Engineer with flame hammer or emberquake

[Mr Burnham]

I'm Engineer using Flame Hammer as main attack.I use 1 handed weapon and shield. I aloccate half points in str and half in vit (more or less). I'm about 25 lvl (begining of second act) I got few questions:

1) Has it sense to invest in focus to switch in emberquake where available? Now i don't use any skills which deal serious magical dmg

2) What is dmg of EQ comparing to maxed FH with no focus

3) If I decide to invest in focus what skills should i pick to take benefit of it?

[Cha0zb0rn]

in vanilla your best bet is to drop vit almost entirely. Your statpoint distribution should look like 3/3/1/1 for str/dex/foc/vit and later get tons of focus off of your enchants and the gear.
Reason: the benefits of vit are extremely unimpressive in vanilla anbd later on you get skulls which grant you about 1,5k health per skull and in terms of def you later wanna get your dmg reduce off of skulls as well.

Your main dmg abilitys should be seismic slam and emberquake with emberquake as your main spender if you wanna go for max dps. A point in onslaught might be a good idea as well since its a good initiator.

As for Defense your main abilitys shouild be the healing bot and forcefield.

As for passives you might wanna skip aegis although it might look good on paper. must haves are fire and spark, charge reconstitution and the remaining points in bulwark.

With the remaining 10-15 points you could go for the sledgebot or dynamofield buts those points are pretty much up to your liking.

If you get bored you might wanna take a look into the synergies mod at some point, the community did quite an impressive job on that one ;)

[Tiomasta]

There's no strategical difference between dealing physical damage and magical damage or different elements, there's not even any monsters that are immune or extremely resistant to one thing. If an attack is strong then it's strong against everything.

Emberquake is just much better over Flame Hammer at everything, no contest. Emberquake splinters can PIERCE THROUGH ENEMIES as if Emberquake wasn't better already, and Flame Hammer spends charge just for using it which is awful because what you want is to have charge ready for casting Forcefield.

Emberquake isn't even necessarily a Focus skill at all, it's stronger than Flame Hammer without and with Focus builds. It's not flat damage, it's WeaponDPS with flat damage tagging in on the same hit, it still inherits weapon effects too. Maybe it might even be stronger with Str builds if you're using melee weapons with pure physical damage.

And if it's a Str build then you can take Coup de Grace, but that's better with 2-hand builds because Heavy Lifting gives that stun chance (to autoattacks and all WeaponDPS skills, including each separate splinter hit).
With an Engineer you're actually not losing a lot by going 2-hand over sword+shield, because when your Forcefield is on you don't roll for shieldblocks anyway, it always takes the damage. (and Forcefield ends up having multiple times your own HP)

Actually, the big deal about using a shield is that you can use Shield Bash, it's useful like what you would want for a melee character in the first place. (and it itself also does great damage on a Focus build if you try to get high-Armor shields and +Armor gems for it)
There's also Fire Bash as another shield-only skill but that's not really that special, might as well use Emberquake over that too.

[Toha]

1) It does. 100 focus will allow you to equip aristocrat/inquisitor/dragonrift/valkyrie jewelry and belts without meeting level requirements and they can contain large amounts of stats from Borris (that allows an early high-end gear equip and is the main reason to get 100 focus, otherwise, don't bother). It boosts the elemental part of dps. Plus, it's larger manapool.
2) Emberquake > flame hammer, hands down. More splinters, longer range and multiple hits per splinter make EQ much more damaging and convenient to use even with pure strength.
3) Investing into focus won't change your skill layout. Quaker's base is EQ, healing bot and force field. Dynamo field or shield bash + charge domination (put just one point in it) for your charging needs, onslaught or storm burst for mobility (onslaught > storm burst). Fire bash is solid debuff, but fully optional. Immobilization copter can help as well. Never, ever invest into charge reconstitution, bulwark, aegis, coup de grace - it's a waste of skill points endgame-wise.

If you're going with the shield, get 100 vitality. With Parma's coal burner and blocking 6 spell you'll hit the block cap. If you decide to dual wield or use two-handers, don't put any points into vitality.