Guild Wars 2

My engineer friend usually plays with me (phantasm mesmer) and a third friend who often plays a support Guardian.

We don’t mind if it takes us a while to get through a dungeon. When we go into WvW, we usually take camps and towers, so we run into other small roaming groups.

I think the ideal build is one that’s fun to play, very survivable, and uses his favorite utilities (tool kit, bomb kit, rocket boots). Below is the build we put together as we chatted about what might be a good fit.

The core idea was to give lots of condition damage and confusion with the perplexity runes and lots of interrupts (which I think he will find fun). Since our coordination isn’t fantastic and he occasionally plays by himself, we wanted his build to have enough ability to handle conditions on its own. Dire armor seems great for survivability. With the sigil of intelligence, Incendiary Powder can be triggered regularly even though precision is very low. I’d love any feedback or suggestions – thx!

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fdQQJAqelUUpkr9ZxvLseNSahMq0i+72lfeSgDA-T1BHABA8AAeTPQjq/o7+D4pEMgTAASK/IEwi1A-w

Its a solid build for roaming, though I dont feel like automated response is worth having without also having -condi food and runes. I also feel youre really vulnerable to stuns.
I usually run something like this when I go condi:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdQQJAqelUUpPrlcxvLseVCbBNqxEuKCGRuxO+xGEAA-TFiMABAs/AoPAgs0CEjyv7U/ZKdA8oEk1TAApAgZOA-w

Swapping out half the gear for rabid gives you the crit chance to work with procs like sharpshooter and ip without intelligence, while still maintaining 3k armor and 20k hp.

Going for the low health heal reset is probably alot more reliable condi protection then automated response, and also gets us stabilized armor to help with no stun breaks. It even stacks with prot injection so you can laugh at thiefs and warriors who try to stun and burst you down.

Invigorating speed + speed kits is just to strong for me to give up, but if youre just trying to front load massive confusion an all in approach, blood injection works fine.

For sigils i prefer bursting and geomancy, though energy for more sustain, tormenting for more coverage, battle for damage, or a stacking sigil all work great too.

I also prefer balthazar runes over perp. While perp is definitely stronger, the burn on heal goes nice with the low health heal reset, and I dont feel perp is worth the 60g+. Also, you probably wont make many friends running them. ;D

For PVE though youre better off switching out to something like this:
http://youtu.be/cYWpstTq528

i would trade blood injection for invigorating swiftness in wvw. tbh in pve you can go 66002 without repercussions, and then you dont need intelligence sigil and can go torment, corruption, bursting, whatever.

toolkit is great for the block, but again for pve the kit is gonna feel lacking since its only damaging condi is pry bar… youd be better off with nades in its place.

Thanks very much for the help!

I have a couple of specific follow-up questions:

- Would you recommend Automated Response if he learned to keep his inventory open and double-click on Lemongrass Poultry Soup when he got heavily loaded on condis? It’s one more thing to learn, but Automated Response seems really nice (especially if you still have 8000+ health when it kicks in).

- If he stayed with this basic point distribution, it sounds like everyone would recommend Invigorating Speed over Backpack Regenerator. Basically, getting an extra dodge is more powerful than 117 health per second.

- I agree Tool Kit doesn’t inherently look like a condi weapon. The pry bar is a lot of confusion, but the rest of it looks mostly like covering conditions. But magnetic pull seems like a really good way to set up a confusion burst with perplexity (interrupt on pull and then pry bar). Does it not work out this way in real game play?

- I assume Power Wrench is not worth taking just for the cooldown value given a condi build. Does anyone use Kit Refinement? It appears that it would give one more interrupt chance (magnetic bomb) and a possible stun breaker (when switching to tool kit). That seems pretty valuable in this build.

- Lastly, how big of a deal are the bleeds in a condi build like this? That’s the damage part that feels trickiest to give up. It just feels like a 33% chance to get a 5 second bleed on a crit isn’t that great unless you get the crit chance at least up into 40% range.

Thanks for all the help. I don’t really know things really play out with the profession, so the guidance is awesome.

@shreddie here’s a variant that’s closer to your build but still uses the perplexity runes (I already bought them for him, so the gold isn’t the issue). What do you think about this one?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdQQJAqelUUpkr9ZxvLseRCbBNyxcGQtBRmlN+xGEAA-T1RHABGp8r2HAgb6BYU9nc3fAgTAQUKBJEwi1A-w

Kit Refinement is no longer worth the points iirc. With the 20 sec cooldown, and the constant kit/weapon swapping you’re likely doing you really have to have a close eye on the internal CD and when it’s up you might be in the kit for which you want the Kit Refinement ability. All in all not worth it anymore I’m pretty sure.

Take a look at this one. http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Engineer_-_Double_Kit_Condi_Roamer

Thanks – the meta build page and video are really helpful!

It looks like we were close to the right concept. Now we’ll do some testing to see what feels best for him.

Thanks again!