Guild Wars 2

I came back to my engineer recently (I mostly play mesmer) and have been noticing how useful this class can be defensively. I know everyone talks about engineers having no dedicated role in WvW, but the presence of one engineer can extend a tower’s lifetime significantly, simply by denying the use of flame rams.

Get into a tower/keep that’s under siege. Get out of combat. Swap in flamethrower. Kill the enemy rams from inside the gate. Get out of combat. Swap out flamethrower. Go on a rampage outside of the gate with your normal build.

Generally this ends in a pile of loot bags, as there’s always a couple idiots who will simply sit on the rams and get mowed down by your flamethrower. Pair a flamethrower with arrow carts, and you can usually force small zergs to retreat for more supply (since they probably wasted most of their supply on the flame rams).

Works fine and dandy up until someone blasts a light field a guardian spammed on the door and you disintegrate from retaliation.

Yeah I was wondering about that. Elixir B (I think) gives retaliation, and I have it up nearly the entire time. If both you and the opponent have retaliation, don’t they take double damage from their own retaliation?

How does retaliation on both you and the enemy work exactly?

Doesn’t change anything.
Retaliation only triggers on direct attacks, not on retaliation or any condition damage.
And since it’s a flat amount of damage per hit rather than a percentage, it slaughters multihit attacks like flamethrower and grenades.

Yep, 75% of the time want I try to flamethrower a door, I get more damage from retaliation then I do.

Retaliation aside, I’m pretty sure 2 rams can destroy a door faster than 1 engineer, even built around the FT, can kill the rams.

I FT through doors as a matter of routine but unless there’s an arrow cart or several other people backing me up, I can’t stop the rams in time. (Before they nerfed omnomberry pie you could almost power through the retaliation.)

just use grenades instead, they do like 3x the flamethrowers damage

:/

and if you can see the rams through the gate you can hit them with grenades

You can still defend incredibly well. 3 things:

Bomb kit, throw mine, flamethrower.

You can’t get very close under a heavy siege for bomb kit – but that’s not what you need. Typically, open with air blast – run in, drop big ol’ bomb (take the larger blast radius trait, please, and after that detonates, use throw mine. You might have to self detonate it, but the point of all this is still there – you’re trolling the living crap out of them and keeping them off their rams. Flamethrower works great, but as others have said, retaliation utterly slaughters you. But you can still do some fairly decent damage, but you’ll have to back off every now and then to heal up.

You can still atemt to 100nades the siege user with the fall trait, and if youre feeling bold, a consussion barrage followed by grenade barrage almost guarentees the loss of a blueprint if you nab them right when its thrown down. And as said many times, freeze grenade and chill field from mortar slow down the rate at which rams attack.

Regardless of the retaliation thing, the OPs idea would work. Just stop using the FlameThrower when you get notice you’re taking damage from noting.

Kamahl.3621:

You can still defend incredibly well. 3 things:

Bomb kit, throw mine, flamethrower.

You can’t get very close under a heavy siege for bomb kit – but that’s not what you need. Typically, open with air blast – run in, drop big ol’ bomb (take the larger blast radius trait, please, and after that detonates, use throw mine. You might have to self detonate it, but the point of all this is still there – you’re trolling the living crap out of them and keeping them off their rams. Flamethrower works great, but as others have said, retaliation utterly slaughters you. But you can still do some fairly decent damage, but you’ll have to back off every now and then to heal up.

This.
1 Engineer isnt going to stop a grp that is big enough to keep constant stacks of retaliation on the door along with aoe attacks.
Against a smaller strike force 1 Engineer isnt going to kill anyone but they can sure make it a pain in the kitten and take alot longer.
And they can do it without having to retrait, just switch your skills and the vanilla versions will work just fine to accomplish this.
You might not destroy the rams before they knock down the door but there is a good chance you will make it take so long that some back up will arrive and you can destroy the rams after they leave.

Its these small unrewarded victories that make it all worth while right!?

We are one of the luckier professions when it comes to base defense because we have alot of options to keep us off the tops of walls!