Scrapper or holosmith

[Bubblez.4612]

I'm coming back after a 3 year hiatus and am looking to start playing engineer like I had so much before. I love the class and excited to be able to use an actual melee build this time. From what I can gather the holosmith is the best for wvw roaming which is what I will be doing primarily. However I love the idea of using a hammer as an engineer and the play style of the scrapper also looks more fun to me. Is a zerker scrapper (maybe mix with some tankier gear) viable at all for wvw roaming or is holosmith the only way to go? Before I stopped playing all I was doing was solo roaming with a full zerker build, with as much mobility and disengagement as possible (rocket boots, elixir s, ect.). I'd like to be able to do pretty much the same thing with scrapper, max mobility and disengagement and full power so I can compete with the other more mobile classes, but am worried it will be underwhelming. What do you guys recommend? Is Holosmith the only way to go for engineer roaming nowadays?>

[Lunateric.3708]

You want Holosmith hands down. Scrapper isn't a roamer and one of its main features (gyros) suffers heavily from you running around and kiting, they are too slow to keep up. Holosmith is the superior elite spec and the only elite spec that sees competitive play in most areas of the game for engineer, sadly.

[Sagramor.7395]

If you want to give Zerker/Marauder Scrapper a shot because you love the idea of Hammer you're not alone, so give it a shot.

[Vagrant.7206]

@Bubblez.4612 said:I'm coming back after a 3 year hiatus and am looking to start playing engineer like I had so much before. I love the class and excited to be able to use an actual melee build this time. From what I can gather the holosmith is the best for wvw roaming which is what I will be doing primarily. However I love the idea of using a hammer as an engineer and the play style of the scrapper also looks more fun to me. Is a zerker scrapper (maybe mix with some tankier gear) viable at all for wvw roaming or is holosmith the only way to go? Before I stopped playing all I was doing was solo roaming with a full zerker build, with as much mobility and disengagement as possible (rocket boots, elixir s, ect.). I'd like to be able to do pretty much the same thing with scrapper, max mobility and disengagement and full power so I can compete with the other more mobile classes, but am worried it will be underwhelming. What do you guys recommend? Is Holosmith the only way to go for engineer roaming nowadays?>

The trouble with scrapper is twofold:

1. It's too slow (as you've identified), for both damage and mobility.
2. Scourge.

To elaborate, scrapper has a very slow playstyle and pretty poor gap closers. It's supposed to win by attrition, not burst. It can't chase enemies well, nor can it run away easily. Even with traited rocket boots, it still struggles in this department. In addition to this, its best utilities (gyros) struggle to keep up with any serious amount of speed and have bad pathing. Now, this alone doesn't make scrapper bad by any means, as it was viable prior to PoF.

But then we come to the nearly ubiquitous scourge (present in almost every PvP match and WvW). Able to put down large AoE condi fields and corrupt boons easily at a distance. Because scrapper hammer's autoattack grants might, which gets corrupted into weakness, any scourge will render scrapper relatively harmless. On top of that, because of the aforementioned mobility issues (and slow damage), it's nearly impossible for a scrapper to disengage from a scourge or kill the scourge, resulting in a no-win situation for the scrapper.

Holo is superior in nearly every way for two reasons:

1. It does burst damage much better and has better gap closers. It can spike enemies and get kills before it gets too inundated by scourge spam.
2. You don't have to sacrifice use of Rifle with Photon Forge, allowing built-in disengage and CC, and a means of slowing fleeing targets.