Guild Wars 2

As my engineer is slowly creeping closer to level 80, I’m starting to think about how I would gear him up once I get there. Just a bit of background, I’ve been playing GW2 for about a year or so. I have played a thief throughout that year and decided to break away from it recently and chose an Engineer because it is by far the most interesting and versatile class in this game. I play this game exclusively for WvW. I do little to no PvE and not really a big sPvP fan.

Anyway, back to the point of this post. I’ve been theory crafting various builds and this is what I’ve come up with.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQJAqalIq6ZX3SfF1LJxoCdG0j8yX8KqQ+/o4tsF-jUCBYNBk8GgCBMHqIas11FRjVzATliIq2jQRzHQoWKAImGB-w

This build relies on maintaining powerful conditions like burn and torment on your opponent. I use P/P because I love blowtorch and after playing a thief for, so long I feel that I can survive without the need to block or reflect. I will probably keep a giver’s shield on call and switch between the two depending on my situation. I will also keep a spare weapon with a sigil of corruption till I reach 25 stacks then swap it out for an offhand weapon with an alternative sigil on it. I’m still on the fence about a leeching sigil but I"ll have to test that out and see how effective it is.

The problem I’m facing is the effectiveness of torment. The runes and sigils are rather pricey so there’s a big risk involved with trying this build out. The sigil and runes aren’t too good at stacking torment and I’m aware that the on heal ability has an internal cooldown even though its not specified in the description. At most I will be able to maintain 3 or 4 stacks of torment on an enemy. However I do like that they are all AoE applications. I have no idea how powerful the torment condition is which leads me to resort to posting this for help from more experienced players.

Or would I simply be better off running with perplexity, nightmare or undead runes and an earth sigil? Any advice on how I can tweak this build will be greatly appreciated. Any advice to scrap this build completely will be equally appreciated as it would save me alota money due to me buying all my gold (since I don’t PvE).

Also: Napalm Specialist > Modified Ammunition???

sigil of leeching is great when you use it with runes of scavenging, i think your build might lack condition damage but you do have that high condition duration so taking the sigil of torment even though it is only 1 stack will help to maximize the cover conditions for your burns, i don’t recommend taking runes of tormenting, you need to be pretty darn close to get it to hit and you could take runes that could bump you up to that 100% condition duration mark or get more condition damage, i would recommend scavenging simply because of the extra life steal will give you some pretty good tank.

since you are taking the invigorating speed trait id take infused precision over napalm specialist and modified ammunition since it will give you perma vigor and greatly assist your survive ability. also the changes to sigils hasn’t been implemented yet so you can use 2 sigils properly yet, so take leeching or torment with a sigil of bursting to maximize dps, if you do take sigil of torment you can take the runes of perplexity to maximize the conditions you’ll be pumping out (as much as i hate those runes there is no denying they get the job done).

Several Tweaks:

My first thought is:

+ If you are buying expensive runes for additional conditions, why would you not take grenades?
-Especially, if you are not taking a shield, grenades ability to give an extra ae blind which replaces much of the need for the elixir.

Other thoughts:

+ Runes of perplexity might be better than runes of torment because you have 2 ways of adding a perplexity stack and it is a separate condition.
– I rune runes of perplexity and a sigil of torment and it is much harder to clean
– You can effectively “AE” a stack of confusion with the bounce from pistol.

+ Bombs are tough to play without the extra radius especially in the kiting and dodging style of play of p/p.
-That usually requires you drop shrapnel which gives you just a few stacks really.

+ I would place my points in explosives over firearms. The traits work better for you.
-Piercing pistol shots won’t really help.
– You have low cooldown blow torch, poison dart and static shot. Each more or less hits multiple targets. You really don’t want to autoattack with the pistol (as bombs and the egun are much better that way)

+ If that leads you to taking grenades, bombs, e-gun (which is pretty standard to the extent anything gets standard with an engineer), those saved points in firearms should go to grenadier.

+ Shrapnel works with grenades and grenadier because it is 15% on hit. You get 3 grenades that can hit up to 5 targets. Or you get 1 bomb that can hit up to 5 targets (and extremely unlikely to do so with short radius having not taking forceful explosions).
– In 1v1, you will have 45% chance per grenade strike to land shrapnel (3 grenades) with grenadier.
-Never found shrapnel to be worth it without a grenade. Even then, it is so tempting to have forceful explosions.

+ Precision you have is tied to getting off conditions but you don’t to go into firearms high except for traits. Much of what you do with conditions and traits is “on hit” or has a cooldown where even with 10-15% less crit chance you will land one.
-That is fundamentally why you see so many condition builds take things like backpack regenerator is because they don’t need 20 even in firearms.

+ Pistol or Shield is very situational. You will swap often and that is a good thing.
-Key for shield is often the blast finisher.
-You can easily blast off bombs and the e-gun for stealth, might and the egun for retaliation.
– If you take grenades, the ability to “multi-blast” poison is extremely useful for a bomb build as you can have long stacks of weakness which makes getting in their face with bombs much easier to manage.

+ Sitting duck is a hoot with your p/p and bomb build if you stay 20 in firearms.
– You immobilize on the following: glue shot, glue bomb.
– That is a great trait for someone not running a shield.

+ Otherwise, I would replace coated bullets with extra range if staying in firearms.

+ On heal proccing abilities work soooooooo much better with the med kit because you just swap into and out of the kit in about 1 second every 9 seconds Of course, the HT is much better otherwise.

I do believe that a 30/10/0/20/10 build is better for conditions.
You are giving up a 15 second passive condition remover and a good heal per second by not going 20 in alchemy.

There is a bug with the sigil of torment, it does NOT share a cool down with sigil of earth. It’s overall power is best used as a “cover” condition but the fact that it won’t mess with bleed procs from earth make it a powerful offhand sigil. As far as runes, torment runes are wack there are many better choices, like perplexity (for the right build)

First of all I want to thank all for the comments.

After reviewing it I’ve come to realize that runes of torment are a terrible choice. According to the wiki durations cannot be increased further than 100%. So with my already existing 80% duration (or 90% if I run a 30/x/x/x/x build) I wouldn’t be adding much to the durations of my torment procs. I still like the torment sigil and it wouldn’t too much of a gold sink to run with it for a while and decide if it worth hanging on to or not.

Perplexity runes will allow be to add a potential of 4 different conditions with a single auto attack of my pistol. So even if it gets cleansed, I still have a multitude of options to reapply them. The only problem with perplexity runes is that my build offers little to no form of interruption. So the 6th rune of perplexity would actually be a waste of a rune slot since I’ve already maxed my condition duration of confusion too. This leaves with an option to get a small increase to another useful stat such as vitality or condition damage.

As for shrapnel vs forceful explosions. Forceful explosions is undoubtedly better when running with a bomb kit. I plan to use the bomb kit for smaller or solo runs and the grenade kit when running with the zergball. So its good advice to go for 30 points in explosion so I can swap traits and slot skills easily without the need to reskill. Grenades just don’t feel right to me without the Grenadier trait.

Hopefully I will hit 80 by the end of this week or early next week. I’ll keep tweaking around the build on gw2skills till then. Thanks again for the advice.

shrapnel isn’t to bad with bombs actually, if you have reduced cool down and a sigil of earth and high precision which you have you can actually get alot of bleeds using fire bomb, when traited it has a 8 second CD and lasts 3 seconds, it has the intial damage from the bomb going off and then 3 following pulses that deal damage as well as apply burning with the engineer 5pt trait in firearms you get a chance to inflit bleeds on crit, a 66% chance to inflict bleeds on crit with a 2 sec cd and a 15% chance to inflict a bleed per pulse of the fire bomb now in spvp useing a rabid amulet and testing on the immortal golem i was able to stack upto and around 12-15 stacks of bleeding by using fire bomb and then switching to elixir gun, now you may think we ive gotta keep them in fire bomb for 3 seconds and well you’ve got glue bomb and glue shot to help out with that.

anyway just something you should keep in mind while running your build.

Agreed with ukuni. I find that for PvE you can live without forceful explosions but it is really hard to get your bombs to land damage in fast moving pvp and wvw without that extra radius.

On the other hand, forceful explosions do zilch for the grenades. It is one of those tradeoffs that can go either way. I prefer the consistency of getting off many types of conditions on the enemy and the certainty of getting the blind and somewhat certainty of getting off the cripple (when running away) that forceful gives me when I am in trouble. But, definitely worthy of consideration!