Guild Wars 2

I love using pp condi on engineer
but i farmed to craft juggernaut and never find a situation where its useful.
Hammer have no condition damage and staying in melee seems
to be the oposite of what engineer is about. Why do that when you could just
change to bomb kit and do better damage or am i missing something ?
do you like hammer ?

Engineers are actually super focused on melee, despite the fact that they have pistols and rifles. Most of the abilities on those weapons work best right in someone’s face (rifle 3, 4, and 5, pistol 2 and 4)

If you’re more asking about what the hammer is good for, it’s a sustain weapon that does solid damage while helping keep the engineer running. 2, 3, 4 are a reflect, triple-evade, and block respectively, and the stun on 5 is good for closing or breaking away. Currently for PvE hammer’s good, but p/p and rifle give more flexibility for encounters. Hammer is really good for PvP, though, where the control aspect of it actually makes scrappers one of the more balanced meta participants. I like the hammer a lot though.

I wouldn’t use a hammer for a real attempt at a condi build, since most of our strongest or most easily applied conditions come from pistols, particularly pistol offhand, and grenades (mortar too, to an extent). It just isn’t built for it unless you’re really pushing conditions on your utilities as hard as possible.

It works the same way that unequipping your helmet still works.

P/P is simply better for condi, but just because you use a hammer doesn’t mean that you won’t still be able to clear content, down enemies, etc.

Difficult raiding content is the only place I’d say that you’d really feel the impact.

hammer is a power based weapon, so its a poor choice for a condi build.

Actualy I prefer hammer over pistols in condi build. Dont forget that in viper/sinister gear you have also lots of power. You taking pistol basicly for blowtorch while hammer have almost equal power dps (with condi gear) and you are able to qucikly break bars and survive on melee like a champ. This is build what I am using in high fracs and raids (minor changes depends on boss) atm:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFASnUUB9ZhlYB2aBEqil0iiu4X+nH8EXxD47pCgGA-TxRBQBNU9nJpEkaK/83+DO7CC0PdEA4BBEA4AY8xD0d3M+4jP+4j3u7u7u7OepAubZF-e

No it doesn’t.

Will you kill things? Yes. Will you be good at it? Maybe. Is there a much better alternative to what you’re doing simply for the purpose of being different? Yes.

Some ppl should realize that old meta where only thing what matters was top notch dps is gone and also we no longer have top dps in game so you should start consider some swaps for utility stuff if you dont wanna be replaced. Pistols have better dps thats simply truth but did they help you break bar? No.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/PvE-condi-hammer-build/first#post5843362

This build work well in high fractals lvl. The main purpose is to use the whirl combo with FT and shredder gyro. You can easy stack burning.

You have different choice for utility skillz, depending of the situation.

Rozbuska.5263:

Actualy I prefer hammer over pistols in condi

When I first read this I thought, “Dude, L2P!”. Lol.

But the build that you link to is pretty impressive! Those are some good Power, Crit and Condi numbers. I might need to give it a try. Seems to lack in Toughness, though. But this can be offset by the trait Adaptive Armor.

Kernell.3197:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/PvE-condi-hammer-build/first#post5843362

This build work well in high fractals lvl. The main purpose is to use the whirl combo with FT and shredder gyro. You can easy stack burning.

You have different choice for utility skillz, depending of the situation.

It seems to me you have no condi remove on that build …

Rozbuska.5263:

Some ppl should realize that old meta where only thing what matters was top notch dps is gone and also we no longer have top dps in game so you should start consider some swaps for utility stuff if you dont wanna be replaced. Pistols have better dps thats simply truth but did they help you break bar? No.

Top notch DPS is gone? Try telling that to Gorseval, or even VG to a lesser extent. Sure some top guilds can burn him fast enough to not worry about timers, but the majority of raiders still have issues with the enrage, which means top notch DPS is absolutely needed. Gorseval mechanics are incredibly easy, the only difficult thing about that fight is the DPS check. Top DPS is no longer the only thing that matters in a fight, and is of course always secondary to personal skill and mechanics, but it is still absolutely important.

Engi has plenty of utility without hammer (as I show below, hammer provides almost no group utility). It is in fact possible for classes to do top notch DPS and bring great utility. You often don’t have to choose one or the other.

Hammer provides:
- Vulnerability
- Personal reflect
- Personal evade
- Block
- Lightning field
None of these are useful to the raid. 25x vulnerability is so easily applied that with 10 players you will never not have it. Two out of three of the raid bosses don’t even have abilities that can be reflected, and the third boss you generally don’t want to reflect, so that’s useless too. Evade and block are definitely nice, but completely unnecessary if you and your healer are doing your job. And lighting field? That provides no benefit to the raid and is actually a hindrance if you end up blocking a fire (for burns) or water (for healing) field.

Why you would bring breakbars into this is beyond me. Hammer offers no CC and so is no better at breaking bars than pistol. When a fight has a stringent DPS check, there is absolutely no reason to bring a weapon that offers less DPS and no beneficial utility to the group.

In fact, pistols offer significantly better utility than hammer. Glue Shot is incredibly powerful on Seekers and Charged Souls. Hammer offers nothing.

tl;dr
For a condi build, you can bring a subpar DPS weapon (unless a build is provided that proves hammer DPS to be on par with pistol, in which case I will gladly retract this statement) with no useful utility, or you can bring a high DPS weapon with great utility.

If you are simply doing open world content, the difference between the two weapons is not really an issue (and the personal defense on hammer might serve you better against HoT mobs), but for endgame content you are hurting not only yourself but also your entire group by not bringing pistols.