in my opinion the only reason Engineer is at all good is because of the weapons he’s shipped with, he’s quite lackluster compared to the other dwarf classes otherwise. Maybe I’m just not seeing the potential of the class kit though, we’ll see
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Agreed, his kit seems a bit mismatched, lacking in synergy.
Both his ammunition sustain and core game-play loop requires a lot of micromanagement.
It’s cumbersome and not very rewarding.
His bomb synergy is also lacking, sure he can hold up to 3 bombs and Bombardier boosts them but an RV with Ranger’s Parting Gift can get more bomb usage throughout a level.
Bombs are one time use items, generating and not consuming them is generally more powerful than boosting them.
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Its actually quite weak, its slow have amazingly high damage drop off its not very accurate. Its okaish
New pistol basically brought back the days when BoP could solo bosses, haha.
It’s a fun weapon, definitely overtuned but I it’s too inefficient to be pay-to-win good. It’s a close ranged elite killer that doesn’t handle Chaos Warriors on anyone besides Ranger Veteran, it lacks the snap fire to kill specials at range, but absolutely shines if you get bombarded with elites and berserkers. I can see why it’s the engineer weapon as it covers what the crank gun can’t. I doubt cat3 and weave players are going to dump handgun and crossbow for such an ammo hungry pistol.
I’m not going to say Bardin can’t have nice things, but the damage its burst fire does to monsters should only be possible with strength pot + shrap/WHC tag.
can’t speak to weaves but it’s actually not very ammo hungry when you have an RV due to special numbers scaling with difficulty
But not so much for IB and engi but one glance at discord is all anyone needs to know the DWONS crowd wrote him off already
yeah it would be hungry on IB but IB isn’t a ranged class so it makes sense, but yeah the inefficiency and drop off is no where near as bad as people are making it out to be
Slayer with Cog Hammer is a beast. RV is very nice with the new Pistol.
Main thing I dislike about Engineer is that his only defense talent is a damage reduction one. Even BH has two defensive talents (movement speed and damage reduction). Very bad on back foot
I see and respect your strikethrough but still, while your point is correct I feel I should mention that the DWONS crowd also writes off BoP and yet I’ve won Cata 3 DWONS games while also getting the most special kills with it. They’re a very opinionated bunch really (BCR on every setup lol). I mean, what’s the the standard for them? Seems like it’s 2 shot bodyshotting with the Crossbow on WHC on DWONSC3 haha.
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H̶a̶n̶d̶g̶u̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶t̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶b̶u̶f̶f̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶i̶g̶i̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶f̶i̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶e̶r̶t̶a̶i̶n̶ ̶s̶e̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶s̶,̶ ̶o̶h̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶a̶t̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶.̶ ̶I̶t̶ ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶n̶e̶e̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶r̶o̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶C̶r̶o̶s̶s̶b̶o̶w̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶l̶e̶v̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶e̶y̶.̶
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literally wasn’t the case lol
and yeah I’ll agree Engineer’s one defensive talent is kinda boring, also not all that effective really. Would’ve taken something like stronger pushes or stam regen idk, man’s got a steam powered arm yet only one talent makes any use of the concept
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I hope not. Definitely feels like it was made more similar. Complete overkill for Cata 1.
I mean there are multiple things that could be described as far too strong for what’s needed to complete cata and yet none of those things were designed with modded realm in mind.
It’s not like Halberd, 1h sword, volley xbow or many of the other weapons we touched ended up becoming meta for onslaught. Handgun was already the meta choice at the time, we buffed it because it felt weirdly lackluster compared to longbow, xbow and also the Vt1 handgun, not because were like “we need more viability for dwons” otherwise I wouldn’t have nerfed billhook and daggers
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Put into a dropdown to prevent thread derailing.
Thoughts/Response
You’ve misunderstood me. My claim is far darker if anything. I’ve basically said the intention was,
“We need more weapons that suit the way we prefer to play for DWONS, or the weapons that we use to better suit the way we want to play.”
I can see that I’ve been too hasty in that judgement, and I’m glad that I was incorrect. I just very much dislike that most of the weapons out of the BBB simply had their quirks and drawbacks removed and were turned into generic weapons, like the Falchion and Greataxe having their stamina buffed when that wasn’t what made them lacking on Cata (Falchion just doesn’t do enough dmg and Greataxe’s cleave was the only thing that really needed buffing imo). Mace and Shield changes turned it from the most boring weapon ever… to the most boring weapon ever.
Buffing the headshot damage on the 1h Sword was pretty funny (even the devs thought it was weird). The things the weapon struggles with is CWs and shield SV, the former of which it’s pretty bad at headshotting with everything but L3, and the later of which the 1h Sword is no better against after its buffs.
Nerfing the daggers was very brave but necessary. That’s the kind of thing people send death threats over, though it seems like the Billhook nerf caused more controversy somehow with a certain group.
The Handgun used to be a satisfying weapon that you could bodyshot with, but were encouraged not to do so except when under high pressure due to ammo sustain. The small hitbox and low cleave made it a high skill precision gun. On Huntsmen it required headshots to proc Thrill of the Hunt to be effective. Now?
It’s just lmb spam into every elite you see. Only every third or fourth shot needs to be a headshot. In the hands of a half decent Huntsmen it’s actually oppressive on Cata.
I know you like the Greatsword changes but kiting elites feels worse to me now. Before, with the slow down I could carefully bait a bunch of attacks into the same spot and then use its decent dodge range + Stand Clear on Merc to dodge away, making efficient use of a small amount of space for kiting. Now I just magnetise running attacks to my own body or rebind the walk key which I personally find to be hilarious and very difficult to use.
Compare that to how you handled the Halberd, which imo brought the heavy stab back into relevancy for the moveset, increased its complexity and quirkiness and gave Merc/FK a anti monster option that has decent armour damage. I sometimes even mess up the moveset and accidentally chain into the heavy sweep when I want the heavy stab, which is good because it means it still feels a clunky weapon (compared to something like the Greatsword) while still being better than it was before.
I don’t quite understand Fatshark’s approach to balancing. I still don’t get why Volley got nerfed. Seemed like populism/reactionism at the time.
Regarding the Mastercrafted Pistol:
- I don’t know the lore for this weapon, but I always got the impression that dwarf made weapons were reliable and more accurate than their human counterparts. Alt fire should be inaccurate but I don’t see why the left click should be.
- Bringing its dodge count down to 6 is appropriate.
- Charge time is cool, but it doesn’t need to be that slow. It can be mitigated with attack speed but on a ranged build that’s fairly limiting. Often don’t want to take attack speed on Charm because of breakpoints, so a faster base charge would be good, just not without removing it.
- Damage drop off is quite high. Seems comparable to BoP dropoff which is again weird to me because BoP is a human made weapon. So lessen dropoff.
- And then bringing its damage down so it requires properties to bodyshot is fair.
I think the above changes would make it a versatile weapon for Engineer that he can use to quickly take out something like a group of berserkers w̶i̶t̶h̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶r̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶W̶u̶t̶e̶l̶g̶i̶ ̶s̶t̶e̶a̶l̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ ̶k̶i̶l̶l̶s̶ without having to rely on others for long range targets (should be more fun too I hope).
Edit: And more interesting talents based on his steam powered arm would be interesting as you highlighted. The current one is pretty epic. He also needs better ammo sustain to be less one trick.
Edit 2: Really if anything I’m more disappointed with Fatshark at this point. They didn’t take the BBB changes to creative heights despite being the developers of V2 themselves.
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On the BBB
yeah that’s my bad actually, I honestly wasn’t finished with running through ideas for tweaking that weapon by the time it got picked up for beta and the end result is, yeah definitely better than what it was and people like it which is cool but I don’t care much for it personally lol. Also feel like the mace and shield buffs have rendered the Axe and Sword shield variants kinda irrelevant? dunno.
yeah balance for huntsman was something we were kinda concerned about but figured there’s no way it’ll be more insane than blunderbuss and hopefully wouldn’t blow longbow out of the water. Overall though the original handgun I didn’t find anywhere near as satisfying I often felt kinda like I was just taking it because it was the only sniping tool available to Merc/FK at the time.
100% true, I myself actually gave into it for a while but after running all the numbers again…yeah nah the reaction to it was definitely overblown
Yeah won’t lie I’m starting to feel like the “outcast” part of the engineer is that he got fired for producing umgak pistols. Surely a dwarf engineer would have the good sense to rifle his pistols. Tbh pretty much 100% on board with your ideas for the pistol. Less jank but also less extreme power.
yeah instead we got…cloak of mist
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I can agree that the MP is OP.
I can agree with it doing handgun levels of damage just because it’s supposed to be a masterwork dwarven gun. Only for it’s primary charged shot though. It should definitely have more drop off than the handgun. Also, I definitely think they should change the damage for the alt fire. I think a decent balance would be reduced spread for something like 25% or 50% less damage.
In relation to the gun charging; I think keeping it where it is would be a decent balance to the alt fire changes I just mentioned. I do think that one tweak they could make is in relation to the charge behavior. I think it should function more like a bow. So you click and hold to charge the shot and then release to fire.
I don’t know, I’m just a filthy Legend casual brainstorming because I’m bored.
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This is tangential to the balance of MW Pistol sorry but has anybody else noticed you seem to make a much louder sound when landing from a jump or fall with it out? Was jumping around the keep and noticed with melee out it was the usual fairly quiet landing sound, but with the pistol out it was much louder. Was Engi at the time haven’t tested to confirm what variables exactly were causing it.
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BBB Reply
Fatshark should’ve improved upon and expanded the changes. It would have been much easier and quicker for them to do it surely, so I wouldn’t blame yourself.
Funnily enough there are still players that think Bluntsmen is weak, which is false.
It’s definitely a lot easier to use than the Longbow. Outside of monsters and massed Chaos Warriors it seems like the better sniping weapon as well. I think the ammo and cleave buff may have been enough for Merc and FK (the reload speed is the main thing that made it better on Huntsmen when it was already fine on HS I believe).
I also believed it was too strong until Sleazy convinced me otherwise. As he said, it was just people not being used to BH having an effect outside of monsters/elites.
A quick versatile weapon that deals with elites in a pinch, is reasonably good at special sniping and compliments the horde clear of his ultimate while being supported by the elite and specifically CW killing ability of the Cog Hammer, with a few more defensive elements thrown into his tree, a way to reliably get bombs and one more option for ammo sustain and we’ll have a career that is more than just turret Bardin.
I’m hoping Fatshark deliberately undertuned Engineer because of the initial reaction to GK (which was that he was op), so the next career they release will be ‘just right’.
You want crits? We got so many crits we’re giving them away for free! More crits than you can handle! Crits, crits and more crits. Come and get your crits. Press f for crits!
As if what Shade needed was more crits. Arguably wasn’t the weakest talent on that row either before the BBB.
Would definitely make aiming it more reliable.
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I’ve noticed a variety of different sound issues, yeah
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I would probably restrict Slayer from using Coghammer, doesn’t really make too much sense for a Slayer to use a weapon that’s clearly meant for an Engineer, while IB and RV make more sense. It’s also a bit too much on him as you’ve said.
Another thing is that the Coghammer is a straight upgrade from the pickaxe in every conceivable way - much better dodge, way faster attack speed, higher damage and DPS, and a better heavy attack that’s faster and equal to executioner (but also faster). It’s almost a better executioner, and what’s the point of the pickaxe now?
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yeah the current state of pickaxe makes me sad, wish we buffed it more tbh seeing the way things have gone
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Cog Hammer is pretty insane. It turns Slayer into GK but with speed in exchange for GK’s ult. A very good trade off, especially considering Merc is still a good option for Kruber regardless of team setup which is what GK is competing with. It’s great on Ironbreaker as well. Currently it’s okay on Engineer, mainly because he lacks thp on kill to synergise with the high horde clear on his ultimate, should be good enough on RV I imagine due to his stealth ult (would let him deal with CWs more easily).
Quick note about MP:
Since the Pistol has 99 dodges you can spam dodge to maintain mobility while crouching to negate the accuracy loss from moving. I guess this means Crouch Engineer is the new tech.
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