Guild Wars 2

So I’m a bit new to the Engineer, had some extra gold so Crafted up one to about 70ish to get a feel of the class.

Super simple question, I keep reading a lot that Rifles are the only weapon that benefits from Power and it confuses me a bit (I thought all weapons in this game did?)

Do pistols only benefit from condition damage than or is there some otherwise flaw in this weapon? (Or have I mis-understood the context in which the Rifle statements were being made)

I am liking P/P or P/S a lot and want to stick with it so was a bit curious.

P\P with power and precision are fine. Their skills are much more usable in real world.
It really depends on what are you’re trying to achieve wih engi.

Power pistol works but it’s strange. You’re hitting for less, but you attack much faster.

Pistol is affected by both power and condition. Power affects the initial damage done by each skill, which compared to rifle is lower. Pistols however also have condition damage after the initial hit with the bleeds, burns, and poisons, so a big portion comes from that. The condition portion of the damage is not affected by power, so it is only half as useful for the most part.

Numot.3965:

Power pistol works but it’s strange. You’re hitting for less, but you attack much faster.

How’s that? I don’t think power makes you attack faster.

Zidijan.4826:

How’s that? I don’t think power makes you attack faster.

The thing is, p\p have 4 damage skills with low CDs and they are good for any combat situation.

Rifle have 2 main damage skills and one of them is autoattack. So overally you have a faster “rotation” with p\p than with rifle.

Basically builds focusing on rifle generally want more power+precision+critical while builds focusing on pistols generally want more condition damage/duration. This is not compulsory but is more efficient because if you look at the pistol skills, almost all of them do condition damage. You should take note most high lvl engineers rely on turrets or kits. For now try your skills & kits and decide what works best or is fun for you.

I have used power/pre/crit gear with pistols, it works just fine. In fact there are several threads floating around with some numbers to make a claim that power/crit scales vastly better for most engineer weapons and kits than condition dmg does. Even for things like the elixir gun yes it has bleed on aa and a weak poison application but the #2 and #4 skills scale extremely well with power. The bleeds from pistol are relatively short duration from the aa, yes you can get a trait for bleed on crit and a sigil but the fact of the matter is there are other professions that can simply stack conditions faster and better than a engi can. We do have access to great amounts of burn but because of the way conditions work in this game on any large event boss or dungeon you are unlikely to see full benefit from going into a condition build since so many other classes have conditions applied to their attacks as well. Of course there is also the issue of environmental objects which condition dmg is horrible against. This is not to say that condition builds don’t have their merit of course, but because of the way conditions have been handled with caps and duration increase vs intensity often times it seems to come up short against running direct dmg. In the end though it comes down to want you want to play. Unless you run a complete elixir/pistol or rifle/toolbelt only build you will be switching out to kits frequently anyhow.

be careful with condition duration as dmg is only applied for every full second and as (most) conditions are short duration a lot of points/runes have to be used to make it effective. being crafted 70 you should have enough sp for all the useful stuff. ’Geers can do fair enough damage but its our versatility that makes us awesome