New Player, totally confused.

I started playing about a month ago and after an initial trial period of briefly trying out every profession I settled on the engineer because it seems like a blast and actually reminds me of my all time favorite class-the Bard from EQ.

However my problem is now that I'm 80 I really don't know what direction I need to go and most information I find starts from the premise that I'm an experienced player.

I'd like to start more group content like fractals and I'd also like a build that gives me a bit more survivability than I currently have so I can get through some of the story content. I'm currently on season 2 Living World and I get slaughtered pretty quickly and it has been getting frustrating.

Right now I have berserker gear with all power/precision/ferocity stats where I can put them and I go through a basic rotation of orbital strike and grenade barrage when they are up, acid bomb on the elixer gun, flame blast, jump shot and blunderbuss on the rifle and then grenades until orbital strike is back up and I start over.

This seems pretty decent for open world stuff but anything that takes longer than 20 seconds to kill tends to be problematic.

Right now I have 32 hero points to put into one of the elite specializations but I'm not sure if I'm ready to do that yet.

So basically I'd love to know how I can improve my game, as I mentioned previously I loved the Bard in EQ so I'm pretty decent at managing cooldowns, and switching between an array of abilities to suit the situation I'm in. I just find the sheer number of options and the volume of technical information online to be incredibly daunting.

So any advice directed at me as though I'm a complete moron would be greatly appreciated. I'd love to know if I should start focusing more on a pistol/Condi build, or if power is fine for now and how I should refine my current build, or what kind of content I should focus on next to work on ascended/legendary.

Thanks in advance!

For PvE group content like fractals, it is important to know one thing: either you are a dps, an offensive supporter (/+healer), or you are rather useless. That may sound hard, but in the end, it's all about killing stuff and that's done by damage. As an engineer, the option offensive supporter/healer does not work because there's no proper basis for it. Thus, dps is the only effective way to go. With the right build, you'll also melt almost all open world stuff so fast that it doesn't have a chance to really hit back.

At the current state of the game, get the holosmith elite spec for damage. Power (i.e. berserker gear) is already the right choice for it. If you do have problems with survival (holo can be something like a suicide spec when overheating), marauder gear may offer you some health cushion at the cost of relatively little damage loss. However, it's in general more advisable to improve/adapt your playstyle than to rely on gear. In fractals, having a healer in your group will also be tremendously helpful. In raids, you'll have one anyway. Although you can never say with perfect confidence how long a spec will be good (ANet "balances" quite randomly), power holo will probably be engi's optimal PvE build at least until the next addon.

You can find the optimal (meta) builds for group content at Snow Crows (raids) and Discretize (fractals). They also have some quite nice explanations on gameplay and other stuff. There are some other nice builds around (e.g. here or here), which trade a bit of damage against being more easy to use than the meta builds.

@"Odemus.1370" said:Right now I have berserker gear with all power/precision/ferocity stats where I can put them and I go through a basic rotation of orbital strike and grenade barrage when they are up, acid bomb on the elixer gun, flame blast, jump shot and blunderbuss on the rifle and then grenades until orbital strike is back up and I start over.

This seems pretty decent for open world stuff but anything that takes longer than 20 seconds to kill tends to be problematic.

Well, there's your problem. Core engineer can work with zerk gear, but it's not particularly optimal for it, unless you're camping bomb kit. There's an old power bomber engineer build, let me see if I can dig it out for you:

https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Engineer_-_Power_Bomber

This used to be the power engineer meta prior to PoF's introduction of holosmith. The big thing I'd point out is that if survivability is your problem, you need to be using blinds from smoke bomb and/or flash shell (mortar kit). You can put out AoE blind fields on trash mobs to make yourself super survivable while still dishing out hefty doses of damage. The same is true for the core condi engi build -- massive blind fields are where your survivability is at.

Holosmith took that formula and essentially dumps AoE CC instead of AoE blinds, which makes holosmith more survivable as well.

If you do want to stick with zerk gear, I highly recommend getting holosmith. It can pump out even more damage than core engineer, and the AoE CC is truly amazing.

There is no reason to not take an espec in my opinion. It is easy enough to get the necessary hero points to unlock both by joining an hp train in hot, or by soloing mastery points in pof. If you are set on being power in open world, might I suggest this build:http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFASncoCFpidpC2XB0ehlKjievn77WcZCgyDM6quOC-jhRBABPcBAwTHwV7PK/A4BAYmSQKV/BA-eIt offers better tanking abilities than core or holo in my opinion, plus there's something about hammer that makes it feel so good to me. Swap out purge for blast when you need some extra ccs, swap for elixir b if you want more boons. For low level fractals this build is fine, in higher levels however, I wouldn't recommend this. As CptAurellian.9537 said "either you are a dps, an offensive supporter (/+healer), or you are rather useless" and this build is a bad dps, and offers no offensive buffs or healing to the group. I would recommend holo for fractals because as Vagrant.7206 said "[holosmith] can pump out even more damage than core engineer, and the AoE CC is truly amazing.". If you want to do some testing in a controlled environment, you can always pop into the aerodrome and go to the training golem.

If you want to get into fractals, just jump in the lfg for tier 1 and work your way up. Build up your agony resist as you go along, do dailies, collect some gear, and you'll be able to get yourself into t4s. Word of warning t3 fractals is a cesspool in na.

Thank you guys for all the input. This really is a great community.

Just to clarify some issues brought up, I am definitely more interested in DPS than healing/support and I'm also not married to the notion of power over Condi, it's just that I have read for leveling, open world, and story line stuff, power is better because it front loads all the damage while condi is superior for long duration encounters.where you have the chance to wind up.

@Odemus.1370 said:Thank you guys for all the input. This really is a great community.

Just to clarify some issues brought up, I am definitely more interested in DPS than healing/support and I'm also not married to the notion of power over Condi, it's just that I have read for leveling, open world, and story line stuff, power is better because it front loads all the damage while condi is superior for long duration encounters.where you have the chance to wind up.

Condi engi died over the last few balance patches. Even in its glory days a few months ago it would be the last build in the game you would recommend to a new player.It's really hard to play and even when played optimal not even worth it.It was mentioned before but you can't repeat it often enough to new players. Active defenses in this game are way stronger than passive ones. Blinds on a mob without a breakbar nullify the damage of the next attack.Engineer has 2 fields that pulse that condition to multiple enemies on a rather short cooldown. One on Bomb kit and one one Mortar kit.Holosmith has a huge area knockdown on forge mode. Try to rely on active defenses like blinds, chill to kite, dodges and cc instead of just a slightly higher health pool. This will also prevent bad habits like facetanking through lots of stuff. Your bomb 1 and Holo forge skills have a slightly longer range than most other melee attacks. You can use that to hit stuff without getting hit yourself.

so for group content, stick to full power and go yolosmith.scrapper doesnt offer the dps you would want in fractal challenges (cm) or raids - and support... everybody else is better anyway.

but i reccomend to try scrapper at some point. its a fun way to play. just not as good performing (in most situations) as holosmith or other professions

You could get some Marauder's GearThis is basically the same as Berserker gear, but it adds some health (Vitality) as well. Once you're more used to being lvl 80 and killing stuff, you can swap out Marauder gear for Berserker stuff again.