Guild Wars 2

Hi everybody. I’ve had an engineer for a while, used to play HGH a long while ago and haven’t looked at or touch my engineer in a while. But he always was my goto in WVW.

So I have some questions because I do not understand this class very well. I am hoping you have some solid answers.

Q1: What are the current normal “best” builds for WVW and where are they used? (ex. best roamer, best small group, best zerg, etc)

Q2: What gear do these builds use? Having a full link or a video link would be awesome. Necros, Thieves, Guardians, Warriors for example have tons of great videos, Engineers seem to be lacking unless you want sPVP.

Q3: Nades seem to be a staple. Tips on using them effectively in smaller battles? In zergs it’s fine. Just throw into the mass and hit whatever. My aiming tends to be a fair poorer when there are only a few targets and we are all moving about. Is there an alternative to nades?

Q4: My damage on conditions with nades seems to be rather low, or at least feel low. Perhaps I have no burst, perhaps that is normal? I feel lacking even compared to my guardian who doesn’t dps anywhere near my Necro or Warrior. I am guessing this is build / gear. I hope.

Q5: Are some weapons simply useless for some builds? For example. I have Rabid pistols, is the rifle a waste in rabid stats? shield? etc. I don’t mind multiple sets if I know when to use them and what to build them for. But I strongly dislike having a weapon with a stat combo that is useless.

Hope there are some good answers out there because I really want to understand this class better and the forums are a bit scattered? Perhaps a poor word choice. But it’s hard to find solid info.

Thanks for all the Help

Charrlee.

KOPPER.1458:

Hi everybody. I’ve had an engineer for a while, used to play HGH a long while ago and haven’t looked at or touch my engineer in a while. But he always was my goto in WVW.

So I have some questions because I do not understand this class very well. I am hoping you have some solid answers.

Q1: What are the current normal “best” builds for WVW and where are they used? (ex. best roamer, best small group, best zerg, etc)

Q2: What gear do these builds use? Having a full link or a video link would be awesome. Necros, Thieves, Guardians, Warriors for example have tons of great videos, Engineers seem to be lacking unless you want sPVP.

Q3: Nades seem to be a staple. Tips on using them effectively in smaller battles? In zergs it’s fine. Just throw into the mass and hit whatever. My aiming tends to be a fair poorer when there are only a few targets and we are all moving about. Is there an alternative to nades?

Q4: My damage on conditions with nades seems to be rather low, or at least feel low. Perhaps I have no burst, perhaps that is normal? I feel lacking even compared to my guardian who doesn’t dps anywhere near my Necro or Warrior. I am guessing this is build / gear. I hope.

Q5: Are some weapons simply useless for some builds? For example. I have Rabid pistols, is the rifle a waste in rabid stats? shield? etc. I don’t mind multiple sets if I know when to use them and what to build them for. But I strongly dislike having a weapon with a stat combo that is useless.

Hope there are some good answers out there because I really want to understand this class better and the forums are a bit scattered? Perhaps a poor word choice. But it’s hard to find solid info.

Thanks for all the Help

Charrlee.

1: Current “best” builds are pretty hard to define for the engineer. It’s not like guardian where you’ve got a couple of builds that pretty much everyone uses. Most engineers use a completely custom build. My personal opinion is that the best builds for WvW are two- or even three-kit builds. I strongly recommend the elixir gun for WvW, and of course grenades are very good.

2: Can’t help you here, sorry.

3: In small fights, there are a lot of great options for using grenades. One of the best uses is at downed enemies, especially if people are trying to rez them. Also, enemies who are engaged in a fight with someone else and won’t see them coming. Landing nades on the person fighting you is hard, but can be done at close range. Use your pistol/rifle/elixir gun at range, and your grenades when they are right in front of you. “Baiting” also works well, i.e. trying to get them to chase you and dropping nades right behind yourself.

4: Make sure you have explosives V, incendiary powder. Make sure you have condition damage on all your gear. Remember that your only grenades that actually inflict condition damage are #2 and #5. You definitely won’t be spamming them in small fights like in ZvZ, just drop a couple on a downed enemy or use the chill to get that thief off you or whatever. You’ll be doing a lot of swapping.

5. You can use a rifle in a condition build. Just don’t use it for damage; swap to it for skills 2-5 only when you need them for control or escape. Rifle 3 can do some decent bleeding but that’s the only condition damage on the weapon. Shield is fine with any stats, as it doesn’t really do damage, just control.

Thanks for the response. How about runes and sigils? I can change all of my weapons and armor at this point to any stats combo I want. However I have too much money and time invested in the jewelry which is rabid.

So without changing RABID jewelry what am I left with to configure? Probably only rabid armor.

I used to use 2 krait and 4 undead runes. Are there better options now? Perplexity? 2 mad king and 4 Travelers as I’ve seen someone else mention? I am confused as to which set best fits conditions or some sort of condition build. I feel with rabid jewelry I am sort of stuck there.

http://intothemists.com/guides/

YouTube specific keywords for videos.
For example, “berseker grenadier WvW” or something.

You could also check out the sticky posts at the top of this forum.

Good luck!

I kind of agree with Nevir, I don’t see cookiecutter wvw builds. Kinda gotta pick your fights. With Zergs I lean to Power builds, small group or roaming I like Condition. Cons to Power in Zergs is Retaliation will eat away at you and Conditions can get cleared quickly. I don’t do much solo roaming so I run Power. I feel kinda useless running Conditions in a zerg.

30/10/0/0/30 has been working well for me lately. Got some burst for small group and grenades for zergs. Runes of Altruism give you almost full up-time on Fury with Medkit. Rocket Boots and Speedy Kits help you travel. This isn’t one you’ll want to stand in the front lines with though, stay back and enjoy the ranged.

Lotsa other options out there too.

Blood~

You’ll be just fine running HgH Rabid. I use perplexity.

I run a couple of other builds and gear sets as well for zerg running now. I had a lot of fun last week running full power based rifle toting PVT Vuln stacking gadget build.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-V;4sPkk0467QFx0;9;4TJ;0J41A42;558-8J0;3IH8_JH8_Q-licA;5i-m0r1wY1_759eWPk4R07V-17V;9;9;9;9;9;57k3E

is what I currently run. It stacks bleeds and vuln extremely rapidly (~15 bleed and ~20 vuln on a stationary target) and provides permaswiftness both in combat (via swiftness on crit) and out of combat (through swiftness on kit swap). It isn’t too challenging to pick up since it only uses one damage kit.

Thanks for all the info guys. Keep them coming if you have different ideas. I need to sift through and look at all these. I am not used to such diversity.

As for the builds posted at top of forums. I am often unsure how out of date they are. Thanks everyone.

A simple HGH Toolkit build still works very well for small-scale WvW. It’s relatively easy to play and produces solid results.

There are numerous variants of it but the one I use is this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQJAqalspyXnuSyF1LJxoCdGki8qXRPeMln8nCsF-jUCBINBkWAkyAIFqIasFhTjtMMIaGYqUER1eEFRrWKAYmGB-w

The nice thing about it is that you can convert it into a power-based zerg-surfing Juggernaut build by just changing your equipped items and traits with no need to visit a trainer, like so: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQJAqelIqyXn1SyF1LJxoCdGki8eXRPyv+d8nCsF-jUCB4OBkgAkyAI7pIasFhTjtMMI6FYqSER1eDFRrWGA9xA-w

Basically, a core trait point distribution of 20 Firearms and 30 Alchemy is really flexible and allows you to make multiple completely different builds to suit the current situation.

A 3-kit build is probably the strongest engineer build for PvP and small scale fighting right now but is also probably the hardest build in the entire game to play well so you’d have to put a lot of time and effort into learning to maximize it. It can be done with a similar point distribution to the above, with generally the Elixir Gun, Tool Kit and either the Bomb Kit or Grenade Kit as the third utility slot.

Edit: If you want some good demonstration videos of what engineers can do in small-scale WvW, here are some much better players than me:

Amadeus on an Elixir Gun/Flamethrower support build: http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=UUS6UxiZCdtLH0RnIwLW34Iw&feature=player_detailpage&v=NSs0PlKm-mY

Maskaganda on an HGH Toolkit build: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=6cmgYIXdnik

Yishis on a 3-kit build: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQd53qlCvo8&feature=player_detailpage

Thank you Stice very much!