Guild Wars 2

The subject line sums my engineer up. Is it viable to try and build a pistol-wielding, condition-based engineer?

My focus has been PvE, and I’m undecided on the decision of a shield or pistol for his offhand. What I’m curious about is whether others have had any success with the pistol, or if the kits are all but necessary at later levels.

I’ve gotten him to 60 ankittenackling over leveled class quests well enough, but I have some concerns when it comes to stacking up conditions. The most worrisome is the inability to stack bleeds higher that 6-7 with the pistol.

Yes, pistols are condition approved.

If your going condition build pistols are your weapon of choice, but don’t write off kits. They aren’t necessary but even so they can be very handy as simple supplementaries. Even if you don’t spec your traits for them, grenades can easily apply additional bleed (#2) and poison (#5), as well as non-damaging chill and blind, with shrapnel grenade (bleed) being on an especially fast cooldown. Switching to the kit and tossing a few then swapping back is never a terrible idea if it’s not too much of a distraction. Alternatively the bomb kit can be used to give you burns and extra confusion if it better fits your purpose.

Kits aren’t going to be necessary, but if they’re available you lose nothing by making use of them.

In regards to pistol/pistol and pistol/shield, I recommend gearing for both. I like to swap between them depending on the situation, as I find the shield extremely useful against areas full of things like Dredge, and also sigil’d it so that it gives me a 60% chance to remove conditions on a crit, so I might switch to it in areas like Orr where there’s lots of poison application and fast-moving melee/shooters to block. Otherwise I use dual pistols for the glue and free application of burning.

For levels 1-80 and a while after I ran a condition pistol turreteer. He was amazing. In WvW I could easily win 1v1 and sometimes 2v1, and soling champ mobs was no issue. What was an issue tho is our group play, which is why I dropped it.

I can’t explain it near as we’ll as others, so ill just suggest you look up how condition stacking in this game works. It got so bad that during Plinx farms, even in full exotics, I was unable to even be registered as a participant in a mob kill, regardless of whether I was there from the beginning or not

Solo- it was the most powerful build I have used in any class in this game, in groups it was horrible and eventually led to me moving on.

I suggest a mixed up build with Zerker gear and Vit jewelry. Going with a dual pistol full power&crit dmg build is at least reasonable and goes fine with a mixed build (static discharge+speedy kits+vigor&Kit refinement) like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcIQJAqal0picnpyuF17IxoHkuzfG0DAnX+KqQ+B
Somehow i don’t get this one to work in WvW.

Tolmos.8395:

I can’t explain it near as we’ll as others, so ill just suggest you look up how condition stacking in this game works. It got so bad that during Plinx farms, even in full exotics, I was unable to even be registered as a participant in a mob kill, regardless of whether I was there from the beginning or not

Really? With Coated Bullets I find that I’m racking up kill credit extremely fast both on my main target and on any mobs nearby/behind/in front. Event credit is, frankly, trivial to obtain.

I love my pistol but, as a poster above observed, I swap between shield and offhand pistol as dictated by circumstance. If I’m running from place to place then I tend to equip a shield as it does make a huge difference to survivability, on the other hand if I’m settled in one spot or in the middle of a group event then I’ll switch to offhand pistol as single mob control becomes less of an issue compared to dps.