"Kit Master" My Damage/Support Engineer build

I have play GW2 for some time and for the most part the Engineer class has been my fav. I was attached to it for the turrets but the kits what keep me on. With that siad, I have made my build that forces on them. My states go to power and condition with a bit of healing since I think about using the medkit which I don't mind healing my team a bit. I went with Explosives, Firearms, and Alchemy. For gear, I decided to go with that Marshal but I'm not really sure if this a good choice but seem to fit all the things I need. I went with the engineer rune for mostly it's up my damages when using kits but if you have any better suggestion I'm all ears. That goes the same for the gear and traits I choose. So if you can please look at my build and tell me about any changes you think I need to make for this build

So, Is it ok for PvE? maybe even WvW

ConditionsThis is the most basic information you can get about condition damage in Guildwars 2. It shows us how high the damage of each condition is. From weakest to most powerful:Bleeding & Torment (PVE) < Poison < Confusion < Burn < Fear (Necromancer only)

When you want to do condition-damage, you always try to pick any of the stronger conditions for your main damage source. As you can see in the table, one stack of burning equals a hilarious amount of 5 stacks of bleeding - to cause the same damage. Bleeding is not a bad condition per se, it just depends on your sources. Nercomancer for example is a giant bleed-factory, thief is a giant poison-factory. Engineer has different sources, but we have a good ability to stack burning. Now if you look back on the table, burning is pretty high on the listing. How many burn stacks can we put on an enemy? I play a weak hybrid build (damage/support), which can land and maintain up to 10-14 burn-stacks on a target. A player who dedicates himself to be 100 % damage oriented may get a lot higher. But for my requirements, it works well. You do not have to switch from bleeding to burning. If bleeding works for you, stick to that. You have plenty of bleed sources in your build right now, although some are a bit debatable (see below).

Condition duration & expertiseThe basic idea behind condition-damage is to put a condition on your target and maintain it as long as possible. The more sources of a condition you have, the more stacks you can put on your target. The idea behind condition duration & expertise is to extend the condition uptime long enough, that you can use one condition-source to put up several stacks on the target. However that does not always result into higher damage.

The big problem is, that the fight needs to take some time, so the condition duration can take effect. That is the major issue with condition-damage in general, it is pretty much useless against trash-mobs. Because they die long before you are done with stacking up conditions. So depending on your main targets, it sometimes makes more or less sense to invest stats into condition duration & expertise. If you fight mostly short combats against trash mobs or pvp against players for just a few seconds, it is rather better to invest in condition-damage. If you fight more champions, elites and bosses with large HP pools, condition-duration will definitely boost your dps. The longer the fight takes, the better your average damage output will be.

GearWhen picking a gear-set or stat-set, we usually focus on our main damage-type and maybe an optional additional goal. For the meta the primary goal is damage and the additional goal is ... more damage ^^. Sounds simple enough? The main damage-type depends on your preferred weapons and skills. So we first have a look at that. Dual Pistol is the most basic condition-damage setup you can get. Med-Kit has no damage type. Flamethrower and Elixir gun are condition-only-kits. Grenade kit is mostly seen as a power-kit, motar as well. Thanks to your Shrapnel trait, both work as bleeding-sources, so they can be seen as condition-kits as well. So the main-damage source is condition-damage, surprise.

Toughness is a little special in this game. Many of us have given it a try once in their life. We all ended up with a bleeding nose, black eye and a few broken ribs. If you want to make the experience yourself, you are free to go. Back when I was motivated to give it a try, I had the stupid idea of outmaxing my toughness stat - on an engineer a very questionable decision. Knight stats. In regular PvE it does feel ok, as long as you fight trash-mobs and do not meet another player. But sooner or later you will realize that you do significantly lower damage than everyone else, which is basically the first warning sign. Blinded by the idea of being a "tank" we usually ignore that fact and proceed until we come into the situation to actually tank something. I remember it as it was yesterday, I was in Malchor's Leap participating in the Dwayna meta-event, final step, bossfight. The priest is no threat to be taken lightly in general, but it has an extremely powerful lightning attack which is a massive AoE that pulverizes every person within melee & FT range. The berserkers usually get instantly downed - back then active defenses were a mere joke. So you either went ranged or watched people die. I really wanted to try my tank-stats, so I jumped into the abyss and waited for the lethal attack. It did not kill me, but I was left with barely 1k HP, the next normal hit downed me. That is the magnificent effect of outmaxed toughness compared to no toughness at all XD. After this traumatizing event, I gave it a few further tests with weaker enemies. But I realized quickly, that you need to spend a hilarious amount of points into toughness to get a visible effect, while spending points on other stuff like damage-stats or even vitality gives far better results. I am still at the point, where I see every stat-point used into toughness as a waste of potential. The stat is not completely useless, but as an engineer you will be not very happy with it, especially in PvE. In PvP it can be more useful.

Sigil of Corruption is mostly used by players who think they cannot be defeated. However even meta-builds do not use it, and the creators claim them to be the ultimate-perfection. The stack-up-sigils are not useless, but mostly a thing for PvE.

With a look on toughness (see above), I think the rune-set might be a little unrealistic. Keeping in mind that you need to do a lot of critical hits to maintain your bleed-stacks with your explosion-type-kits, I would rather go for something that boosts critical chance (= precision) and condition damage. The use for X% on critical mechanics requires at least a 50 % crit chance (from my personal experience). Yours is barely 30 %, Shrapnel triggers only with 33 % chance 0.3 x 0.33 = ~ 10 % chance on hit. Not much reliable if you ask me.

TraitsUsing the grenade-kit and not using Grenadier trait? Big Boomer favorites power-damage and turns part of your very high power stats into vitality. Considering your main damage-source is condition-damage, that power stat is already pretty high. Ferocity does not help you. So you basically run that trait-line to increase your total damage output and to get a source for bleeding stacks. Again with a very low chance to trigger it.

Firearms looks OK. In terms of pure condition damage the Pinpoint-Distribution is the better option. Some of us switch between Pinpoint-Distribution (group) and Thermal Vision (solo). Runing a condition build and ignoring Incendiary Powder is a brave decision. Looking back on the table and the high damage potential of burning. In combination with Thermal Vision you can get + 10 % condition duration (for all conditions), which is a nice trick.

Alchemy is where I completely lost it. As far as I understand it, you use the trait-line because you want to heal with the med-kit? Reasonable, sort of. But why are you using HGH? The only two skills that benefit from this grandmaster trait are the Super Elixir (Elixir Gun) and Elixir Shell (Motar Kit). Both Purity of Purpose and Iron Blooded would imho make more sense with your build.

-I wanted to answer to this earlier, but I do not have that much time at the moment. In the end I had to shorten it up :S. This is NO insult to your intellect or skill. The engineer is just not a class where you read a guide once and can say "now I know all there is to know about." You can ask the other veterans, there is always something new to learn. Nowadays it is more common to spam the newbies with meta-battle and snowcrows links instead of explaining anything. Saves time, but in the end we have to deal with the results in meta-events, raids, fractals and other content. I'd rather invest a little more time in explaining stuff in the beginning, than cleaning up the mess right in the field. #Crowdcontrol #Breakbar #Combos #ActiveDefenses ... etc.

The goal for me was to give you some informations about what your build is focusing on at the moment and what potential is hidden. How to access the hidden potential and how to find weakpoints in your build on your own.

@"HnRkLnXqZ.1870" said:Ok, first of all, think you for your advice and the fact you the only person ot answer this since this post was up. Second, Wow that a lot of words. I'm not that big for word and I'm a bit of a newbie so much of this doesn't makes scents. From what I got from this are the followingConditions: Burn is better then bleed but is still good.Condition duration & expertise: Don't see what you mean in this as isn't good to kill your enemy as fast as you can.Gear: Form what I get is you don't think that the gear I chose isn't very good for a condition/power build. Thought the only reason I put some healing point is the use of the med kit. If you don't mind care to tell me what gear is good for a kit power/condition built?Traits: Out of all of this make the most scents. You think I should use Grenadier but I don't see how that help me deal out more damages. The Firearm is good thought I should switch to Thermal Vision if I'm going to be roaming and Pinpoint-Distribution for big even that are need groups to win. You are right with Alchemy as I use it for a boost to my survived with the backpack reagents. I thought since I'm going with the whole kit build I might as well use the med kit so I went with health insulation but I guess it does a bit of healing won't be a good idea plush that one seems the best out of the three with Invigorating Speed I don't get many switches and I don't really see how me get disable that much, though I could be wrong.. As for HGH, Hidden Flask and Transmute do make you use elixir when low at health so I thought it would be a good idead to have them also add more power to me when I'm in a pickle. I guess I can switch out the med kit with the healing elixir as now I'm seeing it wouldn't use that much.

With that siad, I'm grateful for someone to tell me somthing. Thought if you do talk to newbies about this offten, you might think about summaries what you want to say to them as that mounting of words could scare them a bit. Now if you want to you could show me your thoughts on a kit build? Here my builds changes base off what you siad http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQJAqalcThatY7WwELQ7FLvFl4F9EJx3QNhBA4GWBpFA-jxxCQBA4BBIWlgI7ECok9HSqeiuq8bqq/AA-e

Hi sdt,

Since you don't seem to be an experienced player throwing this build to you might not be the brightest of ideas, but i'll do it anyways:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQJAqalUUhatYfWwELQ7FLsF13LkhHAYIuBBwYOOGfBA-jByCQBT4BA8k9HQ2JE4iK/AwBC4e6JOo6PtUJIA-e

This is basically the meta core engi condi build for dps (with some adjustments towards survivability).

Vipers Gear is the go-to in terms of cdps in pve.

Grenadier is great vs moving targets and to learn aiming with the grenades, but not so much in terms of pve dmg. If you hit your targets without it, it has lost it's use (save for the fall dmg)

Generally i would recommend using the tool traitline for sustain, since high vigor uptime (toolbelt skills) and +50% endurance regen let you dodge most hard hitting attacks + improves your dmg a little.

Modified ammunitions vs incendiary powder: depending on encounter. IP is a flat cdps boost in most cases. If your target has a lot of different conditions (i.e. zerging vs world bosses) MA is a little bit better i think.

Heal turret is a overall better main heal skill, since it cleanses conditions as well as doing more direct heal (deploy=overcharge=waterfield+destroy=blast finisher)

Bomb kit instead of elixier gun: it may not be obvious at first, but elixier gun is a power-dps weapon (with only skill 4 hard hitting), whereas bomb kit 2 is a nice firefield (might) with burning on medium cd+has more utility in forms of smoke (blind) and sticky (snare) bomb. For ranged dps you got mortar, grenades and pistol 1-3 anyways.

Rune of the adventurer i picked mainly for the +50% endurance in heal (more dodges are always good ;P) + the offensive stats.

Generally: Holosmith is the main spec in terms of dmg at the moment, but it requires more knowledge of the encounters, as it dies easier (especially with overheating)

Sadly we got no real pve healer/support spec on engi (scrapper/inventions/alchemy got some but is not really viable, at least in my opinion), so most group support comes from the heal turret.

And yes, viper's gear is quite hard to come by as it needs HoT, with grieving as a really bad substitute.