Guild Wars 2

So I was thinking up different build ideas when I had a thought.

You know how Turret engis and minion necros (and to a lesser extent, spirit rangers) are just generally a giant pain? Especially if there’s two of them and they lurk on a point so you never get any attacks off?

How would pistols and a berserker build work as a counter to this kind of build?

The key would be the “Coated Bullets” trait. That makes pistol attacks pierce (which really only does anything for one and two). However, I realized what that might do to the autoattack, it blew my mind.

The pistol autoattack hits a target, bleeds them, and then explodes to do fairly wimpy AoE power damage. However, if you take Coated Bullets and shoot a tight concentration of three enemies at the right range, it will pierce through each enemy (bleeding them) and also trigger an AoE power explosion at each enemy. According to the wiki, it will also explode at the end of its path. That means that against three tightly-grouped enemies, they’d take 3-4 times the tooltip power damage, and a bleed each. This means that the pistol’s power damage would be something like 60% higher than the rifle tooltip, and it fires faster than the rifle as well.

Now, in sPvP (the only place where turret engis are even remotely effective), you’ll rarely find a nice, concentrated grouping of targets for this to pump out ridiculously OP damage. However, if a turret engi drops 4 turrets plus another 3 from supply drop, it seems like you have a nice lineup of tightly-packed targets to hit. It seems like the pistol should just absolutely shred through the turrets with its ridiculous DPS.

Problem is, I won’t be able to play the game for a week, so I can’t try this out. Itching to discuss it, though.

Has anyone tried pistol, piercing bullets, and a power build? How did it work as an AoE weapon?

Would someone try this idea out and see how it works? It would be nice to be able to demolish cheesy turret builds.

1. Coated Bullets is a stinky trait! Putting more than 10 into the Firearms tree is generally not a good idea!
2. Pistol is bad for a berserker Engi!
3. Rifle is the berserker Engi weapon and it already pierces!
4. Engineers don’t have problems fighting turret Engis, assuming you’re running a grenade build! Plus Grenades have tons of AoE and way more AoE damage output than pistol will ever have, especially on a power build!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

firstly, i dont think youll be able to fit coated bullets into a good build. youll give up either grenadier, alchemy, or tools from the meta ele rifle build. each of which is integral to the build — damage, sustain, and mobility respectively. now maybe you could swap out nades for bombs and do a 44042 build, and it could be alright. maybe.

secondly, a rifle 3/5 combo wrecks minions enough that the effort you put into LOSing them to get them nicely grouped wont be worth the time i think. as for turrets, any turret engi ever knows to place rocket turret away from the point so turrets arent gonna be nicely grouped up unless hes a terribad scrub (and after even just 1-2 games he wont be, cuz the skill floor and cap are so low).

coated bullets imo is prolly viable in dungeons, where it fits nicely into the 66002 meta builds, but as engi you have better things to do than autoattack, and the only time therell be enough mobs to really get the scaling to go bonkers… the mobs will die almost instantly anyways.

its a really good trait that entirely holds back pistol power damage all on its own. anet cant buff pistols without considering it. but it really struggles to find a niche, because its best case scenarios barely happen.

You won’t fight off a turret build just by slotting coated bullets. You’re much better off using the grenade or bomb kit to do so. If it comes to needing higher AoE pressure, those two will always win out over coated bullets. This is especially true if you’re running a power based build since the scaling for bombs and greandes will be much better than pistol.

However, coated bullets can be useful depending on the situation. In particular, I find it tends to be more useful in highly mobile situations. This is because it’s tougher to keep the enemies inside your bomb radii, and grenades can be easily avoided without dodging if they’re used from long range.

The most natural area for these situations is WvW. In fact, my goto WvW build utilizes coated bullets with a carrion/rabid mix to hybridize the damage. However, my WvW build also does not utilize bombs or grenades. Thus, coated bullets gives me a way to sort of fill in the gaps.

The other good aspect to coated bullets is that it allows me to keep pressure on a target despite other people in the way. Thus, in a zerg fight, I can constantly target the enemy’s ele even if there’s several people obfuscating them. Similarly, in smaller scale battles, mesmer clones, ranger pets, and necromancer minions won’t get in the way of your shots.

Of course, the rifle can do this by default, so if you only care about the piercing aspect, then you’re probably better off using that.

Turrets, on the other hand, don’t obstruct ranged projectiles, so you don’t need piercing to be able to keep pressure on the engineer. They’ll also tend to keep their turrets spread out around the node (particularly the rifle and rocket turrets), so you’ll not likely be able to attack them all simultaneously via piercing. You’ll need raw AoE, a la bombs and grenades.

So while coated bullets can be quite useful in some circumstances, I don’t forsee it being very useful for fighting turret builds, or really being particularly useful in sPvP in general.

Coated bullets is kitten.
Condi engi eats through mm necro and spirit ranger. Against turret celestial is probably better.