Guild Wars 2

I’ve been heavily focusing on staying mid-node in spvp with my build being 20/0/30/20/0 and a soldiers amulet. I use pistol/shield, elixir h, elixir b, elixir c, and grenades. Do you guys think it would be beneficial to try and use conditions instead of power for trying to help take/keep a position on the map?

If u are using pistol/shield, power is useless (except for your grenades). You would be better off with a 0/10/30/30/0 or 0/0/30/30/10 build using bombs or tool kit. Bombs give u knockback, condi dmg, combo fields, blind, and cripple. Tool kit gives u cripple, condi dmg, 3sec block, and 1200 range pull.

Power is geared more towards rifle builds, grenadier roamers, or offensive bomb builds.

This is my opinion of course, but hope it helps.

Definitely condition damage.
Beonebee is right by the way, bomb kit or tool kit are great.
I actually combine both kits with Elixir S or Rocket boots.

When you are in real trouble you can drop a bomb kit and use rocket boots to stealth out.
It’s only mere seconds, but the other player(s) lose focus on you for a moment, give you time to escape or heal up before re-engaging.

Elixir S is great for the invuln and quick stealth/stability.
It’s a gamble, but hell, both are powerful results.

You could use grenades instead of bomb kit, the conditions on the grenades are pretty awesome to.
Bombs take a while to go off, the grenades effects are more instant.

I’ve used elixir C in the past, but I switched it out with tool kit a while ago.
The condition remover on the medkit sorts out the really nasty stuff and I just tank out the other conditions.

I’m mostly active in WvW, but it works for sPvP just fine.
Mine is not a pure bunker build, since I tend to seek a balance between tanky and damage. Not one way or the other.

I use a combination of Carrion and Rampager gear.
Getting that balance between crit and vitality depending on the situation.
For PvP I use carrion.

I ran a few games in bomb kit and had a really hard time, granted it isn’t like you can just pick something up and excel but I did have issues. Many of my opponets would just simply kite me causing me to either give up the node or just get destroyed from distance. If I maybe drop the role of being a bunker and change to something more “roamingish” do you think Pow/Vit/Tough with grenades and elixirs would serve me well? I just don’t want to make a unreliable build, get good with it, get exotics, and then turn around a realize all these things I could’ve done better.

tldr: Is Pow/Vit/Tough a good choice for Engie

I can’t speak to your question, but if you want to go bunker with a bomb kit, you might also consider using a tool kit. Then, if you’ve got P/S, you’ve got the following options:

Toolkit 5: Pull the target to you. Cooldown: 25s
Shield 4: Reflect projectiles. Duration: 3s Cooldown: 30s
Toolkit 4: Block attacks. Duration: 2s. Cooldown: 20s

So, drop bomb -> magnet pull -> box of nails -> PRYBARTOTHEFACE -> bombbombomb. If they get out of range and try to kite you, block. Swap to P/S and poison/confuse/reflect.

Anyway, just some options.

Power/Vitality/Toughness would be fine… just not an optimal bunker imo. You could keep grenades (which u seem to prefer) but power would benefit rifle as main weapon. If you want more help on a build, I’d just need to know what it is for (spvp or wvw or pve).

I use a condition roamer build you might like… 10/30/0/30/0 with pistol/shield and rabid amulet (toughness). For utilities, you could keep grenades and use Elixir B with the third slot open to preference (probably use an elixir to take advantage of traits).

Btw… a pow/vit/tough bunker build would be something like 0/20/20/30/0 or 0/10/30/30/0 with soldier’s amulet. These builds concentrate on cc.

I play my bunker engineer with power/vit/toughness. I liked conditions, but felt I couldn’t afford the high amount of +cond duration and +cond damage to be able to use conditions effectively and still be tanky.

Bombs scale well with power and are great for area denial. I’ve also used grenades before as a semi-bunker build, but I had to give up an interrupt and some toughness. I liked it, though, and will probably play more in that role if/when the meta shifts to include more aspects than just keeping people off a capture point.

Just fyi, in many cases the pistol still scales better with power than with condition damage. So the main reason to go condition is as a bumper for your power or for cases where you’re doing conditions with a kit a lot.

KirinDave.6451:

Just fyi, in many cases the pistol still scales better with power than with condition damage. So the main reason to go condition is as a bumper for your power or for cases where you’re doing conditions with a kit a lot.

This.

It’s an oft-repeated fallacy that power does not help pistols and that they are pure condition damage weapons. Power DOES help pistols, arguably more than condition damage. Casia and some others have shown the maths in other threads.

FWIW I run full bunker P/S with bomb kit, healing turret, elixir R/C and use Power/tough/vit gear.

Previous poster was correct, bomb kit is awesome but you’ll have to switch to your main weapon often when fighting kiting, ranged classes.