Guild Wars 2

I just recently created a engineer but still haven’t given a thought about which build i should use and honestly i really don’t know how a engineer works. Any builds that deal dps out there or can deal damage that can handle themselves in a zerg? I keep hearing celestial gear is the way to go with armour since engi are all out but i rather not use that. Not sure if i should focus on the condition or merely power side of a engineer any suggestions?

Leveling, WvW, or PVE? Im assuming WvW since you said Zerg.

Well it really depends. If you wanna run with your up lvld inside the zerg just take grenades and keep spamming them. If you gonna lvl outside wvw i felt that bombs (with power traits and gear) were the easiest way to kill mindless pve mobs.

A problem is the “can handle themselves in a zerg thing”. You will have a much better time if you are in a group as you ll have easier access to stability and other boons. Build wise condition dmg goes pretty well in wvw. Not that power engis don’t but if you run a static discharge build you wont have a fun time inside larger groups.

And regarding celestial gear. I never heard anyone telling that this was THE gear to go and i wouldn’t believe them anyway. I would always recommend rabid for those who wanna try out conditions though: the whole set of armor and trinkets can be bought through karma. So you only have to spend like 3 to 4g for the weapons, sigils and runes and you are set to go.

Engineers are very capable almost anywhere.

The three gear types I’d recommend most are Rabid, PVT, and Berserker’s for conditions and/or semibunker, PVT for full bunker, and Zerker’s for full glass cannon. Good results come from Celestial, but I personally am not a huge fan.

As far as build goes, pick a kit, figure out what synergizes with it, and wear appropriate gear. One of the engineer’s strengths is that almost every ability is highly useful, and as a result almost all engineers have individualized/personalized builds.

If your going to mention rabid and PVT, why not mention Dire as well. Its very solid for one who likes condition for bombs over power for a bunker build.

coglin.1867:

If your going to mention rabid and PVT, why not mention Dire as well. Its very solid for one who likes condition for bombs over power for a bunker build.

IMO, Dire is slightly overrated for engineers. Almost any build you can use Dire with would be better with Rabid or with Soldier’s. There are builds for it, but they aren’t nearly as common.

Every build you can use dire for is better with soldiers or rabid, really ?? A condition bunker ? Hardly……….Soldiers is very limited in value for a lot of build for the engineer, it is worthless for pistols. Thats half our available weapons.

In many WvW situations, you will get much much more value in survivability then the weak damage added by some crits. You can easily get enough crits to proc your on crit conditions with dire.

coglin.1867:

Every build you can use dire for is better with soldiers or rabid, really ?? A condition bunker ? Hardly……….Soldiers is very limited in value for a lot of build for the engineer, it is worthless for pistols. Thats half our available weapons.

In many WvW situations, you will get much much more value in survivability then the weak damage added by some crits. You can easily get enough crits to proc your on crit conditions with dire.

Most dire builds will have >5% crit chance from the lack of precision. And what bunker builds scale well with condition damage? FT doesn’t well, bombs don’t well, toolkit doesn’t well. Pistol does crap damage regardless, whenever I have it equipped I spend most of my time in another kit, switching out only to use a single skill or two.

Sylentir.8913:

coglin.1867:

Every build you can use dire for is better with soldiers or rabid, really ?? A condition bunker ? Hardly……….Soldiers is very limited in value for a lot of build for the engineer, it is worthless for pistols. Thats half our available weapons.

In many WvW situations, you will get much much more value in survivability then the weak damage added by some crits. You can easily get enough crits to proc your on crit conditions with dire.

Most dire builds will have >5% crit chance from the lack of precision. And what bunker builds scale well with condition damage? FT doesn’t well, bombs don’t well, toolkit doesn’t well. Pistol does crap damage regardless, whenever I have it equipped I spend most of my time in another kit, switching out only to use a single skill or two.

Dire is a great choice for tanky condition builds in WvW. There are lots of ways to minmax the stats you need. Toss on noble runes and medkit and you’ve got powerful self-heals, fury to proc IP, and enough might to end almost any fight (except vs. a necro, of course, since they are very close to a hard counter to condi engineer).

Sylentir.8913:

Most dire builds will have >5% crit chance from the lack of precision. And what bunker builds scale well with condition damage? FT doesn’t well, bombs don’t well, toolkit doesn’t well. Pistol does crap damage regardless, whenever I have it equipped I spend most of my time in another kit, switching out only to use a single skill or two.

When you suggest bombs do not scale well with conditions, I have to question your logic here. And pistols actually do fairly decent damage, it may not be the best but (they really need to make P#1 3s beleed or even 4s like it was in beta)pistol #2 does really solid damage. Fire bomb will stack 12 stacks of burn. They can cleanse, but most only maintain one cleanse and in 8s I have all the conditions stacked right back. If not sooner.

coglin.1867:

Sylentir.8913:

Most dire builds will have >5% crit chance from the lack of precision. And what bunker builds scale well with condition damage? FT doesn’t well, bombs don’t well, toolkit doesn’t well. Pistol does crap damage regardless, whenever I have it equipped I spend most of my time in another kit, switching out only to use a single skill or two.

When you suggest bombs do not scale well with conditions, I have to question your logic here. And pistols actually do fairly decent damage, it may not be the best but (they really need to make P#1 3s beleed or even 4s like it was in beta)pistol #2 does really solid damage. Fire bomb will stack 12 stacks of burn. They can cleanse, but most only maintain one cleanse and in 8s I have all the conditions stacked right back. If not sooner.

Reason I say that bombs don’t scale well with conditions is that
1) They scale wonderfully with power
2) They only have 2 offensive conditions, Burning and Confusion
3) Confusion isn’t especially powerful in PvE
4) Burning quickly gets overwritten/overlapped in WvW, PvE
5) Both conditions have a cooldown, though admittedly not a long one

HGH grenadier with dire is one of the most powerful builds imo. It is nearly unkillable and still hurts so much.

Sylentir.8913:

Reason I say that bombs don’t scale well with conditions is that
1) They scale wonderfully with power
2) They only have 2 offensive conditions, Burning and Confusion
3) Confusion isn’t especially powerful in PvE
4) Burning quickly gets overwritten/overlapped in WvW, PvE
5) Both conditions have a cooldown, though admittedly not a long one

Very literally one 1 bomb attack scales with power to any amount at all. That is the auto attack. If you sum up the entire kit as one attack, I cannot trust your logic to exclude the other skills. I can stack 10 bleeds very very easy with bombs. As smoke bomb, glue bomb, and fire bomb offer 4 opportunities a piece to add bleed ticks.

Burning only gets over written if your condition damage is low. But I do have to agree that this is certainly a weakness with conditions as a whole.

coglin.1867:

Very literally one 1 bomb attack scales with power to any amount at all. That is the auto attack. If you sum up the entire kit as one attack, I cannot trust your logic to exclude the other skills. I can stack 10 bleeds very very easy with bombs. As smoke bomb, glue bomb, and fire bomb offer 4 opportunities a piece to add bleed ticks.

Burning only gets over written if your condition damage is low. But I do have to agree that this is certainly a weakness with conditions as a whole.

1) If more than half of what you’re doing is spamming 1 skill (Autoattack), then that skill is pretty significant for discussing the scaling of the kit. Especially since two of the 5 abilities deal no damage. I’d rather rely on a spammable attack for my damage than a pair of abilities with cooldowns.

2) Why are you trying to stack bleeds with Bomb Kit? If you have the traits to stack bomb bleeds, you have the traits to stack grenade bleeds. If you can stack grenade bleeds, you’ll get a lot more bleeds. You say you can stack 10 easily with bombs; I can stack 16+ easily with grenades while stacking at least twice as much vulnerability as bombs will.

For conditions, Bombs are inferior in almost every way to Grenades. Bombs have burning which grenades don’t, but in my experience that doesn’t do much in zergs. They also have confusion, but that isn’t particularly powerful in PvE. In contrast, Grenades can stack vuln and bleeds better, have better poison uptime than bombs have Burning uptime, and have chill.

Here’s another thing to look at: While it doesn’t have to be your biggest damage skill, your autoattack is your main damage skill. Bomb AA scales much better with power than condition damage, regardless of traits supporting it.

If more than half of what you’re doing is spamming 1 skill (Autoattack) then your doing it wrong. this is where I feel your going wrong to start. It might be “okay” for corner stacking PvE dungeons, but not WvW.

I am not trying to do anything, I am succeeding at doing 75% the same direct damage as you while also doing 50% of what you are doing in bleeds, to out damage your way by 25% with the same skill.

Sylentir.8913:

For conditions, Bombs are inferior in almost every way to Grenades. Bombs have burning which grenades don’t, but in my experience that doesn’t do much in zergs. They also have confusion, but that isn’t particularly powerful in PvE. In contrast, Grenades can stack vuln and bleeds better, have better poison uptime than bombs have Burning uptime, and have chill.

The math actually favor bombs for damage.

And why do you keep hand picking one particular bomb skil for one hand picked situation and try to pass that off as a representation of the entire game mode ?

How much damage are you doing in any aspect, be it WvW, PvP, or PvE with flash grenade or freeze grenade? Poison grenade? with a full condition build, even in PvE one skill used by a mob will do more damage with confusion from concussion bomb then all 3 of those grenade skills will.

Also I rreeaallllyy got to ask. Why is it every time someone is new here and ask a question, you guys always try to make it a “I use grenades there fore, bow to my ego” discussion?

coglin.1867:

If more than half of what you’re doing is spamming 1 skill (Autoattack) then your doing it wrong. this is where I feel your going wrong to start. It might be “okay” for corner stacking PvE dungeons, but not WvW.

I am not trying to do anything, I am succeeding at doing 75% the same direct damage as you while also doing 50% of what you are doing in bleeds, to out damage your way by 25% with the same skill.

The math actually favor bombs for damage.

And why do you keep hand picking one particular bomb skil for one hand picked situation and try to pass that off as a representation of the entire game mode ?

How much damage are you doing in any aspect, be it WvW, PvP, or PvE with flash grenade or freeze grenade? Poison grenade? with a full condition build, even in PvE one skill used by a mob will do more damage with confusion from concussion bomb then all 3 of those grenade skills will.

Also I rreeaallllyy got to ask. Why is it every time someone is new here and ask a question, you guys always try to make it a “I use grenades there fore, bow to my ego” discussion?

I’ll concede that bomb spamming is not for small group battles. I was looking mainly at PvE, where incoming damage is easily mitigated. However, in large-scale zergfests where you can barely see the enemies from the lag/graphical effects, or against WvW structures, bomb #1 is a large damage tool.

What math favors bombs? I fail to see how it can compete in condition stacking with Grenades, simply due to the fact that grenades cause 3 explosions for every 1 bombs cause.

I concede with the flash and poison grenade. However, one small tidbit to take note of is that chill grenade deals greater direct damage than the autoattack. Not faulting your argument, just pointing that out.

I’m not trying to say that grenades are superior in every case, or that the best build for anything is always grenades. However, I fail to see how bombs are better for conditions than grenades. Since you’re hitting 3x as often with grenades, logic dictates that you’ll get 3x as many procs, and thus 3x as many bleeds.

I mentioned it before. Smoke bomb, Fire bomb, and Glue bomb all have the original explosion, then tic 3 times. that is 4 chances to proc on 3 of the bombs.

I run a 30/30/0/0/10, 100% condition build.

There is a reason that everyone suggest zerker gear for grenades. With Fire bomb alone it does 11k-12k damage. 8333 with just the burns, shrapnel averaging 2 bleeds at 12s a pop is 2898. just over 11,834ish damage all together if sigil of earth procs 50% of the time. I do not feel that the community gives Fire bomb, for example, credit for that amount of damage.

Then again with zerker gear this test support bombs there as well.

We’re not gonna get accurate PvE DPS until they do something with the combat log but an easy way to get a comparative view is with the Indestructible Golem in the mists. It has 80K HP on its bar and 2600 armor. I simply time how long it takes to ‘kill’ it, usually three times consecutively without pause. So 240K HP / ‘seconds to kill 3 times’ = DPS. e.g. 240,000/77=3,116 DSP for grenades.

Strictly DPS wise these numbers are from my personal testing. Done in the mists for a ‘sterile’ environment. All done with Zerker setup to simply compare DPS levels.
30/10/0/0/30 Grenades w/SD runs around ~3100 DPS
0/30/0/30/10 FT/HGH ~2100 DPS
0/30/0/20/20 FT w/EG4 and SD ~2670 DPS
*10/30/0/20/10 FT w/EG4 and SD ~3050DPS

I am sitting at 3300 DPS for Bombs
30/10/0/0/30 EG,TK,BK

Generally I’ve found that SD helps increase dps on most builds.

coglin.1867:

There is a reason that everyone suggest zerker gear for grenades.

The reason why everyone suggests Berserker gear is because direct damage > condition damage in PvE.

I’ll have to do some personal testing. I feel that the ticks of the fields that the bombs leave behind shouldn’t proc Shrapnel. If they does, that explains a lot.
From a logical point of view, only the initial attack is an explosion; the rest is aftereffects. If they are considered to be explosions too, that changes quite a bit.

DesertRose.2031:

coglin.1867:

There is a reason that everyone suggest zerker gear for grenades.

The reason why everyone suggests Berserker gear is because direct damage > condition damage in PvE.

I am well aware of that thank you. I thought that was fairly obvious when I posted the test of all the damage comparisons in zerker gear. The whole point was that in the case of zerker gear, the comparison demonstrated bombs as outperforming grenades with zerker gear.

The additional procs of bombs also trigger Steel-Packed Powder.
Which is very nice because if you run Grenade Kit you can drop Bomb Kit #2 and actually increasing your stacks of Vulnerability.

Smoke bomb (4) and glue bomb(5) can also proc multiple vulnerability with steel packed powder, not just fire bomb (2).