Well no one else is making a thread about it so I will
1. Role
Heavy DD, if you can get anything to stand still. Well, we don't offer healing or major debuffs so DD is all we can be right? Otherwise, another AS in the crowd with great defenses against ranged opponents, less so against melee. Owning soldiers, and making Adventurers and Doctors drop a lot faster thanks to NSD aura. Protecting team members with our overpowered auras and being prime targets because of it. In tower wars, we transform into an immobile object to warp back the lazier members of the pack. An object for shades to take their frustration out on because we are so perkable and such bad dancers.
2. Strengths
Defense obviously. Our own personal blockers have not been updated in years, but they still do the job. Cocoon, while short-lived vs. most melee professions and NTs nowadays, is still our only real backup and is a powerful tool nonetheless.
Pets have potential for great damage on anything not moving too fast, and with procs (Master's Bidding, Ravening DoT, Gadgeteer procs) they can sometimes rip low hp professions apart. Unlike MPs and Bureaucrats we are not stuck in nano recharge much so are free to use Improved Pet Attention most of the time, and our pets enjoy the best protection of the three pet profs from roots/snares. Calms can still be pretty rough on Engineer, especially in combination with GTH, or the special crat calm, or crat aoe calm (seems to land every time?).
Our blockers are highly desired in team situations.
3. Weaknesses
Lowest evades of any profession, lowest runspeed of any profession (shared with many others). Longest time/most nano to buff up of any profession. Highest nanoskill requirements for a profession without offensive nanos (and with no nanoskill buffs too, thanks fc).
No PVP weapon, very few landable perks (personally I can only land tradeskill perks in PVP). All we can seem to get is pistols.
Defenses can be rather short lived (IMO), especially against melee professions. Perhaps intended by FC, but the combination of wolf mk6/heot/mediblade/viper matching perk damage, the removal of "must be behind", and our total perkability has severely reduced protection via biococcoon from most melee professions
Pets are as much a pain to maintain as ever. Too many buffs to keep running! BS shells changed nothing, as you still have to swap to cast recent buffs on them anyway. Using a BS shell in decon takes 20 seconds to activate and release the pet, meaning you won't be able to buff it with the nano refilling effects. Using a BS shell outside decon roots you for 10s so you will have to be in a safe place anyway. The pet snare mostly only lands on greenies and other pets. And they still get stuck on fking teleporter ledges!
4. Overall performance
Pretty solid on defense, a bit poor on offense. Like most support profs, most engies are a bit tired of the inability to use similar setups in PVM and PVP.
5. Areas of improvement
A PvP weapon. Something like a Dreadloch Silverback would be nice, 1700 shotgun + AS or whatever. Other professions can bitch all they like, Engineers have full perk support for shotgun and Easy Shot is the only DD perk we will realistically be able to make use out of in PvP, and commonly used weapons like RE and bow conflict with prime symbiant spots.
Our defense is strong but it would be nice if we got some improvements that actually helped us personally instead of just people in our team. I doubt we could get more blockers, but maybe an increase in our reflect shield (30%?) or maybe something like 9 special blockers + 1 normal attack blocker/30s (dream mode).
Null space disruptor should effect damage-to-nano shields. NT nukes are not effected by any engineer defenses (blockers, reflect, high ACs) and one triple clears cocoon. Historically we have been able to defeat NT shields, when Nullity Sphere was the norm. Our tools should be updated to reflect changes to shields. We should be able to rip the Nanobot Guard from an NT like AMS from a soldier or candy from a baby.
Make grenade perks 50% defcheck. They have so many other things preventing them from being powerful (13s activation, random damage, doesn't match damage type with any weapon Engineers use nor pets), they should at least be made to land with more reliability. I have ~2100 chemistry AR and can't land a 35% defcheck perk vs duckexp on many Advs, Keepers or NTs even, so this change will in no way mean engineers suddenly become able to perk everyone - and even so, from experience being perked by Mountaingoat on my Engineer, it generally does less damage than a capped special...
Alternately, just make the nanodrain part of the Tinkerer perkline, and based on AR. People consider Demo an Engineer defining perkline and yet, 0 Engineers are using grenades guns for pvp and 1m IP and 10 perks is a lot to sacrifice for the nanodrain.
Our procs suck. Our best proc is a 13% reflect offensive proc. PVM engies who can hit things, realistically, are not tanking difficult mobs for long periods of time without outside healing. PVP engineers generally have low AR. It needs to be changed to a defensive proc (defensive procs, such as Adventurer's Aesir Absorbtion, have a 10% chance to trigger on being hit as opposed to a 5% chance to trigger on hitting something).
A way to remove drains and UBT from pets.
Artillery symbs k?(hey i can dream)
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Originally Posted by egadsrk2
