Alright folks, We've been playing with this gear for a day now. What are your thoughts? Allow me to put mine down:
Let's get the FJ over with: It's a straight upgrade. Never in my 5-6 hours of play so far has ammo been a problem. The crits are brilliant, but I believe as someone said earlier, you still have to aim it. I remember the first time I got the crit boost, I had 3 crits. Another engie came near me, and I sorta freaked out with excitement. Shot him 3 times, basically missed every time, and he killed me. Still have to aim the thing. I deem it balanced, and a powerful upgrade.
I agree 95% of all that. I like my 6 slugs better, but everything else about the FJ is loads better. You should use it. You dont have any reason not to. It has the freaking awesome guitar taunt kill too!
The Gunslinger is a more interesting thing to talk about. Trading a big sentry for a tiny one doesn't seem like a good trade, but I've killed a good chunk of people with my tiny sentry in the past day. They're hard to notice sometimes; I don't believe they beep like the regular ones do (until they acquire a target, of course) meaning that they only indicator for their presence is the big alarm light on top of them, and if you're not paying attention, it's easy to miss.
I really haven't decided between the two yet. The little ones are a lot more for offence though. Throw it down, let it go up, pick it up and when you redeploy it, it goes up even faster. People dont always have time to react to it if you throw it from around the corner or behind them or anywhere. And with The Wrangler... I'll get back to that.
I've put those little guys in all sorts of corners and they've killed a lot of people. Better yet, if you put them in and around a bigger sentry, they can just get kill after kill because the person will assume it's the big sentry. I had a mini-sentry get 4 kills and 9 assists today. That's 17 revenge crits for a fire-and-forget gun that only costs half of your metal. plus, as soon as it dies you can almost always throw up another one immediately. plus, 2.5 second deploy time is stupid fast. Especially when you hit it, and it becomes 1.25.
Yeah. I haven't tried putting them close to a big sentry, since I try to put mine somewhere on the side where I think the enemy might try to flank the big one. Gives extra cover, plus might disorient them to walk into the main sentrys line of sight. Or have them back away and gives your team time to beef up your defences or start an attack.
Also, to clear up any confusion, you can build all the other buildings with the hand; it's just the sentry that's changed. The hand itself is nothing special... I don't think I've ever done a combo crit, because it's actually quite difficult to hit someone three times in a row without them dying. However, like the DH's mini-crits on air hits, I don't think it's meant to be a core part of the gun; it's supposed to be a marginal bonus.
I guess you'd only get it if you charge at a lot of people or ninja behind them. Other thing would be if you get luck while repairing or upgrading your buildings and your 3rd whack happens to hit a cloaked spy. xD
The wrangler. I haven't had mine long enough to really put a good decision down, but at the moment, I actually don't really like it. It's probably because of the experience I had (I hate Egypt, and that was the only eGO server that was empty), but even though your sentry is basically invulnerable except to concentrated, deliberate fire, just standing there and aiming is difficult and it leaves you vulnerable. Yes, you can snipe, and yes, it's ungodly powerful, but I need to play with it more. I haven't really had the opportunity to exploit the range or power of it yet, so I need to do that tonight. So, disregard the biased opinion here; it's mostly just me playing crappily, I would assume. More testing required.
The Wrangler... It makes the engineer a completely different class. Being able to shoot over the sentrys range, aim at anyone you want, shoot twice as fast AND you get a shield... What's there not to like about it? The 3 second cooldown thing is nothing to worry about. During that time your shield still stays up, so you can use that time to repair and reload your sentry. You can do 3 whacks on it and switch back to The Wrangler without dropping the shield. And to note how powerful the shield really us, fully repaired, it can withstand a taunt kill.
Also, you can manually spy check with it. You dont have to be close to your sentry. Hell, you can be at your spawn and your sentry at the enemy spawn and still use it. Of course you can't aim then. If there's a good hidey hole from backstabbing spies around you, you can throw your dispenser there and hop on it yourself and then spam away if you think there's a spy. Reload whenever needed and you're ready to go again.
The best thing about The Wrangler, IMO, is the ability to rocket jump. Shoot at your feet and launch yourself up in the air. Proest people are able to rocket jump and quick weapon switch to grab their sentry with them as their blasted up in the air to get to a lot of normally unreachable places. I myself have completed rj_rockteer with the exception of one area, as well as cp_skyscraper.
Rawr~
