Guild Wars 2

WARNING!!! Long post incoming!
For the non-readers out there you can find the build here : http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFASncoCtbh1XB+dBEqiF2iiu5H+lHcEPxAQsjminA-TJBHABBcBAA4BAU++DJVGAA).
I strongly suggest you read my post first though or you might think me insane!

Hello there everyone!

I am finally ready and proud to share a this Scrapper PvP build with you guys! After some testing and a little selfishness in keeping it to myself I now present you to…

The Rocketeer!

For those of you that remember the short reign of celestial engineer which was then succeeded by soldiers rifle engineer, this build will feel very remiscent of that gameplay with better sustain, similar CC and slightly less pressure this build is an extreme amount of fun and surprisingly effective.
I have managed to get similar results to the metabuild thanks to its amazing mobility which can be used to disegange at a moments notice.

Traits!

Scrapper :
Perfectly weighted.
Rapid regeneration.
Final Salvo.

As with the metabuild this provides a crazy amount of sustain and decent damage output.

Alchemy :

Protection injection.
Self-regulating Defenses.
HGH.

I know what you are thinking at this point! “But Novuake, this is so cliche, nothing unique you scrub!” But “wait!” I say! “There is more and the best for last my grandma always said.” Techincally it was “Los die beste vir laaste” but I doubt any of you would understand that!

Firearms :

Wait what… Yeah you heard me!

High Caliber.
No scope.
Incendiary Powder.

Now here comes a lengthy explanation so buckle up!

By going firearms I am able to achieve a 40% crit chance by without touching precision, this becomes important as you will see later.
“WHERE is this” you ask?
No scope gives very high fury uptime with the alchemy traitline. You will pretty much have it up 24/7 without a single person helping you stack it.
High Caliber gives 10% to targets with in a certain range, we are using hammer, so HELL YEAH!
Hematic focus gives another 10% when foes are bleeding, sharpshooter and elixir gun auto will be giving us the bleeding!

Amulets

This is where things get a little more tough, originally this build was tested using Mercenaries(power, condi mainstat and toughness, vital secondary), this worked well due to its high defensive nature while having good pressure.
Ideally I would have liked to use celestial stats(obviously) and alternatively I would love a NEW statset using power and condi mainstat and precision plus either toughness or vitality as secondary.
But it is what it is. So we are stuck with…

Carrion. Yes this isn’t ideal as I would have liked power to mainstat and condi as secondary but so be it, maybe we get a new amulet soon.

Alternatively you can go full offensive and hopefully not blow up by going vipers.

Sigils

Intelegence, IMPORTANT!
Doom/Geomancy/Blood/leeching. Flexible. Most effective for me in the order given.

Runes
Leadership.

This is another semi flexible one, Hoelbrak works too.

• Weapon – Hammer**

Heal – Medic Gyro
Healing turret doesn’t make as much sense here especially if you are running leadership runes with their 6th bonus.

Utilities

Rocket boots – yes you heard me! Just you wait!
Elixir S. Flexible depending if you are facing a power heavy comp or not. Alternatives include Blast tag gyro, Elixir C, Bullwark Gyro or if you are brave Flamethrower(not advisable for the feint of heart) for more condi pressure and situational utility.
Elixir Gun for oh so many reasons ill get into in the coming gameplay section!

Elite

Sneak Gyro. Although any elite besides supply crate will work just fine depending on your preference. The Gyro does however have the best synergy with the build.

Gameplay and reasoning

This is the fun part! WAHOO!

While this build has slightly less power based damage than the current meta scrapper it more than makes up for it in constant condition application, mostly bleeding and burning, these are provided by firearms crits and elixir gun!

For example an absolutely amazing engage combo goes like this :

Start in elixir gun, auto your target to apply bleeding to benefit from Hematic Focus and put yourself in combat as you close the distance.
Swap to hammer, rocket charge. This procs intelligence sigil and will immediately proc all your different condi pressure in one combo. Burning from Incendiary Powder(IP), doom sigil and a good chance at proccing Sharpshooter.
As they cleanse the conditions you roll into thunderclap followed by rocket kick which applies an amazing 3 stacks of burning for 5seconds. Incidentally this skill also has a decent power scale of 1 and has a mere 15second cooldown.

So between the 10second ICD of IP and the 15 second rocket kick you can apply a scary amount of pressure.

Some further combos can be devised but I will leave that to you to experiment!

The build also excells at escaping hairy situations with double elixir S, rocket boots which is on a low 20 second cooldown, elixir gun 4 leap and Sneak gyro.

Keep in mind that rocket boots is yet another blast at engineers disposal allowing you to sustain by blasting the F1 toolbelt or gaining swiftness by blasting thunderclap.

Use thunderclap + rocket boots to gain amazing mobility despite overall low swiftness uptime and no passive movement buff as with the meta build.

It is extremely important that you learn how to manage intelligence sigil effectively, using it on CD is extremely important as well as what skills to use it on, the following are good choices to get the gaurenteed crit on : Acid Bomb, Thunderclap, rocket charge.
A lot of your pressure will come from this sigil.

I am pretty sure that if a more suitable (power, condi main, precision vital/toughenss secondary) amulet is released this build could become one of the strongest in engineers kitten nal. Not that its by any means a slouch right now.

Well everyone that made it this far, thanks and I hope you enjoy the build as much as I have.
Feel free to criticise or ask any questions you might have!

As someone mentioned on reddit sages actually provides a better stat spread to what i wanted with this build.
Sages.
Somehow didn’t consider it but its definitely better.

Since it seems like you put alot of effort into this, I am sorry to say that I don’t like your build.

Why? You are losing maradeurs crit chance and crit damage just to get a part of the crit chance back by swapping the awesome inventions trait line with firearms. Still dealing less direct damage due to the missing ferocity but gaining some condition damage – without conditions. Sure you have 5 stacks of burning with 50% uptime and some bleed from auto attack of EG… come on you know it better! That’s never worth any point in condition damage.

However, you lose alot of sustian by dropping the invention trait line with bunker down (which also provides a solid point damage with the mines…), a second emergency heal and alot of regeneration plus a conditions cleanse for you and your allies.

Additional you are swapping out bulwark gyro for rocket boots – to give your team less chances to win team fights! But at least you are able to escape when your mates are dying?

Forestnator.6298:

Since it seems like you put alot of effort into this, I am sorry to say that I don’t like your build.

Why? You are losing maradeurs crit chance and crit damage just to get a part of the crit chance back by swapping the awesome inventions trait line with firearms. Still dealing less direct damage due to the missing ferocity but gaining some condition damage – without conditions. Sure you have 5 stacks of burning with 50% uptime and some bleed from auto attack of EG… come on you know it better! That’s never worth any point in condition damage.

However, you lose alot of sustian by dropping the invention trait line with bunker down (which also provides a solid point damage with the mines…), a second emergency heal and alot of regeneration plus a conditions cleanse for you and your allies.

Additional you are swapping out bulwark gyro for rocket boots – to give your team less chances to win team fights! But at least you are able to escape when your mates are dying?

All of your points are tradeoffs. You power pressure for some condi.
Elixir s can be swapped for bullwark as i mentioned.

I feel like you didn’t read the post past the first bit. You don’t even seem to know why i picket rocket boots….

Mind reading it all?

Novuake.2691:

Doesnt change the fact you are trying to use condition damage stats without conditions.

I like your build Novuake, thanks a lot for posting! However, it felt a bit lacking in pvp when I tried it. I tried a lot of different utilities in lieu of Elixir S and Rocket Boots: Flamethrower, Bombs, Elixir C, Tool Kit, but nothing was really shining that much: less presence on point, less teamfight utility, and paradoxically less sustain than the meta build. Still somewhat viable, I would say, especially in 1v1s and 1v2s, and definitely great fun.

I think your build would really shine in WvW roaming however. With Celestial gear, and maybe Tool Kit over Elixir S, to prevent kiting. I liked the Tool Kit synergy with your build, since it’s in nature an hybrid kit, and Pry Bar has a great synergy with the Sigil of Intelligence. I was thinking of Rune of the Traveler in that case for the mobility, but if you don’t mind blasting your lighting fields, maybe rune of the defender? The Aegis on heal would have a great synergy with the instacast heal gyro.

edit: One more thing: have you tried to run Heavy Armor Exploit instead of High Caliber? I haven’t, but right now I’m thinking it could give you more sustain through Rapid Regeneration, and give you a nice little stack of swiftness to escape if things get rough. But here again, you may not have enough precision. Overall, I think one of the main problem with your build is the lack of an appropriate rune, as you mentionned.

came into thread expecting rocket turret, rocket boots, and aim assisted rocket.

insanemaniac.2456:

came into thread expecting rocket turret, rocket boots, and aim assisted rocket.

Don’t forget Mortar Kit. I feel you. I was kind of disappointed as well.

Sorel.4870:

I like your build Novuake, thanks a lot for posting! However, it felt a bit lacking in pvp when I tried it. I tried a lot of different utilities in lieu of Elixir S and Rocket Boots: Flamethrower, Bombs, Elixir C, Tool Kit, but nothing was really shining that much: less presence on point, less teamfight utility, and paradoxically less sustain than the meta build. Still somewhat viable, I would say, especially in 1v1s and 1v2s, and definitely great fun.

I think your build would really shine in WvW roaming however. With Celestial gear, and maybe Tool Kit over Elixir S, to prevent kiting. I liked the Tool Kit synergy with your build, since it’s in nature an hybrid kit, and Pry Bar has a great synergy with the Sigil of Intelligence. I was thinking of Rune of the Traveler in that case for the mobility, but if you don’t mind blasting your lighting fields, maybe rune of the defender? The Aegis on heal would have a great synergy with the instacast heal gyro.

edit: One more thing: have you tried to run Heavy Armor Exploit instead of High Caliber? I haven’t, but right now I’m thinking it could give you more sustain through Rapid Regeneration, and give you a nice little stack of swiftness to escape if things get rough. But here again, you may not have enough precision. Overall, I think one of the main problem with your build is the lack of an appropriate rune, as you mentionned.

Definitely some valid points here.
I feel the swiftness from minor trait elixir B was almost always up in combat anyway and wasnt worth it to give up crit chance. But ill surely give it a go.

The lack of an appropriate amulet is definitely a problem. Dkd you try sages? Works a bit better and actually has comparable over time sustain ratherthan then burst you get from inventions.

I did run it with Celestial in wvw, much better than in pvp but open world mobility is a little lacking.

I like trying new builds so I decided to give this one a whirl.

Its OK but suffers in the way that Sorel posted and I tried all the things he did as well. I even swapped runes to Traveler at one point because not having mobility sucks. This build suffers because you are making an asymmetrical trade off due to both the amulets and the unbalanced nature of Engineer traitlines.

Compared to meta this build probably deals the same damage (if you proc IP every 10 seconds and hit with Rocket Boots) but it loses so much sustain from not having inventions.

Just more evidence that Scrappers are totally pigeonholed right now into taking Inv/Alch/Scrapper to be viable in PvP. Explosives and Firearms need massive buffs OR Rifle/Pistol/Bomb Kit need massive buffs.

Yeah this is the best “rocket” build I can come up with. Not gonna be meta, but decent for some unwanted.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFASlUUh2tYtVwvLQ7FLTG13xlcNH9fn37t4zUABAA-TpQOABAs/QvlBAA

I got every “rocket” skill in there.

Edit: fixed link.

Your link is broken.

Forestnator.6298:

Your link is broken.

Got it. Accidentally had deleted the s from “skills”