Guild Wars 2

Hey, me again!

I’m collecting some nice 1H Sword skins for Holosmith and was wondering, do you think it’s likely we’ll be using a Pistol as off-hand or a shield? My guess would definitely be a Pistol due to how powerful Blowtorch is, plus if you’re playing a DPS build which I will be, shields skills are basically defensive mechanisms…. but then again I’ve heard Holo’s have low survivability so we may need the shield for extra armour and reflects/daze?

Your opinions please!

Flameseeker sheild. Free blast in water field, another 2cc is always helpfull.

Me personally. I’ll be using shield as my off hand. The CC imo is to good to give up.

Certainly going for Shield when I play Holosmith.

Pistol is more ideal for the Power/Condition Hybrid builds.

It depends…
It depends on what you play: Do you PvP? WvW? Fractals/Raids? Do you care about the meta?
It depends on whether you’re going condi or power: Pistol offhand only works with pistol mainhand as condi. Otherwise, you might as well just use a shield.
It depends on what changes: If we get heat generation for our other weapons, then rifle may end up being better than sword, even for power builds.

I’m thinking pistol for meta DPS PvE builds in raids/fractals.

Shield for everything else.

Adamantium.3682:

I’m thinking pistol for meta DPS PvE builds in raids/fractals.

Shield for everything else.

Pretty much this.

The CC for shield is too weak to be effective in PvE, so all PvE offhands will likely be pistol.

As for PvP… I’m not sure yet. We may not see a condi meta in PvP for engineer. I tried messing with one during the demo, and it was really finicky.

I wonder what it would take to make shield actually competitive with our best base weapon.

The overshield recharge should be baseline at the very least.

For pvp the shield is pretty good as a power build, block+blast finisher on the water field of the turrent(yeah after 5 year and 2 elite spec we will probably still use the basic healing turret) and stun on hit +ranged interrupt are very welcome to me.

On the pve side it could not matter, i mean if swords skills are good enough is not mandatory to have offhand as good, you can have whatever give you stats. In the current condition rotation we use pistol 3 just because we’re there and barely use 1 hit of pistol 2.

Is not mandatory to use all available skill, even if if we would use(in pve) something like flame legion rune it will probably be pistol off hand.

offhand? my dude with hammer no longer available it’s time for rifle to get back in the sun

hope shield gets the viable power dps/utility for pve.. pistol should be the condi choice