Showing Posts For Meester Van.1025:
The bleed is a large portion of the dps, but you don’t need them. They do stack though, quite wonderfully so. But yes you can go for incendiary powder if you prefer burning instead. It’s a good option to swap to if you have another condition build in the party that wants to hog all the bleeding.
I haven’t looked much at celestial builds for engie, but I understand what you’re going for.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQJAqalIq6ZX3SiF1LJyoCdGIF1XeJqQ+95xblWQIA-jgCBIMBkWAgqAM/pIaslgBp8JaVRhVXDT5iIq2wrIa1RBARA-e
This is the build I’ve been running with for a while. Hybrid rampager/zerker gear so that you’re not suffering in either area. For dps I cycle through pistols, bomb kit and grenade kit to stack conditions, for autoattacking and waiting for stuff to come off cooldown, I use grenade kit. Provides stacks of bleeding, minutes of poison, sustainable burning, with occasional confusion. The other skills can also provide immob/cripple and blind if necessary. I also take EG due to its fantastic utility, with group healing, condition removal, and escape ability. With my condition duration I am also able to use its autoattack to sustain weakness on bosses, which sacrifices my dps in order to help the rest of the party stay alive by reducing boss damage by 25%. I rarely have to do it, but it’s proven to be very useful when I need to. The kits also provide plenty of combo fields for your party to use. The toolbelt skills are very solid as well, providing a water field, AoE launch + blast finish, AoE regeneration, and grenade barrage that can hit very, very hard. Due to the armor setup the build is indeed quite squishy; however this can be circumvented with superior ranged attacks(although occasional close in to use bomb skills). Vigor on swiftness allows for reliable dodging, which shouldn’t be a problem when you’re good distance away. I am very happy with the build, as it provides great damage along with being very versatile with its utility.
Perhaps you can find what you are looking for in the build, and tweak it as necessary.
Sure, any kit is still useful even when you’re not traited for it. Though to say that the explosives trait line is useless for grenade is well…. silly.
Personally, I get a lot out of that trait line:
30% condition duration (good regardless if you’re built for conditions or not)
15% chance for explosions to cause bleed
20% cooldown reduction for both grenade AND bomb kit (and since I use bomb in my setup, the trait becomes twice as beneficial)
Vulnerability on explosions make 20+ vulnerability stacks a breeze with grenades, which boosts party dps significantly
As far as the grenadier trait itself, I’d consider it invaluable if you plan to mainly use grenades. The 1500 range and that extra grenade make a huge difference. Personally I think that 30 in explosives is a must for any grenade build. I can understand wanting to put those points elsewhere but you miss out on a lot of perks by not having it. Where else were you planning to put those points?