Guild Wars 2

So, I dont’ think I’ll do any dungeon or world vs world and only use engineer for world completion.

I’m going to run 0/30/30/0/10, dual pistol, utility is 3 turret

firearm for pistol, invention for turnet, 10 in tools for permanent run speed

My question comes down to carrion vs rabid. What are the pros and cons of each? Carrion is more offensive and rabid is more defensive?

Well if you focus on pistol Condition Damage and Power are more than welcome, but you would need a healthy mix of Vitality and Toughness as well, though you can get them from runes as well. I think you would have to give us a little more information than that.

I really don’t know what build to use. I suppose the reason I ask for gear first since it is easy to swap skill/trait but not gear.

I think my main question is wheater people will go carrion(power/vitality/condition dmg) or rabid(percision/condition/toughness) or knight(power/toughness/percision)

What level is your engineer? Have you tried out the other kits the class offers?

That’s probably a good start to figure out what build you can use. If you like popping down turrets then you might want to pick up toolkit. If you like condition damage then you might wan’t to pick up the elixir gun or try your hand at grenades+condition damage.

We can’t really answer what gear is the best for the engineer because it is so dependent on what build you prefer. If you’d like to have some advise based on a condition pistol build I used to run then I can offer that.

Carrion gear works well with pistols because they scale best with both power and condition damage. Might want to mix with rabid trinkets if you want to get condition traits/sigils on crit (like Incendiary powder or sigil of fire).

If you go with a lot of alchemy and no inventions I recommend you use rabid armor with carrion trinkets so that your stats scale best.

What I used to run:
10/30/20/0/10
Explosives-V
Firearms-IV, VI, XII
Inventions-I, VII
Tools-IV

Ran with Carrion gear and Knight trinkets. I like being a little hardier, but if you don’t mind being squishy then you can drop the 20 in inventions in favor of getting things to make your turrets better or stack more conditions

I’m going to run 0/30/30/0/10, dual pistol

firearm for pistol, invention for turnet, 10 in tools for permanent run speed

My question comes down to carrion vs rabid. What are the pros and cons of each? Carrion is more offensive and rabid is more defensive?

Carrion
Pros:
~Stacks power, which is good for the pistol (Because it has a really short bleed)
~Stacks vitality, which is good for you since you already have a lot of toughness
Cons:
~No precision, which means you don’t crit as often (You might be able to make up a little with crit-food)

Rabid
Pros:
~Stacks Presicion, which means you crit often. This is vital for some builds that are based on traits that stack strong conditions on crit which the engineer has a few of, like incendiary powder burns (which damage roughly the same as 6 stacks of bleed).
~Stacks toughness, which makes you more resistant to direct damage.
Cons:
~No power. Due to the short bleeds of Pistol #1 it scales poorly on conditions alone
~Stacks toughness, Since you already have 300 toughness though it may not scale as effectively as vitality would.

Given your stated choices go Carrion and not Rabid.

Effective Power = Power * (1 + Crit% * (1/2 + CritDmg/100))

Unless you run with high CritDmg using Power is a better return on the point investment than Precision. Carrion and Rabid will give you about the same amount of Condition damage but using the above formula you’ll find going with the Power on Carrion will hit harder.

With Carrior/Rampager/Knights gear you can get high condition and vit (carrion), good crit and power (carrion, rampager, knights), and a good dollop of toughness if you find you need/want it (knights). For just PvE world running and the traits you stated you would probably skip the knights and drop in some Berserker for the extra power.

I know you want to run 0/30/30/0/10 but I think 30 in Invention is lackluster for us. We get very little benefit from the +heal, you can make up the toughness with Knights armor, and the 15% dmg on Turrets will be lost because they’ll be on cooldown while you move to the next encounter. Off the top of my head I would suggest 10/30/5/5/20 for a touch of Power and CritDmg, Incendiary Powder, Regen at 25% hp, Drink B at 75% hp (lot of GOOD combat bufs in a B), and Static Discharge which you could take advantage of with Rifle Turret and Net Turret if you run with it (haven’t confirmed it doesn’t have Static Discharge issues but it is targeted).