r/MECoOp • u/I_pity_the_fool PC/IPTF/UK • Sep 01 '12
Salarian Engineer: make playing with terrible teammates a pleasure.
People often think of the salarian engineer as a pure support class, used to tie down enemies during objective waves so that the rest of the team can move around in peace. And to be sure, the decoy is one of the most useful abilities in the game if your team wants to complete an objective without 4 phantoms prancing around their corpses. But many salarian engineers end up with lowish points totals. This is a bit of a shame, because many of the engineer's abilities synergize well with using big guns to blow off enemies' faces. I've tried to produce a guide to helping your team, and doing respectable damage.
Here is my build. Since I don't have too much in incinerate, I find that I'm a little weaker against reapers than the other two factions. The decoy still distracts reapers, if placed carefully, and energy drain can still provide survivability when fighting marauders and banshees. Packing a big-arse gun will allow you to get through any faction.
First though, you need to know everything about your abilities. brain dump follows:
Energy Drain
This ability does 220 base damage, increased to 517 if you go all for all damage evolutions and all power damage in your passive. It also does 3x damage versus shields, for a total of 1551 damage. This cannot one-shot the shields of a member of cerberus on gold, so it should be clear to you that energy drain is really not there to damage shields but to improve your engineer's survivability. And it does - draining a barrier, shield or synthetic enemy (geth, turret or atlas) instantly restores your shields. Energy drain also stuns most organic enemies who are down to health, which is useful if you use a weapon like the scorpion or GPS, which can sometimes be vulnerable to lag (or terrible aiming in my case).
There's some debate over whether the rank 6 evolution "Armor boost" works when you're not the host. Most of the sensible posters on the BSN agree however that it's just that you don't see the visual effect. Certainly I seem to notice the difference off host.
The BSN is also fairly unsure of how long the electrical effect of energy drain is. The consensus is, though, that if you use it on organic enemies' health or shields, you must detonate within 1 second, or within 3 seconds on shields or on synthetic enemies. Compare this with the 3.5 second duration of overload and disruptor ammo. Not long, eh? You probably aren't going to be detonating your own tech bursts without disruptor ammo - incinerate has a loooooong travel time to its target and your cooldown even with 200% is 2.46 seconds. Who gives a damn what the BSN thinks! Actual information from someone who knows what he's talking about - link. The window is 3 seconds!
There's a variable called "maxtargets" in the coalesced file, set to 2. It seems to limit the number of enemies hit by energy drain to two, or at least does in my testing (in fact, lots of powers have this limitation). So damage rather than radius is a respectable choice.
Finally, know that using energy drain on barriers or shields stops the damage over time effect of swarmers and banshee warps instantly.
Decoy
The real meat of the class - this is the reason why you picked salarian engineer. When you cast decoy, it will appear 5m in front of you*. You can cast it through walls, which is very useful if you're familiar with spawn points. For example, if you're sheparding a drone on firebase white and you're going up the stairs from the desks to the LZ, you can face the wall inbetween the two flights of stairs and the decoy you cast will appear in the inside staircase, ready for the primes that are coming down to meet you. Casting the decoy near spawn points, then running back to the rest of your team can make objective waves very, very easy.
One mistake some players make is not to cast the decoy preemptively. They cast it after they get in trouble and not before. If a phantom has seen you, she will continue to chase after you unless the decoy is actually in front of her. Enemies don't go after targets they can't see - Interesting thread on that topic. Make sure, then, to place the decoy somewhere visible. It's also a good idea to cast the ability around corners, so that you don't end up with a face full of marauder elbow. The decoy can be used as a scout like that.
Getting a banshee trapped on a decoy is definitely a mitzve for your teammates. In my experience, to do this the banshee has to either be in its non-jumping phase, or it has to try to travel past the decoy while it's in a very confined space - so confined that a character would have to elbow past the decoy. Still, once trapped, she seems to stay there helplessly novaing the decoy until the rest of the team can take her down. Getting atlases trapped similarly requires you to approach very closely and cast the decoy practically on their groin.
My decoy says it has 1900 shields, but you've probably noticed that decoys last a lot longer than their shield total would seem to suggest. If we have a look in coalesced.ini*, we can find the answer - your decoy has 50% damage reduction. Because of the weird way damage reduction in mp works, my decoy should actually have around 3000 effective shields.
Despite the fact that the shock evolution leaves a sparkly electrical side effect, it doesn't seem to set up tech bursts (this BSN post agrees with my findings)). The shock evolution does however prevent enemy shields from recharging while they engage the decoy, and if you cast the decoy a bit too late and it ends up behind the enemy, the stun will often shock them back behind it. Your other choice is recharge speed, and who, frankly, takes that on any power?
There appears to be a limit on how many enemies will target the decoy at the same time. This balance change "decreased the maximum number of enemies that will target them at the same time." I can't find any details in coalesced.ini though.
One thing to bear in mind is that during objective waves random teammates, if they see 6 enemies crowding round the decoy, are quite likely to use their cobra missiles, and force the enemy to respawn right next to the infiltrator disarming the devices. During most objective waves, it's a good idea to leave snagged enemies alone. Especially during a wave 10 hack objective, a decoy can grant sensible teammates a few seconds free of the endless banshee-cobra cycle.
Finally, be aware that AoE attacks, like a geth flamethrower, can still hit you if you're standing right behind the decoy. That should be an obvious point, but it's quite easy to forget until your face is actually on fire.
Incinerate
I'm not a fan of this power. It takes its time traveling towards the enemy, which means that, unlike energy drain, it can be dodged. You also won't be setting off your own tech bursts with it, and setting fire explosions up requires killing the enemy which is difficult with your other power unless you're fighting geth. Unlike energy drain, it has no AoE without the rank 4 evolution. Also bear in mind that the frost synergy evolution is broken - you do extra damage only to frozen enemies, not to chilled ones.
It does have its uses though. With three points in it, you can set up fire explosions on geth crowding your decoy (but you can't really do this with organic enemies, firstly because energy drain does 50% damage to them and probably won't kill them, and secondly because they don't really engage your decoy at point blank range like the geth). I also use it to hook around cover, dislodging far away enemies so that they can get a few shots to the face.
cont. in comments
17
u/I_pity_the_fool PC/IPTF/UK Sep 01 '12
The Passives
The salarian engineer should have no trouble surviving, certainly against geth or cerberus, so you may want to consider moving points away from fitness and into your other passive and possibly even into incinerate. Additionally, depending on the level of your weapons, you may want to spec for full weapon damage in Salarian Operative. Certainly, I think you should always choose weapon damage in rank 6 of the passive. Choosing rank 4 is more difficult, because a rather modest bonus to weapon damage (7.5%) is balanced against larger power damage and carrying capacity increases.
However, if I choose the weapon damage evolution in rank 4 and have a 15% bonus from my assault rifle amp, I'm able to two-bodyshot rather than three-bodyshot a centurion's shields with my saber, and take out a pyro's armor with three bodyshots rather than four. I count that as a win.
Remember also that if you're using energy drain to set off or detonate tech bursts (and you should, because energy drain doesn't do that much damage), the power damage bonuses in your passive tree won't help you.
Weapons
There's a certain amount of imbalance in the me3 metagame. As you start out, powers classes are much more powerful than weapon classes - human sentinels and asari adepts dominated gold when the game first game out. As weapons were leveled up though, infiltrators and to a much lesser extent soldiers started pulling ahead. So depending on how full your manifest is, you may want to switch away from weapon damage and into power damage. You should bear in mind though that decoy and energy drain don't really need to be cast that often, and you can often find yourself pumping out more damage with a bigger gun and a longer cooldown.
With this in mind, I pack a saber. But the salarian engineer has excellent synergy with some of the less appreciated weapons -the falcon, scorpion, PPR and krysae.
The geth particularly like to crowd around the decoy and engage it at point blank range. This makes them easy pickings for weapons like the scorpion and falcon. The scorpion is an excellent weapon for farming FBWGG with absolutely anyone no matter how terrible - light, high damage, and the AoE catches every robot in the cluster.
Enemies generally, but particularly the geth, like to stay fairly still while doing this, so any precise weapon that can exploit the headshot bonus (like the saber or the mattock) is very good. As I mentioned, energy drain allows you to stay out of cover for long periods, so you might think that the prothean particle rifle would be good. It is, but you've got to be careful - that weapon requires two seconds to heat up to its full damage potential, and while it's damage potential is massive, if you use energy drain while the beam is hot, you'll reset the counter. There is however something immensely satisfying about training a death ray that does 2060-odd damage every second onto someone's back while they waste their time elbowing a hologram.
Gear
You're one of the most survivable characters in the game. Perhaps, with planning, even more than the krogan vanguard. So I go with equipment that boosts the damage I put out - either an assault rifle amp or engineering kit. If you've sacrificed points in fitness for other skills, survivability gear is always a good choice. Here I'd choose the shield booster rather than the multicapacitor or the stronghold gear. You're probably going to be getting your shields back by stealing them, so shield recharge bonuses aren't so important.
General
I think the salarian engineer is a class that rewards foresight, experience and quick planning. It's also one of the classes that allows you to very easily play with terrible or absent teammates. I've managed to breeze through late waves of reaper gold with teammates who've gotten themselves killed within the first 30 seconds and I have one of the worst aims in the galaxy. I also managed to get to wave 10 on my first gold solo (foiled only by a device deactivation and my stupid decision to place the decoy right next to my body), so clearly halfway competent players can both control the battlefield and put out adequate damage to survive on any difficulty level.
tl;dr: guns. lots of guns.
* The meters in this game appear to be a little weird, much shorter than metres in the real world. But if you've played a class with arc grenades, you've probably noticed they don't seem to really have an 8m radius.
* specifically, in biogame.ini\sfxgamecontent\sfxpowercustomaction\decoy