Feedback: Update heavily diminished a major role of Engineer - Fabrication

[Ranewan]

The new gene tree overall is interesting, but a major role that I had with my friends as Engineer was manning the fabricator for the ship. Making sure the gunners had the weapon mods they wanted, etc... That was basically all I could do in my downtime, given that the ship's power system doesn't support me hopping on yet another gun.

After the update, the advanced Weapon Mods are now locked under the Gunner role, who is busy with, well... gunning. It is cool to see that there are new fabrications/inscriptions in the game, but disheartening to see them locked under the roles that aren't specifically responsible for actually maintaining the ship. I would much prefer to see other roles have the basic fabrications/inscriptions, and let Engineer unlock Advanced Fabrications as the 16-point-unlock to be able to make Advanced Weapon mods, Thrust Booster, etc for the team.

Implemented as it is now, it feels like all the other roles had features added for them, while the engineer had responsibilities stripped away. Honestly it really spoiled my experience as Engineer for this game, to the point that I'll probably need to the role (if not the whole game) down until something changes.

[Ataxio]

I'm not a huge fan of fabricated items being locked behind skill walls. The ship upgrader should be avaliable to all, it's fine at exactly 50 resources for one.

[Pride Lizard Pride Lizard]

I think a lot of problems with it stems from the kind of game Void Crew *is*. Engineer doesn't do fundamentally anything better than anyone, everyone can already do everything inside the ship well and easily. Engineer offers very little that greatly helps the mission. Sure, you *could* boost something on a ship, that's more QoL over just having another gunner to super-murder everything.

There isn't really any reason to have a dedicated person who runs around fixing things and maintaining the vessel, all of that stuff is... sort of a non-issue anyway, outside of thruster trims and boosts. But, again, anyone can do that.

[PhoenixAscended]

Originally posted by Pride Lizard Pride Lizard:

I think a lot of problems with it stems from the kind of game Void Crew *is*. Engineer doesn't do fundamentally anything better than anyone, everyone can already do everything inside the ship well and easily. Engineer offers very little that greatly helps the mission. Sure, you *could* boost something on a ship, that's more QoL over just having another gunner to super-murder everything.

There isn't really any reason to have a dedicated person who runs around fixing things and maintaining the vessel, all of that stuff is... sort of a non-issue anyway, outside of thruster trims and boosts. But, again, anyone can do that.

I'd actually argue the engineer is quite helpful, at least in my crew of three.

The engineer runs around very fast, goes outside to do repairs (not to mention they heal extra HP when doing a repair), fixes the ship in combat, inserts data shards and fixes engine trims/resets boosts, and also mans the fabricator on top of all of that, leaving the gunner to just shoot and the pilot to focus on avoiding all the weapon fire. The engineer also goes outside to do those objectives, though I would assume in a crew of four you would use the scavenger. Our engineer also handles the gravity scoop and restocking the gunner.

Usually, when I'm not busy, I will help our engineer instead of piloting, and sometimes our gunner does too, but I don't think the engineer is particularly useless, at least not in a crew of three. We have tried two gunners and one pilot and ended up suffering way more damage and being way less productive. We also found having two gunners didn’t seem to really be worth it in the long run, especially considering the engineer can use its perks to activate the engine boost and just use a gun when there are no tasks.

I think the engineer's importance depends on the size of your crew and playstyle. I could easily see it being less useful when everyone on the ship pitches in with all the work, but I could see the engineer being more useful when everyone is only focusing on their role.

We also don't expand into multiple trees, we stick to one tree.
We use the large ship, not the small one, as an added note.

[Katmorphous333]

I usually only gun but I can agree with what you say, I think its a good idea that everyone could craft tier 2 stuff and only engineer craft tier 3 but at the same time I could see how annoying it could be, I think its very debatable.

Iv seen many times engineers craft weapon mods and put them on my gun without asking, wasting alloy or they simply thought it was the right choice because they think its best. Thats something I thought was really obnoxious so when they changed it to tier 3 only being craftable by gunner I was happy. I also gotta say that since players know they cant craft tier 3 they just dont bother crafting tier 1/2 mods anymore either, so it pretty much solved the issue of engineers making decisions for other players without asking.

Maybe let the engineer craft the air needle and boost module, but personally I think having tier 3 weapon mods locked behind a gunner skill was a good idea.