User:Braveangel/Sandbox

The Engineer is geared towards providing battlefield control. Its unique power, Combat Drone, is very useful in uprooting enemies behind covers and providing distraction against most enemies. AI Hacking can make synthetic enemies fight for you. This way, the battle evolution is yours to command. Engineers are very strong against synthetics and shielded opponents. The Combat Drone provides damage against shields while Overload is the anti-synthetics, anti-shield power. Against armored enemies, Engineers provide support fire with Incinerate. If evolved to Attack Drone, the drones can also provide damage against armor. Another crowd-control power possessed by the Engineer is Cryo Blast. It is against biotic barrier that the Engineers can provide no satisfactory reply, save for the Attack Drone power evolution.

Combat Drone
This is the Engineers’ signature power, and arguably the most useful one. Used by Shepard, this power has a ridiculously short cooldown time, making it indispensable at all time. The drones can be targeted to any particular enemy and they will spawn next to the target. Without a target, the drone spawns next to the Engineer and will drift towards the nearest enemy. Any adversary locked up by a drone will switch target immediately to the drone, entirely ignoring the player & co.

This is the power that enables Engineers to control the battlefield. Drones will be able to lock at least one enemy at all time. Use this to your tactical advantage. You may use this to prevent strong enemies advancing to your position, or to keep them at bay while you dispatch all other weaker enemies. Melee enemies such as husks will crowd around it, making them more vulnerable to the Incineration Blast’s area effect. The only notable enemies immune to the distraction effect of the drones are Praetorian and the Final Boss.

Explosive Drone is generally the more useful evolution of this power, particularly if it's used against strong enemies. Strong enemies will often destroy the drone quickly, making the damage output from repeated exploding drones better than that from the Attack Drone. The additional shock provided by exploding drones also helps incapacitate enemies for a short duration. Duly note that the exploding drones damage all kinds of protection.

Incinerate
Incinerate is effective against armor and unprotected organic enemies, and also permanently stops regeneration when it hits an unprotected organic. It also makes affected targets panic for a few seconds, causes them to stop shooting and force them out of cover, or knock them to the ground. When used by the player, Incinerate can be arced around cover, making it possible to finish off an enemy that has retreated behind cover with a well-aimed blast. Please note that it is more difficult to arc a tech power than a biotic power. Learn and aim the shot carefully.

Both Heavy Incinerate and Incineration Blast are useful evolutions. However, Incineration Blast may be slight advantage for its area effect. Even on higher difficulty levels, where enemies have armor, it is usually thin and Incineration Blast can eat through them easily. Furthermore, the splash damage from the Blast can affect other enemies with shield or biotic barrier, though with a severely weakened effect. Incineration Blast is particularly useful against groups of husks, especially where you can make them crowd around the Drones. The Heavy variant loses its effectiveness in higher difficulties because when an enemy has a strong armor, it would be too thick to penetrate with a single shot—while using it on weakly protected enemies would feel like an overkill.

Overload
This is the Engineer's primary counter to shields and unprotected synthetics. Rank 2 of Overload is also required to unlock Incinerate. This power hits its target instantly and cannot be arced around cover. Overload is also capable of detonating explosive crates and will make unprotected enemies with flamethrowers explode instantly.

Heavy Overload is generally a more useful evolution than Area Overload, especially in higher difficulty levels with the more urgent need to quickly strip enemies of their shield. The Heavy variant will nullify the shield of most enemies with only one shot. Heavy Overload is also a better choice for use with AI Hacking, as its smaller area of effect is less likely to include a hacked enemy.

Cryo Blast
Cyro Blast is useful in lower difficulty levels, because it stops enemies dead on their track and make them vulnerable to shattering attack for an instant kill. However, on Hardcore and Insanity, Cyro Blast loses its usefulness due to the fact that most enemies are protected. This power is also handicapped by the fact that frozen enemies may fall behind covers, and cannot be attacked further. Like Incinerate, Cryo Blast can be arced around cover; however, this property is less useful with Cryo Blast, since the frozen enemy will remain inaccessible behind cover.

On lower difficulty levels, Full Cryo Blast is probably the more useful evolution, as a single frozen enemy will probably not survive even its shorter duration. On Hardcore or Insanity, since there are many fewer opportunities to use this power, it is probably best to take only a single rank, or possibly two to unlock AI Hacking; it is a good idea to take a single rank in it early, though, since freezing a charging enemy can be a life saver. However, given the effectiveness of Drones in distracting enemies, you may prefer to use drones to prevent enemies from charging instead of freezing a charging enemy. It is also worth noting that even a rank 1 Cryo Blast is a one-hit-kill against husks (after dropping their defences on higher difficulties) which is very useful specially on the mission on the Derelict Reaper, Abandoned Mine and (to a lesser extent) Horizon.

AI Hacking
AI Hacking is a highly situational skill -- useful against synthetic enemies, but useless against organics. It can be used in two distinct ways: at rank 1 it is primarily useful to stop an enemy from attacking you and cause its former allies to turn on it; while at the highest ranks the hacked enemy becomes a useful ally in its own right. Since the Engineer has several other useful powers contending for squad points, plus a possible bonus power, AI Hacking is best used in the first role, with only a single point invested.

Tech Mastery
The Engineer's passive class power provides not only the usual bonuses to health, power cooldown time, and Paragon/Renegade score, but also a reduction in the amount of resources needed for research projects of up to 25%. If you find planet scanning tedious, you should maximize this as quickly as possible. For an Engineer specializing in Incinerate and Overload, Demolisher is the better evolution of this power because of its damage boost; for a Cryo Blast/AI Hacking specialist, Mechanic may be better since both of these powers will benefit from the duration boost but cannot benefit from Demolisher's damage boost.

Notable Bonus Powers
While the Engineer is a powerful class even with its basic power set, it suffers from a few significant weaknesses:


 * Low weapon damage output
 * No powers useful against biotic barriers
 * No defensive powers

These weaknesses can be addressed with bonus powers. There are two additional considerations to keep in mind with bonus powers, though. The first is that the Engineer’ power tree is a squad point hog. With a large number of useful powers, two of which have other powers as prerequisites, putting squad points into a bonus power will make some character builds difficult or impossible. The second is that most of the Engineer's existing class powers are tech powers, which means that any bonus power must compete with the class powers for cooldown time.

Ammo Powers
Ammo powers are particularly useful to an Engineer since most of this class' powers have a long cooldown; while Ammo Powers last until deactivated (usually by changing weapon at the Armory) or supplanted with another ammo power. Ammo powers can act like a passive power once activated. Amongst the Ammo Powers, Warp Ammo is arguably the best choice for Engineers. This power brings the capabilities to deal with enemies with biotic barrier, the one area which Engineers are severely handicapped. This power provides lower bonus overall, but being the only ammo power that provides bonus against barrier, this ammo power is highly recommended.

If you prefer to have your squad-mates deal with biotic barrier, you may pick other Ammo Powers. Among those, Armor Piercing Ammo provides the highest bonus against armor and health. This might be the second best choice for Engineers, competing closely with Disruptor Ammo. The Disruptor Ammo loses just because Engineers have so many ways to deal with synthetics and shield, having another power that focuses on disabling shield seems overkill. The Shredder Ammo is highly situational for it deals only with health and effective only on organics. However, given the fact that most of the enemies are organics, this Ammo Power could be quite useful in some situations.

Defensive Powers
A shield boost, provided by Geth Shield Boost, Barrier, or Fortification, is helpful to overcome the Engineer's lack of defensive powers and improve survivability in combat. All three provide shield boosts, but only Geth Shield Boost is considered a Tech Power. As such it benefits from the tech upgrades in line with the rest of the Engineer's powers. Furthermore, its Improved Geth Shield Boost evolution grants a 10% weapon damage boost in addition to the boost to shields.

Other Powers
As stated above, Engineer already has a clogged power tree. Having another power competing for squad points and cooldown time is generally undesirable. However, you could allay this problem by having another squad mate with a Squad Ammo Power can free you from having to put points into Ammo Power and enables you to pick up other powers instead.

Reave is probably the best option for bonus power for it provides a means to deal with biotic barrier. Reave have a damage potential on par with Warp, with an additional benefits of health-drain effect and incapacitating unprotected enemies. Reave envelops the target with biotic fields, making them vulnerable to Warp Ammo enhanced bullets.

Dominate is also an interesting choice for a bonus power. With the combination of AI Hacking and Dominate, an Engineer can mind-control almost any enemy in the game, highlighting the battlefield control role that the class is already very capable of. It is also useful even at low ranks, freeing up squad points for other powers.

If you have the Kasumi: Stealing Memory DLC, you may consider Flashbang Grenade as your bonus power. This power, though only deals meager damage, is effective against all kinds of protection, incapacitates enemies within a huge radius (fully upgraded, this power gives you the biggest radius of all powers), jams enemies’ omni tools, and overheat their weapons. Those benefits effectively make this power one of the most effective battlefield control available to any class.

Squad Members and Useful Abilities
Due to the Engineer's difficulty in dealing with barriers, companions with maximized Warp like Miranda or Thane will be very valuable assets; once Samara is loyal, her Reave power can serve the same purpose. Jack can also be a useful choice with her Warp Ammo, especially evolved to Squad Warp Ammo.

An Engineer specializing in Cryo Blast may prefer Grunt because he often charges nearby enemies with his melee attack, which can easily shatter them if they are frozen. Grunt's high health, armor and regenerative abilities allow him to be the team's tank, as well as an effective damage dealer with his Incendiary Ammo. Grunt's M-300 Claymore heavy shotgun is probably a waste of platinum, as he can be roughly equally effective with the M-22 Eviscerator; his Krogan Vitality upgrades, on the other hand, are worthwhile.

If Grunt's charge isn't called for, Jacob is also a good tank and close combat specialist once he becomes loyal and gains Barrier; Grunt is generally a better choice than Jacob, but both of them together make a good squad on extremely combat-intensive missions such as the acquisition of the Reaper IFF.

Tech specialist squad-mates are generally redundant and should not be picked outside of specific tech-oriented missions where synthetics will be the main opponent. However, the ability to swarm enemies with three combat drones at once can be amusing, even if it is not necessarily an effective tactic. Legion can also be very useful in combat after its loyalty mission, with its Geth Shield Boost and its M-98 Widow sniper rifle, and Garrus is an excellent choice for providing both firepower and an extra Overload on missions with many shielded opponents.

Weapons and Upgrades
Naturally, an Engineer's first priority for upgrades should be Tech Damage. If you have the Kasumi DLC, completing Kasumi's loyalty mission should be an early priority, both for the Tech Damage upgrade found there and for the M-12 Locust submachine gun. Since most of the Engineer's powers have a long cooldown, getting three Tech Damage upgrades in order to unlock the tech cooldown reduction upgrade is particularly important.

Since an Engineer's light weapons will be restricted to Heavy Pistols and Submachine Guns for much of the game, it is important to also prioritize upgrades for these weapons, at least with a more combat-oriented style of play. In particular, the submachine gun will be the Engineer's primary weapon in most situations; given this, it is important to acquire a good weapon such as the M-9 Tempest or the M-12 Locust as soon as possible. Fortunately, both of these submachine guns are found on missions that are well-suited to an Engineer's skill set.

For Engineers, both Tempest and Locust are viable weapons. The Tempest has high damage output against biotic barrier, very useful for an Engineer. However, its accuracy is wanting. The Locust, on the other hand, has a very high accuracy but lacks the bonus against barrier. Ultimately, your choice will depend on the deftness of your hands and your overall tactical approach.

When the time comes to choose a bonus weapon type, Sniper Rifles are probably the best choice, since the Engineer's powers already favor keeping at a distance from the enemy. Because Engineers do not have a time dilation ability like Infiltrators or Soldiers, they will miss more often, making the M-97 Viper the best choice of sniper rifle due to its higher magazine capacity. Assault Rifles are also a good choice, in which case the M-15 Vindicator is probably the best choice due to its high accuracy and damage output; the other assault rifles are functionally very similar to submachine guns, to which the Engineer already has access. Shotgun is a very interesting choice. Given that the Engineer has Combat Drone and Cryo Blast to keep the enemy distracted/locked, if used prudently, shotguns can be very rewarding. But this requires a very tactical play-style, so it is generally not advised.

While an Engineer will often work with biotic squad-mates, biotic upgrades are less important than tech and weapon upgrades. Spend your credit elsewhere, although if Element Zero is plentiful, there's no reason not to spend it on biotic research projects.