Guild Wars 2

So I started playing an Eng, Traiting Rifle as my main damage. Just curious what some you max level WvW Engineers would suggest for player crafted gear out there. I would like to be able to run solo and into skirmishes and not just hang back sniping all the time.

should i use (berserker) pow/prec/crit damage or would the (knight)toughness/pow/prec suit me better?

You’re gonna die fast if you go all berserker.

In my experience, engineers don’t have strong healing which makes pure berserker’s very flimsy (flimsier than a thief… the thief can negate a lot of damage and heal up very fast but the engie can’t). So I would suggest mixing in toughness, power, precision, crit damage.

So yeah. What I’ve heard a lot is that you shouldn’t go glass cannon unless you have a cannon. Rifle engie full-glass doesn’t do that much damage, doesn’t have much burst. So people say it’s kinda bad to spec glass without that need cannon.

Precision is important though as the conditions you can apply on crit are very strong. But I don’t think going full crit with crit damage is the correct choice.

It depends. Surviving in zerg vs zerg combat is more about your positioning than your gear. If you get focused in a large fight you’re going to die. Zerker gear is favored here in my opinion (as are grenades with their 1500 range and aoe but they aren’t required as traited rifle has 1200 range just like most other professions). If you’re going to be roaming around more solo/small group you may want to mix in more toughness and vitality.

For WvW, you can gear completely glass cannon if you play smart and/or spec certain traits for defense to make up a few hits like self regulating defense potion, protection buff when crit or CC’d etc. As long as you are good at positioning and moving around with situational awareness. However, Engineer really needs to get close to the fight to do the best burst damage outside of grenades, so speccing in a little more defense can be pretty beneficial. With a grenade/rifle/discharge build, you can drop some pretty hefty burst in a few seconds at close range if you go glass cannon. Jump shot + Grenade Barrage with lightning proc packs an extreme wallop, but to combo it requires close range. For a more long range build, you can use toolkit for the wrench, rifle turret for surprise shot and go glass cannon, as you don’t have to get into melee as much to do good damage and the defensive traits should be all you really need.

Berengar.6951:

It depends. Surviving in zerg vs zerg combat is more about your positioning than your gear. If you get focused in a large fight you’re going to die. Zerker gear is favored here in my opinion (as are grenades with their 1500 range and aoe but they aren’t required as traited rifle has 1200 range just like most other professions). If you’re going to be roaming around more solo/small group you may want to mix in more toughness and vitality.

1200 range auto attack sweet. Pity its abilities have an effective range of like 500.

Traited rifles range perk is pretty much a waste.