Guild Wars 2

I played GW2 at release but got burned out on content after about 6 months of intense playing. I took a break and am looking to get back into the game. I’ve always loved the Engineer but around release the class wasn’t in a great place. Overall damage was low since pistols relied on cond damage so it didn’t scale as well as other classes based on crit or power (and shotgun was med-close range), shield skills were bugged, and spamming grenades was about the only way to do respectable damage.

Is the class in a good place now? I know it’s a very fun class to play in WvW/PvP, but can do you respectable DPS in dungeons? Are there any major traits or skills that are bugged?

EDIT: I’m also not asking about specific builds or anything like that. More a general view of how the class is compared to release.

Engineer requires to have multiple stacks of might to get damage comparable to other professions. Luckily things like elixir build + HGH trait or Superior Sigil of Battle or Superior Runes of Altruism make might stacking easy. You can also get might stacks from fire fields using blast finishers.

Bomb kit and grenades are our best damage options and you can and should compliment them with rifle or pistols, depending on your play style.

Without any might stacks I would say that the engineer damage is about 20%-30% less than the other professions. The auto attack is about on the same level, maybe 10% weaker than most other professions have with similar weapon and same stats, but the other attack skills offer much less burst from one skill.

In order to do lots of dps with an engineer you need to use kits and swap between the kits and main weapon very fast. I would actually also recommend mixing both direct damage (power, precision and crit %) and condition damage. Condition damage will eat through the high armor of bunkers and bosses, but many of them have reduced condition duration. Many things e.g. objects are immune to condition damage, so you need both.

Traits really define some kits, especially the grenade kit and bomb kit. Without any points in explosive trait tree grenades do roughly half less long term dps than allocating 30 points (grenadier trait, short fuse + shrapnel) to explosives tree. I still consider flamethrower more of a control kit than dps.

Engineer has probably the best underwater AoE dps if you can play on the keyboard like a master pianist: use both bomb kit and grenade kit and the harpoon gun, might stack like hell, cancel animations and rotate the kits crazy.

But if you want easy dps I would say almost any other profession is better. Engineer is my main. I have now been leveling some of my alts to level 80 (soon I have all 8 professions to level 80). I am still amazed how incredibly easy e.g. the necromancer, ranger or thief are compared to engineer. Not to mention a warrior. I haven’t made any exact measurements, but necromancer seems to be #2 at the moment, when it comes to dps and thief comes 3rd.

I believe grenades are still the highest DPS we have and pistols still only do mediocre damage.

Very fun to play still, just not going to get the high DPS unless you are running a HGH Nades build.

The ‘paper’ turrets are still worthless and one of the most broken things about the class currently.

The class has more diversity, however as far as damage goes Engineers are still one of the lowest. Grenades had their direct damage nerfed by 30% when we received sigil effects and stat boosts from our weapons on kits. Though this makes other kits more useful, it hit grenades hard. That said, grenades are still the top damage dealer as far as engineers go. You can do some tricks with coated bullets to do a lot of AoE damage, but otherwise we are largely condition based still.

Most of the buffs engineers received were to alternate things. We’re better at healing and buffing and controls and stuff, but peak damage output is unchanged.

This is a little bit disappointing. How low would you say Eng is on the DPS scale? 10% below all other classes? 50%? With all of their utility, I wouldn’t expect Eng to crush other classes in DPS but I don’t want to feel like the “special” player in a group becaues I can’t kill anything.

So for getting the best DPS, is it better to focus on explosives or condition damage? It sounds like might stacking and explosives is the main way to go if you want to be competitive?

It is not condition damage.

Might stacking seems to be the preferred method of dealing the most DPS. Hence the popularity of the HGH nades build.

Engineer is not one of the lowest classes in damage. Grenades outdamage any class apart from warrior.

I would have to say that damage output is comparable if not better than thief, guardian and mesmer. Substitute HGH with SD and you’re still in a good place.

Blood~

A berserker engineer using Grenade or Bomb kit (traited of course) actually is one of the higher pve dps classes in the game. Adding in Static Discharge will increase your dps even further (works best if theres more than one target as Static Discharge will bounce between mobs a few times). Of course they are outshone by Warriors by a lot, but that is because Wars are op in pve.

Forestnator.6298:

Engineer is not one of the lowest classes in damage. Grenades outdamage any class apart from warrior.

^This. to an extent. A full glass thief could do it with perfect circumstances often due to having an engineer or 3 wars in the party. Though that thief would be glass cannon and in melee. Mesmer dps despite popular belief is not very high. Burst can be sustained is no where near nades not even in the same realm. Warrior is DPS champ but at the same time that has to be done in melee range and has less aoe than nades does. In terms of Aoe DPs engineer sits atop the mountain with low CD on Shrapnel Grenade and the spamabililty of nades in general. Engineer is also one of the best classes for keeping vulnerability stacks up in grenade builds. This support everyone’s direct damage making engineer valuable in the right teams. All that being said due to current misconception heavier classes are more accepted in some PvE groups and many players rely on them to tank due to having problems surviving certain PvE content.

It is a severe design flaw many of us have been complaining about it for almost a year now and nothings being done as far as I can tell. What makes things worse for us is the trait system still being in beta. It’s like someone just left the project of balancing the traits for engineer in order to release the game before it was finished.

The face of the matter is this, one shouldn’t have to rely on a one trick pony to actually function the way other classes do without batting an eyelakitten

’s like the healing turret AOE field trick. When did it become acceptable to have to use three moves to do 1 thing especially when it comes to healing which is used in this game as emergency measure while other classes do all sorts of direct heals with fewer moves easily. It’s just one of the ways that this class is still in beta imo.

TheGuy.3568:

Mesmer dps despite popular belief is not very high.

This really depends on how many phantasms you can keep on the field. Three iSwordsmen can output quite good damage, better than what I’ve been able to achieve with grenades or my backstab thief. But this is single target, takes a while to get the Phantasms on the board and thy have a tendency to die so there are times where dps is terribly low also. Its really content dependent and even tougher after the last patch. I have moved away from my phantasm mesmer as its just not consistent at all, sometimes you do great sometimes you do not so great.

Grenades and Rifle on the other hand have tested higher than my other toons other than a 3x Phantasm Mesmer. I don’t run a warrior and have little interest to but I’m out damaging my D/D Backstab thief with more ease of play.

Engi’s are in a good place IMHO. Realistically though without meters we can’t say for certain and a lot of ‘x build has terribad dps’ is subjective, I haven’t found any formula that I feel is fully accurate, I have one for rough comparisons though. So take these comments however you will.

Blood~