Guild Wars 2

Condi Ranger has to flank for that dps and is heavily crippled by a moving target, where Engi basicly only loses Napalm. If you can handle Engi, the dps will be higher, but as mentioned before, if you aren’t really into Engi, Ranger is just easier to handle.

The big difference however is by having a Ranger, the subgroup has an additional Glyph for Grace of the Land. Since 2 Chronos are meta now, you can spam the Sun Spirit for damage, wich means it’s more useful for the Subgroup to let the Ranger take it, while the Druid uses GoAlignment.

What Engi has to offer is lots of CC, Seeker control and not to forget blinds. You will not notice it if an Engi prevented a Thug kick at Sabby that would have pushed an ally into a flamethrower or off the platform while waiting for the Green Bomb, or blinded some shard buffed adds at Sabby, corrupting Slubs at Sloth, etc. You will only notice it if he didn’t.

Sorin Noroku.5342:

If you’re in a premade group, such as one you run with a lot, Grav well is your best option. If you’re in a pug, I highly suggest Timewarp still, as many times than naught, the other mesmer can die. This means you cannot keep enough quickness on the other 8 members on your team by yourself. The timewarp’s 2 secs application willnot override your 6 sec SoI quickness. This means that TW’s quickness will overflow to the other team.

That’s not how the boon distribution in subgroups works. If you have your own subgroup maxxed out with Quickness and you drop a TW, it simply fails to apply Quickness to YOUR subgroup. There is no overflow unless not all 5 people of your subgroup stay within the range of the skill that grants Quickness.

The only skill that successfully applies Quickness to the other subgroup is Tides of Time. Therefore I’d not go for Time Warp, unless you are a solo Chrono in your own subgroup.

Sorin Noroku.5342:

Also, you don’t take mesmer for damage, you take mesmer for quickness and alacrity. Well gives alacrity, TW gives quickness. =) Use wisely!

You take every profession for damage.

If I blame a Tempest for dealing 20k instead of 25k dps, everyone agrees.
If I blame the full commander gear Chrono dealing 5k instead of 10k dps, everyone loses their minds.

Every dps matters, Chrono is no exception, even though his main purpose is to apply Q&A. It’s not like you gain anything from playing less dps oriented anymore, you apply the same amount of Q&A with full Zerk.

Not quite – it triggers from any active heal. So when you have Restorative Mantras equipped, every Mantra can proc Healing Prism. It also used to proc on downed #4, not sure if it’s still the case.

Gravity Well deals more damage than any racial skill, since those summon minions wich have low stats and won’t recieve any buffs.

For damage and adds use Gravity Well, for a strong cc use Moa Signet.

Yea it would be an interesting change.

Shield is a must on every Chrono. You also need a total of at least ~90% boon duration for perma Quickness.

The thing is I wouldn’t pick DT, I’d almost be forced to go IA and throw away Leadership for Scholar. It’s like when HoT has been released, the Alacrity was so strong a single Chrono had no problems granting perma Quickness to everyone (back then you could even swap subgroups in mid fight). Stronger Alacrity equals more Wells, Signets, Tides of Times. It would easily outdamage DT by higher skill uptime already.

Overall I’d welcome the buff, since it would be nothing but a buff. The question I asked myself was rather – is it healthy. But I wouldn’t mind hurr durr :o

(Post is about PvE only!)

Wahoo and heya!

Turrets are very useful, but they need expirience to be useful. Here a short list wich turret is good for what:

Healing Turret (Both)
Plain simple the best heal skill we have. Condi cleanse, water field, blast finisher, aoe heal, everything you want.

Rifle Turret (Power Build)
Never leaves your bar as a max dps power Engi. You will mainly be using it’s toolbelt, a simply shot with a low cd and no cast time. Spam it! You will use the Rifle Turret itself only as a blast finisher and for cc (blowing up turrets causes knockback (trait)).

Rocket Turret (Power Build)
While weaker than the Rifle Turret dps wise (the utility slot, not the turret itself), it’s toolbelt still is a strong wide AoE, equally strong as Big Ol’ Bomb of the Bomb Kit. You want to use the turret itself for cc only. Place it, immediately overcharge it, wich launches a rocket with a wide aoe 3s knockdown (tooltip lies), then blow it up for more cc. It’s a good utility skill for long lasting wide stuns against trash or as a breakbar wrecker.

Thumper Turret (Both)
This turret is quite special. It has 3 blast finishers and also the highest amount of cc of any skill the Engi has. It alone deals over 600 defiance bar damage, wich is massive. Due to it’s mutltiple finishers, it’s very easy to stack lots of might, stealth or heal with it. It’s not really a dps increase however, so only use it if you really have to.

Flame Turret (Condi Build)
While normally the Flame Thrower is the 3rd meta kit for a condi Engi, you can also use a Flame Turret instead if you fight trash mobs. The FT has too high cds and only a small aoe. The Flame Turret’s toolbelt acts like a 2nd Fire Bomb, the Turret overcharge like a 2nd Smoke Bomb with some cleave burn. Use it for trash mobs. Pick the turret up so you get 25% cdr, since you might wanna swap it for boss fights.

Net Turret (… None)
Well … NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG! :o

The thing about Turrets in PvE is: a) You don’t use all of them at the same time and b) when you use them, then only for a short amount of time. You either blow or pick them up (-25% cd) right after the overcharge.

Engi is mainly about using Grenades and Bombs. The last utility skill can be a turret. Just pick that skill according to the situation.

If you have any questions, just go ask.

Greez!

Kaizoku.1298:

Place your mouse in the center of your screen, hold RMB and throw them (you will have to keep your opponent in the center of your screen too).

This.

Berserker Chronomancer
This is the build you will aim for eventually:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAs+dncfC9fiFoBmfCEgiFVjqOZn2q98JGipjMAGhdC-TBSBQB4RvA/2f4bTQAwJBICKBviyPKp+zEfAAkCAwpWA-e

Heal-O-Mancer / Minstrel Chrono
Ths is an alternative “easy mode” build that will carry you through any content, just a bit slower:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAs+dncfClohFoBmfCMrhFnjCtCChI7MAGgFrOQP0GF-TBiXABBr8Dg9H09BAkiehQPJAxq+DWKBNcCCpA8bqF-e

It would certainly make room for less boon duration and thus, Scholar Runes again, wich would be straight up a buff for the Chrono.

However, while I agree the “Leadership for minmax” is currently a horrible meta for Chronos (dps and beginner wise), I think that this change would make IA too strong compared to the alternatives.

Right now you can swap between DT and IA depending on the encounter, if you care about those 8% dmg. After your suggested IA changes, DT is immediately dead. It would be a buff, but an unhealthy one. Mixed feelings here.

Heya!

Don’t try to make a condi Chrono. It will just be inferior to the power one in absolutely every way. A condi Mesmer is a dps profession and has nothing to do with the support Chrono.

As others have mentioned, you’ll be barely useful for trash mobs. You still got the focus pull and some interrupt / shatter burst into scepter #3, but that’s about it. But to be fair, that’s most of the time already enough to deal with trash.

Depending on the fractal, you can run a condi Mesmer and be efficient though. Fractals like Thaumanova, Molten Duo or Nightmare (CM) are your friends.

While against large hitboxes Eles will definitly outdamage you, I’m pretty confident that you’ll be max dps against all other bosses in T4 that can’t just be phased / bursted down (unfortunately a lot of them can be :/). Don’t go condi in lower tiers, since everything just get bursted while you’re still setting up.

Build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAr6PnsIiNoBWoBMrhlcDyMBvWZAA9HLZGA-TBSAQBRUNABu/g0eAAYT53lUCCgTCwf0LsJVfCAcAQ1XPkCYRdVA-e

Torch -> Focus for trash

Missing skills / traits -> swap according to the situation

Greez

Wahoo!

Explosives

• Shrapnel triggers on hit. So each hit on a target can proc this trait, wich makes it much stronger with attacks that deal damage multiple times like Fire Bomb or basicly all grenade attacks. Buffing it would make it op and adding an icd would make it weak against multiple targets. It’s perfectly fine the way it is.
• Evasive Powder Keg didn’t have a cd at all in the old days. It was changed to 10s, when they introduced a trait that transforms this bomb to a blast finisher. However this resulted more into a nerf than anything else, since noone really uses that trait in the first place.

Firearms

• Skilled Marksman is indeed lackluster right now, especially since the faster attack speed doesn’t stack with Quickness either. This trait need it’s damage modifier back to be great again.
• Juggernaut grants you 1 stack Might for 15s every 3s. So naturally after 15s, when you reach 5 stacks, the first one will run out. You can sustain more might vith more Might or boon duration in genera.

Inventions

• 120s cd is too much, agreed.
• The heal from the med kit from Bunker Down itself is already sufficient heal. The regen was sorta overkill. But that’s more of an PvP balance issue.
• Boonstrip for Bunker Down would actually be pretty useful. I’d also like to see the mines explode automaticly after their timer runs out, rather than just despawning (PvE only).

Alchemy

• Transmute is working as intended. It has a 15s cd, so it can only convert 1 incoming condition every 15s.

Tools

• RL cd fix was probably just forgotten… :/

Scrapper

• Expert Examination indeed has become rather useless after the massive Gyro nerf. This trait needs to be working with any kind of hard cc we have. Right now it’s become garbage.

Greez

The aa is fine, our modifiers are not. I’d rather like to see other weapons getting in line with the sword than the sword getting buffed more and more …

Agreed, if the ICD is shared with you, it’s fine. But it would end up being ridiculous with sigils, runes and foods that have no ICD, for example dumplins or just future stuff. So to be on the safe side, I’d not allow them to proc stuff like that.

Daishi.6027:

Apart from the auto attack it pretty much is.

Apart from #2 and #5 it isn’t. :^)

A phantasm summoned by an ascended weapon deals 5% increased damage. This has been added a few weeks after the introduction of ascended weapons, together with the Engi kits 5% damage increase.

What I agree with though is, that modifiers like Grace of the Land, Empowerment, runes (Scholar 6th for example), sigils (Force for example) and other none trait related bonuses should affect phantasms aswell. Hoever phantasms should not be able to proc any sigils or runes.

You’re asking ANet to admit they made a mistake?

PvE and WvW are two completely different things. I have no clue about WvW so I can only give you tips for PvE.

This said – what PvE content are we talking about? Open world zerging, open world hero point solos, Dungeons, Fractals, Raids?

What I can tell you right now is, that your current build is pretty bad for all the PvE contents. While “everything works in openworld”, you’re still gonna have a bad time there and for any group content you’ll not be viable at all.

So lemme know what content we’re talking about so I can answer again.

Greez!

Wahoo!

Don’t you worry about the viability of power Engi, it’s in a great spot, even for Fractals and Raids. I use power Engi against 50% of the Raid encounters and 100% in Fractals and open world.

As you are mainly looking for an open world build, I’d suggest you two slightly different ones. One for the casual open world stuff, like participating events etc, and one for (soloing) hero points.

Events and Roaming Build

The Flamethrower build is simply a must for an Engi playing open world (tiny exceptions). With this build you’ll have plenty of AoE, condi cleanses and a high uptime of all the important buffs. The hammer offers you a block and a good reflection uptime aswell as a long lasting AoE stun/daze with #5 into #3.

Don’t forget to cancel the aftercast of Elixier Gun #4 and hammer #3 by “dropping a bundle” via weapon swap button.

Hero Points Build

The most importnat thing for fighting Hero Points is breaking their defiance bar. This results into a 5sec stun and 50% increased damage during that time. Unfortunately too many ignore the bar completly …

Overcharged Shot (thx stability from Flamethrower! <3) and Blast Gyro will immediately annihilate the whole defiance bar of any not upscaled Hero Point (also works for Fractals bosses). Their cd perfectly fit the recharge time of the bar, so you will be able to proc the stun and increased damage around 30% of the duration of the fight.

Sadly, the hammer cc isn’t really fast due to hammer #5 into #3 and has a way too long CD to be a good and constant defiance bar breaker. You could use a lightning field generating traited Medic Gyro though, and swap between gyro into hammer #3 and hammer #5 into hammer #3 together with blasty. But you lose a whole lot of quickness uptime – ergo damage – this way.

I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Greez!

- Ziggy

Don’t wish for individual damage buffs for weapons. What we need are modifiers that buff our total damage, not just “more sword damage while other weapons still suck” cough staff cough

Mesmer or Chronomancer?

There’s a “brand new” content called raids …

Yup, I do the same. You can use this to immediately set up 2-3 iAvengers, stacking savely stacking Alacrity for later dry phases. Just make sure that if you enter CS with something blocked, you use your 2nd block aswell (don’t have to channel, start it and cancel it with any other skill), so it’s off cd when you leave CS.

Altough I situationaly don’t use CS anymore for quickness. You can also just not use CS and do WoA, swap, shield 5, SoI, shield 4 to keep CS for more moas like against Matthias or for double Frostbow at KC etc. Plenty of good cases not to use it. It’s only a small personal dps to do a full rotation.

What I really would like to see is a bonus effect instead of a clone at 3 illusions just like scepter 1. It would be a major dps buff for Mes and Chrono to be able to block without losing a phantasm. I wondered why this never happened after scepter 1 fix.

I agree with Fay. You don’t essentially have to delay and time distortion to make it great. The rather random procs are already useful. For VG it’s more useful to just use SoMidnight in order to sustain perma Quickness and go for 3 iAvengers for the Alacrity, if you want to skip green fields.

If you know the encounter you may want to swap to illusions for some raid bosses. For example KC basicly forces you to do so in order to use CD at CC and at burst phase for double frost bow. Or matthias to keep up Alacrity without Recall or simply to empower your scepter.

But overall it’s Domination > Illusions, while Illusions is situational superior.

Wahoo!

I just checked out all Engineer raid and fotm builds on metabattle; wouldn’t recommend the site for anything but basic stuff for each profession.

Condi is slightly outdated in terms of priority moves and traits and power is a complete mess with the list of priority moves lacking essential dps skills.

It has been a while sind I recorded my dps rotations, unfortunately my tower died, so I’m currently trying to play on my Laptop. But I wanted to record power Engi anyway since it’s dps got buffed quite good with perma Alacrity and a proper rotation.

So about the main question – what rotation do you want, power or condi? The condi one is almost perfectly executed by qT in this vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxSMg8psXbE&feature=youtu.be&t=126

Greez!
- Ziggy

InsaneQR.7412:

What if they just get all targets in the well just block instead of aegis? It could be countered by unblockable attacks and gives 5s of air in pve.

Probably most realistic suggestion here. Love the idea.

PvE: Sword for power, Pistol for condi.

zaced.7948:

raids -> viper
everything else -> zerk

Raids requires both to be efficient for all fights. For VG, Trio, Matt, KC and Xera I suggest power.

While I cannot deny the technical fact that exlixiers are intended to be projectiles, I don’t think that’s something neccessary to call them balanced. Making them unblockable would already fix the “issue”. That is – if ANet agrees with the op. I personally can understand both designs. It’s clearly cooler to have counterplay to specific skills.

I’d dislike that since it wouldn’t really help much. Condition damage is just weaker than power stats and also scales worse. 10% more condi dmg =/= 10% more damage with condis.

If we get a buff for allies or a debuff for enemies, it must be an universal one that increases an reasonable amount for all sources.

I don’t think any Gyro would be too tanky to not quickly be able to deal with it. Right now it’s just a fact that they need urgent help!

The raid “cheese” does still work with Distortion from signets like always. However they managed to successfully remove any Distortion “exploits” in W3, so reverting Precog is no issue PvE wise.

But as we all know, reverting stuff is a sign of weakness, so never revert anything! /s

Still voting for Mirror Images to stealth and Decoy to taunt to make them more unique. Currently I would never use MI over Decoy in any pvp scenario.

Ah yea true – Gyros don’t even inherit condi damage like Turrets. Well never mind then, Shreddy wouldn’t even be viable if it would be permanent … holy that’s a sad statement x.x ANet just let those Gyros inherit stats already

About that initial effect Gyros have – how about to just switch them to the self destruct instead?

My goal with the change is to make the Gyros more unique and useful than what they currently are. Some traits that then seem unfitting, like “stability on cast of a Gyro” could be adapted easily to things like “stability on gyro toolbelts” or “stability every X sec per gyro alive”, etc.

Function Gyro Aura you say? Naaaaaa – op :P To ress is already enough for PvE. /s

Wahoo everyone!

Before you just say “OFC IT WOULD!”, think about it. Would it really be op in any game mode, to have a permanent Purgy, Shreddy, Bulwarky, Medy or Sneaky? All of them?

In WvW and PvP they still can easily be killed with a few hits. I do not play those game modes much, but form what I’ve heared Gyros there are accidentally killed by cleave anyway and considered rather bad. With this change the enemy may need to aim for them more specifically to weaken you.

For PvE I’d say it’s the best way to give Medy a chance against the HT, while Purgy acts more like a condi cleanse signet and Shreddy may become the go to for condi builds. Bulwarky would die on it’s own after it has absorbed too much damage, so no issue there either.

I would say Sneaky may be op in PvE due to the “let’s skip EVERYTHING” aspect of the skill. But the rest? It sure would help them become viable after the plenty of hits they took in the last few patches.

Opinions?

Greez!
- Ziggy

What PvE content are you talking about? Open world, fractals, raids?

Nothing. Kits are awesome. Other utilities? Not so much.

Heya!

Used it in raids, solo healer. It’s enough heal, even though it’s not the best. But besides heal (and condi cleanse), you do nothing else anymore.

Other game modes? No idea, but I’d say no too.

All traits that use a skill that already exists (like SoI proc, iDefender proc, etc), regardless of Profession, are affected by cdr of other traits and Alacrity.

I see no issue with that, in fact it’s great that one of them programmed it like this, so the whole rotations won’t kitten up when you gain cdr from traits or Alacrity.

The strengths and weaknesses of a profession eh?

That’s not an Engineer specific issue. Every profession suffers from this.

I would welcome a “Cyborg Elite Spec” that uses kit-like enhancements that you can equip, gain 5 new skills, but will have a cd after dropping it. Like personal concured weapons of the Ele.

But basicly – everything is better than more AI …

Fay.2357:

Xyonon.3987:

-snip-

In my experience, 1 necro at Matthias usually results in a dead necro when they pull 30 stacks of poison from everyone…

Haha, yea – but if a solo Necro pre-patch was playing without Death Magic, that sorta was his own fault.

The thing is, the Plague Signet pulls 3 unique conditions every 3s from one lousy person. That’s not nearly enough to help everyone anymore. Combined with the now so low dps of the Necro, you better just take something else, like Condi Mes, now.

For condi cleanse we use one iDisenchanter for the whole team now. Chrono take that one, since Mes wants 3 iDuellists and can use Feedback now that SoI got nerfed into the ground. Anyway – iDisenchanter is really amazing when it comes to attack frequency, holy!

Joxer.6024:

Xyonon.3987:

-snip-

OK! that’s good to hear as I am really getting tired of having a class that no one wants..i.e. Engi, so with the changes I thought I would give Mesmer a go again and this gives me hope. Something to get good at while I wait for Engi to see some love again. Ya know, instead of ANET its the GW2 community ( you meta folks) that could help everyone. If they just listed a class as being viable then folks would be keen to give us a go!
But I digress….that Engi woes, not Mesmer. Thanks for that info and I will go check out qTs site for the build! Cheers.

Talking about raids, Engi has never seen better times.

Perma Alacrity helped him to become king of small hitbox dps as condi and even power rose to almost Thief levels. If there are adds, power is even equal to a thief, just with better utililty and cc.

Thing is – I wouldn’t trust most pug Engis myself either. But if you have a raid team, there is no fight where Engi is just bad – except for maybe Sloth, where you simply are inferior to an Ele in nearly every way. But everywhere else you can be of great value. You just need both – a condi and a power setup.

I think since qT added the condi Mes to the list of “viable options”, it’s not too hard to bring it to pugs.

Yesterday I helped out a friend who was on holydays and had nothing done this week. At Matthias we had 2 Chronos and 2 condi Mes.

In our guild we now completly got rid of Necros (pre patch only used at Matthias) since their damage is nothing special anymore and condi cleanse was never really their strength to begin with (90% of the ppl don’t know what plague signet does u.u). So instead of the Necros we just use condi Mes instead, 2-3.

I have no clue about WvW but for PvE, there are currently 2 Condi Mesmer builds viable for raid content. Condi Chrono is my favourite for open world though, since Chaos won’t contribute much in solos.

Crit Build

Duration Build

They are approximately equal to each other, however there are some essential differences:

• The Crit Build deals more power damage than the Duration Build und thus gets more dps from Glyph of Empowerment, but kills condition weak enemies slightly slower.
• The Crit Build deals more damage via your phantasms while the Duration Build deals more damage by the Mesmer himself.

Condi Mesmer is the highest dps profession for Matthias, a strong green field runner at Vale Guardian and an okish ranged dps for Sabetha. Everywhere else in raids I wouldn’t recommend it to be used. So it’s rather a niche build.

Greez!

For starters, there’s also a slightly less efficient but much easier way to do it.

Instead of Well of Recall, use Signet of Midnight. That’s a short cd insta cast distortion share. To make up for the missing Well of Recall, only summon iAvengers, you want now 3 of them.

You can also just use sword + nothing and nothing + shield. That way you will always be on sword shield wich makes it much easier to proc the Concentration sigil while tanking and doing stuff.

The only thing you have to be aware of: Distortion share has kitten icd. So if you see a green circle, do not summon any phantasms or use SoI, as it may block you from sharing Distortion.

Wahoo

Heya!

About that short cd you get in fotm if you want to cc the Avengers as Engineer: This happens because some skills can’t be cast backwards. Our downed cc is one of those skills. If the Avenger spawns perfectly inside of you, you are like “obstructed” or rather “too close” to the target, thus you cant use the skill.

Imagine it like this: When you walk away from a mob and want to use a skill like Rifle or Elixier Gun #2. You’ll get a short cd, because you are not facing the enemy and can’t cast that skill on them.

You can prevent to get finished by an fractal Avenger even if he spawns directly inside of you by not targeting anything and use your downed cc. That way you will just throw your hook straight forward and because the Avenger is inside of you, you will hit ’em.

Greez!