Torchlight 2 Engineer Tank Build Guide by Loot. Figured I’d share my Tank build. Playing Veteran (nb4 elitists) and able to easily solo Level 105 maps at Level 70. I only really die when I’m just being stupid or when the Spectral Dragon likes to camp the teleporter pad. Currect spec: 10/15 Emberquake 13/15 Heal Bot 12/15 Bulwark 13/15 Fire. Every Class In Torchlight 2 Ranked From Worst To Best. 2 Engineer: Pros. The Engineers are considered the most powerful class in the game by far and for good reason. These brutes are heavy. I really want to perfect these videos so I can offer more efficient guides. So please let me know if there's anything I need to work on. I realize it's a bit. The maximum amount of levels in Torchlight 2 is 100. That means that you get a chance to distribute 100 skill points, but 495 stat points. That means that you cannot take all active and passive skills in your skill trees, of course. So you need to choose Torchlight 2 build and act in accordance with its recommendations. It's very common to see Engineers with this build balancing the same amount of Focus as Strength. Dexterity, for Engineers, helps negate fumbled attacks (Torchlight II's version of missing an attack). Two-handed weapons are slower than one-handed weapons, so fumbled attacks have a greater detrimental effect on your DPS.
I’m going to explain a bit about a build that I like to call, the Engineer Mechanist. This is probably the easiest way to beat Torchlight 2 on Hardcore Elite, but I don’t mean to discredit this build by any means. You’ll still feel that nervous feeling you get when you are in tight corridors with twenty mobs chasing after you. But taking them on is definitely easier with this build.
So to start off I will say, the main skill for this build, are the Spider Mines. These tiny effective little babies are like a heat seeking missiles with an exploding punch. That mean’s this build is slow getting started because you can’t get Spider Mines until level fourteen. This is where skill respec’s comes in handy from my tip video. Until you get to level fourteen you’re going to want to use cannons, and investing a skill point into Blast Cannon at level seven will really help. Once you get spider mines, just take off blast cannon, and you’re good to go.
Before I go any further into other skills, I want to mention the stat distribution for this build. It varies on what gear you find in your play-through, but for the most part. You should just go ALL into vitality. The damage output for spider mines are minion based. A hidden damage modifier in this game that can only be tracked by adding the percentage’s up yourself, and just realizing that if you equip some gear that brings you up to plus eighty percent minion damage, then you’re doing an ass load of damage. That’s why you don’t need to put any points in strength.
Now the reason I say it’s dependent on the gear you find. You might also want to put a few points in dexterity every once in a while with a goal in mind of gaining a plus one percent to dodge every few levels. But for me personally, dodging didn’t really play a factor when you’re plowing so many points into vitality that your high block chance becomes the more beneficial investment.
Though I’m sure at level sixty plus when you’ve long past beaten the game, and simply working on leveling for the sake of end-game grinding. Then dodge probably plays a more important role. Especially since your block chance is capped at fifty percent. Eventually you’ll be spending points for dexterity I assume, but even after beating the game on hardcore elite. My character’s block was still not at fifty percent.
Back to talking about skills, as I mentioned earlier, at the start you’ll want to go to the skill respec guy in town to take off your beginning skill, add Heal Bot, Bulwark, and find a cannon at the blacksmith, hopefully he has one. Heal Bot isn’t very useful in my opinion at the start of the game, but once he gets his tier one bonus, heal bot is your best friend. He’s like a George Foreman grill, “just set ‘em and forget ‘em”. Also, speaking of tier two bonuses, when you do get level fourteen, I would only put one point in spider mines, and don’t worry about it until level twenty. That’s when you’ll want to invest four skill points into it. If you noticed the tier bonus for Spider Mines is a mana reduction for the skill, and adding skill points into spider mines without bringing it up to its tier bonus, will just result in you spending more mana than you need to.
As for Bulwark, that’s pretty self-explanatory, you’ll need all the defense you can get for the times you actually do take damage. Even though that won’t be very many times once you pick up Forcefield at level seven, which is probably why engineer is so amazing. As it sounds, this skill creates a Forcefield around your character that can consume up to a certain amount of damage. It last for thirty seconds, and best of all after you use it, it only has an eight second cooldown. I mean, it literally absorbs pretty much anything from what I noticed. I found myself absorbing traps in dungeons even. Though don’t try it yourself, I don’t think it’s worth risking. I will talk more about Forcefield in a moment.
Once you’ve hit level fourteen unless you’ve picked up some nice gear, you’ll probably notice your mana isn’t really in shape for all that spider mine spamming. This is why I recommend saving as many socket able gems as possible for act two. Where you can transmute in an attempt to acquire mana regeneration gems, and other gems you need. For me personally I struggled a bit at the end of act one, and the beginning of act two because I couldn’t sustain mana. I will add that heal bot for the most part does take care of mana regeneration due to its tier one bonus, but I found myself still needing some more mana regeneration.
Your build picks up a little bit by act two when you get Gunbot and Dynamo Field. Gunbot is just a bit of extra damage in tough fights, but Dynamo Field is the skill for building charge for the mechanist. Building charge isn’t super essential for this build, but take note that for every charge you have, Forcefield will be able to take lots more damage. So it’s really good when you’re at full charge and you hit that Forcefield skill. Really you’ll want to keep Forcefield on at all times, even without charges. I usually just use force field without a charge and go into a pack spamming Dynamo Field to build charge for using Forcefield yet again. That way you don’t take damage when building charge for what I like to call your, “mega shield”.
At level twenty-one you can also pick up onslaught for a movement skill. That’s what I did, but I did NOT keep it. Movement skills are important in my opinion. So I used Onslaught until level thirty-five when I could pick up Storm Burst. It’s all on preference, but I like Storm Burst better, even if it has a two second cooldown. Then, when level twenty-eight comes around, you get Tremor. I personally felt this skill must play a bigger factor after beating the game. Because up until the moment I beat the game, I really only had to rely on this skill when there was tons of mobs crowding me, and even though I have Storm Burst. This skill would cause the mobs to flee from me sometimes. But I would imagine this skill is most useful when its tier three bonus is added. The interrupt chance is great too, but I never found myself needing to interrupt anything casting due to keeping a distance from everything the entire game.
At this point your build really doesn’t change much until level forty-two when you pick up Sledgebot, and Immobilization Copter. In fact, at level forty-two you’ll start to realize how overpowered you really are when it comes to dishing out damage. Especially if you’ve been lucky enough to get some set gear that compliments your build. Hopefully some nice set pieces with minion damage, though I feel like this build could slip by without it.
Now I would like to mention some areas to be cautious about in your play-through, and this really applies to any build for hardcore elite. Towards the end of act one, the area’s leading into act two. There are some nasty shaman’s with ice based damage, so keep your distance, your force field up, and let your spider mines do their work. Kiting is your best friend in this build when you can. Sometimes kiting is a hard task in tight corridors though. You just have to find those openings and stick to using that walk only key I mentioned in my previous video to get around mobs and avoid damage.
Another mob to be wary of is in act two, the lizard creatures you’ll see. They have a spell or ability that stuns you. During my play-through I was stunned a few times, and each time it was a very clutching moment. My mechanist almost met her end each time.
The next area is the luminous arena near the end of act two. For the most part relying on your movement skill can get you through this area with ease. I wouldn’t worry about collecting everything here, just make it out alive. Luminous arena wasn’t too bad on my run, but the arena of slaughter in act three however, was pretty tough. The area is pretty tight-knit and it has some pretty tricky fire traps. Do your best to keep spamming spider mines, keep your force field up, and you should be fine.
Another place to be careful is your fight with the alchemist. Although for me I found this fight to be pretty easy. As long as you circle him at a nice distance, your spider mines along with the Gunbot and Sledgebot, will just tear him up. The tedious part of the fight was really just dodging all the fire floor traps in each phase of the fight. But I figured it’s still worth mentioning even if I found this fight easy.
Lastly, the final boss, he’s fairly easy as well, but once he gets to his last form, he has an attack that summons giant rocks to fall on top of you, and they follow where you go of course. But the game made it very obvious when he’s doing this attack. You will see him point his sword, and you’ll hear a particular sound that always happens when he’s going to summon the rocks.
Torchlight 2 Best Engineer Summoner Build
Torchlight 2 Summoner Engineer Build
So that’s pretty much all I have for this build, just take your time, don’t rush, and you should pull off a fairly easy hardcore elite win. I’ll be posting step by step links to the build.