Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone,
Title should say NEW TO GAME lol
I just started playing. Ive heard how hard engineers are to level blah, blah, blah

So I figured Id come here and ask for some advice/guides so that hopefully I dont fall into any bad habits starting off

Thanks in advance.

PS: Does race matter if so which is best and if not which LOOKS best

Windozer.8240:

Hello everyone,
Title should say NEW TO GAME lol
I just started playing. Ive heard how hard engineers are to level blah, blah, blah

So I figured Id come here and ask for some advice/guides so that hopefully I dont fall into any bad habits starting off

Thanks in advance.

PS: Does race matter if so which is best and if not which LOOKS best

Race does not matter, though I think Humans probably have the best looking cultural armor:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Falconer%27s_armor
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Falconer%27s_armor

Char works the best thematically, but big Races tend to ‘feel slow’ due to their size and animations.

I am personally partial to Sylvari and their armor:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Falconer%27s_armor

I would suggest you spend a lot of time playing around with the Weapons and the non-kit utilities earlier on as when you start playing end game content, you will be using kits almost exclusively.

human male engi here.

When leveling, there isn’t much you can do wrong.
First, convenience is key. For leveling I recommend power builds since power gear is really easy & cheap to come by (merchants in the capital cities that sell white gear… goes easy on your purse). and for powerbuilds you want to run rifle, so buy one at the weapon-merchant. Just a small tipp: gear-merchants update their inventory every 5 levels, so check back & update your outdated junk frequently.

Since I’ve leveld my engineer ages ago, I have no idea in which order you currently unlock your skills with hero points, so I just give you the goals in each lne to unlock, for the easiest leveling expirience:

Sirst, sink a couple of points into kits, until you either unlock bombs or the flamethrower. Since we don’t have access to a roper weaponswap, compared to other classes, we need kits to get access to additional weapon-skills. if you slot a kit as your utility, you can activate it, so it replaces your weaponskills completely, until you swap out of it again. The more kits you slot, the more skills you have at your disposal, and late game it becomes very important to cycle trough your kits regularly, so better start early in PvE with it. Tipp: if you invest enough points to unlock grenades, you can already start to train with this hard-to-aim kit, since it becomes one of your best dps-sources in late-game. Still, for quick leveling I recommend to stay with bombs and/or flamethrower. With bombs you just can pull your enemies & kill them while running in circles, and with flamethrower #1 + #2 you can spray pretty much everything to death. if your target proves to be bit more sturdy, smack it with rifle #3 & #5. Usually that silences everything in the first 30-40 levels

After having unlocked your first reasonable kit, you probably start to wander into areas with a tad more difficult opponents, so you want to have a reasonable heal. I have no idea what the current default healing skill for new engis is, but unless it is healing turret, you want to spend hero points in the turrets line until you can unlock it.
The turret itself is a lame piece of scrap that serves no real purpose, but with a bit of immagination & button-spam, it turns into our heal-powerhouse, star of all our healing skills even in late game, and even compared to the healing options of all other classes.
You have to spam the following skills real quick to get a load of effects:
Healing turret → Cleansing burst → Detonate healing turret → blast or leap finisher of your choice.
what is a blast-finisher? For example your 2nd skill in the flamethrower kit. But why should you use it now? Because you’ve just put down a waterfield, and if you use a blast-finisher inside a waterfield, you press out additional heal for your allies. And if you just do a leap finisher (like rifle #5), you get roughly the same amount of healing from waterfields, but just for yourself
So, if you mange to do this combo in less than a second, you get the following:
- a really high load of healing for yourself
- a medium sized load of healing for your friends in a 480 radius
- you cleaned 2 conditions in a 480 radius
- you stacked enough time of the “regeneration”-boon on you and your friends to almost cover you until it is up the next time
- you’ve put down a waterfield that stays for a short duration & can be finished by you or other players for additional healing
This is how you turn a useless piece of scrap into one of the best support skills in the game, neatly packed in just a 20sec cd

So now that you know how to kill your enemies & how to heal yourself & your friends, you want to get to places, which is why we look into movement speed now.
I recommend to spend points into the tools line, so you can unlock the trait “streamlined kits” as soon as possible. Basically it gives you 20 seconds of swiftness if you swap into a kit, on a 20sec cd… so perma-swiftness for doing nothing but pressing your kit-swap from time to time. And since it comes with addditional effects for each kit that you swap into, this trait gives you a nice boost to combat options early in the game.

from here on everything is up to your liking.
But to give you some soft-goals:
- Investing many points into firearms will naturally boost your crit-chance & give you the juggernaut trait eventually, a trait that makes you immune to cc & increases both your power & condi dps while wielding the flamethrower. Feels like a unstoppable menace of hurt & fire^^
- investing points into gadgets will give you rocketboots eventually, a neat way of traveling the maps faster.
- investing points into explosives will give you nice enhancements for your bombs & grenades, as well as general dmg-modifiers, to burst down innocent ambient creatures before they can eat your soul (and there is a achievement for hitting them with 300k damage in a sngle hit. have fun trying it out)

Ofc there is many more useful stuff to discover, and leveling up to 80 gives you more than enough points to unlock all of them, so don’t hesitate to play around with them & try different things out.

You can change your build to all times for free, so there is really nothing holding you back from trying things that may look silly at first.

Have fun & check back here when you’re 80, then we can look into actual meta-builds & advanced Tactics

The first comment is wrong, race does matter. It’s not a super-mega big deal though. Their racial utility skills have their own unique toolbar skill. Some are useful, most are awful.

For example, Sylvari gain Vine Shield which is very powerful.

I wouldn’t let it decide your race though, you’ll be looking at your character for quite a while so best to pick something you like.

You can view all the racial utility toolbelt skills here

Sounds very complicated but fun. Cant wait to try it

Epixors.8047:

The first comment is wrong, race does matter. It’s not a super-mega big deal though. Their racial utility skills have their own unique toolbar skill. Some are useful, most are awful.

For example, Sylvari gain Vine Shield which is very powerful.

I wouldn’t let it decide your race though, you’ll be looking at your character for quite a while so best to pick something you like.

You can view all the racial utility toolbelt skills here

I do not like to give new players the impression that race is useful in the long run.

Making any non-aesthetic decisions when it come to race can have rather unfortunate consequences.

lorddarkflare.9186:

Epixors.8047:

The first comment is wrong, race does matter. It’s not a super-mega big deal though. Their racial utility skills have their own unique toolbar skill. Some are useful, most are awful.

For example, Sylvari gain Vine Shield which is very powerful.

I wouldn’t let it decide your race though, you’ll be looking at your character for quite a while so best to pick something you like.

You can view all the racial utility toolbelt skills here

I do not like to give new players the impression that race is useful in the long run.

Making any non-aesthetic decisions when it come to race can have rather unfortunate consequences.

I agree. You’ll never use a racial skill in a serious build, but each race has their useful skills for very niche situations. Norns for movement, Asuras for projectile management, Sylvari for AOE, Charr works okay with damage builds, and human… meh I don’t know.

Choose whatever you like the look/lore of as you’ll be staring at it for a long time.

Now let me ask one more question. Someone told me to wait till after HoT comes out to try to learn to play because so much is going to change…any thoughts?

Keep playing
I’m doing the opposite of the current meta and feeling pretty useful if I’m rolling with people who aren’t twitch reflex veterans, playing a healer/CC in PVP/PVE ^^

Engineer is such a versatile class you can pretty much play it however you wish, so go to the mists and try every different build in PVP till you find one that you like

Also, the game will stay pretty much the same, we only get new content like raids where different builds will be more useful and action camera mode.

Do dungeons after lvl 30, you will gain about 80% of a level for each completion and learn a lot about the game, like dodging and movement in general..
And combo fields, one of the most important aspects of teamwork in this game ^^

If you head into Ascalonian Catacombs at lvl 30+.. Remember to watch out for traps!
Patience is the key sometimes

edit: oh, and read this https://whyigame.wordpress.com/the-beginners-guide-to-movement-in-combat-guild-wars-2/

Windozer.8240:

Now let me ask one more question. Someone told me to wait till after HoT comes out to try to learn to play because so much is going to change…any thoughts?

bullkitten.
nothing will change for the class in terms of leveling experience, since our new elite-specialization – the scrapper – can’t be used if you’re not lvl 80 & even then builds upon what you’ve learned about the base-class.
Also, the scrapper only adds tank/cc options. If you want to go full out on dps or condi builds, you’ll still prefer the base-class above the elite spec.

I love the fact that a lot of the the racial skill wiki pages have things like ‘?’ and ‘-’ as their damage… no one has actually used them long enough to bother working out their stats.

Yes, definitely pick a race for cosmetics. Or for some minor incidental bonuses – smaller races tend to be a bit easier for doing jumping puzzles; and in PvP it can be harder for enemies to pick which skills to dodge from the animations.

Yeah Im more interested in the best looking right now. I think Im torn between human and Norn I think.
Was thinking Char but havent seen any good engi picks of them i like

Charr is love, charr is life ^^

go human.
norn have sluggish running animations (even tho all characters in gw2 have exactly the same movement speed) and they are terribad for jumping-puzzles, especially since many ledges are smaller than their feet^^