Are engineer abilities purposefully made to be weak?

That's ok. We can tell you're pretty ignorant about the topic so we don't care what you say either.

Here's some things you may not care about...

The hardlight barrier is NOT cover.

It is PARTIAL cover. Treat it like full cover and you will have a bad time.

(again) your player model is affected by your aim. Aiming down lowers your head. With any elevation at all this will give you complete coverage. If on flat ground it will not fully protect but will help a lot.

You can also setup what is know as a "right angle peek" with the barrier. Your player head leans right when using ADS. Staying ducked at the left edge of your barrier will let you ADS without fully exposing your head.

You can also set the barrier on an elevated surface and not just the ground. This can allow FULL cover.

You can also stand on the thing. There are "double crates" all over the game and a hardlight barrier turns all of them into a "head glitch" style peek.

Try some of these...
hardlightbarriers-1.jpg (3268×3260) (discordapp.com)

Use with the umbrella is quite creative.
Use as a stepladder is cool too.

Speaking of stepladders - pro tip - your tank gun can also be used to access upper floors.

I know it's partial cover. My point is that it should give just slightly more cover so you can effectively duck behind it and not get donked on the head all the time. I'm not saying you should be able to *stand* behind it and be fully covered, but ducking behind it and being covered seems fair.

You seem to have stockholm syndrome for the dev's design choices.

And looking down to make your character's model get a little lower seems like a janky workaround for a bigger design issue. You lose all your visual awareness of your surroundings when you do that.

What, are you gonna hear a nade of any type flying through the air while you're crouched behind that thing looking at your ding dong?

It would be even better as a "V" shape, with higher cover on the sides and lower in the middle. Should be high enough to shoot crouched in the middle, and be fully behind it on either side.

I've been trying to be helpful but let me just say it. No. No to your idea, it's not a good one. Raising the height to fully cover a ducked person from another player on a level field with them would be too high. That would provide nearly full cover to the standing player and make the shield too powerful.

Too powerful? Yeah, too powerful.

You trimmed your quote of me, but I also included things like, "You can also stand on the thing. There are "double crates" all over the game and a hardlight barrier turns all of them into a "head glitch" style peek."

Give it a try. It demonstrates the type of cover you're after. It's too powerful.

Let's not even start on the type of grief that could be accomplished with a barrier that was too tall to climb over. No to your idea.

All I'm saying is it needs like 0.1 more meters or less in height. You could probably still jump over that.

The reason the engineer is weak is because it can do a little of everything. The problem is that they made all the classes more versatile over the years. So, it's a bit overshadowed by everything else now.

Like other people have mentioned, the baby gates are mainly for blocking doorways. The anti-infantry turret is only useful if you're running the implants Robotics Technician and Jockey, preferably inside a building. The anti-vehicle turret is only useful for cheesing infantry from the spawn room or killing abandoned vehicles after an alert ends (It used to be good, back when it had a range of 1000 meters several years ago, but they nerfed it). The auto-turret is basically just for countering drifter light assaults (which they can counter with the Avoidance implant). If you want infinite grenades, just get a gun with an underbarrel grenade launcher and throw an ammo pack under your feet. Everyone uses Flak Armor, so don't expect it to be very effective.

Engineer and medic are support classes. If you want to be a fighter, play heavy or light assault. If you want to be a degenerate, honorless, son of a swine... play infiltrator.

An "engineer" class in Planetside 1 was a heavy carrying like 10 ACE plus 2 ACE in pistol slots, one decimator shot, and one LMG with enough ammo for one clip.

Hold on there.

How did we go from "the baby gate is not tall enough" to "the engineer is weak".

The engineer is NOT weak.

Forget the abilities.
It's got the fastest shield in the game and access to carbines with unlimited ammo.

And once you hit ASP? Carbines, LMGs, AND the coveted Assault Rifles. Plus a shotgun secondary!

Engineer is an infantry beast.

ive mained engie since end of beta.

and yeah they are, or rather they have been nerfed repeatedly to be such.

our mines originally were our thing, but server sync/mine detection and their less than lethal damage nerfed them pretty hard.
people don't like dying to traps now matter how obvious you make them or how easy it is to run mine sweeper.

turret wise yeah, the AI turret is stupid, why it does cover your head is beyond reason, they should have a limited firing arc, and have a weakness to explosive damage so that grenades are their counter play.

the spitfire honestly is in a great spot in terms of its damage, what it does need is 4x the health or specifically a 75% resistance to small arms damage. again grenades, and rpgs and archers should be their counter play (since infils can already hack them, and disable them with emps)

the AV turret, is well sort of a mess, imho it should have a forward facing anti vehicle shield but zero head protection. basically you can face off a tank but if he or a sniper can tag your head your toast, bonus if you make its forward sheild a bit wide you gain cover for squad mates to fire lock ons from. (tankers its stationary, gasp you can still flank it)

i wouldnt call the class itself weak at all, as some have mentioned we have the shields gimmick which is very nice but our greatest strength imho comes from our proximity to a class terminal where we can cycle all of our tools.

honestly i was really hoping the engineer would get a deployable infantry terminal at some point, obviously having max suits via it would be a no go though.

Sounds horrible.

It was only horrible when a CR4-5 right clicked on the map and insta-destroyed all deployables within a 100 meter radius.