Engie’s pistol can apply a wider variety of conditions with ease, and hit more opponents at once. Couple that with the traits Coated Bullets and Incindiary Powder and Engie can apply a load of bleeds, burnings, poisons and confusions to just about everything in front of them.
Actually, that’s not really a good example of condition spreading over multiple targets.
Explosive Shot does indeed hit multiple targets in a small AoE when it hits an enemy, but it doesn’t cause bleeding to anyone but the primary target, so you don’t actually spread bleeds around any better with Coated Bullets unless you actually hit a second target directly, in which case you’d bleed that person as well as the first direct hit.
Incendiary Powder, due to its cooldown as stated in the trait tooltip, will only ever burn one target every ~10 seconds, so you can’t spread that around either. Also it’s reliant on critical hits, which if you’re building a condition damage engineer you’re unlikely to use as condition damage doesn’t crit (feel free to correct me on this).
Static Shot, of course, is unaffected by Coated Bullets and will not hit any more than the three targets it’s initially connecting to. Blowtorch and Glue Shot aren’t projectiles, so they, too, are unaffected by Coated Bullets.
Coated Bullets do benefit Poison Dart Volley though, so you do have some extra poison to spread around. Not sure if that one condition makes it worth the 30-point investment though.
All in all I feel both Coated Bullets and Incendiary Powder are subpar traits to pick for a condition damage build. I would personally go for Shrapnel and carry a bomb, mine, or grenade kit with me, and only go far enough into Firearms to get Hair Trigger (unless I wanted to play with either the elixir gun or flamethrower, or both). That seems like the best way to spread conditions over multiple targets, to me.
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