Aquatic Combat

[Lynx.9058]

Could use some tips on how to deal with underwater combat as an engineer. My engi is currently level 51, so I dont have access to scrapper or holosmith yet. I'm running firearms and explosives, and mostly using flamethrower kit and power gear in overworld, with flame/thumper turret for dealing with champions/elites. I dont have too many issues with that setup on land, and I even managed to solo a champion ettin last night, stressful as that was. When it comes to underwater, though, I feel like a wet noodle.

The harpoon gun setup for engineer just seems terrible. The autoattack damage is terrible, the explosive attacks have long cooldowns and dont seem to do all that much damage even compared to the autoattack, about the only thing I find useful with it is the net when trying to keep at range from melee opponents.Obviously flamethrower doesnt work underwater (what I'd give for a steam-throw in its place...), and neither do the flamethrower or thumper turrets, so I dont have the aoe blind/tanky turret pet when dealing with aquatic enemies.I tried the elixir gun thinking it might be a discount flamethrower, and that was a complete bust. The harpoon gun does better.I tried grenade kit, after seeing some recommendations for it, and it behaves strangely - sometimes it seems to do amazing damage and kills enemies in 2-3 grenade throws with the autoattack, other times it hardly feels like its scratching them at all. The frag grenade (#2) and flash grenade (#3) are moderately useful, the rest are bunk.I tried bomb kit after seeing one comment from years ago about how someone did well with that. It seems to do more damage than grenade kit, but requires melee range (exposing me to more damage and more difficult when in an aquatic environment), I also end up with enemies evading the bombs frequently while still stabbing me no problem. There's a brief few seconds of respite when using smoke bomb, but past that it doesnt seem great.

As far as I know, those are the only real options I have, and nothing seems to work well. This has made any kind of aquatic content extremely frustrating for me, and I'm encountering more and more of it as I get into higher level zones.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

Disclaimer, Engi is a "piano" class and you should expect to press alot of keys to play it effectively.

The problem with Grenades is they have travel time, so they can miss the target. The solution is to always melee with them, like you would the Bomb Kit. That gets you the damage of the bombs without the delay before the explosions.

As for why you're taking so much damage, you need some defense on your gear if you're inexperienced. You also need to take a decent amount of CC, which is Crowd Control skills like Chill, Cripple and Knockback. This game isn't about just dealing damage, but by tanking damage with armor, healing damage with heal skills, and lowering enemy damage with CC and debuffs such as Weakness.

The reason not to try and kite and stay at range is you get mobbed by enemies, you won't hit them all with your attacks. You want everything all grouped up so you can destroy it all at once with a few attacks, rather than take each enemy down one at a time. So you'll want your gear and build to support this, and should be set up as something of a bruiser until you become more seasoned with your class.

Prefer Condition Damage over Power damage, especially with Core Engi (just look at all their kits skills to see why). Condition builds tend to let you survive more and deal an equivalent amount of damage, only outstripped by power builds in high-level instanced content.

Take the Thumper Turret and makes sure you have the turret trait that makes it give you Protection.

Learn what combo finishers are and how to use them. They're extremely important on Engineer. For example, you should detonate Healing Turret within the first few seconds of summoning it so the explosion combos its own Water field.

Learn what a skill rotation is. Good rotations increase damage by a factor of 200% or more. For example, on an Engi rotation, you don't just camp Grenades, you swap through Harpoon Gun, Grenades, Bomb Kit, Elixer Gun, etc. in cycles, casting skills as needed for the situation, then back again, when properly done this results in several times the damage output of just using a single weapon or kit.

Like the Elixer Gun is overall not very good, but its #4 is very high damaging, so you just cast that, then drop it.

There's alot more but hopefully you can get an idea.

[Dawdler.8521]

@Lynx.9058 said:Could use some tips on how to deal with underwater combat as an engineer.Heres my tip - get out of the water because engie is absolutely horrible at it.

The only way to deal with it is to endure it.

[Lynx.9058]

@"Hannelore.8153" said:Disclaimer, Engi is a "piano" class and you should expect to press alot of keys to play it effectively.

The problem with Grenades is they have travel time, so they can miss the target. The solution is to always melee with them, like you would the Bomb Kit. That gets you the damage of the bombs without the delay before the explosions.

As for why you're taking so much damage, you need some defense on your gear if you're inexperienced. You also need to take a decent amount of CC, which is Crowd Control skills like Chill, Cripple and Knockback. This game isn't about just dealing damage, but by tanking damage with armor, healing damage with heal skills, and lowering enemy damage with CC and debuffs such as Weakness.

The reason not to try and kite and stay at range is you get mobbed by enemies, you won't hit them all with your attacks. You want everything all grouped up so you can destroy it all at once with a few attacks, rather than take each enemy down one at a time. So you'll want your gear and build to support this, and should be set up as something of a bruiser until you become more seasoned with your class.

Prefer Condition Damage over Power damage, especially with Core Engi (just look at all their kits skills to see why). Condition builds tend to let you survive more and deal an equivalent amount of damage, only outstripped by power builds in high-level instanced content.

Take the Thumper Turret and makes sure you have the turret trait that makes it give you Protection.

Learn what combo finishers are and how to use them. They're extremely important on Engineer. For example, you should detonate Healing Turret within the first few seconds of summoning it so the explosion combos its own Water field.

Learn what a skill rotation is. Good rotations increase damage by a factor of 200% or more. For example, on an Engi rotation, you don't just camp Grenades, you swap through Harpoon Gun, Grenades, Bomb Kit, Elixer Gun, etc. in cycles, casting skills as needed for the situation, then back again, when properly done this results in several times the damage output of just using a single weapon or kit.

Like the Elixer Gun is overall not very good, but its #4 is very high damaging, so you just cast that, then drop it.

There's alot more but hopefully you can get an idea.

I've heard both sides on condition vs power say they're better, but since swapping from initially focusing on condition damage to using power with the flamethrower/juggernaut combo I am doing far better on overworld content than I used to, so I'm more inclined to stick with power right now, especially since flamethrower is my preferred kit and that will transition into scrapper more easily at 80.

But that doesn't help me underwater, and I cant use the thumper turret underwater either. Starting to think that Dawdler.8521 is right, engineer is just terrible underwater.

On a semi related note, if engineer is only using one decent skill per kit and just having to swap between them, they sounds like the kits are not balanced properly to me. Why have a whole kit when 4 abilities arent worth using and you're taking extra time swap to it for one action than any other class has to I order to just use one of their utilities? Maybe I'm mistaken here but I thought the entire reason engineer has weapon replacement kits and cant weapon swap in combat is to have a larger array of abilities to use. Defeats the point if most of them are useless.

[Kodama.6453]

@Lynx.9058 said:

@"Hannelore.8153" said:Disclaimer, Engi is a "piano" class and you should expect to press alot of keys to play it effectively.

The problem with Grenades is they have travel time, so they can miss the target. The solution is to always melee with them, like you would the Bomb Kit. That gets you the damage of the bombs without the delay before the explosions.

As for why you're taking so much damage, you need some defense on your gear if you're inexperienced. You also need to take a decent amount of CC, which is Crowd Control skills like Chill, Cripple and Knockback. This game isn't about just dealing damage, but by tanking damage with armor, healing damage with heal skills, and lowering enemy damage with CC and debuffs such as Weakness.

The reason not to try and kite and stay at range is you get mobbed by enemies, you won't hit them all with your attacks. You want everything all grouped up so you can destroy it all at once with a few attacks, rather than take each enemy down one at a time. So you'll want your gear and build to support this, and should be set up as something of a bruiser until you become more seasoned with your class.

Prefer Condition Damage over Power damage, especially with Core Engi (just look at all their kits skills to see why). Condition builds tend to let you survive more and deal an equivalent amount of damage, only outstripped by power builds in high-level instanced content.

Take the Thumper Turret and makes sure you have the turret trait that makes it give you Protection.

Learn what combo finishers are and how to use them. They're extremely important on Engineer. For example, you should detonate Healing Turret within the first few seconds of summoning it so the explosion combos its own Water field.

Learn what a skill rotation is. Good rotations increase damage by a factor of 200% or more. For example, on an Engi rotation, you don't just camp Grenades, you swap through Harpoon Gun, Grenades, Bomb Kit, Elixer Gun, etc. in cycles, casting skills as needed for the situation, then back again, when properly done this results in several times the damage output of just using a single weapon or kit.

Like the Elixer Gun is overall not very good, but its #4 is very high damaging, so you just cast that, then drop it.

There's alot more but hopefully you can get an idea.

I've heard both sides on condition vs power say they're better, but since swapping from initially focusing on condition damage to using power with the flamethrower/juggernaut combo I am doing far better on overworld content than I used to, so I'm more inclined to stick with power right now, especially since flamethrower is my preferred kit and that will transition into scrapper more easily at 80.

But that doesn't help me underwater, and I cant use the thumper turret underwater either. Starting to think that Dawdler.8521 is right, engineer is just terrible underwater.

On a semi related note, if engineer is only using one decent skill per kit and just having to swap between them, they sounds like the kits are not balanced properly to me. Why have a whole kit when 4 abilities arent worth using and you're taking extra time swap to it for one action than any other class has to I order to just use one of their utilities? Maybe I'm mistaken here but I thought the entire reason engineer has weapon replacement kits and cant weapon swap in combat is to have a larger array of abilities to use. Defeats the point if most of them are useless.

It's because the kits were not really designed with a clear purpose.

Take bomb kit, for example. It's auto attacks are pretty good for a power build to fill the gaps. Big ol' bomb is also a hard hitter in PvE and used in power dps rotations.But then the kit also holds one of the most potent condition skills from engineer, fire bomb. And then there is also concussion bomb, which deals condition damage primarily as well, but mostly isn't used since there are better condition skills across the other kits.

Literally every kit is like that. There is no dedicated power or condition damage kit, but they are all some weird mix between both.Even the elixir gun, which does have a focus on being supportive, seems to be confused about what it wants to accomplish. It has conditions on 3 and the auto attack (poison and bleed), but 2 and 4 are dealing power damage.

Holo kinda fixed that issue for power builds, since it provides power damage through photon forge and also laser disk as a good power dps utility skill. You aren't required to take 3 kits and cherry pick the power skills from these anymore, since you have different options now.

Condition builds on the other hand.... we have no utility skills which are able to compete with kits when it comes to condition application. And like I said, you have to cherry pick then. If you want to deal condition damage, then many of the damage focused skills might not be worth casting.

And the funniest thing: Anet themselves are confused what they want to accomplish with kits. Flamethrower got changed by taking away some power damage from flame blast (2) for extra burning, since they said that it should function primarily as a condition kit.But they also created traits on scrapper with super high synergy with flamethrower, a class which they designed to be a power damage spec, which doesn't really function well with conditions.

It is a complete mess. What is needed is that Anet gets to the drawing board and start thinking which role the different kits are supposed to fill. Their rework for med kit was great, since it now is a purely supportive healing and boon kit. They need to do the same with the other kits.Like changing the designs to make bomb kit a power damage focused kit, grenades a condition damage focused kit.Flamethrower becomes a power damage kit to embrace the interaction with scrapper, while elixir gun can get reshaped as a supportive kit with some conditions, while ditching the power damage.

[Fueki.4753]

The last time my Engineer got wet, she used her grenades kit to blow up some krait.

[Lynx.9058]

@Kodama.6453 said:

@Lynx.9058 said:

@"Hannelore.8153" said:Disclaimer, Engi is a "piano" class and you should expect to press alot of keys to play it effectively.

The problem with Grenades is they have travel time, so they can miss the target. The solution is to always melee with them, like you would the Bomb Kit. That gets you the damage of the bombs without the delay before the explosions.

As for why you're taking so much damage, you need some defense on your gear if you're inexperienced. You also need to take a decent amount of CC, which is Crowd Control skills like Chill, Cripple and Knockback. This game isn't about just dealing damage, but by tanking damage with armor, healing damage with heal skills, and lowering enemy damage with CC and debuffs such as Weakness.

The reason not to try and kite and stay at range is you get mobbed by enemies, you won't hit them all with your attacks. You want everything all grouped up so you can destroy it all at once with a few attacks, rather than take each enemy down one at a time. So you'll want your gear and build to support this, and should be set up as something of a bruiser until you become more seasoned with your class.

Prefer Condition Damage over Power damage, especially with Core Engi (just look at all their kits skills to see why). Condition builds tend to let you survive more and deal an equivalent amount of damage, only outstripped by power builds in high-level instanced content.

Take the Thumper Turret and makes sure you have the turret trait that makes it give you Protection.

Learn what combo finishers are and how to use them. They're extremely important on Engineer. For example, you should detonate Healing Turret within the first few seconds of summoning it so the explosion combos its own Water field.

Learn what a skill rotation is. Good rotations increase damage by a factor of 200% or more. For example, on an Engi rotation, you don't just camp Grenades, you swap through Harpoon Gun, Grenades, Bomb Kit, Elixer Gun, etc. in cycles, casting skills as needed for the situation, then back again, when properly done this results in several times the damage output of just using a single weapon or kit.

Like the Elixer Gun is overall not very good, but its #4 is very high damaging, so you just cast that, then drop it.

There's alot more but hopefully you can get an idea.

I've heard both sides on condition vs power say they're better, but since swapping from initially focusing on condition damage to using power with the flamethrower/juggernaut combo I am doing far better on overworld content than I used to, so I'm more inclined to stick with power right now, especially since flamethrower is my preferred kit and that will transition into scrapper more easily at 80.

But that doesn't help me underwater, and I cant use the thumper turret underwater either. Starting to think that Dawdler.8521 is right, engineer is just terrible underwater.

On a semi related note, if engineer is only using one decent skill per kit and just having to swap between them, they sounds like the kits are not balanced properly to me. Why have a whole kit when 4 abilities arent worth using and you're taking extra time swap to it for one action than any other class has to I order to just use one of their utilities? Maybe I'm mistaken here but I thought the entire reason engineer has weapon replacement kits and cant weapon swap in combat is to have a larger array of abilities to use. Defeats the point if most of them are useless.

It's because the kits were not really designed with a clear purpose.

Take bomb kit, for example. It's auto attacks are pretty good for a power build to fill the gaps. Big ol' bomb is also a hard hitter in PvE and used in power dps rotations.But then the kit also holds one of the most potent

condition

skills from engineer, fire bomb. And then there is also concussion bomb, which deals condition damage primarily as well, but mostly isn't used since there are better condition skills across the other kits.

Literally

every

kit is like that. There is no dedicated power or condition damage kit, but they are all some weird mix between both.Even the elixir gun, which

does

have a focus on being supportive, seems to be confused about what it wants to accomplish. It has conditions on 3 and the auto attack (poison and bleed), but 2 and 4 are dealing power damage.

Holo kinda fixed that issue for power builds, since it provides power damage through photon forge and also laser disk as a good power dps utility skill. You aren't required to take 3 kits and cherry pick the power skills from these anymore, since you have different options now.

Condition builds on the other hand.... we have no utility skills which are able to compete with kits when it comes to condition application. And like I said, you have to cherry pick then. If you want to deal condition damage, then many of the damage focused skills might not be worth casting.

And the funniest thing: Anet themselves are confused what they want to accomplish with kits. Flamethrower got changed by taking away some power damage from flame blast (2) for extra burning, since they said that it should function primarily as a condition kit.But they also created traits on scrapper with super high synergy with flamethrower, a class which they designed to be a power damage spec, which doesn't really function well with conditions.

It is a complete mess. What is needed is that Anet gets to the drawing board and start thinking which role the different kits are supposed to fill. Their rework for med kit was great, since it now is a purely supportive healing and boon kit. They need to do the same with the other kits.Like changing the designs to make bomb kit a power damage focused kit, grenades a condition damage focused kit.Flamethrower becomes a power damage kit to embrace the interaction with scrapper, while elixir gun can get reshaped as a supportive kit with some conditions, while ditching the power damage.

Yea. Case in point: when I first started I was going for condition gear to use with my flamethrower because common sense says you're setting people on fire and burning is a condition.

Then I got told here that flamethrower is a power kit, so I swapped to power gear and suddenly my soloing experience got a LOT more enjoyable.

Tbh, what I'd actually do if changing the kits were up to me is get rid of bomb kit entirely (it makes no sense dropping high explosives at your own feet in melee range, how are we even still alive?) And merge some of its abilities into mortar kit, and make mortar 1 a targeted (non-ground) ability so it can function as a proper ranged power weapon with an autoattack.Then make flamethrower the condition damage weapon, dropping the burst and raising the burning effect.Then replace bomb kit with a blunderbuss/shotgun/scrap cannon kit that replaces flamethrower as a short range power damage weapon, and make things like juggernaut work for both the flamethrower and shotgun.Then turn elixir gun into a ranged condition weapon kit.

That gives condition and power engineers both a short range and long range kit option meant for that playstyle that make sense. The new elite spec in the upcoming expansion should then be a condition damage spec since both holosmith and scrapper are power oriented.

[Bingus.4236]

Scatter Mines work best at point blank, so I use Capture Line to bring them in and then hit them with the Scatter mines. You can then use battering ram to get rid of them. Also, launch battering ram is also a decent hit. Turrets work alright underwater for taking aggro and are useful in situations with lots of mobs.

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

Leveling builds are imo the most interesting ones in the game, because you have to deal with limitations.

If you run power builds there is one rune in particular, which you should equip the moment you hit level 39 - the Major Rune of Fire. It is one of only two runes which have a special-ability on the major rarity and it is extremely useful in PvE while leveling & mapping. 4 Runes have to be equipped.

It adds a total of 45 stat-points of power, + 6 % Might Duration which is useful as you stack might anyway and grants 4 seconds Fire Aura when you enter combat. The Fire Aura has no internal cooldown, grants might when you get hit and burns enemies that hit you.

In addition, you should run with the Major Rune of Hoelbrak for the remaining two gear-slots to enhance the Might duration even further and boost your power.

Note: Do not forget to equip the same Rune you have on your helmet on your Aquabreather. When you go underwater, the Aquabreather replaces the Helmet. If you forget this, one of the rune-effects will vanish.

As for Sigils, you can run Major Sigil of Strength and Major Sigil of Earth on the Harpoongun.

Traits:Firearms = 2-3-1Explosives = 2-2-2

Skills:Healing = Med KitUtility = Grenade Kit, Rocket Turret, Bomb KitElite = Supply Crate

Combat:You stay ranged and preferably kite the enemies behind you, while you dive in circles. Similar to the FT, you can stick with the auto-attack. Your Might stacks should be very high as long as you keep attacking. Use Big Ol Bomb (Bomb Kit toolbelt) to get some distance if your enemies are too close to you. Place the Rocket turret in the middle of the circle.

For recovery, you use F1 which is your 101 heal-skill but with only 17 seconds cooldown. Running out of HP anyway?

• Use Med Pack Drop from the Supply Crate toolbelt
• Use the Supply Crate
• Switch to Med Kit (equip it) and use skill 2 Bandage Blast which will drop some HP refills in front of you, just catch them while you kite.
• Combo Skill 3 Cleansing Field + skill 5 Infusion Bomb and probably Big Ol Bomb to trigger the Waterfield+Blastfinisher instant heal.
• Use Skill 4 Vital Burst

You fight a boss/champion and want to break its breakbar?

• Big Ol Bomb
• Supply Crate
• Grenade Kit = Freeze Grenade
• Bomb Kit = Concussion Bomb + Glue Bomb
• Harpoon Gun = Capture Line (skill 3) and Net Wall (skill 5)

When the bar is broken:

• Harpoon Gun = Scatter Mines (skill 2) + Timed Charge (skill 4)
• Grenade Kit = auto-attack

Boss has Retaliation:

• stop attacking (obviously)
• detonate the Rocket Turret!

The Fire Aura from the Fire Rune helps you to dispose of trash-mobs before they add up in quantity and helps you to stack up might fast, so your attacks will become painful. The Earth Sigil works with Sanguine Array and will enhance your might-generation.