Guild Wars 2

Hey all, I am playing a 30 explosives, 30 firearms, 10 alchemy engineer. I couldn’t honestly tell you what traits I picked, etc., because for a long time my play skills have gradually deteriorated to a glass grenade launcher.

I have geared myself in full berserker’s exotic and allocated a few junk runes/sigils with the intention of replacing them.

The issue I now have is that I cap out at about 15k HP and realized today in FoTM that I have made myself seriously squishy to the point that this compromises my team. I am pretty good with the old “v” button, except when I press “g” or “b” by mistake. Then I die.

It’s true that I seldom get out my rifle, except when I hit the button next to “1” by mistake and end up with my rifle out. That usually leads to a comedy of errors where I hit 4 thinking my freeze grenade is up, only to go flying backwards over an inopportune ledge. Yeah, I wouldn’t say I’m especially skilled, but my DPS is pretty insane especially AOE.

ANYWAY, the point of this post is to ask whether I can counteract my glass-like-constitution through clever use of runes/sigils. I am also open to suggestions of how to respec points or evolve my play-style. If I had any authenticity, I would find this out by playing around in the mists, but the default gear there makes me unrepresentatively tough as it is.

Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

If you can dodge and maintain range, glass cannon is what you should be. Having a margin of error is still important though.

My suggestion would be defensive jewelery until you get more confident.

Great, thanks! Can you give me an example or two of good endgame defensive upgrades I should be looking for?

Pwr/tough/vit jewelry masterwork or exotic from the tp depending on your budget and then working for your fractal is pretty much it.

Its the easiest place to start at least.

Since there is not much Pwr/Tough/Vit jewelry I would go for Pwr/Tough/Vit armor and the rubin jewelry.

I’m also a grenadier, with about 2000 power and 21k HP. A great deal of my power comes from runes (mad king set, but only because I had some mad king pieces from the halloween event).

I do decent damage with nades and am good to have on a fractal run, but only because

• Power isnt my only spec, I also have some extra vit, tough and healing due to armor and accessories.
• Nades arent all I do, I use an elixir gun as a secondary weapon — dropping super elixir where necessary to generate AoE heals and help out the survivability of the group a bit more.
• Elixir traits like condition removal are good to have at times. I have the healing elixir as my heal trait and can use F1 to throw down an elixir that removes a condition from myself and allies.
• I have the alchemy trait that causes me to use Elixir S (shrinking) elixir on critical HP. This helps my survivability GREATLY when i’m getting mobbed. The 3 seconds of invincibility allows me to gain some distance at a critical moment and often use a heal to prevent becoming a liability to the team (or if my heals are recharging, it helps me to die away from a mob).
• I’ve learned to kite and nade by turning off camera auto rotate and nading on the run.

I probably don’t have as much absolute attack power as you do, but still have a good amount of AoE power. As a result of diversifying a bit (while still having most of my stuff be +power), I can take some hits and sometimes be one of the last one standing when the party starts going down.

Thanks all. Since I spent a hell of a lot of time grinding blood for the berserkers which I just finished, I’m not keen to re-do the power/tough/vit armor. D’oh! However, can you tell me what the applicable set is called?

@Zero Angel – jealous! I should have run that mad king dungeon more than once. That 10 slot bag is just a waste of pack space now

I think on the basis of all advice I will attempt to introduce tough/vit through jewellery and maybe have a play around with the elixir gun. It will be a happy day when kit builds finally benefit from weapon buffs!

Maybe dolyak runes could help? But there are quite expensive.

In my humble opinion… stay glass cannon. Go Grenadier / Static Discharge. Max offense IS max defense. I have very little trouble staying alive. Here is how:

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=VV70;2sPVg0Q63UFx0;9;4T4-4T26A;7157N;5F-03F-03l

1500 range means you rarely have to get your hands dirty. But when you are near an enemy, the Static Discharge build is one of the best burst damage builds in the game for any non-Thief class. —→Surprise Shot is off the global cooldown.<-— And in this build, it’s up every 8 seconds and it comes with a Static Discharge. Usually they are minus 75% of their hitpoints before they realize they’ve been hit.

And if you do need defense, well, it turns out that one of the best defensive abilities the Engineer has — Gear Shield — is in the Tool Kit, which has one of the best Tool Belt (i.e. Static Charge) abilities — Throw Wrench. Tool Kit 2-5 are all quite useful (though situational). 1 isn’t good. But to my point, Gear Shield is an amazing, amazing 3 seconds of blocking everything.

If you really want to be a huge wimp, take the 5 Trait Points out of Firearms and put it in Alchemy for Self-Regulating Defenses. At that point, you really have to have put yourself in a bad situation to die after 2 seconds invulnerable from SRD, 3 seconds blocking everything from Gear Shield, and 2 or 3 dodges. You should be able to do fine without this.

Rifle is just for control, especially when finishing off a kill. Chilling effect from Sigil. Net, obviously. Overcharged Shot. Etc.

you can get more hp in various places.

swap to 30 alch. deep firearms is overkill. should be 18k hp without realm bonus with that.

could use vit/tough food.

Gear does not have to be matching. I would recommend full zerker, trinkets. ruby jewels esp are overpowered.
But you can do a power/vit chest, helm, shoulders, and zerker legs, boots, gloves if you want.

Protip – you’ll increase your damage and survivability (at the loss of ~10% crit rate) by swapping to 30/10/0/0/30. 50% more endurance regen, double super elixirs via elixir gun (and another backwards-escape via acid bomb), and.. well, if they ever bother to make the Scope trait work, you’d make up for your 10% crit loss with that. But anywho – yes, use that. Works really well. I use power wrench instead of scope since I use toolkit’s gear shield, magnet, prybar and throw wrench quite frequently.

I run full Berserker’s with a similar build to Destroyer. This build has the answer to anything you could possibly face in the current dungeons. Here’s my build (you will need to copy and paste)
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-W70;2Z-Vg0u5VQFx0;9;4T9-J946A5;319-5;0L;5G3G3G3G3Q

Grenade Kit is some of the highest sustained AoE damage in the game. If you really want to be doing maximum damage as an Engineer, you have to use it. The best part is that it’s also very safe to use because of the 1500 range.

For some extra damage, you could use Blunderbuss and Jump Shot but those can be pretty risky. Anything that puts you in melee range (Bomb Kit, Tool Kit) is going to punish you a bit for being full Berserker’s and there’s really no reason to go into melee range because, again, Grenade Kit is really the best damage we have.

It’s actually kind of a shame that Grenade Kit is so good. It means if we want to be doing maximum damage, we are pigeon-holed pretty hard into playing a very specific way. However, that pigeon-hole just happens to be incredibly effective in dungeons.

Elixirs are amazing team support and survivability for yourself without compromising any damage output. I go into the Tools tree for perma-swiftness because I love swiftness. But anything else out of that line is unnecessary (kit refinement).

I run a 30/20/0/0/20 build for dungeons (rifle/grenade Static Discharge build), and I regulate my survivability through my gear. If I’m not doing anything strenuous, just want to kill stuff as fast as possible, I wear full Berserker’s gear (Power, Prec., Crit dmg) slotted with Superior Runes of the Wurm (Vit + crit dmg) and full Berskerer’s jewels. For easy dungeons/fractals, I switch my jewels to the Valkyrie set (Power, Vit, Crit dmg) for a little more defense. If I’m doing something more dangerous like high lvl Fractals or WvW, I switch my armor out to a Power/Tough/Vit set with Superior Runes of the Fighter (might change to Dolyak) and my jewels to half Valkyrie, half Knight (Pow, Prec, Tough). My offensive rifle is a Berserker Rifle of (superior) Air, and my defensive rifle is a Soldier (Pow, Tough, Vit) Rifle of Air. I should probably change the sigil on my defensive weapon, but I haven’t got round to it yet.

I personally run full Berserker on armor and gems with runes that emphasize critical damage and precision (Golemancer). My build is 30/10/0/10/20 and focuses on grenades with high AoE con-removal/heal up time and rifle for CC. My slots are usually composed of med kit, grenades, elixir gun, and Elixir R for the support.

During a fight I almost always have vigor up or the capability of having it up on a whim. A good understanding of general fight mechanics and creativity will help you even outlast Warriors and Guardians like I have plenty of times. When you do get hit you have the ability to do 5k+1k(x3) from med kit alone and drop Super Elixir(x2) nearly every 20 seconds as well as a regeneration on a short cool down.

It requires a high learning curve to use full Berserker’s, but it isn’t possible. If anything I’d advise to use full glass cannon when you get comfortable with it like many have mentioned.

Berserkers is your best bet for grenade builds in both Wv3 and the majority of PvE (dungeons included), but it really depends on what you’re doing. For FotM level 10+ it’s highly recommended you get at least some toughness/vit somewhere on you as 15k life is asking to be ressed a ridiculously embarrassing number of times (agony does not mess around). Full berserkers is perfectly viable and probably preferred up until that point, but you should probably buy like some AC gloves and booties or something with those candy explore tokens, or maybe swap out your jewelry. Whatever, just so long as you don’t die like tissue paper when two or three boss abilities hit you at once, otherwise you’ll just end up a liability in something like the grawl fractal.

You don’t necessarily need 30 points in firearms for a power grenadier build but it doesn’t really hurt you. You can also consider 20 in tools for something like discharge or even 10 in alchemy for faster elixir recharge or free auto elixir S at 25% life. Whatever floats your boat.

Well, agony does % damage per second not absolute HP damage, so a low HP eng with lots of +healing should be able to keep up with agony easily. I can see a high HP/low healing engie being able to survive a couple of the agony attacks but that’s only because the agony effect is attached onto one of the bosses normal attacks (which does absolute HP damage). But it makes healing harder keeping HP up since there is more HP to heal in the first place.

Where you really pay though is on things like mobs (especially ranging types), dredge powersuit bombs, and attacks (like AoEs) which may or may not be evaded depending on the player’s dodging/kiting skill.

I will tell you DO NOT go for vitality stat gear if your rolling FOTM. Currently agony is basing damage on total HP, not base HP. This means the more life you have, the more damage you will take. Even if you go condition, healing, and vitality your ability to heal back is nullified. Vitality builds get punished twice. See the post in dungeon forum for more info.