Leveling an engineer help
Experiment with the kits. They don’t have swap cooldowns, so you’ll want to frequently swap between them and your weapon(s) to use your skills at a high volume. Bomb Kit & Grenade Kit are our 2 highest damage kits. Flamethrower is fun and works well in open world and for its utility.
Pistols are good for conditions, rifle for power and control. (generally speaking)
Turrets are subpar. I think the help you’re asking for is due to you using them so much. Grab an offensive kit and Elixir Gun and give those a try.
[TTBH] [HATE], Yak’s Bend(NA)
pistol/pistol is a condition set. pistol/shield is generally a condition set but can be used for a power set because of the utility from shield and poison dart volley can hit pretty hard with berserker gear. rifle is a power set. the best way to play is to swap between your weapon set and your kits often. the power of the engineer comes from cycling between weapon sets for a constant barrage of abilities.
for leveling i’d go for something like this at level 60. (obviously you’re using blue or green gear and not pink gear)
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vcAQJAqelUUpdr9ZxELseNiMqQnJqQ+95hclWQIA-zABBYfBMzsIas6aYKXER1AA-e
good offense, good active defense with lots of dodges, shield blocks, and a stunrbeaker, and permanent swiftness for getting place to place. it’s also a good build to practice cycling between kits. if you want to be a good engi, you need to be good at cycling between kits without getting your fingers jumbled.
really take the time to learn combo fields and finishers. it’s a lot more important for an engineer than other classes. i’m sure there’s a guide around here somewhere but for now here’s something simple. using the build above, powerful combo fields that you have are smoke, fire, and water. blast finishers are probably the most important combo finisher, though there are other good finishers out there. you have a bunch of blast finishers: detonate healing turret, elixir gun 4, bomb kit toolbelt, and shield 4. if you use them inside different fields you get different effects. blasting a smoke field will make you invisible for 3 seconds per blast. blasting a water field heals the area for something like 1500 health at level 80 per blast, and blasting a fire field grants 3 stacks of might per blast.
try to incorporate blasting fire fields into your rotation. your fire field comes from bomb 2. here’s a simple example: place bomb toolbelt big ole bomb, place bomb 2, swap to elixir gun, and elixir gun 4 inside the fire bomb. if done correctly, you should have 6 stacks of might, which is +210 power and condition damage, the bad guys should be knocked down, and you are a good distance away which is the perfect setup for kiting with grenades, assuming they’re not dead already.
and finally turrets are bad. don’t ever use them. except healing turret. that one’s awesome and definitely one of the best heals in the game.