While I plan on covering all races for Engineers it is in my opinion that human Engineers stand alone simply for the fact that they have access to the Overload skill which can be evolved so that it not only incapcitates unshielded enemies briefly, but that it bounces to three other close-by targets as well. Those targets are also incapacitated as long as they are not shielded/armored - and these enemies remain unable to react for about two seconds; disabled enemies can't shoot, enemies that can't shoot can't kill you.
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| Overload is probably the best skill in multiplayer. |
Going with a cooldown-based Engineer for all difficulty levels as a result of this skill alone, is very strong. For those shielded/barrier'd targets like a banshee or geth prime, you have incinerate which deals heavy damage to armored and exposed targets. I recommend upgrading incinerate with the radius, burning damage, and armor damage evolutions (respectively) to maximize the fallout of clustering multiple stunned enemies together and taking them down with incinerate once their protection (barriers and shields) have been dismissed.
Finally, the engineer's staple skill 'combat drone' shouldn't be taken past level 3, this is for two reasons. The first is that level 3 gives your drone a little surviveability and shortens the cooldown. The second is because I advise AGAINST upgrading your Engineer's racial skill (Alliance Training for Humans) to its final level - leaving you 6 points to put into something else, and the only other thing not maxed is the combat drone.
With a maxed out fitness skill (Never take the melee-related evolutions of a skill, I'll explain why shortly) - a human engineer will have 825 health and shields.
Melee, while attention-grabbing as there are many skills related to it, is always a bad idea. While on bronze it might seem tempting to wade through enemies with heavy melee's, on silver and gold, you'll quickly find yourself getting wrecked as the five enemies standing around your melee target drop you to the floor before your blow even connects. Don't melee unless its absolutely necessary.
For the alliance training evolutions you'll have to pick from at levels 4 and 5, I suggest going with Damage and Capacity, and Power Damage, respectively, in order to ensure that your abilities are as effective as possible.
Weapons for an engineer are really limited. You need your cooldowns to be a short as possible in order to ensure that you can not only keep groups of enemies at bay, but that you can kill them quickly once you have dispersed their shields. I stick with either the M-8 Avenger X (Easily obtained from buying lots of rookie packs) or the M-25 Hornet with a light materials upgrade. Both weapons will serve you well - but honestly, you shouldn't be firing them all that much, especially once you progress beyond bronze difficulty - and remember, its about abilities as an engineer, not weapons.
Playing on difficulties other than bronze is a real challenge for the Engineer - as other classes find out, weapon damage really falls off compared to abilities once you start playing on silver. Unless you're a Soldier or Infiltraitor, forget about using weapons on the Gold difficulty as you won't be able to break cover long enough to kill an enemy before you either die, or are heavily wounded.
Your role will be crowd control by spamming overload, distraction with the combat drone (a short cooldown and it almost always draws an enemy's attention), and burning down armored targets with incinerate.
