Flame Throwing

This post was originally going to be about the build I made and spent my last BWE time on. But with all the trait changes coming in the next 15 days I think I'm moving directions.

By the end of my Guild Wars career, I spent all of my PvE time spamming spirits (although that's not my exact build, it's the basic idea). I could drop all of my creepy glowy friends and go to the kitchen to make a sandwich. When I returned, everything had died and left little piles of shinies.

Of course I don't expect or want that to happen in Guild Wars 2, but I did enjoy the play style of the spirit spammer when the content was challenging.

In the last BWE, in the spirit of the spamming ritualist, I ran a turret specialist engineer build. Not only was the build really fun to run, but I also felt that I performed more effectively than any other build I have tried. I think this build will still be great after the changes come down the pipe, but it will be different, so I'm not going to bother emulating all the skill and trait choices.

The build is fairly simple. I took as many turrets as possible and as many traits based around turrets that I could. I specifically took the rocket and flame turrets for damage, because I wanted to stack conditions. To go with that I put max points in Firearms for condition damage.

I picked up the healing turret and the supply crate which drops even more turrets, put 30 points into Inventions and made sure I always had some healing going. After all, I need to be able to run around without dying while my minions do their thing.

For my last skill I picked the tool kit so that I could repair turrets and launch people into them with the pry bar and magnet.

I played a ton of sPvP games. My fights went a little like this:

Drop rocket and flame turrets. Run behind them them and fire my pistol at will. I then alternate between kiting in the turret area and using my shield to absorb attacks. Use healing turret when i need health, prybar and magnet to interrupt heals and bring people into the turrets and keep conditions stacked. If I seemed to be on the losing in I would call in my Supply Crate.

It was a blast! Because the damage is done by turrets and conditions, you are free to actively focus on positioning, interrupting and healing. My proudest moment (and one I wished I had recorded) was when a warrior charged me. After a few seconds I had littered the battlefield with 5 turrets and tons of medkits. The warrior started to run so I magneted him back into the fray. He stunned me and ran again, never to be seen in my clock tower again.