engie shotgun vs smg?

[livin']

i did the math on an upgraded shotgun, which does about 7500 something damage for full ammo, while the smg upgraded has around 5500 ish damage, any instance on high HAZ or in general where smg would be better?

[Dwarfurious]

SMG has the DoT/CC component though, pretty major.

[Шрамами]

I did the maths, Engie was the worst enjoyable character to play for me, but a bit better when i got SMG. I feel like my survival depends too much from others players when playing it.

[Chibbity]

I far prefer the SMG, the debuff is fantastic, especially when fully specced for it.

The general "meta" consensus at high Haz levels is actually that the SMG>Shotty.

[BROLY 32]

I did the maths, engie is worst class. Place a few platforms for scouts, build your little sentries and watch your team do the heavy work, job's done.

[Шрамами]

Broly explained very well how it feels when playing engie.

[BROLY 32]

Originally posted by Zoubir:

Broly explained very well how it feels when playing engie.

Did I ? Damn, that was some pure guessing. An educated guess tho.

[Cactus-Cat]

I prefer the shotgun. It has a very high stun chance, you don't even need the stun upgrade.

[AHarmlessTaco]

I have tried both, with the SMG specced out for electrocute, but frankly I find the shotgun to be better in a vast majority of situations if you have good aim. I don't see any point in stunning enemies when a shotgun to their mouth (grunt) or a clip to the abdomen (prae) simply kills them. I will say that the SMG is a little more friendly when fighting dreadnoughts and cave leeches, but you don't spec it for electrocute. I sorta have the same issue with the incendiary grenades for the launcher, why burn them when you can just deal all upfront lethal damage?

[Fuzzy the imperfect]

SMG is in form a support weapon.

It does have the normally OP holy trinity of CC, DoT, and potential AoE. So it's low damage as compensation. Better in damage if and only if the AoE procs and you let the DoT do the work, which means better on dense high haz hordes.

[Slate]

SMG

[Landor]

I've tried using the Stubby, both shock chance setups as well as damage setups, but in both cases it felt extremely weak and piddly, especially at the rate ammo was being consumed; enemies would get shocked occasionally, but that didn't seem to help much at all, and I didn't like relying on random chance if I could help it anyway.

So I went back to the Warthog, satisfying boom to it, powerful, ammo efficient, a good workhorse of a weapon. The only problem is I find I reload a lot with it, and that's besides my habit of pressing R at any downtime, but that's a small price to pay.

[savinguptobebroke]

I prefer the shotgun as I can kill 9 grunts without reloading. The breach cutter just can't cut it on higher difficulties, so I use the grenade launcher on higher difficulties.

The issue with the engineer is that higher difficulties require you to keep moving, however the engineer has a immobile turret.

His mobility skill is the worst of all the classes, in higher difficulties as it takes so long to set up. As the engineer if you try to build a staircase you just die on hazard 5.

The turret skill scales poorly with more enemies whereas the gunner's shield, driller’s C4 and the scout's grapple scales well with more enemies.

Simply put the engineer gets worse as the difficulty goes up where as the other classes get better or stay the same.

[MisterSpock]

Breach cutter can almost 2 shot pretorians +more ammo.

[savinguptobebroke]

Originally posted by MisterSpock:

Breach cutter can almost 2 shot pretorians +more ammo.

I love breach cutter and I think it's the most fun weapon to use, however you can normally out run praetorians or just circle them. However, grunts on the other hand or far more numerous in higher difficulties and the grenade launcher is easier to use and more effective. I mainly use the grenade launcher as I feel the engineer doesn't have enough aoe damage at higher difficulty levels.

[Syncourt]

It doesn't honestly matter that much what you take if you place and maintain the MKII with defender where it can make full use of it's range to shoot the bugs, it will do most of your share of the regular bug killing for you and has more than enough ammo to have a 100% uptime on haz 5.

We done salvage haz5 with just using MKII turrets while mostly standing around looking pretty, so that says a lot in itself.

Personally I take the SMG with the 50 round mag mod and first ammo mod (+120/total of 540), no electricity mods. Kills plenty if your aim is good, doesn't need to reload too often, doesn't require face to face combat in order to be effective which means you get surrounded less (works decent at long range too) and most importantly it minimizes ammo wastage from overkill.

My total damage build comparisons are as follows

Shotgun:
5760 damage with +2 pellets, standard ammo capacity. 11,520 total standard 2x weak spot.
6240 damage with extended ammo capacity. 12,480 total standard 2x weak spot.
Both with +2 damage mod.

SMG:
5040 damage with +6 damage, standard ammo capacity. 12,600 total 2.5x weak spot.
4860 damage with +3 damage, extended ammo capacity. 12,150 total 2.5x weak spot.

also consider
- Neither of the SMG totals include extra electrical damage (not enough info to add it).
- SMG has less time spent reloading.
- SMG spends less time having to position in order to get all pellets in.
- SMG wastes a lot less ammo from overkilling targets.
- How good is your aim?