A concerned Engineer

With Cataclysm in full motion and the first couple of raid weeks under my belt I feel a lot more at ease with devoting some time to a blog post.

Firstly, like I hurriedly mentioned in my last post (almost a month ago, /sigh) I went through some rather quick guild changes and now I'm the RL of a small 10 man guild called Shenanigans Inc. We've had a decent amount of success so far, even with a rocky start due to the Holiday boss, and currently we're sitting at 10/12 normal 10 man.

Okay so with that out of the way..

I'm a sad rocket bear as of late, and if you yourself are a skilled engineer raiding in Cataclysm I'm sure you know why. The profession isn't really that great anymore for raiding..in fact, it really isn't that great for much of anything.

Engineering in WotLK was justifiable for a few reasons but the one unmistakable reason was Rocket Boots (renamed to Nitro Boost). This alone made Engineering worth it because it gave a whole new level of mobility. I found a use for it in almost every encounter.

Other than Nitro Boosts there was Reticulated Armor Webbing, which was fantastic for tanking as well.

When 4.0.3 (not 4.0.3a) hit "tinkers" as they are called could be stacked up with other normal enchants effectively making Engineering an insanely good profession. You could get all the fun (Move extremely fast), you could get the mitigation (Armor enchant) and then on top of that you didn't sacrifice a normal glove enchant. What a deal!

Alas..along with the changes to allow "tinkers" as well as normal enchants they also dramatically increased the failure chance of the belt enchant. The glove enchant for Cataclysm is actually still really nice - Quickflip Deflection Plates - you just have to get lucky and "discover" it by crafting other engineering items.

The boots though...not so much. If you don't know much about Engineering suffice to say that part of being an engineer and messing with "gadgets" is they have a chance to fail or backfire. Each belt tinker has a chance (large or small) of either not working or causing a different effect than the one intended. Here is how the tinkers (belt enchants) break down for a tank..

1. Nitro Boost
• Success: 150% movement speed for 5 seconds
• Fail: Rocket Fuel Leak or shoot into the air where you may or may not get a parachute
2. Grounded Plasma Shield
• Success: A shield that can absorb almost 20,000 damage
• Fail: Painful Shock (taunts everything withing 40 yards for 4 seconds), Magnetized (stuns you for 5 seconds), or Reverse Shield (increases chance to be critically hit by 100% for 10 seconds)
3. Cardboard Assassin
• Success: A 77,490 HP dummy that AoE taunts. So it can eat a hit or two for you, which is actually rather nice..
• Fail: None..that I know of..yet
4. Invisibility Field
• Success: Go invisible for 15 seconds, this doesn't really have many practical uses for a tank but situational tinkers are situational.
• Fail: Dazzled (Instead of you being invisible everyone [NPCs, players] are invisible, they can see you though), Field Disruption (breaks the invisibility early, possibly from moving too much)

After looking over the list, the only one that is remotely useful and reliable is the Cardboard Assassin. 77.5k HP isn't that much when tanks are running around in raids with close to 200k, but it's something. The best part is it can't fail.

So as a concerned Engineer I'm starting to think maybe it's not worth it, to keep the profession. Any seasoned Engineer has a certain amount of pride with sticking with the profession regardless of how lackluster it appears though so I'm not sure yet if I want to drop it. Engineering is easily the most "fun" profession in the game (not that any of the other professions make the claim to be fun) so it's understandable that you take the risks with the awesome rewards.

The glove enchant is suppose to be equal to other profession bonuses. I'm not sold..but I am stubborn. Hopefully they release a new Nitro Boost or remove the fail chance from raids..