[Engi] The Ultimate Bitterstone Engineer Guide

[Glorian]

The Ultimate Bitterstone Engineer Guide

In the following you will find several Engineer mastery builds.
No build is final, and no build is set in stone. Except 4 Cornerstones which we expect to be on at the weekly gunline.

The 4 Cornerstones are:

Use the Ancestor Inheritance Armor Tactic.
Use the M2 Armor Plating Moral.
Use the Keg Ability
Use the Flame Turret. For explanation see: The Engineer Turret Handbook

Engineer Careers:
As I said we don’t enforce a complete build or masteries. But also in this tightly set Dwarven Warband with a Kegrange of 60 feet, Hold the Line of 50, Extra Ammo Turrets of 30 feet you can’t hang back 100 feet with your sniper build and try to position left or right of the Order Pugs and snipe in a double team Sorcs and other squishies.

In the current meta it is raw AoE Damage vs raw AoE Damage. And there the Grenadiers and Tinkerers shine bright. So if you like your Sniper a lot of course you can play him. We usually have a Snipe double team in Group 3 or 4. But we encourage Tinkerer or Grenadier builds. Be them DPS Tinkerers/Grenadiers or Heavy Armor builds.

Staying close on your warband leader, magnetizing everyone in and then melt them while they run away.

Back on life a full Gunline was kind of a joke warband for Events. But a full dwarf Warband with heavy IBs could sustain a hell of damage in RvR and was gold in protecting entrances and tight BOs. In RoR an Engineer heavy gunline with Tinkerers, fully armored and under the protection of Flame turrets can sustain a mountain of damage and still dish out a lot of hurt. We have proven that at several Events like the defence of the ramp in Praag. That was the turning point from Fun-Warband to PvP-Warband.

So rejoice dawi! The Age of Reckoning is at hand!

In detail we have the following setups for the Engi:

Kegsniper
Armor Tinkerer
Armor Grenadier
DPS Tinkerer
DPS Grenadier

For a complete overview of the different buffs of the Turrets see here:
The Engineer Turret Handbook

To alter your appearance to look like a propper Bitterstone Thunderer Engineer look in the Engineer Uniform Guide.

General Frontline Tips for Engineers.

Stacking Weaponskill to get through armor, or just BS to get more Damage?
Check here latest field studies from the Bitterstone Corps of Engineers.

Flame Turret I
Your Flame Turret has two extra Abilities. Steamvent and Flamethrower.

Steamvent is a low Damage 360° low Damage ability, while Flamethrower is an AoE straight in a line hurt shot. Steamvent does around 60 Damage per second, Flamethrower around 150 on my build. To make it short Steamvent is bad. While it is fired and while it is reloading it would be much better if the Flamethrower ability would be fired at that moment. With the Flameturret buff, it has a good Range and hit quite a lot destros funneling at a lordroom door or a keep door.

To do this you need to make a right click on the Steamvent icon, EVERYTIME after you have setup the Flame turret. You will then not see that Steamvent is deactivated, but it will then not be used when the Flame Turret fires.

Flame Turret II
The Flame Turret currently bugs out. Meaning he doesn’t start firing on its own when Destros are near you. To prevent this, after setting it up, try to select a Destro, even if he is out of range and hit the Sword Icon once. Most of the times when another Destro comes near the Flame Turret will begin to fire on its own.

Land Mines I
Landmines are great. They do a stagger, lay around and look great. And they get really great with the Concussive Mine Tactic. But beware! The Landmine gives the same Immunity as the Turret Selfdestruct does. That means if destroy runs on your Landmine, and then you or a friend makes a self destruct of his Turret to disable the Destros, then they won’t be disabled because of your Landmine. His Turret his gone as well as half of his Damage buff, and the Destros are free to run away.
SO: Only plant Landmines if you are the only Engineer Around, OR if you have the Concussive Mine Tactic.

Land Mines II - Concussive Mines
Concussive Mines are the best you can get. They are the Engineers hidden Heal/Damage Debuff. The Concussive Landmines, if they explode, put a debuff on Destro that increases their Buildtime by 50%. Meaning Long Cast Healers like Shamans have their direct Healing output halved. Instacast Healing is not affected by it. Meaning Doks are not really affected by it, as well as most Tanks or Melee Classes. But on Shamans and Zealots this is the Tactic to go. Also on long cast Damage Dealers like Sorcs or Magus on ST spec they do wonders*.

The Landmine Debuff doesn’t stack. Meaning you can’t get a double Debuff on the enemy.

Pierce Defense I
At least one Engineer should take Pierce Defense. Pierce Defence reduces Destro’s Block, Dodge and Parry by 15% IF destro has blocked, dodged or parried one of your attacks. So it is actually good if you have less BS and miss a destro with this tactic.

Pierce Defense works on:
Blunderbuss Blast
Static Discharge
Friction
Acid Bomb (Only the direct Target you are trying to hit)
Frag Grenade (Only the direct Target you are trying to hit)

It does NOT work on:
Acid Bomb (It doesn't work on the Targets in the AoE damage Area)
Frag Grenade (It doesn't work on the Targets in the AoE damage Area)

SO the tactic works best on an Armor Tinkerer with a Flame Turret. With the full Flame Turret Buff you can hit farther (45 feet) with your Blunderbuss and hit up to 24 Destros with it. Meaning you can put a debuff on potentially 24 enemy players who are then open to be attacked by quality dps attacks.

The Debuff don’t stack on players. So it is not advisable to use it on every Engineer in a warband. Still if you have it use Blunderbuss often, even if it is a low Damage Ability. The Bright Wizzard behind you will like it a lot, as well as the Slayer next to you.











*Wonders = Regular Destro Whine Threads.

[Foltestik]

Use the M2 Armor Plating Moral.

after this you dont need read more

[Glorian]

Use the M2 Armor Plating Moral.

after this you dont need read more

Thanks for your input. M2 armor plating is an integral part of the 1 minute defence cycle.

[Glorian]

Pushing this thread as it combines all the current collected knowledge.

[lefze]

Use the M2 Armor Plating Moral.

after this you dont need read more

Thanks for your input. M2 armor plating is an integral part of the 1 minute defence cycle.

Meanwhile a coordinated UF dump spamming blunderbuss with full damage stacks would probably wipe anything in range. In the big zergy fights full damage is your best bet really, and if you can coordinate it it's gonna be amazing. I know the mechanics are clunky as **** and that speccing around full blunderbuss damage is risky because of the range, but I really would like to see you try it seeing as your playstyle is really stationary.

[Glorian]

The Range on Blunderbuss isn't the Problem. You usually get a lot of the Bonus from the Flame Turret. But also Friction Burn, Rod, Static Discharge are the Tools you need for Tinkerer. Blunderbuss does almost no damage on the screen of Tanks in your front. I think I saw 60 Damage on a chosen once.

As a physical ability it is all soaked up in the armor mitigation.

So even with more BS and UB you might punch it to maybe a 100 on tanks. But as I said the Tinkerer has better tools at hand.

And I can't remember the last time we had m2 before we are all dead, or the enemy is dead.

Phalanx has moral pumps and moral drains in their Warband. Tup a good coordinated m2 raze with moral pumps.

For example in the dwarfs vs Chaos video we even never reached m2 after five minutes because of the AP and moral drains.

[lefze]

I tested around with blunderbuss the other day, as far as I could tell it didn't get any range increase from turrets. BUT, you most definetly underestimate the actual damage you can put out with it, it's more or less comparable to SW, at least combined with dots ticking. Now if I missed something and it actually gets a range increase, it's definetly worth specing around considering morales are so fast these days, even moralepumps are feeling kinda overkill.

And I'm guessing most of your dwarfs are ignoring WS as the main stat to gear for when testing blunderbuss, so not so weird damage might seem low. Gonna play around with it, we will see how viable it actually is. But theoretically if it get's a range increase it's really good.

[Glorian]

I will release a short essay on WS vs BS later this evening.

Short version: Up to 850 BS it is allways better to get BS.
If you want to shoot tanks: WS > BS past 700 BS.

[Collateral]

Yea, that's one of the downsides of certain racial warbands, no morale pump, which means they are very susceptible to drains. But I still think that positioning and tactics can help you a lot. Of course not all the time. Always try to get into a fight before other warbands arrive (you mostly are anyway, since you always stand your ground). This will make it a bit harder to drain morales, and should give you a slight edge if you manage to coordinate well. Also, timing punts and staggers is critical. I have a question, how often do you use flashbangs, and are they any good? Reading the tooltip, it seems like quite a potent way of dealing with morale bomb (mainly raze) if you already gave immunity to the enemy. And since you have so many engies, you can completely shut down a whole warband (8 tanks) if coordinated extremely well.

If you have trouble noticing when enemy pops morales, I seriously recommend NervAlert addon, it will greatly improve your gameplay. It will play sounds when you are hit by morales, and you can modify it to whatever you want.

[lefze]

Seeing as you can get 750 ws with 900+ bs there's no point comparing them really. Without masterful aim that is. if you wanna go full ham and waste a tactic slot the numbers get even bigger. At any rate, if you get to around those numbers blunderbuss might behave a bit differently than youd expect when combined with tracer rounds and trench fighting (as long as it behaves the same as the SW equivalent that is).