Guild Wars 2

Hello, im here to talk about an issue i have with engineer, ps im serious
for the love of god, engi is weak compared to other classes in damage,
they do less against doors compared to ranger shortbow, the ranger was my friend in wvw and he was lower level, than me.

also, in pve, i kill kinda slow, im lv 70, and i use dual pistols, 30 alchemist, and 30 firearms,
i have to say, i kill “normal” mobs slower than rangers but thats expected, but against a risen brute or any other risen monster, they are hella hard to kill. and im kinda suffering from this, this made me make a new char, but i regret not doing anything with my lv 70 engi.
for the ppl saying grenade kit does loads of damage, it doesnt do loads of damage.
on land, its weak, having to click the whole time and seeing average damage that other classes diss out with their weap skills. also they dont benefit from weap stats.
underwater, grenade kit is the best in killing, harpoon is very bad underwater.

TL:DL im having trouble with engi, they are weak and i need help to figure this out.

ps. im full carion lv 70 everything.
also, this is no troll thread and i want to hear ppl say how they kill a risen, it takes me 14 secs with 1 rifle turret (overloaded) + elixer b and u. but when there is another, no elixer, no overload and then it takes like about 20+ seconds.
im struggling. please dont tell me that grenade kits owns.

Try the Rifle for more “instant gratification” of damage.

Also, why are you sporting Elixirs in PVE? Other than a few buffs like Swiftness, I’m always rocking Gadgets for higher damage with the Tools traitline. I see Elixirs as more of a PVP tool. Sure Elixir B/S is good for anything, but Elixir C/U/R is more suited towards PVP in my opinion.

Edit: Grenades are great damage by the way. Hard to use, but can still wrack up conditions like nothing you’ve seen before.

Elixir U is a blessing and a curse in PvP because of the random debuff. Losing all your endurance can flat out lose you a fight.

I love Elixirs in both PvP and PvE.

On the question at hand, are you keeping your conditions and boons up as much as possible? Are you using hidden bullet (or whatever the Toolbelt skill for the Rifle Turret is called, sorry) on cooldown? Are you having problems kiting or is it just killing speed?

If it is only speed, you should consider a Power build with grenades. They hit like a truck, but give you carpal tunnel… If you don’t like that, switching to gadgets for burst works wonders. I use Rifle with goggles (can use Rifle Turret for the Toolbelt skill, too), the battering ram ability (names are hard…), and the Tool Kit (mostly for long shield and huge Toolbelt burst) in PvP and it just blows stuff up. Take Static Discharge from the Tools Trait line to make your bursty Toolbelt skills hit even harder.

Good luck!

If you are using elixirs, your damage should be up around 5% above normal a lot of the time (this is due to the 25 point Elixir trait “Energy conservation Matrix”). Stack your Elixir H and B together and you can see a noticable boost in damage.

Not to mention your Auto-Elixir B gives you an extra Elixir to quaff at 75% health, though there’s an internal cooldown that’s equivalent to the manual Elixir B cooldown.

Heh. It would be awesome to see Energy Conservation Matrix add 1% of damage for every stack of Might. But that’s only in my dreams.

It seems like to me that you’re running a condition build, one very similar to one I’ve run in the past (I opted for elixir gun over rifle turret). The only condition build an engie can run for lots of quick damage is one centered around burning. Otherwise you’re better off with some form of power-rifle build if you want to bring stuff down quick.

Engineers don’t have a way to add up and maintain large stacks of bleeds that are essential to other condition builds such as a ranger. A standard condition build like the one you seem to be using is more about attrition. You can apply a large amount of different conditions quickly making them harder for enemies to clean them off (which frankly is more important in PvP than PvE). Your conditions will kill stuff eventually, so just make sure you’re still alive to see it happen.

Adding traits or utilities to increase your survival I believe would be more effective in a build similar to the one you are running now. Having a stunbreaker is always nice. and seeing as how you seem to like elixirs, I suggest dropping Elixir U for Elixir R or S depending on your preference. Quickness isn’t as effective with pistol skills as it would be for a power rifle. Secondly, if you don’t already have cleansing formula traited for your elixirs, I highly suggest that you do. Finally, I’d swap the rifle turret for anything that either gives you control options (PBR, Slick Shoes, Mine, or Flamethrower) or a kit that benefits from condition damage (Bombs, elixir gun, grenades) again, your choice.

That’s my two cents from personal experience as an 80 engie

Following on devinchi’s idea, I would recommend the Net turret for control. You can fire your net from your tool belt before setting the turret down, then drop the net turret down as soon as the player gets out of it.

Immobilizing a player means they can’t dodge. If they can’t dodge, then they are prone to all your attacks.

Sorry for the late response, but your advice was nice.
Im now 30 explosives; 33% burn, 10% more dmg on explosives and grenadier
My alchemy traits remain the same; 20% elixer reduction and boon increase with the condition removal (formula409 i believe)
Last 10 will go to fireams; range increase and bleed on crit (lv5)
Using a rifle now, but barely using it, im using grenade kit.
I did not realize the important of one extra grenade, which effectively increases my damage output by50%, and the 10% more damage from explosives add another 10% per grenade, grenadekit was week cos it only threw 2 before, one makes a lot of difference. Thank you all my solo pve is going smoothly now and im even stronger underwater than before! I only need to change my condition dmg gear to pure dmg/crit gear
Also, of anyone wants to use this build, keep in mind that on land, grenadekit does not have an autoattack, so you will get tired fingers after a while.
In damage against mobs its superb, sometimes hard to attack moving mobs if they are too fast, but freezing grenade will fix that
Again, thanks

I run a condition build and I do not feel weak at all. Let me explain a little about how it works for me.

I love the P/S myself.

One thing that I had to learn about the shield is to learn the enemies tell to their ranged attacks. Once I did that, I could mitigate the ranged damage completely at times while reflecting it fully back to them, generally with 3/4 of them criting. Nothing is more satisfying then seeing a rifle or bow enemy do a multi-burst attack that reflects back at then for heavy damage.

I found precision helps alot with procs on things that add to cond. damage. I focus on prec/cond dmg/toughness armor and power/vitality/cond dmg jewelry with pow/prec/cond dmg gems in the jewelry. Basically I focus on cond dmg for the pistol and earth sigil. I put 30 into fire arms for the coated bullets and precisions, as well as the 20% decrease on pistol coold downs and 20 in inventions for the added toughness and 20% decrease in shield cool down and the 90 toughness in that same shield trait.

I put 20 more into tools for speedy kits for unlimited swiftness and kit refinement. I use bomb kit, elixir gun and rocket boots. Rocket boots give me two ways to do damage and burning as well as a stun breaker. I use elixir gun for debuffs and two condition removal options and 3 regens avaliable. I use bombs for BoB for damage and control. I often swap to bombs and use #3 then #2 for thr 5 stacks of confusions (got to love watching enemies hurt themselves) and AoE burn. Often I swap just for the fire bomb or smoke bomb for the fire field or smoke field for invisibility or blind.

This gives me invisibility, multiple burns, weakness with elixir gun, 3 AoE regens, a stun breaker, condition removal, the ability to mitigate damage, an escape option, stuns, fire fields, constant swiftness, poisons, and many different ways to play it.

I use this build in PvE, sPvP, and WvW. If I need to help rez in WvW or dungeons, I swap elixit R for rocket boots so I have a stun breaker and an AoE rez assist. I often use elixir gun in those cases as well to keep 100% weakness on enemies. Bosses in particular, as it causes glancing blow consistently, allowing me to limited the enemies damage out put.

Thank you for that build but tbh that is not really my playstyle, my playstyle is to simply kill multiple targets with aoe, (i had 30 firearms with penetrating pistol shots, now using rifle so no need for that trait) grenades are strong, now that i realize it, your build seems rather difficult to master, with the current one its simple, and has good utility plus it fits my playstyle, thanks tho

Hey, go with what works for you bud. Right now the green gear is chip and you can easily buy various build sets to see what build works for your play style.

As far as your comment
“my playstyle is to simply kill multiple targets with aoe”

Well I could offer the suggestion of going to the mist, there is a crowd of dummies that you can test various builds and see what kills the largest group of them the fastest.

Contrary to your thread title though, I would not call them weak. With grenades, you indeed have a very solid way to do AoE damage

If anything is broken, its the condition damage system at its current state; which leaves the only viable dps build being power/grenade build.
We can easily outdamage any other classes out there with 30 into explosives.

A tip for grenadier – if you are having trouble tracking moving enemies, use your net shot from rifle and quickittenurn to freeze grenade.
Also, u need to use the fast ground targeting option.

Edit: why the h* is “quickly” “turn” being filtered into kitten? zzz….

I use a condition damage very successfully, and I can assure you it is not broken. It may be relatively under powered, but it is not broken in the least.

What is broken is a great many abilities and traits, and issues with kits themselves costing a sacrifice of weapons stats.

I find it interesting that you claim it is both broken and “not viable” when so many folks use it so successfully. Bad choice of words perhaps ?

Condition damage is not broken when you are fighting a mob alone.

It is broken when more condition damagers comes in due to the 25 cap. Once the cap is reached, unless your condition damage is one of the highest, it will not kick in and wasted in the background.

And the cap reaches very very easily in a normal group of 5.

Good point, in that case I absolutely agree, it is broken.

One more point re condition damage: I think there is no doubt that burn is one of our strongest condition damage.

But again, afaik, when there are other condition damagers around the highest burn damage will kick in first since it only stacks in duration and not intensity.

So the scenario would be that if we have 2 cond dmg engineer spraying flamethrower, only one person’s cond dmg kicks in, and the other would have been deemed disregarded.

Until Anet finds a way to “fix” this problem… cond dmg would not be a viable dps build… at least in PVE sense.

The Engineer is the weakest DPS class trust me on that. I’ve messed around with several different builds, and I’ve still come to the conclusion that the best dps build is centered around condition burns and that dps again is still far too low compared to other classes.

Engineer is basically a PRO class, low survivability, low dps. Even in full exotic gear the DPS isn’t anything special. Essentially pair up a Ranger VS Engineer; the Ranger will utterly destroy the Eng in sheer DPS number crunching, not to mention the Ranger has far superior survivability. The problem is that the kits don’t really scale well at all, and since that is where most of our key DPS comes from, essentially it is fundamentally broken.

I don’t know, an average of 1.5k damage per throw (grenades) is low dps? and to top that off, with the max stacks of 25 vulnerability in less than 5 seconds.
There’s even one guy who specced into flamethrower with a consistent 25 stacks of might doing a minimum of 3k per cycle is considered low dps?

If you think the best dps is centered around condition burns, then you havent mess around enough.

Low survivability? compared to heavy armor classes yea, but other than that generally I disagree.

@TsukasaHiiragi.9730

If you are speaking about PvP then I completely disagree with everything you say.

Do like me.
Go reset your traits.
Go full Explosive.
Grab your grenade kit.
Own everything.

I haven’t tried this in PvP, but in PvE it works.

TwiceDead.1963:

Do like me.
Go reset your traits.
Go full Explosive.
Grab your grenade kit.
Own everything.

I haven’t tried this in PvP, but in PvE it works.

For the most part you can pretty much unload damage constantly, but its ground targeted so as long as your enemy isn’t an idiot they’ll usually be fine.