Guild Wars 2

Hi engineers! There is a tldr at the bottom, if you don’t want to read all my nonsense =D

I’ve just bought a third character slot, bringing my total to the magic number, 8. Like you, I am all too familiar with the vocal negativity from some in the engineer community, so I’m sure you don’t need helping figuring out which class I’ve saved for the last slot. Having tried every class except engi to at least level 40, the two I play the most are my 80 elementalist (which I run as D/D bunker), and my 80 warrior (which I run as prec. signet because I can’t bear to give up 20k hundred blades every 6 seconds).

I prefer playing the elementalist because it’s much more versatile (GASP) and the combat is more engaging. Don’t get me wrong, there is a certain amount of joy that comes from running around in Cursed Shore on a warrior, pulling groups of 6-7 Risen and melting all their faces in <10 seconds. But this is only entertaining for so long. Yeah, I could spec a different build with support or survivability, but why bother when I can kite and dodge to keep myself alive and deliver insane damage with little to no effort? My point is that big damage is nice, but I’ve been there and I still prefer a class with engaging play over mind-numbing single-skill spam.

So now that it’s the engineer’s turn to entertain me, I have to say there are disappointments and potential right off the bat. I’m prepared to get excited about the potential and take my engi all the way to 80 to see if the fun sticks around, but I’m looking for some reassurance from those of you who are there. I spend a large part of my endgame time running dungeons, sometimes with my guild, sometimes in pugs. From what I hear, engi won’t support as well as a guard or an ele, and won’t DPS as well as pretty much any profession. I honestly have little first-hand knowledge of this, because there are almost never engis in my groups.

My concern is just how far the subpar-ness goes. I’ve heard that engis often take boss aggro and get pummeled into the ground within seconds. I’ve heard that the damage is embarrassing and frustrating, especially compared to the work it takes to put it out. I’m ok with being less than stellar, and I don’t run high fractals, so I doubt my group would care either. But I don’t want to be useless and I don’t want to be carried. It doesn’t matter how fun a skill set is to use if it’s completely ineffective and your group has to tow your slack. Thoughts?

TL;DR – Engi clearly has issues, but they seem like they could be uniquely FUN to play. I will sacrifice massive damage of other classes for enjoyment with this one, but I don’t want to be “that group member” that is more of a burden than a help in dungeons. What has your dungeon experience been like on your engineer?

I love doing dungeons. I run a power/crit rifle build with healing turret, flamethrower*, toolkit*, elixir R, and supply drop (what else?).

*In certain situations, I swap either of these for grenade kit or elixir C.

I don’t pull any extra aggro, I get downed a lot less than the rest of the team, and can revive them remotely in any situation with a toss of the R. Ignoring my grenade and C options, I still have a snare, two knockbacks, a blind, a slow, a pull, a block, a stun breaker, a chill and cripple remover, an aoe heal, an aoe regen, and an aoe condition removal/remote revive. I can provide a fire field, light field and water field. I can finish with projectile, blast, or leap. I can apply vulnerability (in several ways), bleed, burn, cripple, blindness, and confusion. Any of the above at any time (long as they’re not on CD) without a big cooldown for switching kits.

I feel like our damage is a little behind, but not to the point where I’m a liability to my group. I’ve cleared most dungeons, and am currently at fractal 21 (and counting).

We aren’t tip top compared to any other class in a dungeon, but we are pretty close. It’s very unlikely that a group would fail just because they have an Engineer over something else. Player perception is a whole different bucket of issues though, and it can be at times difficult to join a pick-up group.

My Engineer is my less efficient profession in PvE, but still not a burden to the group.

With skills, you can outshine most other prefession, but you have to play 110% to beat their 80% :P.

Personally, I have bad gear for PvE, some kind of glassy cannnon i use for WvW.

But if you traits for kit refinement, you can be pretty useful for your team.

Specced for grenade, you can stack 20-25 vuln on the ennemy, and stack at least 10-12 bleed. Kit refinement + Elixir gun + Elixir gun toolbelt = 3 AoE regen for your team.

But BEWARE!!

Grenade heavy build will leave you with A LOT OF PAIN in your finger. Sometime I switch to rifle only because I’m tired of spamming my grenade.

Oh the joy of fighting under water, where you don’t have to spam grenade anymore!

With my experience as an Engi, I feel like sometimes other classes(group members) take credit for what I’ve done. For instance I have Healing Turret for the F1 ability and Shield for the blast finisher. I pull it off and heal the whole group when their HPs are down. Also running with Elixir Gun and dropping those Super Elixir and applying an infinite amount of weakness to those heavy hitting bosses. Finally, even though grenades were nerfed hardcore, they’re still effective in PvE dungeons on the pesky mobs.

Essentially, I feel like an unsung hero in dungeons.

I´m mostly playing dungeons and don´t feel like a burden.
Even if I may not bring as much to the table as other classes I still save their butts often enough.
I take hits they can´t take, take away their conditions when they dont have a condiremove with them (happens alot <.<) and give them some air to breath in tough fights… Short: I can make bad players less lacking. Sure, maybe others can do that, too, but I feel like engi is MADE to do just that.
And even in experienced groups I dont feel like a burden.
I´ve never run across one of these inglorious PUGs which dont want an engi, yet,
and the guys I usually do dungeons with… heck they´re the reason I started playing engi <.<
They wanted one, they got one and they (have to) love it (or else! ò.0)

From my experience in dungeons, yes, you will get ungodly amounts of agro from the bosses (for some reason, people like Kholer and Alpha hate Engineers), however, if you know when to dodgeroll and how to manage your damage reduction skills (Elixir S and Elixir R are your friends), you can use that agro to your team’s advantage. I’ve had a few times in dungeons where I would manage to pull a boss off of a downed teammate so he could be revived.

Yes, you will run into people that will reject you from dungeon groups for being an Engineer, although I’ve never had the misfortune of meeting those people myself. Yes, you won’t be quite as effective as other professions doing your role. However, for whatever you spec your Engineer as, you’ll be able to excell with a lot of skill, and just a little luck.

Something I think is often overlooked, the vulnerability stacking of traited grenades. You can easily keep 15-20 stacks up on normal mob and 10-15 stacks on a champ or boss mob. So when calculating your total dps, you would need to add 10-20% of every other group members dps into yours. I’ve only met one ‘random’ person who recognized this during a dungeon run and thanked me for it. For me, this means I trait grenades for damage and vulnerability stacking and that’s my dps, done. Now I have 40 trait points to spend on versatility and healing and buffing. I run nades pretty much exclusively in dungeons, its great, the biggest glaring problem though is its lack of burst damage. To compensate for this, if I know there is a situation coming up where I have to have as much burst as possible, such as fighting alpha in CoE and a teammate is trapped by a crystal, I save grenade barrage for that moment. Does not really make up for the lack of burst but it makes sure you have at least a good front loaded damage ability to start.

Also, elixir kit with kit refinement is awesome for a small constant heal and constant condition removal, the only problem is that it will override any water fields people put down for healing. This has gotten me into trouble in groups before, I lay it down on someone with low hp thinking the heals will help him, only to have him die and claim that his blast finisher healing combo was ruined by my overriding light field. So I’ve found that I use super elixir is better used as a preventive measure as opposed to a quick reaction to inc damage. Toss it at the start of the fight and don’t throw it on anyone who’s actively loosing hp and in danger of dieing, unless you know for a fact that no water fields are going down.

People’s perception of the engineer being underpowered has been blown completely out of proportion. There are some definite issues with the class but I have ran nearly everthing except for upper level fractals and thats because I really just don’t have any interest in running the same things over and over and over again. I typically run a power rifle grenadier build and when in groups I opt for healing turret because the healing and condition removal is of great value. I cannot say enough about a well played grenadier engineer. I almost always run with my guild because PUGs can go from being great to horrible in seconds no matter your class.

If you are truly worried about being a detriment to parties just run with kit refinement major trait, elixir gun, and healing turret. There shouldn’t be any situation where you cannot provide AOE heals and condition removal on very short cooldowns.

The boss aggro thing is something that has happened to me before but not recently. When it did happen it was like the boss would go through the bowels of hell to find me and kill me. If this same scenario happend to just about any build of any class then they too would likely go down. Especially high condition/AOE champs. I have seen this happen to other classes as well. The mossman sticks to the thief in my party like he has waited his whole life to kill him a thief. Inevitably the thief goes down because unending champ agro is ridiculous.

I hope you decide to stick with the eng. I have 3 toons at 80. Ele, eng, and guard. I like the ele and eng much more than the guard and for the same reasons. They are versatile classes that have bountiful options for any given scenario. The ele was an overall more fluidly designed class but the same charms that I like about the ele also are evident in the eng. Good luck! And remember, abilities that proc on heal use are the eng’s ace in the hole. Noone does it better.

My experience in dungeons is really all over the place on my Engineer—there are some dungeons/paths that I can burn through with ease, and others where I’m struggling and feel like a load. Part of it is, yes, you seem to carry a stupid amount of aggro in the dungeon. And that can be great in some ways but more often then not for me just winds up sucking, especially boss fights that have adds in them.

Another is crowd control. Engineers have a lot of it, and we’re very good at it, but it’s not a totally reliable mechanic in dungeons because of unshakable (and let me tell you how much I hate unshakable). We, in turn, have only a handful of escape skills and two of them knock us down as well (and are meant to CC the enemy which won’t work on bosses) so it is very hard to get away from aggro that you can’t carry.

… Actually pretty much all my dungeon problems boil down to aggro. But most of my guildies run spellcasters and fight ranged so maybe that’s part of why I get such a disproportionate amount of it…

If, we assume, you don’t have the boss tailgating your sorry kitten the entire fight (or you’re just not in a boss fight), then Engineers can bring a lot of support (vuln stacks, elixir gun, healing turret and med kit, bomb healing, etc), creating and finishing combos (I’d dare say we have the most versatility in combo-fielding on ourselves/everyone else), and crowd-controlling mob sections which can make things a lot easier for your party.

Or you could spec to be a tank and play bait.

well here was one of my experiences i was hitting 500-700 damage with 4000+ Attack and 1200 with crits having 63% crit damage .

Kardiamond.6952:

Grenade heavy build will leave you with A LOT OF PAIN in your finger. Sometime I switch to rifle only because I’m tired of spamming my grenade.

Oh the joy of fighting under water, where you don’t have to spam grenade anymore!

Oh, you are so much right on that point.

I still somehow wish ANet would just change the grenade-1-skill to be an enemy targeted skill with autocast (even if they nerfed the damage in that process to compensate increased accuracy and frequency). For me, it would be so much more convenient to play.

Yet, I am still lovin’ the engi more than any other profession.

~MRA

The gripes are because the main auto attack skills all scale pretty poorly now with the nade nerf.

The engineer has a lot of ways to avoid damage and control a target, but those don’t matter much in dungeons where many bosses are immune to CC.

I used to do really well in dungeons but recently I’ve felt like a fifth wheel, this is probably down to my build but I don’t really want to re-trait every time I want to go into a dungeon. The nail in my particular dungeon coffin was when they “fixed” Super Elixir such that I’m now pretty good at condition removal (though not as good as a Guardian) but my healing is barely noticeable.

The thing is that the build I have works incredibly well “above ground” and is an absolute blast. It’s what’s keeping me with my Engineer really, because it really is crazy amounts of fun to run around the landscape with him getting into and out of scrapes that would leave my other characters a bloody smear on a wall somewhere. Mind you, learning to kite is something of a must, otherwise you’ll probably spend more time at waypoints than would normally be considered “fun”.

I’ve been running the generic SD glass build in CoF 1 speed runs and it’s quite effective. There are even some people who were surprised to see how much engineers could be of help. A constant 5 stacks Vulnerability and additional another 10 stacks from Goggles Toolbelt really help because they are instant. There was also a time when the whole group was downed and I was left alone to kill the final boss w/ 15% HP left which I did easily because engineers can easily burst 25k~30k w/ a good setup.

I’m all in for grenades 1 auto-cast. Bleed + Vulnerability really helps a lot.

I simply tend to be the squishiest in a dungeon group. And damage-wise, generally the lowest aswell. Because even tough im the squishiest, i am not a glasscannon by any stretch.
Strength is perhaps in controlling mobs, but that applies to basic enemies. Not champs or bosses. There im just the guy that does the mediocre damage and goes down first. But for some reason, manage to get aggro all over the place.

As a little side thingy. The whole Fun vs Effectiveness (effort put in, for performance that comes out) choice.
If people felt it was a worthy enough trade off, where the fun outweigths the lower performance, Engineer wouldnt be so underpopulated. So it seems, the general community, doesnt find the Engineer fun enough for its (lack of) effectiveness.

I have a bomb/grenade combination at the moment. I am constantly spamming almost all conditions AoE style. Bleeds, burn, posion, vulnerability, blind, freeze, cripple, confusion. It’s nice being able to go short range or (very) long range depending on the situation. I also buff myself with lots of boons, including basically permanent vigor nicely combined with leaving a bomb on dodge. As support I can take conditions from allies with my 2 thrown elixers. So mostly conditions, being somewhat though and doing decent damage both direct and through condition damage. I have never experienced comments like ‘no engi’s in this dungeon run’ and so far most people seem to be happy with my performance. I am at lv 34 fractal’s and still going good. It is more challenging to play than with my mesmer but I just cannot stop playing engineer.