Questions about the ENGINEER

[Helmic]

Charged, on the other hand, tends to be useful on a lot of engineer-friendly guns.  It's better to just look at the ship layout and pick your ammo based on where you'll be stationed, though; lesmoks if you'll probably hop on a flamethrower, heavy or burst if it's the lower deck of Hwacha Galleon, charged for anything with low ammo counts, et cetera.  Heatsink is more for when a gunner has a free third slot and no idea what to do with it, or when he doesn't trust the engineers to chemspray weapons ahead of time.

[-Muse- Cullen]

By clicking wildly and swapping between my two repair tools(Mallet and Spanner), it seems like I can rebuild a broken system much quicker because it removes the whack cool down. Is this a thing? Or am I just insane.

[Shinkurex]

It seems like it's faster, but it's actually the same speed

[N-Sunderland]

By clicking wildly and swapping between my two repair tools(Mallet and Spanner), it seems like I can rebuild a broken system much quicker because it removes the whack cool down. Is this a thing? Or am I just insane.

https://gunsoficarus.com/community/forum/index.php/topic,199.15.html

Discussion starts at the fourth post from the bottom.

It doesn't speed it up. There's a set gap between hits that cannot be bypassed. You might shorten the time of the spanner animation, but you won't have a real effect on how quickly the component goes up. 

[RaptorSystems]

Which would be the most effective when including a buff hammer in your loadout?

Option A	pipewrench	buff hammer	chem spray
Option B	mallet	spanner	buff hammer (other engineers deal with fires)

[Phoebe]

Which would be the most effective when including a buff hammer in your loadout?

Option A	pipewrench	buff hammer	chem spray
Option B	mallet	spanner	buff hammer (other engineers deal with fires)

Option A on random ships, random people; relatively unknown Engi you are not sure about
Option B on estabilished ships, people you know; an engineer you can co-operate with

[N-Sunderland]

Which would be the most effective when including a buff hammer in your loadout?

Option A	pipewrench	buff hammer	chem spray
Option B	mallet	spanner	buff hammer (other engineers deal with fires)

As Phoebe said, option A is more conservative. Option B requires you to coordinate with the rest of the crew, and is particularly good when the other team can't light fires well.

[HamsterIV]

Which would be the most effective when including a buff hammer in your loadout?

Option A	pipewrench	buff hammer	chem spray
Option B	mallet	spanner	buff hammer (other engineers deal with fires)

Agreed with Sunderland and Phoebe. If you are going no fire control ask your gunner to bring fire extinguisher, and be super coordinated. One fire extinguisher on a ship is never enough especially when the holder of that fire extinguisher has to camp the hull or balloon. I prefer not to have a buff engineer on my ship unless they are the 3rd engineer on a squid, or I have two very coordinated engineers on a goldfish.

[N-Sunderland]

Which would be the most effective when including a buff hammer in your loadout?

Option A	pipewrench	buff hammer	chem spray
Option B	mallet	spanner	buff hammer (other engineers deal with fires)

Agreed with Sunderland and Phoebe. If you are going no fire control ask your gunner to bring fire extinguisher, and be super coordinated. One fire extinguisher on a ship is never enough especially when the holder of that fire extinguisher has to camp the hull or balloon. I prefer not to have a buff engineer on my ship unless they are the 3rd engineer on a squid, or I have two very coordinated engineers on a goldfish.

Having a mallet/spanner/buff is also fairly safe if the other team doesn't have any flamers. Fire from rockets/explosive damage/incendiary is never a real problem. Of course, if a Polaris Spire is on the other team... Those guys know how to use a flare gun, that's for sure.

[HamsterIV]

I find the banshee can put 5 stacks of fire on your balloon pretty quickly. It is not an immediate problem like the hull going down, but it usually can't wait for the post combat fix everything period. I usually fly Pyramidion where the engineer rolls are clearly divided (by the ladder). Asking a gungineer or hull engineer to leave their assigned post can be fatal. On something with more fluid engineering like the Goldfish or Squid a one extinguisher crew would be more survivable.

Edit syntax

[N-Sunderland]

I find the banshee can put 5 stacks of fire on your balloon in pretty quickly. It is not an immediate problem like the hull going down, but it usually can't wait for the post combat fix everything period. I usually fly Pyramidion where the engineer rolls are clearly divided (by the ladder). Asking a gungineer or hull engineer to leave their assigned post can be fatal. On something with more fluid engineering like the Goldfish or Squid a one extinguisher crew would be more survivable.

Yes, that's true. I find that it can also work on the Junker.

[-Muse- Cullen]

Here's a nice little wall of questions.
--
Other than on a Squid, are there any reasons to take the pipe wrench instead of a mallet or spanner in a 'Mallet/Spanner/(Spray-Fire)' loadout?

Any reason not to take the pipe wrench in a 'Pipe/Buff/(Spray-Fire)' loadout?

Are there any intelligent choices other than the spyglass for an engineer? Or, is there any reason for taking a helm tool other than the spyglass? Would any situation allow or need it?

When a ship is fully repaired, and enemy ships are already sighted, what are the ranking priorities of the primary engineer(or, the role that isn't acting as a gungineer)?
--

Thanks.

[Helmic]

1.  For the pipe wrench, there's some theoretical situations where a pipe wrench might be more useful to bring along than a mallet but they don't come up often enough to remotely justify it.

2.  Yes, though it depends on what you're doing.  The Pipe Wrench is pretty awesome, but if you know you'll mostly just be repairing or mostly just be rebuilding the mallet or spanner might be a better idea.  Just like how a lot of gunners like to bring a mallet instead of a pipe wrench, you might prefer to take a mallet to quickly repair a heavy weapon you're on.  Of course, you can eschew the fire extinguisher entirely in most of those cases and just go mallet/spanner/buff hammer, you're probably not the main engineer so it's probably not too risky to trade extinguishing for awesome repairs.

3.  lolno.  If you're on the helm something has gone horribly wrong.  If you know that your pilot is going to ragequit or disconnect a lot MAYBE you'll want to bring something like hydrogen or moonshine so you won't be completely left in the dust, but it's generally better to trust your pilot to do his job.  If he's off the helm repairing something and you're on the helm driving, you guys need to switch places.

4.  That depends on what those enemy ships are doing.  Generally your job will be to stay near the hull and wait for the first sign of burst damage, that peace and quiet will shatter very quickly and you'll only have a split second to repair the hull and stop it from taking permanent damage.  If it's safe to do so, you should get on a third gun and help with damage, but you'll have to pay careful attention to your surroundings so that the hull won't instantly disappear, if there's a ship ready to shoot you assume it will shoot you.  Generally if your pilot is keeping in the enemy's blind spot it's safe to shoot so long the enemy didn't bring asshwachas.  It's risky, but that extra damage even if it's small can be utterly devastating.  I've made great use of a flak/gat Pyra with a flamethrower on the side, by itself the flamethrower isn't worth much and it certainly isn't worth ignoring hull damage but that little extra cherry on top will GREATLY increase the speed at which we can kill just about any ship.

[Captain Smollett]

3). Whoa, I'll have to respectfully disagree here. Though it's rare and takes a lot of coordination, there are situations where an engi jumps on the helm strategically  to use a fourth pilots tool.

For proof of it check out the last Polaris match. All of the commentators missed it but Polaris's top deck engi brought moonshine and the captain brought three other tools. More impressively they moonshined several times in that match to great effect. 

[Helmic]

I haven't thought of using the pilot tool slot like that, but it's still sacrificing a tool you'll use often to great effect for something very situational, it goes back to what I said about bringing a pipe wrench and spanner.  Polaris was also sporting a lot of other unorthodox setups and tactics that game so it's hard to tell if they really found something brilliant or simply wanted to bewilder the Pastafarians.  In my eyes it looked like the Pastafarians lost to their own lack of coordination rather than anything exceptional Polaris did.  It was an odd game in general.