Pretty much what ellesee said. Kits are your bread and butter. The only elixir I find useful is Elixir-S. I stay away from gadgets as they are useless to my play style. Turrets are sometimes useful, but it highly depends on the situation. However, Healing Turret is a must. It’s the gravy train of all healing abilities. You should still try everything for fun, but you’ll find kits extremely useful. I’ll add the following.
1. If you haven’t already, optimize your key bindings. The engineer requires a lot of finger work to maximize his potential. You cannot do that using the standard bindings. To give you an example, this is my setup.
i) W, S, A, D for movement.
ii) Shift + Q, E, A, or D to activate one of my 4 toolbelt skills
iii) Q, E, Z, X, C to activate my 6→0 skills
Everything is nice and tight and I can quickly pull off combos.
2. Elixir Gun Acid Bomb can be interrupted by switching to your primary weapon while leaping. Practice this because it allows you to use the ability in tight places where you would leap off a cliff if you did nothing. IMO EG is the most important kit. It gives you a stun breaker, extra AOE heal, condition removal, and a nice powerful Acid Bomb. It’s always on my skill-bar.
3. If you want to steam-roll, I find the best setup is Bomb Kit + Elixir Gun + Elixir-S. The last 2 are mainly for survivability. EG Acid Bomb does pretty good damage while at the same time your bombs are going off.
Hint: Use Fire Bomb first, then EG Acid Bomb for might stack on blast finisher. Use tip #2 to stop the Acid Bomb leap immediately and start planting bombs again.
4. If you want to farm mobs, if there’s a zerg hogging all the kills, switch Bomb Kit to Flamethrower. You now just converted into a money making machine. Use Napalm and Acid Bomb for might stack and AOEs. Also, Flame Blast is now a blast finisher, so you can use that in addition to Napalm to get your might stacks up. Traits Juggernaut and Deadly Mixture go well with the FT. I usually go 0/4/4/6/0 setup with FT builds. More boon duration = more might stacks. I also have runes of the traveller so I get +15% boon duration and 25% running speed. Runes of strength would also work, but either way this is all level 80 talk.
5. I’m not crazy about grenades. I don’t kill things as quickly as I do with the bomb kit and it’s more of a chore kitting mobs, or people. So for leveling purposes I would put a stronger focus on getting Bomb Kit and Elixir Gun first, then Flamethrower next if the zerg is hogging your kills.
6. For weapon loadout, I play pistol + pistol almost all the time. Static shot is great for blinding (confusion proc is to short of a duration to care), poison volley great for interrupting heals, blowtorch great for AOE damage, and glue shot is a decent AOE immobolizer. I’m not crazy about shields. They slow me down and the Reinforced Shield trait does not apply with kits, so it’s ‘meh’.
7. With the new levelling system, you’ll probably find the engineer pretty hard/boring to work with as you’re locked to a single weapon and you need levels + skills to unlock. Once you unlock two skills and have some kits, it should start to get more interesting. At first, I would probably unlock Rifle Turret to help provide extra damage to get you levelled up quicker.
