Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I play ele, thief and guard in PvE (all of them fully geared, lvl50 ‘fractal frequenters’). But I’m drawn to try out something exotic, unusual, etc… (Ok, ok I’ll gear up my warri for that mandatory PS build one day, I promise.) SO: from the remaining classes engie is the most tempting, because according to people much smarter than me: they are the only class outside the warri-guard-thief-ele quartet that have the potential to properly replace them in most PvE situations. (Keep in mind that I’d like to have a rather elitist approach, so the ‘play any class you like’ arguement is not on the table.)

So I went and:

Checked Element’s new guide – that dulfy posted – and a few other guides… DAT ROTATION!!! I mean is this serious? I get that smart people took a pen and a sheet of paper, did the math and that’s what they came up with; but never bothered how realistic its execution is. Its complicated enough to execute properly on a training dummy, but how about the Aetherblade Fractal or Mai Trin? Your utilities are a part of your rotation as well? What if you need a utility slot for other purposes than DPS? Does this mean that not only you have to know this extremely long rotation by heart, but you also have to know all rotation variations for each utility slot setup? This is getting nasty… Its practicly infinitely more complicated than any other class I guess.

I’m not trying to say that engie pve sucks or is unplayable, all I know is that I’ve only seen them in CoF runs and such. Never-ever in high lvl fracs. I remember one in CoE… one.

So I’d like to ask the few engie PvE renegades how they deal with these issues? From my current perspective it does not seem to be worth the effort. I like challanges, but this just seems plain stupid to me to try. But I dont want to make an early judgement, so convince me pls that it’ll be good… unicorns and rainbows.

ty

Yep – the engi seems to be the hardest class to play in pve. It´s normal that those rotations last quite long, and include almost every skill you´re running.
That guide is pretty nice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UeNcqdSJI8
And the reward for this is – as he mentions in the video – the highest sustain dps in the game.

Ofc you will lose dps when you change you´re slot skills, except you´re elite one, but that doesn´t matter too much if you refleckt / block key attacks from the boss, when there is no one else around able to do it.
However in normal dungeons there are only “rare” situations where you need to switch any utility ( mostly it´s stealth stacking, but you can change back before a fight so nvm ).
In Fractals I never was forced to change stuff. I only played up to 49, so I can´t speak for 50, but that Sinister condition build is extremly flexible, since it has a lot of blinds and cc – all that´s missing is a stunbreak.
I usually get through the optimised rotation from the link in the video description without too many problems. You just need to know the boss mechanics, and fit you´re rotation beginning right into it, since you´re rota has long phases where you can go for a longer range.

And to convince you — engi is a class that is versatile from the bottom to the top, and you won´t get bored of it becaus it´s so hard to play, and offers such a huge potential to become better and better. Once you learned more about this class, you can fit to any situation in the whole game – not only in each part of pve – which gives you even more challenges to claim !

And one last thing – engi is one of the best solo / not full grp dungeon runners so you got more challenges incoming there if you want to do some extreme stuff.

Sry for the long post :P

More than follow the rotations perfectly, I just have a sense for timings of abilities now. I will generally know about when my Acid bomb is up or FT. Sometimes I think wrong and I just move on to the next thing quickly.

It’s certainly a tough profession, but that’s why I play it. They’re great in fractals. Most of my groups actually have one or more of them

So at this point I just kind of have a sense of 6s, 8s, 15s in my head that counts down from certain skill usage. It won’t lead to a perfect rotation, but it’s close and with dodging and what not you will be skipping some moves so blindly following a rotation won’t actually be optimal if you get knocked out of the vacuum of just running it strait. It’s more about prioritizing.

Grenade Barrage>Acid Bomb>Jump Shot>Flame Blast (unless might stacking) > Shrapnel>Blunderbuss>Poison Grenade > Freeze Grenade

Engi is certainly the profession most likely to not reach their mathmatical potential, unless you’re someone like Element.

In the chaos of combat, its just about using your most damaging skills off cooldown. Element’s guide has 3 kits and a weapon, its only natural there are a lot more damaging skills to throw out.

As for trading off utility slots for weapon kits, I view the engineer’s toolbelt as his utilities. That makes it 4 weapons and 5 utilities (with restrictions, since your toolbelt skills are tied to your utility slots). With so many weapon skills available, some of them also serve as your utility skills (Fumigate on the Elixir Gun Weapon Kit for example, you never use it for DPS but as an amazing team condition cleanse on short cooldown)

Don’t follow the rotation if you cannot see why the skills are ordered that way, otherwise you’ll be forcing yourself to memorize which just isn’t fun to play. When you are are familiar with the hard hitting skills, you won’t even need to memorize anything to carry out a good rotation.

I agree with you two that it does not make sense to stick to a rotation, once it got stuck, messed up or whatever — in those situations you´re definitly right, that you need to watch you´re main dps stuff, and pull it of as often as possible.

But I highly recomend you to try to get the optimized rotation through as often as possible, so you get better at it.
And also use it when you don´t see why the skills are ordered that way – many times I just thought like “why is he using that low dps skill while the burst is off cd” and a while later I realised, that I just slacked in the rotation — if the rotation was done well, the burst was not off cd then — I was just to slow at that point.
So rly try to stick to the optimised max dps rotation as much as anyhow possible, to recive the highest dps that´s possible.