Concerns on engineer balance

First things first, I want to say congrats to all the coders/concept designer for making the Engineer class. This thread is in no way meant to belittle your work. However...

I have serious concerns that Engineers in their current form are overpowered. Reasons are as follows:

- Engineers have more pinpoint firepower than anybody else except Adren Masters' beam (which takes adren, unlike vehicles) with their turrets and tanks. Turrets are cool, and I like the idea, but they seem to waste enemies at horrendous rates.

- With Lightning sentinels, Engineers seem to have the best area damage of anyone except Weapons Masters' nuke (one use per wave) or Adren Masters' megablast maybe (huge adren use). An engineer can just stand there, and often still lead the scoreboards.

- Vehicle eject essentially gives engineers free lives. Ghost +Vehicle eject, plus my next point, gives engineeers great survivability, if they abuse it correctly.

- Armor regen further supplements engineer survivabilty. And even though the current lowish level engineers mostly don't have Armor Vamp, that will increase their survivabilty even further, especially with the aforementioned firepower. Also, no player has ever had 800-1000 HP, whereas every engineer in a tank does.

- Engineer link alt-fire heals so fast, I've seen engineers outhealing the damage of multiple monsters smacking their sentinel. I know that it should heal faster than regular link, but more than double is maybe overkill. IMO, the standard should be, that an Engineer can never outheal anything that a medic can't also outheal

Anyway, it's still a new class, I could be wrong, and these things may even already be being worked on, but these are my impressions. My apologies if I've offended anyone.

Without addressing what you've said - I'll leave that to one of the fine gentlemen (or lady!) who have worked on the class recently - please remember that the class is currently beta, with all the things that entails.

Really, it might even be alpha still, since we're considering adding more stuff soon. I'll leave it to one of the others to give you a detailed reply, if they see fit.

Well, I'm new here and I gotta say, cool server and nice people!

Anyways, just as an addition, the developers are thinking about putting in drones: http://disastrousconsequences.com/dcforum/posts/list/3144.page

If they put that in, it might get a little crazy with it attacking monsters. Usually, it's the medics that summons monsters, now its the engineers summoning drones. And the drones will actually follow the player around, so it's like a moving sentinel.

Just thought I could point that out.

It's all experimental at this point, however...

I created a level 250 engineer for testing, and thus far I can say, I can double or triple the score of by engineer with my 135 adrenaline master.

So, we're learning, we're tuning, and we're experimenting. We welcome feedback!

Strangely enough, I'm reminded of the F-Zero cars.

Junkies are the pink car and Engineers will probably end up being the yellow car.

If you don't get the reference, get off my lawn!

well i can say this ...as an engineer spawning mid game its crazy hard to live at lvl 30...now...when i hit lvlv 41 and lose my regen ...which i can never get back its gonna be alot harder to stay alive without those vehicles and now it seem turrents to jump into (ps lava skarj + enginneer = bleaaah)

but yeah when i logged on today to see lightning sentnals..i can say yeah they can score alot...but ..if they max out their engineeering skill to abotu 13 or so thou (like me..) which of course leaves little for shield regen, damge red, and helath bonus..( some go for the damage bonus first too..)...so yeah enginneers can score only as logn as they are alive..and there goodies help em with that ......

at leats that my opinion now...i gotta get a more of a feel for the more recent turrents and lightning sentanals..(which thou they score good are veeeery fragile..) so yeah .great class

as is the sever as aalways..

...

As of right now I have a level 28 (only 22 pts into the lvl) engineer. I scored a couple points under 1300 earlier today. ( I have screenshots, shall edit post tomorrow and add them in.)

I don't know if they are overpowered, I still score much better with my weapons master, and once I get some more core skills with my LA character I'm sure I'll score better with that one as well.

As of right now I think the engineer class is going great, I know it will be very well tuned along with everything else. I, for 1, am very excited for the final product. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!!!!!

*edit* here's those screenshots

Something else to keep in mind, most engineers on the server right now are under level 40. The assist helps out quite a bit. Imagine being without ghost and regeneration. Granted, vehicles do help out quite a bit in terms of survivability, but it'll still be tough.

Good thread. It is important to get feedback.

It is possible that Lightning Sentinels are overpowered.

They are very useful for low-level players as they distract monsters. However, they are not really meant to be the kill high scorers. The normal sentinels are supposed to be better, but I think everyone thinks the lightning sentinel gives more kills. So, perhaps it needs toning down a bit.

Looking through the stats when I am on, I often see engineers with as many kills, if not more kills, from sentinels as from other weapons, turrets, vehicles combined. Usually the lightning sentinel is the main culprit, so perhaps this is another indication that it is a bit high.

Remember also that if an engineer has a couple of lightning sentinels, by the time the monster is killed by the engineer with a different weapon, the sentinels will have probably taken most of its health already. So the lightning sentinels are probably doing all their own kills and most of the other kills as well.

My suggestion would be to reduce the range of the lightning sentinel. At the moment, the range is 2000, which is the same as the lightning rod. To put this in context, the standard link gun has a beam range of 1100, miniguns have 10000 range, ad the lightning beam has a range of 3000.

Changing the range to 1500 would reduce the number of hits each monster gets as it closes in, and also reduce the total number of shots each lightning sentinel gives. It would still be useful for its defensive capabilities of distracting monsters up close, but wouldn't get so many kills.

yeah i noticed a buncch of those up i mean yes they do cost less but they still rack up some damage....but they are faairly fragile...so with reduce range and their breakage i think they wuld balance nicely..

...also some said they couldnt pick up lightning rod artifact...as i believe tis cus it we've got the lightning sentneals on our side ..am i right ?..

Just a note: I never said anything about engineer survival on foot. On foot they are just as vulnerable, if not more so, than other classes. And I'm fine with that.
My concern is that with eject, you could essentially never die if you just spawned another vehicle/turret after yours blew up. And another. And Another. The timer can't really touch vehicles' high health, regen, link healing, and soon to be vamp, except for titans. (EDIT: If that sentence confused you, it just meant that its easy to wait out the build timer in a vehicle/turret, unless you have titans on you.) So, with two sentienls surrounding you, and you, the engineer, sitting in a turret...I personallly found it easier to survive than either my medic @ level 39, my medic currently, my adren at level 39, or my adren currently.
And I'm guessing the reason we see some skilled player outscoring Engineers, is that other players go around and LOOK for kills. Engineers camp in their "fort", and wait for things to comes to them.
Anyway, I made this post after observing other engineers ingame, observing engineers playing whilst I was not playing (mulitiple gamers in my house) and playing an engineer. It just seemed too easy when you did it right (meaning setting up in a nice flat area with your two sentinels surrounding your turret.)
BTW, two points of advice to engineers: Buy vehicle eject if you haven't, and build your turret before your sentinels if you join in after wave 6. Don't stay on foot where you're squishy, hop in a turret.

hmm interesting...well actually i find sometimes that vehicle eject (or at least used to.) not work occasionally..though ive only seena a titan atck and kill me or other with vehicle eject (melee or rock same result..) true the engineers have some serious fire power but at wave 12....whooaaaa it just goes straight down hill (null lords on foot= death)

ps not dissing wave 12 and beyond..just saying with respect dat its hard to beat....period...can be in tank hellbender hiding w/e...its still crazy sweet/hard..

Vehicle Eject works on cooldown, based on what level you have. Level 1: 120 seconds, then 60, 40, 30.
BTW, Lightning sentinels may have been the reason I thought turrets were wasting things at "horrendous rates". Comparing just the raw turret to weapons masters' stuff, it might not be so bad. Still, I have no WS or DB, whereas weapons masters do, and last time I checked, those stats affect vehicles.
But I continue to stand by my other points.

Hi-

IMO: The new engineer class "alters" the gameplay instead of "meshing" with it. It feels like On-Slaught on every map with vehicles and turrets clogging-up the smaller maps.

In other words--the Engineer Class--feels like a new Game Style such as DM, CTF, ONS......instead of a mod.

As far as surviving goes, 1 on 1 with engineer is really hard.

But I agree it is too powerfull, especially for low level players. Sentinels are available very soon, for a very low cost.
I just started my eng TODAY and alredy got over 1000 score TWICE. I'm only lvl 20ish. I surely didn't get that much with my WM at twice the level. The whole tactic: plant two sentinels, camp and heal them. I got around 170 sentinel kills and we didn't even finish the game. Two sentinels and a link turret nearby seems a good tactic also (you can heal them with the turret and the turret makes massive damage too)

I also don't like vehicles at all. I find them disturbing as a non-eng, and I find them useless as an engineer. The amount of stuff one single engineer can deploy through the map is huge. It fills smaller to medium maps too much, esp. when there are >2 engineers around. Today two engineers completely sealed some passages with those blocks (hey, one alone can deploy 20).

Some said that light sentinel is too powerfull. I'd have to disagree. It dies very quickly and makes tiny damage. I had a normal and light sentinel next to each other and the normal made at least 4-times more kills than the light (F3). So if there is a sentinel too powerfull, its the normal one (esp. in tight maps).

I'd really back off on the amount of stuff one engineer can have at once. I'd also rather have one good sentinel than two medium. It would be less disturbing for other players too with less stuff around. Or a kind of sentinel which does not make damage, but only slows/freezes/nulls the monster.

That was long... Sorry.