Guild Wars 2

Hello guys !
Here I will share my own build, created not so long ago after our last monthly ner.. patch.
While not fully tested yet, it has in my opinion a lot of potential, and above all, it is as FUN-FUN-FUN to play as spending a week end partying with Rebbeca Black. And that is saying a lot.
The original part of this build is that it also comes with a specific and original look and background. But enought teasing, let’s start.

Introduction:

- First of all, to play this build you must be an engineer (no kitten Sherlock !), and above all, you must be a Charr. Why you say ? Because it is named THE IRON LEGIONNAIRE §§§. So now this is clear. No Asura or other frogs on crack will be accepted. Seriously. The last time I saw one in the Iron Legion, it was on top of a stick, and it was surprisingly silent…
Side note: when creating a Charr, the size of your horns and teeth will directly influence your success rate on the battlefield, as well as at the black citadel nightclubs. So if you want to collect badges and score chicks, you now what to do. Trust me, I’m an engineer.
- This build is designed for WvWvW, I do not think it works in sPvP due to the unavailability of certain runes. Also, it might work for PvE. Maybe.
- This build excels at running with the Zerg, and especially at attacking / defending structures (I’ll explain why later).
- Ok, finally this build requires also some specific equipment. Without his kit, the Iron Legionnaire is not completely effective, because YES, LOOK DOES MATTER.

Look:

So here you go:

- Headgear: Get the starter googles. Seriously. The look it gives you is so steampunk, your enemies won’t know what to do. If you have not selected at start, create another toon so you can collect them at Charr select, and then transmute them on you usual headst

- Weapon: Get this pistol:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Legionnaire_Sidearm

No other choices. This is the most LEGIONNAIRE looking one.

- Shield:
Only possibility: The IRON LEGION SHIELD OF COURSE !

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Iron_Legion_Shield.jpg

You can get it easily by walking out of the charr starting area, and trading it against a few charrma. Again, as the stats are beginners one, you will transmute it ASAP on your usual gear, to get its appearance.

- Backpack: If you can get your hands on it, the jetpack is really good-looking. Unfortunaletly for me, I am far away from my gaming computer so will likely never get the chance to drop one (snif !).

Ok, so now if you followed my advice, you should look like a true LEGIONNAIRE

[When I get a better connexion I will post a picture of my toon so that you can see what it looks like, to belong to the iron legion]

Ok, so now you are fully geared and look kitten. Fine ! Let’s focus now on the principle and charracteristics of this build. What does the IRON LEGIONNAIRE do
on the battlefield ? Go full velociraptor-in-your-face mode ? No, there is the blood legion for that.
Play around with a ninja suit and sharp butter-knife ? Again no, there is the ash legion for that.

No, the IRON LEGIONNAIRE is smarter than that. What he does -and does well- is to rain a fiery storm of nuclear destruction from afar, by using his grenades.
Oh noes ! Again a HGH grenades build I hear you say. And you are not totally wrong. But wait ! There is more…
Indeed, if the IRON LEGIONNAIRE does focus on the use of the grenade kit together with elixirs, the twist is that Elixirs are just used as a mean to cure conditions (409) and off course, to get a little boost to damages with HGH.
But the CORE idea of this build is to spread conditions like crazy via our express delivery tool, namely the grenades, and to MAKE THEM LAST as much as possible via + condition duration gear. And you will see that it is surprisingly easy to reach + 100% condi duration without sacrificing much of the others stats.

Build link:

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/engineer/?2.0|a.1m.h5.e.1h.h16|0.0.0.0.0.0|1b.7g.1b.7g.1b.7i.1b.7i.1b.71h.1b.71h|1h.62.1h.62.1h.62.1h.62.1h.62.1h.62|u25b.a6.0.u2ab.0|30.d|2b.2g.2f.2j.30|e

Gear:

This is my biggest problem at the moment. While my sigils, runes, weapons and consumables choices are already fixed, I am still poundering on choosing my armor and jewelery. Basically, I would like to reach around 40% crit chance unbuffed (many of my condis depends on crit), 21K health and if possible around 1300 toughtness while always having 100% condi duration and as much condi damage as possible. As you can see, these values are not reached in the link I propose, and I still have to play around with the configuration tool to check wether this is possible. Any help from you guys on some good set-ups will be appreciated !

Gameplay:

- Basically whith this build you have two “modes”: When all goes well, you are running in your zerg / protecting / attacking your / their keep in offensive mode, with your grenade kit out.
I will not teach you when to use which grenades, you know it better than me, but important is to notice that as you do not have the trait reducing grenades
recharge rates, you will need to have a very effective grenade auto-attack. Therefore, the trait “shrapnel”, the earth sigil (60% chance to trigger a bleed on crit), the incendiary powder (burn on crit) as well as the steel-packed powder (explosion causes vulnerability) will ensure an optimal condition spread.
And this conditions will last for long: with the build you will sit at +100% condition duration, this means 8 seconds burns and quite long bleeds as well as vulnerability on your 1500 range autoattack. There is nothing like landing an incendiary powdered / shrapneled auto-attack on an overconfident foe who approached too much from your walls, only to see him run back with little (big?) numbers poping-up, finally going down a few secs later, not understanding WTF happened to his health bar. At least for me, this is priceless.
Also, I noticed that when foes are standing on a wall / approaching yours, they very seldomly let you touch them more than one time with your grenades, hence the importance of maxing condition durations: even if you touch them only once, the conditions will “work for you” even during the time when they are out of range.

- When things do go wild (Ex: a wild thief appears and starts to slice and dice your horny oversized cat butt), you will switch back to “defensive mode”, A.K.A pistol + shield. With that, you have the opportunity to stun any melee opponent with shield 5, or knock them back with shield 4 (Try to make it near cliffs, it’s very fun when you manage to push someone with it !). Once one of the shield skills connects, your opponent will likely stop moving for 1-2 seconds. This is then the perfect time to rush to him and blow your grenade barrage (HELLO 100 NADES HOW ARE YOU DOING ?). Then, I advise to switch back to grenade kit, pop-up freeze grenades at short range and start kitting. Due to the long condition duration, your opponent will be frozen for 4 seconds. This is plenty of time to mess around. If oppenent is still alive, sitch to flash grenades / static shock / elixir S…

Conditions spotlight***:

As we are speaking about it, I included hereundera small summary of the numbers you can reach with this build.

Shranel grenades: 24 secs bleed at 1500 range (OLOL Engi OP)
Flash grenades: 10 secs blind at 1500 range (Can’t see sheet, where is my zerg already ?)
Freeze grenades: 4 secs chill at 1500 range (believe me this feels alsmost as long as looooooooongcat, but colder)
Poison grenade: 10 secs poison at 1500 range (often forgotten as a damage condition, but this + burn + bleed starts to itch a little, I tell you)
Pistol auto-attack: 4 secs bleeds (OH HAI BETA WEEKEND 1 IS BACK !!! U MAD ANET ?!) → A reliable pew-pew while you are messing with your shield skills, nice !
Pistol poison shot: 4 secs poison
Pistol static shot: 6 secs blind

So you will tell me that against organised groups, conditions cleaning will pop-up quite often. This is right, but in my experience I seldomly met such groups

(My experience only !). On top of that, with the grenade auto you apply back conditions so fast that it does not matter that much is some are cleansed. And above-all, my build is not meant to be the most effective build.
I think classic HGH grenades does more straight DPS than mine, but I play to have FUN, not to be the best.

Defensive variant of the build:
A variant I thought about but did not test yet: if you feel like it it is possible to drop 10 points in Alchemy (bye bye HGH) and 10 in firearms in order to get cloaking device and the trait giving -20% recharge to shield skills and +90 toughness while wearing it. As you can imagine, I prefer the offensive version, but hey, I just wanted to mention it for the most defensive LEGIONNAIRES out there ;-)

Credits:
I will complete this section later; but among the posters and builds which inspired me, I wanted to mention Maskaganda for his awesome build that I used to roll before nerfmaggedon, as well as Goloith (hope my spelling is correct) for his idea to go all-in condi duration (but with pistol) as soon as the givers weapon got fixed.

PS: I just typed the post in one shot, and reading it back it could use a bit more formatting and cleared structuring, but let’s say that is all for now, and I will certainly update it later as I get my armor and runes (still farming badges and gold at the moment !).

I am sorry, but I don’t know why you are naming this build… This is just [HGH Grenades P/S]… you really haven’t created anything new, besides picking worse runes in my opinion. I would roll with Hollbrak/ Fire / Strength for the might duration, which is really where your power is coming from. Why would you go 30 points down alchemy if you weren’t going to try and maximize that? To me, that’s just silly.

Also, if you are going to put so much effort into this, you really should have put together a video. If you took this or your “Non-HGH” version into WvW, this would be a joke. Not enough damage to really hurt, not enough survivability to prevent yourself from getting killed before you can react.

It is a theorycrafted suggestion, but please don’t expect us to take you seriously if you don’t even have the armor or runes yet. I encourage you to keep trying; however, you just skipped ahead like eight steps before you post something and try to name your own build.

As the poster above me said, it’s just HGH Grenade build, i guess your trying to go for a “Thematic” Build?
If so, why go for HGH? i never seen any of the Iron Legion Chugg down Potions like an Alchemist HGH spec does.

Standard Meta-build with bad runes & sigils. gg

Wow. I was not expecting such negative feedback for a such a thread. I thought the tone of my post made obvious that the build is not meant to be taken “seriously”, but rather as a “fun” one, not all of us are going for maximum efficiency you know.

As said, I had fun making my own adaptation of a pretty standard build and giving it a dedicated look / background. My post is not meant to be a demonstration of why it is superior to classic HGH, because as I wrote, I think it is not ! (Maybe you missed it).

I do not know how to make a video. I made this thread as a way to share the fun I had, and also to ask for advices in order to pick my armor and jewelry, that is all. I thought forums were the place to do that, but you make it seems like an examination tribunal.

And I do not see why my rune choice is “bad”. It would be bad if I was aiming for classic HGH, I agree, but I am aiming for 100% condi duration, and my runes are serving this. Did you even read what I wrote ?

Anyway, if anyone have fun using this build or can give me advice on which armor/jewels to pick, any feedback is appreciated ! Now if you want to tell me that my build is not as good as classic HGH, I know it, and guess what : I don’t care :-)

Tacgnol.8079:

Wow. I was not expecting such negative feedback for a such a thread. I thought the tone of my post made obvious that the build is not meant to be taken “seriously”, but rather as a “fun” one, not all of us are going for maximum efficiency you know.

Uhm my post nowhere was ment to be negative, as i said i kind of figured you went for a thematic build, which you did, hence why i asked the question about HGH since i never see the Charr engineers (the Iron legion) chugg down any potions other then the Elixir H, i do see them use turrets though aswell as Grenades, but not sure if that’s a feasible build, but then again it’s a Thematic build, right?

JoxerNL.3752:

Tacgnol.8079:

Wow. I was not expecting such negative feedback for a such a thread. I thought the tone of my post made obvious that the build is not meant to be taken “seriously”, but rather as a “fun” one, not all of us are going for maximum efficiency you know.

Uhm my post nowhere was ment to be negative, as i said i kind of figured you went for a thematic build, which you did, hence why i asked the question about HGH since i never see the Charr engineers (the Iron legion) chugg down any potions other then the Elixir H, i do see them use turrets though aswell as Grenades, but not sure if that’s a feasible build, but then again it’s a Thematic build, right?

Hi,
sorry, I made a general answer which was more aimed to Welswift and Adian.
I agree to your point, and did not consider your answer as a negative one. It’s actually true that I have also not seen Iron Legionnaires toss some elixirs. While this is indeed a thematic build, this small inconsistency does not bother me so much. But I could understand that it can bother some.

Apropos using turrets, I was really considering the use of the heal turret now that it has been buffed (Water field + shield 4 or supply drop sounds really appealing), but I still think this would lead to too much loss, as my healing elixir also removes a condition thanks to 409 and provides me some nice stacks of might.

Don’t take it harsh, your spirit is strong Iron Legionnaire! We are looking forward for a Video 2-3 minutes long. Show us how a true Iron Legion looks and also describe your build briefly. Good luck!

Don’t take it personally, Tac. Welswift shows up regularly to poop on threads that don’t promote the status quo of “elite” builds.