Guild Wars 2

The only stolen skills I haven’t developed a strategy for are Ranger & Engie. This is because they’re both fields that have to be placed & heartseekered through to get the most out of.

How strong are they? How do you guys leverage them?
1. Do you wait for when you’re resetting with SR?
2. Do you drop them on top of the enemy mid-fight and burn HS to apply? If so, do you wait for <50% health? (I try to reserve HS for BP stealth until the target breaks 50% to be efficient.)

I run improvisation & love using stolen skills, so I would really like to start incorporating these two more into my play.

i normaly use engi gunk after the go through their hammer rotations, and as soon as i hit steal from ranger i drop it because they normally have that weakness on crit attack trait.

Also with Ranger bundle, you can use HS for a Healing Combo as well as a few others to help with some sustain.

Personally, I don’t wait until the target gets below a certain health threshold if I’m using a combo field. Especially if running Improvisation.

Healing Seed is all about my health, not the enemy’s. So I’ll Heartseeker or Cluster Bomb it when I need to heal.

Can’t give much advice about Throw Gunk. Just use it when you’re going to get hit, haha! :-P

I try to drop healing seed on point for teammates or when i rez them.

Gunk is weird, usually i drop it on point to add some pressure, when i can’t get on point myself or when it is time to spam headshots xD. Most of the time i just drop it on downed body o.o I feel like gunk is one of the worst stolen spells because it doesn’t actually help us vs engis, which it should in theory but due to HoT changed it is outdated now. Sadly, chances of it being adjusted are as high as me becoming Japanese empress.

I use P/D so I take full advantage where possible of the projectile finishers.

For Healing Seed the finisher is regeneration, whether or not you actually even hit. Even if you are out of range the finisher will still activate, so it is possible to get long duration regeneration on you during a fight. Really helps with survivability. Regen is good if you have it as early in the fight as possible, so I generally like to start with this kind of combo.

For Throw Gunk, the projectile finisher is confusion. Engineers have a lot of abilities to throw around, and my build doesn’t normally use confusion, so adding confusion to my other conditions is a strong combination—assuming the combo works. You need to throw the gunk within range of where you think they will end up. Then you actually need to get to the gunk and perform a Sneak Attack. Harder, but doable. I save this skill for mid fight if the engi is tough enough skill wise to warrant the additional effort of timing and positioning the attack.

For both Ranger and engi the strat shuld be the same. Whirl through them. with my DD build. i love getting the ranger one, because when i drop it in a mid fight i call out WATER! and Start whirling it to get those bolts. h\keep in mind it’s not a water feild. i just love yelling WATER! as a thief.

Engy is not as good, as it’s very small but i still whirl it to stack up to three stack of confusion.

For a condi build, Gunk is often a big spike in DPS. Unload and Lotus Training both stack Confusion when using it. I try to use it first thing since most players front load their attacks often without paying attention to Confusion on them till its too late.

I also hold onto the Ranger heal as a second heal mid-fight.