Guild Wars 2

This thread is an effort to provide a bit of morale boost to engineers, and help newcomer engineers in their class.

That being said, I’d like to drop a few questions:
1.) Which specs/combat roles are available to engineers
2.) How can engineers synergize well with other classes inside the party
3.) How can an engineer maximize the best out of his current gear/playstyle

1. We can do everything, but every other profession can do it better already. With the fact that we’re the least played Profession, and there is never a shortage of other professions, what is available to us isn’t necessarily useful to everyone else.

But if you’re really curious.
We can be a Tankcat
A Medicat
A Lightning Spammer
An AOE specialist
A Knockback Specialist
and many others. Just never as good as anybody else.

2. At early levels, there isn’t much synergy required, but at later levels, especially higher tier PvP and higher lvl fractals, we’re just not as useful and we don’t bring as much to the table as other classes can. So realistically our synergy isn’t that great.

3. To be efficient at ONE THING that we choose, we have to pour all the stats and all our Traits into that one role, and be pigeonholed into that one role. Besides that, you must play flawlessly and never make a mistake, as there is no room for mistake in higher tiered pvp and fractals.

I run a full Turret build, so I guess there’s that. Trying to make myself as tanky as possible with Vitality/Toughness gear, as well. As for Traits…well, it takes seventy points to gain all Turret traits, and most of them suck/don’t work/don’t work with what they should work with. If they’d redo traits to network between each other (so, say, Rocket Turrets could inflict Vulnerability, bleed, and/or extra damage, and then the detonation could similarly benefit, for example, and do something about the various cooldown traits that don’t work on the Toolbelt), then that’d improve the viability of a lot of builds.

At the moment, I find myself most useful as a decoy and condition dispenser.

With my current playstyle and gear, I’m pretty much doing it – staying alive long enough to win, being smart about dodging and mean about attacking.

On the build listings:

Can you describe a bit on what every build does best? I’m thinking of compiling a general class guide to make the engineer good in group support.

Turret Engineer’s supposedly good for point defense – probably only if the Engineer is there to do all the dirty work. My turrets vanish at the sight of an AoE, and that’s with them traited for durability and regeneration.

I do know the Turret Engineer’s a great kite, though. It certainly grabs aggro like nothin’ else I’ve seen (except a dual-pistol thief, I suppose).

We can be anything, except being versatile.
Sad sad irony of how the devs describe us…

All the good builds we have (those listed above mostly), they all are weaker than the builds of other professions that serve the same purpose.

I haven’t found that imfamous versatile build yet, that warrants the devs to put a penalty on our damage.
The only builds for engineers that work, are all single purpose builds.

I agree with what others are saying. But I don’t think we do anything very well.