Guild Wars 2

I keep getting the crap kicked out of me in sPvP on my Engineer, because I don’t understand how to properly defend with one.
Could anyone tell me where an Engineer primarily gets their defense from? Like Thieves dodging, stealthing and blinding, or Guardians/Eles stacking boons and healing, or Mesmers creating a wall of decoys.
I think it would be crowd control, since that is what I typically need to do to stay alive in PvE, but that doesn’t work well in PvP. Players have blocking, dodging, condition curing, stun breaking, stability, etc. All of which can easily negate crowd control. More than that, the crowd control typically only affects one person or a small area, so 2+ people will just cut through you like paper.

Engi has just about the most access to hard cc in the game. Rifle, shield, ft, big ol bomb, tool kit, turrets when traited, etc. We also have blocks (Shield, Tool kit), projectile reflection from shield, access to tons of blast finishers and a good amount of water/smoke/fire fields for healing, stealth, or might.

As an engineer, you have to try a bit harder to get the same effects other classes can get by utilizing all your combo fields effectively, and timing your cc/blocks/invulns.

Engineers have access to perma vigor, multiple blinding abilities, and a host of cc abilities.

A lot of the Engineer’s defense comes from knowing his enemy’s big attacks and nullifying them with an attack of his own. Once you learn to do this, you realize you have a lot of tools – is a thief stealthed waiting for a backstab? You can drop a smoke bomb, or you can activate shield 5, or you can doubletap shield 4 in order to prevent yourself from getting attacked in melee range. You also have a lot of dodges if you slot perma vigor, so knowing which attacks to dodge is a great thing. Overall, I didn’t feel my Engineer was strong until I learned a bit about other classes and knowing which skills I want to interrupt.

You also have to know which classes have what negations – you mentioned that players have a lot of defenses, but usually one single class won’t have every single one of those. Enemy Necromancers and Thieves don’t really have access to Stability, only Guardians, Warriors and other Engineers really have access to blocking. Also, don’t forget that you have really great boon-removal and block negation of your own in the Mine gadget, if you’re having trouble with stability and blockers. Dodging is something you have to learn to predict, it’s not exclusive to any class.

The Engineer’s greatest strength probably comes from his AoE Control aspect. While most classes have some amount of control abilities, almost all of the Engineer’s are AoE – Big Bomb, Smoke Bomb, Static Shot, Flash Grenade, his shield abilities and his Supply Crate are all really good examples of this. If you’re good, you can control multiple opponents at once, perfectly locking down high value targets that try to burst you down and surviving attrition fights against multiple people by virtue of your mixed condition and straight damage. However, if you’re inexperienced, you should know that I find him less forgiving of a class than an Elementalist or a Guardian due to his lack of access to Stability, which means that pretty much any Engineer that gets CC chained will usually only have one or two escapes depending on how many stunbreakers they slot. This means above all, you have to avoid getting CC’d.

Finally, it’s sort of needless to say, but you have to make sure your build is workable. It’s less prevalent than before, but the Engineer used to have some of the worst traits and skills out of any class, which caused a lot of noob trap builds that people fell into while going through PvE, then thinking they could take whatever they wanted into PvP. As an example, I would still say Rocket Boots and Battering Ram are skills I would never take in the current PvP format. Despite being recently buffed, Rocket Boots is a spacing tool that either closes a gap or creates distance between you and your enemy. This is largely pointless in PvP point capture other than traveling between points – the points in each map are so small that using Rocket Boots will shoot you off the point, and you will lose point contest. A skill like Battering Ram, while hilarious, fun, and very viable in duels, suffers from being a single target skill. As I mentioned, the Engineer’s greatest strength is his AoE control, and 5v5 / 8v8 PvP format is rarely a simple 1v1 on top of a point. Usually you’ll be fighting multiple people. If you’re having trouble with a decent build, I would look at popular ones and see why they’re good. Take the aspects of the build that you like, and incorporate them into your own.

as said permavigor and active defense like ccs and blinds. id recommend watching experienced engis on twitch or on 1vs1 servers to get started, i learned a lot that way.

Personally, I learned by constantly throwing myself against the Lord NPCs in the Heart of the Mists.

If you can kill all those guys without getting downed, you’re halfway to becoming a good engie.