can someone help me with a top pve build?
Choose either pistols for condition damage or rifles for direct/burst damage and spec accordingly. PvE is tolerant enough that both will be phenomenal, though party make-up is often a consideration.
For later PvE and small-scale PvP consider some toughness/vitality armor for surviveability, especially for harder areas. You should be fine with a glass cannon pure-damage build in most explores and in WvWvW, but later fractal dungeons (if you do those) will benefit from at least SOME surviveability, and it’s almost required in small scale PvP unless you’re adept at hiding behind others (it doesn’t matter in WvW zergs).
You can also attempt to heal with the elixir gun and buff with elixirs if you want a more supportive role, in which case feel free to stack healing, but realize elementalists easily do almost everything you can do better in that regard (most of engineer healing is from regeration anyway). Still, it is a viable option.
For burst damage specs, gear with rifle and berserker armors (or equivalent), though you can mix knight or whatever gear in for extra toughness if you want more survivability (toughness is generally considered better for engineers than vitality, though vit doesn’t hurt). For condition damage builds go with a pistol and Rampager style gear or dungeon/karma equivalents. For pistol it doesn’t really matter whether you use a second one or a shield, so feel free to have both (I do, and switch depending on the encounter).
Builds you will have to look for. Popular direct power builds are grenadier and rifle snipe builds, and condition builds are piercing pistol and elixir builds. There are also free-form builds like flame-juggernaut, chain lightning, and tankcat that will be fine with either weapon/focus, so look around at the trait lines and see what you like.
Just fyi since you mentioned grenades, the standard grenade build has 30 points in the top trait line and has the “10% more damage to explosions” and “Grenadier” traits mandatory for a direct damage grenade build, as these increase grenade damage and utility by huge amounts. The rest of the trait expenditure is entirely up to preference, and as a kit they work well for both direct damage and condition builds, though condition builds don’t necessarily need more than 10 points in the top trait line as they use grenades primarily to apply conditions and the extra explosive damage is a choice rather than requirement (basically they just get the tier 1 incendiary ammo trait).
(edited by LegoTechnic.5910)
The best build or strategies when playing a class is being able to do good on
Damage/control/Support skills.
But only You can figure out what works well by experimenting it. Or observing good players playing the class.
If this game was based heavily on Armor/Stats then I could just tell u to go get <Armor Name> but thats the thing, Its mainly heavily focused on Skills and strategies thay you must experiment and observe other players to see what works for you best in PvE and PvP.
I play in Borlis Pass server. I could show you some of my combat strategies if you play there. If not, idk. lol
This is my favorite “all-rounder” build (can’t take credit for it though other folks had this up with minor variation).
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcEQFAUl0pCYnvSiF1LJyoCdGoC6lIFPml95Bb1WQIA;TYAqZMzImxOjbG5MA
This is more PvP oriented, for PvE I use:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcEQFAUl0pCYnwSiF1LJyoCdGoCAmIFPml95xb1WQIA;TYAqZMzImxOjbG5MA
There is some argument that elixir R can be used for PvP over Elixir S but I like the Elixir s toolbelt skill to get me out of jams!
For gear in this spec I go knights, useful for both PvE and PvP and super easily obtainable.
Something I did not know until recently: you can switch the 10, 20 and 30 point traits when out of combat, so it costs nothing to move between these two specs.
Gable Thorn – Elementalist
Shining in Darkness – Warrior – Mag