Subjectively, what is currently the best class?

[Brechnor]

What is the best class at the moment from a subjective viewpoint?

[Doubtful]

The answer depends on what your playstyle is.

Commander class has a lot of straightup survivability, as well as skills to improve the use of fleet (hired) ships and deployable fighter wings. Best utilized with Merc hirelings and/or a ship that includes a Hangar for fighter wings, imo, since its survivability skills go great with a big, hulking ship without much evasive ability.

The Commander class's Defender ability is a great way to temporarily halt a significant portion of all incoming damage if you're willing to put points in each of the skill's resistances, and its Overhaul subskill is a nice way to top off your hull in the field or in an emergency--which can be done via consumables, as well.

Commander's Piloting skill has boosts to Evasion (its best survivability skill imo) for dodging attacks that would have struck you, as well boosting your ability to avoid attacks manually and increased accuracy of your turrets.

The Gunner class is focused on directly increasing damage and accuracy, with 4 primary skills that increase each weapon type (Plasma, Railguns, Beams, and Heavy weapons). Just find a weapon type you prefer and augment skills that correspond to it!

Gunner is all about burning targets down quickly and violently. Probably best paired with a smaller, faster ship to allow you to use your skill and speed to survive, since it doesn't augment survivability much.

Engineer is sort of the rogue/trickster character with a lot of different debuffs you can apply to enemies, as well as its Energize skill that boosts survivability quite a bit (but its Power drain is fairly high).

Engineer is mostly about cleverly disrupting and disabling enemies. However, due to Energize skill it has good survivability as well in my experience.

*edit* My favorite is Commander I think, for its survivability, since I enjoy flying the large Carriers and utilizing fighter wings a lot.

[Spam_Phisher]

Engineer is great if your looking to be a Capture machine. Hack gives you bonus to troop strenght. It has made me a lot of credits. I don't have very much xp with the others. Gunner to me is the weekest in my opinion. Commander seems better for end game.

[Doubtful]

Originally posted by Spam_Phisher:

Engineer is great if your looking to be a Capture machine. Hack gives you bonus to troop strenght. It has made me a lot of credits. I don't have very much xp with the others. Gunner to me is the weekest in my opinion. Commander seems better for end game.

I pretty much agree with all of this! I forgot to mention Hacking being awesome for capture haha. Good point.

I think Gunner is probably good if you're determined to use smaller (or at least not huge) ships the whole game, especially if you can make effective use of cloaking (while managing to save enough Power for your damage skills?).

It's definitely a "FIRE EVERYTHING!" kinda class. I suspect a skilled player using consumables, a fast ship, and lots of evasive maneuvering can be a fantastic Gunner. I'm probably gonna give that one another shot soon. Seems like it would go well with Gunship and Corvette since they're eligible for the Evasion perks/officers.

[Hariwulf]

Any way to change class mid-game? T.T

[Brechnor]

I dont think so, not without cheats and mods

[probe]

It might be possible to change in the savegame file but how I don't know.

[probe]

Engineer is by far my favorite. It might not be the highest dealing damage class at first but later on after leveling up the Rift skill ( the sub-skill Rad field ) you can deal massive damage to several targets at once with radiation. Like massive damage !!!

Early on the class is good for focusing on capping ships (if that's your preference) and later you can make a pretty hefty defensive buiild with what's been dubbed "Tank-gineer" . Check Ryouchan's stickied tutorial videos. It might be there in between (he came up with the build and it's really powerful for tanking massive damage).

I'd encourage you to try all three and see what you like most.

[Bottom of the Well]

I started with gunner havent tried any other class yet but gunner seems great so far before i even knew you could hire other ships to fight with you i was taking out everything even up to 2 immpossible levels at once. I put all my perks/rank points into one type of weapon system plasma weapons for me and i just destroy stuff only things that give me issues are more than 2 impossible classes at once right now.

Only level 22 right now also

[Zlorfik [CH/BY]]

My preference list goes as follows:
1. Engineer
2. Commander
3. Gunner

About the Engineer:
The engineer is the allrounder class. With the shield boosters you can easily defend against bigger enemies while hacking allows for taking over bigger enemies' ships (I captured a Destroyer with my Wolverine yesterday...). Rift can be a pretty powerful damage dealer and Augment can be used to deal additional types of damage that few enemies have resistances to. All in all the engineer has a bit of everything and surely has some of the most complex resp. interesting powers. Engineer is imho the best class to go pirating. Get yourself an officer boosting your Transporter capacity, invest the first 3 perks into Field Commander and use at least 3 skill points for Sabotage life support systems in the hack tree. Your troopers are now really kicking ass.

About the Commander:
The commander excels at boosting his fleet as well as providing excellent engine based abilities. Although a commander is rather thought to be sitting in a large carrier, which of course is really fun to play, it also offers the ability to increase a gunship or corvette size ship to have even more evasion. Or you can use the speed boosting abilities to boost your travel speed as a merchant. So if you regularly fly long distances, those skills can make you go just a little faster in your merchant's trade. Retaliate is not useful in the beginning - you need a bigger ship for that but makes for an excellent skill against crowds of attacking small ships. Defender is a good defense booster although quite skill intense to be of much use. All in all the commander is a class with some strategic elements, but still quite straightforward.

About the gunner:
The gunners work is laying waste to anything crossing his path. As I personally don't favor pure damage builds, the gunner is surely the most "boring" for me. Additionally, if you're not flying a really big ship, you are using one or at maximum two different light weapons. This means you can focus skilling more on those but kinda makes the other one / two obsolete. Also, I'm no fan of heavy weapons because ammo costs more money than I usually get back when I destroyed a specific ship that's worth using heavy weapons against. However, the powers on their own are really powerful as they strengthen weapon aspects, that are already strong like shield damage for beams, hull damage for rail guns and total damage for Plasma weapons as well as boosting their weaknesses like shield piercing for rail guns, range for beams and fire rate for plasma. This is probably the most straightforward class.

[LoveCake]

Ran gunner for a while, if you have shreder on Velvet Titan with skills to hit thru shiled you can decimate Perun or Tzar in a about 1-2 seconds. Gunner is all about just killing everyone and very fast you can kill huge fleets in just matter of minutes.
As for commander never played it but seems to be balanced class.
Engineer is most fun class as well as very powerfull. If you are planning to have long game and do things not just one way I would say it is best class to play.

[Crimson]

Subjectively? Alright.
The one with the biggest weapons. Boom.
So prob Gunner because his augments affect the weapons.

[Jackofthewolves]

Originally posted by probe:

Engineer is by far my favorite. It might not be the highest dealing damage class at first but later on after leveling up the Rift skill ( the sub-skill Rad field ) you can deal massive damage to several targets at once with radiation. Like massive damage !!!

Early on the class is good for focusing on capping ships (if that's your preference) and later you can make a pretty hefty defensive buiild with what's been dubbed "Tank-gineer" . Check Ryouchan's stickied tutorial videos. It might be there in between (he came up with the build and it's really powerful for tanking massive damage).

I'd encourage you to try all three and see what you like most.

Exactly why I love the Engineer class... Well said probe :)