People need to separate the gimped mana turret from the Engineer. The turret may suck but the class is fine.
I'm mostly fine with the class - I just don't think it's anywhere near the same level of usefulness as the old PS1 Combat Engineering cert. 20 HE Mines, 20 Boomers, 20 Motion Sensors, AND 10 Spitfire Turrets out at once. 25/25/25/15 if you upgraded your Engineering. PLUS Cloaking shields, one man field turrets, and tank traps. Which, okay, I get not having right out of the gate, but we've gone down to 5 mines maximum(mines now split into AP or AV), 4 C4(boomers), a one man field turret inferior to the old one, and an ammo pack. No motion sensors, no spitfires, no shields, no flak turret, no cloaked turret. Combat engineering is currently a joke - you can't fortify anything with no persistence, so CE has basically been degraded to the point where ***** jeeping a Flash into an sundy, or sprinting up to a tank and laying mines right under it's treads are the best uses for your mines. Mines are not working well ATM. AP mines are one hit kills that just require you place them in an infantry choke point - which are plentiful, and you are not prevented from placing them in buildings. If the turret had increased traverse, or covered the head, it'd be fine. If it had certs to make it AV/AA it'd be okay. If it was automated, it'd be fine. A Lack of giant christmas shield would also be decent. It's not fine as is. I'm fine with the weapons, but I seriously believe that the Engineer is a broken class - as in not functioning as intended. In PS1 Engineers allowed you to organize base defense by setting up minefields, placing automated turrets to take advantage of people wounded by mines, and generally allowing assaulting forces to be slowed down - even if the engineer was no longer online. PS2 is an unceasing zergfest where defense is practically untenable, and CE is pretty useless since you can't set it up and wait for the attack to arrive, you have to go and set it up while the attackers are in the midst of attacking the base.
You might have been able to have 20 mines, but it would take 10 to blow a tank, and the spread meant they could hit 2, stop,Repair, throw a jammer and be on their way. Mines in Planetside 2 just instagib anything that crosses them. You need to draw a distinction between "Working as intended" and "working as you want". I think it is working as intended, because I don't think they want the level of defenses Planetside 1 had.
And that tank had to stop and eat fire from the base turrets while someone got out and cleared the minefield. If you were actively defending a base, he'd eat infantry missiles too. You took 6-10 mines to kill a tank, but nothing stopped on a dime so you pretty much got 4-6 mines exploding on a vehicle before it could stop and try to clear the field. Things still don't stop on a dime - you'll still cripple vehicles with minefields if PS1 style mines are put into play, and you'll force retreat. Mineguard would actually be useful as more than a 'make this Sundy immune to suicide engineers tool.' I'll acknowledge that my vision of what should be available to Engineers (PS1 style Combat Engineering) isn't necessarily what the devs intended - but frankly, I found PS1 an overall more enjoyable game than PS2 has been thus far - I'm trying to make suggestions to make the game closer to PS1 and further away from the BF3/CoD template, and hence be both more enjoyable and long-lived.
The title says the ENG needs serious re-hauling.... but you only say how bad the turret is. I totally agree that the turret is almost worthless but that doesn't mean the entire class needs to be redone. The basic function of being an engineer all works fine. Yeah.. they need to do something about the turret. Lots of great ideas and almost all of them would be better than what we currently have.
Played the original Planetside until the patches made it almost unplayable. While I've just started Planetside 2 it quickly stands out that the class just isn't as fun and versatile as the original class. There are still very useful things the class can do like keep a vehicle or MAX in play, the ammo can be useful as well to keep other players in the fight. But so far the turret only seems to have the function of being a big neon sign that says hey guys easy kill over here. Perhaps being able to do more defensively while you are doing things like your repair duties would make the class feel more useful. Some times you just want to feel like you have contributed more than patching things up and providing a reload.
Yeah, I have been saying this for a long time. The eng based on even the original pales in comparison.... At the very lease the mana gun should be an honest to god weapon. Make the turret a vehicle .... let me swap the weapon type... buy upgrades for it.... change the type. Also like a vehicle i should be able to let others "Drive it" I want to be able to let other use the dropped turret. That way I can keep repairing dropping ammo etc,,, and my turret can still do things. Also, I think we need to have stuff that replaces the turrets.... MORE STUFF! I hate the mine system too......... but.... ohh well
I thought Engi was a trap and defense specialist.. but they don't get any sort of large amounts of mines and a crummy turret. We have drone tech now, we have auto turrets now. (Metal Storm) they're primitive but seriously 28th century and no auto turrets or flyable drones etc? Why?
This ^ I'd personally love to be able to let other team-mates use it, and or cert for zoom. (God knows it needs it.) Also, they took the shield out a while back, it was in tech-test and early beta. (Got moved over to medic for a while as a combo shield/healbeacon.) I'd love to see it come back. It doesn't need to be large, just a high tech pavise. Make it so that you can't pass through it as a friend or foe and it not only gives you good, normal-function defilade, as well as letting the engineer tactically modify the environment a little bit too. To keep griefing to a minimum, you could make it "ownerless", so that if someone puts them in the way on a regular basis, they can be easily cut down by friendies. In fact, you could make it that the shield generator itself is pretty vulnerable to damage, so that any damage directed at the back side of the shield would cut it down very quickly. It would allow you to create temporary bottlenecks and slow enemy advance, but not give you an unfair advantage as you encourage grenadespam to clear the obstacle from behind.
I don't know why people hate the turrets, I've gotten nice little kill streaks with em, its all about placement.
I really like the remote turret suggestion. I would accept a limited range for the purpouse of game balance.
