Guild Wars 2

Hello! I’ve been wanting to try engie for a while since it’s the only class I haven’t tried. So right after getting my mesmer to 80 I spent most of the money I got leveling her on gems to buy another character slot for my engie! First impression is that this is certainly a complex class. I never had trouble spamming enough keys to be successful with my ele, but I strained my hand trying to use the grenade and med kit!

So I’m about level 15 at this point, and I have much less of a clue of what I’m doing at this point than I did with other classes. I’m wondering what kind of skills, kits, utilities or weapon sets you’d recommend for leveling? I like having a good amount of aoe since I have a tendency to to gather up groups of mobs instead of taking one or two at a time. I’ve heard this class is rather buggy, so is there some major bugs on certain things that I should know about?

Thanks for any help!

If you want AOE, then grenades and/or bombs are the way to go. Bombs are better survivability because of the smoke bomb, or you can just kite in a circle while the mobs follow you and get hit by all the bombs. Grenades are more damage and range, but also more annoying to use for some people and they don’t have the utility that bombs do. With that said I used Grenades for the majority of my levels up to 80.

Bomb Kit + Elixir Gun is also good combo for leveling. Elixir Gun keeps you healed and you can drop Acid Bomb after a Glue Bomb for a lot of quick AOE damage. Plus mobs almost always run up to you, so bomb kit works naturally for that.

Protip: If you press the weapon swap button right after Acid Bomb fires you can stop yourself in mid air. You will get the message “you cannot drop a kit in mid air” but it will stop you from flying backwards much at all, allowing you to continue dropping bombs without having to run back to the enemy. This is great if you don’t want to use Glue Bomb or it is on cooldown, keeps all the mobs right in your Acid Bomb quite nicely.

If you like the aoe, go with bomb kits. nades tend to be sub par under lv 60 since it doesn’t have access to gm trait while bombs only really need 10 in explosives for force-full explosions. with elixir u and b you can burst down a group of mobs down fast. also use the rifle for the cc if you need to get out or solo a vet/champ

Thank you for the replies! I’m level 30 now and have been leveling using mainly the bomb kit, rifle, and the elixir gun. Bomb kit has been wonderful for me so far, if I can get all the mobs to stand in it they all die in around 4 seconds. Plus there is something strangely satisfying in running around like a madman and spewing bombs until all the mobs are dead. Having a much easier time after changing my key bindings around to make kits more quickly accessible as well. The grenade kit is still really hard for me to use, I think mostly because I can’t control my camera and aim it at the same time. Hopefully that’s gonna come to me with practice since I’m interested in using it still! (If I can make myself not suck at it at least.)

One useful tip I can give you while leveling is that you use both bomb and grenade kit. The main point is for the aoe blind. Aoe blind is what really got me through leveling in open world. Lead with flash grenade then a few other nades (poison, slow, bleed), switch to bomb kit, BOB then immediately fire bomb, get an area might, drop a few bombs while waiting for mobs to regroup to you, once they do drop a smoke bomb then confusion bomb (it doesn’t matter if they hit or not, they’ll still get damage on attack), rinse and repeat.

I might do mediocre damage (but grenade barage and BOB are nothing to scoff at) with AA, but I can face-tank 5-7 mobs at a time with no problem. Once you get to level 60, get elixer-infused bombs and it’ll even help you so much more. If you can get major runes of dwayna for the regen proc, along with a peach pie (or mango pie, i forgot, the thing that gives hp/sec) you’ll be golden in leveling. Every mob will be cakewalk (except champs. I mean, you won’t go down easily, but you’ll be annoyed at how long it takes to kill them.