Love this class concept, but it has a lot of frustrating parts with its design. Here’s a rework that I’ve come up with:
Steam-Assisted Crank Gun (Mk II): Add all of the current effects of Experimental Steam Capacitors. Allow to be cranked while at full charge. Decrease spread by 50% and increase firing kickback by 50%.
Reasoning is that right now Experimental Steam Capacitors is basically required to use the Crank Gun, so just fold it in. Without it firing for even a second means that you’ve lost about 5s that need to be cranked again, which makes the crank gun impractical for anything aside from already-easy situations where you have no enemies around and can operate in complete peace as a ranged class. Being able to crank at full charge removes the incredible annoyance of needing to fire your gun in order to crank it and maintain charge. Decreasing the spread is needed because right now it is incredibly inaccurate, and it already has a kickback mechanic, so transferring some of this inaccuracy to the kickback helps make it more skill-based. Right now you can’t even headshot things that are 30 feet away which is kind of a joke.
Utility belt: Change to “Bardin can carry up to 3 Bombs (of any type) at one time. Bardin starts with 1 random bomb and throws them 50% quicker.”
Reasoning is that this perk is currently pretty useless. With no inherent advantage to Bardin carrying a bomb on its own, you’re better off giving the first 4 bombs you find to everyone so that anyone can use one in a pinch. Making Bardin deploy them faster gives him an advantage here and lets him better use it defensively, and starting the map with a bomb ensures he’ll have at least one chance to use it.
Level 10 talents: There’s a bit of a problem at this tier in that both Leading Shots and Armour Piercing Slugs are very similarly general ranged ability boosters, with Leading shots being better with ranged weapons that use the relevant crit traits and armor piercing being better otherwise. I also want to shift piercing more enemies to another talent, so we’ll change it.
Armour Piercing Slugs: Change to “deal +25% damage to armoured enemies”.
Combined Arms: This is currently bugged (?) and doesn’t refresh if you kill 5 melee enemies and then do a ranged attack while still under the effect of the previous buff. Not a huge problem but fix it so it can be kept up.
Level 20 talents: We’ve folded ESC into the base gun, so the other talents are now far more maintainable and usable. We need some rebalancing and ESC to be something new
Full Head of Steam: I like the idea, but want this to be more interesting, and a flat 15% power buff as long as you are cranking isn’t that interesting. Change this to: “Upon reaching 5 stacks of Pressure, Bardin gains 3% power and 2% crit rate for 12 seconds. Stacks up to 5 times”. Now we’ve enhanced the risk-reward tradeoff, since losing pressure will mean a lot of time to regain this buff.
Superior Gaskets: This will be the opposite, the low-risk option. Change to be simply “Pressure is not lost over time”. For those people who just wish that Engineer was a normal class without this blasted cranking mechanic! With a lot of other changes that make the class more complex, this allows players to simplify things a little.
Experimental Steam Capacitors: Change to “Melee kills recharge 1% of the ability bar. If ability bar is full, melee kills grant +10% attack speed and +25% reload speed for 10 seconds”. Capacitors sound like something that should allow you to charge your gun in another way.
Level 25 talents: All 3 of these talents are interesting at first glance, but have huge issues in practice that need to be rectified.
Ablative Armour: The fact that friendly fire triggers this is a crime, and any kind of DoT chews through it all. Change this to a barkskin-like effect: “Each 15 seconds you gain a stack of ablative armor. Stacks up to 5 times. Taking damage from an enemy grants 5% damage reduction for 5 seconds per stack and then removes a stack. This effect can only trigger every 5 seconds” On a related note, Huntsman needs a similar change for Thick Hide.
Bombadier: Much the same problem as Utility Belt in that it depends on finding bombs too much. Change to “Bardin’s Bombs gain the effect of both regular Bombs and Incendiary Bombs. Bardin starts with an additional random bomb, and has a 15% chance to find another in his belt whenever he throws one.”
Piston Power: This is really weird and overly weapon-dependent on whether it’s useful or not. Change to “All of Bardin’s melee weapons gain the weapon special ability (mouse 3 button) to make a charged attack that deals immense stagger and costs 25% of Bardin’s ability bar”. None of Bardin’s melee weapons currently use the special ability so this should be fine. It also makes it interesting to give players the option of spending their ability bar on a melee ability.
Level 30 talents: Gromril-Plated Shot is an interesting change to the crank gun. Both of the other talents should do the same.
Gromril plated Shot: For normal anti-armor and staggering elites this feels good. But it needs needs way more super-armor damage and monster damage. Gromril shots do EIGHT damage to a Chaos Warrior on bodyshot and NINETEEN on a headshot. Even with perfect, sustained headshots that you can only do while not moving and at close range this will take up half your ability bar to kill one chaos warrior on Cata. Know what does more damage to chaos warriors? Basically every other armor piercing weapon in the game. Gromril is also considerably worse against monsters compared to the normal crank gun, doing only double damage per shot while firing around 1/3rd as many shots. Buff super armor and monster damage by 66-100%. Also give it more kickback on firing, it seems identical to the standard crank gun on a per-shot basis. I said to give the regular gun +50%, so give this +150% of what it has now. It’d still be more than easy enough to control given how slow it is to fire.
Linked Compression Chamber: Change to “Bardin’s Crank gun becomes pin-point accurate, has no kickback, and pierces 1 additional enemies. Killing a Special makes the crank gun not consume the ability bar for the next 8 seconds. The Crank Gun starts firing at full speed rather than taking time to ramp up”. The idea here is to change his gun into more of a special sniper weapon. It needs a LOT more accuracy for that. It will also still require good aim to get headshots on armored enemies like Ratling guns and Warpfire throwers since bodyshots on armor is weak damage.
Innovative Ammo Hoppers: Change to “Increases Bardin’s Ability Bar by 50% and the rate at which pressure stacks recover the ability bar by 50%. Aiming and firing the Crank Gun no longer reduces Bardin’s movement speed”. Who wouldn’t want to try a more mobile crank gun that can actually keep up with a mobile party, or fight through events that require you to move around?
So, what do you think? Do you like the new builds this would allow? Do you think it is too strong?