Drone Tanker

The Engineer class has many possible options available. We can have a minor army of bots firing rockets and dropping bombs, we can have a spinning bladed demon-blender-drone, we have smackdown skills to call in airstrikes and the ability to become invisible. Decisions, decisions! This guide examines just one possible path for the Engineer: the Drone Tanker. Our purpose, as a Drone Tanker, is to create a drone capable of standing up to the toughest demonic pounding, while we stand safely to one side killing the crowds gathered around it. As this is intended to be a HC solo-capable build the focus is on safety and durability rather than raw killing power.

Meet the Drone

The Drone, or Fred as I like to call him, is (not surprisingly) the central element of this build. He's not very bright, he's very agressive, and he's not very bright. On the other hand, he's not very bright. When you're thinking about sneaking up on something Fred will dash ahead spraying bullets about with reckless abandon. When you're in the perfect position to support him against the swarm of demons lurking just up the road, Fred will float quietly beside you beeping contentedly to himself, dreaming of electric sheep. On the other hand, Fred can take quite a beating, he can heal you and your friends, can himself be healed almost instantly in the thick of battle, and can use some of those wonderful out-of-class weapons and armour bits that you would otherwise disassemble or sell.

You access the Drone's interface by Alt-clicking on his icon at the top left of the screen. Select Inventory. Once Fred has the appropriate retrofits you will be able to install guns and armour here. This is also where you adjust his attributes. These adjustments persist between drones (if Fred gets reduced to a smoking pile metal shards) and between sessions (if you leave the game) so make them carefully.

Skills

These are the skills which make up the Drone Tanker. First off, the non-drone skills:

Tactical Skills

====Tactical Stance====

This is a toggled stance. When engaged, you must crouch down and enjoy significant bonuses to your shooting. With only a single point investment your Accuracy is increased by 50%, your weapon's range is increased by 25%, the velocity of your missiles is increased by 25% and your critical hit chance is increased by 4%. It's a one-point wonder! Further investment only increases your critical chance by 1% per point.

Available: Level 1
Total points: 1 ====Beacon====

Beacon highlights the target with a visible beam-of-light effect. For the next few seconds that target will take increased damage from all sources. A single point invested gives a 25% increase in damage for the next 9 seconds. Further points increase the damage bonus by 5% per point and increase the duration by 1 second per point. You will learn to love this skill.

Available: Level 5
Minimum points: 1 ====Escape====

Aptly named, Escape lets you do just that! This skill makes you invisible for a short time. Enemies will completely forget about your existence for the duration, allowing you to flee or simply to peel them off on Fred. If and when Fred dies, this skill will save your bacon. A single point gives you 6 seconds of invisibility. Further points increase this by 1 second per point and also decrease the power cost of the ability.

Available: Level 15
Minimum points: 1

Bot skills

====Inhibitor Bots====

These three floating fellows act as your tripwire. If a target moves within their range, they will point it out with glowing red beams. Their effects appear to be minimal at best, but since you're born with 1 point in this skill, you might as well make some use of them.

Available: Automatic
Total points: 1

Drone skills

====Construct Drone====

This is how we create our drone. Each point beyond the first increases his health by 25%. We will max this skill.

Available: Level 1
Total points: 10 ====MedPak Retrofit====

This enables Fred to send out pulses of red light which heal the Engineer and any of her allies in range. This is a heal-over-time effect, the drone will continue to pulse every few seconds for thirty seconds or so, with each pulse healing a small amount of damage. (He also tends to wander off looking for a fight, so you need to stay in range of this effect to benefit.) Each additional point invested increases the amount of healing done by 20%. Other than health boosters this is your one and only healing ability.

Available: Level 5
Minimum points: 2 (Prerequisite for Shield Generator Retrofit)
Recommended minimum points: 6 ====Repair Drone====

This enables you to repair damage to Fred of up to 50% of his maximum health. Although there is a brief delay (while you wave your hands around) before the repairs take effect, the repairs themselves are instantaneous. Initially this can only be done every 40 seconds, which is a long, long time in combat. Additional points decrease this cooldown period substantially. To make things slightly easier Fred will let you know when he is taking damage. At 50% damage, and again at about 90% damage he emits a distinctive "squeal-beep-beep-beep"

Available: Level 5
Recommended minimum points: 5 ====Gun Retrofit====

This enables you to fit Fred with a gun. Up until now he's been using a built-in laser which, to be honest, doesn't do much other than let you know he's fighting. Now you can install pistols and rifles (including those only usable by other classes.) Fred must meet the Accuracy (and other attribute) requirements of the weapon in order to use it. Each point in this skill gives the drone 7 points of Accuracy which will allow him to equip more powerful guns.

Fred has no concept of short controlled bursts or "one-shot-one-kill". He does better with rifles or direct fire launchers, field weapons like the Firefox launchers just confuse the poor toaster. He can use sniper weapons, but at close range they can be rather ineffective.

Available: Level 10
Minimum points: 2 (Prerequisite for later skills) ====Armour Retrofit====

This enables you to equip Fred with a piece of torso armour, greatly increasing his ability to withstand abuse. Again, he can make use of the armour of any class including the rather tasty pieces Guardians would use. He must meet the Strength (and other attribute) requirements of the piece. To this end each point in this ability gives the drone 7 points of Strength.

Available: Level 15
Minimum points: 2 (Prerequisite for Master Engineer) ====Shield Generator Retrofit====

This allows Fred to emit pulses which recharge the shields of the Engineer and her allies very much as the Medpak Retrofit allowed him to heal them. Additional points decrease the cooldown period from an initially rather long 40 seconds.

Available: Level Level 20
Recommended minimum points: 5 ====Master Engineer====

This skill increases the drone's armour. A maximum of 7 points can be invested here, so let's max it.

Available: Level 25
Recommended minimum points: 7

Those of you following along will notice that there remain a few skill points to play with after meeting the minimums above. This gives you flexibility in your choice of Fred's armour and weapon by applying more points to Gun Retrofit or Armour Retrofit for the Accuracy or Strength bonuses there. "Optional" points would also be well spent on Beacon all the way up to the maximum 10, or on Repair Drone or Escape if you feel the need. The other drone skills; Tactical Mode, Advanced Tactical Mode, Sword Retrofit and Gyroblade are possibilities, although with such a small number of points available to invest it seems to me better to spend them in the skills listed above. Although this is not a party specific build, one point in Tactical Mode does have the advantage of allowing you to anchor Fred in one spot, making it easier for party members to take advantage of Fred's healing and shield recharge abilities. One non-drone skill in which an optional point or two might be fun is Phase Grenade.

Attributes

As an Engineer you will begin with;

• Accuracy 20
  Your role in this little partnership is to kill what Fred flushes out. To that end you want the powerful weapons that a high Accuracy allows. Accuracy also decreases the "spread" of your missiles, greatly increasing your effectiveness. Pump this attribute.
• Strength 20
  You will want to ensure you have enough to equip your chosen late-game armour, but no more. You could easily leave this at the base 20 for the entire game.
• Stamina 15
  As this is intended as a HC soloable build I consider Stamina crucial. All the points from your first couple of levels, and 2 or more of each of the 5 attribute points gained per level after that would not be too many points to invest here. For a softcore or a more team oriented build you could reduce this investment and instead increase your Accuracy investment.
• Willpower 20
  Willpower determines how much Power you have and how quickly it regenerates. On that score you could (with occasional use of boosters) leave this at the base 20. A higher Willpower may also enable you to equip some more powerful weapon mods, in which case apply them as needed.

Equipment

There are a couple of important points to make regarding equipment for the Drone Tanker. The first is that Engineer equipment is available with bonuses to minion armour, health and damage. The first two, armour and health make very nice additions to your kit. Look for them.

As to weapons, since you will often find large groups of such things as Felbore or Imps tightly packed around Fred trying to peel that "No Fear" sticker off his shiny metal butt, it's handy to have a nice area effect weapon (or a weapon which arcs to multiple targets) in one of your weapon sets. Fred will happily remain parked in the middle of your blazing lake of fire or crackling cloud of lightning while the charred corpses pile up to his hubcaps.

Also, since he's such an unrepentantly aggressive little droid there are times when you don't want him to even get a glimpse of that huge pack of evil up ahead. At moments like that a nice sniper weapon (combined with Tactical Stance for that range bonus) can keep him out of the action while you do a little culling of the herd.

Playing the Drone Tanker

There's nothing terribly subtle here. Drone draws the fire, you kill anything that attacks him. Heal Fred when he's hurt, take advantage of his ability to heal you and your friends. Watch your Inhibitor Bots for early warnings. Plain and simple. That said, there are some points to mention;

Use your Tactical Stance and Beacon! They really bring the pain to the target. I keep Tactical Stance on my RMB. Repair Drone on my Q hotkey and Beacon on my E hotkey. (Escape is on 2 3 and 4 since I tend to mash when I panic.)

Listen to Fred. As mentioned he will "squeal-beep-beep-beep" at 50% and 90% damage. When you hear that noise, hit Repair. When you hear that immediately twice in a row it's probably time to Escape.

Fred has no taste in targets. YOU will have to take out those bosses, the spawners and diabolists. Fred doesn't discriminate at all. This may require an area effect weapon if you can't target through the crowd.

Fred will die. Don't give Fred toys or mods that you aren't willing to lose.

Fred tries to follow you from in front. This means whichever direction you're headed he'll (usually) either be right behind you or leading the way. This means you can sometimes pull him out of trouble by turning around and running a few steps away, Fred (like a metal German Shepherd) will dash over to get in front of you, possibly saving himself from the swarms of demons and zombies around him. When it works he's fast and can outdistance pursuit.

Fred tries to stay close to you. Without external stimulus the drone usually stays within a couple of metres of you. If he thinks there's something interesting down those stairs, or around that corner, he'll head off that way, but only about 15 metres or so unless he actually spots and engages a target. (At which point he tends to lose control and will often race off.) So if you see him continually heading out and back while you're stationary, he's caught a scent and wants to go kill something.

Some demons are smart. They will ignore the drone and attack you (the nerve!) This is a good time to Escape, and let them reorient on Fred. While invisible, throw a Repair if needed, move to a good spot, switch to sniper rifle, enter Tactical Stance, hit the target with Beacon and open fire. If they switch target to you again, give them a couple shots with the sniper (and hopefully phase them for Fred) and Escape again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Watch Fred in narrow twisty places (like the passages of brains) He gets stuck on walls and corners sometimes. Either stuck physically, or he doesn't quite realize that he's blasting the bricks offa that wall instead of hitting the Demon standing right behind it. A quick dash on your part might get him to relocate.

Any other comments apply to any relatively fragile HC class. Work the edges before the centre. Make sure you have somewhere to run to. Don't be afraid to use boosters and medpaks. Read Koalachan's HC Guide.

Good luck!
-- Alexandra