Guild Wars 2

I’m a bit lost on this one. I see it a bit more clearly with a class like the elementalist. They spam AOE when the enemy zerg comes along.

Is our optimal role spamming nades? Is it that straightforward? What is a “good WvW engineer” doing, in your opinion?

I should note, I’m aware of the opinion that would go: there’s no point in trying to be useful, as you’re insignificant most of the time, just roll a build to maximize your speed, get runes of speed in your gear, and if your zerg is winning stick around, if yours is losing, run.

I don’t know if that’s valid though.

defensively, I use mortar or nades. Offncively I use elixir R to do AoE revives, super elixir to keep AoE heal tics up, as well as healing mist.

Grenades have different travel times, some longer, other shorter. Timing that you can do excelent burst combos both on offence and defence during WvW , not only vs zerg of enemies, but also against single targets if you manage to stun them first with our Elite.

So in the end my opinion is Grenade Kit it’s the best choice owerall in WvW, paired with Rifle just for his utility into chasing wounded enemies on the run.

My playstyle:

When attacking keeps use grenades, and stay back as far as possible so hopefully you can play the “range game” where you can hit them, but they can’t hit you. Try to damage the door, but prioritise keeping enemies attacking from the wall under control. You can usually force them to retreat with some grenade spam. Using poison grenade on a downed player to limit their received healing by 33% makes it harder for enemies to res.

When defending use flamethrower through the door. You can force enemies off flame rams due to damage from skill 1, knock enemies off flame rams (or try to make it safe for people repairing the door) with skill 3, and lay a fire line at a 90 degree angle with skill 4 to hit/scare off enemy players. Once you force them off the door, grenade from the top. When they go back to the door, it’s flamethrower time again.

This is my build:
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#czMM9VMLaRoMLaRox0aGaVkqzoso
Use it with Cherry Pie food (HP steal on crit) and “Knight” gear.

I’d say you’re area control, very much like TF2 Engy.
Engies can create zones where you team are highly advantageous. As long as your team is willing to take a queue from you (they don’t), they could gain some real advantage.
For example, I could easily lay out 10 medkits in an area, and as long as we are fighting there—hoowee.

The engies best role is sieging, with grenades people arent standing on the walls hiting your team, they just simply arent, at 1500 range spaming bleed grenades no one will last more than 5 seconds on the wall, another thing you can do is support the melees hiting the door or using the ram with the formula trait that makes elixirs cure conditions, just throw elixirs on the melee mob when you see them geting conditioned, or just stand on the door and cure yourself/people around you when they get hit by poison/bleeds

Just chasing people with perma swiftness from speedy kits and spaming rifle 1 is pretty much enough to net a kill on anyone who doesnt have perma stealth

Best for WvW? Grenades. If you aren’t using them, you are doing it wrong.

Nothing else the Engineer can do is as effective as throwing grenades around. The kit severely outclasses the rest of them combined, does tons of damage, and doesn’t require you to get within a country mile of the bad guys if you pick Grenadier trait.

Anything else is a whole lot of fury to pretend you are helping, while that Grenade Engy over yonder is actually affecting the tide of the battle by raining death on the enemy.

The only drawbacks are utter complete boredom, extremely clunky interface for grenades, and sometimes getting smart enemies that will step 4 feet to the left or right to avoid your spam. Sometimes.

I’ve tried quite a few things in WvW — flamethrower and other kit-based builds, even turrets, but I always come back to grenades. I know some engineers have fun with other setups but I always feel I’m supporting with grenade damage the best. Helping out my party and group while they’re conducting a siege by keeping enemies off walls and watching for them flanking us has proven to be of huge benefit. Most of the time the enemy won’t be watching for them, and I adore turning one downed player into about 30 when they decide to cluster around him for a revive. xD