Guild Wars 2

I’m trying to find equipment that allows me to change my playstyle on the fly. I change my skills and traits around quite frequently, but I don’t play efficiently enough to have multiple sets of equipment, so I’m aiming for a jack of all trades kind of thing – power and condition damage, since we engineers seem to be good at both. I usually play solo, so I don’t need to be careful about being too egocentric, i.e. no healing power.

I’ve been reading up on equipment stats, but I feel like I’m in over my head, so if a kind soul could help me untangle this knot, I’d be very grateful.

First, stats. I’ve been thinking carrion would be good, since it provides both condition damage and power, thus allowing me to be somewhat okay at either, and defense in the form of vitality. Other options are sinister (no defense, though), and rabid (precision instead of power – is that a good idea?). Most other stat sets look too defensive for my tastes, and I don’t like the idea of celestial, because I feel that spreads my stats too thin. I’m open for ideas, though.

Sigils… dunno. I guess force for the rifle – but what should I put in the second slot? And maybe bursting and malice for the pistols. No idea what to put in the shield, though.

By the time I reached runes, I was totally befuddled. I blame the heat. There are so many options I just don’t know what to do. Something to offset the focus on condition damage, maybe, or something that gives me more survivability. Help?

Thanks in advance for any tips you can give me.

I’m into rampagers armour with runes of the elementalit and celestial trinkets. it’s a more offensive version of cele that crits a lot. I run it with a zerker rifle with fire and air most of the time. geomancy and leeching would be very good for p/p or p/s. geo is a must for condi builds imo.

I’ve been running rampager/sinister in pve but for pvp, atm

I’ve found carrion with runes of the forge as I stack burns and have a good number of sources of protection, it makes the low toughness less of a burden.

If you’re ok being a glass cannon, rampager would allow you the most versatility in your builds. I dont think you can necessarily change your play style drastically without different sets of gear to move your stats around. I’m an odd ball personally, and carry 5 sets of gear on me at all times. This allows me to be a stalwart tank, to a supporty healer, to 2-3 sets of glass powerhouse sets.
If you need something to let you take a few hits, perhaps take the rampager set, and use some tankier runes. Rune of the forgeman would give you a good balance of toughness, protection, and burn for your conditions. Rune of the engineer isn’t a bad choice either.

the biggest problem with precision as a main stat for engi is that now we only need 53% base crit chance to optimize for coordinated/organized group content. if you choose a stat combo with precision as a secondary and go all the way with it, you get 49% crit chance or so. you then only need like 1-3 pieces of precision main stat to hit 53% (depending on which pieces).

…yeah dont go rampager. dont go assassin. dont go captains. unless youre splashing a couple pieces to hit 53% base rate.

insanemaniac.2456:

the biggest problem with precision as a main stat for engi is that now we only need 53% base crit chance to optimize for coordinated/organized group content. if you choose a stat combo with precision as a secondary and go all the way with it, you get 49% crit chance or so. you then only need like 1-3 pieces of precision main stat to hit 53% (depending on which pieces).

…yeah dont go rampager. dont go assassin. dont go captains. unless youre splashing a couple pieces to hit 53% base rate.

i’m only using rampagers armour, and i should have mentioned it’s for roaming. i have a zerker engi for the rare moments i pve. i hit around 50% crit and it’s solid. i’ve got a knights set with hoelbrak and a dire set with sunless also so i can shake it up whenever.

For Runes, if you want survivability, Melandru or Hoelbrak runes will reduce incoming condition duration, which is very good for offsetting the inherent condition weakness of engineers. The former is more defensive (Gives toughness, and also reduces stuns) and the latter is more offensive (Extends might, which is really good with sigil of Strength or Battle)

Both are nice, but a bit pricey for a full set. But that’s my general recommendation if you can afford it. (Better options for purely offensive builds if that’s your thing, though)

Personally, I’m experimenting with the effects of “When you cast an elite skill” rune perks with the Mortar Kit, but it’s more of a gimmick than anything. They’re dirt cheap though.

@Arioso.8519, you said, "When you cast an elite skill” rune.
Which one are you looking at?

1. Rune of the Mad King - summon ravens
2. Rune Of Lyssa - converts conditions to boons
3. Rune of the Krait - aoe bleed, torment and poison
4. Rune of the Sunless - aoe fear and poison

choovanski.5462:

insanemaniac.2456:

the biggest problem with precision as a main stat for engi is that now we only need 53% base crit chance to optimize for coordinated/organized group content. if you choose a stat combo with precision as a secondary and go all the way with it, you get 49% crit chance or so. you then only need like 1-3 pieces of precision main stat to hit 53% (depending on which pieces).

…yeah dont go rampager. dont go assassin. dont go captains. unless youre splashing a couple pieces to hit 53% base rate.

i’m only using rampagers armour, and i should have mentioned it’s for roaming. i have a zerker engi for the rare moments i pve. i hit around 50% crit and it’s solid. i’ve got a knights set with hoelbrak and a dire set with sunless also so i can shake it up whenever.

if the op wants to run without a gear swap setup, he needs to not run rampager because one of those on-the-fly cases could very easily be “join this 4 man lfg dungeon group that has an ele + war/ranger and get carried by their ridiculous game knowledge in the fastest dungeon run youve ever seen” and in that case having base 65-70% crit rate is entirely wasteful… :/

im not saying you shouldnt do that for your roaming build (except i am because precision is a weak main stat and imo rampager is outclassed by other similar combos with purer focus – but play how you want, you werent asking for my advice) but it sounds like youre perfectly ok with having another toon or carrying around 6 slots of gear for a swap to handle situations like the aforementioned. i dont get that vibe from the op.

in any case. story time!

about 2 years ago when only cele trinkets existed, not armor, my roaming gearset, in fact my only gearset at the time, was rampager with cele trinkets. that was before ferocity, so crit damage was through the roof. id get spiked for 10k backstabs pretty often and i hated it. so i traded in my rampager armor for soldier. i liked it a bit better, but i hated having such low crit rate and bad power. so after a little while i theorycrafted out a build with purer focus that should be able to survive thieves. it was a mix of knight armor, cav/knight/zerk trinkets with about 30% crit rate and ~1800 toughness and the rest thrown into damage. it worked so much better than anything id ever used before. the crits hit harder than rampager/cele and just about as often. the higher power let me better function as a 1500 range siege killer, extremely important for roaming in wvw. anyways. i guess my point is that ive actually used rampager/cele for roaming before, and as soon as i moved away from it to something else i was able to learn to solo camps without burning crate, where before it was fairly safe but really slow and i didnt really have a choice — it was crate or die and crate was a win. (nowadays i more or less stay at full hp while taking out a 100 camp 3x as fast as when i first got decent at it, hows that for power creep eh? same basic build archetype, rifle/nades) lets see… at that time… the better engis than me were able to solo towers. keeps were unthinkable, and towers were hard. to me, i didnt wanna play condi because i wanted a build that wouldnt suck hairy kittens at wrecking poorly placed ACs, and rifle had better utility than p/s or p/p… but id tried soloing a tower lord and there was just no way. idk, it was one of the better feelings ive ever had in the game, the first time i soloed a camp without using crate. and it was after i took a hard look at build synergy and tried to make up something with better synergy than rampager/cele and soldier/cele 30/10/0/20/10. a little bit after that point in time, power shoes was buffed, and amr and some defense against guards is what finally enabled me to solo a tower.

atm, the game is back to a state where more toughness is a necessity. before ferocity you really needed 1800+ just to survive backstabs with a decent chance to fight back. since the ferocity update, 1800-2k toughness has been overkill for roaming builds and 1600ish has been a better number. (and engi has always had about enough hp with just guard stacks imo). but damage has been buffed across the board between trait overhauls, “18 trait points” so to speak, and decoupling stats from specs, and i think were back to about where we were before ferocity. and this time its mesmers and medi guards as much as thieves. imo. (roaming in t1 is kinda lame at any time though. you either duel a bunch of scrubs playing dueling specs and not roaming specs, or you get overrun by the 5 people that answer defense calls and happened to be sentrying the adjacent objective.)

Slalom.3174:

@Arioso.8519, you said, "When you cast an elite skill” rune.
Which one are you looking at?

1. Rune of the Mad King - summon ravens
2. Rune Of Lyssa - converts conditions to boons
3. Rune of the Krait - aoe bleed, torment and poison
4. Rune of the Sunless - aoe fear and poison

Currently running Lyssa runes, but after playing with them a bit I feel like they’re very situational to have in PvE since few NPC types use more than 1-2 conditions. It’s nice to have as a back-up condi clear in builds with very little of it, but since I’m using an HGH Elixir gun it’s not needed as much as a crutch. It could be an option for certain PvP builds though, I think. It’s basically like giving yourself a free elixir C if you can’t give up a utility slot to use the actual elixir C.

I’d love to try Sunless in PvP to have access to fear on an engie, but it seems it’s not available to PvP builds. It might be interesting situationally in WvW since you could probably catch someone off guard, but it doesn’t seem worth it there over other rune choices. It might be worth it on the new maps, so we’ll see.

Mad King runes might work in a condi grenadier explosives/firearms build since you’d be applying a lot of bleeds. (It extends bleed duration as it’s passive bonus) The Ravens might actually complement the mortar since you can apply a bit of close range damage if you’re just using the mortar to drop a quick field in melee range.

Krait Runes would also probably complement a similar condi build. (again, because bleed extensions) I’m actually using a Sigil of Torment so, the extra applications of the same 3 main damaging conditions I’m already constantly applying is a little less exiting, but still handy for upping condition damage.

Honestly, the idea of using “On elite” runes with the new Mortar was pretty interesting, but the actual available options are a bit underwhelming.

Well, a lot of valuable input so far, thanks!

Crit didn’t even cross my mind earlier. Doesn’t it take a decent amount of power to be worthwhile, thus being relatively useless when I switch to conditions?

Either way, it’s dawning on my that for my playstyle, I might have to use two sets of armour. It’ll be a bigger investment than I was planning to make, but it’ll also give me a bigger goal to strive for.

Well you’ll find a great deal of proc on crit abilities that work very well for a condi build, bleed, vulnerability, burn, bunker down, sigils that crit chance is quite handy.

As power is relatively low (unless you’re rocking carrion)
You don’t really need to stack and ferocity.

I do use carrion atm but my crit chance is augmented to 34% vs bleeding foes and fury. That should be plenty to proc things like IP with ICDs.