Guild Wars 2

I recently just rolled and engineer and I absolutely love it! I love all the varieties of different skills and play styles that they have access to. I’m almost level 50 at the moment.

My only question to experienced engineers is this: What is the best way for me to really hone in my skills as an engineer? I’ve been doing a mix of world completion and personal story so far, but I find myself just melting everything I possibly can with the flamethrower or running circles spamming bombs

I don’t really care about leveling up fast, if I wanted to do that I’d sit in a eotm zerg and collect XP. My main goal is that when I hit 80, I’m as familiar as I can possibly be with all the tools I’ll have at my disposal.

Welp, then play them.

timing and planning on dropping your grenades takes a lot of practice, so I’d really recommend this. Don’t get demotivated in the beginning since the AI can be jumping rabbits that seems to avoid your nades automatically… just an illusion that you’ll overcome pretty fast.

Depending on the content you want to play later on, you want to get familiar with the usage of your shield, double pistol and rifle. they not really can be sorted colorblindly into power or condition dps, and have some additional uses. also you should really switch the kits you’re using often. To be most effective, use various of them at the same time. You only have 1sec cooldown on kit-swap so you can put out amazingly high dps with a bombkit, Grenades and Toolkit combo, or get many blasts out of the various fields you can put down with them…

Learn your belt-abilities and use them. Many engis do the mistake to ignore them, but they are a viable part of the builds you will develop later on. You may will actually ignore the actual skill you pick and just take it for its belt ability (rifle turret, paired with static discharge for example)

And to the end, the most important tipp:
Experiment, and play around with whatever sounds fun. The engineer is the most versatile and modular class, therefore you have multiple ways of achieving one and the same goal, while also covering a metric kittenton of other jobs. Read up about your skills (the gw2 wiki is the best place to start with that) and try them out in various combos. If you come to feel stable and experienced with what you’re running, write this build down, reset your traits and create the next one.

Good luck and whisper me ingame or send me a ingame letter if you want further help.

Thanks so much. I find myself getting a little overwhelmed with all the different combos and roles I can play. But that’s also what makes it so fun for me.

Certain skills become extremely valuable at 80 and in PvP and WvW where you will spend most of your time (probably) upon turning 80.

1. Grenades (they can be power or condition and have a few key fields). Learn to throw them against mobs predicting where they will land and then how to get both to hit (pre-80 it is 3x at 80 with traits).

2. Pistol/Shield: Get used to adding Pistol 2 and 3 in your rotation as well as how the shield skills really work. The shield can be amazing defense.

3. Add the Elixir Gun and drop the Flamethrower. Egun is excellent utility and can do significant condition damage. Learn how the weakness really works as well as the leap from acid and fields. Egun is probably best to learn to play in PvP.

4. COMBOS. You have a lot of fields and blast finishers. Learn to create effective combos. Start with the healing turret and learn to blast 3X on the water field. Progress to the bomb kit for stealth and might. Use Heart of the Mists as a simple place to work on getting combos down.

One of the things I’m having trouble figuring out is how to make blasts on the water field. Can someone give me just a sample skill chain to do once I drop the healing turret?

pretty simple.
every skill that is a combo field will show that in its tooltipp (f.e. the healing turrets overcharge is a “waterfield”)
and every skill that is a finisher will also have that notification in its tooltipp. What you look out for in this case are “blast finishers”. these finishers usually create an AoE effect which can be a buff for you or a debuff for enemies.

combining a waterfield with a blast finisher (placing the field by activating the healing turrets overcharge and immedeatly using a blast finisher skill inside this fields’ white circle) will result in an aoe heal. every field can be finished multiple times, so the most common method is to:
1. placing the healing turret
2. instantly overcharging the healing turret (waterfield is active now)
3. exploding the healing turret (use its belt ability, it is a blast-finisher)
4. double tapping the shields’ skill #4 (2nd blast finisher in that field and an AoE knockback)
5. switching to elixier gun
6. using skill #4 on it (3rd blast finisher and a leap backwards into safety)

optionally you now can use elixier-gun skill #5 to fully heal you up and placing a light field. All your auto-attacks are projectile finishers with a 20% activation chance. If a projectile finisher crosses a light field he will cleanse 1 of your conditions if the projectile get triggered as finisher (visually displayed by changing the projectile into some kind of white lightning bolt) AND lands in its target. Therefore you’re able to not only give yourself a mayor load of healing, but for the next 5sec – as long as the lightfield lasts – all your auto-attacks that cross this lightfield have a chance to clear your conditions.

The above explained is only one of the more advanced self-preservation combo-chains for engis but for beginners the best option to train their reflexes for mastery-tier combo chains, like long-duration stealth, perma blind, perma burning, might-stacking a.s.o.

Arantheal.7396:

pretty simple.
every skill that is a combo field will show that in its tooltipp (f.e. the healing turrets overcharge is a “waterfield”)
and every skill that is a finisher will also have that notification in its tooltipp. What you look out for in this case are “blast finishers”. these finishers usually create an AoE effect which can be a buff for you or a debuff for enemies.

combining a waterfield with a blast finisher (placing the field by activating the healing turrets overcharge and immedeatly using a blast finisher skill inside this fields’ white circle) will result in an aoe heal. every field can be finished multiple times, so the most common method is to:
1. placing the healing turret
2. instantly overcharging the healing turret (waterfield is active now)
3. exploding the healing turret (use its belt ability, it is a blast-finisher)
4. double tapping the shields’ skill #4 (2nd blast finisher in that field and an AoE knockback)
5. switching to elixier gun
6. using skill #4 on it (3rd blast finisher and a leap backwards into safety)

optionally you now can use elixier-gun skill #5 to fully heal you up and placing a light field. All your auto-attacks are projectile finishers with a 20% activation chance. If a projectile finisher crosses a light field he will cleanse 1 of your conditions if the projectile get triggered as finisher (visually displayed by changing the projectile into some kind of white lightning bolt) AND lands in its target. Therefore you’re able to not only give yourself a mayor load of healing, but for the next 5sec – as long as the lightfield lasts – all your auto-attacks that cross this lightfield have a chance to clear your conditions.

The above explained is only one of the more advanced self-preservation combo-chains for engis but for beginners the best option to train their reflexes for mastery-tier combo chains, like long-duration stealth, perma blind, perma burning, might-stacking a.s.o.

Thanks so much!

So can I essentially use just a chain like this to stack stealth with bomb 4?

correct, or you use the smokefield from the flame-turrets’ overcharge, or the duskwall from elixir U’s belt ability. You could also get 25 stacks of might for 20sec out of the bombkits skill #2, the flamethrowers skill #4, and the flameturrets belt-ability.

keep in mind that the engineer has access to many combo-fields, and also to various combo-finishers. I’d recommend you to look into the wiki to get a list of all your fields / finishers and also what each finisher will do in the different fields.

This is a lot of dry stuff to read up and keep in mind but also crucial for you to master if you really want to squeeze out every ounce of power from the engi, so I’d also recommend you to try out all the combos at least once ingame and try to incorporate them into the builds you’re testing.

Willy Savage.5043:

I recently just rolled and engineer and I absolutely love it! I love all the varieties of different skills and play styles that they have access to. I’m almost level 50 at the moment.

My only question to experienced engineers is this: What is the best way for me to really hone in my skills as an engineer? I’ve been doing a mix of world completion and personal story so far, but I find myself just melting everything I possibly can with the flamethrower or running circles spamming bombs

I don’t really care about leveling up fast, if I wanted to do that I’d sit in a eotm zerg and collect XP. My main goal is that when I hit 80, I’m as familiar as I can possibly be with all the tools I’ll have at my disposal.

Mastering professions is what i’ve been doing lately. I go to the Heart of the mists and look for people of that profession, ask about their builds and then go try them out myself in hotjoin/heart of the mists npc’s. Then when I find a build to my liking I look how I could possibly improve on the original design and then I’ll run it in tpvp.

Note that for me attleast it takes 2-5 matches to get used to a different build regardless of the class you’re playing.

For PvE its all just go zerker and learn to dodge/blast in the healing turret waterfield (or firefield). Reading up on every single one of your skills can be usefull too.

The key to the HT is a couple of things:

1. If you drop it and then Immediately overcharge it, you get the water field immediately. OTHERWISE, you will get the water field on the next “activation” which occurs every 3 seconds.

2. You often want to drop a series of delayed blasts like Big ol Bomb BEFORE you activate the overcharge as you only have a 3 second field. That gives you more blasts.

Finally, determine how many blasts you really need. A LOT of the blast finishers are often better used for their skills. Shield 4 can really reflect a lot of damage or you can get a single blast finish from it.

When I really start blasting to the moon is when I want either might/stealth before a fight (and everything will be off cool down in time) or when I want to stealth/rocket boots out of a fight and flee.

Great! I’ll start playing around with it and see what I can do.

Bombsaway.7198:

The key to the HT is a couple of things:

1. If you drop it and then Immediately overcharge it, you get the water field immediately. OTHERWISE, you will get the water field on the next “activation” which occurs every 3 seconds.

I’d love a little clarification on this: are you saying that if I don’t overcharge the HT right away I will continually get water fields for as long as it is up?

Not saying that at all.

The HT has two modes:
Basic which provides a heal and a regen. It triggers every three seconds there are allies within its radius.

The overcharge mode is an active skill. You press it then AT THE NEXT BASIC MODE HEAL it will “go off” providing:
a. a heal
b. a regen
c. removal of 2 conditions
d. a 3 second water field

The overcharge has a 15 second cool down after it is activated.

Think of it this way. The HT is designed to fire every 3 seconds. You overcharge the basic timed heal (getting all the other benefits), but it still takes the basic timed heal to go off.

The way around it is that the basic heal goes off on activation. SO, if you drop the HT and immediately (basically spam) the overcharge, it happens right away. But you still have another 15 seconds before you can overcharge another basic heal.

There is one catch! If you pick up the turret while the water field is in effect, for some odd reason it eliminates the water field. So either, wait or simply blow up the turret with the toolbelt detonate skill (though that adds 5 seconds to the cooldown).