Risk of Rain Vanilla Engineer
The Engineer has a bit of an odd unlock: repair 40 Drones total. Re-repairing the same Drone does, in fact, count as an additional step in that progress, amusingly. It's odd since the Engineer isn't really that Drone-biased of a class himself. It's sort of thematically coherent I guess...
Anyway, the Engineer's four moves are...
Tri-nadeLaunches three grenades that fly forward and downward and bounce along terrain and detonate after bouncing 4 times or upon impact with an enemy. Each grenade does 80% base damage in a small splash radius. No cooldown.
Bounding Mine
Bounding MinePlaces a mine that will, upon an enemy being in its blast radius, bounce into the air and explode in a modest area for 300% base damage. The Engineer can store up to 15 Bounding Mines at a time, and their 'cooldown' is 6 seconds; this is the interval of time between Bounding Mines being put into storage. Thus, it takes a minute and a half for the Engineer to go from no Bounding Mines to full.
Thermal Harpoon
Thermal HarpoonFires four homing missiles into the air that, after a brief delay, seek out a target to inflict 250% base damage per harpoon. The Engineer cannot move or use other skills until a little after all four harpoons have been launched, though if he's in the air his momentum will be retained and he can potentially jump again or use a Photon Jetpack if he has Hopoo Feathers or a Photon Jetpack. 5 second cooldown.
Auto-Turret
Auto-TurretSets an immobile turret that autonomously fires on enemies in bursts of 3 shots that do 100% base damage per shot, approximately one burst per second. The Auto-Turret is treated by the AI with the same targeting priority as a player character, and thus Auto-Turrets will frequently draw attention away from the Engineer. Auto-Turrets last up to 30 seconds, or until destroyed. As with Bounding Mines, the Engineer can store multiple copies, up to 2 total, and their cooldown of 40 seconds is the interval between turrets being generated, for a total of 80 seconds to go from having dropped both back-to-back to having two in storage again.
And I yet again got the Ancient Scepter, so it changes Auto-Turret to...
Auto-Turret Mk. 2
And I yet again got the Ancient Scepter, so it changes Auto-Turret to...
Auto-Turret Mk. 2As per Auto-Turret, but the Engineer can store a total of 3 Auto-Turrets. Also, the turrets have a differently-colored graphic. Naturally, this means going from dropping them all to full takes two entire minutes.
The Engineer has probably the most underwhelming Ancient Scepter modification...
Note that both Bounding Mines and Auto-Turrets actual cooldown is a split-second. You can drop mines fast by just holding the button down, and Auto-Turrets aren't much slower to be set down. Also note that you can drop mines and set turrets without ceasing moving for even a moment, like the Huntress' attack behavior. Also note that Bounding Mines and Auto-Turrets will fall -actually fall in the case of Bounding Mines- to the closest valid ground below you if you're in midair when you use them. Outside of... whatever resulted in the floating turret when I was fighting Providence, you can't actually have floating mines and turrets. And, lastly, there's a brief delay before a Bounding Mine actually detonates, which can allow enemies to potentially activate a Bounding Mine and yet not get caught in the explosion.
The Engineer is a pretty weird class, but while the game draws your attention to Auto-Turrets and Bounding Mines, it's really much more Tri-nade and Thermal Harpoon that set the Engineer apart from other classes. Tri-nade has decent total damage, albeit a poor fire rate -tied with the Enforcer's shotgun and a button-mashing Sniper, with only one other class that has a worse basic attack rate discounting the Sniper's desire to pursue perfect reloads, and both it and the Enforcer can speed up their basic attack rates- and critically it travels down. In conjunction with Thermal Harpoon's extremely generous behavior, the Engineer is by far the best class at fighting from relative safety, and does surprisingly solid damage.
Auto-Turrets, meanwhile, primarily serve to act as distractions and modest damage support -the distraction part contributing to the Engineer's ability to fight in relative safety- where Bounding Mines are the Engineer's primary source of burst DPS. If you want something dead as fast as possible, just dump all fifteen mines onto it; this can be done in under 5 seconds -there's an unlock that requires you detonate all your mines in under 5 seconds and can absolutely be done by simply holding down the button in the middle of enemies- and will be doing 4500% damage in splash form. That's stronger than even a perfect-reload fully-charged Steady Aim, albeit before a crit -and it's not that far behind one benefiting from a crit. And then the splash damage doesn't experience damage drop-off for hitting multiple targets, albeit said splash is much more narrow in its strike zone.
Auto-Turrets and Bounding Mines do give the Engineer a unique mid-long-term focus; is it worth burning more than a handful of mines on this fight? Is there any point to setting an Auto-Turret down, or is it just going to be a waste with a noticeable opportunity cost? Most classes don't need to plan beyond 10 or so seconds into the future as far as their actual move usage. When playing the Engineer, you can't be reacting to moderate threats by panicking and papering them with mines; you need to be reserving them for actual problem situations. Even the Bandit -who has unusually long cooldowns overall, relying on Lights Out to make them tolerable- can be pretty casual about breaking out the big guns for even middling threats like elite Lemurians.
The Engineer also has a lot of technical oddities as far as item interactions. Heaven Cracker will, when it triggers, prevent Tri-nade from actually releasing grenades. (This applies to CHEF as well, mind, but CHEF doesn't have nearly as many such wonky things as the Engineer) Many on-hit effects like freezing have erratic or weird behavior with Tri-nade and/or Thermal Harpoon; you might have noticed that I kept getting Telescopic Scope triggers that didn't actually do anything. And on a non-technical level, the Engineer tends to get a lot less use out of eg mortars, since he's liable to not be anywhere near enemies when triggering it.
The Engineer also has some odd benefits from mobility enhancers and attack rate enhancers. Thermal Harpoon's 'you have no control' period is shortened by attack speed enhancers; this applies to plenty of other classes, such as Lights Out coming out faster, but Thermal Harpoon eats up so much time that it's a lot more meaningfully important, since just hopping into the air isn't good enough to maintain more-or-less continuous movement while firing. By a similar token, Hopoo Feathers or other 'stay in the air longer' effects make it a lot easier to use Thermal Harpoon on the move.
This is all important, because the Engineer's main flaw is that he's slow. Unlike most classes, he has no mobility enhancers, and in fact both of his primary attacking actions immobilize him for a noticeable period. While Tri-nade hits decently hard and has splash damage, the splash is sufficiently small that the Engineer usually struggles to cut through large mobs in a timely manner without item support, and against single big targets Thermal Harpoon is good but still fairly slow. Mines can be used to eg dramatically hurry up the deaths of the teleporter-generated boss and a good chunk of the enemies that usually spawn in shortly after it, but you can't lean on mines on a continuous basis for that kind of burst damage.
Oddly, while the Engineer is slow, his actual fighting style is surprisingly mobile. Setting Mines and Turrets doesn't impede your motion any, and even with no jump enhancers jumping and firing Tri-nade can more or less completely avoid being momentarily immobilized by it. And you should be doing hops with Tri-nade just because it extends its range! It's only Thermal Harpoon that demands support to get around that, but once you have that support Thermal Harpoon enhances this mobile fighting style by not caring about relative location; you don't need to move to anywhere in particular to hit things with Thermal Harpoon. Just fire it and let the homing handle the rest. The Huntress is actually the only class that's more combat-mobile than the Engineer, weirdly enough!
This particular run ended up with an unusual pace of enemies, with nearly nothing spawning for a while until several elites kicked in, and I had a surprisingly low number of Drone wrecks generate and so never got the kind of firepower some of my non-Engineer runs have gotten in these recordings, but it's still decently representative of how the Engineer's speed issues can be a problem. I spent the first 20 or so minutes worryingly behind the curve, and even once I stopped worrying the run was actually doomed I was still struggling to kill things in a timely manner. I was only rarely in danger from whatever was around me, but I increasingly blew off trying to kill various enemies, not wanting to get into the trap of constantly fighting enemies because you're killing them too slow to get a period of silence.
The Engineer isn't my favorite class, but I like how they're very successfully designed as a relatively weird class without breaking the game or being broken by it, both of which are problems quite common to game attempts to make weird classes/units/whatever.
The Engineer has probably the most underwhelming Ancient Scepter modification...
Note that both Bounding Mines and Auto-Turrets actual cooldown is a split-second. You can drop mines fast by just holding the button down, and Auto-Turrets aren't much slower to be set down. Also note that you can drop mines and set turrets without ceasing moving for even a moment, like the Huntress' attack behavior. Also note that Bounding Mines and Auto-Turrets will fall -actually fall in the case of Bounding Mines- to the closest valid ground below you if you're in midair when you use them. Outside of... whatever resulted in the floating turret when I was fighting Providence, you can't actually have floating mines and turrets. And, lastly, there's a brief delay before a Bounding Mine actually detonates, which can allow enemies to potentially activate a Bounding Mine and yet not get caught in the explosion.
The Engineer is a pretty weird class, but while the game draws your attention to Auto-Turrets and Bounding Mines, it's really much more Tri-nade and Thermal Harpoon that set the Engineer apart from other classes. Tri-nade has decent total damage, albeit a poor fire rate -tied with the Enforcer's shotgun and a button-mashing Sniper, with only one other class that has a worse basic attack rate discounting the Sniper's desire to pursue perfect reloads, and both it and the Enforcer can speed up their basic attack rates- and critically it travels down. In conjunction with Thermal Harpoon's extremely generous behavior, the Engineer is by far the best class at fighting from relative safety, and does surprisingly solid damage.
Auto-Turrets, meanwhile, primarily serve to act as distractions and modest damage support -the distraction part contributing to the Engineer's ability to fight in relative safety- where Bounding Mines are the Engineer's primary source of burst DPS. If you want something dead as fast as possible, just dump all fifteen mines onto it; this can be done in under 5 seconds -there's an unlock that requires you detonate all your mines in under 5 seconds and can absolutely be done by simply holding down the button in the middle of enemies- and will be doing 4500% damage in splash form. That's stronger than even a perfect-reload fully-charged Steady Aim, albeit before a crit -and it's not that far behind one benefiting from a crit. And then the splash damage doesn't experience damage drop-off for hitting multiple targets, albeit said splash is much more narrow in its strike zone.
Auto-Turrets and Bounding Mines do give the Engineer a unique mid-long-term focus; is it worth burning more than a handful of mines on this fight? Is there any point to setting an Auto-Turret down, or is it just going to be a waste with a noticeable opportunity cost? Most classes don't need to plan beyond 10 or so seconds into the future as far as their actual move usage. When playing the Engineer, you can't be reacting to moderate threats by panicking and papering them with mines; you need to be reserving them for actual problem situations. Even the Bandit -who has unusually long cooldowns overall, relying on Lights Out to make them tolerable- can be pretty casual about breaking out the big guns for even middling threats like elite Lemurians.
The Engineer also has a lot of technical oddities as far as item interactions. Heaven Cracker will, when it triggers, prevent Tri-nade from actually releasing grenades. (This applies to CHEF as well, mind, but CHEF doesn't have nearly as many such wonky things as the Engineer) Many on-hit effects like freezing have erratic or weird behavior with Tri-nade and/or Thermal Harpoon; you might have noticed that I kept getting Telescopic Scope triggers that didn't actually do anything. And on a non-technical level, the Engineer tends to get a lot less use out of eg mortars, since he's liable to not be anywhere near enemies when triggering it.
The Engineer also has some odd benefits from mobility enhancers and attack rate enhancers. Thermal Harpoon's 'you have no control' period is shortened by attack speed enhancers; this applies to plenty of other classes, such as Lights Out coming out faster, but Thermal Harpoon eats up so much time that it's a lot more meaningfully important, since just hopping into the air isn't good enough to maintain more-or-less continuous movement while firing. By a similar token, Hopoo Feathers or other 'stay in the air longer' effects make it a lot easier to use Thermal Harpoon on the move.
This is all important, because the Engineer's main flaw is that he's slow. Unlike most classes, he has no mobility enhancers, and in fact both of his primary attacking actions immobilize him for a noticeable period. While Tri-nade hits decently hard and has splash damage, the splash is sufficiently small that the Engineer usually struggles to cut through large mobs in a timely manner without item support, and against single big targets Thermal Harpoon is good but still fairly slow. Mines can be used to eg dramatically hurry up the deaths of the teleporter-generated boss and a good chunk of the enemies that usually spawn in shortly after it, but you can't lean on mines on a continuous basis for that kind of burst damage.
Oddly, while the Engineer is slow, his actual fighting style is surprisingly mobile. Setting Mines and Turrets doesn't impede your motion any, and even with no jump enhancers jumping and firing Tri-nade can more or less completely avoid being momentarily immobilized by it. And you should be doing hops with Tri-nade just because it extends its range! It's only Thermal Harpoon that demands support to get around that, but once you have that support Thermal Harpoon enhances this mobile fighting style by not caring about relative location; you don't need to move to anywhere in particular to hit things with Thermal Harpoon. Just fire it and let the homing handle the rest. The Huntress is actually the only class that's more combat-mobile than the Engineer, weirdly enough!
This particular run ended up with an unusual pace of enemies, with nearly nothing spawning for a while until several elites kicked in, and I had a surprisingly low number of Drone wrecks generate and so never got the kind of firepower some of my non-Engineer runs have gotten in these recordings, but it's still decently representative of how the Engineer's speed issues can be a problem. I spent the first 20 or so minutes worryingly behind the curve, and even once I stopped worrying the run was actually doomed I was still struggling to kill things in a timely manner. I was only rarely in danger from whatever was around me, but I increasingly blew off trying to kill various enemies, not wanting to get into the trap of constantly fighting enemies because you're killing them too slow to get a period of silence.
The Engineer isn't my favorite class, but I like how they're very successfully designed as a relatively weird class without breaking the game or being broken by it, both of which are problems quite common to game attempts to make weird classes/units/whatever.
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