Engineer: fewest weapons, most buttons in the game

The engineer has the shortest weapon list of the nine classes and the most buttons on screen. The reasoning holds up: it barely needs weapons, because it carries its own arsenal.

The tool belt

The class mechanic is the tool belt. Every utility skill you slot automatically grants a second skill on the belt.

Where other classes have three utility buttons, the engineer has six. You choose nothing extra: slot a skill, receive a pair.

The belt comes with small print.

Two details do more for your play than any build guide.

The first: tool belt skills recharge on their own timers. Using the belt skill does nothing to the utility skill above it, and using the utility does nothing to the belt. They are two separate buttons that happen to arrive together, and players who treat them as one throw away half the class.

The second: the belt fills in as you level. F4 opens at level 19, F5 at level 20 when you get your elite skill. Before that the engineer feels oddly plain, which is why so many people drop the class at low level and never see what it becomes.

Elite specialisations take the belt as payment. Scrapper and Holosmith each replace F5 with their own mechanic. Mechanist replaces all five, which is the real reason it plays nothing like the core class.

Kits

A kit replaces your weapon skills entirely while you hold it. There are seven:

• Med Kit for healing
• Bomb Kit for explosives at your feet
• Grenade Kit for thrown damage at range
• Flamethrower
• Elixir Gun for support and condition cleansing
• Tool Kit for melee and turret repair
• Elite Mortar Kit

Kits are how the engineer works around its weapon list: a rifle in hand, grenades in a kit, and the swap is instant.

Turrets, gadgets, elixirs

Turrets are immobile emplacements: drop one and it attacks and holds an area. You can pack it up again or detonate it.

Gadgets are one-off devices such as Rocket Boots and the Personal Battering Ram, the most engineer-flavoured part of the class.

Elixirs grant boons, clear conditions, revive allies, and occasionally make you invulnerable.

Turrets exist, and almost nobody runs them.

Six of them: Healing, Flame, Net, Rifle, Rocket and Thumper, plus Harpoon underwater and Supply Crate as an elite that drops several at once.

Each one overcharges automatically when deployed, and you can overcharge it again by hand for a second effect. You can pick a turret back up, which cuts its redeployment recharge by 25%, or detonate it for damage where it stands.

Now the part the tooltips do not tell you:

• turrets cannot critically hit
• projectiles pass through them and damage them on the way
• they self-destruct after five minutes
• 🔴 mounting removes every turret you have out, instantly

That list is the whole story of why turrets are the least-used skill family in the game. There is a real affection for them among veterans, and a real resignation, and both are earned.

Weapons

Two-handed: hammer, rifle, short bow, spear. Main-hand: mace, pistol, sword. Off-hand: pistol, shield.

The list is short, and in practice you spend more time inside kits than on your weapon.

It is hard for a newcomer, and not because they are slow.

There are many buttons and no two behave alike. A kit changes five skills, the belt adds six more, and all of it has to live in your head.

The engineer is also, along with the elementalist, one of the two classes with no weapon swap in combat. Kits stand in for it, and they have to be slotted in advance.

Practical advice: take a rifle and the Grenade Kit and leave the rest alone until they feel natural. Those two carry you to 80.

The elite specialisations

Scrapper (Heart of Thorns) adds gyros, hovering helpers built through wells, plus the hammer. The sturdiest version.

Holosmith (Path of Fire) adds the Photon Forge, hard-light weapons that overheat you if you hold them too long. Risk traded for damage.

Mechanist (End of Dragons) gives you a battle mech commanded through signets. The engineer effectively gains a pet like the ranger, and it is the easiest way into the class.

Amalgam (Visions of Eternity) uses stances to morph and evolve.

Advice for a newcomer

If you like the look of the class but the button count worries you, wait for 80 and take Mechanist. The mech holds the enemy, you shoot, and half the complexity goes away.

The comparison against the other eight sits in the overview.