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[RedCaesar97]

The Lockdown Engineer uses his powers to lock down enemies on the battlefield. The Lockdown Engineer uses his Combat Drone to distract and harass enemies, Stasis to immobilize opponents, and Cryo Blast to freeze foes. The Lockdown Engineer will also use AI Hacking to turn murderous synthetics into deadly allies, which will in turn can distract, harass, and kill your enemies for you.

NOTE: To acquire Stasis as a bonus power, you must first complete The Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC. On PC, there is a bug that prevents you from taking Stasis as a bonus power when starting a new game; you can reassign your bonus power at the Research Terminal after recruiting Mordin.

Build:
1 - Overload
0 - Incinerate
4 - Attack Drone
4 - Full Cryo Blast or Deep Cryo Blast
4 - Improved AI Hacking
4 - Mechanic
4 - Enhanced Stasis

* For alternative builds, see below.

1-point Overload is all you need for detonating Pyros.

I prefer Attack Drone to Explosive Drone. Both will work and it is a matter of preference to which evolution you prefer. Attack Drone generally deals more damage or has the potential to deal more damage than Explosive Drone.

Full Cryo Blast or Deep Cryo Blast? Full Cryo Blast has a larger radius than Deep Cryo Blast (3m compared to 1.5m), but Deep lasts 2s longer than Full. If you want to keep the single-target theme of Drone-AI Hacking-Stasis, then go Deep Cryo Blast. If you want the potential to hit more targets, then I recommend Full Cryo Blast. If you take a squadmate who is good at stripping defenses such as Garrus or Mordin, then Full Cryo Blast is the better choice.

Improved AI Hacking means you can keep a single synthetic hacked longer. Area AI Hacking is good, but then you generally get a group of hacked synthetics fighting each other, and since AI Hacking gives hacked synthetics shields, you are better with a single hacked robot fighting for you.

Mechanic will improve the duration of all your powers. Since all your evolved powers all duration-based, this is the only evolution worth taking as the extra damage provided by Demolisher will go to waste.

Enhanced Stasis versus Deep Stasis: Deep Stasis provides an extra 3 seconds of duration over Enhanced Stasis (12s versus 9s) but Enhanced Stasis means enemies take longer to become immune. Enemies become immune to Stasis over time; the more you stasis an enemy, the shorter the Stasis duration will get each time until Stasis has no effect. Generally an enemy will become immune to Stasis after 3 casts; Enhanced can double that number. You will rarely ever need to put an enemy into Stasis that many times, so the extra Duration provided by Deep looks better at first. However, the shorter duration of Enhanced means you can kill enemies quicker.

Note that enemies coming out of Stasis take extreme amounts of damage; this is a bug that you can exploit (more info here).

Note that Stasis does not work on Harbinger or the Shadow Broker, or the connection VIs on the Project Overload boss.

Alternative builds:
1) You can put 1 point into AI Hacking and evolve Overload to Area Overload.
2) Use IMNWME's balanced build, discussed here.

Build priorities:
Almost as important as the build is how you are going to spend your points as you level up. At level 1, you start with 1 point in Combat Drone, 1 point in Overload, and--if you have completed the game at once--1 point in your bonus power. If you import a character from Mass Effect 1, you can start at level 3 (level 50-59 import) or level 5 (level 60 import).

1) I would focus on maxing your passive to Tech Mastery first. Stasis can be a 1-point wonder, and the Combat Drone, while a little sickly, is also good at level 1.
2) Get the Combat Drone to rank 2 to unlock Cryo Blast, then maximize Cryo Blast.
3) Maximize Stasis.
4) From here you can:
 a) Max AI Hacking then Combat Drone; or
  Max Combat Drone then AI Hacking.
 Either one works. I recommend option (a) after Horizon since you start to face a lot more synthetics. A hacked synthetic can distract multiple enemies at once, while the Combat Drone will only distract one at a time.

Playstyle:
Cast your Combat Drone immediately. It has your shortest cooldown (base 3 seconds) and it will start to distract an enemy soon after.

Next, I recommend casting Stasis to take someone else off the battlefield. Stasis is best used for elite enemies (enemies with stronger barriers/shields/armor) or boss-type enemies (enemies with multiple defenses or armor-only). You can typically spot Elite enemies rather quickly as they are either:
a) Krogan (Blood Pack)
not wearing a helmet (Blue Suns or Eclipse/Shadow Broker's goon squad)
c) Large robots named Destroyer or Hunter (Geth)

Start shooting or run in to get a better position.
Use Cryo Blast to freeze unprotected enemies. Do not waste Stasis or your Drone on them. 
Try to shoot enemies as they come out of Stasis to take advantage of the damage bug.

Videos:
Lockdown Engineer test

I may film a playthrough in the future, but that is all I have for now.

Modifié par RedCaesar97, 06 août 2012 - 01:02 .

[CaolIla]

I watched the video, it was very entertaining : )
And it's nice to see that only a different bonus power (in comparison to your puppet master) makes a real difference.

[geth47]

A blonde female shepard of the engineer class using a shotgun? This certainly does bring back good memories.  

 

Too bad you won´t do a total video coverage this time. This built appears to be the ultimate incapacitator. 

 

Not as daring as the puppet master, but safer to use, relying much more on pure tactics than reflexes and luck.

[a_mouse]

Too bad you won´t do a total video coverage this time. This built appears to be the ultimate incapacitator. 

 

Not as daring as the puppet master, but safer to use, relying much more on pure tactics than reflexes and luck.

 

Heres some more in the same genre:  

 

 

 

 

And, for comparison, the same mission using thralls:  

 

 

 

 

Based on my own experience with this, I'd say that a puppet build is not really "riskier" than a lockdown build, as long as you take your time and pick your way through the mission maintaining control of enemies the whole time.  It generally takes longer, though.

[geth47]

Yeah, but in the case of RedCaesar he attempted to go at point-blank with a shotgun nearly the whole time. His character behaved more like a vanguard than anything else. And the constant explosions of frozen enemies did remind me of Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat II.

[a_mouse]

Fair enough.  Although collector missions may not be the best illustration of CQC with thralls since you have to deal with so many heavy or advancing units.  Here's one with mercs, where it's a bit easier to use a shotgun most of the time:

 

 

Having said that, it's true that I tend to initially hang back quite a bit more with thralls than other builds (including lockdown Engineer).  The problem is the timing of the thrall effect.  It takes some time to strip and spellbind the thrall, and then a bit more time for the enemies around the thrall to get distracted by it.  So there is a delay before you get an optimum window to pounce with a shotgun.  If you charge in too early you end up in the red, with little benefit to having created the thrall, and thus revert essentially to a Lockdown Engineer with focus on Cryo Blast and shotgun.  If you pounce too late, you end up just hanging back and watching as the enemies kill each other.  In the vid above you can see I am often struggling to avoid these extremes, either over-advancing or playing catch up behind a wake of self-desctructing enemies.  Yet occasionally I find the sweep spot where I can move in and among distracted enemies, wreaking havoc with a shotgun.

 

RedCaeser's vid series on the puppet master is one of my all-time favorites.  These vids really illustrate finesse and smart tactics (over braun) in ME2!  Here is the same mission as above from this series:

 

 

 

Overall similar, but you'll see RedCaesar tends to push the advance, then fall back, push, and fall back more than I do.  This is probably closer in style to my own lockdown Engineer (which relies more heavily on Cryo Blast than thralls on merc levels).  With puppet I tend to be more opportunistic in the timing of my advances for reasons described above.

 

In any case, comparing these vids to RedCaesar's Lockdown Engineer video in the OP (Haestrom), I think you'll see what I mean.  With Lockdown he is not constrained by the thrall delay (and has more cooldowns devoted to cryo and stasis), so seems generally more aggressive in pushing forward than he does with puppets.  That's my read anyway - maybe he'll have a different opinion!  

[RedCaesar97]

Overall similar, but you'll see RedCaesar tends to push the advance, then fall back, push, and fall back more than I do.  This is probably closer in style to my own lockdown Engineer (which relies more heavily on Cryo Blast than thralls on merc levels).  With puppet I tend to be more opportunistic in the timing of my advances for reasons described above.

 

In any case, comparing these vids to RedCaesar's Lockdown Engineer video in the OP (Haestrom), I think you'll see what I mean.  With Lockdown he is not constrained by the thrall delay (and has more cooldowns devoted to cryo and stasis), so seems generally more aggressive in pushing forward than he does with puppets.  That's my read anyway - maybe he'll have a different opinion!  

 

The problem with being aggressive with the Engineer, is that even with Stasis and Cryo Blast, you can get wrecked very quickly if you get too confident and push you boundaries too far. Or if you suck (like me) and run out like a dope with no real semblance of a plan.

 

I had started to record a full playthrough of Lockdown Engineer (Stasis Engineer), but at some point I started getting aggressive just for the sake of getting aggressive and I died a lot and stopped having fun. 

 

Dying repeatedly on Archangel recruitment mission:

Spoiler

 

Dying repeatedly on Kasumi's Loyalty mission:

Spoiler

 

 

Someone once described my style as "Passive aggressive". And that is probably accurate. I play best when I hang back passively setting things up, then running in aggressively when everything is primed for destruction. 

 

The one vid I created for this thread was on a mission where you can pretty much run in a circle so you can pretty much know what to expect. If I recall, I think I tried for about an hour on that video before switching out Grunt for Garrus and then beat it first try with the new squadmates (proving once again that Grunt is a waste of squadmate space).

 

When I tried replicating that in actual missions, I got my butt kicked repeatedly since I thought I could play everything aggressively. When I played passive-aggressively, things went much smoother and much more fun.

 

As for thralls, you need to hang back a bit at first to make sure that the thrall is taking all the enemy fire before running in. If you go in too quickly, they may still focus on you first which can get you killed. It helps to have a feel for the timing of how long your duration powers last.