How bad is Artificer?

[Mark]

It's embarrassing to have a character that pathetically trash compared to the rest of the roster by miles.

[Chimbo]

Do randomly cringe throughout the day thinking of how embarrassing it is that some video game has a subpar character? What an odd descriptor.

I don't think she's that bad. I quite like her, actually, she just isn't "Hold M1, get soldiers syringe, hold M1 harder". She is likely the weakest character on the roster though, and she could use some buffs.

[Slayer Slayerson]

When i use her in multiplayer and shoot projectiles, the targets are dead or mostly dead since other people are dpsing much faster and more reliably.

[Hee Haw]

she is one of the weakest characters in this game, but her freeze is very useful and her ion surge pretty much makes you immortal. she is good for taking out single enemies, and can be more like an assist character sometimes, like engineer.

[InZombiac]

eh, maybe just havent found the right build to make her fun.
i usually go for maximum damage in a single shot while flying high in the sky, making her an orbital bomber. works best solo or with friends though.
once went on a run for over two hours one-shotting even the bosses with that build.

if you do want to have more fun without getting op though, just go download the artificer overhaul mod. it adds a lot of new abilities, all of which are actually pretty good. overhauls her existing skills too.

but anyway, i dont believe that a bad character exists in ror2. just some are harder to play than others, but i find all of them fun. engi and arti being my by far favorites.

also, keep in mind that this is coming from a solo/duo player. i have no idea how viable they are in larger/random groups.

[[RU] kocatka]

Ha-ha op character named "trash". Try better next time, troll.

[mldb88]

Originally posted by косатка:

Ha-ha op character named "trash". Try better next time, troll.

Sounds like an awful trolly thing to say...

Back to the point though
She’s generally considered the weakest character by most, not unplayable in any sense but definitely a few steps down from things like loader or even huntress.

[[RU] kocatka]

Originally posted by mldb88:

Originally posted by косатка:

Ha-ha op character named "trash". Try better next time, troll.

Sounds like an awful trolly thing to say...

Back to the point though
She’s generally considered the weakest character by most, not unplayable in any sense but definitely a few steps down from things like loader or even huntress.

Arti has colossal amount of damage, only thing that can compete with her - cap's Diablo, which kinda useless in most of cases. So, her skills must have been nerfed. The way to do it without decreasing numbers - take her maneuverability off.

Weakest? Weakest in what? Movement? Excuse me, her ion blast not only taking her such high, that most of maps back you to ground by teleporting, but damaging in a medium radius very well.

In damage? 2000% to enemies per shot in large radius. Give her some bands with magazines - absolute destroying machine to your service.

In item collecting? She one of the most universal survivors, who can get any build and will wiping out anything without problems.

You can give her purity, glass, tonic, meteorite ANYTHING of lunar items and all map would suffer in agony. If other characters depend on luck and item builds, so you need to try hard to get as far as you can. And with arti we have opposite situation: you have to try to manage to failing the run.
I can name only one such a multipurpose survivor - commando.

So where you saw arti's weakness?

[Lunacy]

She's more about big burst damage rather than consistent damage.

[Blackgun]

she was much better before the Lightning ball nerf, now she's just a placeholder if you ask me. Still decent for an occasional game

[Sato]

Don't know what you're on, Artificer was the first character I beat monsoon with.
Immobile yes, but very powerful in my experience.

[Senki]

Not bad at all unless you're trying to play on eclipse. She can easily clear monsoon and doesn't rely too much on items because of her high base damage. At least not as much as other characters like commando

[Engineer Gaming]

She is weak in most situations but she is the best Survivor VS Mithrix as she can freeze him and stunlock him to death.

[LordAziki]

Her ENV suit and ion surge give her a lot of utility. She can stay airborne indefinitely to avoid melee enemies, ground-based AoE, and all damage from beetle queens (The acid spit does nothing if it hits you in the air, but the flying bugs will still debuff you.). She can skip the pillars and go straight to Mithrix then avoid the majority of his attacks by flying. She can avoid fall damage in most situations with proper use of her ENV suit. She can easily fly out of range of wandering vagrants then take them out from a distance. She can easily avoid everything the alloy worship unit has. Ion surge also lets her fly up to hard-to-reach areas quickly and easily, and simply being high above the ground gives a good vantage point to more quickly find chests and teleporters. The damage from ion surge is also decent, usually taking out weak enemies in a single hit while taking a fair amount of health from stronger enemies while stunning them. The only weakness to her flight is some attacks being hard to avoid without either being close to the enemy using them or getting cover, which is hard to do when you're in the air.

If you opt for the flamethrower instead of ion surge, she can rapidly hit all enemies in an area in front of her 22 times with high proc coefficient and the ability to easily cancel it to move out of the way of things.

Charged nano-bomb does low damage to enemies around the projectile as it travels to soften weaker enemies before dealing high damage in an area and stunning enemies on impact. It can be released early to throw a weaker projectile that still has decent damage and puts it on cooldown sooner because the cooldown starts after the projectile is fired. Main issues are the projectile drop and enemies being brought under 90% health by the damage around the projectile before it can hit.

Cast nano-spear has lower damage than charged nano-bomb, but its damage is still pretty high. It has no drop, more reliably benefits from crowbars, and freezes enemies. Since frozen enemies die instantly if you hit them below 30% of their max health, that gives it similar infinite scaling to what old guillotines have. Since snapfreeze has a cooldown and can't hit flying enemies unless they fly close to the ground, having a second freeze from cast nano-spear isn't bad.

Snapfreeze creates multiple pillars of ice on the ground which damage and freeze enemies on contact. Since most bosses are so big, using it on a boss on the ground will instantly hit it multiple times with high proc coefficient. While it can't hit Mithrix multiple times immediately when cast, he will still be frozen by it and be given a 30% execution threshold while frozen.

Flame bolt does more damage per hit than most primary fires while igniting enemies to take a decent amount of damage over time. It can technically hit multiple enemies at once, but doing so is so unreliable it's best to just consider it a single target skill.

Plasma bolt is similar to flame bolt, but it hits all enemies in 6m radius for full damage with high proc coefficient instead of igniting them. The damage doesn't normally compete with that of flame bolt, but 220% damage to 2 enemies is a total of 440% while 220% to a single enemy with another 200% over 8 seconds is ultimately 420%. The extra procs from hitting multiple enemies at once with individual proc calculations can boost the advantage ever farther, especially when difficulty gets high enough that enemies will usually be in large groups. Plasma bolt still won't do as much damage to a single target like Mithrix and won't give an ignite to potentially proc deathmark, so you may want to take flame bolt instead if you need single target damage more than AoE damage.

The cooldown on her primary and charge time on her secondary can be annoying for people trying her for the first time, but literally every skill she has access to is strong. Her main weaknesses are low health and average damage stat. Her low health can be made up for by properly using her skills, and her average damage is already made up for by her skills having high damage scaling. Her total damage will be relatively high compared to anything but a loader's charged gauntlet, but MUL-T is the only character who would do less damage with items that scale with damage. At the same time, only the bandit, the engineer, the heretic, and Acrid have higher damage stats than average.

[Lunacy]

Originally posted by LordAziki:

Plasma bolt is similar to flame bolt, but it hits all enemies in 6m radius for full damage with high proc coefficient instead of igniting them. The damage doesn't normally compete with that of flame bolt, but 220% damage to 2 enemies is a total of 440% while 220% to a single enemy with another 200% over 8 seconds is ultimately 420%. The extra procs from hitting multiple enemies at once with individual proc calculations can boost the advantage ever farther, especially when difficulty gets high enough that enemies will usually be in large groups. Plasma bolt still won't do as much damage to a single target like Mithrix and won't give an ignite to potentially proc deathmark, so you may want to take flame bolt instead if you need single target damage more than AoE damage.

The problem with plasma bolt is that flame bolt also has a good enough splash radius and often kills things in 1-2 hits that plasma would take 3-4 to kill, plasma bolt desperately needs to be reworked into something competitive. My main suggestion has been turn it into a 100% ukulele-like lightning attack with no charges that chains, 2 bounces and get more bounces with every 50% attack speed.

[[RU] kocatka]

Originally posted by Lunacy:

Originally posted by LordAziki:

Plasma bolt is similar to flame bolt, but it hits all enemies in 6m radius for full damage with high proc coefficient instead of igniting them. The damage doesn't normally compete with that of flame bolt, but 220% damage to 2 enemies is a total of 440% while 220% to a single enemy with another 200% over 8 seconds is ultimately 420%. The extra procs from hitting multiple enemies at once with individual proc calculations can boost the advantage ever farther, especially when difficulty gets high enough that enemies will usually be in large groups. Plasma bolt still won't do as much damage to a single target like Mithrix and won't give an ignite to potentially proc deathmark, so you may want to take flame bolt instead if you need single target damage more than AoE damage.

The problem with plasma bolt is that flame bolt also has a good enough splash radius and often kills things in 1-2 hits that plasma would take 3-4 to kill, plasma bolt desperately needs to be reworked into something competitive. My main suggestion has been turn it into a 100% ukulele-like lightning attack with no charges that chains, 2 bounces and get more bounces with every 50% attack speed.

Or just decrease proc koefficient of fire bolt, so make plasma more proc-related