Guild Wars 2

So today I decided to start my engineer. I have one of every character at 80 except for engineer, necromancer, and mesmer. I like the idea of engineer so I decided to give it a whirl.

Let me first start off by saying that these forums can be toxic. I almost didn’t even want to attempt engineer due to all the negativity (which might be fair, idk). But alas, I made one any ways.

I spent a few hours looking through the “Let’s See Your Engineer’s” sticky to get an idea on how I wanted my Engineer to eventually look. I decided on making it an Asura. So the adventure begins…

I initially thought about using Tomes of Knowledge and an Experience scroll to get my levels up a little bit before starting but I decided I wanted to take my time and really learn the class.

Day 1
Initial toon creation. I decided on female asura and got the show on the road. My initial reaction for engineer is the low level dps is absolutely horrible. I scrubbed my head against a brick wall and finally made it to level 11 and unlocked flamethrower.. still.. low..dps. I have finally made it to level 15 but I will say it has been like absolute torture. I hate to start my adventure out by complaining but goodness it was horrible.
I decided to stay in metrica province to try and keep immersion but it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. Normally I would knock out all the starter zones in the 1-5 area heart quests.
But enough complaining. I will pick up my adventure again tomorrow and hope that it will go a little better once I am able to get my armor and weapon upgraded with cheap runes and such.

I refuse to give up because I really want one of each class at 80, preferably before HoT. Wish me luck on the rest of my adventure!

I will try to keep this journal/log up to date so I can get tips from people who enjoy reading this type logs the way I do. Maybe it’ll start a trend

My question for today will be..
How do you like to level your new toons? Tomes of knowledge, story as it unlocks, map clear, or some other fun thing you have created? Good luck and game on!

Most of the complaints people have about the state of the engineer are due to temporary bugs that are significantly hindering our maximum potential, like bomb kit radius. When they’re all fixed, I think we’ll be in a good place.

Enjoy the experience to 80. Don’t rush it with Tomes of Knowledge. You won’t really get to appreciate all the engineer has to offer unless you spend time playing with each kit.

Well first off, engineers trade burst damage for amazing survivability, and great damage over time, heres a picture of my engineer atm, hes my main btw

pistols are for conditions, and quite fun, try using em, rifle, is pretty boring

Phineas Poe.3018:

Most of the complaints people have about the state of the engineer are due to temporary bugs that are significantly hindering our maximum potential, like bomb kit radius. When they’re all fixed, I think we’ll be in a good place.

Enjoy the experience to 80. Don’t rush it with Tomes of Knowledge. You won’t really get to appreciate all the engineer has to offer unless you spend time playing with each kit.

just because kits are out for right now doesn’t mean engineer is useless, or " blocked full potential " you people act like engineer kits are the best way to play engineer without even thinking of trying, or looking at other builds, sigh

Usually I just use tomes of knowledge, unless classes require a complete leveling experience to be understood. I leveled my engineer the normal way, since he also was my first character. every other toon so far got set to 80 by either toomes, eotm farming, regular WvW k-training or PvP.
Only for classes that are rather complicated, I go back to normal leveling, like the mesmer I’m currently doing map-completion with.

When it comes to dps, you maybe got mislead.
The starter weapon on engineer is pistol, hich is nothing but a condi-weapon. After that you get the choice to pick a shield or off-hand pistol, both of which are either support or -again- pure condi.
Additionally you picked Flamethrower, which is also a low-dps kit, primarily used for might-stacking, cc and safe-stomping with #5 late-game. It can work for leveling, but will require proper traits (which you currently don’t have) to perform well.
My tip to make your life easier would be to go to the next outfiter, buy a rifle, and then unlock bombkit as fast as possible. Rifle has decent power-scaling, and the #3+#5 is a pretty heavy burst, on a rather low cd, and netshot + overcharged shot makes it quite easy to kit rather tanky mobs, like veterans.
Bombkit is one of the hardest-hitting AA’s we have, and if you keep running in circles to kite mobs, while spaming that AA, you kill stuff pretty easy and fast.
Anyways, the strength of engineer is the amount of weapon-sets he can run, which gives him access to a plethora of burst-attacks, so we are rather not meant to spam any AA, but to cycle trough our kits and use these burst-skills.

You may be surprised to hear this, but if done right, engineer is one of the most relaxed classes to level, due to its easy access to hard-hitting AoE, awesome in & out of combat mobility, high sustain, and build-versatility. Other classes need to specialize and are very hard to get balanced between offense, defense and mobility. Engineer on the other hand naturally balances himself in all builds he runs, and has almost no builds that only fullfill a single, specific role.

Arobain.8274:

just because kits are out for right now doesn’t mean engineer is useless, or " blocked full potential " you people act like engineer kits are the best way to play engineer without even thinking of trying, or looking at other builds, sigh

Having a subset of utility skills that are underperforming due to unintended bugs is the very definition of lost potential.

I planned on toming my guy up once I hit about 50, well… I’m just continuing the old fashioned way. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s very powerful.

Get your grenades, barrage is great burst. Flame Blast on Flamethrower is great burst. Acid Bomb on EG is great burst. Once you can grab your Mortar kit and you can toss down a blind field, if you go into explosives you can trait it to last quite a while.

That said, I’d trait tools first, get your streamlined kits for perma swiftness.

This is my third engi so I kinda have the hang of it, but I just leveled from 50-62 in about an hour and a half by mass killing rarely killed stuff with killstreak/birthday booster/experience booster. I’d pull 4-12 things together and burst them down real quick while they remained blinded and essentially harmless.

Engi’s a profession where you constantly swap between your big hitters to burst.

Big hitters being:
Acid Bomb
Grenade Barrage
Flame Blast
Prybar
Freeze Grenade
Shrapnel Grenade
Poison Grenade
Jump Shot
Blunderbuss
Static Shot
Blowtorch
Orbital Strike

and some others, obviously you can’t use all that list at once, but they are the things that if you are set up for them you want to rotate to as you move through the list. You don’t want to be using the 1 skill till you deplete your list of options.

I’d suggest getting your kits first. Tools line second(up to adrenal implant). Save up for Explosions at lvl 45 and then go deep in that. You’ll get the speed for travel then the burst for damage, and have your wide variety of big hitters from your kits. Rifle + Power/prec being your focus for gear. Personally I’m going condi this time (3rd engi again ) and it’s not bad but I know power is better.

So yeah, stick in there, gets better after 20-25 or so when you have your skills to actually use. I’m blowing stuff up right and left, blinding them so they can’t attack back and wiping out a dozen enemies while at full or nearly full health. Only died a dozen or so times because I’m Yoloing everything.

Day 2

And so day two has began. I logged on to see that I made it to level 15 on day 1 and needed to buy some new gear as I was still wearing level 1 gear.

I strolled over to the Black Lion merchant and bought all level 15 power gear, a level 15 power rifle and 6 different runes all of which the first bonus was +10 power. Stuck a bloodlust sigil and a flame sigil on my rifle. That will do for now so I headed off to Lion’s Arch to decide which map I wanted to do next.

I briefly contemplated doing my level 10 story but I decided to wait a bit because I want to be able to enjoy the story and on days that I have to work I don’t really get to focus on story very well because I want to rush around and gain a bunch of levels and feel accomplished before I must leave Guild Wars for the day.

But I digress, I headed over to the portals in LA and (like I do 80% of the time) decided to go and clear out Queensdale. I began my journey clearing the map and thought how much nicer it was finally have some gear which made killing soooo much easier compared to day 1. I stayed on flame thrower throughout Queensdale and enjoyed it quiet well although it did start taking a tad bit longer once I made it down to the swamp.

I finished up Queensdale which got me to level 20 and I headed back into town. I found a website last night (www.wolfineer.com) and liked the fact it was an up-to-date smallish website that was geared to all things engineer. I read some articles on there and realized the “owner” of the site plays gw2 frequently as a main engineer. So I figured I would add him to the friends list just to see if he could answer a quick question for me (which core spec should I dive in to first at level 21).

He responded immediately with very helpful info and he recommended getting streamlined kits first for the speed buffs which was an excellent idea! He also mentioned that he felt like grenade/bomb kit was a little bit faster for low level characters. I had been saving up my hero points since I unlocked flamethrower so I had enough to get streamlined kits right away and still had enough to unlock all the way to bomb kit so I will be giving this kit set a try tomorrow.

Forgot to mention I gained that extra level to boost me to 21 by doing about 2 story missions. Hated to rush it but I’ve done this particular story line before so I wasn’t so upset by speeding through it. I think tomorrow I will clear out Wayfarer Foothills or maybe Plains of Ashford. Caledon Forest will probably be last because it has too much underwater combat for my liking so I’ll put it off. Although I love the environment of Caledon so idk yet :P

Question for the day:
For those who have an engineer what race did you go with? I’d love to see some pictures!

Day 3

Alright I have my coffee so lets get this entry started.

I started out today as I always do, I hopped on to my engineer and checked out my gear and inventory to get a feel of where I left off the day before. Looks like I’m level 21 with level 15 gear. Meh, not ideal (not that it even hugely matters either) but I’ll run it until level 25.

So I head off towards the Eastern Ward of Lion’s Arch towards the town portals. Decisions Decisions. Guess I’ll just go to the Plains of Ashford. Not particularly crazy about the “fall” look of Ascalon but I want to go ahead and knock it out. I travel through the “bang and clang” of The Black Citadel being careful not to be trampled on by all the Charr running around and head towards my objective.

Streamlined kits has definitely made my life much easier now with the perma-speed buff. I just speed my way through the zone. No real issues to speak of. I did run into an issue with the heart “Help Paenula train troops” where it didn’t seem to be giving me the rifle that has the capture skill on it but it was actually just an oversight. The rifle she gives you looks so identical in skill set as my current rifle I didn’t realize Paenula had been giving it to me the whole time. Duh.. After that I finished up Plains of Ashford. Thank goodness. Back to LA.

I made it to level 25 after clearing the first little area of Wayfarer Foothills and had to wind down my game so Tomorrow I’ll be finishing up Wayfarer. Cleaned up my bags and upgraded my armor to level 25 armor. I’m off work tomorrow so I’m expecting to make some good progress. I don’t have anything else to do and I’ll have the house to myself so I’ll be “no lifing”. Wish me luck.

EDIT: I will try to get us some pictures uploaded tomorrow while I’m home.

No idea for how long you already play Gw2, and how deep your understanding of level-scaling is, but if you keep switching your gear every 10-15 levels, you will make your life more misserable than it must be.

You know the regular armor & weapon-merchants around outposts and in capital cities?
Buy the offered white gear every 5 levels (their inventory updates automatically in 5-level steps, according to your current level). It is cheap, and while it can’t be salvaged, it can be sold back to the vendor for roughly half the original price.

The reason for updating your gear that frequently is that if you wear gear that is 10 levels (or more) below your level, while entering a zone that would scale you down, your stats also get calculated down to a level that makes you as equally strong as a person on that level, wearing sub-tier parts. Therefore you’ll have a harder time than necessary, even in the starter areas.
Ofc, since they nerfed the starter-areas to not be that hard anymore (no champs, just vets / less (if any) condis from enemies), you don’t really feel that as of now, but the difference in your gear-gap will become quite painful when you switch over to lvl +15 zones, and takes another, significant step up in lvl +50 zones. And Orr becomes a living hell for under-geared lvl 80 characters.

Day 4

Ok so I left off on level 25. I am a day behind on updating the log but since my last update I am now level 40. I have cleared all the starter zones, Kessex Hills, and Gendarran Fields and finished the all the story up to this point. I have went back to using my flamethrower as I like it more. Sorry for the short log. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day. I’m hoping to be 80 no later than the end of the month. That’s plentyy of time. Hope every one has fun on the beta this weekend. Still not sure I want to pre-purchase yet. Havnt seen enough to make me jump on board.

Do not buy white items, ever. You can buy blue on the trading post for comparable prices, and the difference is huge. Especially for weapons. Try to get green weapons whenever you can, though. Sometimes they’re cheap on the ’post. Other times you can get them from renown hearts, but you may need to consult a guide to find the right hearts at the right levels.

Gee, sorry to hear your first impressions of being an engineer weren’t too good. Oddly enough I had a blast (Pun intended) on my first run when I tried’em out back last year. And now it’s my main. Then again that was last year, stuff changed… But I still seem to be blowing stuff up just fine, so meh. Though I’ll admit killing can be pretty slow, but killing stuff ain’t my forte. I just like handing out conditions like cupcakes that are explosion flavoured for that extra zingy taste.
… It’s really late.

Flamethrowers are dang fun, son. But I tend to sling pistols ‘round just as much. Getting used to cycling through kits fast is a good idea. I have no seriously good tips for you, I ain’t much of a serious (Or good) player. Hope your experiences progress well in future entries!
Back to promoting my grenades/bombs to the local peeps in PvE— I mean, cupcakes…

Hi. I could not get into engineer at low levels either. But looking into spvp and seeing what they could do, I got over the feeling instantly. I made other character but they do not feel like this one. Best class in any game by far.