Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, the long-awaited remaster of BioWare’s classic sci-fi RPG series, is launching this week. At the start of each of the individual games withinMass Effect: Legendary Edition, players will be able to pick one of six classes.
The classes oftheMass Effectseriescan be divided by their area of focus, either Tech, Combat, or Biotics. Three of these classes dedicate themselves to a single discipline, while the rest combine two into a hybrid. The class which dedicates itself solely to Tech is the Engineer, and it gains several unique and powerful abilities by doing so.
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The Engineer in Mass Effect 1
As the ultimate Tech specialist, the Engineer fills asupport role inMass Effect: Legendary Edition. This begins inMass Effect 1, with a range of Talents that allow the Engineer to help their team, hinder their enemies, and control the battlefield. The most important of these Talents are Hacking, Damping, and Medicine.
Hacking, and its precursor Decryption, allow theMass Effect 1Engineer to not only disable enemy weaponry and open sealed doors, but also cause synthetic hostiles to turn on their allies. Damping, and its precursor Electronics, gives the Engineer access to the Overload and Damping powers. Overload can be used to quickly disable enemy shields, while Damping can completely shut down enemy Tech and Biotic abilities.
TheMass Effect 1Engineer’s final core Talent is Medicine. Not only does the Medicine talent massively reduce the cooldown of the First Aid ability, it also grants access to the powerful Neural Shock. Neural Shock induces paralysis in its target, as well as dealing toxic damage. Combined with Hacking, this allows the Engineer to disable both synthetic and organic enemies with ease.
The Combat Drone
Like all of theclasses in theMass Effectseries, the Engineer will gain new powers as players enter theMass Effect 2portion orMass Effect: Legendary Edition.Mass Effect 2made a lot of changes to the classes, which would last for the rest of the series. The most important change for the Engineer inMass Effect: Legendary Editionis the Combat Drone power.
The Combat Drone is considered to be the Engineer’s core power throughoutMass Effect 2andMass Effect 3. It enables the Engineer to summon a small, holographic drone to fight by their side. The drone is an incredibly useful tool, primarily because of its ability to draw enemy fire and melee combatants. Although the drone isn’t particularly tough, on higher difficulties the attention it draws away from the rest of the party can make the difference between life and death.
As well as drawing fire, the Combat Drone can also deal damage itself. The base drone is capable of stunning enemies and taking out shields, while an upgraded Attack Drone can also damage health, armor, and Biotic barriers. InMass Effect 3, which makes up the third and final part ofMass Effect: Legendary Edition, the Combat Drone gets a big boost. The ME3 Drone gets access to all kinds of different attacks, and its Health and Shields are also improved.
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Fire and Lightning
Right from thestart ofMass Effect: Legendary Edition, most enemies have some kind of protection beyond Health. These additional defenses consist of Armor, Shields, or Biotic Barriers, denoted by orange, blue, or purple bars respectively. While someMass Effectclasses excel at dealing with certain defenses, not many can handle all of them equally well.
The Engineer is the exception, with access toMass EffectTech powersthat enable them to quickly neutralize any kind of protection. The first of these is Incinerate, which appears in the second and third games withinMass Effect: Legendary Edition. Incinerate fires a projectile from the Engineer’s omni-tool, which homes onto the targeted enemy and strikes in a fiery burst. This is especially effective against Armor, and deals 25% of its damage over-time, preventing health regeneration.
The weakness of Incinerate is that it deals reduced damage to Shields and Biotic Barriers. Fortunately, the Engineer also has access to Overload throughouttheMass Effectstory. Overload is the mirror-opposite of Incinerate, dealing heavy damage to Shields and Barriers but less to Armor. However, it does deal full damage to the Armor of synthetic enemies.
The Tech Specialist
There’s no doubt that the Engineer is one of the most versatile classes inMass Effect: Legendary Edition. Although they don’t pick up their signature Combat Drone until the second game, they have access to a suite of useful Tech powers throughout.
Any player who likes to take on a support role should consider picking up the Engineer. It’s a class that offers an answer to every situation, and the ability to completely control the battlefield. Whether facingMass Effect’s Geth, Krogan, or Reaper enemies, the Engineer class is ready and able to take them down.
Mass Effect: Legendary Editionreleases May 14 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
