Guild Wars 2

My build cont….

I decided to go with Celestial amulet for marginal DPS increase, significant vitality increase, and negligible hit to healing power and toughness (which we already have a lot of thanks to 30 in inventions). Clerics also works pretty good, but I found that I was often being bursted down by conditions and spammy thieves/mesmers with the lack of vitality and dps.

If you’re really against using Kit refinement you can drop it and go for more traits in the alchemy line like Backpack Regen and Automated Response. For even more vitality, and survability, but reduced slightly reduces DPS and utility.

I pretty much winged it on the extra sigil and runes, Dwayna sounds appealing for the healing boost maybe something to up the annoyance value like Nightmare might also work.

I like this build because it’s fun to play, marginally effecitve (at least in hotjoin, yeah I’m a casual, don’t really care though so sue me), and it’s the only build I’ve ever used that people have actually commented on in-game (both positive and negative).

Edit: Don’t know why the spoiler tags don’t work sorry for wall of text.

What’s the meanest annoyance build you can come up with for the express purpose of ruining someone’s day in PvP/WvW? Viability goes completely out the window on this one.

This node defense monstrosity is my contribution.

Explanation…
So I wanted to build a something that offered extreme surviability without reliance on turrets or sacraficing too much offensive power and utility. I wanted to go into PvP, pick a spot anywhere in the map and claim it as my own and send anybody who thought otherwise packing.

Since I’m investing a lot of points here to get Elixir Infused Bombs I wanted to ensure maximimum explosion uptime. Two traits that work excellent with EFB are Evasive Powder Keg and of course Forceful Explosives. I wanted to trigger evasive powder kegs for that extra aoe healing and damage as much as I could so I wanted to ensure high endurance up-time. That’s where Elixir R and Sigil of Energy make their debut. Drinking Elixir R refills endurance on a 30 second cooldown and also grants access to Toss Elixir R on the toolbelt for 10 second AOE pulse revive field that also cures conditions. Toss Elixir R is almost always a garunteed rez for you and your teamates, especially if you manage to drop a big old bomb in addition to the revive field. The only thing that will prevent the revive is if you have multiple people bursting you down while one stomps, you get knocked out of the rez field or somebody loads you up with poison. Sigil of Energy grants 50% endurance regen on a 9 second cooldown after a weapon swap in combat, swapping to a kit or between a kit and your weapon also trigger this effect. Needless to say, all those extra evades your getting is also giving you a tremendous boost to surviability.

I tried incorporating vigor into this build, but found the added vigor was giving me more endurance than I could effectively use and it just wasn’t worth the cost of the extra two traits that went into setting it up. In addition the swiftness put me me out of range of the bombs that I was dropping behind, me reducing my heals per second. Instead, I decided to use Projection Injection and Kit Refiniement!!?! in place of the vigor-enabling traits.

Projection Injection is pretty self explanatory, more surviability, but I must be crazy for taking Kit Refinement right? It’s a terrible trait. Well generally speaking I would agree with you, but because this build lacks any range power whatsoever the added Magnetic Aura Effect that is gained from swapping to the Medkit grants a 4 second projectile reflect to help deal with those spammy rangers/thiefs/and in some cases engineers, coupled with the shield #4, a quick magnet pull and a supply crate you can make pretty quick work with them and laugh as they essentially kill themselves. Also, swapping to the bomb kit with this trait active drops a Magentic Bomb (which isn’t even documented in the wiki), which pulls everything in 240 radius to the center of it (I think it’s something like 360 when traited with Forceful Explosives). That Magentic Bomb also works with EFB for even more explosive healing! I try to avoid swapping to toolkit when Kit Refinement is active, as it’ll grant a useless 2 second speed buff which won’t really help you. The added utility from Kit Refiniement really helps your survivability and ups the troll factor in this build.

As you see in the build editor, I decided to go 3 in tools to get Inertial Inverter this skill recharges all tool kit skills every 90 seconds after you hit 25% health. 25% health is exactly where you should be dropping your Elixir R which has a long 100+ second C/D otherwise so this trait plays really really well with this build. Needless to say, that’s also going to instantly recharge your toolbelt medkit heal which gives you some wiggle room to heal much earlier in the fight without loosing your main heal. The medkit is probably the best heal you’ll get in this build because you can drop as many bandages as you can 40 seconds before the fight even begins. This is enough time to get 6 bandages, 2 antidotes, and 2 stimulatants on the field before they start to dissapear. That’s gonna give you a crazy edge against the next guy who tries to invade your turf.[/spoiler]

I play an Engi, and my condi removal is poop. That said, what can I do to help counter these sorts of guardians in PvP? I tried to rock as much condition removal as was feasible, but it seems to proc a lot, much more than I can keep up with. Are there any weaknesses to this sort of buid?

A quick and easy fix for just about all PvE related content would be to make them explode when they expire after the 5 second (or however long it was) life span of the mine. The way mobs standing on-top of the mines but down trigger them will still get hit.

I forgot to mention, but this trait is also pretty useful when fighting on points.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Damage reduction between medium and heavy with no bonus toughness is only like 5%. It doesn’t make a huge difference and heavy armor looks ugly.

You sure about that? A 100% glass zerker warrior will have the equivalent to what I would have in terms of power, precision, crit damage, with about 2 ascended soldier trinkets worth of toughness and vitality. I’d say that’s pretty huge.

If you’re a condition engineer it’s not useful to you all. If you fight in close proximity bomb/rifle/nade build then it can be a decent DPS boost for sure, more so than Modified Ammunition for sure. You won’t land every mine, but the odd mine every here and there is the equivalent to an extra Sigil of air/Fire proc which is always handy. Where Bunker Down really shines is kiting. Bunker Down is something like a 20% DPS boost in zerk bomb builds against mobs that want to get up close and personal. Even for mobs that don’t want to get up close and personal, if you can effectively kite them around a single corner/wall/or any sort of obstruction then you’ll see a significant damage boost. In most dungeons you will be stacked, but personally I enjoy soloing a lot of dungeons on my own so I have the freedom to easily kite corners and such without having to coordinate with teamates.

Chances are, if you’re running a zerk engi build you’re already 30 in Firearms so it’s a trait that can easily be swapped in/out for modified ammunition where it’s appropriate.

To give you a recent example of where bunker down was AMAZING to have (I could have killed them twice as fast had I mad some more intelligent utility decisions and I wasn’t using all 6 gambits like a dummy, especially squeamish) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnRs-DOvOTQ

Rozbuska.5263:

More like change Acid Bomb to jump forward

Try the “About Face” command. Takes practice, but it can definitely be done.

Also, that would mess up one of my favorite combos, Jump Shot -> Blunderpuss -> Big Old Bomb -> Acid bomb to get out of dodge and range with grenades at a safe distance.

It wouldn’t make it too good, it would just bring us one step further up to the level of classes like mesmer, theif, and warriors who get evasion like it’s going out of style.

That is all.

Message Body length must at least be 15.

Does the overcharge blast finisher only work in combat? I’ve been trying for the past 5 minutes to get a single blast finisher out of it using various combo fields at different times and haven’t managed to hit a single one. Is this bugged? Or am I doing something wrong?

Probably some 12 year old kid with nothing better to do with his time. Just ignore him.

My Asura engineer is called Fizz Kablooey, I think it’s pretty appropriate. The best engineer name I’ve seen though was a Human called is Dora The Exploder.

Phineas Poe.3018:

Fumigate does a lot more for overall DPS than using Mine Field.

I think you mean acid bomb, right?

Elitist.8701:

Stahp too much bad. The only way a thief can hit 9k BS is literally on people wearing yellow gear with full zerk stats. The highest backstab Ill get on a level 80 is 6k. Also, D/D eles if played to a certain level should have no problems with Thieves. Thieves aren’t the problem. Too many scrubs is.

Also you should main Ele. Thief is so boring in PvE.

Not supporting the guys argument or anything, but I’ve been once for a 12k backstab on full ascended zerk with half soldier trinkets half zerk.

Arantheal.7396:

Never noticed it…

maybe a hardware error?
I don’t know what grafic card / driver you have, but a licensed (don#t download any trash from 3rd party devs) monitor software could help you find the issue…

and just to get the obvious out of the way:
have you cleaned your rig recently, does it heat up under heavy load?

Nope. It’ll usually be about 50c when playing guild wars 2. I can play with high settings just fine, but I just can’t throw grenades or bombs without a huge fps spike.

It’s definitely not an issue with my system, I play all the latest PC games on max settings with no performance problems to speak of.

I’ve been having this problem for a little while now. It hasn’t always been like this, I only noticed it becoming a problem maybe a couple of months ago or so. But nowadays I can’t drop a grenade or bomb without my frame rate dropping from about 100 to 30 (ON PERFORMANCE MODE!).

I have a pretty beefy gaming rig, and I have no problem with particle effects in any of the latest games on ultra settings. It just seems to have become a problem recently with guild wars 2. Nothing on my systems changed in terms of graphics drivers.

Since I main engi and use grenades and bombs and mines primarily this results with me having to play with performance mode just to help reduce this FPS loss. It’s really irritating, I used to play on high settings with a solid and consistent 40+ frames per second.

Anybody else having fps drops from explosions?

AFAIK, explosive powder doesn’t stack with Accelerant-Packed Turrets, unfortunately.

insanemaniac.2456:

static discharge is not the only way, and in fact, you give up tons of survivability to take it because inventions and alchemy have excellent traits… the build in my sig can survive about 3 people chasing you across the map and is your best bet against power thieves

Is the tooltip on protection injection wrong in game? It shows 20 seconds for me.

Here’s the build that I’ve been playing with that focuses on CC, it’s pretty much the only means of survabiltiy you’re going to get in this sort of roaming spec as other classes will outrun you, and probably outburst you (Thieves can drop you in seconds if you don’t react fast, but that pretty much goes without saying regardless of what spec you run :P ):

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUlUUpPrlYxLLseNSbBNqvA6MMiW/5FEgHA-ThRBABXt/o8DPdAAcBAe4BAQp6PmpEkMA5bB-e

And if you’re feeling particularly brave, here’s an even burstier variant that makes use of static discharge and grenades:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUlUUpPrlYxLLseNSbBNq3A6MMiW/5FEgjC-ThRBABXt/o8DPdAAcBAe4BAQp6PmpEkMA5bB-e

Yes you’ll melt pretty fast in most team fights, but man does it feel great to absolutely destroy 1v1 in this spec.

Yep, definietly making that my next character. Reminds me of the happy mask salesman.

I could sell this skin, but I think I’d rather wait….

http://i.imgur.com/vYCmNjr.png

Trice.4598:

Frailty, Accuracy, Battle, Strength are all good alternative for day. I don’t know how swap work with engineer so I’m not sure about Battle.

Actually, Sigil of battle (and all on swap kits for that matter) probably works better on Engineer than any other class because our main weapons are out utility skills that don’t have cooldowns when we switch to them.

Basaltface.2786:

Seems you gonna die as a sad hobosack wearer then… the day they do something nice like this is the day i drink a whole bottle of the cheapest and most poignant cider vinegar i can find, record it, load it to youtube and post it on the forums… have my word for that.

I’m going to quote you on this and send you a PM in game if it ever happens.

Honestly the thing in this thread that bothers me the most is the copy and paste Elxir X skill, I’d rather have unique and interesting skills than fancy visuals. If I wanted fancy visuals I won’t be playing a medium class! >:(

Don’t listen to what we, or anybody else says. You really have to play a class to know if it suites your own individual playstyle and needs. A lot of people lock themselves into the first class that they pick off the seat of their pants without ever trying the others. The only thing I can recommend is, pick a class that sounds somewhat appealing, play around with it in PvE, try all the weapons, go to PvP try some different builds, and then move onto the next class.

It won’t be a deciding factor, but at the very least getting your feet a bit wet with a class will give you an initial indicator as to whether it’s inline with how you want to play.

You should pick a class based on whether YOU like it, forget what other people say, and what’s the current flavour of the month meta build/class. You WILL NOT enjoy this game if you play a class that you don’t like only because other people tell you it’s viable.

As far as viability is concerned, a player that really knows the ins and outs of his class, and how the game works will be better in every aspect of the game than some newbie who picks a class because it’s got the best XYZ. Hard counters aside (i.e., condi necro versus Diamond Skin Ele), anybody that says otherwise just needs to get good.

I’m going to be making the Predator in the next couple of days, just as soon as I make the last bit of gold I need to buy the materials. And I’m having a hard time deciding which sigils I should invest in. I generally run a full zerk engineer, and I mostly do PvE content with an interest towards high level fractals.

I’ve been using sigil of force and sigil of energy on my exotic rifle up until now, with a spare exotic rifle off to the side using sigils of force and night. I was thinking of just salvaging the rifle with the force and energy sigils and using those, as they’ve been working pretty good for me and it will save me a bit of cash. But maybe somebody could suggest some better runes for PvE?

I was using Bloodlust for quite some time, but it got really tedious having to work up the stacks every time.

Stability? What’s that? There ain’t no such thing as stability in my mine field.

And then proceed to CC the hell out of them.

tigirius.9014:

Ameno.6813:

I’m quite pleased with the way bombs and mines are working at the moment. The fact that there’s a slight delay on the bomb explosions makes it bar none, the best kiting skill in the game against melee mobs. Literally just walk forward while spamming one, you take no damage, and the mobs take tons of damage. This works great against Thieves, Warriors and Guardians as well. As for the range mobs, well, if you can find a nice corner to kite around then even range mobs can be solo’d easily.

Bunker Down trait is STRONG, it absolutely does not need any buffs at the moment. I’ve been using it to much success in PvE and PvP. Just watch the numbers roll in in the combat logs.

All of my posts deal with PVE only, and the delay on bombs is unacceptable in PVE against mobs when bombs are supposed to be the answer for Engineers since we lack greatsword access. Sure it’s different and it might work in PVP well but certainly not in PVP.

These are not buffs

Reducing their pause before exploding and improving the trigger range of ALL explosives is hardly buffing them, it’s restoring them to the qualities of equality because they already had these things 2 years ago. When we’re underwater we don’t deal with these same issues, there’s absolutely no reason why they can’t improve qualities of these kits and traits to coincide with what we already experience underwater, and what other classes enjoy by default in every class but ours.

Are the only player communities left in this game the PVPers/RPers?

Most of my response was geared towards PvE…, I just tacked on PvP towards the end there.

I’m quite pleased with the way bombs and mines are working at the moment. The fact that there’s a slight delay on the bomb explosions makes it bar none, the best kiting skill in the game against melee mobs. Literally just walk forward while spamming one, you take no damage, and the mobs take tons of damage. This works great against Thieves, Warriors and Guardians as well. As for the range mobs, well, if you can find a nice corner to kite around then even range mobs can be solo’d easily.

Bunker Down trait is STRONG, it absolutely does not need any buffs at the moment. I’ve been using it to much success in PvE and PvP. Just watch the numbers roll in in the combat logs.

This is almost as terrible an idea as the guy that suggested warriors should get a trait that gives them afterimage clones. You guys are wwayyyyy too pampered of a class lmfao.

DiazKincade.2891:

Skorm.4897:

Engi’s dont need more weapons, Thats what kits are for.

So what you are saying is that kits or gtfo…what about all of the other utilities they have? How often do you hear of gadget engineers? Heck even turret engineers run with a kit.

The way engineers are set up at the moment requires them to have at least 1 kit on them at all times. if not more. That seriously limits their build options. Having access to some melee skills would be nice especially if they can use some of their other utilities and actually trait with those in mind rather than “trait for kit first”. Especially considering all the players who keep crying for melee only. and melee is the best. Engineers get tool kit for melee. That takes up a utility slot. and tool kit is stupidly slow damage wise. On the terms of hammer guardian slow. The guardian gives protect to all(up to 5? I forget.), damage to enemies around in the symbol and potentially healing if traited, where tool kit gives a weak vulnerability and a bunch of situational defensive/support skills.

In short engineers need a standard melee weapon to go to that actually doesn’t rely on their utility slots to open up more viable builds.

AsmallChicken.9634:

Corian.4068:

I’m a warrior. I’ll trade you my mace for your flamethrower.

Take it.

Enjoy your garbo weapon.

Flamethrower does significant damage when built for it (Its a power based weapon not condi just fyi) yet compared to other options it is lackluster. Bomb and Grenade kits come to mind (when traited for).

No engineer takes a toolkit for melee… maybe one that doesn’t know any better. Bombs, and hell, even grenades do great in melee.

Wolfar.6508:

It hits the ceiling in Dungeons way too much for my taste..

Don’t use it at a range. If you use it in melee range in explodes immediately on launch.

Arantheal.7396:

for pve, okay
maybe even viable for wvw wall bombing (need to test that myself)
but for wvw roaming and pvp its worthless since even a blind cow with 3 broken legs can dodge it.

I would argue with that one. Grenades also have a pretty terrible travel time and in theory, are easy as hell to dodge. But people still use them effectively all across the board. The travel time really depends on how close you are to the target. Short range it’s great, because like grenades, there’s almost no travel time and it explodes almost instantly. At medium range it’s pretty terrible because you can clearly see it coming. At long range, however, I can’t even see it in the air once I launch it, and I have no way of guessing when it’ll actually hit even though I’m the one who launched it – I highly doubt anybody else will be able to in the heat of battle. Granted, for the long range to work you’ll need to use it against a mostly stationary target (somebody on a node) or a blob of people.

It’s like a mobile version of the Big Old Bomb, it shares the same CD, does the same damage, and doesn’t knock back foes which is a good thing in most circumstances.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that I wasn’t on a full glass cannon spec when that screenshot was posted. I was running 4/6/0/2/0 to get some extra survivability because I was trying to solo Pyro. Additionally, for whatever reason I decided to use a weapon using a sigil of force and a sigil of night even though it wasn’t night. I could easily see somebody critting 15k+ with that thing under the right circumstances. Imagine being in a dungeon with 25 stacks of might…

I don’t get it, I’ve NEVER had trouble against conditions…

I’ve been experimenting with a explosioneer build lately, and well…

http://i.imgur.com/IolqZyp.jpg

I was admiring the looks of my Elxir gun and Flamethrower the other day and thought to myself – wouldn’t it be awesome if I could wield both of these at once!?

Image if we could summon some sort of exosekelton that replaces all of our mainhand/offhand and utlity skills with kits! Unfortunately there’s 6 kits, so we’d have to maybe sacrifice the medkit or leave out one of the existing kits in order for this to work. In addition, we’d have to make all the utility skills act like a regular skill bar for the duration of the elite which could get really awkward depending on your keyboard setups – and you would also need to add some additional buttons in order to exit our of the exoskeleton and the currently selected kit on the utility bar side, and maybe even an additional toolbelt.

It would probably be a ton of work in order to setup and even more so to actually use, but just imagine being able to lob 6 grenades at once, or spam dual-elixir gun auto attacks on thieves. I think the unweildy nature of it would help to balance it so it isn’t too terribly OP, and give it maybe 10-15 seconds of max uptime and a really long cooldown (200+ seconds?). It would give engies some pretty amazing burst capabilities and it would take tons of practice in order to use effectively. I just had the idea pop into my head and thought I’d share it. Personally, I don’t think it would be any more OP than a Turret engie being able to pop a toolkit.

Anybody else have any cool ideas for elite skills?

I just wanted to comment on this issue, as I seem to be having the save problems. I recently picked up grenades and bombs again on my engineer and the explosions from my grenades drops me down to about 10-20 FPS on a relatively high-end gaming machine. I tried lowering everything to the lowest possible settings, but I’m still seeing a huge FPS loss when my grenades explode. This is particularly noticeable in dungeons where I have my camera zoomed in closer than usual when stacking, and when I’m rotating my camera while explosions are going off.

I’m using an NVIDIA 560 TI graphics card, I figured it might have been a driver problem so I updated but I still see the same FPS loss. I don’t have any trouble with other games on ultra settings like Dark Souls or Bioshock, it just seems to be an issue with Guild Wars 2.

On the subject of Fortified Turrets, are there any practically PvE/Dungeon use cases where it absolutely makes sense to pick this thing up? People keep telling me in game that Fortified Turrets is useless, and I haven’t been able to test it out myself.

That’s something I was thinking about today… EFB should apply to grenades too IMO, and probably mine field. Think of the interesting mechanics it would introduce by healing allies from a far with the grenade kit, maybe pop a mine field and a stack of med kits as a little heal cache off to the side in case you need to double back during a boss fight/PvP for some extra healing.

And maybe take the base healing of the bomb kit and split it between all the grenades/mines so it’s not OP. That’s a seriously kitten trait line at the moment, basically everything in there is terrible if you’re not a turret engi (and even that’s saying a lot). Buffing EFB in this way would make it a little more worthwhile investing all those traits in a kittenty trait line.

That’s pretty sick dude! I saw a Thief solo HoTW butcher patch a while back, I know they buffed the troll since then (not sure what else might have been buffed) but it should be a fun challenge if you’re interested. And then do AC

I used those cat ears on one of my asura, here’s the sliders:

http://imgur.com/heSJS8k.png

Has it always done that?

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

You’d probably have to pull data from the game itself since I don’t see how the overlay would be able to distinguish Rifle 3 from Grenade 3 otherwise. And Anet probably wouldn’t be too happy with that since it’d give a direct gameplay advantage.

It wouldn’t be completely automatic. You tell it what weapons you’re using and all it’s listening for is keys 1-5 or whatever you have it set to and it fires off a countdown according to the weapon you selected. It wouldn’t interact with the games API at all.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Engineer does just fine in all PvE content, the problem isn’t with them being a bad class, it’s with people being bad at playing them. Short of a lot of QoL fixes making the bads less bad (being able to see/use rifle cooldowns while in a kit, grenade auto-casting, etc.) the engineer situation isn’t going to change a ton.

It’s the same situation as why rangers have been demonstrated to be really good for speedruns but no one wants to take them still. Even the hardcore speedrunners don’t have any good ranger players, or any good engineer players for that matter.

Do you think a third-party overlay app that keeps track of keybinds that you set and display calculated weapon cooldowns for you while you’re in a kit would be against the rules/cheating? I know there’s plenty of overlays for things like WvW updates and boss timers and those seem to be OK.

Also, I realized later on that there’s no point in having any more than 5 gambits.

I wanted to take a crack at the Lyssa back-piece recipe today and I went on the forums to see if there were any gauntlet farming methods for Engineer and I didn’t see any listed anywhere so I thought I’d share mine.

This isn’t meant to be good gameplay or the most optimal build possible (read the video description for easy ways to improve on whats shown), but it’s a pretty reliable way to farm these gauntlet chance bags in under a minute (probably well under 30 seconds if you drop the damage reduction gambit and don’t be dumb luck me and use A.E.D isntead of medkit -.-).

Here’s the build link, it’s also included in the video description!

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUnUISfW2uF+dBrXGptgGZY+Coj4Ia9HXQAA-TxAXgAA7PK/6V/5RJIZAynCA-e

Also, for what it’s worth, this is also probably one of the best kiting builds for hard-hitting bosses/warriors if you want to turn your brain off for a moment and just spam one on bomb kit.

If it’s unique you want, you could dress your Engineer as a giant fat nakes norn with a purple afro and mustache. Rock a full cripple-specced toolkit wrench auto build and use A.E.D. for extra hipster points.

NevirSayDie.6235:

alofear.9637:

So I just want to say that I love my Asuran Engi and I don’t plan on playing anything else.

Currently I’m trying to build an anti decapper engi. I’m assuming that a condition top heavy build would be a great idea, but any other tips on what I should be running?

Correct. Engineers can’t deal with conditions.

Are you referring to countering turret bunker engineers, or the old rifle/flamethrower/throw mine engineers?

Either way, you’ll probably want to use runes of Balthazar, probably pistol/pistol, and something like grenades, toolkit, and elixir gun. Grenades aren’t a great engi vs. engi kit but you might need them to take down turrets from range.

You might consider sigil of doom—the poison proc is extremely strong in engineer 1v1s.

I’d suggest a standard 6/2/0/4/2 rabid condi setup.

Wait, wah? Surely you’re referring to just that particular decap engi build right? I have no problem dealing with conditions on a lot of builds I like to run.

@lunyboy.8672, very well said.

Very well put. Nothing is set in stone, while the current PvE meta is certainly leaning towards those other classes, there’s nothing to say that a feature patch further down the road won’t make us equally viable. It would be nice if Guild Wars 2 can one day hit a perfect state of balance where any class can just hop in a dungeon and see that “oh I’m paired with class _, and they are all running _? Well I better use _ .” Without having to re-log into a different character, just swap some trinkets, swap some traits and you’re good to go and you have a nice copacetic dungeon party where everyone can cover a role without having to be completely pigeon holed into a specific class.

Gooz Nooz.2960:

Engis aren’t really optimal for zergs, our lack of stability and stun breaks do make it hard for us. However, i find that in zergs its best to stay on the rim of the fight and chucking grenades from down range. As for small groups engis are great and thats what engis excel at. For the role of an engi in a zerg, I’ll say the best role is aoe damage with nades we dont offer much boons or heals however we have a lot of blast finishers so i guess blasting fields is another role.

What are you talking about? We are one of the classes with the most stun breaks in the game, and we also have access to stability. Healing turret is one of the best AOE heals in the game. Grenades are terrible in zergs, they’re inprecise, don’t do much damage, and offer a quick suicide by way of retaliation.

Bombs on the other hand are great for zergs, they pack a huge punch, offer bling and immob/cripple fields, fire fields for might stacking, AOE big damage knockbacks and can be traited to heal for 300+ per bomb – oh, and this synergizes great with the drop a bomb on evade minor trait – not quite as good as the guardians dodge heal trait but the guardians dodge heal also won’t hit enemies for 1.5k – 2k + damage.. so arguably better? Slick shoes are also great for zerging, cut the enemy zerg in half with slick shoes and rocket boots.

EXPLOSIONS EVERWHERE!

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdQQFAUlUUpPr9dxLLseNSbBNqwA6TMiW/5FEgVD-T1BEABks/ATK/aTDBAPIgHugAJq+zWKBJFQeCjA-w

This is a really fun build I threw together that will destroy any class that gets close to you. The bunker down trait and high evasion and precision that this build offers is probably one of the best kiting builds in the game. If you’re feeling particularly evil swap out rocket boots for Slick Shoes, there’s no going back if you opt for this though, every fight will be to the death as you have zero ability to escape. This build is like perma retaliation, except the retaliation is actually bombs/mines that each hit like a truck.