Guild Wars 2

any advice? i feel totally useless when i come up against an engi.

I find S/D and shortbow to be the most effective against them. Especially if you’re running 25 Deadly Arts in PvP, only fight them if they are on a node (duh) and use shortbow to maintain poison fields, and fire cluster bombs onto the node in between auto attacks. Some of them are so engrossed in running in that circle spamming bombs, that they won’t even notice you left the AoE and are ranging them... S/D’s advantage is simply the evades and boon steal to remove their protection, swiftness and regeneration. If you’re using S/D, it’s good to take at least 5 Deadly Arts so you can poison them with steal right before they heal. It has to be timed right before they heal, otherwise they’ll just cleanse it.

kite the kiters. I’ve seriously killed one with just my SB lol. but on a serious note i find that crippling them helps a lot. but usually i will start off with my sb until that crete comes down. once i see that i shadow step and burn the turrets just with auto attack. then the fun comes. i usually switch to d/d or s/d depending on what i feel like that day and just get heavy on them. their condis are pretty easy to get around. just keep your distance and shadow step backstab on them and pull off. I’ve found most engis won’t burn nothing but their 5 and auto attack for nades. and if they are running bomb kit they will just spam everything till its on cd. stay out of that you shouldn’t be following bombs period lol. most panic as well and throw up their shields once you stealth.. its basically a battle on who messes up first tbh. just keep your cool and attack when its safe

Engie is my main and thief is my secondary.

Engineers hate to be immobilized or crippled. Our condition clearing is too often tied to the healing turret. KILL IT. Stun breaking is another problem for an engineer.

Engies have lots and lots of abilities, but if you interrupt, stun, immobilize or otherwise hamper their ability to get them down quickly, the engineer is pretty easy to beat.

Couple of things I find thieves forget:
1. An engineer can stealth too. I see you stealth, wait a second and stealth too which screws up your backstab chance.
2. Bombs can have a large radius making kiting fun and attacking the engie w melee hard.
3. Engies have a LOT of blinds too which really screws up thieves at the wrong time.
4. Engineers can be almost anything and you often don’t know (because they run many of the same kits) till the fight starts. An engineer makes an excellent healer, physical damage dealer as well as condi spam.
5. Engineers are really good at getting invulnerability (short duration) for your big attacks if they time them right. (So juke them).

Your biggest fear should be the engineer’s bombs and ability to immobilize you.
Don’t go into SR except as a last result. The grenades will do you in.

The most important thing you can do to an engineer is stun them followed by immobilizing. Basilisk venom is very helpful as is shadow step!!!!

Bombsaway.7198:

Engie is my main and thief is my secondary.

Engineers hate to be immobilized or crippled. Our condition clearing is too often tied to the healing turret. KILL IT. Stun breaking is another problem for an engineer.

Engies have lots and lots of abilities, but if you interrupt, stun, immobilize or otherwise hamper their ability to get them down quickly, the engineer is pretty easy to beat.

Couple of things I find thieves forget:
1. An engineer can stealth too. I see you stealth, wait a second and stealth too which screws up your backstab chance.
2. Bombs can have a large radius making kiting fun and attacking the engie w melee hard.
3. Engies have a LOT of blinds too which really screws up thieves at the wrong time.
4. Engineers can be almost anything and you often don’t know (because they run many of the same kits) till the fight starts. An engineer makes an excellent healer, physical damage dealer as well as condi spam.
5. Engineers are really good at getting invulnerability (short duration) for your big attacks if they time them right. (So juke them).

Your biggest fear should be the engineer’s bombs and ability to immobilize you.
Don’t go into SR except as a last result. The grenades will do you in.

The most important thing you can do to an engineer is stun them followed by immobilizing. Basilisk venom is very helpful as is shadow step!!!!

Nice man, thanks for your help!

I also find fighting engies very hard, i will consider all of this, seems very accurate!

exos.6831:

any advice? i feel totally useless when i come up against an engi.

Shortbow or P/P+Ricochet.

We don’t have much tools at range but all the bouncing projectiles will destroy all the turrets really fast. Getting too close to them almost always spells doom.

cleanse early, they don’t apply condis consistently but rather in bursts. You WILL get a long duration burn early on, and it is quite likely you will get confused so pay attention so you don’t kill yourself

If they pull out bombs, back off til they waste all the good ones and switch out

decide if you are going to spike them or blind them. grenades and bombs are very hard to land hits with, so you can often just dance around at range and spike them every so often. If they are glassier and not using grenades, just dropping black powder on them and spamming autos into a heartseeker when they run can be pretty effective.

Sir Vincent III don’t you have issues with SB?

When i try to do like you explain i don’t do enough damage.

They do a lot more damage to me and i have to stop since i don’t have condi cleanse with SB.

Steal, throw gunk, shortbow clusterbomb the spot to get chaos armor. If they switch to bombs get the hell out of that area. I use d/p #3 a lot when I’m fighting them with that set. Start in shortbow and with experience you’ll know the right time to switch to d/p for the kill.

Engineers have an advantage against thieves but it’s not a foregone conclusion who will win.

This must be in sPvP. I was just on my Engi in WvW, whom has 2.5k armor, and was instagibbed by a D/D thief for 17,532 dmg. The ole’ Steal, cd, and backstab macro. Nerf’s can’t happen soon enough.

I prefer to reflect the grenades/bombs with dagger storm tbh so I always switch elites when I see an engi, from what I’ve experienced it gets a decent amount of burst back at them + cripple etc, makes them panic that you’re not kiting like they expect you to, and before they can react properly gives me a chance to burst them down after DS ends.

As I main an engineer (and just now creating a thief as my second passion) let me try to assist everyone. Some of the ideas here are pretty good. Some simply won’t work. No offense as it is hard to really know another class.

Engineers are a class that you simply have to know upfront can be just about anything from a tank/healer to a condition grenadier. The harder issue is that there are very few upfront tells on what build the engineer is. In addition, while you see certain weapons on other classes and know pretty much what utilities are being used, you will have far less luck with an engineer. As a class, engineers run a wider variety of utilities and this is CRITICAL for a thief because so many of the utilities act like weapons (e.g. kits) .

There are metas so lets talk about two.

1) The Condition Engineer.

This engineer is typically going to by 30 in grenades (will explain that importance) and will have 20 in alchemy. Weapons will be pistol/shield almost certainly. They will tend to use at least 2-3 kits but you can only count on grenades being one of them. The other two tend to be bombs and elixir gun in that order of priority.

INCREASINGLY, you are seeing players skip bomb kit which is a mistake but bombs are hard to play well.

Headaches:

1) The engineer with bomb kit has the best area denial in the game.

Counter: The bombs have delays both casting and the fuse/timer. Properly timed, a thief can get quite used to getting in fast for a backstab then shadow stepping back or dodging out. Rinse and repeat. Stealing and shadow stepping and dodging away really make it quite possible to counter bombs. Do damage then get away. Don’t finish the fight on the first burst of damage. That is where the bombs will chew you up.

Engineer’s Counter: This works on newer engineers who make the mistake of dropping a bomb, moving and dropping another bomb. Since I can’t see you, I’m guessing where you are and when you will strike. A good engineer will drop 2 bombs, move, drop 2 bombs. The differences in the timers will make it very likely you will get hit as you move in. Also, while the thief can time the bomb’s detonation, the engineer has the advantage that you really don’t know what bomb I just dropped until it explodes. I have often “caught” a thief in a glue bomb then rained hell on him.

2) The engineer will have passive healing in Backpack Generator. While only a few hundred health/second, it really prevents a lot of whittling me down with your SB or P/P. I WILL outlast and out condition you.

Counter: Most condition engineers run Healing Turret which is the best heal in the game really but makes them VERY susceptible to thieves. You need to encourage me to bring my turret out and then attack it quickly. CND is a LOT of fun with turrets out. You just nail the turret, backstab the engineer and have oh so much fun rinse and repeat.

Engineer Counter. A good engineer wants only the healing turret overcharge and will drop, overcharge and pick the turret right back up when thieves are around.

3) Engineers have VERY long duration conditions especially burning and confusion that can cause a LOT of damage. They will be applied quickly. Burning comes from each and every critical strike on this build. You will get it no matter how the engineer opens up on you. Confusion can be stacked beautifully with the pistol with additional adds from bomb kit and tool kit if they are using it.

Counter: Thieves don’t die from a condition quickly and in stealth can clear them quickly. You simply don’t want to continue fighting after the initial stealth combo (plus one or two other fast attacks) before re-entering stealth.

Engineer Counter: Thieves worst nightmare is losing mobility to an engineer. I have more and more types of area attacks on shorter cooldowns than any other class. If I can determine where you are, you lose given your low health. Instead of spamming damage initially, a good engineer will do everything he can to immobilize you and/or cripple you so that where you are is limited and the bombs, grenades or even FT can chew you up.

4) Engineers are very good against being burst by single target ranged damage.

Sure the sustained pressure of a ranger can be a bit much if I were to sit and take it, but seriously, don’t try to take me on your pistols/SB vs my grenades/pistol/e-gun. I have too much healing. I can easily add retaliation and weakness (and keep it up on you) and I have more blinds than you do in a ranged fight. Plus, if I really get in trouble, I have 3 seconds of full projectile reflection. And I will start immobilizing and crippling you or otherwise limiting your movement. That is the last thing you want.

Thief Counter: Note, for an engineer to really counter a thief’s ranged damage, they have to play with skills that are not really in the normal rotation. Most people forget to blast the light field, use the shield, etc.

5) An Engineer will have at least one solid block to “bust” your melee burst. The shield has a long cool down but it will block and then daze/stun you. IF, I get the timing right. You have even more trouble if the engineer is using a tool kit as now they have 2 blocks and the tool kit provides a 3 second one which means they really can screw up the timing of your strike and still block the backstab.

Thief Counter: Don’t let me predict when you are going to attack. I see way too many thieves stealth up then rush in at full speed. I can figure that out! If you wait 2 seconds, I tend to misapply.

Engineer Counter: If you are going to hide, so will I. Engineers stealth off blasting smoke fields. It just takes a couple of seconds (which I usually have if I see you stealth). But you should be able to stay in stealth longer. Be patient.

Also, an engineer should be able to take your backstab and punish you for it with a daze/stun/immobilize combo ESPECIALLY if you stay around to long.

6) Shadow Refuge is a BIG Mistake with an Engineer. It is a giant sign for me to just bomb the living snot out of the area or grenade it. You will likely die or I will just push you out with Big old Bomb and reveal you to burst you down.

Thief Counter: Blinding Powder utility gives me that extra stealth that I often need to get the multiple backstab, retreat, backstabs I need to kill and engineer as well as to clear the conditions. DON’T forget Shadowstep too. If you get loaded with conditions it is soooo great.

So the basic idea for the condition engineer is to simply get in, backstab and maybe HS quickly and get out. QUICKLY, go back to backstabbing again, getting out and rinse and repeat. You can take a bomb or two and you can remove the main conditions in stealth fairly well (I will try hard as I can to drop as many conditions on you as I can when you are revealed). So, I love D/D and CND with engineer fights. Shadow stepping, stealth on steal etc all are good traits. The more I can attack from hiding the better this fight will go. As my thief can quickly retrait before a fight, I tend to win more than I lose on engineers.

IN AND OUT beats the condition engineer. Next up, the real problem. . . the power/heal engineer.

Now the fun really begins. What if the Engineer is a healer? A good healing spec engineer will have over 3.3k power and can passively heal between bombs and backpack regenerator 1000/hps. That is before any active heal or regeneration. Regen which will go up upon getting attacked will add another 400-500/hps. For main heals they have a 7k self heal on a 20 second timer and 3 2k heals worth of bandages every 15 seconds (or more precisely every 5 seconds they can drop one). And their elite skill supply crate carries 6 more bundles of bandages.

They still have every condition in the book, just less damage per pulse. However, bombs stack with power better than any other skill in the game.

With ZERO healing stacks or might they drop 2 bombs a second that are rated 987 each (of course their crit chance sucks but hey you can’t have it all). Still, that is significant damage. Not to mention the 1500 blunderbuss attack to the face. So, quickly, I can pump out damage.

In this case, you simply can’t backstab, retreat, backstab as the engineer will too quickly recover the damage. Remember, most all of the healing comes from active play versus passive. So you need to stun, daze etc. If I can’t heal, I’m in trouble. If I can’t run over the bandages, I am in trouble.

ONE FINAL POINT: I see a lot of thieves on my engineer try to blind me. Why? I don’t target you. I target a piece of ground. Sure, it helps v my pistol shots but seriously, I am the last class that blind really works on.

The healing/power engineer is much harder for a thief to handle imho.

exos.6831:

any advice? i feel totally useless when i come up against an engi.

What build are you using? Trickery? Stealth? Acrobatics?
Are you referring to pvp or WvW?
What build is the Engi using? Condi? Power? Turrets?

I use to have trouble against engineers until I accidentally discovered that I can use PP against them. I don’t avoid them anymore.

Slcrisis.6930:

I prefer to reflect the grenades/bombs with dagger storm tbh so I always switch elites when I see an engi, from what I’ve experienced it gets a decent amount of burst back at them + cripple etc, makes them panic that you’re not kiting like they expect you to, and before they can react properly gives me a chance to burst them down after DS ends.

As an Engie, please use dagger storm. It doesn’t reflect properly aimed grenades (at your feet), and it doesn’t do anything against bombs but make you easier to hit.

With all due respect, having played an engineer (note name) as main, the PP build is perhaps the one I fear the least.

Your damage will be eaten by you thru retaliation and projectile blockers. If you still have initiative, it will be blocking time. Your damage per initiative on ranged damage isn’t great. I have plenty of ways to solve for the bleed from the autoattack. I don’t fear A condition. Engineers only worry about getting lots of different conditions on them.

I out range you. Your blinds are somewhat meaningless as both condition and power rangers take area attacks. I suppose if you find one without grenades or bombs you would be doing better.

I’m really good at immobilizing and crippling so I can keep you out of range if you don’t stealth often.

A good BS thief can take an engineer down. P/P would be hard to imagine. I suppose skill could obviously make a difference, but this is a tough one to see as really doing much EXCEPT for the unfamiliarity of it to the engineer.

Berengar.6951:

Slcrisis.6930:

I prefer to reflect the grenades/bombs with dagger storm tbh so I always switch elites when I see an engi, from what I’ve experienced it gets a decent amount of burst back at them + cripple etc, makes them panic that you’re not kiting like they expect you to, and before they can react properly gives me a chance to burst them down after DS ends.

As an Engie, please use dagger storm. It doesn’t reflect properly aimed grenades (at your feet), and it doesn’t do anything against bombs but make you easier to hit.

Then I guess 90% of engineers don’t know how to aim, seeing as almost every single one I’ve fought just starts panicking like rabbits, leaving room for free bursts. I’ll know not to use it against you though

Slcrisis.6930:

Berengar.6951:

Slcrisis.6930:

I prefer to reflect the grenades/bombs with dagger storm tbh so I always switch elites when I see an engi, from what I’ve experienced it gets a decent amount of burst back at them + cripple etc, makes them panic that you’re not kiting like they expect you to, and before they can react properly gives me a chance to burst them down after DS ends.

As an Engie, please use dagger storm. It doesn’t reflect properly aimed grenades (at your feet), and it doesn’t do anything against bombs but make you easier to hit.

Then I guess 90% of engineers don’t know how to aim, seeing as almost every single one I’ve fought just starts panicking like rabbits, leaving room for free bursts. I’ll know not to use it against you though

as another engi, i have to support him. when you use dagger storm, i know you arent going to stealth and i have a ton of non-projectile bursty skills that will force you to choose between downing or cancelling. dagger storm is a huge aggro magnet.

my panic moment is when a thief gets off a 7-9k backstab or 10~13k steal + cnd + backstab because they took their time and/or didnt proc protection injection. but for that kind of damage, you need the back/side bonus AND to be nearly full glass. most of the rest of the time, im just waiting for he thief to show himself so i can continue my burst rotations.

In a PvP setting, you should have no issues whatsoever to engineers. Thief is the sole reason decap Engie has never made it out of SoloQ, and why any decent tPvP team prefers thief over engineer. As someone who’s played both extensively in PvP, I can tell you that, when playing my Engie, if I see a thief on the opposing team who frequents their home point (which I’m decapping), that match is lost. Utilize your blinds and evades well, and you shouldn’t have a single issue fighting engineers as long as you maintain an aggressive playstyle.

I main Ele, Engi is my most recent class but easily my second favorite class now but I have had a thief for a long time what Bombs and Insanemaniac tell you is solid. I find the best way to tell people how to fight a class is to tell them what the class can do so you know what to watch out for Bombs and Insane pretty much gave good solid advice for fighting a engi imo.

I personally agree with dagger storm it can be quite useful against engineers grenades and other projectiles and CC removal (If Yishish uses it it can’t be all bad :p). But as with all builds and skills it won’t always work with everyone we all play differently and counter differently. Thieves do have other kitten nals though and if dagger storm doesn’t work it doesn’t mean they can’t cancel it and pull something else out their sleeves.

I definitely find taking your time and knowing when to apply pressure is best to go against Engi. Blind on stealth to minimize their damage too + Backstab to keep them on their toes and I always make sure to fight them in open spaces so always bait them out to fight where you have the most advantage with kiting and space (I am talking WvW here so I don’t know if that makes any difference) I find I often win the same amount I lose in SPvP, very 50-50 outcomes.

jenniferfleur.3721:

Blind on stealth to minimize their damage too

be careful about this, since i normally use power grenades ill just auto and watch for the blind to fall off so i know if i hit you. i lose 1/3 of 1 auto and i figure out your general location. :P

make sure you arent moving predictably so you actually get something out of the blind instead of just a missed scouting autoattack.

jenniferfleur.3721:

I personally agree with dagger storm it can be quite useful against engineers grenades and other projectiles and CC removal (If Yishish uses it it can’t be all bad :p). But as with all builds and skills it won’t always work with everyone we all play differently and counter differently. Thieves do have other kitten nals though and if dagger storm doesn’t work it doesn’t mean they can’t cancel it and pull something else out their sleeves.

You’d be surprised at the amount of people that will just mindless fire projectiles into reflect walls. It’s particularly effective if your opponent is running a rifle because it will reflect 4 of 5 of their weapon attacks (including their CC attacks), and any static discharge bolts. Even if it doesn’t help you against skilled players, it will work against quite a few people.

I’ve found that p/d builds can be fairly effective against engineers since more of the AoE condi focused ones typically don’t have good condi removal/micro mobility. If they’re running automated response, you just have to try to overload them with condis before they hit the 25% mark (though it’s getting changed in the patch anyways). You do need to be patient though, and watch out for any reflection they might be packing (i.e. shield).

DeWolfe.2174:

This must be in sPvP. I was just on my Engi in WvW, whom has 2.5k armor, and was instagibbed by a D/D thief for 17,532 dmg. The ole’ Steal, cd, and backstab macro. Nerf’s can’t happen soon enough.

my favorite build, instagib build. i will hate the crit damage nerf comes, i miss the old steal crit.