Guild Wars 2

just FYI scope trait is still bugged.

if you don’t have it kit refinement is a great trait for grenade kit since it will basically release a close aoe version of grenade barrage. All the grenades don’t typically hit but it can still be 3-4k damage, which is not shabby at all.

the 20sec is nice am I like it, but for me the biggest problem with the mine kit is just the way the tool belt mines spread out.

It’s hard if not impossible to get all the mines to hit sometimes even with the added radius trait.

I’ve taken to deploying them against walls and in arch ways to ensure a tighter clump for maximum dps.

The thing that engineers excel at is crowd control we have the most CC in the game and pretty much every weapon, kit, gadget, and or turret has built in CC. Elixir skills being the exception.

Most kits actually have 2 CC abilities.

We get tons of AoE KBs. FT, Thumper turret, Big ’ol bomb, mortar, elixir X, shield #4, trait-ed turrets, mines

As well as 2 ST KBs overcharged shot + PBR

We get tons of cripple / chill AoE skills. Grenade 4, bomb 5, pistol 5, toolkit 2, mortar 2/4.

We get them in the ST variety as well, pbr, throw wrench with trait, net shot with trait, any attack with explosives trait, net turret tool belt with rifle trait, tool kit 1 with trait.

We get plenty of aoe and ST immobilize’s glue shot / bomb, net shot, net turret, net turret tool belt, supply crate

We have a few AoE / ST KD’s / Stuns slick shoes, rocket turret, shield 5, supply crate.

We get plenty of blinds / blind fields. Bomb 4, grenade 3, pistol 3, rifle with trait, FT 5, explosives trait, elixir U tool belt, flame turret activate.

We have so much CC it is a bit silly when you swap to another profession and take a look.

So what I’ve found the engineers niche to be is providing control. I have enough of it I can keep people / mobs / bosses locked down and out of the way.

Which really helps when your trying to land gtaoe grenades!

Net turret saves lives! and grenade barrage cool downs!

I’m planning to mix the flame legion armor with the SE helm, I think it gives a really nice look.

I’d use the SE set but the chest looks really big and bulky on the human male. It triples the width of my character and makes my weapons clip horribly.

But I love the steampunk look of it. I kind of regret we do not have many steampunk sets.

Well I think it would be well within the range of possibly that we could see the burn on flame jet increased from 1 to 2 seconds. Which would cover the cast time of the ability, and get a great effect from + duration.

I.E. 3 seconds with stacking. Which would let flamethrower work better with runes sets like baelfire, flame legion, forge, fire.

FT is a bit behind grenades dps wise and it would be a small but effective change. 1 extra second of burning is another 500 damage to the one skill, or more depending on stats.

Only the initial hit gets the bleed, but every hit gets the explosion. So you enemies are tightly grouped you can get the explosions to overlap and increase the damage of the ability of 3-4×.

I think this is a known bug. I’ve reported it myself at least once. I would avoid using it because it falls pretty clearing into the “not intended” box. It does make elixir X a lot more useful however.

I agree with the OP on all points!

Nice post

Also

Burlok! Forever!

((If I could I would be a dwarf!))

I think my point was that when you say “Rifleman” you picture a more ranged setup like warrior rifle, rather than engi’s “Shotgunner” style. Which is way I suggested grenades for ranged combat.

And as Tigger and a few others pointed out there are a few FT or Rifle / FT builds that play well in the mid range – melee that are fairly competitive with grenade depending on the situation.

I’m really liking 0 30 10 0 30 with rifle tool kit, FT, and utility goggles. Use Tool belts at range, close in use FT / build might / vuln. Burst with blunderbuss + jump shot, and then repeat.

You get a good mix damage, control, and survivability.

Yeah no matter how much + condition duration you stack (you can get another 10-15% with doing a mix matched rune set) you’ll not be able to hit 2 second mark.

But try not to over look the fact that if your using another ability that applies burning, the tool belt from FT or the combo field for example, or lets say a flame / rocket turret, or rocket boots that extra 1/2 seconds of duration proves to be more beneficial. Since you can add them together to get an extra full second of duration.

Especially with the turrets since your damage overrides their damage letting you take over the burn effects.

Making a rocket + FT or a flame turret + FT combo give perma burning. Which for even power FT spec is around ~500+ damage per second.

The key to thieves especially D/D is having a stun break on your bar. I tend to fight them with rifle – healing turret – tool kit – net turret – elixir S.

I hit elixir S as soon as the pop, swap to tool hit and then hit pry bar and then channel a block kitten fades. After that its net shot, tool belt net, deploy net turret jumpshot blunder buss overcharged skill on net turret, overcharged shot, net shot ((typically ded by now))

I noticed the net turret will often continue to target them in stealth, which is really handy.

The only issue you might have is if your full on glass cannon with poor vit / toughness a good thief with lucky crits and buffs your 2 shot you before you hit elixir S. Which is the main reason full on berzerkers is a bit risky.

I noticed and have put some testing into this that multiple effect abilities seem to draw aggro. Condition removal abilities especially.

I’ll take much more threat using fumigate then when just auto attacking, the same seems true of shout warriors with the condition removal trait.

We have 2 warriors in a group who use the same gear and roughly the same trait setup but the one who uses shouts always has aggro while the banner warrior never gets any at all.

I need to test it more but I think abilities that do multiple effects cause more aggro than others.

Dodging is important, but with rifle builds can be really squishy early on if you focus on power / precision gear and do no stack any vit. / toughness.

The protection traits and bit of toughness or vit. make a huge difference, especially with timing your dodges.

Don’t forget that when fighting multiple mobs you are not going to have enough dodges to avoid everything.

It’s not a bad build but at the same time without a lot of power or crit damage the dps from rifle on it’s own would be really low.

With a 10 30 0 30 0 build pistol / pistol condition damage would work a lot better dps wise with the same amount of utility from elixirs.

Keep in mind that rifle is not a ranged weapon, but a melee weapon. If your looking for a ranged build with good dps and utility. You might be better of going 30 10 0 30 0 and using grenade kit with elixirs.

You lose an elixir but you’ll do much better damage with grenade than rifle if you want to play from range.

The knock back from PBR is really great for setting up a jump shot + blunderbuss combo.

If you time it right you can also use the utility goggles to prevent the knock down from overcharged shot as well.

@ pyronix

Keep in mind that rifle is melee so with ranged mobs you want to take the fight to melee were you’ll do more damage and kill them faster.

To get into melee you need to be able to close the distance while taking damage. So using gear with + power / toughness or + power / vitality, and getting a protection trait from alchemy or inventions will help you a lot.

Melee need to be a bit more tanky than ranged.

As far as the golems go there is a little bit of arm movement they do before the machine gun skill. If you watch for it you can dodge it and cut their damage down.

Don’t forget to use crowd control as well. When you get close you can use bomb kit and drop a smoke bomb to blind for 3 seconds and then use the knock back bomb to give another 1-2 seconds of control. That way you can take multiple enemies out of the fight for a short time.

But it’s better not to fight mobs more than 1-2 levels above you. Do not forget you can go to the other starting zones to level as well. You get ranked down to match the area so you’ll still get good xp.

A few levels means a lot in terms of stats early on in this game.

You might give a long bow / trap ranger a try.

Or a flamethrower build on your engi. It’s less key intensive, does ok damage, is not long range, but still not full on melee, and has a lot of area control with the right utility / weapon choices.

Unfortunately your link doesn’t work.

Are you trying a rifle + elixirs build?

There was not an active Dwarf thread so I felt the need to make a new one!

Dwarfs have beards! beards are sexy! Ogden for President!

Discuss!

But on a more serious note we know that with the exception of Ogden the sexy, supposedly all the remaining dwarfs on Tyria are either dead or fighting the Destroyers.

The question is were / are there dwarfs outside of Tyria? Elona? Cantha?

We know they went to fight the elder dragons during the last awakening, and we know not all of the elder dragons are currently on the Tyrian sub continent.

We also know that Dwarfs are not all dedicated to the same cause, cultural rifts did form in the society, the Stone summit dwarfs being the key example.

So what are the chances of dwarf colonies outside of Tyria?

I’ve always found that you need to have a goal in mind and an escape route pre planned.

Especially if your fighting the zerg. having a few balistas ready to go a decent funnel spots such as a supply camp, or lets say the ruins in front of blue keep ((./wink)) Can help a lot.

Group swiftness, and AoE CC like chill fields, glue bombs, knock back walls, and projectile reflects are a must though. No matter what you have to move fast.

Having people in defined roles such as making siege teams, having 3 people who always build siege together helps a lot. You can drop a bit of CC and a knock back wall and then build a balista or two quickly for extra dps.

You’ll also want to make a decision about stomp’ing. Do you stomp or do you dps? Who stomps? Who assists?

Using a guardian to pull downed players close together and then aoe’ing them can be much more effective than try to stomp them 1 by 1.

But the key is coordination and organization.

The spec I run works fairly well in dungeons.

It’s a 30 firearms, 10 Inventions, 30 tools build.

It is a build that I’ve found to be very flexible in dungeons.

The basic setup is a 40/60 split of knights and valkyrie gear.

I use rifle, healing turret / medkit, tool kit, PBR / Rifle Turret, Open slot, Supply crate

The bulk of your damage comes from rifle abilities, namely blunderbuss + jump shot, and tool belt abilities + static discharge. You pretty much use tool belts – jump shot + blunderbuss – and then repeat.

The build is quite flexible since you can use elixir gun to get a lot of group condition removal when needed, you can use turrets for control or kiting, or even swap in a few elixirs like R or S for the really rough fights.

You can also swap to P/P or into a Flamethrower build with trait or gear swaps within the build, which can be handy.

But something to keep in mind is even without the grenadier traits for fights you have to range, and for melee fights when your burst skills are on cool down, you’ll always be better off swapping to tool kit, bomb kit, or grenade kit for dps’ing. Their 1 abilities will do much better dps than hipshot and you can take advantage of some other strong burst skills like the confusion bomb, pry bar, grenade kit #2, while your waiting for cool downs.

I think overall elixir has better survivability. They play very differently for me since I view P/P elixir as a kiting build I move away from my enemy, while the tools build is more of a skirmisher build. I push in and take them in melee. That’s where my CC is, that’s where my burst is.

So for me they are black and white.

Overall I like tools more because there is more for me to micro manage and I enjoy the feel of it, the way I setup the burst rotations.

P/P elixir feels less active in its rotations. 1 2 1 (they get close) 3 4 5 (make distance refresh elixirs) 2 1 1 ….

But that’s just me.

With p/p alchemy I die far less though and it’s easier to take on multiple enemies or an addon.

With tools your in a tricky spot if someone joins the fight or if you try to fight 2 on 1.

Elixirs and being ranged give you a lot of survivability.

That’s pretty much the build I run, except I use utility goggles or elixir S as my last spot.

The tool kit can be very deadly is you utilize it well. For example box of nails + the box of nails from kit refinement is nasty for D/D thieves since they’ll get de-stealthed as they move in to you. You’ve also got the channeled block to block power moves / escape with.

With some vuln. stacks up the 3rd hit from the 1 and pry bar do hit hard. Easily 3k with knight gear, closer to 5 with berzerkers.

But it is a very tricky build to play well I think. You need to tie a lot of abilities in together to get your dps in. Jumpshot + blunder buss, PBR + Throw wrench, thwack + pry bar. So you need to get your rotations down and setup your burst with CC to make it work.

You’ll be surprised how much your rotation will henge on getting a net shot or PBR to land. Otherwise a lot of our dps is easily avoidable.

The thing is if you nerf grenades range from 1500 you take away our ranged option. I don’t disagree with you but they’d need to give us another ranged option if they were to nerf grenades, and the only way to do that is to add in a new kit / weapon or to scrap and completely redesign a current kit / weapon.

I don’t like the way grenades play, but I use them all the time, because they are our only ranged option for WvW, and a lot of dungeons.

Even if I am not explosives spec’d with grenadier I still use them in those situations because we have nothing else really in the 1200+ range.

Hipshot is not enough, neither is elixir gun, and mortar is far to situational, and even un-traited grenades will do damage that is slightly better than hipshot.

You can do spec’s that are around 900 and those specs work well, but there are to many places that 1200+ is a most, and for those we have grenades.

The trick to getting mortars / trebs to attack the thumper turret is to place it in range and then move out of range. Once they focus on the turret they don’t seem to shift until it dies. I’m not sure if it’s a bug or just a bit of randomness, but this helps a lot in certain dungeons since you can use it + net to buy your group 10-15 seconds without incoming aoe to dodge.

Pierce lets you shot go thru targets in a straight line. So it will hit enemies behind your target if they are lined up.

In effect with good positioning it makes the poison dart volley of the pistol aoe, and can give really good damage off of explosive shot. Since you get an explosions for each enemy hit. If they are close enough together you can have enemies hit with multiple explosions for overlapping damage.

It significantly increases the pistols damage in PvE where you often fight a lot of tightly pack monsters.

I use namely rocket and flame for dps. Since they give burning effects which stack in durations as well as good CC moves.

At times I will use net turret for bosses I need to kite or to better control enemy movement. It’s good when your fighting a lone enemy since you can use it to lock them down and keep them away.

Thumper turret is good for off tanking or baiting mobs / objects. With the auto tool installation trait it can draw fire from treb’s, or mortars in PvE so they don’t hit you. For tanking mobs it’s ok but they don’t always go for it. But it’s health is pretty good when they do.

I do not use the rifle turret much as a turret. I use it’s tool belt skill a lot in tool spec’s but even with traits it always gets 1 shotted and since bleeds don’t stack in duration it doesn’t help me much dps wise. The low CD is nice but I get so much more dps from rocket or flame when I place them correctly, it’s not an issue.

I also do not use the healing turret as much these days. I like the heal, and the quick detonate for the AoE heal, but with the deploy-able turret trait it bugs out and is a pain to use so I swap it out.

I think if they every fix the deploy-able turret trait so that it works with more than rocket / healing. I’d use rifle and thumper more. If I could toss thumper into a group of mobs it would be awesome.

The main reason for the flame turret / rocket combo is that if they are both alive and in range they’ll keep burning up. You only need to apply your own burning effect from the fire bomb, the explosives trait, flame thrower, or blow torch and you take over the effect.

Rocket will also do nice consistent damage if your enemy has vulnerability on them. So it adds nicely to your dps.

Net turret is actually fairly tank as well. It takes 2-3 hits to kill it unlike the rifle or rocket. After thumper I think it has the most HP of any turret.

The net turret is a really strong turret 1v1. I was noticing the other day that it seemed to target and shoot thru stealth if a thief went back into stealth after a attacking. Which is really really handy for those hit and run D/D thieves that flee the second you hit elixir S or they’ve used their signet.

But the 600 range on the turret is a bit tricky. It’s much easier to dodge and avoid then the net shot as well.

But it is massively OP for certain dungeon boss fights. Like the twin golem bosses in the second path of SF.

It lets you completely lock down the mark I golem for 10-15 seconds at a time making the fight much easier.

With full tools the tool belt skill for rifle turret is about a ~7 second cool down. With static discharge it’s fairly nice dps.

The reason I use the bomb kit is it works well with the pistol. When mobs get close you stack 7-8 stacks of confusion, and the fire combo field and smoke combo fields work well it pistols fast attack speed for applying burns and blinds.

The main reason though is having the AoE knock back from big old bomb, the additional smoke field on top of the flame turret one, and the cripple / immobilize from glue bomb.

It gives you a lot of control abilities, which are handy for a pistol / pistol spec, since they will be your source of survivability.

I like this build in dungeons especially since, you can chain blinds and CC on multiple mobs to keep them locked down for your group.

Don’t for that if you time things right you can use the turret detonate skills, big old bomb, the rocket turret overcharge skill, and supply crate to trigger combos off the smoke / fire fields for AoE stealth, and AoE might.

That’s really the benefit of bomb kit.

If you want to use pistols more. I’d recommend dropping 10 points from explosives and putting them into firearms for coated bullets to make your pistol shots pierce. You can then use flamethrower for the ranged burn and still have a fire combo field + aoe knock back and blind.

I agree with the OP.

As far as pure numbers go for dps I have not been able to beat grenade. So it is the go to spec for dps’ing right now.

I do not think it is as fun or interesting as other spec’s but until changes are made it is what it is.

unfortunately your build isn’t showing up for me from the link.

If you want to use a pistol / turret build I put one up in another thread you might want to take a look at.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Turrets-n-Toolkit/first#post450503

It’s pretty much stacking burn damage with pistol / pistol, bomb kit, rocket turret, and flame turret.

The other build I use is not strictly a turret build but it does use turrets + the tool kit.

It’s 0 30 10 0 30. So 30 firearms, 10 inventions, and 30 tools.

The key traits are hair trigger, rifled barrels, precise sights from firearms. metal plating / protective shield from inventions, static discharge, deploy-able turrets, and power wrenches from tools.

I use it with a mix of knight / valkyrie gear.

the utilities are rifle, medkit / elixir H, tool kit, rocket turret, (open slot), supply crate

I basically use the tools static discharge power build, but place the rocket turret out of harms way to provide extra dps, burning, and it’s AoE CC. Sometimes I will use the rifle turret for its quick tool belt, or net / thumper for additional CC.

I found that if you combine the rocket turret with vuln. stacking the turret does nice damage. With 16-18 stacks it will do above 1-1.4k to most targets with 3 seconds of burning at about ~250 a tick. So about 1.75- 2k every 4 seconds. That’s not bad at all. You just need to place it in a place it can’t get hit, and keep enemies in range.

It’s nice to actually set it up as part of your rotation. Such as use net shot from rifle to ensure the knock down rocket hits, and then use jump shot / blunder buss + overcharged shot. If you time the rockets you can get the overcharged rocket and the normal rocket to hit at about the same time. ~ 2.5k instantly.

The more I use the turrets the more I realize that they actually do fairly good dps.

The big problem we have is not that they have low stats, but that their targeting AI is funky, and they will shoot at dead npc’s, stuff out of los / range. If you could pick their targets they would be a lot more useful in the long run.

To OP:

I have found 2 ways to build out turrets and be effective.

1 method is as Coglin suggest and to go for condition damage stacking burn duration.

The build I like for this is 20 explosives, 20 firearms, 20 inventions, and 10 tools.

The key traits are incendiary ammo + accelerant pack turrets from explosives. metal plating and auto tool installation from inventions, haired trigger, and napalm specialist from firearms, and then deploy-able turrets from tools.

I run the build with Pistol / Pistol. Elixir H / Medkit, Bomb kit, flame turret, rocket turret, supply crate.

It is basically a burn build. The turrets do not do much on their own but both apply burning, and with the inventions traits flame turret / thumper turret are pretty tough if you use their utilities right.

The way you use the build is that you setup the rocket turret on a cliff or ledge out of the way and then deploy the flame turret below. Pull mobs in and chain the AoE blind from the smoke bomb, the the flame turret and then the AoE knock down from the rocket turret. If things get tricky you can use the detonate on the flame turret for a stealth with a smoke field or for a knock back, added to your glue bomb + glue shot.

It will take time to get use to the ideal turret ranges but I found the build to be fairly fun.

You will want to run + condi gear with it, and I like the + condi sigil + and bleed on crit sigil.

The damage is actually pretty good.

The build is not perfect though it could use some work.

I get to hit people with wrenches … what else more do you need?

coglin.1496:

I like bomb/tool kits together on a heavy condition build. The 4-5 stacks from concussion bomb stack with the 4-5 stacks from pry bar to watch the enemy kill itself ridiculously fast with confusion.

Yeah I use it the same way. I actually played around with pistol / bomb / tool to max out confusion stacking.

I really like pry bar as a skill. I get a lot of burst out of it when I have a lot of vuln up. With the 3rd hit of the 1 skill, it is really nice damage, that is very different from the way grenade / bomb functions.

But if you time it right thwack – throw wrench – pry bar – (second throw wrench hit) its a nice combo.

I actually think tool kit is not far off from the rest. a few minor cast reductions and ability tweaks will do it.

Smack, Whack, Thwack
I really like the 3 hit combo, and upon doing some comparisons with FT and bomb kit I realized that dps wise it is not that far behind. The big issue with the 3 hit’s is the longer cast time and telegraphing on the third hit. It is very easy to spot and dodge. With the bulk of the damage centered on the third hit, and it being the case you interrupt the combo if you use another ability, a lot of the 1 skills potential is situational and easily wasted.

My suggestion for the 1 skill is to decrease the cast time on the 3rd hit from 1 second to 3/4 seconds. Also to boost the damage to increase the vuln stacks from 1 on the first 2 hits to 2.

Box of nails
I like BoN for the cripple and tiny bit of bleeding, it is nice to toss down in door ways or ramps, but I really feel it is hindered by the long cast time, and short duration. It functions very differently from other 2 skill moves, which provide kits like bomb / grenade / ft a solid source of damage.

For BoN I have 2 possible suggestions.

1. Reduce the cast time to 1/2 to allow faster use
   or
2. Remove BoN ((we have a lot of cripple fields + kit refinement)) and add in a 2 sec duration lightning combo field without the stun feature and name it static field or lightning rod, ((only ele gets lightning fields at the moment and the swiftness + vuln stacking could really compliment other tool kit abilites, + it gives a combo field to the kit to match up better with bomb, grenade, eg, and ft))

Pry Bar / Gear Shield ((perfect as is!))

Magnet
With magnet I have a few suggestions

1. Make magnet AoE ((like guardian GS pull)) and add 5 stacks of vuln to those that get pulled ((more vuln stacking))

1. Extend magnets range to 900, and add add 5 stacks of vuln to those that get pulled ((more vuln stacking))

Overall I love the tool kit. It is my favorite kit among all engineers kit, and it has earned a special place on my utility bar, to the extent I willingly kitten myself at times to run the kit even if I am grenade or bomb spec’d!

((Yup I am a newb, but whats the point of being an engineer if you are not beating people with a wrench?))

I’ve tried many different builds with the tool kit, with as many different stat setups and have come to the point where I realized that, while I utilize many of the tool kits abilities, I have yet to find a build where I will utilize all of the abilities or stay in the kit for extended periods of time.

Other kits such as bomb, grenade, flamethrower, and even elixir gun have builds that focus on full use of the kit, but for tool kit, it’s used as clutch utility.

It lacks a little something that prevents it from being used in a more complete manner.

So I’ve come up with a few suggestions take from other threads on ways to adjust the kit without completely reworking it.

Don’t get me wrong. I more than agree that mortar is weak to the extent of only having very minor niche uses.

But when you compare it not to other utility skills but to elite skills. It has some very unique attributes that might be screwing the dev’s towards its balance.

For example think of the damage you can do with elixir X vs mortar or supply drop vs mortar for their full durations.

Since mortar has such a long duration in that total time it can do more damage than most other elites.

So the downside to mortar is that it’s weakened to spread damage out over a long duration rather than a short.

If it was changed to do tons of damage from a massive range they might need to nerf the duration to counter it.

I kind of get the feeling that elites were never suppose to be something that you can use as a main ability set, but rather a clutch ability to turn the tide of a fight.

Mortar is just a bit away from the norm. Like a lot of things on the Engineer.

Keep in mind that the deadzone / low hp might be part of the balancing that allows us to have mortar up for so long.

When it doesn’t die you can have it up nearly 100% of the time.

Something no other elite can do.

Think what your happen if thieves could chain dagger storm or guardians their tomes.

So mortars weaknesses might be a part of it’s balancing.

I didn’t advise hitting gates with cata’s to take them down. They are better used against walls.

But you can hit other cata’s by aiming your shoots in the gaps above some gates, to kill enemies / cata’s on the other side.

With siege it all comes down to placement and practice.

In a mix of berzerkers / Valkyrie exotic gear I crit 900-1100 on pistol 1. That is with vuln stacking + might.

So ~25% from vuln makes the difference.

It is not hard to get 3-4 enemies hit with the pierce and explosion in pve, or tightly grouped players in WvW. Having guardians use the great sword pull helps a lot.

But even if you only 3 enemies overlap on the damage you still out due the damage from grenade kit due to the faster attack speed, attack arc, and travel time.

But as I said it is very niche in it’s usage. There are places where you can get a lot out of the setup but it is by far subpar to grenades which can pretty much be used in any situation to great effect.

The thing about the door cata’s is that they are easily countered or killed.

You do not have to attack a gate with rams, you can use cata’s or treb’s from a distance.

In many keeps / towers you can also take out the cata’s with siege.

A good example are orges / anzalins. If you build a balista outside orges on the orges you can kill any cata placed inside unless it is pretty much on top of the door, and if its on the door you can kill it with normal AoE.

For Anzalins you can arch your cata’s shot through the space above the door if you time it right hitting anything / everything inside, or you can build a treb on the cliffs and rain death from above.

Cata’s are not that bad, I actually think they make players try harder and play better. Without them zergs would just run through the keeps even faster.

Take a look at the claw in the second phase of the fight after it looses it’s wings and becomes grounded. The model changes a fair bit between the phases.

It might also be that they use the same base model. Like kodan / icebrood kodan, branded charr / charr ext.

But when you get up close and look at the head from the side the eyes and head shape are very similar.

My guess is the Leviathan might end up being a meta event zone boss like the claw, the shatterer, tequatl, the shadow behemoth, the crab, and others.

I need to go check the risen sea-monster event though and check their models.

You can do P/P power but going 30 firearms for coated bullets is a must.

When you get 4-5 enemies tightly grouped you can do massive damage in a power build since the 1 skill will pierce and explode for each target. So to a small group you can do 4-5x your normal damage.

Which with crits can be 4.5-5.5k per skill. Add in quickness and it’s monstrous

But its not easy to line it up, and you need lots of enemies tightly grouped to make it work, and outside of the 1 skill you really don’t have many other hard hitting abilities. You can use grenade kit / tool kit to make up for that, but after running it extensively I have found that it’s really niche like a lot of engi builds.

In certain dungeons, solo pve, and zergy keep defenses it’s great. But for 1v1 / small group pvp, bosses with adds, tpvp / spvp it’s really lack luster.

I run a 0 30 0 10 30 rifle crit build and I swap in pistols when I know I am heading into an area I can use them.

Otherwise the damage is fairly low for power builds.

They are nothing like Thief pistols. Just like how rifle is nothing like Warrior rifle.

Engineer weapons are very unique in their roles.

If you take a close look at the claw of jormag in frost gorge sound he has the exact same head as the Leviathan in the picture.

It might be they use to have the claw come out of the water or some such.

To be honest the fact other people can ninja my mortar annoys the kitten out of me! Why can’t those kittens go get their own kittening mortar by rolling a kittening engineer!

I am tired of it! It’s not even that good but all these kittens, and kittenettes are just ninja’ing right and left before I even get the chance to fire off an ability!

Supply drop is good from a support / utility stand point. Nice AoE stun, some turrets to soak up aoe damage, and a nice bit of healing from medpacs.

But it is not a damaging elite, neither is elixir x regardless of what you get.

I’d gladly trade either for a machine gun kit ((see char engineer concept art)) a machine gun turret or a dredge like mech-suit.

Heck just make elixir X give the effects of all our elixirs minus S. C, R, U, B and H. That would be well worth the elite spot. ./wink

I found if I play smart and focus on hit and run tactics I can get away with just protection injection / the block from tool kit.

If the focus gets bad I swap in elixir S for utility goggles.

You can get away with being squishy with good team support and smart play in WvW / PvE and at times in sPvP.

But in tpvp / or if your a point guard you really gotta swap to a tanky bunker build.

I just noticed though my dps doesn’t not drop by all that much if I swap in a few pieces of Valkyrie for berzerker. You don’t really think about it but an extra 2-3k hp does help a lot.

I’ve tried going around with full berzerkers before and you can do it, but you may need to swap elixir S into the build and run the protection injection trait from alchemy.

With full berzerkers you would be an easy target for anyone that wants you. In WvW I like Valkyrie gear since it gives me a really nice amount of vitality.

If you play the edges and are careful to avoid attention you should be ok, but if a group decides to focus you, you don’t have many options.

Brutus Tarsi.1283:

Is there any trait that reduces the CD of the toolBELT? Outside of the 30 point investment?

Nope sorry

I kind of wish the 20% reduction traits worked as well but any further reduction on grenade barrage or throw wrench could be OP.