Guild Wars 2

I’d rather not post this on WvW forums since last thing I want is for people to call nerf or so on ( especially coming from a D/D ele ) which I do not want for either party but I was wondering if someone on this forum could help me.

I just had my kitten kicked by an Engie ( it was 2 on 1 against him too! ) using… what I can see as a pistol and flamethrower. He seemed a extremely tanky, I was running bunker but even so he was extremely hard to damage. Conditions seems to be stacking minor blooding and confusion.

Assuming that this is a bunker vs bunker fight, which would mean I just sucked and couldn’t kill him ( most likely ), any tips on how to beat him?

Also, if you were that Engineer on JQBL vs a DD Ele and I think some warrior, I bow to your skill.

Did he have any kind of food/oil buff?

Not sur eof the build.

A Flamethrower build that is strong in WvW vs multiple target, is the might stacking flametrower with life stealing food. They regen a lot of HP and can be hard to take down.

But I don’t think it’s that, since you said he was using pistol and flametrower. I think you might mistake flametrower for dual pistol, which can use an ability that looks like a flamethrower shot.

Might have been Tankcat? If he was using pistol/shield?

Hard to tell a counter without being sure of the build.

Umm, from what’s left of my combat log I see

Blowtorch
Explosive Shot
Poison Dart

I wasn’t paying too much attention to the type of food, but I know he had food and item buffs on.

Oh, he had skale poison item on as well, that I know since I confused him for a thief at the beginning.

Food turn flamethrower engineers from weak to considerable.
If i had to guess he was probably going knight armor or precision/condition/toughness
and omnomberry pie + skale venom.

If it was blowtorch then its a dual pistol engineer.
Where all I can say is that you should just try to circle them often :x to make them miss their shots.

Blowtorch is the skill Kara is talking about.
He was running duel pistols, the number 4 skill, (first skill for off-hand pistol) blowtorch, looks similar to a flamethrower auto attack. The most popular p/p build is p/p elixirs. Traited a certain way this build can be a might stacking, condition removing, but still offensively focused build. If this was what he was running, he was gaining protection (-33% damage) and retaliation on elixir b use and auto elixir b at 75% hp, had a 5k + heal up about every 15 sec, and lost all condition and gained every boon in the game about every 40 sec.
Your best bet at beating this build is personal condition removal and efficient boon removal on the engi, and range and movement so he can’t burn you or a full pdv burst.
Depending on the gear, after the boons wear off and his condition removal is on cd, his survivability is limited.

Well as a general rule of thumb ALWAYS watch if the Engie pops retaliation. Elixir B (It’s B, right?) is the lifeblood of any good engineer, since it gives retaliation.

Definitely sounds like he was running dual pistols, and to compensate for the lack of a shield he would definitely be stacking knights or soldier gear.

Google’s advice is definitely good.

Hummm, Elixer B really does look painful. It would explain how he managed to deal so much damage to me. Considering I was also staying close to him it makes sense why I fell.

Thanks, unfortunately D/Ds weren’t made to remove buffs but it gives me a good enough idea of how to even the odds.

I wouldn’t even bother learnin how to counter him, you’ll probably won’t meet him again and engineers are very different from each others.
However there’s only one thing you should watch for when fighting random engineers, it’s retailation and confusion.
99 % of players that gets killed by a bunker engi simply kill themselves with those

They will pretty much always gain Retaliation when they approach 75% of their health if they have a mere 5 points in Alchemy. Especially as a D/D, you are going to have no choice but to eat that Retaliation. Refrain from multi-attacks when you can though, since your goal isn’t going to be to burst him anyway.

Your best bet is to just skirmish in and out and wear their defensive cooldowns down. They don’t have that much sustain. You do. The damage output is heavily, heavily condition based.

The biggest condition to get rid of is Burning from Blowtorch. You don’t want that stuff lasting on you. Switch to Water and use the healing cooldowns w/ a dodge roll. At that point, just get out as quick as you can so the Water cooldown comes back up. Keep an eye out for Static Shot, as you will be blinded so you won’t land your next attack. Try to use longer cast time attacks after a Static Shot as well, as you will have a couple stacks of confusion. Pretty much all of the damage is in that Blowtorch though, so keep an eye on that.

It was likely he was using Rabid or Carrion gear with something that appears to be a Pistols and Pots setup.

Just a clarification—elixir B doesn’t give protection. It does sound like he was using a pistols/elixirs build, which is a decent build for WvW. Engies can’t get more than a few stacks of bleed up, so the only damage he was really dealing was probably burn. He probably also dealt a little damage from retaliation, but he was probably a very low power build (rabid?) so his retaliation was probably not hitting very hard. Main hand pistol does have a bouncing confusion attack, so if there were 2 of you, he could conceivably have put four stacks of confusion on each of you, if it successfully bounced the maximum number of times.

…and that’s pretty much all of the damage sources for a p/p engi. Sounds like a burn job to me.

I’m not going to lie.
But I can’t see how a D/D ele would lose to a P/P engineer.
Having played them both the ele has more condition removals then most other classes combined.

Yeah, to be honest judging from logs we were pretty even on the damage front. I do feel that most of the damage is from me mis-judging confusion on myself and mis-using my healing skills.

I didn’t have much trouble removing conditions except that confusion seemed to keep popping up.

>_> I’m quite sure I got spoiled by glass cannon thieves.

LieutenantGoogle.7326:

I’m not going to lie.
But I can’t see how a D/D ele would lose to a P/P engineer.
Having played them both the ele has more condition removals then most other classes combined.

condition removals only matter so much. p/p engies can re-apply the conditions in no time and do some decent direct damage while at it.
I’ve done dozens of duels against d/d elementalists, I only remember dieing once to a very tanky one and mostly because I did alot of mistakes, got greedy and followed him at low health instead of waiting for some cooldowns to be ready.

I’d say if both players play perfectly, elementalist has some slight advantage, but tbh neither will be able to kill the other if they really want to disengage. Atleast that’s my experience so far.

Maskaganda.2043:

LieutenantGoogle.7326:

I’m not going to lie.
But I can’t see how a D/D ele would lose to a P/P engineer.
Having played them both the ele has more condition removals then most other classes combined.

condition removals only matter so much. p/p engies can re-apply the conditions in no time and do some decent direct damage while at it.
I’ve done dozens of duels against d/d elementalists, I only remember dieing once to a very tanky one and mostly because I did alot of mistakes, got greedy and followed him at low health instead of waiting for some cooldowns to be ready.

I’d say if both players play perfectly, elementalist has some slight advantage, but tbh neither will be able to kill the other if they really want to disengage. Atleast that’s my experience so far.

Except the elementalist can remove 2 conditions when tuning into water (9s)
1 on a water dodge roll (up everytime you attune back to water), 4 on cleansing flame(45s), 1 for each other catnip and depending on healing skills 7 condition removals o-o. And a fart ton of healing skills.

Bunker eles are phenomenal when it comes to removing conditions and the direct damage from the pistol and posion dart from my experience is mehhhhhh.

The OP said the Engi kept confusion stacks on him, and that the he was taking almost no damage, that means the Engi was using the TankCat build. I run a lot with the original TankCat and have seen many, many players kill themselves on his confusion/retaliation stacks.

Ways of beating TankCat:
Don’t hit TankCat.
Run away from TankCat.

In all seriousness you won’t kill a well played TankCat build even 1v5, but at the same time he won’t kill you either unless you’re hitting him.

Preacher

LieutenantGoogle.7326:

Maskaganda.2043:

LieutenantGoogle.7326:

I’m not going to lie.
But I can’t see how a D/D ele would lose to a P/P engineer.
Having played them both the ele has more condition removals then most other classes combined.

condition removals only matter so much. p/p engies can re-apply the conditions in no time and do some decent direct damage while at it.
I’ve done dozens of duels against d/d elementalists, I only remember dieing once to a very tanky one and mostly because I did alot of mistakes, got greedy and followed him at low health instead of waiting for some cooldowns to be ready.

I’d say if both players play perfectly, elementalist has some slight advantage, but tbh neither will be able to kill the other if they really want to disengage. Atleast that’s my experience so far.

Except the elementalist can remove 2 conditions when tuning into water (9s)
1 on a water dodge roll (up everytime you attune back to water), 4 on cleansing flame(45s), 1 for each other catnip and depending on healing skills 7 condition removals o-o. And a fart ton of healing skills.

Bunker eles are phenomenal when it comes to removing conditions and the direct damage from the pistol and posion dart from my experience is mehhhhhh.

I’m not denying this. What I’m saying is that against a heavy condition removal bunker ele what I generally see happening is neither me nor the ele having enough damage to kill each other.

Meh… I could have ran, but that’s really the same as losing tbh. So yes I stayed, I died, hence the thread.

Only thing I can think of doing is switching my armor and buffs around since I wasn’t taking much direct damage from him. Of course I normally play as a zerg breaker in WvW so switching to Knight’s gear isn’t all that good but will need to see.

Yes, I will most likely never see that Engie again nor would such a situation arise since JQ is normally running zergs or running against zergs but still would want to know how to fight you guys properly.

Bunker ele’s sacrifice a lot of damage and support to get that much condition removal. Even then, hardly anyone ever takes Cleansing Flame. It’s still the case though that with Pistols alone you aren’t going to put out enough damage to get past the condition removal on a Bunker Ele, but they aren’t going to have the damage to kill you either. That is a stalemate until someone makes a mistake which can take a long, long time.

If it’s a traditional D/D Valk Ele with some arcane utilities, then as long as the Ele is skirmishing they can often outlast. The key is the majority of the damage is in the Blowtorch. Mitigate that and you can survive forever while you have enough damage to blow away what they could sustain. It’s mostly a skill matchup still, but this game is mostly about skill matchups in general anyway. We often have a fantastic advantage in that no one knows how to deal with Engineers.

To be clear, what I mean by skirmishing is I mean getting out when the pressure is too much. If you handle the burns you shouldn’t even feel that pressure, but you should never be afraid as a D/D ele to get out when things go bad and rush back in once you go through a Water Attunement. Skirmishing isn’t running away, it’s playing smart. It’s basically like kiting, except it’s the literal definition rather then the distorted ranged over melee definition it has now.

As an aside, unless this was some strange variation of it this wasn’t the Tankcat build because he brought Blowtorch.

I’m surprised you lost, usually the question I see is ’How’d an engineer make me implode in 2 seconds from nowhere in WvW’ and the answer is magnet, net shot, grenade barrage → swap to grenade kit for another barrage. P/P engies are pressure engines, and D/D eles have a plethora of heals and condition removals. I’d say you just misplayed. This ‘tankcat’ crap is garbage, just an idiot glorifying prybar and being beefy, while dealing very little damage outside of conditions.

MikeT.9428:

Preacher.4836:

In all seriousness you won’t kill a well played TankCat build even 1v5, but at the same time he won’t kill you either unless you’re hitting him.

Preacher

As far as the TANKCAT build being “garbage” that would be the case if everyone played competently but the tankcat build is a perfect counter to a glass cannon thief which is why I run it.

I play a TANKCAT build on JQ but it was not me that you fought. This statement isn’t correct BTW. All it takes is a couple thieves that remove condition or do no attack while confusion is up and you’ll go down as soon as your blocks or elixir S is on cooldown. I would say you should never be beat 1vs1 using the TANKCAT build but a couple bursty classes played half way competent should be able to take down a tanky engi. A tank class like a D/D ele will have a hard time killing a well played tanky engi though. If you don’t attack while confusion is on you, the ele should have no problem outrunning the engi but my guess is that it would be a stalemate if both players were paying attention.

Oh, it was a BG on JQBL. I’m also JQ.

Well, questions asked and answered, tweaking build and learned something new so all good.

Thanks for the help all, I hope to beat all of you next time! XD

NevirSayDie.6235:

Just a clarification—elixir B doesn’t give protection…

Dam, your right, brain fart on my part, I responded to fast. If he had protection it was coming from elixir H. Sorry for any confusion. He still gets retaliation with B.