for AoE healing with healing turret), as well as more super elixirs. It can reach almost 2k healing power, so your bombs should be healing somewhere around 350-400 per bomb (I think). I use acidic coating here because blood injection only provides a small benefit, and the blind on melee attack can be useful during a stack against melee enemies. You don’t need speedy kits for PvE, although invigorating speed for vigor uptime is always a useful thing to have (can take it and have allies give you swiftness to get your vigor).

Thanks a ton for the great replies definitely gives me more to think about.

I gotta say my engi may be the first character I actually buy multiple full sets of armor/gear for. They are just so versatile! Also considering a rampager grenade build as another one, but I prefer the tanky/bomb support more overall.

Velcro Raptor.5064:

I gotta say my engi may be the first character I actually buy multiple full sets of armor/gear for.

I know what you mean, I’ve currently got 4 sets, planning on getting a fifth some time in the future.

Velcro Raptor.5064:

Also considering a rampager grenade build as another one

I’d advise against that for two reasons:

1. A balance patch is coming up fairly soon, so you might want to wait and see all the changes before investing in new gear. Specifically, they might alter the way some rune sets work.

2. Grenades don’t require a high amount of precision. Since you’ll be tossing three grenades each time (traited with grenadier, of course), each one of them can possibly crit. That effectively triples your chance of having one land a crit. Statistically speaking, this means that with approximately 33% crit chance, you would expect one grenade to crit for each volley.

Since engineers don’t have a ton of on-crit condition procs, it’s usually sufficient to go with a modest amount of precision. In particular, the bleeds from sharpshooter won’t have a profound effect on damage, and incendiary powder has a 100% chance to proc on any crit when it’s off cooldown.

As such, the high precision offered by rampagers won’t have as much value as you might think it does, at least not for a condition focused build.

I would suggest you instead look at taking a combination of rabid and carrion gear. Carrion gear is particularly nice for the grenade kit since it scales well with both power and condition damage.

This is what I usually use for an HGH might stacking grenade build: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vcEQJAqalcTp6qlYx+KseNiAqQeJ6xjRZT2nHvFbBhA-zECBIhCh0CAkIJMDtIasVhFRjVJTQWdDTHLpkCAipRA-w

It only has 19% crit chance by default, but elixir B will provide a source of fury to put it up to 39%, which can ensure that I proc incendiary powder more or less every time it’s off cooldown. The build is also fairly durable with 2.4k armor and 23k HP, and has some nice utility features (probably don’t need elixir S in general PvE though, elixir U or elixir R would likely work better). Runes of altruism also work well with this for might stacks and fury uptime.

The only time I feel it’s best to use rampager’s is when you’re in dire need of precision or you are primarily building for direct damage/crit damage with condition damage on the side (at least in the context of the engineer). If you want to be primarily condition focused, then a carrion/rabid combo is generally better. You could even go full rabid if you want the higher precision, though combining it with carrion will give an overall better DPS.

You could always just mix in partial rampager’s with either rabid or carrion, but I’ve just found that it’s not the best overall choice due to rabid gear often providing a sufficient amount of precision for condition builds.

Oh wow, that is a really nice build.

I never noticed Elixer R had a revive built into the toolkit!

Also good call on the gear part, waiting will have the added bonus of gathering more gold to throw at the resulting builds I want to try. ^^

Once again thanks a ton for the input, I really appreciate it

Velcro Raptor.5064:

Oh wow, that is a really nice build.

I never noticed Elixer R had a revive built into the toolkit!

Also good call on the gear part, waiting will have the added bonus of gathering more gold to throw at the resulting builds I want to try. ^^

Once again thanks a ton for the input, I really appreciate it

One more random thing since you pointed it out:

Regarding the elixir R revive, it’s actually possible to revive yourself with it. If you know you are going to go down, toss it at your feet and ensure you go down in the field. If your enemy can’t stomp or damage you fast enough, it’s possible that you’ll actually cause yourself to rally from it.

Otherwise it’s quite useful for helping out allies that need it. It also removes a condition, but that’s more of a side benefit.