I know not everyone is going to agree with my ideas, and that’s fine. This is just what I personally believe would be the best way to fix the many issues with the engineer class.
Kits
Kits are no longer considered Utility skills instead they are treated in full as our secondary weapon. The Toolbelt skills of Kits will be converted into new utility skills complete with new toolbelt skills to match (some might remain as toolbelt skills with a new utility skill made to match) The auto attacks of various kits will be nerfed to be more in line with the auto attacks of every other weapon in the game, and their power redistributed across the rest of the kit’s skills to keep them competitive and useful.
Power Weapons
Rifle will become officially a Power weapon with a greater focus on flat damage. The Bleed from blunderbuss will NOT be removed, but will instead be toned down. Overcharged Shot will no longer self-knockback but will instead become an Evade with the same distance.
Tool Kit will become officially a Power Kit, Throw Wrench will be moved from toolbelt to the kit itself, replacing Box of Nails. Gear Shield’s visuals will be made a standard part of the kit.
Hammer will be rebalanced to be a more reliable power weapon than current.
Bomb Kit will be made officially a Power Kit. Fire Bomb will now do large flat damage with a smaller burn proc. Concussion Bomb now only applies 1 stack of Confusion and has higher flat damage. Bomb auto attack has had its damage reduced.
Condition Weapons
Pistol Mainhand 3 and Offhand 4 will be swapped to make the Mainhand an official Condition weapon.
Grenade Kit will become an official Condition kit. Flash Grenade now applies 1 stack of Confusion in addition to Blind. Grenade now has a chance to apply 1 stack of burn for 1s and has had its flat damage reduced.
Flamethrower is retooled as a true Condition kit. Flame Jet now has a chance to apply 1 stack of burn every 5th hit. Napalm now applies 2 stacks of burn per pulse. Smoke Vent now creates Combo Field: Smoke.
Support Weapons
Pistol Mainhand 3 and Offhand 4 will be swapped to make the Offhand an official Crowd Control weapon.
Shield is reworked and buffed to provide greater Support and Defensive functionality.
Elixir Gun is retooled to have a higher focus on Crowd Control and Support. Fumigate now creates Combo Field: Poison.
Med Kit is retooled to be a more reliable healing kit. Med Blaster is now a Cone AoE. Medkit 2-5 are no longer “Throws” but instead apply their current effects as instant AoE effects at the target area.
Traits
Many traits that are currently seen as useless and weak would in fact be quite useful and comparable in power to their alternatives simply by making the above changes, a few might need some minor number adjustments. The traits outlined below are in need of some mechanical changes regardless of any other changes made to the class.
Grenadier is adjusted to maintain the original arc of grenades while still applying its velocity increase.
Aim Assisted Rocket has its cooldown removed or greatly reduced, or its damage increased.
Bunker Down now throws the Proximity mine at your target’s location.
Scrapper
Function Gyro is virtually useless in PvE as you almost never have to Finish a downed enemy outside of a few select events, and using it to revive downed allies is so situational that you’re more apt to forget the ability even exists than to ever actually use it. Not to mention the fact that it’s far more efficient to let other classes to use AoE revival skills. The Function Gyro needs a new effect to make it actually functional in PvE. Either something offensive or supportive and it’s revival needs to become AoE. I would suggest making it provide an AoE support function, so even if you don’t need to revive allies you can use it to support allies. It creates a bit of critical choice with the ability too in PvE as you must decide “do I provide some quick support now, or do I save it for a group revive that we might need soon?”
Decisive Renown trait needs to proc just as reliably in PvE as it does in PvP. As such, I would suggest changing it so that the current version of the trait is how it functions in PvP while in PvE the “finish” proc is replaced with “defeat”. Considering that all other “defeat an enemy” procs only trigger when you manage the killing blow, this would have the same overall proc rate in group PvE content as the current implementation has in PvP.
These changes would make a HUGE impact on how the Engineer functions as a class. By bringing the Kits in as officially out secondary weapons and reducing their power to be in line with actual weapons, they create room to buff our actual weapons without creating imbalance. Additionally this would allow for our other skills to be buffed.
The largest problems with our class is that most of our interesting traits feel so weak since the flat damage passive traits deal so much more damage from auto attacks alone due to our kit auto attacks being vastly overpowered. Our non-kit utility skills feel worthless since most of their functionality can be found on kits and the kit versions are superior. And our base weapons are vastly inferior to not only our kits, but to any other classes weapons as well. Our problems ultimately boil down to “Kits are overpowered”… so changes focused around balancing kits to any other weapon, would fix a lot of problems.