List of suggestions

[Safewood]

We need lesmok on the flamethrower, so we pull the lesmok engineer from his repairs to load the gun, soon we need to load greased so we pull the greased engineer from his repairs to load greased, and then we'll need the incendiary engineer to load... well you get the point. While certain builds and people use three engineers on their ship, having them load the different types when they could be doing something useful is needless tedium.

Take Pyramidion for instance. You have two top, where one rotates, while the other is stationary until we're forced fully broadside, and last's on the deck. The one who rotates sits on the Gattling with Greased Rounds, and will reload that onto the Flamethrower when there's dead time, and the stationary will sit on Mortars with Charged Rounds while repairing the balloon whenever possible, but will rotate to the Rockets as soon as they have no line of sight.
The last Engi has Lesmok or also Greased Rounds, and will be the primary repair man. However, when shit starts to hit the fan, you're the focus and there's no point fighting back, then the time 3 Engi's beating relentlessly on a red Hull waste for the opponents is just incredible. It usually gives your team mate enough time to draw one of them away from you, giving you enough breathing room to come back into the fight and start focusing 1v2 against them.

[Piemanlives]

-Snip-

Again, needless tedium, and again, the point of a gunner is to provide said different types of ammo. Guns can utilize several different ammo types and being able to switch those as needed is quite literally, really useful, and the thing about pyramidions is you're supposed to fly those things head on, that's how the ship really works, great engage and if you've got your turning engines buffed or you're using phoenix claw you'll be able to keep your front guns aimed at who whoever is firing at you. If the pilot isn't keeping the ship pointed at the enemy they are doing something wrong.

Secondly, if you have 3 engineers banging on the hull and nothing else, you'll eventually lose balloon, your engines, and all guns, even if a situation like the one you described there's still two ships, if they see you're hurting they will go in for the kill and wreck you. If you're facing a Hwacha fish/spire/galleon they can keep disabling you or your ally, even with the long reload time there is still that second enemy ship to deal with. Sure three engineers work, but you shouldn't count on things going as smoothly, besides, pyramidions are not the best example of how a three engineer ammo loadout works, considering that a single good engineer can feasibly keep both the engines and the hull maintained. The engineer up top is typically told to maintain the balloon behind his gun while the gunner can use a wrench to help out the main engineer in pinch.

Now I want to know exactly what kind of gunners you've encountered that have given you this view on how useful they are.

[Safewood]

@ Piemanlives:
If it's close range, then of course, you're going to go down no matter what. I've now watched quite a lot of VODs from the HC tourney and 9 out of 10 teams go 3 Engi's, too. So within the competitive scene it seems to be the most popular setup, and with good reasons.

[Piemanlives]

HC? Are talking Hephaestus here?

Edit:

Of course we, it's the only tournament running right now.

2nd Edit:

You still seem to underestimate gunners, which I guess is fine, however this thread is descending into another gunner debate, which I hope we can avoid, there are far more topics with the exact same arguments as the ones we're using.

[Safewood]

@ Piemanlives:
Yes, Hephaestus Challenge.

Sure, no problem. I wanted to discuss new ideas rather than argument about whether it's viable or not. Thanks.