Guild Wars 2

Just started GW2 and was drawn to engineer as my first profession. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I don’t even recognize the language of builds, plus have only a few skill points and almost no money.

I started an elementalist and am doing much better, but hopeless newb tho I may be, I still consider the engineer my main.

Should I just keep leveling and hope it makes sense as I go? Are there any up to date resources about the class -I’ve looked and found some, but they seem to either be jargony, aimed at end game or somewhat out of date… Should I play my ele more until I ‘get it’ and then come back to engineering?

My original plan was to play a support type character (yeah…recent convert from holy trinity MMOGs where I played a healer. I get that that’s not how it works here, hell I love it, but I have “support class” spiraling through my DNA.)

Anyways, having fun, loving it! Just wondering what I’m doing wrong because I feel like I’m missing something (a lot of things) when I watch others play.

To play engi is to play the piano in most cases. Even a static discharge build has you pressing buttons more often tehn most professions.

My advice? just stick with engi if you like the feel of the class. I first played a ranger, I kept getting kicked cause at the start of the game rangers were… terrible and hated, and still are mostly. I was like “lets try engi” it is the perfect class for me. I love flexability and diversity, and engi offers that. There will always be the “best” a character can do, but Engi has a large number of viable builds, and many diffrent play styles. And I like that.

Alot of being a good engi is watching cooldowns and using kits. When I first started engi I ran with turrets cause they are cool concept. but they are weak compared to our strongest abilities which are in our kits. Get used to swapping kits and maintaining their cds. For example if you run med kit/bombkit/toolkit

You wanna be always using medkit 5 on cd, giving yourself moderate fury uptime. And dropping bombs 2/3 and toolkit 2/3 on cd will add lots of aoe conditions and lots of single target damage and conditions.

The Toolbelt is also a mechanic which gives us ALOT of flexability. You can run an AoE nuker build where you just run skills and try and put down alot of aoe burst as fast as possible. Bombkit/Nade kit toolbelt skills are HUGE aoe nukes that are really strong in open world for nuking a group. Add rocket turret, and you dont even have to equip the two kits or place the rocket turret, and with a rifle you have rifle 5/3, nade barage, big bomb, and rocket which will make short work of most mobs. All without worrying about managing internal kit cooldowns.

Sometimes you will take a utility just for its toolbelt skill, and dont be afraid to. I take med kit cause I enjoy the f1 it gives me. BUT, If I feel the need I will use it to pop extra heals and fury/swift in a pinch. but its perfectly usable without ever even putting it on, just to use its good f1 skill.

This is my opinion anyways, I am just a pve player mostly. so take it with a grain of salt and keep on playing your game how you want honestly.

For levelling, bombs are your best friend. Try to los groups (up to 5) of enemies so they all stack up in a bunch and just drop bombs at their feet. Smoke bomb will help you to survive and bomb 1 and fire bomb will do the killing.

Taking speedy kits is also highly recommended. Its basically a permanent 33% movement speed increase.

Healing turret and elixir gun should nullify conditions and rocket boots will allow you to get around a map faster.

Engineer is a great support character, vulnerability, team might, team stealth, plenty of aoe blinds, team condition cleansing, control skills, and there’s even some team healing in there with heal turret, toolbelt regen and super elixir. You can get all this even when running some of the top builds for engineer.

Hello my frand! Vee Wee here, retired #1 Engi NA and world first rank 80!

Engineer is a pretty easy class to pick up once you figure out the basics! Here are some tips for you my frand!

Kits! Use them! Kits are the most efficient way to play Engineer! Bomb Kit and Grenade Kit are the kits that deal the most damage! Flamethrower, Tool Kit, and Elixir Gun provide team and self utility! Practice swapping in and out of kits and your weapons! That’s what makes a great Engineer! For example if you have Bomb Kit, Grenade Kit, and Elixir S on your utility bar, use your weapon skills, then swap to Bomb Kit and use those abilities, then swap to Grenade Kit and use those abilities and repeat! Obviously there is a time and place for certain abilities but you’ll learn that as you get better! Wahoo!

Master the Healing Turret! Healing Turret is without a doubt our best heal! It’s one of the best heals in the entire game! The correct way to use it is to place it, overcharge it immediately, and either pick it up or detonate it! Picking it up reduces the cooldown from 20 to 15! Detonating it will heal you and your surrounding teammates for more!

Here are some tips for leveling!

Your first 2 trait points should go into the Tools line for Speedy Kits! Speedy Kits gives you Swiftness for 10 seconds every time you swap into a Kit! You basically have permanent Swiftness! This will help you a lot for moving from quest to event and around the map! It will also help you kite things! Mobility is the key to fast leveling!

Use both Grenades and Bomb Kit for leveling! Run in a circle and spam your Grenade, Bomb, and weapon skills! It’s very easy! You have a lot of snares and slows with those 2 kits which makes it easy to kite! And they are both kits that deal AoE damage! You can group up 10 different bad guys and slay them all really easy!

I hope that helped! Wahoo! Bye frands~!

roll a guardian and warrior to level 20-40 to get the feel of the game, then go back to engi. I originally started the game as an ele and found it complicated and not worth it, leveled a guardian and then thief, went back to my ele then engi and it made it so worth it. Ele and Engi are the two hardest classes to play

Gear:
Go for Power, then Power+Precision, then Power+Precision+Ferocity gear.

Weapons:
Try out Pistol+Shield and Rifle and see what you like more.

Utility skills:
Get Bomb Kit, play around with the rest.

Traits:
Get Speedy Kits (Tools VI) first, then Forceful Explosions (Explosives III). Once you unlock Master level traits you might want to add Backpack Regenerator (Alchemy IX) for more survivability.

About support type character in PvE:
Even though the Engineer has a wide arrange of support (AoE blind, Fire field and group Might, Smoke field and Stealth, Vulnerability, snares, knockback, condition remove, water field) to be helpful to your team none of these kinds of support are crucial for the team’s success.
If you want to provide your team with crucial support play a Guardian, their reflects, absorbs, Aegis, Stability, and Protection make a lot of fights noticeable easier.

Engie is hard to understand as a class, but just to be clear, the only really easy class to understand in this game is Warrior, and even that have a really high skill cap when it comes to pvp.
I have 5 lvl 80 and i found the thief the hardest class to understand, but once you understand the basic of the game, everything is possible.
My suggestion: after 2 years of GW2, i never regret the choice of my first class, and even if i have 4 more pgs now, my first character have something “more” compared to them, and i’ll remember my experience with him in years, like i remember the adventures i had in previous MMOs (but only the ones with my main). So play what you like, not what is easy, this is the best suggestion i can give to you. ^^

Vee Wee is pretty much right. A “wee” bit more from me.

Engineer is a hard class to MASTER but not to level once someone gives you the “aha” moment. You can get good and make it your main easily and by playing it first, you will develop some good skills too for any other alt you might want.

The key to engineer is kits. Take them especially for leveling.
You should use kits even more than your weapon.
Bombs and Grenades. If it goes BOOM you want it for leveling.
As you get better, add a few skills from the pistol/shield or third kit.

A few UI changes will make the engineer a LOT easier.

1) Bind your 7,8,9 and weapon swap to your keyboard where they are easy to reach and hit in rapid succession. I tend to use r, f, v, and t. When you can get in and out of kits quickly, you use a LOT more skills and that tends to be the biggest initial shock for a new engineer. Biggest thing with engineer is finding a quick way to move between kits. If you “click” it just is too hard and takes too long IMHO. Try keybinding!

2) Go into options and play with the setting that allows you to still see the range for AE but to not have to double click. That will make life sooo much easier for grenades. (I can’t log into the game from abroad easily but someone can tell you what it is called exactly).

Healing turret is easy to get a simple use on and work from there. Drop it and IMMEDIATELY push the button again. CLICK CLICK and it will immediately do “all its stuff” at once (the initial drop plus the overcharge). Now hit F1 to blow it up for a bigger heal. Do it all basically like hitting three keys in a row typing a word.
When you get used to engineer, you can do more staggering of when to hit each function but for now drop, overcharge, blow up 1-2-3.

The fastest way to level and get money is going to be EOTM which is Edge of the Mists and part of WvW. Just open the WvW tab and on the right is a button to take you to EOTM. Follow on the map what we call a “blue Doritto” which is a commander. You get:
1) Gold
2) Items which you should sell on the trading post (at top of screen) versus merchants so you make more money.
3) Karma which can buy gear as you level or can be traded for gold (will explain another time)
4) WvW experience which will really help when you get to 80.

It is the best leveling in the game frankly. You can always do your personal story later or when no Blue Dorrito is on. But if you love the storyline, feel free to do that instead. Both work.

When doing “main story” leveling, gold is easier if you grab some gathering tools from anything that says merchant. Make your minimap really big (zoom in) and you will see all the nodes as logs, weeds, or little rocks. Sell all you can on trading post.

Sell everything you get that you don’t wear on trading post. It is more money! Investing in bigger bags helps too. The more you sell, the more you make.

One annoying thing, sometimes you have to wait a little bit after selling say 15+ items on trading post (a way to make sure you are not a bot). Lots more cash that way.

Tell us what server you are on and I am sure someone can give you a bit of a starter gold fund too. Engies help engies.

Finally, when leveling don’t worry about being support. When you get to 80 come back and we can help you with all sorts of support type builds and ideas.

As a teaser. . . you really can heal very very well with an engineer without giving up too much damage. Elixir Infused Bombs are wonderful as are your toolbelt skills for long regenerations and the fact you have a pulse heal in the elixir gun. That is a LOT of heal per second. You also have LOTS of combo fields and blast finishers and the ability to remove others conditions etc. In certain situations, your turrets become great support with the right traits.

You will find as you advance that a quick trait change here or there and a quick utility change can make you the most versatile support class out there. Others would have to spend quite some time changing everything. Not you.

One more thing, this game is completely biased to the idea of dodging. The best heal is the damage you never took. Go to Edge of the Mists (in the pvp tab) and run around till you find the golem that trains you on how to dodge and play with it again and again until you get the timing right. You will figure out when to dodge as you level. It often is a pretty easy “tell” (like a big red circle under you which typically means “get out”).

While you are in the Edge of the Mists consider taking a build you find in forums and trying it against (in this order):

1) the Heavy, Medium and Light golems
2) the different classes of character that you will find to train on
3) the couple of PvP monsters (Svaniar, etc) which are quite a bit harder to kill but will really test you.

Play around with the kits we mentioned (bomb and grenades) on the golems till you get a sense of what the skills really can do for you. Don’t be afraid to NOT slot all your utilities or take all your traits so you can get more of a feel of what they might do for your level (as you won’t have all the trait points yet).

Try it both ways.

Wow, thanks for the advice everyone! A lot to think about and try out here – I appreciate it greatly. I was feeling a little lost as to what I should be trying to learn, but this is a solid foundation.

Just stick with it, its not that difficult. Hardest thing is probably getting good at using your combo fields. Theres quite a few guides on youtube, should help you out alot.
Both Teldo and Yishis vids are quite good.

https://www.youtube.com/user/Teldo/videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/bemeric1/videos

You dont have to use 3 kits, you can just ease into it (tho I’d advice you to atleast use the bomb kit). I found my engi to be the only class that remained fun all the way to 80 (and beyond), as you’re learning and getting better all the way. Other classes might do things easier and/or even straight up better, but none with as much fun. In a game (quite frankly) thats really the only reward you’ll ever really get.

Thanks for the links Raz. I wish I had the time to respond to everyone individually about their feedback. (TY Bombs(!!), Mijo, DesertRose, Azure, ellesee, Ronin and DD!)

Fun is indeed the thing, and I’ve been having a lot of it on my somewhat lackadaisical timeframe. I’ve just been doing it badly, but I aim to stop that. >:)