Ok, so stupid question, but I used to be able to carry and do massive damage in my Anaconda running coil mortars. I’ve noticed they’re not really doing as much damage in the higher levels, like the Grizzly. The question is, should I keep running them and rank them up or is there a better weapon for that level and ship?
Depends on your playstyle. If you prefer doing direct damage to the enemy frigates and fighters, do coils. If not, switch to Eclipses with Supercooled Charges. They’re basically a weaker but way more accurate EM coil mortar that can heal allies.
I prefer Eclipses because I can heal wounded teammates in a pinch, yet with the proper build I can suppress and punish anyone who comes within 5km of me.
Depends on your playstyle. If you prefer doing direct damage to the enemy frigates and fighters, do coils. If not, switch to Eclipses with Supercooled Charges. They’re basically a weaker but way more accurate EM coil mortar that can heal allies.
I prefer Eclipses because I can heal wounded teammates in a pinch, yet with the proper build I can suppress and punish anyone who comes within 5km of me.
Interesting, I enjoy doing the most damage. Basically, I want to be able to look at an enemy and have them explode.
Have you ever considered flying LRFs? They’re the kings of DPS for frigates, and properly built ones will demolish even the toughest Guard within a matter of seconds.
Have you ever considered flying LRFs? They’re the kings of DPS for frigates, and properly built ones will demolish even the toughest Guard within a matter of seconds.
I like the versatility of the engineering frigates, you can repair allies plus the combat drones are nice
Your main problem is that engineers are support ships, and have the lowest DPS of all frigates. Coils are good in low tiers because people forget or doesn’t care about fixing the kinetic hole in their tank. But in tier 4 most people know how to play, and ships have more hull slots, so it is difficult to add more damage.
Usually engineers do well with the Eclipse launcher. It is very accurate, it does a fair damage and has long range. The cooling cycle is a bit bad, but you can fix it with supercooled charges OR shared cooler on the engine slots.
If you want to melt other people, just take a LRF.
Eclipse launcher is generally ok - heall allies, deal decent support damage. Still does explosion damage to frigates. You can also use heavy blaster and get up close and personal with missiles and your combat drones, however note that engies are targets so you need to know how to attack and retreat.
Basically, I want to be able to look at an enemy and have them explode.
Here, let me introduce you to my good friend Mr EM Torpedo :012j:
Other than that, yeah I use eclipse on all engies, since you are a support role and healing your teammates with eclipse can win you the game.
Ok, I’ll try out the eclipse launcher, and if I don’t like it, it’s not like I don’t have a backup weapon.
It’s possible to make a decent-DPS Eclipse on the Grizzly at the cost of healing power. Simply stick a Horizon, a Weapon Cooler, and 2x Iridium Heatsinks on. Maximum pewpew.
Let me know how you like that!
Keep in mind though that Eclipse is a support weapon, meant to heal ally hulls and keep enemies suppressed with volleys of obnoxious blue splashes. You can bend the rules with my suggestion but it will weaken your healing capabilities with your auras.
Ok, I’ll try out the eclipse launcher, and if I don’t like it, it’s not like I don’t have a backup weapon.
It’s possible to make a decent-DPS Eclipse on the Grizzly at the cost of healing power. Simply stick a Horizon, a Weapon Cooler, and 2x Iridium Heatsinks on. Maximum pewpew.
I highly recommend you use a shared cooler in one of the engine slots (as mecron says) or supercolled charges (purple ammo) if you have enough computer chips. It highly increases your enjoyment of eclipse launcher, and pisses off your enemies due to loss of vision 
It also increases DPS since you are firing for longer.
So, I tried running a few matches with the eclipse launcher with the supercooled charges and the weapon cooler and I’m not really impressed. I miss being able to just put a target down hard like I did with the coil mortars, I’m definitely not playing the eclipse launcher correctly. It seems like with the eclipse, you’re just bringing their shields down, then hoping either your fighters or a teammate destroys the target.
You’re right about it not having as much raw DPS as the Coils. The EM damage means that you’ll suffer against hulls. Like I said before, I personally use this gun as more of a suppression/healing weapon than a carry weapon.
How are you building your Eclipses?
For me Federation Engies are more ore Less pure Healer and when you want to play a engie with high DMG Output fly the Empire line
My Current Grizzly Fitting (weak but not tons of healing)
Tactic: stay behind the front line heal you teammantes and kill shoot at the enemy when there is no hull to heal
So, I tried running a few matches with the eclipse launcher with the supercooled charges and the weapon cooler and I’m not really impressed. I miss being able to just put a target down hard like I did with the coil mortars, I’m definitely not playing the eclipse launcher correctly. It seems like with the eclipse, you’re just bringing their shields down, then hoping either your fighters or a teammate destroys the target.
Supression is key. You can switch targets very quickly and fire a constant barrage that blinds enemies. Don’t forget this. Even if you are not getting kills, you can hit all targets, even inties, and can provide supressing fire (forces enemies into cover). To get kills you have your EM torps. And also don’t forget you can heal teammates and that your role is a support ship, not a damage-dealer. Firing eclipse on allies takes practise, since you cannot lock on, but a good engi can keep many people alive over the course of a match. For example you can heal an allied ECM that has metastabled on low health, so he has a chance of getting away after his metastable wears off. You can heal a friendly LRF that is getting counter-sniped (useful in dreadnoughts gamemode). You can heal another engineer that is being focus-fired, creating a strong frigball.
My ship build:
My pilot layout:
My ship build:
My pilot layout:
I’m going to preface this by saying that I sent my Grizzly on a forward fleet mission and so only had my Grizzly M available to compare, but since the two have identical slot layout and similar stats, I’ll pretend I’m using the Grizzly.
Alright, so your builds include a lot of mistakes that new pilots tend to make.
First off, as a Federation ship, you must consider your energy regeneration above all else. I can’t see your ship stats, but I bet if you look, your “Afterburner energy use” is, if not larger, at least very close to your “Max energy regeneration”. This is pretty much the worst thing that you can do for Federation ships. With no extra energy regeneration, it will be very difficult to use your modules and afterburners at the same time. I suggest changing one of your capacitor modules, since the pulse discharger reduces your energy regeneration, and the capacitor power relay only has a marginal increase to shield regeneration for a lot of important energy. A good replacement would be the voltage stabilizer.
Second, as a frigate, you shouldn’t have trouble avoiding bumping into things. If you do, then the collision compensator is an okay module, since it reduces the damage taken from collisions greatly, but if you don’t, take verniers or inertial stablizers instead. They’ll increase your rotation or strafe a lot more than the collision compensator, which fails to specialize and thus does not have a very large effect on your ship’s handling.
Now, your shield slots are less than optimal. If you look at your stats, you’ll see that the shield projection splitter greatly reduces your acceleration while giving you only so much more volume. The thing that lets Federation engineers survive is their mobility – and if you can’t start from zero and catch up with the team with such low acceleration, you can’t survive easily. On top of that, you’ll see that the variative shield projector only increases your shield regen by something like 20. Considering how most matches nowadays are around 5 minutes long, that’s approximately 6000 shield volume you recover – which is completely insignificant in comparison to the amount you get from your two shield healing abilities. Try an EM resistance, or an adaptive shield. Either one will increase your tanking ability much more than a bit of shield regeneration.
Your hull slots aren’t horrible, but they could be a lot better. Resistances multiply your tanking ability, while volume simply adds. The optimal setup is a middle ground between the two, since you’ll multiply the added volume. With what you have now, not only are you slowing yourself down (death in a Federation engineer), you’re also not optimizing your setup! Obviously that’s bad.
And your CPU slot is bad. Overclocked CPU is a very useful module, but engineers don’t need to lock on very often – they don’t get much in the way of bonuses related to it, while the enemy might get 12 extra resistance from Gigas II (top rank 9 implant). On top of that, coil mortars don’t really need a lock! They explode if they land so much as near the enemy, damaging them regardless. Instead, I suggest an infrared scanner or proton wall.
Your weapon and missile slots are up to you in the end, so I can’t really critique them. I personally like coil mortars and attack drones the least out of all frigate weapons and missiles, but again, your choice.
Your active module choice is a lot better than a certain number of engineers, since you have both healing auras. Personally, I’d get rid of one of the multipurpose modules and replace it with another engineering module, since there’s so many good ones to choose from. However, the ones you have are perfectly fine.
A fit that may work for “carrying and doing massive damage” with coil mortars in T4:
Fit:
Verniers are there because they help keep up mobility. If you like peeking from behind cover more than moving across the entire map and dodging in the middle of nowhere (albeit unsuccessfully most of the time, since you’re a frigate anyways), take inertial stabilizer.
Shared coolers are there because shared coolers rock with coil mortars, since coil mortars have awful heatup time.
Acceleration coils are there because coil mortars have very slow default projectiles.
Voltage regulator is there to regulate voltages 
EM diffuser helps deal with EM damage, which is typically heavy from interceptors or positron frigates. Thermal is a good thing to have on resistance, since there’s a lot of thermal damage. So is kinetic, since mass driver is still very, very painful.
Adaptive shield helps tank anything at all, should you stay on the move. It makes it difficult to deal with interceptors, since you have to move and shoot at the same time, but that’s not exactly a game changer, since interceptors are the bane of frigates anyways. With the engineer and attack drones (if you take them), it shouldn’t be too hard, anyways.
Galvanized armor adds to the all-around tank. It helps mitigate all damage types, and effectively increases your tank by about 25%.
The reinforced beams does not slow the ship down, but does increase volume. With the added resistance from the adaptive shields and galvanized armor, the extra volume pulls almost double duty on increasing tank.
The proton wall helps deal with ECMs. I don’t like being stunned for long periods of time, so proton wall.
The green ammunition increases rate of fire. Coil mortar has awful default rate of fire, so it helps.
The EM torpedo is very easy to use, especially with extra mobility. Launch it in the general direction of an enemy frigball, or a soon-to-be-contested beacon, and it’ll do bunches of damage.
Two auras because you need them to be a good engineer
A warpgate because mobility for Federation engineers is everything
And a shield heal because you already get hull regeneration from the hull aura, and the shield heal heals considerably more over time. A hull heal could work, too, but that typically helps with very sudden damage, like a surprise covert ops, rather than continual, like taking pot shots from the enemy team.
All in all, you need to realize that T4 is not the same as T3, and diving into the enemy team with your engineer will get you killed very easily due to the lack of other players on your team distracting the enemy. Engineers should focus on being a good team member first and a damage dealer second.
Implants:
1 for top, 2 for middle, 3 for bottom:
3,2,3,3,1,3,2,2,1,3,3,2. I won’t give reasons for them besides that I think they’re optimal for this setup, because otherwise this would be like a five page post.
Ship+Weapon stats:
Thanks Statue, I’m working on upgrading to that build, the only difference is that I’m keeping the collision compensator since I keep banging into ships and structures and I got the aux shield projector instead of the EM since credits in game are tight and I want to just deal with whatever they throw at me.
Thanks Statue, I’m working on upgrading to that build, the only difference is that I’m keeping the collision compensator since I keep banging into ships and structures and I got the aux shield projector instead of the EM since credits in game are tight and I want to just deal with whatever they throw at me.
Collision compensator depends on your play style. I use it in almost all my interceptors, and even in some of the Fed fighters, like the Wolf M or the Tiger M.
I have the bad habit of hugging rocks too much when avoiding fire, because the best cover is solid cover, and sometimes I just died…
And to be honest, most of the time you won’t notice the difference in rotation, specially in frigates.
My pilot layout:
Your implant setup isn’t terrible, but it could be better for the Engie. Of course since you only have one crew at the moment, these are merely suggestions.
For the Rank 7 implant, you might consider choosing the top one that gives you +40% capacitor size so your heals a more powerful (since they now scale with capacitor size).
For the Rank 9 you’ll want the top one as well, since it gives +12 resistance for every enemy lock. The one you have selected is redundant with collision compensator.
Finally, for the Rank 10 implant, you’ll want the bottom one that boosts all non-multipurpose modules stats by 20% since that will also make your heals much more potent.