Guild Wars 2

I was planning on playing Revenant through PoF but after seeing Holosmith i couldn’t resist. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally make an Asura. So i’ve boosted my Engi to check out the traits (not commited to the boost yet) and it’s frankly overwhelming. I need a crash course on the Engi’s place in the game and effective builds. I’ll likely switch to Scrapper because i liked the look of the hammer gameplay. So what’s a great build to solo HoT content pre and post-Scrapper? Thanks in advance!

Verdis.8472:

I was planning on playing Revenant through PoF but after seeing Holosmith i couldn’t resist.

I had the exact same idea…came back to GW2 planning to level up a Revenant and after watching the PoF trailers went back to my engie.

I don’t recommend ever boosting a class to 80 that you still need to learn how to play. Leveling it the normal way is very helpful towards learning the class.

Agree with Chaba, take your time and level your Engi up the normal way. Maybe use a Level 20 birthday boost if you have one, but Engi is worth learning the first time bit-by-bit.

You’ll also need a ton of Hero Points to unlock two Elite Specs, so just level by getting every Waypoint and HP in every map. That will get you to 80 without having to bother with tedious Hearts.

That said, if you really want to boost, here’s the current best guide on how to play Engi without Elite specs at 80: http://qtfy.eu/build/engineer#condi_engie

kurtosis.9526:

Agree with Chaba, take your time and level your Engi up the normal way. Maybe use a Level 20 birthday boost if you have one, but Engi is worth learning the first time bit-by-bit.

You’ll also need a ton of Hero Points to unlock two Elite Specs, so just level by getting every Waypoint and HP in every map. That will get you to 80 without having to bother with tedious Hearts.

That said, if you really want to boost, here’s the current best guide on how to play Engi without Elite specs at 80: http://qtfy.eu/build/engineer#condi_engie

Cheers for the info. Which do you find more satisfying to play: Power or Condi?

I personally like Condi at 80 in PvE, it’s just fun melting everything with chemical warfare. AoE Blind & Chill also do good suppression of incoming damage. My other two most played classes are Tempest and Reaper, so I seem to gravitate toward strong AoE classes.

Engineers have always been a very Jack-of-all-trades class. This limits the extremes of what it can do, but gives it a very high average performance and high versatility within a single build. Before HOT raised the performance bar, Engineers had a solid place in both Fractals and WvW due to its ability to bring an extremely diverse set of support functions without sacrificing its damage potential. There were more focused team comps….. but the benefit of Engineer was the ability to slot in easily into any group. Used to also have the highest condi damage potential in the whole game…. with the single most unnecessarily complicated rotation anyone bothered to pass through a DPS meter.

That changed a lot with Raids, though. Scrapper is technically a PvP spec, and the 10 slots allowed for more specialized builds without losing coverage. With the sheer focus on highest DPS possible, Engineers fell to wayside in PvE; but found a new life in WvW and PvP.

The class’s strength comes from its kits, and it has a kit for just about everything except long range combat. Aside from that, it makes for exceptional open world roaming due to the on-demand diversity with or without scrapper; and is highly entertaining if you’re good at adaptive strategy. Its most notable downside is not getting the high impact damage and support bursts the meta classes are set up for….. but can sustain extremely well once you learn to manage kit swapping.

From what been said about it so far, Holosmith looks to be a less complicated DPS spec. Could be good or bad, but it won’t be clear until more people get their hands on it.