Guild Wars 2

Ive seen two different kit selections for pve, mainly either grenade, elixir, and flamethrower or bomb, grenade, and elixir/tool/flamethrower.

I was wondering if there is any difference between the two and if one is better than the other?

What do you mean by pve? Levelling? Trash farming? Dungeons?

Depends on what you’re doing and what your build is.

Toolkit is a defensive option witht he 3s block, but also has a solid cripple/bleed with box of nails and confusion/good hit with prybar which can be worked into rotations for damage.

Flamethrower is generally used for firefield/blast(with damage) though the blind and knockback/reflect have their uses as well.

Bombs have your blind/smokefield(stealth) and Fire field, then the confusion isn’t bad and explosions have a lot of synergistic properties. Even glue bomb has it’s uses to catch an immob on things or just chain immobs.

Elixir Gun has your Acid Bomb which is HUGE damage and a blast, fumigate for party condi cleanse (not yourself unfortunately) then you can even toss a little healing down with the 5 skill.

Then Nades is just awesome with the explosion synergy, the chill is nice too, and even has more blind. keep 2/4 on cooldown, and maybe use the rest depending on your situation.

So yeah, it all depends really. General “lets blow this up” Nades/FT/EG. Toolkit/Bombs will be more for specialized situations or condi builds. I’ll use every one throughout most of my Fractal runs. And then in Open world I generally don’t need the utility so I’ll just run the “lets blow it up” set, unless I’m feeling like a baddy that day and want my “get me out of here!” 3s block on Toolkit.

Engi has a lot of useful tools, your success on the profession is directly linked to your ability to see which ones will help the most. Though like most things in the game, high damage is quite often the best option.

Sry i shoulda put i meant dungeons and fractals. Basically i was reading over the rT guide and they seemed to be using bomb kit w/ grenade kit and i wanted to know why and if ones dps is better than the others. Also seena lot of people using bomb kit in fractals.

Ty Jerus! thats helpful! Ill have to spend more time figuring out when to use what.

I don’t have much experience with fractals, but Bombs give you a smoke field for stealth blasts that also applies AoE blind.

I can’t play any game mode without elixir gun. Honestly I forgot it’s even a kit it’s mandatory for me I don’t know vow to play without it

Yeah, bombs are GREAT in fractals. Stealth through Ascalon fractal, or blind enemies as you kill through it. Then the Glue bomb is amazing to stop warriors as they charge you, then blind them up. Plenty of other uses as well such as Immob uptime with glue bomb, especially nice now that turrets suck donkey kittens (seriously I have much hate for this change as it ruined most of the spots I actually pulled a turret out with the condi thing).

Anywhere Blind/Stealth is wanted bomb kit is nice. General rule of thumb for me is if I have a thief I don’t need it, if I don’t I’ll opt for it when I want certain skills. Ascalon/Cliffside both great, Harpy not bad at all, old snowblind before they broke the Object Hitboxes it was a godsend.

Toolkit I really like on Mai/Harpy. You can backpedal kite Mai and the Ettin with all the cripples quite easily (once you remove stacks on Mai). FT is also good on both really with the reflects, but specifically Mai, between toolkit and FT you can deal with all the pistol shots if you are quick (I still struggle a bit, slow reaction time). Toolkit is also great for that nasty staircase in Harpy, just dodge till like halfway up then block the rest of the way, and nice if you’re skipping the harpies and run out of stealth (which it’s good for all stealth runs for this, I’ll often go Toolkit/Elixir S/Bomb for stealth runs, swapping in what I need for blasts when/if it’s called for)

Sorry to ramble, but yeah, everything has a use, and kits are ohh so nice, allowing you to use the skills then swap skills to pick up something else, between that and toolbelt skills we can do some pretty tricky stuff. Made this video a while ago of me doing a very mediocre job of our Might stack rotations, swapping in Thumper Turret for the toolbelt skill and bomb kit, and still able to jump right back to what I wanted.

(yeah I suck at video editing, just made it because I realized someone’s guide didn’t have a video for it and I thought it might be helpful so figured I’d give it a shot).

Azure.8670:

I can’t play any game mode without elixir gun. Honestly I forgot it’s even a kit it’s mandatory for me I don’t know vow to play without it

It’s excellent for pve, but I don’t feel it does much for spvp, though.

If you want to choice your kit

Grenade is your mandatory kit. It’s your main source of damage and vulnerability and any meta engineer should have it. All the other kits will support your grenade. Those other kits usually give you 1 burst skill to use in your dps rotation and some support skill to use in specific situation.

Bomb : That’s mostly a utility skill with field and blast (Stealth and Might stacking). It also have a decent burst (Big-O-Bomb) for your dps rotation, but personnally I dislike the cc from Big-O-Bomb, it can screw thing up, you need to watch out for that.

Elixir Gun : It give you some healing and condi removal, but it mostly give you Acid Bomg as a burst for your dps rotation. It’s a hard skill to master because you need to cancel it before he send you flying backward.

Flamethrower : Its burst skill is Flame Blast. It’s one of the easiest secondary kit to use but it’s not the best. It also give you access to some blind and a fire field for blasting might.

Tool Kit : It give you pry bar as burst skill, which is the weakest choice (lowest dps and the only one that is single target. But like Flamethrower it’s easy to use and give you access to a low cd block. It’s the a solid choice when you solo or you start using the meta.

So here are your 4 secondary kit that you can choice. Try them and see which one are the best for you. Personally I prefer Elixir Gun/Flamethrower in dungeon and Elixir Gun/Bomb in fractal or when we don’t have a thief.

RabbitUp.8294:

Azure.8670:

I can’t play any game mode without elixir gun. Honestly I forgot it’s even a kit it’s mandatory for me I don’t know vow to play without it

It’s excellent for pve, but I don’t feel it does much for spvp, though.

Good thing it’s a question about Dungeon/fractal then

Jerus.4350:

Yeah, bombs are GREAT in fractals. Stealth through Ascalon fractal, or blind enemies as you kill through it. Then the Glue bomb is amazing to stop warriors as they charge you, then blind them up. Plenty of other uses as well such as Immob uptime with glue bomb, especially nice now that turrets suck donkey kittens (seriously I have much hate for this change as it ruined most of the spots I actually pulled a turret out with the condi thing).

Anywhere Blind/Stealth is wanted bomb kit is nice. General rule of thumb for me is if I have a thief I don’t need it, if I don’t I’ll opt for it when I want certain skills. Ascalon/Cliffside both great, Harpy not bad at all, old snowblind before they broke the Object Hitboxes it was a godsend.

Toolkit I really like on Mai/Harpy. You can backpedal kite Mai and the Ettin with all the cripples quite easily (once you remove stacks on Mai). FT is also good on both really with the reflects, but specifically Mai, between toolkit and FT you can deal with all the pistol shots if you are quick (I still struggle a bit, slow reaction time). Toolkit is also great for that nasty staircase in Harpy, just dodge till like halfway up then block the rest of the way, and nice if you’re skipping the harpies and run out of stealth (which it’s good for all stealth runs for this, I’ll often go Toolkit/Elixir S/Bomb for stealth runs, swapping in what I need for blasts when/if it’s called for)

Sorry to ramble, but yeah, everything has a use, and kits are ohh so nice, allowing you to use the skills then swap skills to pick up something else, between that and toolbelt skills we can do some pretty tricky stuff. Made this video a while ago of me doing a very mediocre job of our Might stack rotations, swapping in Thumper Turret for the toolbelt skill and bomb kit, and still able to jump right back to what I wanted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6WOrSAivlg

(yeah I suck at video editing, just made it because I realized someone’s guide didn’t have a video for it and I thought it might be helpful so figured I’d give it a shot).

Dont be sorry about the rambling! This is all really helpful info. I felt kinda stuck with the ol’ grenade, elixir, ft only swapping out for elxirs every once in a while. I kinda just want to get a better awareness of when to use what and this has definitely helped.

Ty thaddeus as well!

I’d say it depends on your party. The main upside of engie is you’re versatile enough to fill whatever gaps your party is lacking in.

Personally, for dungeons and fractals, I almost always run Grenades and the Elixir gun, and rotate the third slot based on the situation. Usually things for specific bosses and dungeons or to help offset a wonky party composition.

I specifically have a grenadier build, if you’re heavily invested in crits, grenades are better damage wise than bombs because with three hits per attack, you’re guaranteed to crit constantly and have more procs of “on-crit” effects. You can use grenades at both close and long range, making them more versatile than bombs too. I have a gaming mouse though, and I wouldn’t run grenades without one. One click grenades are way easier and more comfortable to use.

Bombs in PvE are more for the utility than the damage. Fire, Smoke, Glue and the Big bomb are all very useful if used well. If you’re NOT fully invested in the explosives line and lack grenadier as a trait, bombs will come out slightly ahead of grenades.

Elixer gun is good for support, and comes with a stunbreak. You get some okay damage out of it with both power builds (acid bomb) and condi builds (it bleeds and poisons). Its autoattack is poor DPS, except for maybe full condi builds, though the constant weakness upkeep can be situationally useful. (moreso in PvP though) If you have an enemy that fear bombs or uses a similar mass CC tactic you can stunbreak yourself and then fumigate your allies. Tequatl is an obvious example when that tactic is handy.

It would be amazing if they buffed something else’s damage that wasn’t grenade kit so you aren’t gimping your performance.

Projectmar.4136:

It would be amazing if they buffed something else’s damage that wasn’t grenade kit so you aren’t gimping your performance.

Been writing it a lot lately in other areas, but I really think if they increased The Confusion Bomb to be similar to Prybar Power damage, and raised FireBomb to the power damage of the normal Bomb it’d outdamage Grenade kit, while Grenades still held the vuln spot. Such that if Vuln was covered Bombs would be best, and if not it was still just a loss in Vuln for higher damage. but yeah /shrug. It’s just a wish of mine that Bombs did highest damage for the “primary” kit and Nades the best teamsupport through Vuln.

no way dude, elixer gun is the truth for pvp. the AA bleed and poison wrecks, especially eles. always keeps bleed and poison up and acid bomb wrecks them too. Maybe theres a better option but every build I run in wvw pvp or pve has elixer gun in it. I take that back, I usually dont run it with Static, but sometimes I do

90 nade hits in 30secs(1 freeze + 5 shrapnel possible)
34 bombs
So i did 2 30sec rotations, using just grenade skill 1 you get 29.7 total coefficients. If you include 1 freeze grenade(2 would require a 40+sec rotation) and 5 shrapnel(6 takes just over 30secs) you get 33.51
The bomb kit hits 42.5.

So, disregarding vuln and other traits. Bomb is the best for damage on a slot 1 attack.(Sorry Jerus). Grenades gets 21% less damage than bombs even when you use the higher coefficient attacks. I heard a mysterious rumor that bosses won’t have the 50% reduction to vuln, so bomb could actually make a play for an auto attack(maybe not with speed clears, depends which other classes could drop their vuln on crit skills to get more damage).

SlyDevil.3952:

90 nade hits in 30secs(1 freeze + 5 shrapnel possible)
34 bombs
So i did 2 30sec rotations, using just grenade skill 1 you get 29.7 total coefficients. If you include 1 freeze grenade(2 would require a 40+sec rotation) and 5 shrapnel(6 takes just over 30secs) you get 33.51
The bomb kit hits 42.5.

So, disregarding vuln and other traits. Bomb is the best for damage on a slot 1 attack.(Sorry Jerus). Grenades gets 21% less damage than bombs even when you use the higher coefficient attacks. I heard a mysterious rumor that bosses won’t have the 50% reduction to vuln, so bomb could actually make a play for an auto attack(maybe not with speed clears, depends which other classes could drop their vuln on crit skills to get more damage).

Are you factoring in bleeds into this as well and all that. IIRC even in a power damage build you’re going to get about 20-25% of your damage from condi’s still >.<

SlyDevil.3952:

90 nade hits in 30secs(1 freeze + 5 shrapnel possible)
34 bombs
So i did 2 30sec rotations, using just grenade skill 1 you get 29.7 total coefficients. If you include 1 freeze grenade(2 would require a 40+sec rotation) and 5 shrapnel(6 takes just over 30secs) you get 33.51
The bomb kit hits 42.5.

So, disregarding vuln and other traits. Bomb is the best for damage on a slot 1 attack.(Sorry Jerus). Grenades gets 21% less damage than bombs even when you use the higher coefficient attacks. I heard a mysterious rumor that bosses won’t have the 50% reduction to vuln, so bomb could actually make a play for an auto attack(maybe not with speed clears, depends which other classes could drop their vuln on crit skills to get more damage).

You forgot to use Grenade Barrage btw. It should be 36.02 coefficient and not 33.51

But you are right. With the damage coefficient alone, Bomb get on top. But not taking into account the condition damage make your numbers useless. Especially since with the expansion, there will no longer be any restriction to the number of stack.

With the meta build you have 70% of condition duration. So your 5 shrapnel will make 15 stack of 17seconds. Shrapnel have a 15% chance of creating a stack of bleed (20.4sec). You gonna launch 98 grenades during that 30sec so about 14 stack of bleed. And finally you have Sharpshooter that have 33% chance to give 5.1sec of bleed on crits. On a meta build you should reach between 92% and 100% depending on the presence of a ranger. Let’s say 100% to make thing easier, this make 32 stack of 5.1sec. In total, grenade will give 703.8 sec of bleed for 40468.5 dmg in 30sec

Bomb will give you 5stack of 20.4sec from shrapnel and 11stack of 5.1sec from sharpshooter. A total of 158.11 sec of bleed for a total of 9091.32 dmg.

In total, grenade in 30sec will do 95544.91 direct damage and 40468.5 condi dmg for 4 533.78 dps. Bomb in 30sec will do 112 733.45 direct damage and 9091.32 condi dmg for 4060.82 dps. So in total, even if bomb do more direct damage, grenade still do more total dps, while giving more vulnerability. Of course, the fact that grenade rely a bit more on condition damage, will mean that it’s dps will lag a bit more than bombs.

Thanks Thad for the more thorough explanation. Again, I think making Concussion Bomb do the power damage of Prybar, and maybe an increase on firebomb would be enough to push bombs to be the higher damage. So really not much of a change required to create that situation.

Jerus.4350:

Thanks Thad for the more thorough explanation. Again, I think making Concussion Bomb do the power damage of Prybar, and maybe an increase on firebomb would be enough to push bombs to be the higher damage. So really not much of a change required to create that situation.

Yup. Bomb really need to be the top dps kit so you have to make a choice. Do I take the best dps kit, or do I sacrifice a portion of my personal dps to give more vulnerability.

The problem is that vulnerability is too easy to get right now and it seem Anet is going to make it easier in the future. Dragon Hunter will be a beast at giving vulnerability.

I was kinda confused how you got some of your numbers, so I modified one of my sheets and upload a comparison for bombs vs nades. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qlcalhq2x_KgEUXOl0Lf2XmOJORRj8ZyCQWayvYSjFo/edit?usp=sharing
Top Left: Bombs, only might provided by build, capped vuln from mysterious source
Bottom Left: Grenades, only might provided by build(none), capped vuln from mysterious source
Top Right: Bombs, capped might, both banners and a source of fury, capped vuln from mysterious source
Bottom Right: Grenades, capped might, both banners and source of fury, capped vuln from mysterious source

Grenades didn’t lag too much behind in terms of total damage without buffs and much of the difference that was caught up came from capped might. I assumed no use of target-the-weak to cap crit at 100% for the buffed comparison though bombs benefited more from crit rate than grenades did with more multipliers and a higher base coefficient.

Main problem I’m running into is what’s going to happen to the 30% condi duration in the first line, we have no gear for those stats to be put into, and I didn’t see any traits that gave some of it back so grenades will lose more of its damage post patch than bombs would. But, I’m not sure what is going to be done to both poison grenade and fire bomb with the new stacking changes for those conditions. Currently poison grenade only reaches about 1/2 – 1/3 of its potential damage due to capping which could give grenades an advantage, and I’m not sure what will happen with fire bomb since it would only give 4 stacks with a 2sec duration each after the update, which is pretty weak with burn damage getting reduced.

Fire bomb getting raised from 0.2 to .25/.3 per tick would help make up for damage loss from burning, but I’d still expect to either get double stacks of burn on tick or an increased base duration.
Perhaps grenades being reduced to a 0.3 from 0.33 coefficient on the auto would help reduce the total damage output of grenades. Maybe the 2 changes together would help create a larger gap.

Were you calculating the damage as if all the condition stacks ticked through fully? So 30s of nades or bombs and then ~18s of the last conditions ticking out?

Yes, I calculate the total duration of conditions and multiply it by the damage. Which is one of the multitude of reasons condition builds aren’t viable in pve. With bombs I throttle the total duration to 30, so its a 30sec rotation, and it considers the burns to finish occuring at 31/32 secs. On the other hand some of those bleeds are going near 20secs from shrapnel and for a burst build are completely incorrect, but this calculates an average damage output/potential damage created per second.

Interesting stuff. I had never actually sat down and compared the two kits like that.

But, here’s the problem I see with it. You’re not going to be just spamming the individual kits.

You’re going to be running a rotation with other big hitters, taking a lot of the “1 skills” out of the picture.

How would that change the picture? I imagine that’s where the idea of nades being higher comes from?

If I run the rotation of Grenade Barrage →Napalm→Flame Blast →Acid Bomb →Jump Shot→Blunderbuss → Freeze Grenade → Shrapnel Grenade → Flame Blast → Grenade 1 X4 →Shrapnel Grenade→Flame Blast →Nade1 → Blunderbuss →Nade1X2 → Shrapnel →Flame Blast → Acid Bomb

I’m only going to have time to use 11 nade skills, only 7 of them being the 1. Now that’s not a 30s rotation, but you get my point. When you do get around to the “primary” kit on nade you’re getting some bigger hitters, on bomb you’re just getting the 1, so that would eat into it’s advantage wouldn’kitten

Yes it will change the picture because the strength of the Bomb over Nade is the auto-attack. In a real rotation, the strength of bomb won’t matter as much.

I’ll run into a wall probably this afternoon after I pass out with the current meta rotation and see what kind of coefficient bombs would need to compete with average vuln on grenades.

SlyDevil.3952:

I’ll run into a wall probably this afternoon after I pass out with the current meta rotation and see what kind of coefficient bombs would need to compete with average vuln on grenades.

Thanks. Again personally I think that coefficient should come from something other than just the 1 such that it’d also strengthen it as a “secondary” kit but knowing how much extra coefficient would be needed to win out would surely be nice to know.

Most of the spreadsheet is done, ill post it later today once I figure out food and utilities, the condi duration doesn’t seem to help bombs much. Sloppy rotation video will be included for mild dose of laughter.

So, reuploaded the original sheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aVFznlKF6kynT3v0LTm8WX6tO2MnFhEDRrTFCq0rdoA/edit?usp=sharing
Updated the first page with a comparison to grenade kit without grenadier. Second page is a comparison of Brazil’s meta rotation to a modified version with bomb kit replacing grenades.
This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6asR3sOA4g is the rotation I used for the calculations. Average might for the buffed calculations assumed that fire fields were placed for all blasts where the engineer couldn’t.
The Adjusted Coefficients is the base coefficients multiplied by the build specific multipliers, so grenade kit is multiplied by the average vuln it produces and bomb kit is multiplied by the average vuln it produces, bomb kit uses short fuse to replace grenadier.