Unfortunately, a lot of what makes engineers good gets wrapped up in the kits. Almost any build you find will have at least one kit, if not two.
As for dual pistols, they do have some good points. First off, you have access to all damaging conditions in the game via the pistols (bleeding, poison, confusion, and burning). The auto-attack is notoriously weak, but it has it’s uses for apply consistent ranged pressure. However, the other abilities can ensure relatively high poison and burning uptimes if used correctly. I found that it can take quite a bit of getting used to dual pistols, especially having a sense of when to use something like glue shot, but it can be fun once you do get the hang of it.
It’s definitely tailored towards a more condition-focused build though. Currently, condition-focused builds tend to be lackluster in PvE, so you wouldn’t want to dump everything into that if you’re going to be focusing on PvE primarily. Most often you’d be using your grenade or bomb kit to get damage in PvE so overall weapon choice might not matter as much, although rifle would still be nice since it can do some high AoE damage on clumps of enemies.
A common dual pistol setup for PvP would be something like this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQJAqalUUpErlcx+KseRCbBNqxAqNIyNWlPfgAkUA-TJRHABCt/QSlBA4BAE8JAAA
You can obviously make some tweaks there for person preference (i.e. different sigils and runes, maybe protection injection instead of backpack regenerator), but that’s the basic idea. The grenade kit would be your primary offensive tool, and you’d use the pistols to keep condition pressure on enemies or use the utility they provide. Tool kit is good for defence as well as combo setups/interrupting people, while elixir S is there to get you out of places safely, help secure stomps, rez allies, &c. You could also take something like slick shoes instead of elixir S if you wanted the CC.
If you didn’t like using the grenade kit, you could maybe try something like: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQJAqalUUpvrlcx+KseRCbBNqxAyNECRuxq8xIGAA-TJRHwA92fIZZABnAAAPAAA
I don’t think it’ll be quite as strong, but a build like this would have more mobility and a ton of dodges, so you could stay very mobile while fighting and not have to worry about lining up every grenade volley correctly. Also gives you an extra source of burning to work the condi angle.
Most of the dual pistol stuff I do is in WvW, though I do have a hybrid PvE build that uses it. However, the latter is only really true because I made my ascended gear for that style of build, and I don’t want to make new stuff for doing fractals.
Of course, stuff will be changing in the near future with the specialization updates and HoT release, so it’s possible condi builds might have a bit more relevance in PvE.
