So, I changed some stuff around:
Prybar is just too good right now, 5 stacks of confusion for 5 whole seconds is insane and it still crits for 2k+ with direct damage, I honestly don’t know what the devs were thinking here.
I dropped C, slotted toolkit, dropped potent elixirs, traited into 409.
To make up for the lost elixir, I swapped sigil of earth for sigil of strength.
Thanks Amadeus, Siofra, Kardiamond, Amiable, Lavzz and Raquel for their respective ideas, opinions and whatnot.
Yeah I’m not entirely sure why they gave Prybar a boost, but then I’m not entirely sure why WvW has double Confusion damage either. Awesome build Mask, I really like how it is put together.
Haha I love it! I love it!!! It’s just as brutal as I were hoping! Anet really never should have buffed that Prybar, not without nerfing Confusion damage with like 33% or something in WvW! But anyway! It’s looking goood! Gonna be great with a full movie hehe!
Heh. Yeah. Saw Drakeco’s vids with y’all dueling and swapped out C for prybar. My favorite are guardians because it’s instinct for them if pulled to Whirling Wrath. Don’t overlook Box of Nails before Magnet if you have the tempo for it.
It’s situational but hard to find a better place to spend the 5 points given everything else taken. (Hmm. Maybe some synergy with HGH/409 and Adrenalin Pump if you aren’t using Runes of Adventurer.) Look into Maskaganda’s earlier videos and you’ll see he actively sets up piercing situations (often across downed players but in a few you can see him working the pierce for the extra damage while 1v2+). Once you start looking to set up those situations in your own fights you find them more often than you might think. Which is not to say they are always easy to take advantage of.
love the build, love the video, love the music too. I live in fear of asura engineers.
that is because asura have been eugenically engineered for generations to garner grotesquely gargantuan levels of genius, gravitas, and gusto. you should fear us. we destroy the world!
Boundaries are for the effortless.
Benn E Violence :: 0/20/30/20/0 You kittens don’t even know what the prefix “meta” means.
Looks good. Confusion everywhere. Really dig the control by conditions aspect of the build.
I’ve been trying out tool kit with HGH for a while now (In a rifle/elixirs build) and have been loving it so far. The build your using is almost the exact same as what I want to use once I get my gear. (stacking more toughness and slightly less power) I really think an HGH/Tool kit build would benefit much more from P/P, and can’t wait to try it out.
I had a question though: Have you thought about dropping some vitality for extra toughness? I’m a huge fan of toughness and I think if you balanced the two stats out a little more you’ll see your survivability go up, especially considering the sheer amount of boons you have rolling at any given time. Protection, Regen, Vigor, pretty much everything has me thinking that you shouldn’t need over 20k hp with this build.
you are right, I could go up about 100ish points of toughness and lose the equivalent vit. I’m not sure what I can swap around for it while keeping the other stats, I need to take a better look.
Yeah I’m not entirely sure why they gave Prybar a boost, but then I’m not entirely sure why WvW has double Confusion damage either.
ANet halfed confusion damage for s/tPvP at some point and then forgot about it appearantly.
In WvW in a might stacking build Prybar is ridiculously overpowered now, especially if you’re playing Asura and can fit Pain Inverter somewhere in there on top…No idea how they did not see that coming.
So there’s a really good reddit thread on the trade-off between vitality and toughness. To a first approximation you want an armor to hp ratio of 1:10 because adding 1 point of toughness is equivalent to adding 1 point of vitality. To a second approximation you have to know how much incoming heal you’ll get over a fight and how much of the incoming damage is a result of conditions.
For most people I would suggest the 1:10 ratio and then worry about more important things. I’ll use Masakaganda’s numbers here. He’s suggesting swapping 100 vitality for 100 toughness. He is currently 21632 hp. He’ll lose 1000 hp in that deal and pick up (100/24 ) 4 mitigation. 4% of the new 20632 hp will be 825 hp.
The reddit author doesn’t take weapon coefficient into account but now we can. If Maskaganda is attacked by a coef of less than 0.825 he’ll come out ahead on direct damage but will lose EVERY time on condition damage which bypasses the tradeoff to toughness.
Tl;dr – build preferences allowing go with an armor to hp ratio of 1:10 and move on.
[Doing the coefficient math off the top of my head and have a nagging suspicion I might have it backwards. I welcome corrections if I got the numbers or logic wrong.]
Well. Alot of stuff with Tool Kit now actually does fit, the confusion remains useful even without raising condition damage and my zerker build does something about 7k damage on a Pry Bar hit.
Since I’ve never had the hang of these HGH*409 builds and religiously hold onto my Med Kit I just cooked that:
So there’s a really good reddit thread on the trade-off between vitality and toughness. To a first approximation you want an armor to hp ratio of 1:10 because adding 1 point of toughness is equivalent to adding 1 point of vitality. To a second approximation you have to know how much incoming heal you’ll get over a fight and how much of the incoming damage is a result of conditions.
For most people I would suggest the 1:10 ratio and then worry about more important things. I’ll use Masakaganda’s numbers here. He’s suggesting swapping 100 vitality for 100 toughness. He is currently 21632 hp. He’ll lose 1000 hp in that deal and pick up (100/24 ) 4 mitigation. 4% of the new 20632 hp will be 825 hp.
The reddit author doesn’t take weapon coefficient into account but now we can. If Maskaganda is attacked by a coef of less than 0.825 he’ll come out ahead on direct damage but will lose EVERY time on condition damage which bypasses the tradeoff to toughness.
Tl;dr – build preferences allowing go with an armor to hp ratio of 1:10 and move on.
[Doing the coefficient math off the top of my head and have a nagging suspicion I might have it backwards. I welcome corrections if I got the numbers or logic wrong.]
Yeah I read that article, I’m assuming its the same one, and its partially why I suggested going with a bit more toughness. My reasoning is that with his boon uptime, specifically regen and protection, he has access to a higher effective health pool already.Taking more toughness, despite losing out on his overall effective health pool point by point, he gains a larger effective health pool based on its interaction with healing: i.e. negating incoming damage. At least this is how I understand it.
Regarding Condition Damage: He does lose out in that battle and here’s where build preference comes in. With 409 you have 6 condition removal options, creating significant condition removal. It seems to me he would have more wiggle room to negate incoming direct damage based on his ability to remove conditions. I guess if he feels like he loses to conditions more than direct damage, more vitality would be the way to go.
I hope this made sense, and I wasn’t too far off with my assumptions, considering I didn’t work out the math, just used approximations in my head.
Tried this build tonight in Zerg and roaming situations. It’s awesome. The additional survivability with he shield block let’s you run into zergs if you want (as long as your defensive cooldowns are up) and prybar a few folks and run back. The build really shines in small group 1v1 situations though. I don’t consider myself an awesome player but I was able to pull off a 3 v1 and a 2v1 tonight. Admittedly my opponents were not very good, but both groups contained D/D elementalists who hilariously killed themselves to my confusion as they mindlessly spammed their abilities.
I had three thief fights. 2 were baddies who died almost immediately as I pry barred and static shocked them. The third was actually clever and stopped using abilites when I stacked confusion on him. Unfortunately this left him with a Hobson’s choice of standing their unstealthed while I dpsed him or C/d ing and taking 3-5k in damage from the confusion stacks. He healed once so I got a bit of range and kited till my cooldowns were up and started over again. (I suppose he could burn a heal, but i don’t think their stealth heal removes confusion). Verdict this build is great, but it is particularly good against the current meta of D/D elementalists and thieves. Not sure how it performs 1v1 against a mesmer but I imagine it would have similar results.
Once folks get used to it an know not activate abilities when the confusion is stacked I imagine it will get harder to execute.
Aliquot Love – Engineer
Gable Thorn – Elementalist
Shining in Darkness – Warrior – Mag
Since the patch I ran something in that direction but with incendiary powder instead of the cloaking device. Like some said this also works good with some berserker gear.
Uhhh and about the confusions I cite Zapp Branningan: “People of Earth: SHHHHHH!”
Verdict this build is great, but it is particularly good against the current meta of D/D elementalists and thieves. Not sure how it performs 1v1 against a mesmer but I imagine it would have similar results.
Once folks get used to it an know not activate abilities when the confusion is stacked I imagine it will get harder to execute.
You can now look forward to several duels with me vs Osicat using a confusion damage build! look forward to see how well it actually works against a mesmer! But good D/D elementalist —> See my duels vs Intigo, don’t care, they just remove them
Yeah I’m not entirely sure why they gave Prybar a boost
God forbid engis actually get something really good for once
you kitten your mouth right now before someone hears you and sends word to the forum police and you and everyone else who posts in this thread disappears in the night.
oh god .. i’ve posted in this thread!
Boundaries are for the effortless.
Benn E Violence :: 0/20/30/20/0 You kittens don’t even know what the prefix “meta” means.
Thanks for all your comments, I’m probably going to make a new movie today, it will be slightly different since I didnt run solo all that much this week so you’ll likely see a 2v5+5 and a 2vs10+. I might still go in game and try to get more footage, depends on my mood when I get back home :p
I know I can record better fights, it is just tough to get them to happen sometimes.. “oh here’s a nice 1v3, BAM 20 allies show out of nowhere”.
anyway, thanks again ^^
I run the same build Mask- the confusion stacks just melt people (around 2300 damage with all stacks) and theres still a 7k damage burn from blowtorch and 140 damage bleed ticks…. it feels so strong to me, I love it
Some guy on a bunch of servers, mostly Mag
Former top 50 spvp engi main.
Yeah. There’s a lot of wiggle room. I’d certainly say go with more toughness rather than vitality if you are going to go with more of one than the other.
I’ve tried to break my HGH habit several times with 409. The biggest trouble I see with it is that you (well I) want the bufs that the tosses and drinks are gonna give me for a fight more than I want to hold off on using them just so I’ll have a condition removal. Outside of static line zerg v zerg or keep defense where the conditions can REALLY mount up I usually just ignore condition removal in favor of Toolkit and in those situations I slot C. (I’m running 22.8k hp though so I have a nice buffer to soak up a condition or three.)
So there’s a really good reddit thread on the trade-off between vitality and toughness. To a first approximation you want an armor to hp ratio of 1:10 because adding 1 point of toughness is equivalent to adding 1 point of vitality. To a second approximation you have to know how much incoming heal you’ll get over a fight and how much of the incoming damage is a result of conditions.
For most people I would suggest the 1:10 ratio and then worry about more important things. I’ll use Masakaganda’s numbers here. He’s suggesting swapping 100 vitality for 100 toughness. He is currently 21632 hp. He’ll lose 1000 hp in that deal and pick up (100/24 ) 4 mitigation. 4% of the new 20632 hp will be 825 hp.
The reddit author doesn’t take weapon coefficient into account but now we can. If Maskaganda is attacked by a coef of less than 0.825 he’ll come out ahead on direct damage but will lose EVERY time on condition damage which bypasses the tradeoff to toughness.
Tl;dr – build preferences allowing go with an armor to hp ratio of 1:10 and move on.
[Doing the coefficient math off the top of my head and have a nagging suspicion I might have it backwards. I welcome corrections if I got the numbers or logic wrong.]
Yeah I read that article, I’m assuming its the same one, and its partially why I suggested going with a bit more toughness. My reasoning is that with his boon uptime, specifically regen and protection, he has access to a higher effective health pool already.Taking more toughness, despite losing out on his overall effective health pool point by point, he gains a larger effective health pool based on its interaction with healing: i.e. negating incoming damage. At least this is how I understand it.
Regarding Condition Damage: He does lose out in that battle and here’s where build preference comes in. With 409 you have 6 condition removal options, creating significant condition removal. It seems to me he would have more wiggle room to negate incoming direct damage based on his ability to remove conditions. I guess if he feels like he loses to conditions more than direct damage, more vitality would be the way to go.
I hope this made sense, and I wasn’t too far off with my assumptions, considering I didn’t work out the math, just used approximations in my head.
So, I changed some stuff around:
Prybar is just too good right now, 5 stacks of confusion for 5 whole seconds is insane and it still crits for 2k+ with direct damage, I honestly don’t know what the devs were thinking here.
I dropped C, slotted toolkit, dropped potent elixirs, traited into 409.
To make up for the lost elixir, I swapped sigil of earth for sigil of strength.
Thanks Amadeus, Siofra, Kardiamond, Amiable, Lavzz and Raquel for their respective ideas, opinions and whatnot.
gear is high condition + as much power as you can stack while reaching the vit/tough you want. (Given those constraints crit-chance gets surprisingly high.) Food of plate of fire-flank steak and either maint-oil for perception or tuning crystals for cond damage. Runes are 2x S Monk, 2x S Water, 2x M Water for boon duration. Sigils are Earth and Corruption.
Utils — H, B, S, Toolkit, Supply Crate
Re: Potent Elixers — This one is probably not needed with Runes and can be swapped as desired. Maskaganda runs 409 for the extra condition removal.
Hmmmm okay just tried the build. It works pretty good, but if there is a condition cleaner, particularly a guardian, anywhere nearby then you become useless.
Hmmmm okay just tried the build. It works pretty good, but if there is a condition cleaner, particularly a guardian, anywhere nearby then you become useless.
Oh, of course. The slight difference might be that we are condition spam based rather than condition nuking. Reapplying them over and over proves to be a major pain even for those shrugging them off, especially if it’s poison and burning. Also, a random Pry Bar in the middle of a Guardian or an Ele’s attack cycle does tremendous and rarely noticeable confusion damage.
Disgruntled Charr Engineer and Thief – Jade Quarry.
Hmmmm okay just tried the build. It works pretty good, but if there is a condition cleaner, particularly a guardian, anywhere nearby then you become useless.
Oh, of course. The slight difference might be that we are condition spam based rather than condition nuking. Reapplying them over and over proves to be a major pain even for those shrugging them off, especially if it’s poison and burning. Also, a random Pry Bar in the middle of a Guardian or an Ele’s attack cycle does tremendous and rarely noticeable confusion damage.
It works out. I vote it as a good build and will probably continue to use it. What I have been looking for, for a while, is a good build that isn’t entirely kit based. In other words, a good build that uses a rifle or pistols. Basically, a build that would get some use out of me picking up a legendary weapon.This fits the bill.
That said, the effectiveness is questionable against a guardian or anyone built around mass cleansing conditions. It works out surprisingly well against a thief. I can’t seem to do very well against a mesmer, but that is probably me and not the build.
The most surprisingly effective thing about the build is coated bullets. I always viewed it as a useless trait, which is why I almost overlooked this build, but boy is it not useless.
Well timid, I’ve been using this variations of this build since launch and I can tell you without any doubts, guardians aren’t really a problem. Not in 1v1 and not in group fights. The only issue with them is their massive cc if they use hammer, not their condition removal. I’m not saying you won’t find one that beats you, it can happen, but other classes will have less problems doing so.
A class that can give you trouble is necro, they have alot of tools to defeat this build, elixir C helps alot against them, 409 not so much.
Anyway, check out the new vid at https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Paradigm-SHIFT-a-wvw-movie
Well timid, I’ve been using this variations of this build since launch and I can tell you without any doubts, guardians aren’t really a problem. Not in 1v1 and not in group fights. The only issue with them is their massive cc if they use hammer, not their condition removal. I’m not saying you won’t find one that beats you, it can happen, but other classes will have less problems doing so.
A class that can give you trouble is necro, they have alot of tools to defeat this build, elixir C helps alot against them, 409 not so much.
Anyway, check out the new vid at https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Paradigm-SHIFT-a-wvw-movie
I’ve been playing this build for the last couple of days, and yeh what you say is correct. I haven’t had much issue with necros, then again my server consists mostly of mesmers and thieves. I rarely see a necro. The only necro I’ve seen in two days, ironically, was an arena net staff guy that was playing one.
Probably the best thing about the build is that it uses the same trait point setup as my pve hgh might stacking flamethrower build, so I get to avoid any cost when swapping into pve mode. I just have to swap a few traits and gear around.
I tried this build when 10 taken out of toughness and put into tools for speedy kits, but the invisibility trait + elixir s + elixir s trait combines for to much survivability.
Good job dude, you actually gave me some small motivation to go farm up some legendary weapons.
EDIT:
I do have one question. Why not put supreme sigil of battle on one of your guns so that you get 3 might stacks every time you go back and forth between toolkit and pistols?
Probably the best thing about the build is that it uses the same trait point setup as my pve hgh might stacking flamethrower build, so I get to avoid any cost when swapping into pve mode. I just have to swap a few traits and gear around.
I don’t want to hijack the thread, but please do share! Weapons, utilities, gear stats, runes, sigils and major traits please! Just a link or a PM will do.
Sheldor the Eidetic (Group Engi) | Shorty McShinkicker (Solo Engi) |Turanga (Solo Mes)
Doing what I can for DB during EU primetime
Probably the best thing about the build is that it uses the same trait point setup as my pve hgh might stacking flamethrower build, so I get to avoid any cost when swapping into pve mode. I just have to swap a few traits and gear around.
I don’t want to hijack the thread, but please do share! Weapons, utilities, gear stats, runes, sigils and major traits please! Just a link or a PM will do.
I don’t want to hijack Mask’s thread, so I’ll pm you it.
Probably the best thing about the build is that it uses the same trait point setup as my pve hgh might stacking flamethrower build, so I get to avoid any cost when swapping into pve mode. I just have to swap a few traits and gear around.
I don’t want to hijack the thread, but please do share! Weapons, utilities, gear stats, runes, sigils and major traits please! Just a link or a PM will do.
I don’t want to hijack Mask’s thread, so I’ll pm you it.
Could you set up a seperate companion thread? I’d be interested in seeing it as well! Also Mask, awesome music, that kitten song has been my earwig all week.
Aliquot Love – Engineer
Gable Thorn – Elementalist
Shining in Darkness – Warrior – Mag
I do have one question. Why not put supreme sigil of battle on one of your guns so that you get 3 might stacks every time you go back and forth between toolkit and pistols?
I dunno if it’s worth it since I dont change to toolkit every 10 seconds, I need to test it and check if it pays off more than having the might on crit one.
Not taking group fights/multiple enemies into the equation, in close quarter combat or by making use of a terrain, this trait helps you deal double damage on an enemy.
HoT = Grind Wars 2
HoT = WvW players forced to PVE
It’s just as brutal as I were hoping! Anet really never should have buffed that Prybar, not without nerfing Confusion damage with like 33% or something in WvW! But anyway! It’s looking goood! Gonna be great with a full movie hehe!
