Guild Wars 2

Greetings fellow mad scientists, I recently bought guild wars 2 and have been having a blast with my engineer. I fell in love the first time I managed to rocket boots onto something too far for a jump, and I don’t think I could play anything else without the versatility of the Engineer. Although I don’t much like the turrets clunkiness, everything else is fun, and I’m hoping with some traits and some levels I may be able to make turret build functionally fun.

After I had started guild wars 2 as a Thief, I plowed through to level 25, where I was getting bored with the repetitiveness of either blinding my enemies, having boring ranged option, or stealth backstabbing over and over. I did some WvW and it was fun, but then I had met an Engineer who crushed me. (I was able to get my revenge) But the class seemed most interesting. After a while I decided to ditch the Thief and focus on either an Elementalist or Engineer. Again, while leveling them both I found rocket boots and made up my mind XD.

Now to the point of this post:

I really wish there was a viable melee engineer build, I feel like it is the only thing missing. If I could just pick up a giant hammer or even a shovel, and wack someone over the head senseless on my Engineer, I’d have no regrets about this being my main. The toolkit is a very poor replacement with only one melee attack. Even Elementalits can summon a lightning hammer or fiery greatsword for some fun in melee. I was wondering if anyone knows of a build I’m overlooking (even if its weak), or any plans by Arena-net to add a melee weapon to the Engineer? I want to make this my main and only character (I don’t like focusing multiple characters and wouldn’t have time anyway), but sometimes I just want to smack a centaur on the head XD.

Anyway, let me know if any other engineers have ever craved what I crave and if there is any hope.

Thanks a bunch, from an admirer of the profession, Loboling.

TLDR: Can Engineers melee (with more than auto attack) or is there any future plans to incorporate a melee option to engineers. (like a mechanical hammer that swings for you, like Homer Simpson XD)

I can’t think of any option for actual melee – you hit stuff with a hand held item besides toolkit (number 3 is a swing too) But bombs are a melee range weapon if you just want to be close range.

Do realize most weapons have utility and damage so you don’t normally have 5 attacks guardian great sword for example attack aoe attack leap symbol area pull.

It’s good you like rocket boots if you want to melee as an engineer you’re going to need that leap rocket boot kick is also nice. I’d suggest slick shoes for your other utility stun breaker and helps to catch kiters knockdown is nice too.

Good luck with your build.

Rifle + Bomb kit + Tool Kit is the best you can do for melee weapons as an Engi. Bomb kit is especially useful for leveling, you just gather mobs, smoke bomb, fire bomb and auto bomb. As Merkenary said all our weapons have some built in utility, and any effective Engineer will swap kits like crazy to get the job done.

I have been using bomb kit and rifle, but have only tried the toolkit in uplevel situation. (I didn’t spend much time as I wanted to learn the class from the ground up). I love the bombs, helped me open a chest in a jumping puzzle that was surrounded by sludge creatures, they would respawn nearly instantly, so a big bomb was the only way I could give myself the space to open the chest.

I can’t wait to try a toolkit build, good news to hear that 3 is another attack. Might be enough to make me feel like I’m hitting my enemies rather than blowing them up. I almost rolled a guardian just for their hammer knockback attack, but I can settle for a rifle to the face. I think I’ll keep focusing on my Engineer, and see how far I can push a melee build. I still hope one day we can get another weapon, and that it’s melee, or an all melee kit. For now, I don’t think another class could satisfy me as much as the Engineer.

I have played engineer since launch and have studied the toolkit (TK) extensively with the goal of creating a true melee build. While I think that it can be done, it is certainly not an optimal engineer build. In my mind, a true melee build is one that uses TK much of the time, including for autoattack (but still, of course, switches to other weapons or kits as necessary).

I won’t link a specific build here unless there is interest, but here are some points I have discovered that support a melee build:

-don’t be too glassy: TK autoattack is slow, and the kit has no mobility, so you need to survive more than a few hits in melee range.

-consider your mainhand weapon: yes, rifle works well with TK (both are power-based weapons). But if you are squishy or pick up rifle traits, it will be far safer and more effective to just autoattack with the rifle most of the time instead of the toolkit. Then you won’t be melee anymore. Furthermore, both rifle and TK are single-target direct damage weapons, but rifle is honestly just hits harder overall…you may experiment with P/P or P/S as main weapons, since they don’t compete with the strengths of the TK (single-target direct damage).

-pick melee-friendly utility skills: This will encourage you to be in melee range where you can use TK frequently. Examples include rocket boots (gap closer and short-range rocket kick) and throw mine (toolbelt can be used to good effect in melee range).

-consider your traits: power wrench is pretty much a mandatory trait for a melee TK build. I also strongly encourage backpack regenerator, if your toughness is high enough that you live long enough to benefit from it. This will reward you for staying in TK rather than switching to your main weapon all the time.

finally, consider your gear: TK is a power-based weapon for the most part. If you don’t have power on your gear, TK will only be something you switch to transiently for 2-5 skills, and you won’t really be a melee engineer. I like to stack power without crit%/crit dmg., and otherwise focus on vit/toughness (e.g. P/V/T gear). This makes you survivable enough to use TK in melee range. Furthermore, with too much crit/crit dmg., it seems more effective to just autoattack for 1k+ at range from the rifle.

In conclusion, it may not be optimal to play melee engineer, but it is feasible in all but hyper-competitive play, and it can be very rewarding. Good luck!

I spend most of my time in meleeish range as FT/EG support, but it doesn’t have that melee “feel” to it that Toolkit does. Rocket Boots help a TON, and I run with Pistol/Shield.

ANet has said they could/would add new weapons to classes(not a confirmation), so there’s some hope for a hammer or mace :P

fluidmonolith.3584:

I have played engineer since launch and have studied the toolkit (TK) extensively with the goal of creating a true melee build. While I think that it can be done, it is certainly not an optimal engineer build. In my mind, a true melee build is one that uses TK much of the time, including for autoattack (but still, of course, switches to other weapons or kits as necessary).

I won’t link a specific build here unless there is interest, but here are some points I have discovered that support a melee build:

-don’t be too glassy: TK autoattack is slow, and the kit has no mobility, so you need to survive more than a few hits in melee range.

-consider your mainhand weapon: yes, rifle works well with TK (both are power-based weapons). But if you are squishy or pick up rifle traits, it will be far safer and more effective to just autoattack with the rifle most of the time instead of the toolkit. Then you won’t be melee anymore. Furthermore, both rifle and TK are single-target direct damage weapons, but rifle is honestly just hits harder overall…you may experiment with P/P or P/S as main weapons, since they don’t compete with the strengths of the TK (single-target direct damage).

-pick melee-friendly utility skills: This will encourage you to be in melee range where you can use TK frequently. Examples include rocket boots (gap closer and short-range rocket kick) and throw mine (toolbelt can be used to good effect in melee range).

-consider your traits: power wrench is pretty much a mandatory trait for a melee TK build. I also strongly encourage backpack regenerator, if your toughness is high enough that you live long enough to benefit from it. This will reward you for staying in TK rather than switching to your main weapon all the time.

finally, consider your gear: TK is a power-based weapon for the most part. If you don’t have power on your gear, TK will only be something you switch to transiently for 2-5 skills, and you won’t really be a melee engineer. I like to stack power without crit%/crit dmg., and otherwise focus on vit/toughness (e.g. P/V/T gear). This makes you survivable enough to use TK in melee range. Furthermore, with too much crit/crit dmg., it seems more effective to just autoattack for 1k+ at range from the rifle.

In conclusion, it may not be optimal to play melee engineer, but it is feasible in all but hyper-competitive play, and it can be very rewarding. Good luck!

Thanks for this post; it was really helpful. I’ll look into what “power wrench” is I’m still only lvl 18. But this was most of what I was looking for. I’m glad to hear I can at least run around bashing mobs or players in the face if its what I feel like doing at the time. Now all we need is some kind of holographic stampede, does no damage but inflicts fear XD.

Anyway, I think with this I can invest the needed time to hit 80 without worry that the profession itself will get stale too quick. Although if Arena Net ever reads this, I approve of another melee based kit or a new melee based weapon. And thanks for all the feedback so far, not sure when I’ll visit this thread again, but I hope this thread serves useful to any other melee enthusiasts wanting to focus their attention on the creative engineer class.

Flamethrower is kind of a melee weapon too. All the skills are fairly short range, kind of like how elementalist daggers work.

A true melee build would be focused largely on melee range – 130 – with skills designed to reach this range, keep it, and lastly, have a way to escape it if things get too hot.

Toolkit has 2/3 criterion met in this respect – being able to pull a foe to you lets you reach melee range, whilst Box of Nails lets you keep it. Gear Shield arguably lets you escape, but as it has no distance component, I feel it doesn’t qualify.

Now as for whether Toolkit is truly viable for a true melee build, I don’t think it is for the most part. 2/5 skills deal no damage, which really cripples the overall Power coefficient. As a kit, it uses a “steady” 969 Power constant of its own rather than using Weapon damage. Therefore it can never scale as high as possible because your rate-limiting factor is the steady 969 constant. If Ascended weapon stats hit in the future, this will become even more apparent.

Now, this being said, what damaging skills there are on Toolkit have very handsome damage scaling. Its scaling coefficients are actually comparable to Guardian’s Greatsword, which explains people’s observations of obtaining 3-4k crits with Pry Bar when running Power/Crit damage builds. On the other hand, the 1 other damaging skill, Box of Nails, does Condition damage and has no Power damage of its own. Couple that with a long cast and it’s actually counterproductive to cast Box of Nails if you want to melee. It’s better to simply run Power Wrench if you want anti-kite.

So that essentially pares Toolkit down to 2 skills for dedicated melee – The auto-attack chain, and Pry Bar. This is absolutely terrible for a Melee weapon because having only 2 “true melee” skills really cuts down on your tactical flexibility.

As it stands, Toolkit, although just-barely viable as a “melee” weapon, is still not quite there. Box of Nails should probably have some kind of pulsing Power-based damage instead of just pulsing Bleeds. If you’re looking for melee, try Bombs instead.

It is unfortunate that most kits have similar weaknesses: Bomb kit on its own is only useful if the enemy is stupid and stands in the bombs, Tool kit on its own is easily kited, Flamethrower on its own can be countered handily by kiting. We often have to combine multiple kits in order to achieve build viability due to the inherent weaknesses of each kit.

It’d be nice if a few more of our kits took after the Grenade kit. I’m not simply saying our kits should be buffed, since even the Grenade kit isn’t that powerful until after a hefty 30 trait investment. With this heavy trait allocation, the kit becomes very viable at all ranges, close or far, and comes coupled with great burst, condition damage, and control aspects. Because of the existence of the Grenadier trait, the utility slots “taken up” by grenade kit are very light, because it doesn’t require other utility slots to make it useful. This means that gadgets and elixirs suddenly become viable choices, as evidenced by the ever-popular HGH nade build.

What this means is that inherent kit skill synergy, rather than forcing us to combine certain kits and utilities for maximum effect, would really lighten up the load on our utility slots, which would be a great step in the problem of opportunity cost when taking too many non-kit utilities. I think it would be a great idea to add more powerful Master and Grandmaster traits to all of our skill lines, ones similar to Grenadier. This would ultimately lead to the player’s choice of having a few, specialized and traited utilities, such as multiple traited gadgets, or letting the player bring multiple kits without the trait specialization in order for a more jack-of-all-trades spec.

A good example would be the magnetic bomb for bomb kit: an AoE pull, it’s the perfect power-up to the Bomb Kit, something you can only get if you trait for it. Or, you could ignore the trait, and instead attempt to set up your bombs with Tool Kit’s Magnet or the Rifle’s Net Shot. he build diversity would be amazing if we just received a few more actually meaningful traits. (Now, if only Kit Refinement weren’t such a terrible trait with an exceedingly long GCD, magnetic bomb would actually be used more often. Hint to Anet: change the 20s GCD into a 10s ICD, then turn it into a master or grandmaster trait. Either that, or split up the trait into separate kit-related traits, so you could choose which kits to trait, so you would have to trait each kit separately if you wanted all of the kitswap effects.)

By meaningful traits, of course, I mean something that really feels powerful. Grenadier is a straight 50% increase in damage and condition duration. Despite it being a powerful trait, it also has strong counterplay in retaliation and a soft counter in reflects, which makes it not quite overpowering.

Tool Kit, Gadgets, Turrets, even Elixir Gun and Flamethrower could benefit from more meaningful traits. Gadgets currently have only a 20% CDR trait, which really hurts their viability. Turrets are incredibly useless even when quintuple with a full condition build to complement the scaling. The current traits need to be condensed and a very powerful grandmaster trait needs to come out to make turrets viable.

Tool Kit’s trait, Power Wrench, is a pretty good trait, but it’s not something that would make you think, “this is definitely a trait I need to build around.” It’s a more of an “eh, take it for the shield CDR if there’s no other trait that’s better.” If Power Wrench were made into a grandmaster trait that made box of nails instant cast and do double bleeding stacks, made gear shield reflect, and made magnet faster and autoattack cast faster, there would be an extremely powerful trait that would truly allow for a one-kit focus while still allowing people to take the kit for its simple baseline functionality if they didn’t want to spec so far into Tools.

On a final note…WHY THE HECK is Tool Kit’s third auto chain OBJECTIVELY worse than the first two?! It takes twice as long of a windup while dealing BARELY more than the two autoattacks would. However, it doesn’t apply vuln and also doesn’t cleave. It’s actually WORSE in most situations to use the third attack in the chain! Most good engineers will cancel the last cast with a pry bar or a throw wrench. This needs to be changed!

tl;dr: We need more strong grandmaster traits that allow for more skill specialization rather than simply spamming our utility slots with kits. Base functionality doesn’t even need to be improved that much, (other than the terribad wrench auto I just mentioned) we just need good traits.

Aegael.6938:

On a final note…WHY THE HECK is Tool Kit’s third auto chain OBJECTIVELY worse than the first two?! It takes twice as long of a windup while dealing BARELY more than the two autoattacks would. However, it doesn’t apply vuln and also doesn’t cleave. It’s actually WORSE in most situations to use the third attack in the chain! Most good engineers will cancel the last cast with a pry bar or a throw wrench. This needs to be changed!

I believe this is incorrect. The third auto-attack in the auto-attack chain, Thwack, deals significantly more damage than the initial two hits. According to the wiki, it has more than double the base damage, and nearly triple the amount of power scaling. If you compare this to similar skills (mace auto-attacks), it actually has the highest raw damage output.

With a warrior mace you are getting weakness, and a guardian mace gives a healing burst. However, Thwack does superior damage, and the first two attacks will provide vulnerability for additional damage. Also, you can trait it to give cripple. Thus, each mace-style attack has it’s benefits, so adding more onto Thwack could give it even more extra things than the other mace-style attacks. The auto-attack chain for toolkit can also repair turrets, but I don’t believe it’s used for that often. It also gains an evade property underwater, but that’s probably not worth mentioning since it’s underwater.

The only real weakness Thwack has is that it does not cleave. In some scenarios this won’t matter, but it can really cut down on the DPS if fighting a group. I’m not really sure what the rationale behind doing this is, as it poses a significant weakness that the other mace skills don’t have. It’s definitely a buff that would not make the kit incredibly overpowered (although gear shield is an insanely strong ability as it is).

Aegael.6938:

Tool kit on its own is easily kited

I also find this to be a very odd statement. This thread advocates for more melee options, yet it also contains complaints about how currently available melee options can be kited. However, every single melee ability in the game is subject to kiting. If you are going to advocate for more melee skills, you are shooting yourself in the foot by complaining about being kited. There are many melee weapons without direct means of countering kiting, at least not without some sort of cost. Just look at the warrior and guardian mace skills. The only one that could be considered anti-kiting is Tremor, which is the mace offhand skill. As a matter of fact, the Toolkit is actually pretty decent at countering kiting with a block to prevent ranged disables, ability to cripple, and an unblockable 1200 range pull.

The only skill that I think really needs adjustment on the toolkit (other than maybe the Thwack cleave) is Box of Nails. If it were faster to cast it would be a lot more usable. I don’t think upping the damage output for Box of Nails would be a good idea because it’s on a significantly shorter cooldown than Caltrops. The long cast time for Caltrops works because the effect can be significant, and it can be done from stealth. For Box of Nails, the cast time doesn’t really warrant the use of the skill, although it can be handy as a getaway tool.

Aegael.6938:

On a final note…WHY THE HECK is Tool Kit’s third auto chain OBJECTIVELY worse than the first two?! It takes twice as long of a windup while dealing BARELY more than the two autoattacks would. However, it doesn’t apply vuln and also doesn’t cleave. It’s actually WORSE in most situations to use the third attack in the chain! Most good engineers will cancel the last cast with a pry bar or a throw wrench. This needs to be changed!

“If you actually look at the table for damage calculations”: http://pvx.gw2buildcraft.com/Damage_Calculations#Kits you will find that Thwack is not objectively worse than Smack and Whack – in fact, it is more than double the Power scaling of the first and second auto. It actually has more power scaling than even Warrior Greatsword’s third attack in the chain, which is pretty hilarious.

That being said, I do agree that the third attack does need to cleave in the absence of applying any other special effect like Warrior’s Mace inflicting Weaken. I believe that if Warrior’s Axe and Mace’s, can cleave, so should Toolkit. (Axe does a ludicrous 2.55 total scaling as a reward for 1.5sec channel and cleaves)