Guild Wars 2

So I’ve been playing fractals with my engineer till around 24 right now and wondering what build others use for the higher fotm levels.

So far I’ve been using condition gear together with nades and the occasional bomb kit.

I’ve also heard we can reflect projectiles altho I havent figured out how yet.

Hopefully someone has some new interesting/effective builds for me to tryout.

Not to rain on your parade, but I would advise highly to stay away from a condition damage build for high-level fractals, heck, just PvE in general as well. The problem with running with condition spec is that; as you progress to higher levels the mobs gain more and more health, effectively making DoT skills less and less potent. However, if you insist on speccing into conditions, do it with condition duration rather than damage. Extending conditions like, immobilize, vulnerability, weakness, chill, poison is a lot more valuable in team-based instances.

If possible, try to go for a more direct damage type of set-up using power, precision, or even crit damage. Not only will it make the run go a lot smoother, but you’ll be contributing to the party by tearing down smaller mobs faster.

Oh and the skill to reflect projectiles is the tool-belt skill of Elixir U. It’ll either conjure up a smoke wall or wall of reflection. It’s probably the best utility skill to bring on an engi for fractals. Nothing compared to a Guardian, but it helps fill in the gaps.

This is the build I use for fractals 38+: Cleric’s Healing-bombs build
It’s worked fine for me so far, but as I progress, I see that having more damage is important so I’ll be switching to a more damage-oriented spec when I can get the gear.

Yeah I figured condition damage isnt that great in fotm. but its the only gear ive got atm. How would that more dps build look?

Not too speak for Pwn, but I started with the soldiers gear you can buy for Karma at the Orr temples. I specced 30 (grenadier of course) 0 10 (protection) 20 (Elixir S + 409) 10 (swiftness). Typically running Grenades, Toolkit, and Elixir S with Supply Crate in PvE/WvW roaming, and then swap out Elixir Gun and Elixir R for Support in Dungeons. I generally run P/S for the shield abilities which are excellent, and will swap out for rifle as necessary.

Once I got comfy with the survivability of the build, I started replacing the soldiers armor with Berserker gear from CoF, starting with gloves and boots and progressing from there.

I am now running about 1410 toughness/58% crit dmg mixed build with a few ascended trinkets I got from laurels/guild bounties.

As Pwn said, it is important to have some flexibility in your build, as each fractal can require a different skill set. I rarely slot Elixir U unless we are facing the giant tree in the swamp, or on a higher level shaman for reflecting the epic projectiles. Note that I also have a reflect with my shield skill as well as 2 blocks and two elixir S cooldowns (one is automatic).

Moving away from conditions with my build was the best decision I ever made, and now that I know what conditions might be good for, I am building a Condition Damage/Duration burning build for use with the flamethrower. This will be primarily a Non-dungeon build, useful for farming when I am bored or WvW when I feel like trolling.

Soldier gear is fine for lower-levels since the primary stat is power, which when spec’d into can get you some big numbers, but when going higher-levels you want to be bringing at least two offensive specs in your build. You only really need one defensive spec, because by then you should know how to survive off dodging and kiting alone and having a secondary defensive stat is just going to be dead weight. Not to mention that most mobs will tear you down regardless of how much vitality, toughness, or healing power you have.

This is the damage spec I’m striving for: Just specs, no traits yet

Thnx for the response, are there no other engineers that do fractal of the mist at high levels?

Honestly, not many. I know of 3 on my server that go past 20, and I have attempted to friend all the Engies I can find. Most of them are alts of well-known players that they use primarily in WvW, lol.

I have failed at ~24-28 a few times, and can reliably do about 15-18 myself (the big agony increases occur at multiples of 10), but I don’t like it all that much, and seem to pull the shaman/swamp/dredge combo ALL too often.

Once you get to a certain point, from what I have seen, there are… profession mechanics that are NECESSARY not just optional to beat the different dungeons, check out youtube for level 40s fractals and what not… insanity.

I have done FotM up to 50 before they made it impossible to do Jade Maw. I ran with 30/20/0/0/20

Rifle and zerker, but switched it for soldier and P/S as needed. Rifle/grenades for dmg, and cc, elixirkit/toolkit for utility and the last spot I ran Elixir U or Elixir S or whatever the situation called for. It is a very powerful build with lots of direct dmg and lots of utility. Obviously the build was nerfed with the change to KR, mainly because of no more double Super elixir, but nothing major.

Sepahbod.4653:

I have done FotM up to 50 before they made it impossible to do Jade Maw. I ran with 30/20/0/0/20

Rifle and zerker, but switched it for soldier and P/S as needed. Rifle/grenades for dmg, and cc, elixirkit/toolkit for utility and the last spot I ran Elixir U or Elixir S or whatever the situation called for. It is a very powerful build with lots of direct dmg and lots of utility. Obviously the build was nerfed with the change to KR, mainly because of no more double Super elixir, but nothing major.

That is amazing, I would LOVE to see a video of this, do you have a channel or any Youtube vids?