Guild Wars 2

Hey all. I’m Tallman (in-game name is Briggs), a rank 21 engineer who just loves PvPing. I figure since these forums just came up, let’s have a thread to discuss some builds and tactics that we’ve found to make engineers really viable. I’ll go ahead and share a build of mine that I’ve found works quite well. If we get a good discussion going, I might share some more of mine.

My Rifle/Elixir Build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/en/?fcAQFAUlspSYHvSfF17IRoC4H0j67X9K6R+fMlB;ToAg0CnoQygkAJbNOkk1Mo4QB

The link doesn’t seem to be working, so here it is:

30 firearms, 3/9/4
30 alchemy, 1/2/10
10 tools, 6
4 Runes of the Ogre, 2 Runes of Divinity, Sigils of Air on the rifle and harpoon gun. Elixir H, R, U, S, Supply Crate.

This build focuses on dealing respectable damage with the rifle while being a huge asset in teamfights. Crits deal massive damage and grant you vigor and swiftness, giving you a huge boost of mobility in fights. Elixir R and Elixir S are both phenomenal low-cooldown stunbreakers, and Elixir U is great for burst. Throw Elixir R is great for rezzing allies (or yourself!) and Elixir S and Throw Elixir S are great for securing stomps and not getting interrupted. Throw Elixir U is a great defensive skill to zone out ranged enemies in teamfights, and all of these elixirs cleanse conditions off of yourself and allies. Probably my best and most well-rounded build.

What tactics have you discovered? What builds do you use? Why do you love the PvP Engineer? Let’s discuss!

wow thought i’m the only one doing this

ya this build is great gets me 190-210 pts per 8v8 match

only thing troublesome are a thief mesmer duo

Problem with eng on spvp is that 30 pts alchemy autamated response doesn’t work.

Been going with pistol/shield, condition build so far. But i’ll have to try this out considering as I rank up and people get better at the game I have a feeling a lot more ppl will be taking condition removal.

godofdun.5269:

Been going with pistol/shield, condition build so far. But i’ll have to try this out considering as I rank up and people get better at the game I have a feeling a lot more ppl will be taking condition removal.

CD/Pistols and Pwr/Rifle seem to work really well in sPvP to be honest.

Can’t wait to try out this build among the others I have seen all over the internet!

Escellation.9270:

godofdun.5269:

Been going with pistol/shield, condition build so far. But i’ll have to try this out considering as I rank up and people get better at the game I have a feeling a lot more ppl will be taking condition removal.

CD/Pistols and Pwr/Rifle seem to work really well in sPvP to be honest.

Can’t wait to try out this build among the others I have seen all over the internet!

Oh the condi build is working really well for me too, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that i have a feeling in a couple months everyone and their mother will be using their condi removal stuff and won’t work well. It happened with DOT based builds in GW1 as well.

Which amulet+jewel are you using? I’m tempted to test it.

I’m rank 20 engineer and I’ll share my rifle/grenade build:

30 Explosives 4/7/11
30 Firearms 6/4/9
10 Tools 6 <——- Who can play without this? :p

6x Runes of Divinity and Sigil of Bloodlust
Soldier’s Amules with Berserker’s Jewel

Skills:
Medkit
Grenade Kit
Elixir B
Slick Shoes

This is the build I enjoy the most. It offers tons of offensive power with grenade kit and heavy rifle power with Elixir B. I know I do not have a stun breaker, but slick shoes+super speed+ med kit heals is a great way to recover and Elixir B is just too good to not play with imo. The build also offers great mobility so you can roam the map and score alot of points.

Tip for all Engineers: Tool belt skill on Grenade Kit is one of the highest hitting abilities in the game if done right. Make sure you immobilize your target and hit it and only it will all the grenades. Cause if more than one opponent is around, the damage is split. With traits it throws one extra grenade, dealing even more damage.

Nade build would have the most dmg if all the nades hit every time. Sadly it’s random where they land within the radius. Bomb build also has higher dmg than my spec but it’s easy to kite.

I’m using a crit, crit dmg rifle build with a lot of knock downs.

10 Explosives 5
25 Firearms 6/9
5 Alchemy
30 Tools 2/3/11

Knight Amulet, 6x Grove Rune

Medkit (decent heals and only swiftness in my spec)
Rocket boots (stun break, high dmg toolbelt skill)
Slick Shoes (Knock down)
Bomb kit (High dmg knock down toolbelt skill. tried landmine; it bugs a lot)

All my specs defense pretty much comes from itemization. Knight amulet gives a ton of HP and grove runes give protection with about 30% up time (33% less incoming dmg). Also the target is knocked down very frequently, unable to do dmg.

Offensively, the spec has about 45% crit from the points spent in firearms, which allows for burns and bleeds from incendiary powder and sharpshooter to be up consistently. Also the 5 points in alchemy give you at least 1 elixir B each encounter.

I opted not to get tools 6 since medkit has a swiftness buff already and I have slick shoes tool belt skill. Relatively, most of the Tools trait line selectable abilities are less beneficial than the other trait lines’, but specing into it was necessary for the crit dmg since I’m using defensive gear.

Spec lets me 1v1 anything but a mesmer. If I could tell which one was the the real one more quickly I could probably consistently kill mesmers too.

it’s my first time last night in WvW, i’ve not been on PvP. i been using almost the same build as the OP.

the differences is i…
uses pistol instead of rifle.
have 10 explosive instead of invention.
have coated bullets instead of rifle mod.
uses elixir B instead of elixir R.
focus more on precision and condition damage instead of power and crit damage.

so far i think my engineer did a good job on WvW, i’ve heard from some people that engineer are weak but after last night i think it is a very good and fun profession to play.

btw in PvE i use HGH instead of cleaning formula 409 and use elixir C instead of elixir S.

To all the engineers that claim nades are a viable spec please address these two issues for me:

1: Nade travel time

2: Randomness of nade impact location within radius

With these two factors how can you attribute any successes you’ve had thus far to anything more than luck?

godofdun.5269:

Escellation.9270:

godofdun.5269:

Been going with pistol/shield, condition build so far. But i’ll have to try this out considering as I rank up and people get better at the game I have a feeling a lot more ppl will be taking condition removal.

CD/Pistols and Pwr/Rifle seem to work really well in sPvP to be honest.

Can’t wait to try out this build among the others I have seen all over the internet!

Oh the condi build is working really well for me too, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that i have a feeling in a couple months everyone and their mother will be using their condi removal stuff and won’t work well. It happened with DOT based builds in GW1 as well.

I run a condition damage build in tournaments that actually does quite well, even against teams with solid condition removal. As long as you can apply them heartily and often, there’s really not much that the enemies can do. I’m seeing more and more condition damage around now that the meta is starting to work towards countering power/critdmg combo builds, so I suppose we’ll see. In the long run I think both will be viable – in order to truly negate a condition damage builds umph, you’d have to dedicate your whole utility bar to condition removals, which just really isn’t worth it.

I do run Melandru runes a lot though, they make a huge difference as far as survivability goes.

Grenade/Elxir build, that focus on critical hits and stacking up lot’s of vulnerability to my enemies. It looks like this:
http://www.gw2db.com/skills/calc/engineer#10|10|2729|253|2454|4052|4065|30|1422|1417|1885|10|2266|0|0|0|0|0|0|30|1470|1473|1785|0|0|0|0|0|0|1|28016|28016|49965|49965|49965|49965|49965|26058|0|0|0|0|0|
I use this this setup in WvsWvsW where it beyond amazing for defending and attacking.
Aaaaand I use it as well in sPvP. With rune of the eagle, and drinking Elixir B, I pass a critical rate at 85%. In combo with the HGH trait, I can get about 6-10 stack of might running on me all the time. Also Elixir B gives Retaliation, which should’t be looked down on either
Drinking Elixir S is my “oh kitten Button”, while trowing gives me the ability to revive people, or finish off people (either doing it in stealth, or with stability)
So my role on my team is long range bombardment at battle areas, where I apply large amount of AoE vulnerability, and burst down players that get’s rooted or crippled (Each grenades do 600-1000 damage).
Works great as a Point defender/attacker with a ally as well, they run in and you keep anything trying to enter the point under fire.

godofdun.5269:

It’s just that i have a feeling in a couple months everyone and their mother will be using their condi removal stuff and won’t work well. It happened with DOT based builds in GW1 as well.

it wont affect the engineer that much because his condition applications have low cooldowns and short durations anyway.

Dremlock.4608:

To all the engineers that claim nades are a viable spec please address these two issues for me:

1: Nade travel time

2: Randomness of nade impact location within radius

With these two factors how can you attribute any successes you’ve had thus far to anything more than luck?

Also, grenade travel time can’t be called “random” our “luck based”, the speed they travel with is the same, and when you use the grenades often enough, you will learn how long it takes depending on the range you trow them. The bug with impact location is gonna be fixed sooner or later, but it is hardly a problem that large!

I noticed pretty fast that turrets in PvP are useless. Used them in PvE and still like them. WvW also was okay. With 1 vs. 1 or a few small groups of 2 or 3 people against each other I never had a problem. Never had to change the build. But then again never tried dungeons. Probably different there because of towers shooting random.

Now I played 2 matches sPvP and I already now towers would suck there bit still wanted to try mainly because the bug with the deployable turrets is fixed there. So… useless. 2 matches were enough for me to not use them again. Always been like 4-8 people in one spot attacking each other and the whole area constantly attacked with aoe and other stuff.

But I don’t want grenades now. Seems hard for me to aim with the ground targeting and stuff.

Is flamethrower possible?

Or should I just go elixirs and gadgets + rifle(I really want to use the rifle never used anything else up til now in PvE and used to it and the knockback stuff seems useful to me and I heard a lot of PvP guys recommending it too).

The elite elxir always seemed useless to me in PvE because of its short duration but in PvE probably the only possible choice and 20 seconds are a lot, righ? I means supply crate and mortar obiously seem pretty useless. For healing probably the elixir.

So If I don’t want to use grenades – flamethrower possible. Then what elixirs and gadgets would you recommend? There are a lot of stuff like boots that make you jump back or battering ram that pushes the enemy away but I cant use everyone… hard to decide if you rarely used that stuff and it is like starting to play completely new class now for PvP.

@Luthan,
Supply Drop is by far our best Elite Skill in sPvP, it’s a large 2sec AoE stun, with health kits, a healing turrent, Flame Turrent, and net Turrent, where both the Net and Healing turrent are quite good turrent’s in PvP Mortar is pretty much useless, and Elixir is simply just to random to be any good for SPvP

Really? Okay. Then I’ll leave the supply crate. Used this always in PvE because the elixir seems even more useless to me there. And mortar only at castle wall in WvW but still feels weak.

I thought the stability(I saw each of the 2 transformation comes with stability 15 or 20 seconds) was a nice thing. But maybe I will just try both – supply crate a few matches and then the elixir to see myself. Usually the people just go out of range of the turrets or there are too many and just aoe spam everywhere and no turret is standing more than a few seconds. But have not played many matches and the ones I playede seemed to be a bit imbalanced and lots of people leaving and joining during the match at our teams with enemy often having more people.

Amadeus.5687:

Dremlock.4608:

To all the engineers that claim nades are a viable spec please address these two issues for me:

1: Nade travel time

2: Randomness of nade impact location within radius

With these two factors how can you attribute any successes you’ve had thus far to anything more than luck?

Also, grenade travel time can’t be called “random” our “luck based”, the speed they travel with is the same, and when you use the grenades often enough, you will learn how long it takes depending on the range you trow them. The bug with impact location is gonna be fixed sooner or later, but it is hardly a problem that large!

I don’t mean to say the travel time is random. The movement of the target you are attempting to hit is random. Due to the travel time, you have to assume where the target will be.

Dodging nades is almost as easy as dodging bombs.

Dremlock.4608:

Amadeus.5687:

Dremlock.4608:

To all the engineers that claim nades are a viable spec please address these two issues for me:

1: Nade travel time

2: Randomness of nade impact location within radius

With these two factors how can you attribute any successes you’ve had thus far to anything more than luck?

Also, grenade travel time can’t be called “random” our “luck based”, the speed they travel with is the same, and when you use the grenades often enough, you will learn how long it takes depending on the range you trow them. The bug with impact location is gonna be fixed sooner or later, but it is hardly a problem that large!

I don’t mean to say the travel time is random. The movement of the target you are attempting to hit is random. Due to the travel time, you have to assume where the target will be.

Dodging nades is almost as easy as dodging bombs.

The movement of a player, since it’s human controlled, will never be random. There is all ways a sense of control in what players do, and where they move. Hence, that is why we call it a Skill Shot. That you have to aim, figure out the movement of the player you against. It’s not a matter of luck, it’s a matter of how skilled you are at reading players movement. That is why I, and many other people, enjoy skill shots, because it get’s stronger and better, the better we get at using them. look at the games like LoL and HoN, where some of the most popular heroes use skill shot ability. It’s not a matter of luck, it’s a matter of skills

Amadeus.5687:

@Luthan,
Supply Drop is by far our best Elite Skill in sPvP, it’s a large 2sec AoE stun, with health kits, a healing turrent, Flame Turrent, and net Turrent, where both the Net and Healing turrent are quite good turrent’s in PvP Mortar is pretty much useless, and Elixir is simply just to random to be any good for SPvP

Frankly, its kindof broken OP.
Supply drop is a giant I win button. If you can’t 2v1 any duo with it, you probably have a bad build..

Tools 2. Noted a few comments about tools 6. While another had 2.
I also use tools 2. However need to make a few comments. 1. I am 30 alch. 30alch giving me + 30% boon duration, makes my elixir B much longer duration. I really don’t need swiftness on kits. While at the same time, lit strike is crazy OP. Being able to proc it ON CALL 4 times, is nuts. It is power based, like retaliation. When referring to p/p auto-attack, I make the estimate, if your p/p auto hits for about 200, then ret/lit strike will hit for about 380. This is rough, I have not taken the time to really break down the exact amount. Lit strike will bounce 5 times off enemies. if there are more then 1, it can bounce back to the original target. 2 is ideal of course. In pve this is insane. PVP slightly less so. As targeting it is much less reliable. The only way to ensure it lands, is to be standing right on top of your target. or face a target that is standing still. Easy in pve, potentially dangerous in pvp, or simply circle strafing so it will never land. As a pistolier, I can land them pretty often as I intentionally get face to face for blow torches, etc. anyone that jumps on me thinking as a ranged target I’m soft is making a giant mistake, as I blowtorch, then grenade barrage+lit strike, them to the face. But if you are rifle, or grenade, I would not recommend tools 2 so much. Flame thrower on the other hand. Very good again.