The Engineer

The engineer looks more like a construction worker than a pencil pushing geek. His main role is to support the defense (usually) with his ability to make a dispenser and a sentry gun. The dispenser can give out armor and health to anyone that walks up to it (including enemies!). It also regenerates its own ammo and armor, so after it's build, it can act just like the respawning backpacks in your home base. The great thing about dispensers is that they can be placed on any flat surface, so you can have a dispenser near a defensive position that does not have quick access to normal ammo and armor. Note that the dispenser does NOT dispense health. The Engineer has the option of remotely self destructing the dispenser at any time, which can be a great trap for enemies as all of the ammo in the dispenser explodes simultaneously.

The Engineer can also build a sentry gun. This gun is an automated turret that can be placed on any flat surface, and will track and shoot down any enemies it sees. The gun also has 3 levels of firepower, which the Engineer needs to upgrade. At the first level, the sentry gun only has one turret to shoot from, the second adds a second turret, doubling the firepower and attack rate. At the third level a rocket launcher is added to the dual mini-guns, making the sentry gun a frightening menace to walk by. While the sentry gun is in operation the Engineer must maintain its ammo level and health.

The Engineer also has EMP grenades, which will detonate any explosive ammunition in the blast radius. This includes any ammo a player is carrying on them. The Engineer also carries a rail gun (sorry its nothing like the Quake2 railgun) which is more or less a glorified nail gun that shoots slower.

What's New?

Most of the differences with the engineer are only aesthetic. The wrench actually looks like a wrench now, from first person and third person perspective. You still swing it if you want to work on your sent gun, dispenser, or a teammate. Its nice a shiny though =]

The sent gun looks amazing! They are imo the best models in TFC. Check out the screen shots below to see what I mean. They added a new weapon for the sent gun in TFC instead of using a quad autorifle. The new sent gun weapon is like the Hwguy cannon, but without the spread. There are tracers from the gun, and the rockets fired leave a trail just like the soldier rockets. The dispenser looks like a small terminal that you step up to to use. Another nice touch.

The railgun is slightly different. They took out the cool smoke trail following the slug and replaced it with a bright green tail. It fires at the same rate, but I think they lowered the damage. The Gauss gun from Half-Life is the model for the railgun.

EMP grenades haven't changed much. They still pack a large punch, destroying any explosive ammo within the blast radius. Now the effect of the EMP explosion is a green flame like ring that expands from the blast point. I think the range of the grenade is slightly smaller.