Guild Wars 2

I’d say a solid build, but more suited to havoc groups than zerging (since you were speaking about essential roles, I assume you run it in zergs).
Just some general flaws:
- retal kills you. It kills you faster than you can deal dmg.
- high mobility in itself is awesome, but in a zerg it just makes sure that you neither can stick to the backline, nor to the commander, often exposing yourself for focus groups.
- especially since you’re forced to deposition yourself, you are not covered by the fly-by-clears from your melee’s anymore, which – in a edition to your low healthpool – makes you very vulnerable to conditions.
- Your very low dmg (no kit but FT) hurts the group you’re running with since you could have opted for melee bombs or s/d ranged focus instead (in case you don’t run with a guild-group, you can neglect this point)

A decent build for SW farming and blobbing, but for roaming it lacks the pressure and sustain, for zerging it lacks the dps and/or support and for small-scale havok it -again- lacks the pressure and sustain, especially since you will meet thieves often there.

Basically it’s the FT who drags this build out of any competitive potential in WvW, especially since it’s the only kit…
Nades, bombs or even TK alone (on a s/d build) would serve you way better than the low-dps / zero support variant that the FT promotes.

Nothing against you in general, it’s good to see some more people trying to theory-craft and learn more about the class, but FT as main-kit has proven to be sub-optimal in almost all game-modes. Taking it together with bombs or nades usually works well as blast-machine and for the cc. But then he also competes with EG & TK, and since slick-shoes are even better than both in WvW, people go for the TK to get the pull and block, or EG to get the mobility & additional stunbreak.
So yea, FT is the least-optimal kit for WvW, therefore hurting this build quite a lot.
Maybe go 6/4/0/2/2 with nades.
or 4/4/0/2/4 with bombs.
If you adjust your play style a bit you’ll see a impressive increase in both dps and utility, while still having rocket-boots and slick-shoes to your disposal.

The purpose is not to spam FT 1 the whole time on the opponent MT. This is how retaliation is not a problem.

About mobility, you use it when you need, it allow to go easier and faster where it is preferable to be. This is really strange to hear “If I move easier, i will go where I shouldn’t go”. Use instead your mobility to leave a such place !

Damage with FT 1 are not low at all. It does 61.6% of bomb 1 damages, if you just change the 4 points in alchemy to explosive, and just looking at directs damages. This is lower in theory. But in practice, bomb 1 have a very lower range and a delay to explode, which make them imprecises and force you to enter the melee. You take more risk, and so more defensives stats/traits which also lower your damage, but you still don’t hit each time. It is a lot easier with FT to maintains a damage flow on anything.

When you can go melee, then you can use the rifle 3 & 5 + FT 2. In pratice, this is enough to take profit of any opened melee window, and then concentrate the damages.

As I tried to explain, the principle is to adapt your weapon to your best range at a moment, and not the opposite. If you just want a monogameplay build, which mainly always spam something 1 while sticking others, then this one is obviously not for you
I already played everything in WvW, but now I know that if all I want to do is damages, then this build is what do the more in practice. Because high damages on the paper are worth nothing if you rarelly have the comfort to make them real in pratice.

I have been using a similar build since the engi rework announcement and it basically lets me zerg dive while dealing tons of damage.

[http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUlUUpWrtbxALseNSdBNyo0FQHgFUARuwYA-T1BEABG8AAeS5HAXAg40B4z+DJq+jhKBJFQRKjA-w]

Build Strengths:
Spammable Blast finishers with 4.75s and 12s cooldowns
Low cooldown stunbreak 33s
53% reduced damage under stun. (engi’s have weak stunbreaks)
53% condi reduction on snares
20% condi reduction on DoTs
Strong Movement on Elixir Gun 4 and Rifle 5’s extended leap range 650 and 800 respectively (swap kits mid EG4 jump to maintain momentum for the extra range as Wolfineer would do)
17 stacks of might strong uptime
Elixir C ‘oh crap’ button – full condi clear
very low cooldown 25s aoe condi convert to boon ‘Toss Elixir C’ (Toss Elixir C can be used on yourself while you are in mist form to remove snares and big DoTs)

Escape:
Mist form at low health + Toss Elixir C while mistform + EG4 and Rifle 5

Heal:
13.5k HP (78% of total HP every 20s) [8.4k AOE HEAL HP]

Heal skill blast finisher (20s cd waterfield) [5040hp + 2640hp(from 2 blast finishers)]
Toolbelt Heal (2nd 20s cd Waterfield)/FT2 [1320hp]
EG5 [700 + pulsing 205 so long as inside field]
Total: 9700HP on 20s cooldown Does not include 12 seconds of regeneration [1560hp over 12s]or pulsing heal [2255 if stay inside EG5 field for 10s]

Alternate Traits:
Formula 409: 3 condi removal aoe instead of 2 on Toss Elixir C. I have personally felt the impact of running this to get away from the zerg in mistform.

Precise Sights: 50% Vulnerability on Hit no Cooldown -on Flamethrower that pumps 4.44 hits per second constant at the cost of higher cd on escape EG4 and knockback FT3 without affecting spammable blast finishing too much.

Hopefully I can post a video here soon of this.

@Franke:
The build you present is also a nice one ! I really appreciate the fact you presented it as a similar build, because it show how much we share the same understanding beside our many differences :
(Rifle + Rifled Barrels) + (FT + Deadly Mixture) + zerk stats.
This is our common basis. All the differences between our builds only show how much we both understood how Rifle can effectively combine with FT, and open the door to additionals synergies.

We both look at the short CD blast finisher on FT 2 (and you built a synergy out of Elixir Gun, with reduced CD on both), and we try to rentabilize our tool belt with reduced CD, while taking profit of leg mods which is especially efficient in WvW.

We especially search for mobility/sustains/escapes to validate our zerks stats.