Balancing the Engineer class :)

So, here's my first impressions...

1) I'd like to get this closer to the other classes where by level 100, you should be a fully functional engineer, with good distribution of skills.
2) By level 150, you should have all the engineer skills, and be working on ancillary skills. (Right now you have to be level 250 to buy everything)
3) I think that maybe the vehicle health bonus should be "Capped" at a much lower level than they currently are.
4) Remove All <whatevers> seems to cause the server to pause. Maybe we should just do away with the remove alls...
5) I think there needs to be a cap on the number of turrets and vehicles you can summon at the same time.
6) I removed the Ion tank and Leviathian... just too powerful.
7) I think the link turret is too good. (And doesn't seem to take the weapon speed) Either less health or less damage..

I think that there should be a lifespan on vehicles and turrets, set based upon some skill, but have them expire after a couple minutes...

Anyway, there's my musings for now.

3) Vehicle health bonus currently goes up to 300%. It should really only go up to 100%, I think, maybe even less. Mantas with 1200 HP and Goliaths with 3500ish(?) HP are flippin' scary.

5) There appears to be such a cap. 3 turrets definitely, regardless of how many points you have available.

7) The link turrets are way, WAY too good. I don't remember the map name, but it was one where I found a spot where I could set up a turret that had a view of about 80% of the map. I put 3 link turrets there and basically didn't do anything for 16 waves and scored over 1800.

Point usage and strength wise, you might want to consider dropping the cap on vehicle/turret points down from 20, to say 15 or less.

Monsters should target sentinels more often, overall, as well. As an example, Sparky had a moment on CTF-Grassyknoll where he wasn't shooting at the monsters and two turrets were blasting away, yet the monsters went after him.

Titans seem to be the sentinel killers.

Manned turrets are not affected.

My impression is the sentinels are not targeted at all, and are only hit by accident.

We've disabled all turrets for now, because most of them are way overpowered.

Other musings:

- What about a "Destroy Last Summoned ____"
- The points bar "filling" up, when it worked, made it hard to read the numbers. I suggest ditching the green filling.
- Let's discuss how many vehicles, etc. you are allowed to summon at once.
- Just as a side note, the anti-camper will have to be upgraded. I had several experiences where I received the out-of-bounds warning while flying above the map in a vehicle.

Overall, I have to say the engineer is super cool. I'm particularly impressed that you got something similar to the vehicle translauncher to work. Nice job.

I agree the ConstructionHealthBonus going up to 300% is too high. Instead of +30% for 10 levels, we could try it at +10% for 10 levels.

Engineer Points bar. I must admit I don't like it either. I took the Monster one, and adapted it to show 3 sets of points, but it is a bit confused. Let's have a rethink.

The spawning limits should be currently at 3 turrets (including sentinels), 2 vehicles and 1 building. Perhaps we need to have sentinels separate, and limited to 1

I think the sentinels are too powerful. I was going to produce a low-power one based on the lightning rod (suggestion by Mystic), but didn't get the graphics done in time. But I think we need to take down the damage and health on all of them, and perhaps make the aim worse. Note the health is configurable in the ini.

If we knock down the starting health, and limit the number of sentinels, and lower the effect of ConstructionHealthBonus, it should be a bit better

Monsters targeting sentinels. I think I set it so when the sentinel targets a monster, it also sets the monster to target the sentinel. However, that is just a one-off. Once the monster retargets on someone else, it will ignore the sentinel, until the sentinel again re-targets the monster (not just keeps on attacking it). We need to check how well this is working. I didn't want Monsters to totally target sentinels and ignore players.

Dropping the maximum number of points is a good idea, so you can't have 3 of the best

There is no visible difference between a link turret and a link sentinel, which I think needs fixing. Personally, I would drop the link sentinel and just leave the link turret

There was always going to be a balancing issue.

As a side note: the raptor should be changed to the invasion raptor so it can have the lock-on monster features.

The cicada should probably come out.

Shantara wrote:

As a side note: the raptor should be changed to the invasion raptor so it can have the lock-on monster features.

Moof wrote:

The cicada should probably come out.

Both get configured in the UT2004RPG.ini file.

So, what do we need to do before we can have another trial?

Shantara wrote:

My impression is the sentinels are not targeted at all, and are only hit by accident.

Sentinels are now targeted a lot more by monsters.

Also, Sentinels were getting ArmorVampire. I have stopped this to limit their lifespan.