Engineer class?
Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 6:18 am
The general tendancy for offering new classes is new kinds of 'magic' classes. However, here's one, an important one to history on Earth, in fact, which may be interesting to deal with:
The combat engineer.
I have not beaten this game (yet) so I don't know a great deal about potential balance issues, but I figure that this might be at least fun to throw around ideas for this.
This would be an addition to the 'warrior' meta-class, and would use only stamina as it's 'magic.'
Engineers would basically be area-of-effect ranged fighters with some possible special abilities. They would have access to some existing game talent trees: suvival, trapping, combat training, conditioning, and combat veteran. The area-of-effect abilities will revolve around being a summoner and operator of immobile seige engines.
I'll not go into numbers for now, and just hash out the basic ideas first:
Catapult talent. Summon a catapult which then can be operated to lob low-velocity, high-trajectory projectiles at targets, at least 2 tiles away from the catapult. Essentially, this would mean that these projectiles would ignore enemies in-between the catapult and the target, although limiting the range to LOS probably would be a good idea for balance reasons. Different kinds of projectiles become available at higher skill levels - obviously, some of these projectiles will make big booms.
Ballista talent. Summon a ballista which can fire beam-effect projectiles.
Cannon talent. Summan a cannon which can fire more powerful beam-effect projectiles, exploding projectiles, or cone-effect projectiles. Unlockable at level 10.
Now, an engineer who learns all 3 of these talent trees, while only being able to operate one seige engine at a time, would be able to operate each sequentially (helping to deal with potential cooldowns) and use the catapults as a kind of wall to protect themselves from direct attack until the engines are destroyed. Some tactical care should be applied, since if these engines are immobile, tile swapping them with the engineer isn't allowed, which makes some corridor tactics unusable with them. In addition to these offensive talents (and the trapping which can be another kind of offensive tool for these engineers), they have a defensive talent tree:
Field engineering. Alter the terrain to create favorible battle conditions. This would include some things like improving pickaxe digging speeds, creating that pesky 'loose rock pile' trap, summoning temporary immobile barriers, summoning temporary floors (if that's possible in gameplay mechanics), and creating smoke screens from pyrotechnics.
It might also be neat to add another pure trap talent tree:
Pit trapping. Create traps that do damage effects and pinning. Unlockable at level 10. Thematically, it would make sense that engineers and not rogues would be able to do this simply because creating pit traps is an incredible amount of labor - all that digging in the floor/ground.
I am thinking that a class like this would be fun for a different flavor of tactical play. In an emergency, engineers should be capable of basic self-defense, but the majority of the slaughter should come from clever use and placement of the various engines and traps. They would be heavily dependent on strength, cunning, and constitution, depending on the talent trees and goals of the build.
Shoot, there could even be a little unlocking-the-class quest involving rescuing a brilliant engineer from a kidnapping in some fortress somewhere, populated by an army including evil engineers that this kidnapped genius was forced to train . . .
All right, enough brainstorming for me for now. It's a fun game.
The combat engineer.
I have not beaten this game (yet) so I don't know a great deal about potential balance issues, but I figure that this might be at least fun to throw around ideas for this.
This would be an addition to the 'warrior' meta-class, and would use only stamina as it's 'magic.'
Engineers would basically be area-of-effect ranged fighters with some possible special abilities. They would have access to some existing game talent trees: suvival, trapping, combat training, conditioning, and combat veteran. The area-of-effect abilities will revolve around being a summoner and operator of immobile seige engines.
I'll not go into numbers for now, and just hash out the basic ideas first:
Catapult talent. Summon a catapult which then can be operated to lob low-velocity, high-trajectory projectiles at targets, at least 2 tiles away from the catapult. Essentially, this would mean that these projectiles would ignore enemies in-between the catapult and the target, although limiting the range to LOS probably would be a good idea for balance reasons. Different kinds of projectiles become available at higher skill levels - obviously, some of these projectiles will make big booms.
Ballista talent. Summon a ballista which can fire beam-effect projectiles.
Cannon talent. Summan a cannon which can fire more powerful beam-effect projectiles, exploding projectiles, or cone-effect projectiles. Unlockable at level 10.
Now, an engineer who learns all 3 of these talent trees, while only being able to operate one seige engine at a time, would be able to operate each sequentially (helping to deal with potential cooldowns) and use the catapults as a kind of wall to protect themselves from direct attack until the engines are destroyed. Some tactical care should be applied, since if these engines are immobile, tile swapping them with the engineer isn't allowed, which makes some corridor tactics unusable with them. In addition to these offensive talents (and the trapping which can be another kind of offensive tool for these engineers), they have a defensive talent tree:
Field engineering. Alter the terrain to create favorible battle conditions. This would include some things like improving pickaxe digging speeds, creating that pesky 'loose rock pile' trap, summoning temporary immobile barriers, summoning temporary floors (if that's possible in gameplay mechanics), and creating smoke screens from pyrotechnics.
It might also be neat to add another pure trap talent tree:
Pit trapping. Create traps that do damage effects and pinning. Unlockable at level 10. Thematically, it would make sense that engineers and not rogues would be able to do this simply because creating pit traps is an incredible amount of labor - all that digging in the floor/ground.
I am thinking that a class like this would be fun for a different flavor of tactical play. In an emergency, engineers should be capable of basic self-defense, but the majority of the slaughter should come from clever use and placement of the various engines and traps. They would be heavily dependent on strength, cunning, and constitution, depending on the talent trees and goals of the build.
Shoot, there could even be a little unlocking-the-class quest involving rescuing a brilliant engineer from a kidnapping in some fortress somewhere, populated by an army including evil engineers that this kidnapped genius was forced to train . . .
All right, enough brainstorming for me for now. It's a fun game.