Guild Wars 2

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/New-vid-up-eSports-Gaming-w-Ostrich-Eggs/first#post1809396

seen a lot of people ask for this, so I figured I’d post it in the engi forums too

Thank you very much. It was very nice to see this guide.

Ostricheggs I have a question regarding your movement. You say in the guide we have to kite a lot and throw a lot of grenades. You use free camera. If I look back with free camera and throw some grenades I can not turn to left or right. If I press right mouse my char is running into the “wrong” direction. Can you post your settings or write 1-2 lines how you look backwards while throwing and running in circles?

I actually use keyboard turning for minor turns and whatnot. Like say if your running directly away from a guy, but you’re headed straight for a wall next to a set of stairs. Keyboard turning allows you to slightly alter your angle while throwing nades at the same time.

It’s not suitable for movement under any other scenario, but it’s a common enough scenario to warrant keeping it hotkeyed.

so you have

WASD for forward/back strafing left/right and E,Q for left, right?

I have to review my hotkey bindings. Working with a gaming mouse but only with 3 extra buttons.

Thank you very much for your answer.

I hope you ppl already started to learn other build ;]
HGH condi is so going down nerf tube.

I do not see a nerf. I played HGH for a while now and I love it. The guide from ostricheggs made some things more clear and some had some good advices.

I guess they will not nerf HGH because it is our last strong build.

They won’t nerf HGH in itself, they will nerf might stacking.
Even with 10 might instead of 25, HGH transforms in trash build due to low pistol base damage.
Also

I played HGH for a while now and I love it

I played it couple weeks and got extremely bored. I literally felt like my skill disappeared.

what kind of build do you use right now?

With the HGH build I use the pistol for the utility, the damage comes from conditions+grenades. I try to avoid to use #1 pistol

1st, under 25 might #1 pistol is 500+ damage + bleed. So not that bad.
2nd, kit base damage based on pistol.

Personally using rifle + wrench zerk build now. Feels a bit like thief but instead of coming in battle, you bring battle to yourself.

Rifle+Wrench is also kind of HGH, isn’t it? I guess 20/20/0/30/0 .

Nope. 10/20/0/10/30 + scholar. 50 crit, 60% crit damage. No need for might.
10 alchemy for many options, right now its elixir recharge cos i have S and C both.

Like the HgH more. But it my personal opinion.

I`ll post something for which many engineers and possibly others would hate me, and it`ll mit myself too, me spending lot of gold replacing rules/sigils… but there is something most people describing HDH builds dont write in their guides, a real secret for it.

Once its out, it`ll probably get nerfed… so i am writing it with mixed feeling as i use it…

“Enhance performance” trait Explosives, that gives you 3 stacks of might when you use healing skill got a trick to it… and the trick is – it procks when you equip med kit. Not when you use MedKits heal, but just equip a kit. Thus giving you 3 Might every 10 seconds. There is also armor rune that does exactly the same, thus giving you 6 stacks of might whenever you click medkit. With Might duration runes and boon duration, you can easily stack it to 25 even out of combat, by just clicking MedKit once every 10 seconds.

Sigil of Strength and Battle, elexir might train etc. are minor in comparison.

Normally HGH is using elixir H. So Med kit is fine but not really used for the normal HGH build.

You can get ~20 stacks of might without Medkit.

Preacher.9018:

I`ll post something for which many engineers and possibly others would hate me, and it`ll mit myself too, me spending lot of gold replacing rules/sigils… but there is something most people describing HDH builds dont write in their guides, a real secret for it.

Once its out, it`ll probably get nerfed… so i am writing it with mixed feeling as i use it…

“Enhance performance” trait Explosives, that gives you 3 stacks of might when you use healing skill got a trick to it… and the trick is – it procks when you equip med kit. Not when you use MedKits heal, but just equip a kit. Thus giving you 3 Might every 10 seconds. There is also armor rune that does exactly the same, thus giving you 6 stacks of might whenever you click medkit. With Might duration runes and boon duration, you can easily stack it to 25 even out of combat, by just clicking MedKit once every 10 seconds.

Sigil of Strength and Battle, elexir might train etc. are minor in comparison.

This has been the basis of any ‘on heal’ proc an engineer uses for ages… nothing so secret about it.

HGH uses it if they don’t use elixir H (which most do I think), I use it with Hydromancy and runes of grenth for double chill proc.

Others use it for whatever procs on heal.
It’s how you get perma swiftness for a group with runes of centaur for example…

You’re right that it is very strong for might stacking. But it’s not like it has been a secret at all.

If they nerf might stacking, the first place I guess they will look is stacking different 2 set bonuses from different rune sets.
Once these overwrite each other, you can forget about having double ‘20% might duration’ and that alone will tone might down.
That’s my first guess.
Next stop could be HGH itself, revert to 1 stack and HGH builds are dead if both changes go through.

There is no reason to nerf HGH.
There is nothing about it that is OP at all.
It is actually a very balanced trait and build style.
You have no direct damage burst, or even a High Dmg rotation(maybe a Barrage+Shrap Nades) it is a gameplay style that requires active thinking and decision making and playing differently depending on the enemies and the situation.

Imo it would be in the Top 5 list of highest Skill Cap builds.

I have tried every differenct combo of skills and builds I(& everyone else) could come up with since Beta and I always end up coming back to P/P HGH and 8 months later I would say I am only just getting fairly good at it.

My guess is we’ll see what happens to the build once the aoe nerfs are implemented.

Other than that the +Might duration runes will likely get knocked down from 20% to 15% or maybe even 10%

2pc bonus of Lyssa runes getting fixed will tone down a bit of the damage as well.

It’s really just an uber efficient build though. You’d like to think ANet had this kind of efficiency in mind for every class when creating builds.

hackks.3687:

It’s really just an uber efficient build though. You’d like to think ANet had this kind of efficiency in mind for every class when creating builds.

Famous last words.

Imo it would be in the Top 5 list of highest Skill Cap builds.

I’m sorry, i just keep going tpvp in 30 ranks and facerolling with it and ppl just die. When i go any other build i have to really be on guard and watch opponent.

bromi.7809:

Imo it would be in the Top 5 list of highest Skill Cap builds.

I’m sorry, i just keep going tpvp in 30 ranks and facerolling with it and ppl just die. When i go any other build i have to really be on guard and watch opponent.

That’s because a very large majority of people suck in this game. Simply put, the gap in skill between an amazing player and a kittenty one makes playing HgH at a competitive level ridiculously harder. It’s an amazing build and I’ve refined it until it’s the best. You won’t have as much success comparatively because it IS the best. You can kitten yourself and claim that other builds are harder to be successful with, but that’s like saying that because you go into a tourney with no amulet on your build is harder to play.

HGH is a hard build to play. Go ahead and stroke your kitten all ya want, but I’ve played a lot of games on a lot of classes with a lot of builds and it’s one that takes a lot of practice. If you miss a grenade you’re punished more severely than any other class in the game.

And plus, if you’re rank 30 you lack the experience that, in my opinion, is required to comment on the difficulty of a build. When I was rank 30 I ran that exact build with static discharge. It’s pretty crappy ;(

I’m more of a hot join player than anything so I’ll speak from that level of play – I’ve played various thief, necro, and warrior builds in addition to engineer. Of all those builds I find that the hgh engineer is currently the easiest to play to high levels of success. I can totally see it being a lot more challenging to play at higher levels as landing grenades as you said can be very difficult and I have to assume that I could be using my elixirs much more efficiently. But you gotta consider lower level play too because that’s new players first impression and I’d say this game could use some more pvpers ;P

Of course it’s easy in hotjoins, it does the most condi damage in the entire game and most hotjoiners aren’t even aware of what’s on them when they die. But claiming any specific build is “easy” in the realm of hotjoins is pretty laughable.

The entire dynamic of the word difficult implies that you would be playing it at a higher level of play, AKA competitive tourneys. That’s like saying that professional baseball is incredibly easy because you can hit a ball at a batting cage.

There’s a reason why there are only 2-3 engis who play at a high level in tournaments on NA. Yes, the build is strong as kitten and I’m 100% sure that it IS going to get nerfed in some way next patch. But to say it’s easy to play is ridiculous.

Why must every build be Grenade based on Engineer, so tired of grenades, it even feels totally wrong for a ranged class…

Dante.1508:

Why must every build be Grenade based on Engineer, so tired of grenades, it even feels totally wrong for a ranged class…

Its the strongest thing we have in engineer at the moment that synergizes particularly well within the class. It scales particularly well with both power and condition builds (moreso with conditions ever since the grenade and 100nade nerf).

We used to have a lot more toys to play around with, but Anet does that thing where they nerf stuff down alot (granted some of it was called for, even if I disagree with the degree they did it with). The old beta Pistol was extremely strong (nerfed down), the old Juggernaut Flamethrower (nerfed down and reworked), old elixer gun (nerfed down/bug fixed and then buffed up but nowhere near as good as before), old bomb kit, etc.

By now the HGH build is all over every forum, not just the engineer one but tpvp and WvW as well.
This is a really bad thing, it’s what gets things nerfed.

Bit silly, since the last patch didn’t really buff this build, except maybe those going for condition duration in WvW, with the fix of Giver’s weapons. But all in all it didn’t change much.

What has changed is that the competion got eliminated: 100 nades got removed as a build, so there is no more discussion to what build is best.
HGH could have been better than 100 nades all along, but still both were deemed ‘strong’.
Now, at best static discharge is a decent second. But not considered as strong.

So HGH got loads of attention now, without really improving a lot. And it will most likely lead to some changes-nerfs.
It is THE specc others think about when they think of engineers now.

It’s not even about the question if it should be nerfed or not… it got the attention, it is well known by now. It will be looked at for sure, big or small.

Yea. I’ve used this build for months at a time and screamed it was overpowered from the get go.

No one believed me until recently :|

Ostricheggs.3742:

Yea. I’ve used this build for months at a time and screamed it was overpowered from the get go.

No one believed me until recently :|

still can’t put my fingers on it as to why I don’t lik the build. For myself that is, not as build in general.
I think it’s a simple as: elixirs bore me, or don’t feel like an engineer.

The ‘magic’ of a character is very important to me, even in pvp. And somehow the idea and design of elixirs never fitted on my engineer.

Maybe that’s why I remain stubborn and still not use the build I know is the best.

Current WvW experiment for me: coated bullets, mine, rocket boots, tool kit. Pistol and shield.
Rather tanky, still decent damage options, and loads of fun. Not bad.
But I do realise things would go better with the elixirs and grenades. Not ‘easier’ just ‘better’.

HGH is a hard build to play.

Man, your arguments would be much easier to get into if you’d supply them with an example of a competitive engineer build which is EASIER to master. Oh wait, i know one, 4 kit bunker where you faceroll your rotation till enemy got bored.

You see, my post was not to diminish your efforts in mastering HGH build, but to put in place someone who says its in ‘top 5 highest skill cap’. No, really? Are 4 others also engineer ones?
Because if not, there should be plenty of competitive engineer builds which are easier to master than HGH. This or the statement is false, can’t you see?

IMO
HGH IS the highest skill cap build for Engineers.
I put it in Top 5 only to allow for other professions which could be more difficult.

No Burst Rotation.
No Nuke.
No Lockdowns.
Constant use of Elixirs for Might stacking & Cond. Removal (easy to spam sure, but timing them out right can be a hard thing to master.)
And once you blow your single Stunbreaker, which is completely obvious to enemies, you are incredible vulnerable to being CC’d and bursted.

This is why you don’t see to many HGH+Grenades in WvW because unless you really know what you are doing you will get murdered. I know I can hardly manage to stay alive with Grenades which is why I traded for TK.

So to me things like;
CC+BarrageX2
CC+SD Burst
Bomb Spamming
Healing Bomb Support
Turret Plopping

These are all alot easier to master then HGH which is a completely reactive playstyle that requires a good understanding of other professions and leaves little room for error.

But this is all IMO which is why when I orginally said
“Top 5 highest skill cap”
I started the statement with IMO.

I get what you want to say, but is it really the build skillcap? IMO the things you mention is a generic positioning/dodging skill which would do good for any character and build.
See, you mention it yourself:
*you don’t need to learn burst rotation
*you don’t need to learn when is the best use of your utilities
*you, probably, can’t see very good enemy movements when you begin to spam all the hell of grens under yourself and poor 3 guys around.

I could argue about timing of elixir spams, too. If you play classical HGH, with Enhanced Performance, battle sigil and +60 might duration – you will have 25 mights easy and you really don’t need to waste utilities in battle. You use them just as you need.

On the other hand, take as example classical WWW TK+bomb confusion build:
you need to learn all quirks of magnet use on real terrain
you need to learn to force enemy into eating most powerful of bombs and not evade
and yes ,
you need to remember timings of gear block and glue bomb to succesfully escape when fan goes other way $)

Even in generic sense, every engineer doesn’t need to learn the weapon swapping thing AT ALL.

So I’d still argue your top 5 skill cap point of view, sorry

P.S. I’d even argue about reactive playstyle of HGH. You see, we can’t look only on top 100 players battles. In most cases, with HGH today you can just jump on enemy and spam him to death.
Its like with BS thief: of course in top100 you have to learn all map quirks and how to help everywhere and not die to counterattacks but in lower ranks you just combo them down, end of story.

Ostricheggs? I have a question (again).

watching you playing I see your role is to support your team with damage. You are focused on condition damage instead of direct damage. I guess with your build you are the king of all condtion damage but your direct damage is not that high. Even with 25 stacks of might.

Are you focused so much on condtion damage to keep your opponent busy removing condtions or why is your build focused on that?

For example if you could go for Sigil of bloodlust or force to make more direct damage if you do not like to lose your toughness

Lupanic.6502:

Ostricheggs? I have a question (again).

watching you playing I see your role is to support your team with damage. You are focused on condition damage instead of direct damage. I guess with your build you are the king of all condtion damage but your direct damage is not that high. Even with 25 stacks of might.

Are you focused so much on condtion damage to keep your opponent busy removing condtions or why is your build focused on that?

For example if you could go for Sigil of bloodlust or force to make more direct damage if you do not like to lose your toughness

The problem is that in this build it’s nearly impossible to get crit damage. Every single physical damage build relies on three stats: Power, precision and crit damage. A lack of one makes the others less effective in comparison to the other.

Condi damage however, is a totally different story. The only things we need are condition damage and precision to maximize our damage via condis. This is the most logical choice, because by nature of the build our runes are dedicated to might stacks and we don’t have room to be able to fit in crit damage. Furthermore, condition’s effect on the opponent is only limited by their max HP and their condi removal. Pushing your condition damage up into the realm of burstiness makes them far more difficult to handle and often times forces classes to waste abilities for condi removal that they’d prefer not to waste at that moment (like a guardian’s shouts or thiefs shadowstep). This is also why toughness is so good, once you outlive your opponents condi removal they’ll melt.

Even though I don’t prefer it, I do run a power rifle build with HGH quite often, and it’s a great build, but it’s definitely not as good as condis IMO. The roles are a lot different. Rifle can spam nades from a huge range and actually have a massive effect unlike condis.

If you wanna use it:

30 0 0 30 10 with 5 7 11 explosives, 2 10 11 alchemy, zerkers ammy, ogre runes, zerkers, battle sigil, elixir H B S and nade kit

It seems like they’ve fixed the bug where 2x runes of lyssa (total 40% condi duration) gave Incendiary ammo 3 ticks of burning. Instead what you get now is the proper 2 ticks. Is runes of lyssa still worth it for some other reason? What would you replace them with if they serve no other purpose Ostricheggs?

Dreadlord.5419:

It seems like they’ve fixed the bug where 2x runes of lyssa (total 40% condi duration) gave Incendiary ammo 3 ticks of burning. Instead what you get now is the proper 2 ticks. Is runes of lyssa still worth it for some other reason? What would you replace them with if they serve no other purpose Ostricheggs?

This might be in PvE. A lot of people have told me this and every time I go out and test it. I’ve done it on both players and golems in the mists and it works. If it ever does actually get fixed I’d probably use a 15% burning duration rune set, that was working earlier too. If that doesn’t work then kitten if I know, maybe more might staackin runes

I’ll do it right now

EDIT: Oh kitten, they don’t work

OH kitten NEITHER DOES 15% BURN DURATION

The sky is falling

Thank you for your answer.

@Bromi

See that is just where our Opinions differ.
To me having burst rotations is what makes builds easier to use, because you have a common thing you can use over and over to different levels of success.
If you are just going to spam Elixirs to stack Might then rush into battle and hit every skill that is off CD then my guess is you are only successful because you are playing in hotjoin PvP matches.

I also stated that I use TK instead of Nades.
HGH doesn’t mean Nades.
So I also had to learn all the quirks of Magnet Pull, Shield Timing, Prybar postioning and vigilant use of Box O Nails.

I still would classify it as a reactive type build because I don’t know what the hell you are talking about being able to just jump on enemies and spam them to death. You must be lucky enough to only face 3 fingered players who use their keyboard to camera turn.
In my experience I have to treat every profession I run into differently.
Go spam on a Mesmer and see what happens, since you used all the Elixirs right off the bat you will smack yourself with confusion without a cleanse unless you want to waste Throw S or Elixir S itself.

I hardly ever see HGH P/P Engineers in WvW or even the few times I try hotjoin PvP, its always Rifle/Bombkit users or P/S Tanks and they are always using the same exact rotations over and over and over. If HGH was so easy to be successful with there should be as many HGH Engineers as D/D eles or Macro Thieves, but their arent, because it is not.

So if you really think mastering HGH builds is so easy then gratz to you I am sure you will have great success just spamming skills ontop of ppl as they die.
Although I can say that in my experience unless they are an uplevel’d newbs, just spamming skills like s BS Thief isn’t going to cut it unless you are just doing it in your head.

But once again this is all just in my opinion about my experience with the game.
:)

Sorry, i’m not sure why are we having this argument if you use TK instead of grens. Of course if you don’t have grens you can’t spam the hell out of enemy because you have nothing to spam. Let’s close the discussion before you bring more fantasies about me playing hotjoin and all.

bromi.7809:

Sorry, i’m not sure why are we having this argument if you use TK instead of grens. Of course if you don’t have grens you can’t spam the hell out of enemy because you have nothing to spam. Let’s close the discussion before you bring more fantasies about me playing hotjoin and all.

I said that I use TK and that I most often play WvW not PvP, I said this in like my second post. That is what happens when you take a single quote (which is only an opinion to begin with) and contradict it.
You said you are the one “Facerolling” in Hotjoin because HGH is such an easy build to play with.
I never claimed HGH has to exclusively use Grenades and I have actually rarely used Grenades when running HGH because I consider them a liability in WvW and imo they cannot compare to the defense and utility of TK.

The fantasies are yours, that all HGH Builds are easy and just about spamming and in doing so it is as easy as playing a BS Thief.

So yes, now lets end the arguement since you don’t seem to be talking about HGH at all but simply how strong the Grenade Kit is when you have full stacks of Might, which you can get in a variety of ways besides just HGH.

You said you are the one “Facerolling” in Hotjoin

I’m sorry, i just keep going tpvp in 30 ranks and facerolling with it

Yeah.. sure. Now who’s is very attentive?

but simply how strong the Grenade Kit is when you have full stacks of Might

If you read through thread from beginning, yep, my basic idea was that might stacking right now is broken in general and that ppl should train some other engineer builds if they don’t want to cry when they nerf might in generic.

Ostricheggs.3742:

Dreadlord.5419:

It seems like they’ve fixed the bug where 2x runes of lyssa (total 40% condi duration) gave Incendiary ammo 3 ticks of burning. Instead what you get now is the proper 2 ticks. Is runes of lyssa still worth it for some other reason? What would you replace them with if they serve no other purpose Ostricheggs?

This might be in PvE. A lot of people have told me this and every time I go out and test it. I’ve done it on both players and golems in the mists and it works. If it ever does actually get fixed I’d probably use a 15% burning duration rune set, that was working earlier too. If that doesn’t work then kitten if I know, maybe more might staackin runes

I’ll do it right now

EDIT: Oh kitten, they don’t work

OH kitten NEITHER DOES 15% BURN DURATION

The sky is falling

More Might stacking would definitely be a good option for a replacement, but since the current build runs fine with +40% Might duration, maybe you could switch the setup to +20% Might Duration and +20% boon duration (so something like 2x Fire, 2x Water, and 2x Monk)? That keeps you at +70% total Might duration while giving you +50% boon duration in general, so other important buffs from your Elixirs (e.g. Protection, Swiftness, Vigor, Stability) have better uptime. It wouldn’t be a massive boost, but it would provide a little more margin for error without sacrificing anything the build currently offers.

bromi.7809:

You said you are the one “Facerolling” in Hotjoin

I’m sorry, i just keep going tpvp in 30 ranks and facerolling with it

Yeah.. sure. Now who’s is very attentive?

but simply how strong the Grenade Kit is when you have full stacks of Might

If you read through thread from beginning, yep, my basic idea was that might stacking right now is broken in general and that ppl should train some other engineer builds if they don’t want to cry when they nerf might in generic.

ah 2shae I guess I wasnt a very attentive reader either

I agree that Might stacking in general is broken but I see no reason why fixing it should break HGH Builds.
My guess would be that Might/Boon Duration runes will not be stackable so only the HGH Engineers that try max Might Durations would be affected.
Besides that though there is nothing specific to the HGH Trait that is OP and messing with it would just be another way to kill one of the last popular builds Engineers have.

Just balance everything properly and let us choose Anet.
There should be no reason players are forced into certain things just because 9months later Anet decides to try and make Turrets workable.