Guild Wars 2

If you play FT, then you have to decide whether you are going to be Power/Precision or Precision/Condition. The two don’t mix well, and you don’t want to sacrifice survivial since you will constantly be dangerously close to melee fights.

The Firearms Grandmaster and Master traits for the FT work well in both situations because they aren’t based solely on direct damage or conditions. Don’t choose the Alchemy one if you are going conditions, as it looks like these only focus on direct damage from everyone’s input.

Does anyone know if the medkit bandages take your healing bonus (if you have any) into effect?

Yes, it is useless to a player who is already dead.

Toss Elixir R removes all conditions and gives you a 6 second auto-regen to downed health.

If you toss it at your feet before you die, then you will automatically start to regen your downed health at 20% a second. This means that, if you don’t help yourself when you have the chance AND noone’s attacking you, you will get up in less than 3 seconds.

Power/Precision/Crit damage?

Rune of the Eagle gives Precision and Crit damage bonus, and the 6th rune gives you an extra 5% damage versus enemies under 50% health.

If you think you’ve got enough Power and Precision, then Rune of the Wurm gives you crit damage and a little survivability (Vitality).

Shows how much I know about copyrights or idea protection. :P

If you think that you’re only tagging folks and not doing enough damage, then your style seems more suited for a condition build. You’ll want to find armor and weapons that increases Precision and Condition damage, with upgrades that do the same thing.

Your traits should focus more on conditions. Explosives increase Condition duration, while Firearms increase Condition damage and precision. I normally choose only 10 points in Explosives for the burn on crit chance, with 30 points in Firearms to max out condition damage and precision, and 30 elsewhere (usually a defense-aligned trait).

You want your third to be defensive, either with vitality or Toughness. Vitality will help you overall and especially help you vs other condition users, while Toughness is specifically for direct damage.

Runes:

If you’re looking for toughness and condition damage, then Rune of the Undead set would be good for you to add to your armors. Duration isn’t much unless you have some long durations.

If you want a defensive and offensive rune, you can choose Runes of Lyssa, which gives +Precision, +Condition duration, buff on healing, and condition removal on Elite skill.

Sigils:

As for Sigils, use a Sigil of Corruption to stack your condition damage. Superior sigil will net you +10 condition damage per stack, for a total of +250 when you reach 25 stacks. A nifty bonus!

Aside from that. . .Sigil of Strength is good for kit swapping because it gives you Might for 10 seconds. If you are looking for more crit chance and don’t plan to use a kit or stay in one very long, use a Sigil of Accuracy to give yourself a crit chance boost (+5% from the Superior Sigil!).

Flamejet’s effects seem fine, but the aim/targetting could use some more work.

Fire Blast needs a definite overhaul with the obstruction bug and travelling into terrain and walls, but all I ask for is a fix to the obstruction bug. I like the skill a person needs to judge the distance for the blast.

Air Blast is perfect. No damage or additional effect is needed there.

Flame Wall is perfect as well. It’s there to provide a combo field and to burn people who run through. Sure it’s only 1 tick, but noone’s going to stand on the field.

Smoke Vent? I think it needs a simple AOE radius extension, enough to affect at least two people out. The blindness is just fine and suits a short-to-melee range kit. It doesn’t interrupt any of your channeled skills, and you can also use it while stunned.

The healing turret is not really great. You only get your healing bonus off them when you drop the turret. The regen is bad because it’s based off the turret’s own healing score of 0, and you get the lowest possible healing ever.

Don’t use healing turret in group play, either. It overrides everyone else’s regen effects, which means they lose a lot of regen if they are slotted for healing.

If you want to compare how prices are fairing, you need to find a medium item.

I think the best medium items to compare would be the Blue collectible items. Claws, Totems, Bones, Blood, etc. These are uncommon and are in high demand. Your average tier 5 collectibles like that right now run just under 1s.

If you track them, you can track supply, demand, and the economy of the game.

I’ve just figured out how to play my class. I slot most keys to the #1 key so that I can simply choose grenades and roll my face around the keyboard. Ultimate win!

Kidding!

I still think if you’re not using a programmable mouse that you should use the keys closest to your WASD. ZXCV are good choices, and you can use shift or control with them for your toolbelt skills.

The ascalonian ghost rifle effect works only on the ghosts. It’s a special attack designed to help you in a special situation.

Don’t expect that ability to be there for you anytime soon.

Environmental weapons are designed to be more powerful in attack but limited in nature. This is because usually they are scenario-based or one-use. Boulders have enormous damage and a knockdown, but you have to run over and pick it up again before you can use it.

To compare an environmental weapon to your normal weapons is . . . absurd.

Following on devinchi’s idea, I would recommend the Net turret for control. You can fire your net from your tool belt before setting the turret down, then drop the net turret down as soon as the player gets out of it.

Immobilizing a player means they can’t dodge. If they can’t dodge, then they are prone to all your attacks.

I’m not sure if that is considered a copyrighted ability by another game. I think ANet probably mulled that idea over before deciding they didn’t want to be sued by Valve.

It does sound like a good idea, though.

If you are using elixirs, your damage should be up around 5% above normal a lot of the time (this is due to the 25 point Elixir trait “Energy conservation Matrix”). Stack your Elixir H and B together and you can see a noticable boost in damage.

Not to mention your Auto-Elixir B gives you an extra Elixir to quaff at 75% health, though there’s an internal cooldown that’s equivalent to the manual Elixir B cooldown.

Heh. It would be awesome to see Energy Conservation Matrix add 1% of damage for every stack of Might. But that’s only in my dreams.

Has anyone ever noticed if, when traited into Formular 409, the traited auto-elixirs (Elixir B and Elixir S) remove conditions when they trigger?

I’ve tried the kit regen and it isn’t as good as it sounds. You can use the med kit or elixir H and get better results. I would replace it either with HGH or Formula 409 if you use a lot of elixirs.

My build is similar, but I use Infused Precision which gives me swiftness on crit. With the swiftness on crit I also have Invigorating Speed. This combo not only increases your speed but also gives you more dodges. More dodges in melee also means you’ll be dropping more bombs via the 5 point Explosives talent.

I use this tactic with that combo is to usually pop an Elixir B (Swiftness + Vigor), Flame blast them as you run up, dodge through them (bomb), about face, flame blast again, smoke screen, Pistol Poison Dart volley, Pistol Flamethrower shot (if you’re dual), and then Pistol #3 shot and run out of melee.

If response lag gets bad (1 second or greater) expect some skill command inputs to be ignored altogether.

We’ll see if they manage to fix this problem.

I would say go for armor looks, as animations really don’t do much.

If you want to look mean, choose Charr. Their armor isn’t the snazziest – many say it’s downright ugly – but their attitude with everything is awesome. You can roar, call in artillery strikes, and also can pull out the Charzooka. They’re practically made for engineer players with their abilities.

Quotes from Charr that I remember

Might – “I feel . . . .STRONG!”
Retaliation – “Go ahead, hit me!”

Humans seem comical, and there’s only one quote I remember from them

Fury – “Urge to kill rising!”

Redtah.3016:

How do you lead the net shot…? I wish I could. Also I love being OBSTRUCTED by blades of grass or watching the net shot graphic hit someone in the face and then say miss/obstructed mostly obstructed.

In order to lead, you have to select off the target so you can face away from him. Stop attacking him (hit escape once or twice to be sure) and you should see your target ground reticle disappear from him. Then you can face in any direction and fire your net.

The problem with this is the time it takes to do all this. You have to practice it. Be quick. If you want tips, go the the Mists and practice on the moving robots. Try hitting them at the maximum range possible with the net. This should help you out a little bit.

The net is most effective at mid-range in PvP because by the time they see it shot it’s too late for them to dodge or run to the side. At short to melee range your accuracy is practically 100% but the problem is that they have 100% accuracy on anything they throw at you as well. This means that they would probably get 2-3 melee auto attacks before you can unleash your attacks on them.

Medkits have to be run over to be picked up. If your teammates aren’t moving, then they won’t pick up that bandage you just dropped on them.

I’m more for seeing us automatically get deployable turrets than seeing it disappear. I know how you feel, Lorechief.

Grenades do almost twice the amount of damage a pistol shot does, and that’s per grenade. If you get the Grandmaster Explosives trait, then you’ll be tossing out 3 grenades, and adding 2-3 stacks of vulnerability per hit.

I think grenades don’t need an auto aim or any type of homing. Besides, you’re tossing them, not precisely aiming them.

With the current condition of engineers, your best bet is putting a stacking sigil on your pistol or rifle. Before an enemy dies, switch back to your pistols or your rifle so that you’ll get the stack bonus for the kill. These bonus stacks stay on you when you swap to your kit, so they’re the most beneficial.

Don’t put 2 stacking sigils on your dual pistols or pistol/shield, as only the primary weapon’s stack will work.

If you want something that might help you if you swap kits a lot, then Strength would do well. The might buff stays on long enough for you to switch to a kit and use its effect with at least 1-2 shots.

The biggest reason grenades can out damage bombs is what Lyuben said.

The Grandmaster major grenades trait gives you one extra grenade, so direct hits on an enemy yield you one more stack of vulnerability along with the damage and effects. If you put points in firearms you’re also going to give a chance to bleed (aside from #2 ’s bleed effect).

Don’t forget to cycle through your #2 and #4 grenades as often as possible, as the others do more direct damage than just spamming the #1 constantly.

Grenades are definitely powerful, but trade power for easy predicatbility and slow travel time.

In PvP players see the explosion circles and can easily dodge them. If they know your class well enough they already know the travel time for your grenades. You’ll have to practice leading and expecting maybe 1-2 of your grenades to hit them instead of all three that usually hit a dumb mob.

I like my FT condition build with pistols on the side. 10/30/0/30 gives you extra vitality and several proc-on-crit effects. Like someone else said, pop your incendiary ammo and stack a lot of burn up on an enemy with one fireblast!

I’ve thought about turning it into 0/30/20/30 for more defense and survival since I use the Juggernaut Grandmaster major trait a lot. This would give you 300 extra vitality (+3000 health) and 200/400 extra toughness.

The most negative thing about FT is the bugs.

Your flame blast (#1) damaging area usually follows where you are facing, so you’ll see plenty of misses on an enemy you’ve targetted if he’s out of the cone.

Your Napalm (#2) gets easily obstructed, especially if you use it after using blow back (#3) on the targetted enemy.

The idea for an FT conditions build shouldn’t be to constantly stay on the enemy. Besides, the FT can hit people without being in melee distance. (425 range)

Conditions aren’t immediate damage, so you should fry them once to build up
conditions, then work on defending yourself. Back away firing your pistol poison shot and (if you are dual pistols) flame shot. If you are using rifles, net shot on the way in to keep them from avoiding your flame jet, then blunderbuss and overcharged shot to kick them away.

A good addition to your utility skills is the Net Turret. Both the turret and the toolbelt skill are useful. Use the toolbelt to immobilize your enemy, then flame jet and pop your pistol condition attacks. Drop the net turret and overcharge it to stun and immobilize them again if you want to flame jet them even more.

Net shot is a straight attack. If they are strafing you will probably miss them unless you’re good at leading.

Check your distance too. Plenty of players are really good at dancing in and out of range limits, and your net shot looks like it goes farther than it really does sometimes.

I was thinking about another game where an engineer deployed a turret and was able to control it with a remote.

Here’s an idea:

Give engineers the innate ability deploy turrets (It’s not too bad an ability and doesn’t extremely disadvantage other players if you have it). Replace the trait for deploying turrets with the ability to focus your turret fire on an enemy.

It’s as simple as giving engineers with this trait the ability to either “call target” and focus a turret’s random attention to a that target, or perhaps just have them attack an enemy you are targetted and currently attacking.

Well said, Brutus and Lyuben.

We have to sacrifice a utility slot in order to have an extra weapon, so we are hindered from the start with attack and utility options.

A good example of this hindering us very much is PvP.

Many players use a variety of stunlock and conditions to defeat other players. Usually a player will stack a utility effect to remove stuns, a utility effect to remove conditions, and still have a free utility slot to do something else. Yes, some of their healing skills remove conditions, but there are drawbacks.

If an engineer wants a second weapon set, he has to spend a utility slot to get it. This means he doesn’t have an extra utility to use. So if he wants a special effect, he now has to sacrifice either a condition-removal or a stun-removal utility.

We have lose a utility slot in order to have more weapon flexibility.

That’s the problem. It’s not an actual auto-attack if you have to manually turn it on everytime you switch kits.

But that’s not the topic I starting here.

Back to the actual question: Steady plume or just 2 second burst?

If they fix the eng kits so that #1 is an auto-attack, then shouldn’t the FT be one continuous plume of fire coming out? Every tenth shot could be the burn just to make sure people get the extra 1 sec burn.

It’s not a single attack like other eng kit #1’s are.

Good info. I’ll keep that in mind. Since they don’t track that, healing turrets make a pretty lousy choice for heals.

Do you know if the bandages from med kits get your healing bonus?

+Healing is more efficient than power or condition damage. If you want to do damage with both, you have to split your stats up between them. However, if you want to boost your regen and direct healing, you only have to buff one stat.

Removing conditions? Tossed Elixir R, Boosted Healing Turret, Elixir C, the combo field from Elixir Guns Super Elixir, Med Kit’s Antidote, and also the Elixir Gun’s Fumigate cure conditions. Not to mention you can talent into Alchemy to have every elixir used (excluding elixir gun) remove conditions when you use them.

Regen? Elixir R’s Super Elixir and the toolbelt skill, Elixir H both tossed and drunk (randomly – yes, that’s a big pain), Healing Turret both set down and toolbelt, and many traits provide regen. Supply crate drops a healing turret out, too for regen.

Healing? Elixir H, Healing turret (to yourself and the boosted ability, which gives everyone a small heal), med kits healing packages and the toolbelt skill (toolbelt for yourself), supply crate drops healing kits, and then you have . . . . uhm . . that’s it. If you use the healing turret strategically (Drop it for the heal and a regen, then pick it up), then you have a heal every 15-20 seconds.

We have ways to heal, and we have regens. And we have combos that do both or can be traited to do either or both. We also have dodges, blocks, blinds, and stealths ti help us mitigate damages.

We have plenty of both healing and regen, and we have ways to remove conditions.

If you place all of your abilities on the bottom row (Z X C V) with your Elite skill somewhere else (I usually use . . . uhm. . . R), then you can use control and those keys as my toolbelt skill.

That places most of my skills within reach of my left hand.

I also use a G500 Logitech mouse . . . which I need to program to help myself out sooner or later. Meh.

Regen is supposed to counter conditions and give you a little extra healing on the side while blocking or dodging. It’s appropriate that a player who does not have a lot of healing stats be unable to regen versus an opponent with high condition damage.

If you complain that regen isn’t doing enough, then buff your healing.

Regen is designed to help you out against conditions more than anything else. It’s designed to help you outlast the damage they do.

Regen has a higher damage ratio than poison or 2 stacks of bleed, so if your healing matches another player’s condition you will wipe poison out, or you can last against the short duration bleeds (a stack usually doesn’t last more than 5 or so seconds).

Regen isn’t made to protect against hard-hitting direct damage. That’s what your direct heals are for. And you can protect yourself against direct damage further by blocking or dodging.

You can’t complain about regen if you don’t stack +Healing for it. It’s as simple as that.

Synergy is the key to most skills and traits. Some synergies aren’t immediately noticeable (rocket boots while Cloaking Device procs? I didn’t think about that!). Some are blatantly obvious. (Traiting 10 points into Explosives to give your Precision condition build yet another condition to add to your repertoir).

Before you bash a single skill or trait, you need to ask if any skills work well with it. Some skills are horrible by themselves, but if you put them with others, their effectiveness is multiplied tenfold.

Don’t think to yourself, “This trait sucks. Why is it here?” Think to yourself, “This trait sucks by itself. Is there anything that works well with it?” If not, then you can rant and rave to the forums.

Flamethrower needs a combination of both condition and power because of how it plays.

You can go either way or both ways.

With pistols as your backup you’ll want to lean more toward condition, so that their condition damage (3 different types if you dual wield) becomes more effective.

If you play with rifles, I would suggest getting more power. Rifles have no condition abilities, but do very well to help a player dance in and out of range.

Explosives and Firearms together do well for the flamethrower by buffing power, condition damage and duration, and precision.

Your third option can be either defensive (alchemy is a mix for you since it has a Master trait that can boost your FT damage, while Inventions increase both toughness AND healing – more health and armor!) or offensive (Every point in tools increase crit damage, which helps out on your FT’s direct damage hits and increases the chance for proc-on-crit conditions to be applied).

You have many places to go, and many trait paths to choose. I just hope my information helps you decide.

Loved that episode of “The Tick.”

High five to the OP for mentioning this!

Like coglin said, that’s a charr skill. I don’t think they’re going to let a class get a hold of a racial skill.

Seriously, I’m with Nashun that Elixir X is actually pretty good. On one hand, you turn into an enraged version of yourself, increasing health and toughness. On the other hand you turn into a whirling tornado that knocks people down when they touch you. Perfect for a finisher.

The negative of those two is that you don’t know which one you’re going to get. Again, the random effect that a lot of people who try to play engineers effectively don’t like.

I like the idea, but I would prefer it to be a targeted turret that you created. Pulling every turret within a certain range could end up in, you screwing up previous turrets that you didn’t want to move.

Engineers can kite very well with rifle and grenades. An FT/dual pistols user has two different kinds of damage mitigation and also has a slow. In addition to that.

If you trait certain ways, you can gain swiftness or apply cripples to further kiting even more.

Engineers can CC very well, and though they take a while to kill mobs, they are usually on top of the survival pyramid for PvE.

PvP they can pretty much take plenty of damage while dishing out moderate amounts. Trait into alchemy or (for even more survivability via bonuses to healing and toughness) inventions to withstand the brunt of attacks. Alchemy especially if you are more afraid of conditions than direct damage.

I find that the most diverse trait allocation revolves around firearms, alchemy, and a third trait line. The third one is usually your tertiary, but you can put 20 points into alchemy and it to balance them out. This doesn’t pigeonhole you into one kit like majoring in explosives does (I don’t like bombs at all, so that leaves grenades).

You can use the Flamethrower, elixir gun, pistols, or rifle to good effect with this trait balance. Your third line will determine your flavor too, be it more offense, survival, or complete off the wall attitude.

If you are using a kit, then that might be your problem. You won’t get a stack if you kill an enemy while actively using one of the engineer kits. When you equip a kit, your actual weapons disappear, and the stats and sigils that were on them no longer effect you until you shift from that kit to your rifle/pistol/shield set.

Stacking burn conditions would make it OP unless the stack was due to a (perhaps) 2 or 3 second (Maybe 2 1/2 since the ticks are half second) burn given on the last tick.

I posted my spec in a previous thread with 30 Firearms/20 Explosives/20Alchemy.

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#McMzM9cmorLMmorLMGx0G0VoVRqMk

This is a pretty versatile spec, allowing you to shift from flamethrower to a rifle spec for defense on keep parapets in WvW.

You can also shift over to an elixir gun to add more condition attacks to fight.

This spec lets you not only be a juggernaut in flamethrower mode, but also lets change your attacks up and confuse the enemy.

I understand what you are talking about, Gurt. Strategically, randomness shouldn’t be a factor in a game where you are fighting enemies.

Proccing randomness is fine, where you already know there’s a percentage chance of getting a single effect. However, it’s not good to have 2 or 3 random effects (especially so different from each other) when you need a single effect.

Sure, the idea of randomness when thrown lends a whimsical character effect to it, but I now agree that not being able to use the toolbelt elixirs effectively enough to help players or yourself out of jams.

So do would we accept just defense effects being a single nonrandom effect, or do we want both defense and offense to be single and nonrandom?

I call my rifle “WTF is THIS in my hands?!? Where’s my pistols?!?” It’s kinda long, so I shortened it to “WTFITIMHWMP.” I think it doesn’t like me, either because of the name I gave it or perhaps because I tend to let it sit in my backpack and acquire dust.

The FT is just short enough of range to allow quick leaps and runs into melee by opponents. But you can always get out of melee with blowbacks and (if you have dual pistols) the glue shot.

I’m perfectly fine with staying out of melee. I don’t want their grubby little hands on my flamethrower anyway. . .

Not to mention the fact that the Grandmaster tier of Explosives nets you with the ability to get a third grenade, which increases the chances of critting and thus proccing the condition on crit that the adept tiers of Firearms and Explosives can do.

If (big IF here) you steadily barrage an enemy, you can max out your vulnerability damage to them (+25% damage). Doubt this will ever happen, but . . . Well, it’s plausible in a stand still and hit a non-attacking robot target way.

I agree with Capt Cosmic. I run with offensive stats on my armor/weapons and survival/defensive stats on my trinkets.

If you balance it that way, you can get a good mix of damage and survival to help you play intelligently (albeit not calmly) through most instances and PvP.