How do I not suck as an Engineer?
Turrets have never been viable in PvE and only for a short period in PvP.
The only turret that is universally useful is the healing turret and it is either immediately picked back up for shorter cooldown/condition cleanse or detonated for the water field combo.
Try kits, grenades and bombs are the best dps, elixir gun has tons of utility/damage/heal.
Still loving the smell of Napalm
Bill Kilgore – [BIER] –Seafarer’s Rest random Megaserver
Bill Kilgore – [BIER] –
Turrets are completely viable in PvE… the only real problem (asside from the current inability to Overcharge multiple times) is that Kits are so much more useful than literally everything else that the Engineer has access to, and our base weapons are so underwhelming and underpowered it’s not even funny… When 99.99% of your DPS comes from Kits… you know there is something wrong…
That said… if you really want to run Turrets, then you’ll want to do the same thing I do… spam the living daylights out of your Toolbelt skills… Once someone at ANet realizes the mistake they made by removing our ability to manually overcharge turrets, then things will be much better… as long as they don’t remove our Toolbelt skills while turrets are out again…
Please stop assuming I’m a guy… I am female.
Turrets have never been viable in PvE
I disagree, unless you mean to say viable as in standing back and watch the turrets do all the work for you.
@OP
People used to suggest kiting enemies in a circle with your bombs or grenades. Grenades require a bit more twitch skill, but are better in groups.
Switching between Flamer and Elexir gun also can work quite nicely.
Focusing on a full set of Turrets to do your damage, isn’t going to be enough. Its not really meant for you to AFK. You get a lot of cool toys to play with as Engineer, a lot of kits which you can change between, giving you quite a bit of flexibility.
If you are looking for a non mobile class, Engineer isn’t going to be for you. I think my Elementalist is the only other class i am moving around so much with as i do with my Engineer. Even my Thief doesn’t move around as much.
Try to see the Turrets as the background singers to your main act. They are your support, not the star of the show.
(edited by Kajan.7410)
I just bought the game, and made my character an Engineer thinking that I’d enjoy using the turret skills, but so far have not found them useful. I’m almost level 40, and it feels like the only way to use turrets is to place them and detonate them when the overcharge is done. I feel pretty squishy, but at the same time also feel pretty weak, both in PvE and PvP.
Are turrets just not viable now? What should I do to either give myself better sustain/healing or higher DPS?
I had two level 80 characters on an old account about a year and a half ago, but abandon that one as I hated the account name and it was a f2p account, so I didn’t really lose anything, so I don’t think it’s too much to do with game knowledge or not being used to playing GW2.
One word: Kits
Most of the high DPS builds currently rely on the bomb kit and grenade kit to deal a significant amount of damage. Those are our big DPS, regardless of whether you’re running condi or power.
Turrets have never been a particularly big deal in PvE besides farming (their damage was underwhelming even before they were nerfed hard), and generally our gadgets are lackluster. Our weapons generally underperform (except pistol for condi, and hammer for PvP) compared to most other classes, and so we’re stuck with kits until ANet even bothers to give us attention.
If you want a high DPS power build that incorporates a turret, you may want to try this one out:
https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Engineer_-_Power_Bomber_Raid
The great god Lagki demands sacrifice.
If you want a high DPS power build that incorporates a turret, you may want to try this one out:
https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Engineer_-_Power_Bomber_Raid
Actually this build incorporates the toolbelt skill Surprise Shot, the turret itself is utterly useless.
Still loving the smell of Napalm
Bill Kilgore – [BIER] –Seafarer’s Rest random Megaserver
Bill Kilgore – [BIER] –
If you want a high DPS power build that incorporates a turret, you may want to try this one out:
https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Engineer_-_Power_Bomber_Raid
Actually this build incorporates the toolbelt skill Surprise Shot, the turret itself is utterly useless.
Well, the turret does add a negligible amount of DPS, but yeah.
The great god Lagki demands sacrifice.
How do I not suck as an Engineer?
Not knowing you I’ll preface this in stating that what I’m about to say isn’t meant to disparage your ability as a player in any fashion.
Now that’s out of the way, the solution is simple. Don’t play as an Engineer.
engineer is by far, has the best utility and options not available by any class in the game.
Engineer has the most active skill in the game, more buttons to press and all of them have their strength. Swapping kits have no cooldown. Engie also technically have 15 seconds reflect if you trait it properly with turrets and gyro heal. They have a low cooldown invulnerability elixir (with toolbelt STEALTH!). Traited shield and toolbelt gives you a lot of blocking. Stealth detection, and mortar kit, an elite that have no cooldown which opens you up with more option for aoe disables.
This often met with their weakness in unreliable dps and condi damage (compared to other condi classes). You may not be able to kill things as fast but fighting anything is always a fair game with engineer. Engineer have so much control but you had to decide whether you want to build yourself for solo (which is less recommended but doable with rifles which you can check on metabattle), but with a group, you are a force multiplyer with strong pulls, launches and control.
That said, engie suffers quite much on pve, but they do have the strongest bar breaker. Tossing elixir X can drop bars to half in most dungeon bosses.
engineer is by far, has the best utility and options not available by any class in the game.
Engineer has the most active skill in the game, more buttons to press and all of them have their strength. Swapping kits have no cooldown. Engie also technically have 15 seconds reflect if you trait it properly with turrets and gyro heal. They have a low cooldown invulnerability elixir (with toolbelt STEALTH!). Traited shield and toolbelt gives you a lot of blocking. Stealth detection, and mortar kit, an elite that have no cooldown which opens you up with more option for aoe disables.
This often met with their weakness in unreliable dps and condi damage (compared to other condi classes). You may not be able to kill things as fast but fighting anything is always a fair game with engineer. Engineer have so much control but you had to decide whether you want to build yourself for solo (which is less recommended but doable with rifles which you can check on metabattle), but with a group, you are a force multiplyer with strong pulls, launches and control.
That said, engie suffers quite much on pve, but they do have the strongest bar breaker. Tossing elixir X can drop bars to half in most dungeon bosses.
Technically, Elementalists have the most potential skills to press in the game if they went 4 conjured weapons (but who really does that?) by having 4 elements x 5 skills then another 4 conjured weapons with 5 skills for basically 40 buttons to push at anytime. Most of those skills have quite some impact too but many of the engineer ones are just damage.
Secondly, guardians can get 12s reflect with only 1 skill in a traitline that makes it easy to swap for it (consecrations) whereas for engineer you have to give up bunker down for it which just isn’t worth it. Guardians also have a ton of blocking and an invulnerable state in addition to group stability.
Lastly, engineers do not have the strongest bar breaker. Mesmers do, with their Signet of Humility. Even though they kind of do the same thing it’s not as strong as the signet.
For all of those saying that the engi rotation is too difficult to maintain a consistent DPS, this is true for the three to four kit engi that is recommended by Metabattle, however if you look at the single kit condi engi described here-in:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5z1vtj/cnd_simplify_this_the_one_kit_condi_plebineer/
You will find that the rotation is actually easier to maintain than many other classes and is not even remotely like playing the piano while still breaking the 30k benchmark… and it manages to do over 25k even in raid scenarios where the rotation cannot always be maintained spectacularly, which is really the goal of EVERY DPS build.
Lastly, engineers do not have the strongest bar breaker. Mesmers do, with their Signet of Humility. Even though they kind of do the same thing it’s not as strong as the signet.
I am fairly certain Mesmer SoH does the same amount of breakbar damage (Though almost no one carries this in pve due to the group utility of other elites), though they do still win by virtue of continuum split allowing them to use it twice… but there is still a class that can outperform mesmer in breakbar and that is thief with basi-venom shared to five people. (while each strike may do a little less than a single moa, the potential far outstrips moa by hitting from five people at once)