I think most people who play on cata level know that engineer is in a terrible spot. It is inarguably the worst class in the game when you compare it objectively with others. It was poorly implemented without taking into consideration the melee meta of the game and competitive nature of quickplay. Obviously it’s a PVE game and you can succeed with literally anything, but you need exponentially higher skill in order to accomplish the same things with ranged focused classes in general compared to melee, and engineer is even worse off in this regard.
In order to play engineer well you need your team to play around YOU. You have to let them know when using crank gun, trollhammer, etc. Your crank gun takes forever to ramp up and if you get hit one time by an enemy you’re at least half dead and have to start over. But the main problem is that even if you manage to shoot in the small area your teammates are not taking up while they are tardmode melee smashing, they will inevitably do their WASD waddle back in forth into your line of fire. Then it’s always your fault for doing friendly damage even though they ran into it.
The majority of matches people play are in quick play and they aren’t forming comps and using voice chat. Having a class require this just to play is a horrible design oversight. No other class in the game does team damage with their career skill. The meta of the game is to have the entire team on the frontline spamming melee attacks but you have a minigun that does friendly fire damage? Ridiculous. The only solution is to remove friendly fire from the crank gun, or just remove the crank gun entirely. Because regardless of how careful you are, at the end of the day people just want to chase green circles on their grail knights. You’re the one dealing the damage, and even if it’s not your fault you are going to take the blame.
It doesn’t feel right that the class I have played the most is my worst class by far. I can cruise through cataclsym on grail knight or ironbreaker or solo legendary. But I play engineer 10 times more than these classes and I’m dying in legend runs because my team just abandons me in the backline to hook rats and leeches while I try to shoot around them, or kick me out of the game for dealing unavoidable friendly fire. When new classes are designed, you need to take into consideration the mentality of players and the actual meta of the game instead of just throwing in random cool ideas. And the outcast engineer is the perfect example of that mistake.
I wouldnt say he is the worst or weakest, actually he can be damn strong and help the team out a lot. But i know what you mean, to get the full potential the team has to play around him and most players dont care about the backliners. He just doesnt fit the current playstyle of most players, which makes it hard for the engi to shine, it is not impossible, but really hard.
See that is subjective reasoning right there. You have played him or seen him be played and it seemed strong to you. But if you play every single class in the game including engineer and objectively analyze the results, you will see that engineer performs worse than any other class when compared to them. Something can only be strong when it’s stronger than something else. Just because you can beat PVE content on engineer doesn’t mean it’s strong, you can do that on any class, and at a much more efficient level. Faster boss killers, better special snipers, better frontliners, better everything.
I have played all classes and i agree that he needs the most effort to shine and is annoying to play in quickplay. But i can carry and be strong in qp as well on cata and cata+. But i also have 4500+ hours.
And dont get me wrong i am agreeing with you he needs the most effort, his ult is slowing him a lot while others just rush forward and you can fall apart very easily. He has poor movement capabilities to handle spicy situations more easily (1h hammer helps out a lot), and he seems to be designed for a slower gameplay over all which isnt the the way how people play the game.
So yeah rework would be nice to make him more mobile.
I think now you’re just trying to flex on me and say its skill issue which gamers always try to do. Change the topic so they can flex and say l2p. Just realize people don’t like you when you do this stuff. Most of the time like in this case it’s not even a matter of skill, I can already clear the highest difficulty with every class. And I don’t know how having better aim would prevent people from walking into my line of fire once I already start shooting. I have much more than 4500 hours in shooting games and was able to beat cata within 3 weeks of playing the game. My argument is to remove friendly fire on crank gun, since it is the only career skill that deals friendly damage. I’m arguing that engineer is bad by comparison rather than my own experience.
It seems you think meta exists arbitrarily. But the truth is meta exists because gamers are competitive, even in co op games. They want to play the strongest class and outperform others.
Why would they move aside so you can use your crank gun when they want to get more kills than you? Even if it was for the greater good and that’s your argument… it’s really not. You just put your team in the possibility of taking friendly fire. And lets say you’re a god with 100% perfect aim, you’re still an inconvenience to them because telling them to move aside so you can shoot, they could have already killed the boss or horde anyway. At least if there was no friendly fire you can mitigate the possibility of team damage and have fun playing your class, even if your dps is bad. If you’re really arguing against that idea, then I don’t know what possible reason you have.
You should not need to make a full discord team of tryhard nerds just to play engineer. Most players have no positional awareness at al they are just wiggling back and forth on the frontline to look cool. 90% of the time I can’t even use the crank gun because I realize it’s not possible to do so without hitting somebody, and by the time I get to the boss it already got one shot by a GK kerrilian and bounty hunter.
No i just wanted to say you can make him work but it needed a lot of effort when i started to play him. I struggled a lot to make him work.
More than with others classes. So i am agreeing with you, if you meassure “being weak” that you have to put in way more effort into him than into other carees, that with this definition he is weaker.
I disagree that he cant handle certain enemies as efficient as others because he can delete any enemy as fine like others can or even better.
I just see his weakness more that he doesnt fit the way how players play this game. You already mentioned that many players are always rushing forward. Which results in a lot of friendly fire which is annoying if players in front of you dodge left and right and dont stay on one side so you can help them with your ult.
But i got used to it, but it annoyed me for long time as well and maybe there is a better solution or fix for this problem
So annoying points are
Team is rushing forward which results in friendly fire if they dodge around like crazy.
Team is rushing forward while you fall apart and have to handle enemies attacking you by your own while others just continue running ahead.
Falling behind caused by slowed movement speed of the ult
your ult is your main weapon
Conclusion: A main weapon as ult which is causing friendly fire and making you fall apart and an overall lack of mobility of the engineer is annyoing, not fun and doesnt fit the way the players play the game.
I just wouldnt say he is weak, but certainly annoying to play sometimes
based on your experiences, you claim things but have 0 data supporting your statements.
melee meta? in what world are the ranged classes worse? are we playing the same game?
hagstalker has been meta since release and remains one of the strongest builds
BH always had a build that made him incredibly strong.
Ranger vet, sure is squshy and has less killingpower than many other classes built in his kit, but his utility is almost unrivaled, also abuses pistol like a lunatic
marksman kruber i admit requires more for equal results but often can reach bigger heights too, if the player has the skill for it.
and lets not forget BW hands down the best class in the game, basicly since her rework.
you mean unlike, hunters prowl, locked and loaded, trueshot volley, and the bruning head?
Sorry but reading this sounds more like issues in positioning and little to no awareness of the stuff happening around you.
I was never that big Bardin-player, but Engi brought something completely new into the game design-wise. And this is A GOOD THING and i can tell you that, if i start a game these days, i´ll mostly play Engi for what it is compared to the LMB smashing super tanks you´ve mentioned or highly broken afk burners like BW.
There are a lot of open fields and space, maybe even high grounds in several missions. Just position correctly and you can spray & pray all day long without hitting your teammates. There might be sick spots where friendly fire is unavoidable aswell, but how about taking your melee weapon into the hand and do the same what others do?
And if you know you´re alone, why would you wield your gun all day long?
As said above, Engi is a bit different and that´s a good thing gameplay-wise. This “the mentality of players” - thing is bs tbh. If we go that way, then this game should be a singleplayer RPG or something i guess.
The game is just a couple of years old and the most guys still playing are tryhards who jump in with 2000h+ and don´t care about win / loss, the most times they won´t get hit anyway. And even here the game just lacks a better class-balancing or something that forces coop-play.
TLDR: Engi is fine. Stop thinking the team have to play around you, actually adapt by yourself to maximize your output and performance.
I strongly disagree, it takes much less skill to just waddle around with an infinite ammo build/wizard and just murder 80% of targets before they reach melee. Surviving a real zerg rush of armored horde waves + specials as a newbie melee meanwhile is much harder…but it is true that melee careers have a higher survival ceiling when actually played well.
I state that as someone who has dumped more hours into ranged careers, longbow stalker especially, by far.
Teamwork makes the dreamwork, you wana minigun, those other 3 or 2 wana melee, respect your teammates and do not shoot them while greeding for kills.
Basically every career has good damage potential against quite a lot of targets, specifics being down to builds. Engi does not hold any kind of monopoly.
If you let a hook/leech hop up to you and take your ass because you are too oblivious while shooting upfront then you got tunnel vision. This is on you alone.
If you shoot teammates then of damn course they are gona be pissed, you having a minigun that clears hordes well does not automatically mean they gotta make way for you. Same way they do not have to make way for a elf with hagbane or javs and how they kick her if she doesnt respect them.
A matter of definition, in my view, strength in a PVE game is relative to the content of the game, Engi can perform excellently on cata and can do great. But indeed he is clunky and i do not think there is any argument against that.
As for him not being best in class on anything, well, comes with the territory of being versatile. Sure he doesnt pop a monster like shade does but he can gun down a horde in a third of the time she needs to chow through it. And if neither has potions then he actually just does better if the boss doesnt just drop dead from the shade ability use(lower difficulties…) due to massive DPS difference.
Of course these already blow up the boss, at least when using those builds and often granted they have a conc pot, that´s their specialty. They do not clear anywhere near as well as engi except griffonfoot bounty which is kind of a balance problem in on itself.
This is factually incorrect, all ranged career skills do friendly fire damage, bounty hunter can even outright oneshot teammates.
I wrote my statement that i could see a rework because of his clunkiness because many players complain about it. But damagewise he is in a very good spot.
The friendly fire thing - Yeah i can see the problem in some maps. In narrow corridors you can just hope that the other players while rushing forward stay on one side, what they actually do very often when they see an engineer in their team on cata (thumps of for this ;)). If that isnt the case then just cover your and your teammates back. Then you wont have the problem with the disablers as well.
Edit: i am totally fine with him but i can also see when other players want a rework because playing him can be annoying in quickplay. But i cant support the argument that he is weak. He is definitely not weak.
Remember when I asked people to make tier lists and rank the careers by performance on regular ol Cataclysm?
Almost everyone had OE somewhere near the bottom. Also noticed some people left the lowest two tiers empty and that most people put as many near the top as they could. Most had more in the B tier and higher than any all tier combined.
Since most people here wouldn’t put engineer at the bottom, I want to know who would come in last? What is the weakest career overall?
Having just checked, some of those people also had warrior priest,zealot, slayer, SoT and even unchained as equally bad/good or barely better. I think its quite objectively fair to state that those lists were highly subjective.
Oh make no mistake, he is at the bottom, perhaps only pyro could be argued for as being worse in terms of disjointed design with lack of internal synergies and whatnot. But him being the worst of all the careers however does not mean he is bad or even weak relative to the game itself. He is still perfectly viable in standard cata and dare i say, a welcome addition to any CW run.
On pyromancer, I think we all agree that Pryo may be the career most in need an update and rework to many talents; probably should make Volan’s Doctrine a career ability rather than a talent. So you raise a good point, while one career may be weaker than another; it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are in the greatest need of an update.
Still, the Engineer’s lack of talents to make Drakefire work well is something I’d like changed.
And the bad pairing of sluggishness by design paired with squishiness could have been implemented better. I don’t often use Coghammer on Engineer unless I’m playing Legend; I feel I absolutely have to use a shield to get THP and clear space. No other career has that problem as much as the Engineer.
I think having Ablative Armor be a career ability and replacing Ablative Armor talent with a Drakefire talent could work; something to get rid of the slowdown from Drakefire overcharge and perhaps also provide some useful synergy between steam-buildup for the crank gun or the crank gun could remove some overcharge.
I would put Engineer and Pyro at the top of the list for some changes needed.
Huh, i only really run cog on him but at the same time, i´ve always been a bit adverse to shields. But as for making ablative a passive&adding a new talent…well sure, he would by no means become OP even with that i believe. But i´d hesitate to tie the minigun up with drakefire guns as it´d encourage their use and downplay the other weapons.
Can just put a passive on him that gives him synergy much like how WHC has that extra headshot damage and such. Too many passives isnt a problem when the powerbudget still doesnt get overblown.
Thanks frosty for your response of engineer is fine, clearly skill issue, l2p.
This is the response you get on every single game forum in history. So the question is what is more likely, that every video game is 100% balanced and people make complains for no reason? Or there is a specific psychological profile for insecure men who lack skills in life and feel the need to flex their ego in video games.
This is why I don’t even bother using forums anymore. There’s always those gamers who are just toxic no lifers who feel he need to change the subject so they can have an excuse to brag about how skilled they are rather than actually discuss game balance. Thank you for proving my point. That the pointless goal of competing in a PVE game actually exists. Purposefully trying to create competition in an uncompetitive environment is the ultimate beta move. My entire point was they should remove team damage from crank gun because of the competitive PVE mindset common in this game, and you came right out and exposed yourself proving my point.
And saying melee takes more skill than ranged is hilarious. You ARE one of the bad players dude. My first 2 weeks playing I was soloing legendary and doing cata runs on grail knight, zealot and slayer. You’re the one who’s bad but lacks the self awareness to even see that. You exposed yourself as one of those idiot grail knights spamming your left click on the front line chasing green circles when you said that playing melee classes has a higher skillcap than engineer.
Oh, I think that is common enough here, and it’s ironic you bring this up considering:
From what I know, Frosty mainly sticks to ranged careers; plays a lot of Waystalker.
Now you’ve shifted completely off-topic into a rant. Some points have been made that make me question you more than anyone else here despite the fact that I do think Engineer is one of the careers in most need of a rework.
It’s not a good look when you get basic things wrong like this.
Personally, I don’t think friendly fire should be in a game like this at all; it doesn’t really add much to the game.
there are careers that could need a touch, and engineer is one of them
but none is definable as the weakest, all careers have pro and cons and all have things they exell at including engineer.
many people reduce him to his crank gun, not realising that having 3 weapons to cover all enemy types is an advantage compared to the two weapons and a CD based ability of other careers, so he is trading immediate power button activation (burst power) for availability and Consistency, and sure he is somewhat clunky to play, as you also have to manage the recource of a third weapon.
if anything his unique selling point is not immediate apparent because other careers have too easy access to their abilities
what im saying is that many careers have spammable ults, where you don’t really need to consider when you use it.
but that is a personal qualm about the game, for me, and i know thats controversial.