Fragile

Maybe its me, but from my 8 level 80’s engineer feels most fragile when build for dps of all of them in both pve as well as pvp...

Stop facetanking skills then! Don't let them breathe.

@Yannir.4132 said:Stop facetanking skills then! Don't let them breathe.

All of the best skills on Core are all close range. The only time you can reliably attack at range is Rifle auto which is just lol and even worse with no cleave. By design, you have no choice but to facetank, or at the very minimum fight within 600 units.

Risk / reward for core has been off since HoT. Scrapper was/is less risk, Holo is more reward. Try one of the elite specs.

Its not just on core, but also on holo.
I dont play scrapper..

Add some toughness.I find they're squishy too, until I added ~300 to 500 toughness with minimal loss of DPS.Mind you, that may be a problem in a raid, but open world and wvw? Necessary.

Several ways to improve tankiness:

• Blind fields. Smoke bomb and flash shell (from bomb kit and mortar kit) are AoE blind fields, which are incredibly powerful for non-champ enemies. Several other kits feature AoE blinds as well (flamethrower, grenade kit).
• Blast and leap your water fields. You can massively increase your self healing and AoE healing by using combo fields.
• CC's. As a class, engineer has some of the greatest number of CC's. Use this to disable opponents and reduce their damage output.

Engineer relies on ACTIVE damage mitigation (dodging, blinding, LOS, CC's, etc). Facetanking is not advised.