Guild Wars 2

Hello com,

I seem to have found the optimal build for WvW when running with the zerg. I’ll try to share it with you, so you can add your two cents or ask questions about it. Try it out and have fun.

The Zergeneer

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-VRw;2sPVg0l6gSFx0;9;4T-JJ-19A;156-08;26o0;36Rk06Rk06ge (copy-paste the link in your browser)

Skills:

• The pistol is our first choice mainly because of skill 3, which jumps over 3 enemies and confuses them for a quite good damage, or disables them for quite a bit. Skill 2 spreads a bit of poison, which is only useful in few v few fights.
  The shield in our offhand is the source for 2 good defensive skills, which reflect projectiles, knocks back nearby enemies and stun them aswell. Our regular weaponset only has medium range, which is just enough to switch to in a zergclash, when skills from other weaponsets are on cooldown or when you need the defensive abilities of the shield.

• The medkit is the perfect skill for our purposes. You’ll have to get used to the fact that healing comes by pressing F1, and that you should be switching to it every 10 seconds (or, say, once in a while) so that you can keep on stacking swiftness and might (latter only in a fight) on yourself and up to 5 nearby allies. since the medkit has no cooldown like every other kit, you can use the 6. bonus of the rune of the centaur perfectly. And mobility is a really important thing in WvW.
  The bandage packages are useful when trying to get away from somewhere. Together with the passive regeneration from the trait and the F1 Skill, the amount of selfhealing is quite good, even without the eliteskill.
  Skill 4 removes only one condition, and is quite annoying, since you’ll have to walk over the little flask you’re throwing right in front of you.

• The granade kit has an extraordinary range with the grandmaster trait grenadier. The granade skills explain their uses by themselves. They’re perfectly well adepted at shutting down chokepoints and cleaning out battlements from a huge range. the F-skill provides a nice spike damage for any use. you should be using this kit alot when in a zergclash, using skill 2, 4 and 5 while other skills are on cooldown.

• The toolkit has a more practical use in melee situations like open field fights. Skill 3 can be a bit tricky to hit, and only hits one enemy, but it hits very hard and punishes the target with a whopping 5 stacks of confusion. Skill 2 is a neat, underrated movementcontrol and also grants a bit of bleeding in an aoe. a good combo would be pulling your enemy with skill 5 to you, popping out skill 2 and hitting it with skill 3, which leads at least a guaranteed dodgeroll or two, or massive damage and conditions. Skill 5 is nice to pull out single individuals out of the enemy zerg, aswell as pulling down dumb enemies from the battlements if they stand wrong. It’s doesnt work very often, but when it works, it’s a guaranteed bag of loot. Skill 4 is very important too, since it grants 3 seconds full blocking, which is enough to run through heavily nuked chokepoints, saving your dodgerolls and your endurance.

• the last utility slot can be used for any skill actually, but there are some recommendations.
  - Elixir S - Instant invulnerability for 3 seconds, this doesnt only help while escaping, it also helps when finishing annoying enemies, which can interrupt you otherwise. It also helps running through chokepoints.
  - Bomb kit - is quite similar to the granade kit, but with a melee range and therefor for zerg clashes only. Skill 3 and the F-skill are specially good, first one applying a gigantic 5 stacks of confusion to all nearby enemies, which can either deal massive damage or disable up to 5 foes for a good amount of time. The latter knocks a whole bunch of enemies back, which can be a huge advantage for the zerg. The usual disadvantage of simply beeing avoided is negated due to the huge chaos in a zergclash normally. You should also change the first major explosive trait from III (chance of bleeding on explosion) to II (larger bomb radius).
  - Rifle turret is an option for capping supplycamps while it has an invulnerability buff, since lifesteal from the combo darkfield-projectile finisher still works, and the F-Skill is a 100% projectile finisher with only 10 seconds cooldown. Use skill 5 from shield (100%), F-skill from toolkit (100%) and pistol 1 (20%), too.

• The eliteskill is simple, supply crate. use as stun if you can, but rather try to place the precious healing turret in a useful and safe spot.

Alternative traits, which you can equip if you like or when the situation requires it, would be:

• Inventions II – “Explosive Descent”, when the commander wants you to jump from a smaller cliff into the enemies. Or for jumping off of a cliff
• Explosives III – “Forceful Explosives”, if you choose bombkit
• Alchemy IV – “Self-regulating Defenses”, if you’re seeing yourself chased down too often (in which case you’re maybe doing something wrong?)

One more thing to say, changing kits while in battle grants 3 stacks of might with the sigill every 10 seconds and another 3 stacks when switching to the medkit with the trait. In battle you’ll easily stack up to 12-15 stacks of might, which is enough to boost your damage quite a bit. You won’t even need HGH, which cripples your utility slots.

Conclusion:
This build has extraordinary diversity and effectivity. I had light problems in 1v1 situations versus Shatter-Mesmers and tanky enemies, latter beeing not a really threat though. Advantages are the extraordinary range (1500 + AoE-radius of the granades… you’ll be outranging everything but siege weapons, while still beeing very mobile and not costing any supplies), the big amount and quick application of conditions, and the distinct ability of movement control with stun, knockback, cripple and freezing.
In my opinion this build is among the most important ones in any WvW-Zerg, comparable to the portal mesmer, walling guardians and a few other essential WvW builds.

Have Fun!

edit 22.4.:
- added throw wrench to combo finisher projectile
- changed explosives II to mainbuild, added explosives III as option for bomb users.
- added “alternative traits” section

Very nice guide. Unfortunately I’m still of the opinion that engineer doesn’t work in WvW for the simple reason that retal destroys grenades.

In GvG what you need as a condition class is aoe and survivability both of which would in theory work with the grenade kit.

In my opinion engineers (and rangers) are simply useless in WvW. Organized WvW that is, not standing on top of a wall trowing grenades.

I use a build like this for wvw, but I don’t put any points into inventions: 5 into firearms for and extra chance to bleed (retal hurts I don’t want to just spam grenades, so getting some extra bleeding on them is nice), and 15 points into tools for speedy kits, or SD (SD is nice for some extra damage from the surprise shot and throw wentch) since the heal is on tool belt the 15 tool trait will recharge it at 25% health helping you keep alive, and the points into tools lowers the recharge of the tool belt skills. Also, I take exposives II instead of III (III is useless when you arnt using bombs or mines; while II is good for genades and bombs).

A traited rifle and your tool kit is all you need when dealing with large, open battles.

I have been running a very similer build for wvw myself.

Elixer s / Tool Kit / Nades With Pistol Shield

What I love about it is its the perfect reactionary build IMO.

Super long range high dmg… Medium range dots… Upclose and personal pry bars to the face.

For the Zerg… Ben has it right… lobbing a bunch of nades into a pack is a bad idea at times. Some groups though you can get away with it. If not… I’ll try to stay on the outside… and magnet pull some poor target out of the pack a bit pry bar em… drop some nails… throw some conditions up. Then spam my shields and laugh.

I wouldn’t say we have the perfect zerging class…. but I play my build like a hybrid roamer… I try to stay out of the zergs… but if I have to we have all the tools we need to do better then average. As long as we use things at the right time and don’t mess up.

That’s sort of the Engi Motto isn’t it… Time it right, and don’t F up.
If you time things right Engi has a very good chance of coming out on top in every situation imo.

thanks for all your answers!

JeffHardisty.1926:

I use a build like this for wvw, but I don’t put any points into inventions: 5 into firearms for and extra chance to bleed (retal hurts I don’t want to just spam grenades, so getting some extra bleeding on them is nice), and 15 points into tools for speedy kits, or SD (SD is nice for some extra damage from the surprise shot and throw wentch) since the heal is on tool belt the 15 tool trait will recharge it at 25% health helping you keep alive, and the points into tools lowers the recharge of the tool belt skills. Also, I take exposives II instead of III (III is useless when you arnt using bombs or mines; while II is good for genades and bombs).

Thank you for sharing your ideas. I’ll add the explosives II to the guide, explaining that you should only chose III if you’re mainly going with bomb kit (which is what i do, therefore this error). I also like the basic recharge toolbelt @ 25%, but i kind of believe that it’d be of less use, since in WvW, you’ll normally die without a chance to heal yourself, once you get under 25%. But that seems to be as useful as getting invisible when immobilized – so your argument is valid. i’ll probably add that. By the way – does anyone know, if minor trait inventions@15 “automated medical response” recharges our F1 skill with medkit? that’d be as useful as tools@15 “inertial converter”, and we could keep it the way it is, for the better major traits and more useful 200 toughness & healing power.

Speedy kits is a bit useless when you’re using the rune of the centaur. i’m thinking about power wrench (tools VIII) or our new kit refinement (tools IV), latter granting a quite good elementalist skill (magnetic aura) with a lower cooldown than for the elementalist himself. Need to try that before i decide. sharpshooter minor trait (firearms@5) is not useful, since we have like 4% crit chance, and that’s really nothing.

so yeah, keep the ideas coming, tell me about your experience after trying out everything and share your opinion. I’ll update the guide as soon as i get useful results.

edit: i forgot to say that i’ve never had any big issues with retal. i can understand that if you take 2-3k dmg with a bunch of granade shots, that’s quite a bit, but it also shows the full potential of the aoe this build has. since you’ll have problems with retal mainly when throwing at massed up enemies, you’ll clearly be quite far away in these situations and can simply stop to heal as soon as you notice you’re losing too much HP. When the zerg starts fighting, you’ll be noticing less and less people with retaliation due to no lightfield combos. and even then you’ll be able to just switch to bombs or toolkit.

pza.8024:

thanks for all your answers!

JeffHardisty.1926:

I use a build like this for wvw, but I don’t put any points into inventions: 5 into firearms for and extra chance to bleed (retal hurts I don’t want to just spam grenades, so getting some extra bleeding on them is nice), and 15 points into tools for speedy kits, or SD (SD is nice for some extra damage from the surprise shot and throw wentch) since the heal is on tool belt the 15 tool trait will recharge it at 25% health helping you keep alive, and the points into tools lowers the recharge of the tool belt skills. Also, I take exposives II instead of III (III is useless when you arnt using bombs or mines; while II is good for genades and bombs).

Thank you for sharing your ideas. I’ll add the explosives II to the guide, explaining that you should only chose III if you’re mainly going with bomb kit (which is what i do, therefore this error). I also like the basic recharge toolbelt @ 25%, but i kind of believe that it’d be of less use, since in WvW, you’ll normally die without a chance to heal yourself, once you get under 25%. But that seems to be as useful as getting invisible when immobilized – so your argument is valid. i’ll probably add that. By the way – does anyone know, if minor trait inventions@15 “automated medical response” recharges our F1 skill with medkit? that’d be as useful as tools@15 “inertial converter”, and we could keep it the way it is, for the better major traits and more useful 200 toughness & healing power.

Speedy kits is a bit useless when you’re using the rune of the centaur. i’m thinking about power wrench (tools VIII) or our new kit refinement (tools IV), latter granting a quite good elementalist skill (magnetic aura) with a lower cooldown than for the elementalist himself. Need to try that before i decide. sharpshooter minor trait (firearms@5) is not useful, since we have like 4% crit chance, and that’s really nothing.

so yeah, keep the ideas coming, tell me about your experience after trying out everything and share your opinion. I’ll update the guide as soon as i get useful results.

edit: i forgot to say that i’ve never had any big issues with retal. i can understand that if you take 2-3k dmg with a bunch of granade shots, that’s quite a bit, but it also shows the full potential of the aoe this build has. since you’ll have problems with retal mainly when throwing at massed up enemies, you’ll clearly be quite far away in these situations and can simply stop to heal as soon as you notice you’re losing too much HP. When the zerg starts fighting, you’ll be noticing less and less people with retaliation due to no lightfield combos. and even then you’ll be able to just switch to bombs or toolkit.

I forgot to say I use Knight armor (toughtness, power, and precision), so my crit chance is higher. The inventions minor trait does "This will recharge Bandage Self, but not other toolbelt skills linked to healing skills. " according to the wiki. I like the 15% faster recharge of tool belt skills I get from the tools trait line which means, I can cast my heals more often, and use the extra damage from SD faster when I get closer to the zerg.

JeffHardisty.1926:

edit: i forgot to say that i’ve never had any big issues with retal. i can understand that if you take 2-3k dmg with a bunch of granade shots, that’s quite a bit, but it also shows the full potential of the aoe this build has. since you’ll have problems with retal mainly when throwing at massed up enemies, you’ll clearly be quite far away in these situations and can simply stop to heal as soon as you notice you’re losing too much HP. When the zerg starts fighting, you’ll be noticing less and less people with retaliation due to no lightfield combos. and even then you’ll be able to just switch to bombs or toolkit.

The issue is that before you notice that you’re taking retal you usually have 3 other grenades flying over. So the only thing left to do is run to an ally and say that you’re about to need a ress, because the mighty 300’s are about to kill you :P

Benjamin.7893:

pza.8024:

edit: i forgot to say that i’ve never had any big issues with retal. i can understand that if you take 2-3k dmg with a bunch of granade shots, that’s quite a bit, but it also shows the full potential of the aoe this build has. since you’ll have problems with retal mainly when throwing at massed up enemies, you’ll clearly be quite far away in these situations and can simply stop to heal as soon as you notice you’re losing too much HP. When the zerg starts fighting, you’ll be noticing less and less people with retaliation due to no lightfield combos. and even then you’ll be able to just switch to bombs or toolkit.

The issue is that before you notice that you’re taking retal you usually have 3 other grenades flying over. So the only thing left to do is run to an ally and say that you’re about to need a ress, because the mighty 300’s are about to kill you :P

or you could learn to be more proactive and aware of the things happening around you, and, as pza stated, when you see your hp dropping when attacking … stop attacking.

you wont kill yourself from 2 grenade lobs, especially not with as much damage mitigation as this build has.

also, i fixed your quote.

solid build, pza, thanks for reminding people that there is more to playing this game than 100 nades.

Benjamin.7893:

Unfortunately I’m still of the opinion that engineer doesn’t work in WvW

This is an issue with your play style, not the engineer class.

Alright, i’ve been testing several things now in past days, coming to the conclusion that it actually works better with the current setup, which grants you a better survivability through more alot toughness than the setup JeffHardisty proposed. It’s also more zerg friendly if you don’t die as often, and running in the zerg expects you to take damage. that’s why you’ll need the survivability. The lower cooldown rates for the toolbelt skills is not as useful as i hoped. The recharging of all toolbelt skills @25% hp doesnt trigger as often as the quicker recharge for shield skills is useful.
The main disadvantage of not skilling inventions is the lack of the ability to use explosive descent, which is often enough useful when jumping into the enemy zerg, aswell as the obvious use for lowering the falling damage. i find this one of the most handy traits to equip.

pza.8024:

Alright, i’ve been testing several things now in past days, coming to the conclusion that it actually works better with the current setup, which grants you a better survivability through more alot toughness than the setup JeffHardisty proposed. It’s also more zerg friendly if you don’t die as often, and running in the zerg expects you to take damage. that’s why you’ll need the survivability. The lower cooldown rates for the toolbelt skills is not as useful as i hoped. The recharging of all toolbelt skills @25% hp doesnt trigger as often as the quicker recharge for shield skills is useful.
The main disadvantage of not skilling inventions is the lack of the ability to use explosive descent, which is often enough useful when jumping into the enemy zerg, aswell as the obvious use for lowering the falling damage. i find this one of the most handy traits to equip.

Fair enough, everyone has their different play styles.

Benjamin.7893:

Very nice guide. Unfortunately I’m still of the opinion that engineer doesn’t work in WvW for the simple reason that retal destroys grenades.

In GvG what you need as a condition class is aoe and survivability both of which would in theory work with the grenade kit.

In my opinion engineers (and rangers) are simply useless in WvW. Organized WvW that is, not standing on top of a wall trowing grenades.

It looks like you are one of those people that can’t separate your failing to be effective with a profession and the profession itself failing.

So, I was making a nice Video as example of gameplay, but somehow arenanet might have tried out this build and desperately nerfed confusion. well, at least will. if granades get nerfed too, this build has no purpose any more.

thank you arena net,

yours sincerly

Zergs are melee based constructs, therefore if you were to go for optimal you would want to consider bombs which functions at close range. When you get run over by a mass of red names it’s tough to effectively toss grenades.

yeah, sure… consider re-reading the guide.

timidobserver.7925:

Benjamin.7893:

Very nice guide. Unfortunately I’m still of the opinion that engineer doesn’t work in WvW for the simple reason that retal destroys grenades.

In GvG what you need as a condition class is aoe and survivability both of which would in theory work with the grenade kit.

In my opinion engineers (and rangers) are simply useless in WvW. Organized WvW that is, not standing on top of a wall trowing grenades.

It looks like you are one of those people that can’t separate your failing to be effective with a profession and the profession itself failing.

Oh please, I do just fine in zergs. The thing is I don’t think an engineer brings anything that another class wouldn’t do better. Luckily in zergs this doesn’t matter, because well the more the merrier. However in things like GvG when you want your group of 20ish people to be as effective as possible I can honestly say I wouldn’t bring an engineer.

Benjamin.7893:

timidobserver.7925:

Benjamin.7893:

Very nice guide. Unfortunately I’m still of the opinion that engineer doesn’t work in WvW for the simple reason that retal destroys grenades.

In GvG what you need as a condition class is aoe and survivability both of which would in theory work with the grenade kit.

In my opinion engineers (and rangers) are simply useless in WvW. Organized WvW that is, not standing on top of a wall trowing grenades.

It looks like you are one of those people that can’t separate your failing to be effective with a profession and the profession itself failing.

Oh please, I do just fine in zergs. The thing is I don’t think an engineer brings anything that another class wouldn’t do better. Luckily in zergs this doesn’t matter, because well the more the merrier. However in things like GvG when you want your group of 20ish people to be as effective as possible I can honestly say I wouldn’t bring an engineer.

Fortunately GvG doesn’t matter. Engis bring plenty when you are doing stuff that actually works toward winning the match.