Guild Wars 2

I’m looking to play an engi build in spvp/wvw that doesn’t rely on any of the major kits (FT, bomb, grenade). It’s getting a little old to play with Grenade/Bomb kit in pvp and SD doesn’t really interest me. Has anyone had any success with a primarily pistol/shield build and would like to share it?

No, you really need one kit.
Pistol/shield works really well with runes of complexity and tool kit btw.

Its really hard to use P/S without a kit. Mostly because you don’t have an offense. You have plenty of defense, but you can get more defense using kits.

I’m currently using a Pistol/Shield build (0/10 (Hair Trigger)/30 (Metal Plating|Reinforced Shield|Rifled Turret Barrels)/0/30 (Static Discharge|Leg Mods|Adrenal Implant)), with a full set of Turrets. It works surprisingly well, though I’ve never been enough of a fan of WvW to really test builds there.

The only decent no-kit builds I’m aware of are quadturret (which works with any weapon set, as long as you use all turret utilities) and HGH-Firearms, which requires P/P for conditions or Rifle for crits.

The problem with toolkit shield/pistol is that the second someone utters the word “zerker”, you are odd man out in the group >_>

Static Discharge builds work very well, though in the end you probably still will want to pick up the Toolkit because it’s awesome in PvP. Get Static Discharge, get gadgets (and Rifle Turret) in your utilities and have fun. Very basic, but decent burst.

to soak damage, definitely. to actually do damage, no, you will need a kit.

I would like to see a viable build that doesn’t need to use a kit. Rifle and pistol and shield skills are all fun and very unique with good Engi flavor. If only somehow you could build the utility traits to be enough with the weapons to not need more kit skills…

the problem:
in pve, its faster/better to aoe everything. our weapon sets have slow line aoes, not circles. therefore our aoe is situational. our kits have circle/cone aoes.
in pvp, tool kit is overloaded on utility, and not taking it is usually just hurting yourself.

they had to buff turrets a lot to make them competitive with kits.. and they still have little use in dungeons and pve zergs. theyre only viable in small fights, when the other person (people) is thinking more about you than your turrets.

gadgets and elixirs dont do enough compared to kits either to want a full 4 utilities dedicated to them when even just 1 slot for a kit would make your build sooooooo much better.