Guild Wars 2

Back in the day I enjoyed playing the grenade builds a lot (100 nades cheese and elixir might stacking condi nades, specifically)

Do these builds still work or is relearning required?

you really want to play hammer scrapper tbh. you can play other builds for giggles, but you’ll be gimping yourself.

without explosives nades arnt that great, and that’s just not a trait-line we have room for anymore. it’s a very boring time to be an engineer in pvp, hence why im playing Gunflame 90% of the time.

Ugh…

I really loved playing glasscannon stuff, but those just don’t seem to exist anymore, outside maybe thief. 100 nades, glass HGH, S/D Zerker oneshot ele… I guess I picked a bad time to come back.

i play glass cannon on both warrior and guardian.

it’s doable on engi too, you can definitely make marauders hammer work. however scrapper is a bruiser spec, and that’s what engineer excels at right now. we have excellent res, and very strong sustain (bonkers on menders amulet) and solid damage. so bruiser will be better, but marauders is doable too, but not with things like nades.

if i were to run marauders hammer, http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFASnUUBtoitbBepCEqilJjS8ZKgAIsfSmwi+vz79G-TJRIABg9AAA4CAUdZAU2fAA would be my go to. blast and purge gyro can be swapped out, but i feel they are the best skills for those 2 slots, but hey go out and test it yourself.

• projectiles… These will be reflected by Scrapper’s Defense Matrix (5 full seconds of point-covering aoe reflect) or Hammer 2, or Mesmer reflect or traited Warrior Shield or hit a druid wall or .. Basically, projectiles are kitten right now. Waiting 5-10 seconds to attack is a huge deal in a teamfight. 5-10 seconds of you not being able to attack is the difference between winning and watching your team lose the fight because you couldn’t do anything.
• Warriors will eat you alive with their long pulsing stability and resistance. Pistol, Rifle, and grenades were designed to use their hard & soft cc skills as survivability vs melee. You want to knockback an attacker, or blind them, then chill & immobilize to buy you some time and create distance. All of that is completely useless vs Zerker. You can’t stop them with cc. You can’t burst them dead thanks to invulns. They passively out-heal your damage while you’re running away/dodging their attacks.
• Condi clear is a problem. You need tons of it in pvp right now. 2 or 3 per 20s from Healing Turret (which takes almost a full second to cast now) is not enough. That means speccing elixirs and/or dedicating a skill slot to condi clear like elixir c or purge gyro.