hmm I dunno much about how the current games Endgame, Last time I played Endgame was shortly after they merged some servers. Engineer was playing well in RVR mass wars, but sure some abilities have bordelrine pointless niches or are inferior. But that is surely not an Engineer exclusive thing.
Back on Live then I ran something like:
http://waronlinebuilder.org/#career=eng ... :3646:3656:
but it was more a mas RvR focused build than smaller competitve group ones.
Main purpose was to lay carpets of DOTS around and debuffing to give opponent healers a very busy time to then use the the few rifleman abilities and try to focus fire down a healer.
Bandolier
is totally fine within this setup because it just requires one point to achieve it. while extra ammo would mean 4 points to get some AP. it does not need a change in my opinion.
Extra powder,
kicks in exacty with the above build, 50% extra size, irrc means radius, which means the acid bomb will go from 40m diameter to 60. That massively saves the amount of spamming Acid bombs around because it covers so much more opponents at once, which then also saves AP. It also has a nice synergy effect with napalm then. Further, it helps to deploy the debuff on enemies past 100m if the opponent stands in speciifc situations. theoretical range is now 110m when you find a target at 80m that can push the AoE further to the ranks behind. Because if with a 9 ppl cap, they aren't always huggign each other that tight.
Proximity Alarm
In a large Keep zerg groups, having a support engineer with proximity and various turret buffs is very nice as well. Also the keg is great to leach renown by healing others around
. So ath this point its a nice thing, but demands an RvR group where one just accepts to do this support role. But it was a very enjoyable role, in which I was mostly focused on controlling Siege wepaons with occosionally checking the group support being at the right place and active.
Quick Reload
Not sure about this since I never made some great rifleman builds work with the shorter range skills, generally when you spam shorter rifleman skills you may have AP issues, but I see hardly a purpose in these builds because at these ranges the grenades just do a better job. And the slow long range skills do not require such laods of AP. I just can't find how this fits well into the system. But either wa always too bad to play this properly or generally a short range running and gunning, running and hopping around your Enemy Engie just never worked, since the most classes have too many movement debuffs to cross this short distance and get into melee.
Would really like to know how viable such a shorter range rifleman build is and how its played correctly.
Stopping Power
its a nice addon in Keeps to get some people shot off walls which is fun but only usefull in a few cases.
Well oiled machine + Reinforced Case
Yes thats something which seems for me to lose the cost of opportunaty calculation. Ther are just plain out better things to get for Reinforced Case and And Well oiled, it just too good. If self destruct wouldnt' have any cooldown it would have a nice synergy effect in a redeploy, self destruct, well oiled, and again selfdestruct rotations. But this way it is, it hasn't.
In my opinion: Well oiled, Reinforced Casing, Hand crafted Scope Stopping power, as it has a rather borderline niche effect.
Toldavf wrote:Being a defensive DPS won't see them taken in a 6 man much. On live all they ever did was focus on giving engine more and more utility and it never really compensated for a lack of killing power. The fact is that any engine that wants to DPS is stuffed for tactics as is so giving them more utility tactics seems like a step in the wrong direction to me.
may be true, but wasn't WAR supposed to be an RvR game and not a 6vs6? it will surely be not possible to make every class balanced for massbattles and small group battles.
Genisaurus wrote:There are some good ideas in this thread. I would advise holding onto them.
What the Engineer class needs, IMO, is not a few fixed tactics and abilities, but an overhaul. As Penril points out, there are only 4 tactic slots, and the Engi already has about 6 tactics that are must-haves.
That being said, by all means brainstorm some better tactics. I do believe that for all classes, every tactic should be desirable and able to compete for a slot. I would perhaps like to see the overhaul come first so that the tactics can be designed accordingly. But don't sell yourselves short by trying to propose something you think will pass without much of a fight, like adjusting a few tactics, adding an armor debuff, and calling it a day.
Well, they are "tactics", they should support roles/builds or alter playstyles and only be "must haves" for specific builds and no must haves in general.
However the Engineer being more kinda defensive was initially a general idea for the Dwarves to be a more defensive Race. I don't really would like to have this taken away too much since it kills the flair of the races a bit.