Guild Wars 2

It’s been over a year since I’ve played GW2, and I’m looking to jump back in, and perhaps level up my engineer some more (currently around 50). Is there a good general guideline as to what weapons, skills, and traits to use? Thanks.

Rifle should be your mainhand, and beyond that any combination of bombkit, FT, rocketboots, slickshoes, elixir B, Healing turret& Elixir H will Serve you well. Elixir X can be fun, but Supply-crate is the only really viable elite we currently have…
Try to run as many power & precision based equip as possible, optimally berserker.

When it comes to traits for leveling, I’d recommend 4/4/0/2/4
Pick forceful explosives, and accelerant-packed turret in explosions, hair-trigger and rifled barrels in firearms, Invigorating speed in Alchemy and Speedy kits + Speedy gadgets in tools.
Ofc you won’t be able to spend all trait points right away, but as long you’ve speedy kits and forceful explosions for Bombkit, you shouldn’t run into any issues. Once you acquire more trait-points, you can buy the rest of these cheap adept-traits from the profession-trainer and complete the build.

When I leveled my engi(s), I was running this build, together with healing turret, supply-crate, bombkit, rocketboots and slickshoes. It served me well, and solo’ing champs with it is fairly possible as well, especially if they are melee-oriented and you can kite them for ages…

Thanks. Would it be worth it to trait for elixirs H and B?

yes, decreased cd on elixirs is fine for leveling.

It doesn’t take long to notice that Healing turret is superior in every aspect as healing skill – if used right – but for the aspects “easy-to-use” and “plain heal-output”, elixir H is totally fine. and if you decide against running speedy kits, the decreased cd on elixir B helps you with swiftness.
When it comes to fury, I’d recommend utility-googles instead of elixir B, since their toolbelt allows for applying 10 stacks of vulnerability (therefore 10% more damage on that npc), the given fury from the googles themselves lasts equally long to elixir B, and they are a stunbreak that also gives you blind-immunity. If you run speedy gadgets, they also have a equally long cd to a traited elixir B and bring a reduced cd to rocketboots as bonus, so you really just loose swiftness and a stack of might (retal is useless in PvE, since most mobs simply don’t hit often enough or die too fast). And swiftness would be covered by speedy kits anyways.