Coffey’s guide to taking control of a situation

Note: I have posted this information elsewhere already and elaborate here for the sake of completeness.

Ten-HUT! You are no longer a SAPPER. You are now an ENGINEER. It is time for you to learn that the ability to Hack your opponent’s machines goes beyond your ability to MOON A STRIDER. Your girlfriend, boyfriend or significant other MAY enjoy the personalised postcards but there are BETTER ways to spend your time.

Hack is essentially a charm skill although you do not take direct control of the target as its master but it operates as an autonomous pet. Hack does not really currently work as advertised due to certain AI issues with a LOT of things you can hack but that doesn’t mean it’s a useless skill. Even when it is fixed it will still hold MANY uses that go beyond doing some extra damage. The most obvious use for it is as a crowd control measure. Even though the Hacked machine currently rarely attacks, it at least makes it attack something besides YOU.

It is time for you to UNDERSTAND that you can KILL THINGS NOW. Your days of being a second class citizen riding the shirt-tails of some gun-toting COWBOY are OVER. You now have the TOOLS if you have the BURNING DESIRE TO MAKE BANE INTO PERFECTLY GOOD CORPSES!

One thing to remember is that you have graduated from “another type of specialist” to a damage dealer. Not the biggest or the best but quite adequate. With the tools at your disposal as an Engineer it becomes possible to kill the largest of enemies provided they don’t get the drop on you. Hack is useful for making sure this does not happen. Hacking a Stalker or Strider gives you breathing space to place turrets and EMP bombs before suffering a fiery rain of death. Because these monstrous machines feature high on Turret’s priority list, as soon as Hack wears off and it reverts to a Bane machine your turrets will normally all target it almost immediately. They are capable of taking out the machine on their own in normal circumstances, but occasionally you might be required to add a little firepower on top just to kill it before it manages to kill a turret or 2 and live.

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A Brave Engineer
Holds the Line

Bane Turrets (Including AFS turrets in a bane controlled CP) are also a prime candidate for Hack. Being immobile they act pretty much as your turrets do. Having no ability to move they will not look for a good firing position but pick some poor Bane sap at random and start pasting him. If no Bane are in LoS they can also target the shield wall at CP’s etc and give you a bit of a helping hand. Bane turrets also sometimes have an added advantage. Due to the placement of turrets in Bane designed CP’s, many are capable of turning inward and firing into the compound. This will hold aggro and see a smaller flood of Bane at the gates when you get the shield wall down.

As mentioned before, Shield Drones are also good targets. Hacking a Shield Drone realigns it with the AFS and it ceases to act as protection for the bane underneath for the length of the hack. Although Hack is not cheap in terms of power usage, this method of dealing with Shield Drones has the added advantage that because it’s not “dead”, a Technician can’t reactivate it with Jumpstart.

Predators can also be a good target for Hack. They are highly mobile and can move into a firing position very quickly. They do significant damage in large hits and also tend to pull a lot of aggro. The drawbacks are all of their strengths. Being highly mobile it won’t be long at all before they are pounding you when Hack wears off.

Other things that can be hacked are Nitroglazers, Thrax Technician’s turrets, Forean Machina, Hominis Machina, Necromites, Reconstructorbots, Guardian Bots, Juggernaughts, and a few others. Depending on the time and place some of these are worth hacking, most are not.

Also interesting to note is that Bosses are not immune to hack. In confined spaces such as Instances these are capable of doing considerable damage. Due to certain current quest-loot bugs I have also been known to hack a boss so that my turrets time out to ensure that I get the appropriate keycard or item assigned to me instead of one of my turrets. Remember that this only works on robotic bosses, not all of them.

It is important to remember that when you Hack a creature it becomes an Autonomous pet. It's damage will count and gain you Kill Credits and XP, even though a lot of things you hack will never kill anything in the duration. Some of this is due to the way that the AI will drive a hacked machine, others is just because things like Machina rely on having multiple units to do real damage and hacking enough will not do much but drain your power as they all pick diferent targets to shoot

When you LEAVE THIS ROOM you will drench the battlefield in the blood of your enemies and MAKE ME PROUD!

Many thanks to Learsfool and Micon for questioning some of the things I said. This guide is now more accurate due to their input! Cheers Guys

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