Guild Wars 2

Well firstly, I am sorta new, I played GW2 when it first came out but my machine wasn’t very good, and got to maybe level 30 on my warrior.

I returned a few days ago, and figured since I havent played this in so long, I’d start from scratch and re-learn the mechanics of the game, etc etc.

Been trying out some classes, but this Engineer class seems so – slow in terms of damage. I only just hit level 15, but my rogue, warrior, ranger, guardian at the same levels kill faster and stay alive better.

Let me be clear here, I am not saying the class is bad, I am saying the player (me) is bad at playing this class specifically. There is a lot about the game and its mechanics I just do not know yet.

But help a newb out, I was reading the grenades is the best of one of the best DPS options.

At my level, I have the grenade kit, but number 1 doesnt auto atttack, I have to manually spam it, unlike the other classes, and its damage seems lower then others too.

But my question at this point in time, is how do I play, am I supposed to spam 1 and use my 2 and 4 abilities off of CD? Because that seems to get me killed / can’t seem to kill fast enough.

Or, should I open with my rifle, then weap swap to the grenades use those CDs then flip back to Rifle? Just a general guide on how people typically play this because at the moment I am kind of frustrated, but it seems like such a fun and engaging class at the same time.

Thanks

My main is an engineer and if you need help I am always willing to show ingame my own combos and setups for new engineer players. I also have a decent understanding of other classes and what works and what doesn’t work vs them.

The thing about engineers is that we have kits available to us. Each one of those kits has 1 or 2 abilities that hit absurdly hard, and to balance that damage out, the auto attacks don’t really do a whole lot. At early levels, when you don’t have a bunch of kits unlocked yet, this is particularly problematic since you have to rely on your relatively weak auto attacks much more.

The skills you want to try to use in PvE while leveling are:
Rifle – Blunderbuss and Jumpshot (at close range)
Grenade Kit – Shrapnel Grenade, Grenade Barrage
Elixir Gun – Acid Bomb
Flamethrower – Flame Blast w/ detonation, Incendiary Ammo
Toolkit – Prybar

Condition damage setups
Bomb Kit – Fire Bomb
Pistol – Blowtorch

Almost all of your other abilities hit for pretty low damage. The Grenade and Bomb auto attacks are your best bet as filler damage as you are leveling.

Frankly, I don’t much recommend grenades without a gaming mouse. They’re only good when you can spam them at maximum frequency, which is pretty unwieldy while moving and hitting the number keys, and if you’re the type of person that clicks the skill on the bar and then the ground, you’ll never be able to use them fast enough while whipping the mouse between the grenade button and your target.

I have the 1-5 skills mapped to my side keys with fast ground targeting, so basically whenever I click the ground with my side button I toss grenades on it.

Either way, the strength of grenades is due to the fact that they multi-hit and have an obscenely high rate of triggering “On hit” and “on crit” traits and sigils.
You get very few of those things at low levels so grenades are meh until you’re at least level 50 or so. Even then, it’s not until 80 that you really see the DPS from them.

When I was leveling my engie, I actually found Rifle Turret, Rocket Turret, and Thumper Turret somewhat helpful while solo because they’d aggro some of the mobs off of me and do some extra damage. But turrets have been nerfed so there’s even less situations where they’re useful. But it might be handy to keep in mind anyway. Rocket turret in particular does very good damage against objects, which is usually a problem for engies, so if you need to break a door down fast you might want to take it out.

Engie is one of those classes that doesn’t really shine until you get most of your skills and traits. Mesmer has the same problem.

I would agree with Arioso. An an engi, you really do need your traits in order to make your kits do what they are supposed to do. Engi is definitely not a brute force class. We will never be like a warrior, “Guys, I hit my greatsword 2 skill and the whole map is dead now.” We can kill, but we do it with style. The thing I love about my engineer is I can do so many things with it. However, in order to do any of those things, specialization into traits, skills, and gear is needed.

In my own experience, I’ve found that FT and Bomb Kit do the most damage when you are leveling and have no to minimal trait lines unlocked and no other way to really supplement your damage. Before you get to 21 and then 45, look ahead on the wiki, see what the traits do, see what kits you think you might want to use. Spend your hero points toward those trait lines and skills so when the time comes that you can unlock them they are set to go.

As Frightlight said, if you see me online, give me a pm. A lot of us are more than willing to help.

Open world PVE? Run bomb kit. Seriously, I had an easy on engineer since I could kite melee mobs while their dumb AIs kept running into the bombs that I dropped behind. And those bombs hit for pretty good damage. Against ranged enemies, I just ran circles around them dropping bombs while the melee mobs followed me around.

Tips for new players:

With Rifle you have access to Immobilize, you can run up shoot that out, toss your Grenade Barrage, equip grenade kit and throw a shrapnel grenade and honestly a lot of stuff will be just about dead, if not follow up with Freeze and Poison grenades, maybe drop kit and follow up with a blunderbuss and jump shot.

Second tip would be to learn to use blinds, with Bomb kit you get smoke bomb, it’s sweet, you get a few seconds where enemies will “miss” you giving you basically invulnerability (note many bosses are basically immune to that tactic), you also have Flash something on Mortar kit for another blind field, great stuff. you have Flash grenades on that kit, the 5 skill on FT, the 3 skill on pistol, just a lot of it available. It’ll take hits away and give you more time to damage without a concern for avoiding that hit.

Probably the two best tips I can give, rest would be more general. But, like said above, use your big hitters as much as possible, use these defensive techniques to give you seconds of safety in order to get those out without concern.

in the options menu, theres a dropdown menu for aoe ground targeting, select “fast cast with range indicator”. there is a check box for limiting your ground target to snap to max range when your cursor moves past max range, check that. turn off the melee target assist checkbox. autotargeting is kind of up to your preference, but its enabled by default and generally gets in your way when fighting things that stealth, so i normally leave it off. if possible, enable free camera (it takes some getting used to but as long as you arent clicking your skills its gonna be a much better option than not using it). besides that, comfortable keybinds and a gaming mouse are your best friends.

these options generally make high level engi play much more accessible and may be related to why grenades feel bad to you, but yes you are gonna have to push a button every time you wanna toss a grenade and manually target with them.

Grenades are very strong, but there are many strong options as an Engineer.

You’ll probably find that grenades shine most in group settings, although since you’re new I highly suggest you try Bomb kit in place of it. Bombs typically do more damage, have better aoe and also bring a lot of utility that helps you deal with multiple mobs at once.

Grenades are a pain to use sometimes if you aren’t used to it, and as suggested by many, a gaming mouse or rebinding helps. In your general options you can turn on a fast casting setting to your liking so you reduce the amount of key presses required.

You can also go for a condi build, utilizing grenades/bombs/flamethrower or an any combination that has a lot of burning. This yields great results without requiring as much work as a power build, as power builds are slightly more complicated when you’re starting out.

Rifle for power builds, pistol/pistol for condi builds. Offhand pistol is better than shield because the burning far outweighs the defense you get.

If you have any questions, PM Kluzu in-game.
I’ll teach you and walk you through everything you could ever imagine on Engineer.

Ah yes us engineers are prob the most friendly players in gw2

VisualDeadlock.2163:

quote

To answer your question quickly, yep, just spamming 1-2 attacks will get you killed quickly, particularly with engineer. So in order to survive as one you will have to swap to other kits/abilities quickly to get access to various conditions, fields and ways to mitigate the damage coming toward you. Likewise these same fields can be used offensively by firing projectiles through them for various effects or simply standing in them/coaxing mobs into it to suffer the effects.

Look for access to blinds and use your environment to your advantage (corners of buildings/structures/around trees etc), the engineer has a lot of access to blind fields and aoe that can really help, as the majority of the mobs damage can be mitigated this way. Something like this perhaps would be good to take advantage of blind;

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFAUlUUhqqYJWwPLQ7FA-e

That’s just the skills, don’t worry too much about traits at this point, and for armor, go straight for vitality so you have a decent health buffer as you learn engi, throwing in armor with Power as you become more confident with it.

Its difficult to learn anything if you just get one shot off the bat because of very little HP.

Overcharged Flame turret is a pulsing smoke field, Grenade kit #3 is a blind, Bombkit #4 is another pulsing smoke field, and later onward once you get access to elites, mortar kit has another pulsing blindfield on its #4.

You could also go condition damage later on too, grenade/bomb/FT turret can take advantage of condition damage a lot via burning stacks (poison/bleed for grenade) but it takes a little getting use to as conditions are damage over time whereas Power is straight up damage as fast as you can cycle cooldowns which as you alluded to toward the end of your post is actually how engineer is usually played – cycling cooldowns out through every kit including your main weapon set.

Note the difference however that Power is mitigated by a mobs toughness, but condition damage /bypasses/ toughness.

If you’re not dealing with too many mobs at once and its just a single mob or two giving you grief, consider swapping out flame turret for the flame thrower kit, it’s got a few significant differences;

- its auto attack isn’t something to yell about but its great for tagging enemies when say you’re at a big event.

- has a very hard hitting #2 that finishes off as a blast, combine this with your healing turret toolbelt Regenerative Mist for a quick top up of health on the move if your healing turret is on cooldown. Outside of that, when you fire the glob at an enemy, wait for it to JUST pass through the enemy then detonate it right behind them to get the most out of it.

- pushes enemies back and extends their burning duration by 2 seconds on #3

- produces a fire field in a line on #4 (try to keep mobs on this field, #3 will help you with this if positioning is not easy)

- single AoE blind on its #5, see an enemy about to wallop you? trigger it to on-demand cause that attack to miss, lifesaver if you run out of endurance/dodges, can even be swapped to and used while being stunned/ragdolled around!

- The toolbelt ability doesn’t seem like much but currently at endgame plays a significant role in getting insane damaging ticks with burning, but for the moment its still very nice supplemental damage (even when using power) when dealing with a tough mob.

Other alternative setups could be..

Healing Turret / Flame Thrower Kit / Flame Turret / Bomb Kit / Mortar Kit (if you dont like having RSI with throwing grenades constantly)

Healing Turret / Flame Turret / Elixer U / Bomb Kit / Mortar Kit – Elixer U’s toolbelt has 2 possibilities, it can come out as a smokewall which blinds (and destroys enemy projectiles!) or a reflect wall, which while doesn’t blind, causes enemies to get their shots reflected back at them (and since they generally deal a lot of damage you can make short work of them). Elixir U itself helps with getting through your rotations quickly as well.

.. And many more, one thing you’ll quickly realize I think with engineer is that they’re incredibly versatile, which is a blessing and a curse, you can cover all sorts of gaps but in order to be effective you will find yourself changing your build/swapping abilities around a lot to actually get a decent amount of damage going and mitigating damage dealt to yourself.

Some other bits for food for thought;

Net Turret paired with rifle is a lot of immobilization spam with an overcharge stun, excellent for dealing with that one really tough or high damage melee mob like warrior and thief types, Net Turret toolbelt is also a second rifle #2.

Toolkit is incredibly useful, magnetize particularly is unique in that if you need to ‘peel’ a mob or simply bring it into your fields/killzone, that will help you do it. Toolkits Auto Attack hits very hard in power builds as well as crippling foes hit by it, on top of that nailbox for more cripple/bleeds and prybar is the toolkits nuke. Gear Shield will buy you time for cool downs to come back up when things get too hot.

I hope this helps, if you have any other questions please feel free to ask.

Just go bombs to level.

Its the one kit you can use the whole time and it melts groups(the game AI will sit in your blasts and bombs auto attack is great) by the time smoke bomb wears off the packs of mobs will be dead. Choose power gear.(you will also learn how combo fields work using this kit).
Then grab mobility and survivability skills and leave all other stuff till 80 because the class is about using our ability to change weaponsets with no cooldown (kits) which no other class gets. That means we cherry pick the best skills off each kit we use and trait those skills. You wont get to do this properly till late in the game.

Awesome thank you all for the replies and taking the time. The GW2 community seems a lot nicer and willing to help then some other certain will not be named MMOs.

During leveling, although not strictly needed, I am swapping between kits to throw down my big hitters just to see if I can get used to it. Doing okay, but seems more effort for little less reward then other classes.

How is dual pistols, I really like the idea of dual wielding and the abilities seem decent too, esp blow torch and incen ammo. I guess in the mean time, before level cap, it doesnt matter so much. So i can open with pistols and maybe switch to Grenades, or FT if I wanted to change things up. I can see how the rotation in dungeon or raid play can be complex though at higher levels (not specific to Pistols vs Rifles but in general)

Dual pistols is ok as the burn condition is pretty strong.
I actually run dual pistols and rocket boots as the toolbelt skill has 3 burn stacks, so you can get at least 6 burns in a frontal cone which kills things pretty easily and they are on a very similar CD. Boots also make you pretty mobile so its enjoyable dps and agile. At 80 u can push it to about 8 burns(with IP) which ticks for about 3k damage per tick (using carrion pvp set). Its very nice and a lot easier to pull off than using flamethrower.
If burns get nerfed then this all goes out the window obviously. Most of us used pistol and shield previously as it has a ton of utility. Blowtorch is just great in the current state of the game and i can finally run about with 2 pistols out
As a condition its also pretty strong even if you dont have the gear for it so its probably pretty good for levelling.

Pistol is a condition weapon, only used in power-builds if Shield is taken (rare for pve), as Rifle has #3 and #5 skills which are hard-hitting.
Another thing is that off-hand pistol’s #4 is a “bit buggy”, most of the time misses the enemy (maybe not so much in pve, but in pvp it’s almost impossible to hit someone with it).
If you want to rotate some kits, a (melee-range) Rifle 3 – 5 → FT – 2 → Bomb AA spam is something which maybe is more dps than simple Bomb AA spamming.

But yes, Engi’s using more keys than your average class for the same dps (maybe spammish Dagger-Dagger Ele is the same).

The whole Grenadekit is great. Even the Freezing Grenade and Poison Grenade hit very hard.
No matter how you build your character the Grenadekit has the damage. Unlock that and you should notice a spike in damage, and survivability thanks to blinds and chills.

But as an Engineer you have pretty bad autoattacks. You need to swap kits and use abilities like that to deal anywhere close to decent damage.

You cannot compare it to a Warrior who can quite happily autoattack his wayo to lv80 and by admission of the devs is quite a simple profession. Same goes for Thief and Guardian, not exactly difficult.

Yeah Im starting to get a hang of it, at least a newb understanding. Using DW Pistols which I think looks cool and is fun. Levelling wise in term of equal level mobs at 17 or so, I dont need to swap out my kit yet for single target. Pistol spam, Incendiary shot (that thing is great), let them get close, blowtorch, and kabam. I suspect will need to adjust accordingly once I hit more mobs AOE and higher level mobs in general.

Fun class, I quite enjoy it, if ya take the time to figure it out.

Oh – is going precision bad? I like the idea of crit, but seems most folks recommend Power and Condition dmg.

VisualDeadlock.2163:

Yeah Im starting to get a hang of it, at least a newb understanding. Using DW Pistols which I think looks cool and is fun. Levelling wise in term of equal level mobs at 17 or so, I dont need to swap out my kit yet for single target. Pistol spam, Incendiary shot (that thing is great), let them get close, blowtorch, and kabam. I suspect will need to adjust accordingly once I hit more mobs AOE and higher level mobs in general.

Fun class, I quite enjoy it, if ya take the time to figure it out.

Oh – is going precision bad? I like the idea of crit, but seems most folks recommend Power and Condition dmg.

With dual pistols, get condition damage over power. Also, flamethrower for extra burning with incendiary ammo, etc.

Personally, I prefer power/crit with rifle and grenades, but my brother prefers condition with p/p and flamethrower because of how out of hand burning is at the moment.

Edit: with a condition build like pistol/pistol, you don’t want ferocity and you only want precision if you have traits or sigils that give something useful on crits (for example, incendiary powder).

At any rate, perhaps the reason you’re having difficulty is because engineer is not an easy class to pick up, nor is it particularly good at low levels. At high levels (and in PvP), it’s quite strong and extremely versatile.

Take note of Rifle 3 and Rifle 5, Flamethrower 2 and Grenades these are gonna be your best friend if you want some burst damage

We may seem to lack dps but we can actually dish out tons of damage with the right rotation ( yes it includes a lot of KIT SWITCHING and BUTTON SMASHING ) mainly i use 4 kits on my engie, Grenades, Flamethrower, Bomb Kit and Mortart Kit while using a Rifle

you may need to get used to the Grenade spamming like “1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,3,4,4,4,five,five,five”

Precision is quite excellent for Engi!

Feel free to explore builds on your engineer as you progress ~

VisualDeadlock.2163:

Yeah Im starting to get a hang of it, at least a newb understanding. Using DW Pistols which I think looks cool and is fun. Levelling wise in term of equal level mobs at 17 or so, I dont need to swap out my kit yet for single target. Pistol spam, Incendiary shot (that thing is great), let them get close, blowtorch, and kabam. I suspect will need to adjust accordingly once I hit more mobs AOE and higher level mobs in general.

Fun class, I quite enjoy it, if ya take the time to figure it out.

Oh – is going precision bad? I like the idea of crit, but seems most folks recommend Power and Condition dmg.

If your going down Firearms you can get a decent amount of crit anyway from the traits and fury. You just need about 30% crit to enable the traits to snowball into lots of crit and IP procs.
So dont go overboard but it cant hurt either. 30% crit is fine and functions great if you have Firearms traited. I am forced to play with a tiny 4% crit in pvp due to the way stats are set up and i miss my crit terribly compared to how it is in wvw and the open world.

As others have said, Engi is not meant to stay in any one kit for long. This includes weapons. Your #1-5 skills should be constantly changing, more than any other profession in the game.

And yeah, grenade auto is painful (sometimes literally) but bind it to a mouse button. Even if you don’t have a fancy gaming mouse you probably have at least the back/forward buttons on the side use one of those.

Use rifle, at least for leveling. It’s faster because power is a lot better before 80.

As for kits, the pve standard is grenade, elixir gun, flamethrower. Your highest damaging skills are rifle 3 and 5, grenade toolbelt+2 and 4, elixir gun 4, flamethrower 2. Try to use those as much as possible.

Use fast targeting to aim grenades. Spam grenade auto if everything else is on cooldown but that’s rarely the case with engineer.

Edit: You don’t need a gaming mouse. You won’t press that 1 button more than 3-4 times in a row anyway.

robertul.3679:

Your highest damaging skills are rifle 3 and 5, grenade toolbelt+2 and 4, elixir gun 4, flamethrower 2.

Add grenade 5 to that list. Since the last patch poison grenade does the same direct damage as freeze grenade (and additional condition damage ofc…).

And it’s never to early to start using your numerous blasts and fields. Blasting your bomb 2 or flamethrower 4 with flamethrower 2 / elixirgun 4 for example produces might stacks while using your heavy hitting attacks.

I dont really understand how these combo field and finishers work. I went and googled it but not sure if I am doing it right. Can you do a combo field generator thing with one toolkit and then swap to another and use its finisher move to generate a combo ?

I just hopped onto my Engineer and tried Napalm (that fire wall thing) switched to my pistol and used fragmentation shot thru it. Wasn’t targeting a mob or anything was just doing it in the environment, but nothing special seemed to have happened. Like how do you know if you successfully did a combo?

Regarding Flame blast, when I use the ability, it seems to have 2 states, one when I use it and it rolls out a ball, then if I press it again before it hits the mobs it detonates. Based on what Oooops said above, does that mean this “finisher” has two ways to activate?

1 – Flame blast then press flame blast again to detonate

or

2 – Napalm wall then napalm ball to hit the wall and this would also cause the detonation finisher?

EDIT: Ok got it to work. First I misunderstood, and thought that the finisher gave extra damage or something, upon research I see it gives an AoE might buff. But I had to have the fire wall right in front of me with the mob standing in it AND I had to detonate the napalm myself (I thought the napalm just had to roll through it and I didnt need to detonate the napalm myself). Does that seem about right? Maybe in PVE with someone else having aggro, I can throw the fire wall where the mob is and napalm would go there and explode without me having to detonate it myself.

Projectile finisher using Fragmentation shot from pistol. Can the bullet just pass through the fire wall and have its 20% chance or same thing, I need to have the mob standing in the fire wall before shooting it?

Sorry for all the questions.

Combos occur when you execute a finisher in a field. You will get the combo visual cue if you either provided the field, the finisher or both and it’s a floaty heart split in 2 parts of brown shades. The first field set down takes priority over others used afterwards, until it expires obviously.

Most important fields are fire, water, smoke but you shouldn’t neglect the others either.

Most important/common finishers are blast and leap. Projectile is also very common, often in the 20% chance form like the pistol auto, but it’s not as relevant. Whirl finisher is basically a point blank aoe consisting of multiple projectile finishers.

Yes, you have to detonate the napalm(skill2) on flamethrower to get the blast finisher. Ideally you want to detonate after it first deals damage by passing through the enemy but the skill is already buggy as it is so just spam 2 and detonate instantly. Avoid aiming downwards or it bugs and goes through the floor.

Oh and keep in mind that blast finishers have a 360 radius(small) so you have to be close to gain the benefits.

Engineer has access to fire, ice, light, smoke, poison, water, lightning and ethereal which is 8/9 total. That’s pretty good. Ethereal and lightning are however restricted to a trait and elixir x rng. Also amazing access to blast finishers.

Ooops.8694:

Add grenade 5 to that list. Since the last patch poison grenade does the same direct damage as freeze grenade (and additional condition damage ofc…).

VisualDeadlock.2163:

I dont really understand how these combo field and finishers work.

You create a Combo Field first, then use a Combo Finisher on/through it, triggering the listed effects.
Blasts are AoE
Leaps are Auras/Personal gain/Additional effect for your attack
Projectiles are a lot of time with 20% chance to trigger and the effect works on you/player around your target which was hit.
Whirls are similar to projectiles, almost every whirl finisher shoots the projectile finishers’ effect in random directions, that’s why mostly used in melee-range.

You don’t have to have a target to use (a lot of) skills, and if you turn off Autotarget (which is really bad for some skills, like Leaps.. You want to leap a lot of time without a target, but if you have Autotarget On, it’ll search a target for you and leap in that direction..), you can just shoot FT #2 to your #4 and detonate it (press 2 again) when it’s “really close” to the line of firefield. Easier to do with Bomb #2 which has a nice big AoE to blast.

Another thing you can try is disabling Melee-assist. If it’s on, you can’t walk through enemies while attacking, which is annoying.. You can just walk inside the enemy and use the attack just fine, and some whirling attacks are even hitting more this way (like Guard’s GS Spin-To-Win #2).

If you want to check how they work, the most common blast finisher is maybe your Healing Turret’s F1 skill Detonate Turret. If you just stay inside the field, put down the turret then detonate, it’ll trigger a Blast finisher, showing you the effect. Or you can use shield and double-tap #4.
For Leaps, I would say Rifle #5. It seems like a blast, but it is a leap finisher, and a targeted one at that, so it’s easy to test with.
Projectile/Whirl finishers are rarely used for a reason, most of the time it just happens and none really care. The 20% chance makes it hard to count on it for a build, and just a few skills have 100% (on your engi).

The engineer is a micro-heavy class. Even autoattacks in some cases. Think it through whether you want such class. It’s very fun and interesting but you need to switch in and out of kits a lot and feel cooldowns and skills.

Hey there!

You won’t regret getting into engi, it’s the funniest class to play (beware: you’ll get addicted and everything else will feel boring, or at least this is what happens to me now).

I had a friend leveling an engi not so long ago and I’ll tell you what I told him: p/p with bombs and rocket boots is probably the best way to levelup. Rocket boots is THE skill for what concerns mobility on engi and it is simply a must have while leveling, it’ll get you through the map a lot faster. Your damage will come mostly from bombs, mobs will never get out of your aoe so just drop a fire bomb and watch them melt.

Gearwise, try to prioritize condition damage and then power.

As for the third utility, there are a lot of choices. Depending on what you feel you can choose flamethrower for a lot more burn, blind and some blast finishers, or toolkit for its 3s block which can get you those three seconds that you need to get your healing turret off cd when fighting a veteran or when you get kittened by mobs.

This might seem like a silly question, but does all your gear have the + power stat to it? Also, when I leveled I would buy a bunch of https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Roasted_Meaty_Sandwich which are really cheap to get to use.

I think the #1 issue that troubles new players for pve is just not picking the right stat (which is generally power before you hit 80) . The other is not dodging.

You should also use “fast ground targeting” so it’s easier to use grenades and also “lock ground target at close to max range” so you don’t get out of range errors when you try targeting too far away. But for the most part you shouldn’t have to use nades. Rifle 3 Rifle 5, and grenade barrage should damage the enemies enough for you to just finish off with autoattacks. If that’s giving you trouble, use rifle 2 to stop the enemies from moving.