Guild Wars 2

Which trait do you use in the master trait slot (tier 2) and why? I’m wearing mostly zerker gear, with Koi Cake buff food.

Adept would be Shrapnel vs Empowering Adrenaline. I picked Shrapnel because gut feeling and i like the numbers spam.
Master trait could be Explosive Powder (increases power-based dmg for grenades and bombs), Short Fuse (shorter CD = more utility, more might), Incendiary Powder (which I tend to count out because of the ICD not being per-target) or the Adept trait that hasn’t been picked before (I don’t think they can live up to the Master traits though).
Grandmaster Grenadier is an obvious choice.

If you use zerk gear its pointless to take condi traits and food.

Short fuse and explosive powder are both solid choices.

Short fuse let’s you use shrapnel and frost grenades more often which increase dps over your autoattack and explosive powder makes those hit a bit harder. I usually prefer short fuse so the flash grenades have shorter CD to have a bit better blind uptime.

Rozbuska.5263:

If you use zerk gear its pointless to take condi traits and food.

Mostly using that for vulnerability. It doesn’t hurt that engi power ‘rotation’ tends to proc quite a few damaging conditions.
At least that’s my theory behind it, never done the math

Condi duration food is worth it for stacking more vuln on a boss, The DPS loss for using Koi Cakes is virtually nonexistent (since you’re offsetting the direct DPS loss with more bleed) and you’re also boosting party DPS on non-capped bosses by about 3%.

Condition damage or application traits (like Incendiary Powder) aren’t worth it though because the scaling on burn is terrible, you’re probably already getting at least some burn from other party members, and you’re giving up a ton of direct DPS for it.

+40% condi dura bufffood outdamages greatly the missing power and precision due the passive damage buff. Nothing more to say.

It doesn’t “greatly” outdamage it, it gives you an extra 2 seconds of vuln per application = about 6 vuln stacks extra (3 on bosses), and adds a bit of bleed damage which makes up the difference if you aren’t capped on bleeds already.

It also won’t help your burst DPS so it may be better to use raw DPS food depending on the situation.

what’s the dps of a party? ~5’000-10’000 per player, depends on buffs and enemies. Well now lets say the worst case of 5k. Even 5k*5 are 25’000 per second from wich 3% or 6% are 750 or 1500. If you deal 5’000 dps, additional 200 power would result in 6% at 3k power wich is 300 damage.

• worst case of 5k dps party, like 0 might stacks
• 3% or 6% wich seems wrong to me. Definitly more stacks you can maintain.
• 200 power from bufffood is too much ofc, however you often get power and precision so I made this up a bit.

Yes – it GREATLY outdamages any power bufffood unless there isn’t a 2nd vuln stacker as effective as you.

5k per person in a pug is absurdly optimistic. Keep in mind that pugs are typically:

1) Not well traited.
2) Not wearing good gear.
3) Using the wrong weapons.
4) Dead.

Let’s make up a few hypos here and see what my spreadsheet tells me.

1) The “I’m in zerker armor so I’m dps” pug warrior: 0/4/4/6/0 healshouts with a ascended greatsword, uses only HB on cooldown and doesn’t wall for WWA. Uses Omnom Pie but no meaningful runes or sigils. DPS: 2403

2) The “my pet tanks while I help the party by ressing the melees who go down” bearbow ranger. Full PVT armor, no meaningful runes, sigils, or consumables. 6/4/0/0/4. DPS: 1783.

3) The “I looked up meta builds online and found Strife’s video” 0/3/6/4/1 Guardian. Uses staff + greatsword and knight’s gear, again, no other DPS stuff. DPS: 1853 (includes burn).

You’d be extremely hard pressed to find a pug that can deal 5k/second on his own. Even a properly played meta engie only solos for about 8k/s average and as far as I know they are the highest solo DPS profession, unless I overlooked some other class (I compared them with warrior and ele).

Pug =/= bad players. It’s hilarous how everyone calls himself a “pro” and playing with friends automaticly means “organized group” and every random is a tardnub. Oh, ofc if you are the random, everyone else is a nub and you’re still the pro… Sick of such posts.

There are many bad players in this game, this is fact. Just count the number of bearbows and staff guardians / conndi guards.

Another reason to use condition duration food and giver weapons is chill uptime.
I find that it really helps smooth out those disorganised pugs fights where people just panic and spread out.

It’s not like (if it matters) you can kick such terrible persons. However I rarely kick somone from a dungeon since it really doesn’t matter. Fotm 50 is another thing. Good players or poof!

Xyonon.3987:

Pug =/= bad players. It’s hilarous how everyone calls himself a “pro” and playing with friends automaticly means “organized group” and every random is a tardnub. Oh, ofc if you are the random, everyone else is a nub and you’re still the pro… Sick of such posts.

You can call them tardnubs or pugs or whatever, they’re still bad and they’re still the majority.

Explosive powder is a guaranteed 10% dps boost. Short fuse is not. The less close to perfect your rotation gets the less you benefit from shortfuse.
Empowering adrenaline is theoretically nice because you are encouraged to dodge by the free bomb too. In practice it seems very bad though.

Basicly if you play power bombs you use only skill 1 so short fuse is useless

• bomb radius
• explosion dmg
• grenade trait

you really should go bombs AND grenades.

Shrapnel adds quite a bit of damage when grenading. It’s easy to overlook bleed damage if you’ve got no gear stat investment in it but 25 might + 6 in Firearms = 1175 condition damage which puts you at around 100 damage per bleed tick. Shrapnel + Short Fuse gets you 15~ bleed stacks easily which is an extra 1500 DPS right there.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Shrapnel adds quite a bit of damage when grenading. It’s easy to overlook bleed damage if you’ve got no gear stat investment in it but 25 might + 6 in Firearms = 1175 condition damage which puts you at around 100 damage per bleed tick. Shrapnel + Short Fuse gets you 15~ bleed stacks easily which is an extra 1500 DPS right there.

Yeah, that’s exactly what I’ve been using so far – same reasoning. Even zerker engi got everything that’s needed to make conditions worth it: high conditiondamage stat via traits and might, high condition duration, lots of ways to trigger bleeding via traits/skills and high crit chance.
I’ll stick with it until someone can prove me otherwise.
TBH I use celestial main set for now, so that pushes the advantage even further in the direction of those two traits.

Rozbuska.5263:

Basicly if you play power bombs you use only skill 1 so short fuse is useless

Basicly if I play power bombs I don’t open threads about Grenadier traits :/

robertul.3679:

Explosive powder is a guaranteed 10% dps boost. Short fuse is not. The less close to perfect your rotation gets the less you benefit from shortfuse.
Empowering adrenaline is theoretically nice because you are encouraged to dodge by the free bomb too. In practice it seems very bad though.

Then again, the less perfect my (pug :>) group or me myself play, the better it is to have more frequent blinds etc. More frequent access to Grenade#2#4 and Bomb#2 help make up the damage-loss.
My experiences with EA vs. Shrapnel are the same. Without doing the math, Shrapnel just seems more beneficial with the whole way engi works.

Taku.6352:

Short fuse and explosive powder are both solid choices.
Short fuse let’s you use shrapnel and frost grenades more often which increase dps over your autoattack and explosive powder makes those hit a bit harder. I usually prefer short fuse so the flash grenades have shorter CD to have a bit better blind uptime.

Pretty much this

Just don’t go for bomb radius. Besides being useless it also makes it easier to draw aggro from nearby mobs. The fire and blind fields are large enough as it is.

No way. There is nothing better for the bombs than the range increase. If you go for easy stacking dungeons, it might be less useful, but even there and especially in fotm etc, mobs do not allways stack as you wish, they tend to move a bit or one stays left one right, if someone has to dodge etc. I’d never leave that trait for some semi good condition damage.

Btw, in theory the bleeding sounds “good” however, in a 5 man group your bleeding gets easily overwritten by other players and the damage is cut early. Also 300 condi damage is not “high” condi damage. It’s low, even if it’s a zerker build. Low is low. 300 condition damage grants you crappy 15 damage per sec per stack. The might stacks will add up to 1000 condi dmg though.

However I’d also suggest the bleeding trait IF you only play with grenades. With other weapons 15% are just too low to be procced.

Well the topic is about grenade optimisation so there’s that.
Bomb radius is still big enough untraited, especially since you use them purely for utility which is stealth/blind/might.
But lets assume you use the auto for some wacky reason. If mobs are scattered so much that you can’t hit them with normal bombs the issue is your party(i.e. bads). Where in fractals there are multiple mobs that you can’t stack or otherwise group together? Molten facility? You should have 1guard/mes in your party in case hiding behind a pillar is too much of a chore. You need them for reflects anyway.
Even empowering adrenaline is better.

Since noone of us can’t “win” anyway an argument – let’s just focus on the topic ye?

poop bombs with more dodges:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQJAqOGptgA9JiYbFVG/cDDwRB-e

or

supporting rifle a bit:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAEGptgGVZA9JGRb/cBCwRB-e

I’d say – at 01:00 AM

gn8 xD

Xyonon.3987:

No way. There is nothing better for the bombs than the range increase. If you go for easy stacking dungeons, it might be less useful, but even there and especially in fotm etc, mobs do not allways stack as you wish, they tend to move a bit or one stays left one right, if someone has to dodge etc. I’d never leave that trait for some semi good condition damage.

Btw, in theory the bleeding sounds “good” however, in a 5 man group your bleeding gets easily overwritten by other players and the damage is cut early. Also 300 condi damage is not “high” condi damage. It’s low, even if it’s a zerker build. Low is low. 300 condition damage grants you crappy 15 damage per sec per stack. The might stacks will add up to 1000 condi dmg though.

However I’d also suggest the bleeding trait IF you only play with grenades. With other weapons 15% are just too low to be procced.

A dungeon engie with Strength sigil and runes will pretty much always be sitting on 25 might if he’s running grenades. Most other classes do not passively stack a large amount of bleed, you only actually need to worry about mesmers and/or multiple warriors capping you at 25 bleed.