Guild Wars 2

I’m new on Engi(love it alot though) I main Elementalist. Am I correct in my assumption that the majority of the engineers conditions damage is from incendiary powder?

I have 7 classes at 80 to include a necro now I’ll say in my opinion you want dhuumfire(basically incendiary amor for necro) because the dps it has but the condi pressure is still pretty good. Here on engi it feels more like incendiary ammo makes up alot of the damage and essentially you are playing to keep it covered.

I really like Engi alot though I figured I would since I main Ele BUT I will say they are nothing alike even though people compare them so often.

Engineer has a LOT of condition sources. You have to kit swap & trait right.

Pistols have bleed, poison, confusion, blind, burn.
EG has bleed, poison, weakness, cripple.
Bombs have burn, chill, confusion, immob.
Grenades have bleed, chill, poison.
FT has burn, blind.
TK has bleed, cripple, confusion.
Traiting gives bleeds and burns.

You can have most of these in one build.

Tack on runes of Perplexity and a Torment Sigil and you’ve got a TON of conditions applied regularly.

Well I’m not much of a theorycrafter, but I’d say engineers do have a higher dependence on burning in order to establish significant condition damage pressure when compared to other condition builds from other professions. Engineers can also make good use of confusion as well, although that can be a bit more hit-or-miss at times (unless it’s in WvW where you can simply apply 24 hours of confusion with perplexity runes and go to bed).

Without the burning, the damage pressure drops significantly because engineers generally can’t apply very high intensity bleeding like warriors or necros can. In some instances, I feel even a mesmer is better at applying bleeds than an engineer is, and thieves can easily be if they go for particular builds.

However, if they did just decide to give engineers more bleed options, it could start to get out of control unless they toned some other things down (kind of like how Dhuumfire necros are now, except with confusion and more CC on top of it).

It’s not common to find a condition build without incendiary powder (especially if they run grenades), though you can get them to work. For instance, you can make a 10/30/0/30/0 build with dual pistols with primarily carrion gear. It still has a fair amount of burning through blowtorch, and the wide variety of conditions allow for stronger modified ammunition bonuses. However, the amount of mileage you can get out of incendiary powder makes it difficult to not justify taking it, even though it’s only single target.

Back in the beta days (when people were still learning to use their heal skills), you used to be able to make p/p builds (that were kitless, mind you) that could get 20+ stack of bleeds on a target in an elixir U burst, but they nerfed those just before release. I don’t think we can really go back to those days though, unless a lot of other stuff was significantly changed.

The problem with balancing burning is that it’s difficult to make fine adjustments. Adding or removing 1 second from a duration either adds or removes a significant amount of damage, as does limiting or enabling the access to burning.

They could maybe try to exchange some of the burning with torment since engineer’s don’t have the latter yet, but I’m not sure how they’d go about handling that yet.

Burning is certainly a top condition for the engineer.
Confusion is likely the second (pistol, bomb, toolkit).

Those simply hit hard and tend to reapply for an engineer very quickly given how our traits work and the cooldowns on the skills.

Bleeding CAN be extremely effective as an engineer, but unless specifically designed for it tends to be modest (important but not overwhelming).

The key to the engineer is that we stack so many types of damage (both lots of conditions and even with a condition build your physical damage doesn’t have to be bad at all).

I tend to have the following damage conditions up almost all the time on an enemy:
1. Burning
2. Confusion
3. Bleeding (modest)
4. Poison
5. Torment (sigil on shield)
6. Vulnerability (doesn’t tech do damage, but it makes them take more damage)

On top of that, you lay down a lot of utility based conditions (bomb, grenade, e-gun build):
1. Chill
2. Blinds
3. Weakness (which can more or less be perma if you stay in e-gun)
4. Cripple
5. Immobilize

Outside weakness, you won’t have these utility conditions up permanently but you can reapply them relatively easily as you have several sources in 3 kit builds.

Hard thing playing against an engineer is trying to remove the condition that matters.
As an engineer, almost all you "stacks’ intensity conditions are going to not get to full unless that is how you build. Why? You have too many to rotate. This is why typically, more damage comes from “stacks duration” conditions.

But you can build for “stacks intensity” play too.

Bleeding can go from modest to modestly high. You just need to build for it. Typically this comes from 2 of 3 sources.

1. Obviously, the e-gun auto attack bleeds and is a fast hit. Bad damage but it can help build bleed stacks when your other conditions are still ticking.

2. Shrapnel with grenades is great DPS because it lacks an internal cool down. It tends to be slow damage vs the very quick damage of burning though. Only works with bombs and grenades.

3. If you combine shrapnel with 5 pts in firearms for bleeds on crit ability, you really do well with the whole grenade spec. Remember, you have 3 nades 3 times to crit and 3×15% to apply shrapnel.

The issue with shrapnel is almost always tied to what trait do you give up. You WANT incendiary powder and you almost need grenadier for nades (50% more damage and extra range). The key is whether you play bombs in which case most people like that extra radius. But shrapnel WITH incidinary powder can be quite nice!

If I want the enemy to bleed out, it is almost always using grenades for shrapnel and throwing as many shrapnel grenades as I can then moving to e-gun when the bloke starts running or kiting.

Bombsaway.7198:

As an engineer, almost all you "stacks’ intensity conditions are going to not get to full unless that is how you build. Why? You have too many to rotate.

This is also one of the reasons incendiary powder offers a lot of mileage. You don’t have to rotate out of your current kit/weapon set in order to proc it.

Some professions don’t have to worry about this as much due to the durations. For instance, warrior bleed durations generally have a very high base duration, so their condition damage pressure won’t necessarily start to dissipate rapidly when swapping off their swords (they can also trait for faster weapon swapping).

Agreed. You want incendiary powder unless your crit chance is just horrible (in which case you need to think about not being a condition engineer the way our traits setup).

But, you can have incendiary powder and create a fairly high bleed stack build without sacrificing too much (mostly bomb radius and forcing yourself to a different kit swap rotation and with a good sigil). To keep high stacks you almost need a shrapnel trait because with lower durations, you basically need everything that hits to bleed. You won’t do 25 stacks consistently, but you can go from about 1/2 of burning or confusion to slightly over what each of those conditions can do.

It stacks up (pardon the intentional pun).

the bleeds come from shrapnel grenade, shrapnel, sharpshooter, and pistol auto. incendiary powder is good but you need another form of reliable burning to be viable against anyone halfway decent. so take bomb kit, flamethrower, or offhand pistol.

Yea I havent played offhand pistol much I might give it a try. I watched a few wolfineer, prozap, teldo vids. Actually alot of vids I like to do my research it’s enjoyable.

Pistol main hand seems more like it is using the bleeds as a cover more then dps. Any other class the bleeds provide a larger chunk of dps which I noticed is different on engi unless you have grenades with shrapnel the bleeds seem to be pretty good.

Thanks for the replies the read has been helpful. Engineer forums seem pretty good so and this class is really pushing my Ele to be my favorite it is alot of fun. More freedom and more fluid flowing game play.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vcAQJAqalcTp6qFYxELseNiAqAgJ6xjBZT2nHvFbBhA-zgBB0CIEEgk3AlgRrgJIVRhFA-e

Something like that… Grenades are the fastest way to put a ton of bleeds up super fast. Run something like that… What I do is open with Shrap grenade (grenade 2), with a Freeze Grenade (Grenade 4) followed by a couple quick grenade 1s or tool kit grenade. If I really want to stack conditions I’ll switch to my gun and posion dart and blind them.
Pretty much in 3-5s they have
15-25 stacks of Vulnerability
7-10 Bleed Stacks
Torment
Chill
Fire
Poison

To top that off the direct dmg from grenades is not terrible on its own.

Are many of you using sigil of torment on your condi setups maybe earth?

I have 2 pistols I swap back and forth one torment one earth. I mostly just run the torment pistol. In some Pve though I’ll slot the earth pistol instead.

oZii.2864:

Are many of you using sigil of torment on your condi setups maybe earth?

I feel the torment one will get you more mileage, especially since it’s AoE and will generally do more damage than a bleed will due to people moving. It’s also an extra condition, meaning it synergizes better with modified ammunition and eats up more cleanses.

However, it has a 7s internal cooldown compared to the earth sigil’s 2 seconds, so you might be able to get a few extra bleed stacks in the time it takes the torment to come off cooldown.

So it is possible that you’ll get some better short term damage potential out of the sigil of earth, but I feel the sigil of torment is probably the better one overall.

I agree, I like the torment sigil right now. I like to maximize my AoE with pistol(I use coated bullets a lot) and bomb kit. When your running any condition damage at all, it really helps.