Guild Wars 2

Azrael.4960:

I did Arah once or twice in the dim past. This was before the advent of solo runs, or around about the time that solo runs were being hinted at being possible (when dungeons were sort of interesting and challenging) We got to Lupi and none of us had any idea what to do about him, so read a few guides about his attacks and made do as best as we could. After about the 9th wipe we kinda gave up, haven’t been back since.

Oh and having a charr, that means a LOT of grime sticking to his fur…

The old pug method for Lupi (before people figured out how to melee) was to run around and range him and res people when they invariably got downed by his unavoidable fast shots and/or bubbles. It was super slow but it sorta worked.

Now Lupi is pretty much either people trying to solo range him (which doesn’t work because he will pretty much insta-down you if you’re the only target he can hit with his projectile) or trying to melee him without any idea of how to actually do so. Back when I pugged Arah for “fun” I used to get tons of pugs who would go “Oh yeah I saw that video i can do it” then immediately get kicked/swiped and die and go “wtf I don’t get it i stacked like in the vids”.

If anyone ever figures out a valid pug method for Lupi other than “hope everyone knows what to do” or “let them die and then solo” do let me know.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I’m curious why some people have that black/white attitude. If it’s a ranger with a bow, the dungeon-run MUST last more than 1 hour, it MUST have at least 2 wipes.

I could say the same to any other profession. Mesmer, keep your clones out of aggro! Necro, those minions are the reason why we wiped again. GS-Warrior, why don’t you have banners instead of full-signets? Thieves, just get rid of sword, please! … and so on.

In truth, every profession can be played in a lot of different ways and be viable. Not necessarily speedrun-viable, but wipeless viable without doubling the run-timer.

If you want to have casual runs, great! Join casual groups, it’s all good. We want to have fast runs, we join speed-clear groups. Everyone’s happy.

The best quote in this thread imho. Every one of you can choose which group you wanna join. I wouldn’t join a speedrun-group with an experimental new build with any profession. I don’t expect others to have a certain build when doing normal runs though, you don’t turn 30 minutes into 90 minutes just because of a build, it’s the player skill that matters, and how he/she can work with the chosen skills.

Clones don’t take or cause aggro, neither do pets. No one takes necros either so that’s a moot point. Signet warriors are easily filtered out and they DO get kicked on a regular basis too so I don’t get your point.

Most PHIW pug groups do in fact fail on a regular basis. There’s a reason why you always see LFGs for groups that are like “LFG one more for AC P2, on last boss”. It’s because those are the PHIW groups comprised of healer ele, staff guardian, bearbow, and condi GS mesmer with zero DPS not being able to kill the endboss, so they keep rolling pugs and hope a zerker will come along with enough solo DPS to meet the threshold.

And yes, I imagine most of those pugs end up sitting there for at least twice the average duration of a casual zerker run.

Simon.3794:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Simon.3794:

im sure warrior had high dps back then, but when they bring warrior sustain up in pvp (cleansing ire, healing signet)
in exchange, they nerfed warrior damage for something like 30%.

a guardian with fury surpasses warrior’s damage by quite a bit.

They haven’t done any such thing lol. In fact they’ve consistently buffed overall warrior damage by giving them stuff like Dual Wield Agility, while guardians have overall remained mostly the same. If anything Guardians were the ones who got nerfed outside of hammer builds ever since they raised Symbol of Wrath CD to 20 seconds.

Lol dude, Berserker power and Heightened Focus used to be adept traits you know that, axe auto attack chain used to have damage spread over all hit you know that?

and also wat kind of idiot would believe Dual Wield Agility is any close to being decent, lol

Berserker’s Power also used to be 12% and Heightened Focus only 9%. And DWA being a 8-9% DPS buff (it’s not quite 10% due to aftercasts) right next to Attack of Opportunity being another 10% one point to the left is in fact a pretty big deal.

There’s a reason why the new solo DPS build is 6/6/0/2/0 now even though the old 6/5/0/0/3 build hasn’t been nerfed at all.

dlonie.6547:

Drakent.9605:

according to anet the zerk build is receiving a 10% damage nerf which means having 5 group of zerker after the patch will be doing 50% less damage

I hate how all of my dungeon runs are taking twice as long now :-(

Dat 50% nerf.

Now I know why pugmath never seems to add up like guangmath does.

DWA does affect the GS+A/M rotation, since your time spent in axe is basically determined by the amount of time it takes to complete the ongoing axe chain once your swap recharges. Without DWA, it takes 3.6 seconds for a full axe chain meaning that you swap to Axe for 7.2 seconds then swap back to GS. With DWA, you swap for about 6.6 seconds and then swap back, so you are gaining a bit of DPS since you’re getting more HBs on average. That said, it’s still a DPS loss since there’s no way to take BP, Fast Hands, and DWA in the same build so you’ll have to give up one.

If you are not taking BP, 4/6/0/0/4 will be your best bet for raw DPS as Sharpened Axes will allow you to hit Eviscerate on cooldown. In general, the old swap rotations simply aren’t as good as just camping one weapon or another simply for math reasons. Don’t listen to Warlord, he doesn’t understand math or much of anything at all. He thinks DWA doesn’t affect axes because your hits don’t deal any more damage, but it does affect swords because you get more bleeds. Or something.

Simon.3794:

im sure warrior had high dps back then, but when they bring warrior sustain up in pvp (cleansing ire, healing signet)
in exchange, they nerfed warrior damage for something like 30%.

a guardian with fury surpasses warrior’s damage by quite a bit.

They haven’t done any such thing lol. In fact they’ve consistently buffed overall warrior damage by giving them stuff like Dual Wield Agility, while guardians have overall remained mostly the same. If anything Guardians were the ones who got nerfed outside of hammer builds ever since they raised Symbol of Wrath CD to 20 seconds.

The short version of that being:

- Guardians have better auto-attacks on GS, hammer, and sword versus the warrior equivalents (GS and axe).
- Guardians have good burst damage on their skills too, it’s just not as obvious. Whirling Wrath deals about 75% of the damage of HB in about half the time, for example. They also have stuff like Symbol of Wrath, etc. which tick heavy damage over time.
- Warriors APPEAR to have better damage because they can build up might/vuln/fury more easily on their own. Once you take those out of the picture (i.e. by giving the guardian the same buffs) the guardian keeps up just fine.

Warriors got a pretty decent DPS buff in the last patch so they are still ahead in overall damage, but it’s not by nearly as much as a lot of people seem to think. It is at most about 10% depending on whether you can push the target into a wall or not. To be honest I’m surprised the “but what about HB’s big number” thing still comes up this late into the game’s lifespan.

obal.3218:

Assuming all buffs including spotter and full zerk, scholar runes, night/force sigils, power infusions, sweet and spicy butternut squash soup, and powerful potions.

5/5/0/4/0 GS+Hammer Rotation with Preception stacks EP = 20283 and DPS = 11606
4/6/2/0/2 GS+Sword/Focus Rotation with Bloodlust stacks EP = 21102 and DPS = 11359
4/5/0/0/5 GS+Sword/Focus Rotation with Preception stacks EP = 19835 and DPS = 11063
3/5/0/4/2 GS+Hammer Rotation with Preception stacks EP = 17095 and DPS = 10675
4/6/2/0/2 Sword/Focus Camping with Bloodlust stacks EP = 21102 and DPS = 8149
3/5/0/6/0 Staff Camping with Preception stacks EP = 17095 and DPS = 7778

People accepted sword camping as a great idea in the past. Some still do or are too lazy to do rotations. I guess those people mine as well have ran staff and cleaved better . Gandolf OP.

Our numbers are a bit different but the relative values look similar so it’s probably just an issue of the way we calculate things specifically. That said you should keep in mind that you’ve got Spotter and banners on the Guardian in this case which is putting your sword crit chance at like 107% which is basically entirely wasting the point of taking sword in the first place. Once you cut out Spotter GS/Hammer becomes 11817 (for me) versus 10558 for sword, which is a lot closer in overall daamge.

For a pug, sword is probably the best failsafe option for AFK if you don’t want them screwing up fire fields with a hammer, since expecting a pug ranger to have Spotter is pretty unrealistic, and Fury is pretty spotty as well. If you’re looking solely at self-buffed damage, sword camp actually comes pretty close to hammer camp since that extra 15% crit chance makes a way bigger difference when you’re sitting at around 50% than when you’re at 85%.

Ryn.6459:

Actually I cry of happiness when I pug with one with spotter and mh sword XD

You mean hypothetically? I’ve never seen any such thing.

The proper Engineer DPS rotation isn’t any harder than the proper rotation for any other class, people just think it is because they’re comparing perfect engineer play to non-perfect play on other classes. For example:

Perfect engineer: Uses rifle 3 and 5 on cooldown, blasts might on cooldown, throws grenades accurately
Easy engineer: Throws grenades a lot, doesn’t use other skills.

Perfect warrior: Hits a full HB on cooldown, connects with all hits on WWA (on cooldown) regardless of size and positioning of mob (both of which require good spacing at best and may be impossible at worst).
Easy warrior: Interrupts HB, either doesn’t use WWA or uses it inappropriately. Most of time is spent auto-attacking as a result.

Perfect ranger: Uses sword for DPS, uses sword skills to attack while dodging, manages pet positioning to prevent pet death.
Easy ranger: Uses any weapon other than sword, ignores pet health.

The “easy” engineer in any of those cases is as easy to play as any of the other “easy” stuff, and a “perfect” engie isn’t any harder. It’s a total fallacy to go “engie is harder than other classes” because you can make engie as easy or as hard as you want to, same as any other class.

Wolfar.6508:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

With 50% crit chance you have a 30% chance per hit to proc Strength sigil. Throwing grenades at a single target = 3 hits per second lining up with the ICD = about 65% chance per toss. That’ll get you to 3 stacks in about 4.5 seconds, and you should cap around 6.5 base before factoring in boon duration. Battle will get you to 3 stacks instantly but you won’t get any more until 9 seconds in, after which you sit at 6. If you swap perfectly on cooldown you can get then get 3 more stacks for 2 seconds before you lose the original two; that’s a sustained 6.6 on average which means the two sigils are equal in the absolute worst case scenario (no extra precision, only one target, enough ramp-up time for both).

In practice Strength will almost always be better due to AOE, the fact that you will usually have more than 50% crit chance (via fury, banners, Spotter, consumables, etc.) and the fact that engie actually attacks faster than 3 hits per second thanks to stuff like Mine Field, Grenade Barrage, Fire Bomb, etc. giving more than 3 hits per second. That’s even factoring in that you may have to dodge or stop to res someone. With just fury or two targets, you’re hovering in the 8-9 stacks range already.

Also I did the calculations since I was curious about this myself, but it seems the extra 3 stacks of might party-wide is almost never worth the DPS loss from having a rifle, even if you don’t trait it with Rifle Mod. If I recall correctly, a party of 4 other players in exotic Knight’s gear would have to have an average personal unbuffed DPS of about 2.5k for the gain in damage to them to offset your own loss in damage, and that required number gets even higher if they’re in zerker or soldier gear. This is getting pretty math-heavy but suffice to say that the average knight/soldier-wearing pug doesn’t get that high in numbers.

About Sigil of Battle, with the Extra Might duration from Rune of Strength the might will last for 29 seconds (if not counting anything in alchemy). So that means (if I think of this correctly) that you are able to maintain 9 stacks and are able to get 12 stacks for 2 seconds before losing the first one. Correct me if I am wrong on this one but I believe this is how it is.

The big issue is indeed that Sigil of Battle takes time to stack up which could be too long. I never really took this in consideration which clearly makes the Sigil of Strength better.

For the shield, I was referring to using it beforehand and then swapping back to Rifle once done with the Might combo, in that case it should always be better. I made some weird connections to Rifle Mod which made no sense and so thank you for correcting me on it and doing the math.

I used base numbers because boon duration is multiplicative and so it won’t affect the overall balance between the two. For example, with Strength runes (+45% duration), Battle stacks last 29 seconds = 9.7 stacks. Strength stacks would be 66% chance to proc per Grenade toss (approximately, with 50% crit chance on one target) which would be about 9.6 stacks with each stack lasting 14.5 seconds.

The takeaway is basically that Battle sigils will be more consistently maxed around 9 stacks on average (since the 2 second overlap before the sigil expires is pretty insignificant) while Strength sigils may fluctuate slightly more, but have the potential for much higher stacks in general, with the worst case scenario getting about the same as Battle and losing one stack of might for every 1.5 seconds not spent attacking.

With 50% crit chance you have a 30% chance per hit to proc Strength sigil. Throwing grenades at a single target = 3 hits per second lining up with the ICD = about 65% chance per toss. That’ll get you to 3 stacks in about 4.5 seconds, and you should cap around 6.5 base before factoring in boon duration. Battle will get you to 3 stacks instantly but you won’t get any more until 9 seconds in, after which you sit at 6. If you swap perfectly on cooldown you can get then get 3 more stacks for 2 seconds before you lose the original two; that’s a sustained 6.6 on average which means the two sigils are equal in the absolute worst case scenario (no extra precision, only one target, enough ramp-up time for both).

In practice Strength will almost always be better due to AOE, the fact that you will usually have more than 50% crit chance (via fury, banners, Spotter, consumables, etc.) and the fact that engie actually attacks faster than 3 hits per second thanks to stuff like Mine Field, Grenade Barrage, Fire Bomb, etc. giving more than 3 hits per second. That’s even factoring in that you may have to dodge or stop to res someone. With just fury or two targets, you’re hovering in the 8-9 stacks range already.

Also I did the calculations since I was curious about this myself, but it seems the extra 3 stacks of might party-wide is almost never worth the DPS loss from having a rifle, even if you don’t trait it with Rifle Mod. If I recall correctly, a party of 4 other players in exotic Knight’s gear would have to have an average personal unbuffed DPS of about 2.5k for the gain in damage to them to offset your own loss in damage, and that required number gets even higher if they’re in zerker or soldier gear. This is getting pretty math-heavy but suffice to say that the average knight/soldier-wearing pug doesn’t get that high in numbers.

Try dropping condi sword and use zerk sword, it should still total up to more with 25 stacks of might + 25 stacks of bleed being about half your damage, and the rest being direct. Although that sort of kills of the point of using the sword against bosses with high armor, but then again I don’t really get the point of this whole exercise except as a PHIW thing.

You have Fast-Acting Elixirs instead of Invigorating Speed on that link just so you know.

Overall I’d say rifle with Rifle Mod (instead of Infused Precision, unless you need the vigor) is the clear choice 90% of the time, as the extra DPS is pretty significant and far outweighs the extra 3 stacks of might from Magnetic Inversion in most cases. I almost never use my shield now in fact.

Also Strength is clearly better than Battle now, it’s virtually a guaranteed 9-10 stacks.

Actual DPS gained from using Eviscerate with Berserker’s Power traited can be calculated by:

([Damage dealt by Eviscerate] – [Damage dealt while adrenaline not full] * .5) / [cooldown of Eviscerate or time it takes to build max adrenaline, whichever is more]

With BP active you’re basically losing 5% average damage per hit across the entire time spent rebuilding adrenaline, so if you have Eviscerate dealing 1000 damage, you need to build back to full adrenaline in less than 50,000 damage worth of attacks. If you’ve got Sharpened Axes traited you can build adrenaline back very quickly and not lose that much; without it, you’re looking a pretty big DPS loss.

Condi warrior is fun but it’s hardly the new meta. It’s still less DPS than an axe warrior and you’re still in zerk (Rabid is crap damage) so it’s not like you’re getting extra armor out of it. If there’s a specific boss with more than 2600 armor the sword may pull ahead but only by a small amount.

Guardians aren’t necessarily the best pug class. I’d say it’s a toss-up between engineer, warrior, and guardian, with mesmer or thief potentially being very good for specific content as well.

- Engineer has the highest solo DPS (using only buffs he can apply himself) and is also boosts party DPS by a large amount via high sustained stacks of might and vulnerability.

- Warrior are very good in a support DPS spec, using Phalanx Strength, which can give a pug a very wide range of buffs (including Empower Allies and banners) for the largest overall DPS boost a single character can give. However, your own DPS will suffer, which means you are basically gambling on having a good party comp. Even if you give your party a massive DPS buff, it’s meaningless if they’re dealing nothing for damage and/or dying all the time.

- Guardian gives extremely strong defensive buffs (Strength in Numbers + hammer auto + Communal Defenses = massive party-wide damage reduction). However, since the guardian is very weak on offensive buffs and pugs tend to be sketchy about boon sharing, your party DPS will be very weak. You will be very hard to kill but you will also take a really long time to kill anything.

- Thieves are great for “hard skips” in dungeons like Arah (although Engineers can provide stealth to a lesser extent too) and Mesmers can maintain 100% reflect uptime easily, which can totally shut down certain “hard” bosses like Alphard, COE Golem, etc. that pugs get wrecked by regularly. They’re not as useful otherwise due to lack of strong solo DPS options though.

That’s why I always laugh when the so-called “pros” accuse me of “spreadsheeting” DPS then immediately turn around and claim that GS is the best DPS (but only so long as you’re hitting perfect HBs and WWAs on cooldown). I did a crunch on the actual numbers and GS loses more damage with every interrupted HB, you can take a look at them here:

http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/12695698-interrupting-axe-auto-vs-hb

But if you don’t care, basically axe not having a cooldown makes a big difference is the obvious takeaway.

Xyonon.3987:

No way. There is nothing better for the bombs than the range increase. If you go for easy stacking dungeons, it might be less useful, but even there and especially in fotm etc, mobs do not allways stack as you wish, they tend to move a bit or one stays left one right, if someone has to dodge etc. I’d never leave that trait for some semi good condition damage.

Btw, in theory the bleeding sounds “good” however, in a 5 man group your bleeding gets easily overwritten by other players and the damage is cut early. Also 300 condi damage is not “high” condi damage. It’s low, even if it’s a zerker build. Low is low. 300 condition damage grants you crappy 15 damage per sec per stack. The might stacks will add up to 1000 condi dmg though.

However I’d also suggest the bleeding trait IF you only play with grenades. With other weapons 15% are just too low to be procced.

A dungeon engie with Strength sigil and runes will pretty much always be sitting on 25 might if he’s running grenades. Most other classes do not passively stack a large amount of bleed, you only actually need to worry about mesmers and/or multiple warriors capping you at 25 bleed.

Shrapnel adds quite a bit of damage when grenading. It’s easy to overlook bleed damage if you’ve got no gear stat investment in it but 25 might + 6 in Firearms = 1175 condition damage which puts you at around 100 damage per bleed tick. Shrapnel + Short Fuse gets you 15~ bleed stacks easily which is an extra 1500 DPS right there.

I’d say we carry nubs quite well, and do quite well in most of them:

1) Casual pugs, i.e. “I hope these four random guys can dodge the first couple of Alpha spikes before wiping”: Engie provides a massive boost in vuln and might since no one else will be providing those. You’ll be going from 0 might and 2-3 vuln to 15 might and 25 vuln, party-wide.

2) Elitist pugs, i.e. “zerk heavies only, ping gear”: Most are dumb and won’t let an engie join but an engie would be a massive DPS buff. A team of 3 warriors, 1 guardian, and 1 mesmer won’t cap might or vuln (they do at least have fury covered) and their DPS is pretty subpar since the only class capable of dealing high-end DPS in that comp (the mesmer) is also pulling the least might stacks since he needs to Signet of Inspiration to cover the lack of might.

3) The “competent guild” speedrun, i.e. “yo mike we’re doing arah, bring a good class”: You probably have might and fury covered but vuln is likely lacking. The engie usually gives “good enough” stealth for most content and has better DPS than a thief, and covers any gaps that the group has otherwise (i.e. not enough might, need more blinds, etc.).

4) The “record setting” run, i.e. “guys i think we can shave 10 seconds off this run if we bring a thief to speed through this one skip and open the waypoint while the rest of us kill the boss”: This is what the debate about “speedclears” is about, NOT the above. The complaints are highly specific like “Smoke Bomb doesn’t recharge fast enough so we have to wait 5 seconds for it at this point” or “this one boss is immune to conditions so we lose more time than we save by vuln stacking”. They are highly context specific and ignore the fact that engies ARE good in most other contexts, we just don’t discuss them because they aren’t really worth discussing. No one ever tries to set a record for AC because that’s honestly so easy that really any comp can do it in a time very close to whatever the record actually is. Even if an engie does speed it up (and it probably would) and set a new record for it no one would really care.

Xyonon.3987:

Pug =/= bad players. It’s hilarous how everyone calls himself a “pro” and playing with friends automaticly means “organized group” and every random is a tardnub. Oh, ofc if you are the random, everyone else is a nub and you’re still the pro… Sick of such posts.

You can call them tardnubs or pugs or whatever, they’re still bad and they’re still the majority.

tigirius.9014:

Iris Ng.9845:

So there was a bit of talk about how effective engi is in the dungeon speed run and the suggested comp for Arah p2 is to let engi replace the thief and et cetera Arah path 2 Guangway

If you ignore the terribad mesmer, engi seems good except for:
- The stealth combo used for skipping has long cd and duration is really short.
- Their blast finisher is a finisher that can CC mob unintentionally.
- They are too slow at stacking vuln in a short fight.
- Their DPS isn’t on par with a second ele with conjured weapons.

Engi isn’t the greatest in PvE and had no place in the meta dungeon speedrun.

I would add that gadgets and turrets still are not on par with ele weapons and summons, that Turrets still die too quickly, that the pickup cooldowns are still not on part with ranger spirit cooldowns, and that many of them still have extremely high cooldowns for little effectiveness in comparison to the similar skills in other classes, even with the new traits.

That’s why you don’t use them, you use Elixir Gun or Mine Field or whatever.

Iris Ng.9845:

So there was a bit of talk about how effective engi is in the dungeon speed run and the suggested comp for Arah p2 is to let engi replace the thief and et cetera Arah path 2 Guangway

If you ignore the terribad mesmer, engi seems good except for:
- The stealth combo used for skipping has long cd and duration is really short.
- Their blast finisher is a finisher that can CC mob unintentionally.
- They are too slow at stacking vuln in a short fight.
- Their DPS isn’t on par with a second ele with conjured weapons.

Engi isn’t the greatest in PvE and had no place in the meta dungeon speedrun.

- It’s fine for Arah P2, there’s no situation where they wouldn’t have been without it except the one point where their engie literally wasted the Smoke Bomb randomly right before the group actually needed it and went “OH LOOK MY SMOKE BOMB IS STILL ON COOLDOWN THIS CLASS SUCKS FOR STEALTH”.

- Don’t CC mobs with it then, that was also entirely his fault and of course he blamed it on the class too instead of his own being utterly stupid with the bomb drop. Might as well say warriors are a terrible class for speedruns because Fear Me CC’s mobs out of stacks too.

- Grenade Barrage > Mine Field > Jump Shot (or any other comparable combo) is an instant 15-20 stacks of vuln. Fights in this game can get pretty short with a good group but they don’t get THAT short.

- Again, you can’t FGS everything and even where you can it’s not necessarily better (or necessary) to have a second FGS. Moreover in this particular comp the engie is replacing the thief, not an ele. I was actually musing over whether a ranger was desirable in Arah P2 (I still think it’s okay since there’s only a couple bosses you can FGS in P2) but either way it’s the ranger that would be replacing the ele, not the engie. The ranger/ele choice is raw DPS while the engie/thief are necessary because you want the stealth, you’re not going to be just throwing in random eles and running 1W/3El/1G, it’d look like 1W/1G/1T/2El if anything.

Given how much they botched that particular run, I’m reasonably certain that a group that wasn’t actively out to make it fail could have shaved off at least 5-6 minutes if not more off the total time, which would have put them pretty close to the current record which I believe is around 11 minutes.

Lastly, keep in mind that we’re talking specifically about record-setting minmax groups, the average dungeon tour even for DnT etc. likely isn’t aiming for records, they’re just trying to get stuff done fast. When you’re not picking and choosing to scrape out 2-3% more total DPS is where engie flexibility and DPS becomes really good since having an engie alone basically covers, like, half the party’s bases by default.

First, it’s 15 stacks party-wide, the engie can get 25 on himself pretty easily.

Second, what good is a guard if you don’t need reflects? They overlap heavily with mesmers, their big sell is having Aegis and Protection which helps in some harder-hitting content like Dredge Fractal, but that hardly makes them mandatory to every party. Similarly, you’re not going to be able to Fiery Rush every single encounter and ele DPS suffers without it and without allies to buff them up. They get good might and fury but lack vuln which is very important.

And hey look who gives vuln and lots of it.

They bring stealth for easy and fast skips mostly. Thief stealth is stronger than engie stealth since they have multiple ways of applying it and they can do it instantly mid-run without Revealing themselves in the process. By comparison engies can apply stealth of comparable length but they need to be able to stack in a safe spot while they do it and they can’t do it multiple times in rapid succession (thief has two stealth stackers, while engie only has one).

Incidentally, this may not be what you originally had in mind but a Warrior in Zealot’s, Knight’s, or Soldier’s does MORE damage solo with a sword than an axe or a GS without WWA. That’s obviously because the bleed applications don’t scale based on stats at all (since you have no condition damage in zerker) so reducing your stats doesn’t affect the amount of bleed damage you deal.

What this means in practice is that if you’re half-assing it with a so-called “hybrid tank” build because you don’t want to go full zerker, you may actually be better off with a hybrid weapon (in the actual sense this time) like warrior sword, ranger SB, etc.

The problem with stuff like “just go rabid and run conditions if you can’t handle full zerk” is that:

1) The guys who would be running full zerk and tank traits (i.e. healshout warriors, AH guard, GS mesmer) etc. aren’t going to suddenly go “oh hey I have toughness now so I can go full DPS on everything else”, they’ll take the toughness and STILL take the tank traits. So you go from bad DPS to worse DPS.

2) The “conditions still tick when you dodge” thing isn’t wholly true because unless you’re way over the cap, you’re losing condition applications and thus not maintaining all your stacks. It may not happen immediately but you will lose conditions 2-3 seconds later and thus lose ticks. The two classes that can avoid this to an extent are engie and ele because they have very large bleed applications (Shrapnel Grenade and Eruption) that are gated by cooldown rather than how often you attack. The other two “heavy bleed” classes, the warrior and the necro, both have their bleed applications on their auto-attacks so the instant they stop auto-attacking, they start losing ticks.

That’s not to say conditions aren’t fun (sword warrior is actually pretty fun and although there’s no strict reason to take one, their bleed DPS actually puts them fairly close to raw axe DPS) but it’s probably not a solution for pug badness.

25 stacks of vuln and 15 stacks of might at all times plus the highest self-buffed DPS in the game isn’t a gamebreaking mechanic?

5k per person in a pug is absurdly optimistic. Keep in mind that pugs are typically:

1) Not well traited.
2) Not wearing good gear.
3) Using the wrong weapons.
4) Dead.

Let’s make up a few hypos here and see what my spreadsheet tells me.

1) The “I’m in zerker armor so I’m dps” pug warrior: 0/4/4/6/0 healshouts with a ascended greatsword, uses only HB on cooldown and doesn’t wall for WWA. Uses Omnom Pie but no meaningful runes or sigils. DPS: 2403

2) The “my pet tanks while I help the party by ressing the melees who go down” bearbow ranger. Full PVT armor, no meaningful runes, sigils, or consumables. 6/4/0/0/4. DPS: 1783.

3) The “I looked up meta builds online and found Strife’s video” 0/3/6/4/1 Guardian. Uses staff + greatsword and knight’s gear, again, no other DPS stuff. DPS: 1853 (includes burn).

You’d be extremely hard pressed to find a pug that can deal 5k/second on his own. Even a properly played meta engie only solos for about 8k/s average and as far as I know they are the highest solo DPS profession, unless I overlooked some other class (I compared them with warrior and ele).

lunyboy.8672:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

lunyboy.8672:

Stuff

words

Dude, in your OWN DPS calculations, you put Engineer near the bottom, if you want to have a real conversation about the class, play it in high level speed runs and in 40s+ fracts exclusively for a few months, get a real feel for the class.

Then re-read my post. The synergy present in certain other professions does not exist in the Engineer in any build. Yes, they are good for low to mid-level Pvp (this is largely because of good access to conditions+lots of tanky traits). Yes, they can be reasonable for wvw roaming, and some use in a zerg (although not as much as GWEN).

But they are mediocre in dungeons, and the very high skill floor does nothing to improve their reputation.

Yes, my OUTDATED calculations which did not factor in the buff to Ascended kits, dual sigils on rifles, and used old rules on Ferocity and damage scaling because I made it pre-patch. Go take a look at my new list and see how high engies are on that, being the class that got the most substantive buffs in the April patch and being the least hurt by Ferocity change made a big difference.

Moreover, the Strength runes and sigil give them downright amazing buffing capability in solo/pugs, Engie benefits the most out of any class from Strength sigil.

If you’re honestly not getting any DPS out of engie you’re probably just playing the class wrong, that’s all I can really say.

It doesn’t “greatly” outdamage it, it gives you an extra 2 seconds of vuln per application = about 6 vuln stacks extra (3 on bosses), and adds a bit of bleed damage which makes up the difference if you aren’t capped on bleeds already.

It also won’t help your burst DPS so it may be better to use raw DPS food depending on the situation.

Berserker is technically a better phantasm for AOE damage than Warden but the fact that you are forced to use a Greatsword to summon offsets the damage advantage. You can technically do open with GS > swap to sword but honestly neither phantasm is particularly great for AOE damage anyway so the advantage in short fights is minimal and the damage loss from not being able to swap Swordsmen/Wardens on cooldown is pretty substantial for longer ones.

Condi duration food is worth it for stacking more vuln on a boss, The DPS loss for using Koi Cakes is virtually nonexistent (since you’re offsetting the direct DPS loss with more bleed) and you’re also boosting party DPS on non-capped bosses by about 3%.

Condition damage or application traits (like Incendiary Powder) aren’t worth it though because the scaling on burn is terrible, you’re probably already getting at least some burn from other party members, and you’re giving up a ton of direct DPS for it.

The only thing that would make conditions viable is a serious damage scaling boost, either with precision or power. As it is even 25 stacks of bleed with no conflict with any other party member’s conditions still won’t do as much as a pure zerk setup.

lunyboy.8672:

Stuff

Uh, engineer does just fine in all comps, but especially pugs. They are probably the second-best support class and the best self-sustaining class, at the same time. Phalanx warrior is the only class who has them beat in raw DPS support (since it’s hard to beat 25 stacks of might + banners, which scales like crazy on the average pug who has probably very low power stat and might-stacking of his own) but even with banners, fury, FGJ, Empower Allies, and the might from blasting a fire field, a non-Phalanx Warrior is barely competitive with the 10-15 sustained might stacks a rifle/grenades engie can output along with giving 25 stacks of vuln on non-Defiant mobs, and in terms of solo sustained DPS engineer is the highest in the game (even higher than staff ele, who is lacking in vuln).

In a loosely organized comp (i.e. everyone knows what they are doing and runs meta builds but they aren’t actively picking and choosing everyone’s builds and roles for the absolutely minmaxed speedrun time) the engineer provides might, vuln, and stealth and has super high DPS and burst, so they are covering multiple bases at once so your party is guaranteed to have strong coverage in all fields. Again, this results in an overall DPS gain, and yes, it is a boost over taking another ele.

In a minmaxed record-setting run, engies haven’t been explored that much but they are looking pretty strong. Being able to cap and sustain vuln even on bosses (engineer stacks + incidental vuln from allies) is a big buff to overall DPS and the engie’s stealth allows him to replace the thief as a class with better personal DPS. Some of the guys from rT were actually “debating” this with me and their counterargument was basically “we tried engies and it went terrible.” Terrible in this case being basically doing the absolutely worst run they could plausibly do without making it look intentional (multiple wipes/permadowns, screwing up on basically every pull, stopping to kill random mobs, not even using swiftness or stealth while running) and they still managed to end with less than 18 minutes for Arah P2 including pre-dungeon stuff and load screens. Go do that with one of your “meta” warrior/guard/ele dungeon guilds and tell me how long it takes them by comparison.

nearlight.3064:

I’m not sure how well I can help with the support side, since this game is designed to have support primarily through boons rather than healing. But with DPS, ele staff DPS can be some of the best in the game if you know what you’re doing.

I think the build is 6/4/2/2/0 or some permutation of that involving persisting flames and +damage traits (the vuln stacking minor in air can work as well).

You can probably run less zerker for world bosses but for dungeons zerker is ideal. I’m not sure of the rotations myself, but I know that blasting and keeping lava font up all the time to give your party might and fury is important.

6/2/2/2/2 or 6/2/4/2/0. 6/2/2/2/4 if you need vigor to survive in a pug. Taking 4 in Air is pointless unless you’re planning on going at least 5 points in for Weak Spot.

To be fair he’s actually pretty close, not bad for a first try. This we can work with, unlike some of the other “i use greatsword for aoe” clowns that post on here.

If you’re not using a focus for reflects you should drop the 4 points in Inspiration. Pistol gets a fairly good damage bonus from Phantasmal Haste and taking that also gets you Illusionist’s Celerity which stacks with the weapon cooldown traits. You can keep the 2 points in Inspiration for the Glamour cooldowns but honestly you probably don’t need them, you can drop them into Illusions too for better shatters to clear trash mobs faster.

So your end result would be 2/6/0/0/6 with Sword and Pistol offhands, that is a workable build. Bit light on reflects but it’s not like you need them for everything.

Thaddeus.4891:

yayuuu.9420:

Thaddeus.4891:

yayuuu.9420:

Actually tanking is working in GW2. If you want to know how, read this article: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aggro

It’s not like in most of the games that tank can stand still and be healed, but he can take some hits and hold mobs in place for long enought to nuke them by the rest of your team. For most of the mobs / bosses it’s enought to just stay melee and have enought armor to become their only target for the whole fight. I’m not sure if this approach is faster or not, but it is for sure easier.

NOOOOOOO don’t spread LIES. We already have enough tanky people that think that they bring something to the group even if they don’t. Don’t give them another reason to hold back groups. Surviability is for you little kitten only and bring nothing to the group except if in full DPS you die each 2sec. Having enough survivability to match you level of skill is the only reason to use defensive stats or healing in PvE.

What is a lie? Wiki article? The stuff that I said is basically the confirmation of wiki article and from my experience having a lot of toughness keeps most of the mobs on you. It’s not like tanking is neccessary in PVE, you can do everything just fine without it. I have tried it once and went to lvl 9 fractal on my elementalist with 3.5k armor and build based around magnetic shield (couldn’t try it at higher level because I don’t have agony in the set that I bought just to do this test) and somehow it worked.

The lie is not about toughness = more likely to have aggro. Its about the old ’’Anchor’’ theory of more than a year ago. The principle is have 4 full DPS character, with 1 tanky anchor guardian (because it work better on a guardian for some reason). That way, the anchor take the aggro while the 4 other DPS more easily. That was an interesting idea back in the days and I was an advocate of that. But that was a bad technic as we found out. Why? For it to work properly you do need 4 full DPS character with you. If you have some hybrid and other stuff like that, you won’t have aggro most of the time. Ya in a particular run you could have aggro on you for most of the time, and there is ways of playing to get yourself more aggro, but with hybrid in your party that can change in a second, leaving the system without any purpose (except that you are not a DPS without much damage but a good survivability that serve nothing since you no longer have the aggro for some period of time). But even when you have 4 full DPS party member, sometime the mobs change target for no apparent reason. Why? Because some mobs don’t seem to respond to toughness more than damage they receive. Toughness work well in fractal (Legendary shaman and Ettin are the best example), but others like the flame legion shaman (the one with the Ettin and rabbit in Harpy Fractal) most of the time attack the guys that hit the hardest and switch target a lot. On top of that, you add the current global strategy of stacking. The game encourage to melee, to share boons and support and to stick together. That mean that all the party member will likely be hit by the mobs, not only the ’’anchor’’ guy. That leave not strategical purpose to a tanky character other than you self survivability.

I not saying that tanky build can’t influence greatly the aggro. I’m just saying that its unreliable and don’t help the party that much if you use the best strategies.

There was also the fact that a bunch of people tested and couldn’t find any clear correlation between toughness and aggro, so the whole “tank” thing was pretty much based on “this one time I was in Rabid gear and got attacked a lot”.

I certainly do believe there are ways to “steal” aggro if the boss is targeting someone else, and ways to break it (or not break it) if he’s after you, but they typically involve a lot of running away and stealthing and kitten. It’s far from reliable, much less efficient, to rely on one guy actually holding a boss’s aggro without dying.

Darox.8069:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

- You had the engie burst Brie when your warrior was standing right there.

But… did’t you explicitly compare engi’s burst to warrior’s saying that engi is best? :o

Not for Brie, you want the Warrior to Eviscerate Brie at 51% so you get a big chunk of extra damage while she’s still taking extra damage. The engie might be able to drop Brie to 50% a few seconds faster but getting that extra chunk of free damage past 50% is more important.

Darox.8069:

And once again Guang shows his ignorance … this is the most important thing you had to suggest to increase the speed of the run.

I’m too lazy to swap traits on the fly between fights and I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I myself wouldn’t. If you’re up for it, yeah, take Speedy Kits if you’re that lacking on Swiftness.

spoj.9672:

Did you not see the waiting 7 seconds for smoke bomb after the spider run and before the deadeyes? Clearly engi has enough stealth. That run was a mess yeah, but thats because it wasnt repeated to perfection (why would anyone waste their time doing that with such an awful comp).

Anyway what do you recommend for TA Forward guang. Id love to improve our time on that path. http://gwscr.com/records/current-meta-dungeon-records

That Smoke Bomb was on cooldown because he accidentally dropped it before the tunnel. If it’d been a thief misclicking Shadow Refuge you’d have been waiting an extra 40 seconds, clearly thief stealth sucks for skipping too since your party has to wait around for it all the time.

Also as an aside I’d recommend you switch to Rocket Boots whenever you’re stealth stacking, if you have the time/motivation to do so, since it’s also a blast finisher and will give you a huge head start on the skip. Also switch to Medkit for swiftness when practical/necessary (i.e. on the long empty stretch before Abom). I also couldn’t tell if the party was helping with stealth blasts in your vid but if not slot Thumper Turret in place of Grenade Kit and grab your shield (if you don’t need Elixir S) and use that to get the full 5 stacks of stealth.

Also if you don’t have a good ranger player who can do Arah without dying don’t take a ranger lol.

Okay so I just watched that video. On my phone so i couldn’t see all the stacks and stuff but I’d honestly say 18 minutes for a no-FGS Arah P2 run isn’t bad considering:

- You stopped to kill random Risen at least twice.
- You downed multiple times against Belka, Abom, and Alphard. You almost wiped on the latter.
- You never popped Swiftness or swapped to Rocket Boots on your Engie even when you were just running through an empty field.
- You blasted the Abom away from the stack for no apparent reason.
- You got stunlocked by the Inquest laser guys and didn’t have Elixir S slotted to get you out of it. I think your mesmer died during that run, even.
- You had the engie burst Brie when your warrior was standing right there.
- You didn’t vuln-stack Lupi during his reflect phase and I didn’t see you drop any turrets, clones, spirits, etc. prior. I’m actually not sure he targets spirits or turrets though.
- I’m not sure if your mesmer ever used Time Warp. I’d have to go back and look.
- You complain about lack of stealth but the only times you were lacking it was when you dropped the Smoke Bomb randomly and put it on cooldown right before you actually needed it.

And you STILL got sub-18 minutes even with all that. I’d call that an overall success.

spoj.9672:

Thief also does higher dps with fgs and stacks vuln. More stealth. Faster stealth. Perma blinds. Spammable blasts. Faster at skipping. Is that not enough to convince you?

Engie is:

- More DPS than thief outside of FGS.
- Better cleave for trash clears.
- Way better vuln stacking outside of FGS, and slightly better vuln stacking with
- Blasts are simultaneously and faster.
- Can blind without sacrificing DPS

It is true that thief has better stealth and better modifiers for FGS, and can permablind at the cost of something like half their potenital DPS, but if those are the only reasons you’re taking a thief and think engie is never viable, you’re just intentionally being close-minded. You wouldn’t take a full cleric hammer/staff guard if a DPS greatsword guard with Wall of Reflection is good enough for the content you’re running, and you don’t need to take a stealth-and-blind-spamming thief when an engie provides enough for your purposes and gives you better DPS.

hendo.1940:

I just watched through our run. I was NEVER able to maintain 25 vuln on bosses, not even on belka. It usually reached 25 peaks while dropping to 14-15 on average. And this is including other people’s vuln stacks. I was even using Koi Cake and the vuln on crit trait. Been doing your rotation, with little interrupts, as bosses don’t just facetank you infinitely.

Even on bosses, the engie should be maintaining 10-15 of those stacks you’re seeing, so that alone is a pretty big DPS boost. If they could maintain 25 stacks permanently solo on a boss with Defiant, that’d be pretty much the end of the story, they’d be 100% absolutely worth taking.

Purple Miku.7032:

@Guang

Your last statement on warriors…

-Ahem- http://i.imgur.com/burgBx2.jpg ???

Despite how much I love my beloved beast of a warrior, I accept the fact that she would lack a purpose in a speedrun if not for Banner of Strength and Banner of Discipline.

The general rule of thumb:
Bring 1 warrior and as many elementalists as possible; swapping one out for another class depending on what utilities said class is able to provide that would improve the time it takes to clear the path (i.e. stealth, reflects).

In an optimal speedclear, the warrior is only there for banners and banners are pretty much essential. Your last statement of “If personal base DPS was the only thing that mattered you wouldn’t bring a warrior either, you have to look at how much the group is dealing overall.” We all know that warriors aren’t there for the sole purpose of individual damage output and there have been repeated attempts on this thread to get through to you that the vulnerability that an engineer applies is easily outsourced.

It looks like the main reasons you advocate use of an engineer are because of stealths and vulnerability, so…

Please, answer these two questions…

1) Do you really think engineers are able to provide stealth to the team better than thieves?

2) Even if engineers are able to cap the vulnerability for the team in a boss encounter, would that be better than another elementalist there with ice bow and/or fiery greatsword?

I can’t think of any encounter for those. Let me know if you can.

I don’t dislike engineers or anything, I just don’t see the point in taking one over an elementalist if you want an optimal group composition for speedclearing.

1) No, but they provide ENOUGH to get through the skips. Thieves have a couple of advantages that MAY make them necessary but Arah P2 isn’t one of those situations where it matters. They don’t stack stealth any faster than engies either, the thief stack method is either Smoke Screen > spam Cluster Bomb 5 times or Shadow Refuge > sit in it for 4 seconds. Either way that’s exactly the same as the Engie’s Smoke Bomb > blast combo route.

2) Yes, because then you don’t NEED to outsource the vuln. The engie takes on all the vuln (and might, if necessary) stacking so your eles deal more damage. Adding another ele for another FGS may be good if you only have one but a third ele doesn’t add anything other than giving you a fifth FGS that would be picked up by the party member with the fewest modifiers anyway.

Moreover since we’re talking stealth, the engie is replacing the thief, not an ele. That means it’s a very easy comparison since it’s not an issue of “do I want to give up an FGS for more overall sustained” since you’re not touching the ele portion of the comp.

hendo.1940:

Because it’s dps isn’t close to as good as other professions, vuln stacking on engi takes quite long (and is covered on fgs fights anyway, as most professions get a vuln on crit trait for no investment). Engineers are potentially very fast runners, but that is solely based on offering all three utility spots and using executioners axe. Okay, you can change two of your utilities on the fly, but without exec axe engi is slow anyway. As for stealth, engi’s stealth is not sufficient. It takes a while to build up (especially in your composition), doesn’t last long and has a 25 seconds cooldown. If you don’t see the problem here, I’m not sure if you ever played arah. Even with the additional 5 seconds of Elexir S, it’s still not enough. Now to the vuln stacking, it isn’t even remotely close to what you want it like. Before you stacked up more than 15 vuln, bosses would have been dead already in a proper setting. You can totally take out bleeds and burn out of any assumptions and also ditch a lot of the ‘25 vuln’. It’s closer to like 10 on average.

So basically we are now at this: Engineer is average to bad at dps, provides zero reason to take over an ele. It’s slow on skips and a lot less good than thief on granting smoke fields/stealth. It basically yields nothin, another profession couldn’t do better.

And now, in the discussion, we are at following point:
- You claim engis are good for speedruns.
- We tell you why it’s not.
- Nothing constructive for three sites, would be surprised if you read our posts.
- You tell us why you think engi is good in theory.
- We tell you why engi is bad in theory and praxis.
- ???
- No profit.

Video should get up this evening, rendering the condi guard one took longer thsn expected.

Uh:

- Engie can stack like 16 vuln in 3 seconds and it just keeps rampig up from there, your comp must be godly if you can drop a boss before Grenade Barrage even hits. I’d like to see your vids of you dropping Lupi in less than a second.

- Engie stealth blasting works just fine. BOB > Smoke Bomb > Heal Turret > Magnetic Inversion > Acid Bomb gets you four blasts pretty much simultaneously and takes about 4 seconds tops to execute, which is pretty much exactly the same as what a thief would get. If you want even more stealth you can put Thumper Turret on your bar and use Rumble, you can use the toolbelt skills on Engie utilities and swap them immediately so long as you don’t use the utility itself. Either way 12 seconds of stealth is more than sufficient to get through all of Arah P2, there’s no skip there that needs any more than that except maybe the Risen after the spiders, which doesn’t even actually need stealth since you can just run past them and dodge the Deadeye shot.

- Didn’t you just agree that Engie DPS is just fine? Now you’re saying it’s bad? If personal base DPS was the only thing that mattered you wouldn’t bring a warrior either, you have to look at how much the group is dealing overall. Even without the support buffs the engie does just fine because of how many burst damage skills he has.

1) Roll a bearbow.
2) Sit at 1500 auto-attacking the boss.
3) Open TP and flip stuff for money.

By the time the dungeon is done you’ll probably have made at least 20-30 gold depending on the size of your flips and you’ll get the end chest and tokens from the dungeon itself too.

Archon.6480:

GrimmR.3541:

Oh guys, i had a good laugh at the start of this thread. The advice to take carrion is just ridiculous. (Do you want to wait 5min to see your enemy going down by conditions?)
Or also those guys who came around with axes and longbows; he asked for MELEE recommendations..
Nevertheless do i still think everyone should play how he wants.

As a dedicated ranger player i have to say that people tend to overreact when the sword is concerned. It is quite smooth to play if you practise it alot. (Would start with heartquests to learn it)
Greatsword on the other hand is more tankier due to the extrablock, the stun and the evade but it also does less dps.

Now you can call me a **** or elitist or whatever, i don’t care, my runs are still fast and i don’t have to rezz after every boss! Strange without any knight gear or even rabbids.
Have fun!

I must say, at first I was angry at the backlash against carrion gear on melle rangers, but now I am just finding the whole discussion rather amusing. I know it’s not very Meta, and it’s honestly a little overpowered in my opinion, but I am starting to think the disagreements have more to do with flame trolls than anything.

There are a few points I’ll leave the non-trolls with:

Carrion is not a bunker set. It is a major in condition and minor in power, and the only set that has this very powerful stat combination (a major in one of power or condition and a minor in the other). There are no carrion trinkets as I suspect a full set would mess up the balance and be way overpowered.

Might grants both power And condition damage. Emphasis on the And.

A max condition build mixed with four power builds works really well In dungeons.

If you really study the trains lines, rangers are designed for these kind of builds. Just look at it. Power is with condition duration, toughness is with condition damage.

There are some interesting berserkerish style ranger builds that I really enjoy using, so don’t think I am saying these are horrible. This is not at all my point.

Finally, I am not speaking to Bambi, Turtleduck, or Fluffinutter as you are beyond reason, and are having fun flaming others. I already know you disagree vehemently with what I am saying, and your views and deriding comments drive the point home to everyone reading this forum.

Ranger condition damage isn’t even good. You can put an engineer in full Carrion getting 25 stacks of bleed without any crits at all and he’ll still be hitting more in zerk.

Even assuming you’re actually 50/50 between condition damage and direct damage, Carrion isn’t going to come remotely close because you’re splitting your damage output between two different types then splitting it again in stats. So not only are you dealing less direct damage on account of using a weapon that is meant for condition damage, you’re getting less power scaling because you’re not in zerk.

Foosnark.1784:

That’s me, adding conflict.

Oh, and addressing this, though I didn’t quote it at the time:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

OP may not have phrased it as such but I think he was asking if there’s any OBJECTIVE reason to run GS over sword, beyond “I like the pretty butterflies”.

hendo.1940:

The OP is looking for practical reasons, not “play how you want” reasons.

The conflict arises where people try to claim it’s an objectively good weapon, and not just “I like lasers”.

It is, in fact, an objectively good weapon for certain purposes and playstyles. Even in dungeons some people have personally found a use for it, but they’ve been repeatedly dismissed out of hand in this thread. Because apparently anyone who uses a GS is among the “bads” and is “scared.”

It doesn’t even matter whether one proves, objectively, that optimum DPS is achieved by using exactly X equipment and pressing Y buttons at Z time and that greatsword never factors in to it. Other people have found ways to make it work, and they’ve given those as the reasons why they use it. The game is playable without turning everyone into totally optimized meta machines.

If you can put me and Dub in the same thread saying the same thing, it’s probably true.

Talyn.3295:

I was reading the original post and was like “holy kitten.” Then I looked at the dates and I laughed.

Thinking you could tank was dumb even in 2013. I don’t think the whole “anchor guardian” thing survived more than a few months past release. I remember it pretty well since it was the whole “zerk war best dps guard only for tank” argument that made me start theorycrafting seriously, otherwise I would probably have been happy with being the only DPS guardian in existence for the next six months.

Arah P2 hasn’t changed since the last time I played it other than them fixing the jump-past-Lupi thing, I can comment on it just fine.

Moreover, I’d like to hear your reasoning for why the engie is a “burden” on the group when he’s boosting DPS and providing stealth for skips.

DonQuack.9025:

Personally I dont care what the rT guys say.

Youre saying engi’s are baller.

Ok how? Gimme some numbers, a build, a rotation.

I have an engi gathering dust I would love to carry him some more than my ele or guard. Gimme something so I can tell my guild mates “Here is Guang’s proof, numbers, build, rotation etc. Get with the times Engi = supermeta”

Or you know what? Ignore the rT guys! There are people who want to see what you have come up with. kitten or not it is something to look at. Youre so stuck on arguing with em that you cant properly display your theory and supporting facts.

This insnt rT asking “How are engi’s good?” This is some random skrublord who wants to use his engi in SC’s effectively. Bloody enlighten me! I cant be the only “lurker” reading this crap wondering what the details of your theory are.

I can accept that but keep in mind that I don’t really play this game that much anymore, it’d be a special occasion for me to get motivated enough to make a pug video, much less find four other guys (most of my friends quit a while ago) to do a speedclear with. I can tell you what I’ve been telling everyone else though:

1) The “engie is all condition damage so not viable in zerk meta” thing is an exaggeration. Engie stacks about 15 bleeds all together and those are bleeds with no condition damage investment other than the 300 from traits + whatever you’re getting from might. At 25 might this is equal to 875 CDmg which adds up to 1175 CDmg = about 100 damage per tick. 15 stacks of bleed is thus equal to 1500 bleed damage per second. That’s a lot, sure but engie does just fine with direct DPS (you can see the video I uploaded as proof), so it’s less of a “engie DPS is all bleeds” deal and more of a “engie gets a lot of bleed as extra damage on top of what they deal directly.” situation.

2) Vuln stacking does in fact make a difference. rT/others tend to dismiss it with “we get plenty of vuln anyway” but they’re ignoring the facts that 1) you’re not capped at vuln for most of the fights, even if they’re short, since Defiant makes burst vuln applications very short (something like Crushing Blow only lasts 4 seconds, for example, which is a fair bit shorter than most fights last even with FGS). Certain tricks can get you lots of vuln (i.e. Ele with Weak Spot using Fiery Rush) but even then there’s the fact that the ele is now forced to invest points into Air (which is sort of a bad trait line to go that far into despite being Precision and Ferocity) and also the fact that you’re relying on your primary burst damage skill to apply the vuln needed for it to maximize damage; by the time you have 25 stacks of vuln from it, you’re already halfway through the Fiery Rush and have lost a significant amount of potential damage.

3) Engies actually have very good burst DPS. This is another reason why I made the “engie DPS rotation” video, to demonstrate this. It seems there is a common myth going around that “engie does crap DPS in speedruns because they don’t do anything until their bleed stacks build up”, when it’s actually the other way around. It’s the same deal as with mesmers and the “mesmers don’t get damage until all three phantasms are up” myth, which again ignores the fact that you’re getting a big burst of damage from having three phantasms appearing and unloading their skills at once.

And that’s pretty much the gist of it. Engie isn’t a class that you just toss randomly into a group that already has four other guys already specced to stack vuln and might, it’s when you drop them into said group and then take out the other vuln/might guys and replace them with DPS guys is when you really see the difference. This may account for any issues rT was having, but again I can’t comment on that because thus far they’ve said literally nothing constructive about what they actually did in said run, if they actually did it at all..