Guild Wars 2

I spent about 15 min explaining to another player that the backpack that appears when equipping the flamethrower on my engi is NOT a piece of equipment, but actually tied to my utility skill. I got a good laugh from it when I was finally met with the response “Wow, i feel so dumb now”.

I say either give the mortar 1600 range with 2000 traited, or make the mortar automated like other turrets, putting skill 5 as the overcharge.

It seems fairly solid to me. One thing I would change is that you might be overdoing it a little on the vulnerability. Usually Grenadier alone can stack tons of it, so I might suggest dropping either Sitting Duck or the 50% vulnerability on crit, maybe even both. Buffing your pistols with cooldown, range, or Coated Bullets depending on what you’re using this build for, may be better alternative traits in the Firearms line.

Ayestes.1273:

It’s something I didn’t know before.

I could only imagine how awesome it would be though if Mortar was automatic like a turret. It’d actually be useful, given it’d probably have horrible accuracy issues, but it’d be interesting to see.

That’s a great idea! I would sacrifice the other mortar skills in a heartbeat if it fried skill 1 automatically and skill 5 was the overcharge. I could only imagine how fun it would be to use with deployable turrets.

I wish it would work, but I don’t think it’s supposed to. If it did though, Rocket Boots with that auto smoke bomb trait would be really fun to use

I absolutely agree. Why they didn’t make overcharged turrets work like “The next X attacks are overcharged” and instead added a timer is beyond me. I would also like all the turret overcharges to be instant regardless of their rate of fire and how long ago they last attacked, but maybe that’s asking too much. Still, I think it would be cool if you could overcharge your net turret while knocked down to “counter-cc” your opponent, and have it fire the second you command it to.

It does work on detonation. At least, it did last I checked

Because victory belongs to the charr! Oh, and charr puns make for awesome names.

I just got myself a set of condition armor last night, so I decided to give your build a go. From my WvW experience today, it’s definitely a blast to play! I’ve never seen a thief drop so fast, and one time a guardian I fought downed himself in confusion by activating his own heal. This is one build I see myself holding on to for a while.

I did decide to switch up a few things though. First of all, I run with Rampager gear and Carrion accessories. Shield might be useful for that added control and defense, but Blowtorch on the offhand pistol is devastating, and glue shot helps deal with multiple enemies. My offhand weapon changes quite often until I figure out which I like best. For the heal, I use healing turret because I can’t use the med kit toolbelt heal while tiny. It also works well as a blast finisher for the fire and smoke bomb fields, as well as its own water field. I am also trying to decide between a few traits. I switch between the automated elixir S and fast-acting elixrs, as well as short fuse and accelerant packed turrets, because having my heal being able to give regen, aoe heal/stealth/might, AND knockback is really useful, especially after using S when you’re in trouble. I’m also debating over taking elixir R over S, as the toolbelt skill can come in handy for an emergency condi removal or revive.

In other words, great build!

While I agree that minor tweaks such as the cooldown need to be looked at, the biggest problem I see with gadgets is the lack of traits built for them. Gadgets only get a 20% cooldown reduction, but look at how many traits do elixirs have! Turrets, kits (both for specific kits and kits in general), even pistol and rifle have multiple traits to benefit from. Hell, even the shield trait gives more than a cooldown reduction, and that’s just for 2 skills on a offhand weapon, let alone an entire class of utilities.

The way I envision gadgets is them being the ultimate surprise factor, based on skills such as rocket boots and slick shoes. Perhaps making all gadget skills instant cast would also serve to make them unique. I know, most of them already behave that way. But being able to PBR a warrior while knocked down would be pretty sweet and maybe even justify its current cooldown. Idk how that would work with the mine, but it’s a concept nonetheless. How about adding some gadget traits that give more synergy between the gadget itself and their respective toolbelt skills?

While everyone keeps crying, I’d like to note that the flamethrower seems to have no problems hitting structures. At least, this is the case with the Fort Marriner practice dummies and Volatile Blossoms in TA

-Mortar shots will disappear on contact with destructible walls in WvW

I’d also like to point out that Deployable Turrets still has yet to function at all outside of the mists since this game launched, it’s extremely frustrating given how much potential it has.

As a flamethrower engi primarily, I was disappointed with just how devastating retaliation was. Although, I still spam it through the gate until the retaliation is too much.

Other tips:

-Mortar is actually helpful during sieges. Although grenades can potentially outdamage the mortar, the mortar has that high arc that allows you to fire it while keeping a safe distance from the edge of a wall. Also, the number 5 skill is an absolutely devastating zerg-buster

-The toolkit’s Magnet will ruin an enemy’s day in zerg vs zerg fights, especially when paired with a rifle. Pull, net shot, the overcharge them right into your zerg for a quick kill.

-With proper traits, you can set up 3 turrets on a dolyak supply route and they alone can take it out without you being even close to them. This is probably even easier now that turret condition damage scales with your stats, but I haven’t tested to what extent because my current armor has no condition stats. By dropping 30 points into inventions for the obvious turret traits and 10 into firearms for the cripple on immobilize, a rifle, rocket, and net turret are capable of soloing the dolyak with almost no condition damage investment. When your turrets start hitting their target, you will be considered “in combat”, an easy notification that you should start overcharging them until you get the Event Success notification. This strategy works best deep in enemy territory, where few people will ever pass by your turret nest. Also, this only works if there are no caravan guards. I haven’t gotten around to testing other turret combinations yet, but I imagine that flame could replace net if your burns really hurt.

Strange. I feel like I know how to fight against engies the least considering I’ve faced far more of just about every other profession. Even when I do face another of our kind, I find that most of them rock a pistol and elixirs. I can’t honestly tell you what I’d do differently against other builds, such as 100 nades, or just about anyone wielding a rifle.

Being an avid WvW player myself, I will easily agree that we are the least popular class on the battlefield. I’m glad too, because I tend to enjoy being the guy who’s “different” in these kinds of games. It also appears to make the engineer community closer. In those rare moments where I party with another engie, we often share builds and learn new tricks.

Speaking of builds, I always feel like so many more build options are available, and I always have a cool new idea to test out. In fact, I recently discovered that activating Slick Shoes as you pull a target with Magnet has lethal effectiveness, especially in WvW. The engineer feels so unique, that I find it hard not to find any other class boring in comparison.

I run Valkyrie armor with Knight accessories for my FT might stacking build.

Probably a bug. I remember getting Sword Master with the flamethrower, so I imagine it’s like that with all kits.

The reasons most people don’t invest in inventions is because that trait line is heavily turret-focused, which few people use. That’s because turrets rarely last on the field long enough to make a difference in dungeons or a pvp setting.

However, I feel that they work fine in general pve and leveling since mobs aren’t quite as tough, so long as you don’t mind having to pick up your turrets to move every so often. In fact, turrets allow you to complete heart quests quicker once you get the traits for reduced turret damage and auto repair because you can set them up to kill the required mobs while you go around clearing secondary objectives.

If you wanna respec, talk to an engineer trainer. You can find one in any of the big cities, as well as one near the Mystic Forge in Lion’s Arch.

SoulstitchMMO.1396:

There are aalot of bad players who believe that if they don’t win with it, is worthless. Keep at it. Flamethrower has its place.

I absolutely agree. I’ve settled on a rifle/flamethrower/elixir build after trying about 4 other builds and can easily say its my favorite one. Flame Jet will never miss so long as you keep your camera centered on the target. While it’s true that the skill will fail if used immediately after air blast, there’s other ways to set it up once you learn the proper spacing (the rifle’s net shot or overcharged shot, net turret, PBR, rocket turret overcharge, you get the idea).

The flamethrower itself doesn’t have the raw damage to take full advantage of the might gained from juggernaut, but a power build with rifle/grenades can, as can condition build pistols/bombs.

Don’t make such wrongfully boastful statements and then go around acting like our whole server is behind this. The only reason we’re doing as good in this matchup is because we shouldn’t be in it in the first place. During all of our more even matches, the fair-weather players (which sadly is a vast majority on our server) bail WvW at the first sign of difficulty. Ironically, we get the most players to join WvW when we need them the least such as when we completely out-man the other 2 servers combined. How can you take such pride in a hollow victory?

Leave me and the rest of our server out of this, because we don’t want to be the target of statements such as:

lol.

That is all i have to say.

just note, we won’t make it easy for SF.

Trying to get a WR against 2 servers who have lost most of its WvW Players (And alot of PvE Players, and on top of that, people are still transferring away to winning servers) is just beyond stupid and insulting.

The amount of arrogance from your server ./Flip hair

I ran a turret control build using toolkit, rocket turret and net turret in WvW and found that it worked really well in small battles (1v1, 1v2, 2v2). The plan is to get into melee range, drop and instantly overcharge the rocket turret for a point blank knockdown rocket. Just before they get back up, drop the net turret and overcharge it too for the stun. By the time the stun wears off, the second knockdown from the rocket turret hits, followed by the second net stun, giving you a good 8 seconds of control with just 2 overcharges.

Bringing a rifle lets you add about 5 more seconds of control between overcharged shot and net shot. Toolkit helps keep the enemy close to your turrets with Magnet and Power Wrench trait for perma-cripple, and the exploding turrets trait gives you 2 more emergency knockbacks as well as access to the net turret’s toolbelt.

It does lack survivability, but ideally your opponent should be dead before they even regain control of their character. The only problems I’ve had with this build is block-heavy stability guardians and people with multiple stunbreakers.

Terrahero.9358:

Always use a blind on a downed opponent before you try to finish him. you would be amazing how often they blow their interupt while blinded, which the misses and you can stomp without a hic up.

This works especially well for guardians who seem to hold back everything to use their aoe knockback. Because their damage ability is channeled. Blind, then finish,

To add to this, the flamethrower’s 5 skill is fantastic for doing so as equipping the flamethrower and activating the smoke vent blind can be done without during your stomping animation.

Turrets are really good at control as well, specifically Rocket and Net. If you drop a Rocket turret at close range and overcharge it instantly, you have a rather quick double knockdown that will rarely miss. Do the same with the net turret with proper timing and you can add a double stun to that, giving you a good 8 or so seconds of control with those skills alone.

If you like WvW, net turrets give you a decent counter to thieves in small battles as turret’s targeting isn’t affected by an opponent’s delayed rendering after coming out of stealth. If you see your net turret shoot at seemingly nothing, odds are you snagged a thief that is now immobilized wherever the net projectile disappeared, so startlaying on the aoe.

Our rifle is a shotgun. It has shotgun styled skills and performs optimally at close range. In the great history of shotguns in games, the vast majority are hip fired. The only reason it’s called a rifle is because it would be ridiculous to have a weapon such as a shotgun that is entirely unique to a single class. The sooner people accept this, the fewer of these threads we’ll have to read.

Another option is to use a condition removal on the immobilize then roll out of the roots real fast. The roots themselves seem to work by applying a 1 second immobilize every second you’re standing in them, so as long as you end your condition early, you can walk out.

I want more traits to affect Gadgets. Currently, the only trait that affects them is the reduced cooldown one. Right now Gadgets are overshadowed by other utility skills we have that have equal or greater use.

Yes. Badges should be part of the event reward or something. I did notice you sometimes get a badge for killing keep lords/camp supervisors, but even those badges are hard to come by.

I don’t have much of a problem with the mesmer’s portal itself. I simply wish that every class had some kind of skill that had as much utility in WvW as the portal. For example, as an Engineer, I’d like to have either our mortar have actually useful mortar range or for our wrench skill to repair siege. I’m sure equally useful skills can be thought of for other classes as well.

Please, not another one of these threads…

coglin.1496:

Devinchi.2756:

I have no idea what you’re talking about either. Any skill that says projectile finisher without a 20% behind it is a guaranteed projectile finisher. We do have a lot of blast finishers, but our only access to half of them is if we bring a bunch of turrets with sole purpose of blowing them up for a couple stacks of might or a few seconds of stealth.

So even though Anet posted here on the forums that they made all projectile finishers 20%, your suggesting it is more likely that they went back on that without telling us, then it is that they didn’t update a few tool tips?

Or did they change some back and tell us and I missed it?

And because we have 13 blast finisher, I really have to wonder what logic you use to determine that means we do not have very many.

Please do put a link to that forum post, for a forum search popped up with no such confirmation on the projectile finishers. I just tested it in game with throw wrench, and it combo’d with smoke bomb 10 consecutive times. Either it was never changed in the first place, or I should go to a casino and get rich on slots. My guess is you must have missed it.

Secondly, I said we have a lot of blast finishers, but very few are practical to utilize specifically for a combo. Assuming you took that number from the wiki, 6 of them are detonating turrets. Now, this works great with the healing turret considering it sets up it’s own field. However, I wouldn’t overcharge my flame turret and destroy it for a 3 second stealth and a 40 second cooldown when its much more useful burning people indefinitely until killed. Same with all the other turrets; they accomplish much more by staying alive than they do constantly on cooldown.

After that you have Supply Crate on a large cooldown, thumper toolbelt which also has a ridiculously large cooldown for what it does, and your downed skill Booby Trap. That leaves you with BoB, the mine, shield 4, and rocket boots as the only blast finishers that aren’t on a long cooldown or that don’t require to sacrifice the effectiveness of your utilities.

coglin.1496:

Don’t worry about that finisher post, It is completely inaccurate. ALL of the projectile finishers are 20%. Not a single one is 100% as he implies.

We have a HUGE amount of blast finishers and a great deal of projectile finishers. I got no idea what that Devinchi guy is referring to.

I have no idea what you’re talking about either. Any skill that says projectile finisher without a 20% behind it is a guaranteed projectile finisher. We do have a lot of blast finishers, but our only access to half of them is if we bring a bunch of turrets with sole purpose of blowing them up for a couple stacks of might or a few seconds of stealth.

My point is that our combo finishers don’t make sense. Why do we have skills on our pistol, rifle, and elixir gun that behave just like skills other classes do, but don’t finish combos like those other classes? How come none of our projectile based turrets even have the chance of finishing on their own, but a lot of other classes have pets and summons that can? Why do the finishers we do have on our turrets require that the turrets themselves not be used (detonating turrets and not deploying them so as to have access to Surprise Shot and Shockwave)?

We can throw out combo fields real easy, but to actually take full advantage of them would require you to sacrifice much more than the combo is worth, and often take way too long to purposely set up, making our ability to combo very situational.

I apologize if I did sound somewhat insulting because that was definitely not the intent of my post. Perhaps I could have been more constructive, so let me start over.

I don’t feel that a multi-target attack that performs best at close range fits on the thief’s pistol due to its single target long range nature. Frankly, the only thing the pistol has going for it over a melee weapon is the fact that you can be at a safe distance. Being close enough to use a skill like this one in turn takes away from the range advantage of every other pistol skill, and seems to make an offhanded dagger seem kind of pointless considering it gives you 3 skills designed to keep you at range. I could see it’s usefulness as a skill to transition into a different weapon, but that’s about it.

That’s just me though. It’s apparent to me that other feel differently.

I’d like to see the build you’re running because while we do have a good amount of combo fields, I feel that our combo finishers are awful.

Between all of our guns and turrets, we have no 100% projectile finishers, while the thief pistol alone has 3. Ranger axes and thief shortbow and sancing dagger both bounce projectiles and have a chance to combo, but our Static Shot and Elixir F cannot. Warrior’s rifle volley, ranger longbow, thief unload, and even the mesmer’s duelist phantasm can all rapid fire finishers, but our poison dart volley can’t. In fact, the only projectile finishers we have are all on our toolbelt (Surprise Shot, Launch PBR, and Throw Wrench), all attached to skills that make absolutely no since as to why projectile finishers are attached to them.

Meanwhile, despite being a class that has a fondness for explosives, our only blast finishers are again restricted to our toolbelt skills with the exception of the mine. BoB is fine, but after that all of our blast finishers rely on detonating our turrets, which seems like a counter-intuitive reason to bring a turret in the first place. All we got left after that is the thumper turret toolbelt, which has an absurdly long cooldown when it’s only purpose is as a finisher.

Besides bugged traits and skills, our combo finishers are my only real disappointment with this class.

Are you aware that the engineer’s Rifle 3 skill is “Blunderbuss”? It works just like the skill you described, except your proposed thief version has about a 3 times greater effective range, applies up to 14 stacks of vulnerability as opposed to the engie’s 6 stacks of bleed (even less if outside of melee range), is a projectile finisher, and is both more powerful and costs less initiative than unload.

I’ll give you that you probably didn’t put too much thought into exact numbers, and I do want to see a better Body Shot or replacement for it, but a blunderbuss skill just doesn’t fit on a pistol, let alone on a thief.

nofo.8469:

If i want a viable ranged option play another class? cool feedback.

edit: Yes grenades are wonderful against stationary targets ie pve and sieges but anything else? No

Also, who says rifle implementation has to be boring like warrior?

Being excellent in PvE and large WvW fights covers a lot of the fighting you’ll be doing anyways. The only place you claim grenades don’t work are in sPvP and small WvW battles. In PvP, 90% of fighting is done over control points well within 1200 and often even 900 range. In small WvW skirmishes you may have a point, but it is much more difficult for an enemy to keep you at max range then it is for you to close the gap.

Greatswords all are big powerful melee weapons. Why does the mesmer fire long range lasers from it? The point is, weapons behave differently between differently between classes. They would never build the engineer’s rifle the same way as the warriors, and they wouldn’t make a separate kit to be nearly identical to another classes’ skills. That’s just how the game works. If grenades aren’t a good enough range option and you’d like to have some other form of strong range skills, then I suggest running a ranger, staff ele, or greatsword mesmer.

BumbleeViper.2459:

For any GoM/SF still around, gather up your teams and head to the Skritt cave and/or the Krait/Quaggan lake on Yak’s Bend borderlands map. There are TONS of bots in each place, free for the farming. Come help feast on these bots!

I’ve been taking full advantage of this. Unfortunately, that job is made tougher by a select few players who choose to farm alongside these bots, and even go as far as defending and reviving them. If any YB player notices players performing such actions, I suggest you attempt to discourage them from helping a problem that negatively affects us all. Additionally, I know for a fact I’ve accidentally reported players as bots due to them hanging out with the bots. Not until they decided to chase me out of the lake from the middle of the bot pile did I realize I made a mistake. It would be rather unfortunate if many of these accidental reports led to some negative side effects for these players.

@fivekiller

If the current score and a week’s worth of complete map domination doesn’t make it clear enough, I am talking about Yak’s Bend. And yes, I’m from Sorrow’s Furnace. I’m not going to pretend that our shortcomings in WvW are due entirely to factors outside of our control.

I wish people would quit attributing the massive score difference to being because of numbers and not skill. In case you haven’t discovered this already, good servers win because they have a large active WvW population AND the necessary skill to coordinate those numbers. Yak’s Bend has both of them, as should be quite obvious. We have plenty of players that WvW. The problem is the large majority of them quit as soon as we aren’t winning, or the second we don’t own anything on the map. Losing should be even MORE incentive to join the fight and turn things around. If people would realize this, then we would have even numbers on the battlefield and perhaps we’d be able to prove that we are truly the better server.

I’ve been farming the Yaks Bend bots for badges too. However, I have encountered some actual players who will actually farm alongside, defend, and even revive these bots. It’s really kinda sad. But whatever. Free kills for me

I run with a Rifle and Flamethrower/Elixir boon stacking build. With my trait and rune setup, I’m able to maintain permanent fury, swiftness, retaliation, and about 12 stacks of might.

The flamethrower is great for charging into and pushing back larger groups so long as you have some backup. The 200 toughness increase with Juggernaut makes a lot of difference and adds to your survivability. The AoE of the FT skills spreads the damage around effectively and can be used through gates on offense and defense. Between Air Blast and Overcharged Shot, I always have an interrupt ready when I need it most.

The only disadvantages I’ve found in my build so far is lack of 1200 range outside of my rifle auto attack (I have increased range traited for that), but I think the importance of long range is largely overrated unless you get involved in a lot of sieges. Also, be wary of retaliation when spamming FT throw gates. It will kill you in 3 full flame jets if you aren’t careful.

I don’t understand how they took the two worst parts of this dungeon and made them even worse.

The problem with the first path wasn’t the grenadiers. It was that there were so freaking many of them. At least they quit coming after Nokk was defeated. Adding different types of enemies but making them endless does the opposite of what needed to be done with that path. There is absolutely nothing fun about endless spawning mobs unless there is some sort of non-exploit mechanic to keep them from spawning.

Path 2 is already among the longest dungeon paths in the game considering you fight over 100 dredge just to get to the end. There was absolutely no reason to buff the MkII Golem. He already did respectable damage before the update. His attacks are fast, have no red circle indication, and have a very large area considering that static field is his only attack. Now he hits insanely hard far too consistently. The initial lightning strike one hit a mesmer in my party and the remaining AoE damage finished him 3 seconds later. Even me as a Power/Vit/Toughness engie took half health from the first hit, and I would be down quick if I didn’t get out of the circle. If at any point a teammate goes down in this fight, it over for him because trying to revive is suicide. And boy is that a loooong run back, considering there are still no waypoints in that dungeon. That one golem is hard enough to fight to be the final boss all by himself, let alone having to kill his buddy at the same time while they swap invulnerability buffs. You basically have to chew through 2 entire health bars. To think people say Subject Alpha is bad…

This dungeon was already extremely unpopular before the changes because of the hoops you’d have to jump through to make it tolerable. I’m glad I have only the leg armor left to get to complete this set, otherwise I’d have to spend forever because only Path 3 is doable now without extreme frustration.

I noticed this as well. I was defending a tower one time using a ballista set up on the corner of the tower. When the enemy began to build a ram, I hopped off the ballista to go use the oil pot, but every time I took control of the ballista instead. Needless to say I didn’t have enough time to fiddle with the camera to the right position before the meteor showers started dropping. Sometimes I even launch people off of siege, but they never lose control of it.

After an extensive amount of time I’ve spent playing WvW, I’ve come to one important conclusion.

If you cannot push forward, you will not win.

This rule has been true in nearly every battle I’ve experienced. As soon as your enemy begins to flee, you’ve won, but until then, you haven’t. If an army is slamming on the gates of a tower and kills everyone on top of the wall, but has no siege to knock down a gate properly, then they aren’t pushing forward nor are they winning. Likewise, if you are cutting up an attacking zerg with a mass of arrowcarts, but that catapult is still slamming on your wall, you will lose the fight unless you push forward and drive the enemy out.

The same idea goes for smaller scale skirmishes. The inclusion of the ability to revive down or defeated players means you have to secure your kills. Don’t give the enemy the opportunity to revive. Down or kill some people, then push forward for the stomp. Push your opponents back so they can’t even think about reviving without walking into certain death. There’s many ways to ensure a guaranteed stomp, whether it be stability, stealth, invulnerability, or even blind. CC people to prevent them from picking up downed players long enough to move in and secure the kill. It also takes twice as long to revive defeated players while in combat, which means that you should have enough time to kill any reviver 5 times over.

If your fighting against numbers that outweigh yours by so much that they are capable of holding your entire group back as they send 10 people around fully reviving completely defeated players, you should never expect to win that fight. I don’t understand why people believe they can fight 3v15 and still win. Even if your opponents have half the skill you do, they can dish out 5 times more damage, CC, and conditions that you can. Smaller numbers battles can go either way, but you’re a fool if you 100% believe that you can fight 5 times your numbers and come out on top more often than not.

Yeah, that’s y bad. I thought you were green. I’m used to being red from last week. Regardless, we were able to waypoint in despite the fact it was clearly contested. And that shouldn’t happen.

Well, BP just took our garrison in SF borderlands, but the waypoint still allowed us to teleport, even after the keep was contested. Unfortunately, I cannot speak for our server, but I’m sorry it was bugged for you guys. The keep was definitely yours, and you should have been able to hold it after that sneaky attack you pulled off. Just know that some of the people defending there with me who died as you knocked down the inner gate feel the same way.

This bug has to be fixed asap.

To the people who replied to me:

I agree that there is some stuff you can do while solo, but those activities would be much more efficient with even just a few teammates. Killing dolyaks works, so long as the other team is oblivious to the fact that their yaks are falling over dead all the time. All it takes is for 3 people to find you, and 9 times out of 10 that’ll end in your death.

Yes, you can also take camps with only 2 or even solo them, but it takes way too long to do. You give the enemy too much time to react to your attack. All it takes is one good player to defend the camp from a 2 man attack group with help from the npcs.

My point is while you can do it, the success rate is significantly smaller if you try and solo content as opposed to doing so with an appropriately sized group, like 4 or 5 for camps. Therefore, your armor repair bill will likely outweigh any earnings you make from solo activities.

merry.3247:

So What happens when you decide to be a solo runner and enjoy killing your opponents ONLY by your own ?

Then you’re playing WvW wrong. There is nothing productive you can do by yourself, except for killing dolyaks and praying the other team doesn’t catch on. You are rewarded based on your contribution. You’re contributing nothing, therefore you won’t earn enough to cover your armor repairs.

Unfortunately, you’re confusing the toolkit with the toolbelt. Power wrench reduces the cooldown of toolkit skills, such as box of nails, magnet, gear shield, etc. Not the toolbelt skills. I’m also almost positive that the throw wrench toolbelt skill for the toolkit doesn’t have its cooldown affected by “Power Wrench”, but I may be wrong about that one.

I’ve noticed this too. Just today I ran HotW and CoF story modes, and of all the bosses and minibosses I encountered with my flamethrower, only 1 decided not to chase me for 90% of the fight. The only time I caught a break was if I tossed Elixir S and got stealth. Even then, 30 seconds later he’d be after me as though I insulted his momma.

I’ve been running a flamethrower build all the time recently, it’s just too fun. I’m not big on sPvP, but i always take my flamethrower into PvE and WvW and have had much success with it.

There is definitely a bug with the 2 skill where it will miss every time if used immediately after the knockback. As an alternative, I found that an overcharged rifle shot followed by flame blast works just as well, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that the 3-2 combo doesn’t work very well. I also think that the flame blast should auto detonate if it hits an obstruction, kinda like the pistol auto. Also, I’ll admit that the flame wall is lame. It does need a 2 second burn to make it special. Right now, my only use for it is to set up a combo field for a zerg fight or kite thieves through it.

Smoke vent I initially thought was lame too. However at second glance, it’s a rather fantastic skill. An on demand blind that you can use while you’re stunned/knocked down/whatever and you can use without interrupting animation if useful despite it’s radius. It guarantees and uninterrupted stomp on warriors, rangers, guardians, engineers, and I believe necros so long as you pay attention while you’re in the middle of your finisher. I’ve avoided big hits from hammer warriors by popping smoke vent while knocked down. In tight situations, smoke vent can make a big difference. Just keep an eye out for these opportunities.

Credit for the mid stomp blind idea goes to whoever wrote that engie guide stickied to this board. Thanks for that one!