Guild Wars 2

Engineer has always been suboptimal for zergs due to the lack of stability. Now that NO ONE will be very stable, do our unique damage reduction while CC’d plus slick shoes give us a comparative advantage up front? Discuss. My laptop charger has been broken and won’t arrive until Thursday so I can’t see for myself :/

I’ve always been a frontline Engie. So what if we don’t have stability? We’ve still got great defensive CD’s, decent heals and combination fields out the wazoo.

slick shoes washes the stability away lol

what just happened 30min ago:
trying to take t3 cliff-side with a small 15-man group.
Another guild-group showed up (roughly 20-25 people). They came from the garrison, stacked right on top of the small uphill road, tried to empower and buff stab. All I did was to run into them while still being out of combat, triggered slick-shoes while they just stood there (probably waiting for their commander to shout go) and washed their whole stability away instantly. after that they tried to run directly to our rams for giving it a good ol’ hammering, but got stopped completely by a spectral-wall and downed by all the spike we could pump out in these few seconds (2 power-necro lichs / 3 meteor-showers and a good load of icebows, on top of me spamming bombs).
We downed them faster than I’d ever would have expected when seeing them first, our commander actually tried to take a defensive approach first, but luckily was aware fast enough of what me and the necros just did to them and called for all the spike we had right away.^^
That was just one of the engagements we had tonight, and even tho we got our kitten handed to us a few times as well, the raid was so much more fun than any of the months before.
Engi feels awesome in the frontlines now!

That is the build I’ve used btw.
(did cost me 63g to set it up today before we started our raid. worth it^^)
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUlUUpPrdexkLseNicBNyrMGRfkImkPGgCA-TVyDwAxU/52+Dy1B8T5XhHEAXlgAM/c4CC4RDRAAEgbezAggNLFATKjA-w

I’m running predator as weapon (just swapped from berserker to knight), and since I usually go for s/d builds, fire and air sigils are still on it. I guess for the build itself energy would make more sense than air. Fire definitively already is a good choice, but hydromancy / purity / generosity / renewal all would make solid replacements.
And I couldn’t find / craft a proper knight backpack in time for the raid, so I went with my berserker spinal blades…

The build feels incredible tanky, and since I ran the typical shout-heal warrior pretty often lately (last 6 months) for our raids, I can say with certainty that this build makes you feel as save as a tanky warrior in the frontlines. You feel the lack of stability of course (like everyone now^^), but running this build gives you so much utility/cc/escapes that you get more than compensated by it.
My warri definitely will not see WvW again for quite a while^^

Now I just need a set of ascended knight trinkets/armor… ugh.

That’s what I run but with Soldier’s armor and pistol/shield for more blasting and blocks! I just need a way to boost my crit chance :/

try it with knight-armor then. going too tanky will not help you, and you still end up with around 22k health, thanks to “defense against guards”, covered by way more toughness. with fury you’ll sit on a 60% crit-chance, which at least for me was more than enough to reliably proc fire and air^^. And even without that sigil based dps-gain, the higher crit-rate will greatly increase your dps, even considered the power-loss between Knight and Soldier stats.
Going Pistol-shield is definitively viable, but I rather take the spike that comes with blunderbus + jumpshot, and the immob helps as well.