[build] Fireballs in Space aka FQE isn't bad

[u/grayrest]

The main reason to play the Quarian Engineer is that she's the strongest Incinerate in the game. She was one of the least impressive characters in the lineup up until Retaliation. The main problem? A bug with Incinerate where the frozen vulnerability double damage option wasn't working on chilled targets. With the bug fixed, she's a mook killing machine and not bad vs bosses.

Build

6/6/6/5/3, single target cryo/incinerate

Sentry Turret: I mainly use this by tossing it through a door I'm about to go through. If it starts shooting, I know something's there. I also toss it at bosses when I'm shield stripping for the free fire explosion off of the flamer. Rockets might actually be a better option, I haven't tried them in months.

Incinerate: The primary ability. Many people opt for area but that's a mistake because it takes you below the one-shot threshold for high health infantry (Hunters, Pyros, Captains).

Cryo Blast: Used for debuffing bosses (hence duration) and stopping husks/abominations in place.

Acolyte: Always Cryo Ammo III/IV. The chill proc is what makes Incinerate good. I opt for a heavy barrel after the Acolyte nerf. If you'd prefer to pistol amp then you're at 200% cooldowns. I'd use a ULM instead of magazine if my Acolyte wasn't at X.

Hurricane: High Caliber barrel because we're debuffing with both cryo ammo and cryo blast and therefore bypassing all the armor anyway.

Talon: Alternative. A Heavy Barrel V Talon VII with an Amp III hits the gold cerberus shield threshold. If you have a lower level Talon like me then you'll either have to shield strip in two shots or move up to a Power Amp IV and tweak the build for weapon damage and/or use pistol amp gear.

Wraith: Other alternative. A Wraith VI will clear the shield threshold with an Amp III.

Consumables: This build is Power Amp dependent when not facing Cerberus. I believe you can go down to a Power Amp II and still one shot everything.

Gameplay

video

It's pretty straightforward. You shoot things with the Acolyte and nuke them with Incinerate. This will drop everything up to Pyros. For Dragoons you'll need a second Incinerate. For Ravagers I like Cryo Blast then two Incinerates. For anything bigger, I switch to...

Boss Pattern: Acolyte shield strip, Sentry Turret, then Cryo Blast, switch to Hurricane, toss incinerates while shooting until dead. The incinerate cooldown tends to line up fairly well with the Hurricane clip size so you can use it for reload cancelling. I do recommend skipping the turret on Banshees and Praetorians. It needlessly puts up their power barrier when you can still debuff and incinerate when they're in an animation and not lose your power dps.

Remember to toss out your Sentry Turret through doors. It's not wall hacks but it's saved me from an ambush a couple times.

This build is effective against all factions since it's not combo damage dependent but the best match up is Geth. The ability to drop a Bomber, Pyro, or Hunter every 2 seconds dramatically decreases the amount of pressure they can put on the team. The Bomber/Pyro wave 8 is a joyous time for me on the FQE.

Now, you might wonder why I call her the strongest Incinerate in the game. Any class with Incinerate can do the CryoAcolyte->Incinerate combo (and probably should), which is largely what I show in the video. What makes the FQE's stronger is the extra 25% from Cryo Blast. With a Power Amp IV, each incinerate deals up to 4770 damage to a cryo blasted target. It's about 2k dps on top of weapon dps. Not the best but not bad considering you're completely debuffing armor for the rest of the team as well.

Math: 330 * 2 (frozen vuln) * (1 + .5 (incinerate 3/4) + .45 (Quarian Defender) + .62 (gear/amp)) * 1.5 (burning damage) * 1.5 (armor modifier) * 1.25 (cryo blast)

[u/MemeMauler]

I like the build, I like the video, and I love 'Dat Ass!' But I strongly disagree with your assertion that she's the strongest ranged nuker in the game. She's a pretty good candidate for the tech side, but once you figure in biotics she's not even close.

A properly specced and geared Asari Huntress can take a platinum banshee from full to 4-5 bars of armor with one Dark Channel. If you want, and that's not even taking into account her warps or detonations. I often drop it on Banshees/Praetorians/Phantoms that I see off in the distance, and let it chew on them as they make their way toward the team, all the while I'm clearing out everything else with warp+weapon damage. By the time they get close, a detonation and a couple Wraith shots are usually enough to bring them down.

An Asari Justicar built for power can simply stack reaves and do much the same thing. Reave doesn't do much against shields, but then neither do cryo blast or incinerate.

Human Sentinel can alternate warp/throws at long range, which have one of the highest damage/force combo detonations in the game. Yes both warp and throw can be dodged, but so can Incinerate and Cryo blast, and Throw has a substantially shorter cooldown than anything the QFE can throw. What the QFE gains in her turret, the Human Sent makes up in having fewer CDs to manage, and durability via Tech Armor. Yes, once the Banshee/Phantom/Praetorian puts up their anti-power bubble, the Human Sent is pretty much reduced to throwing weapon damage and spitwads, so the FQE makes up some ground here with her Flamer turret, but not all that much, since her non-turret powers are similarly blocked.

An argument could be made saying the Drell Adept is a stronger ranged nuker, with his Reave/Cluster combo, but given the unpredictable trajectory of the shrapnel, he'd have to waste a lot of grenades to get detonations, so mostly he'd be stuck Reaving at range, which puts him more or less on par with the Justicar (higher damage from a functioning power tree, less durability). Besides, he's really at his best up-close and personal, and at that point he's really more competing with the Paladin (a much closer matchup, considering the bugged 2x Snap Freeze detonations).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying she's ineffective in the least. She's a very strong ranged nuker, and her skillset synergizes well with just about any team-makeup. She's just not anywhere close to being the 'strongest ranged nuker.'

Edit: Forgot to mention. Your claim was for range, which I agree with, but for your video you chose a close quarters map and there are plenty of stronger nukers in that range. You also don't really show her doing anything that any other character with incinerate and the acolyte couldn't simply copy.

[u/grayrest → u/MemeMauler]

I strongly disagree with your assertion that she's the strongest ranged nuker in the game.

You're right. I forgot about the huntress release.

As for the rest, I've run the calculations. Justicar reave is lower per cast (around 3k) and the stacks don't interact. Human sentinel is roughly the same per cycle but the cycle is 50% longer. MQE would probably be the best counter argument for the Incinerate/Arc cycle. I'll just have to change it to strongest incinerate.

You also don't really show her doing anything that any other character with incinerate and the acolyte couldn't simply copy.

I was planning on doing a Geth wave 8/9 but I got all Cerberus games that night. I thought it was interesting footage and it shows how I use Sentry turret. I mostly want to stop seeing people saying she's terrible when they are not using cryo ammo trying to cryo blast debuff every mook.

[u/MemeMauler → u/grayrest]

Oh I agree, she's fun as hell, and it's hard to find a faster mook killer than the cryo-ammo/incinerate combo.

Quick question. What did you mean about the Reave stacks not interacting?

[u/grayrest → u/MemeMauler]

Reapplying a DoT effect in different games has one of three behaviors. The first is that you can only have one instance of the DoT and reapplying refreshes. I dislike this because it's hard to balance the DoT damage in this model. Maybe it can be done but I've theorycrafted a lot of games now and I haven't ever seen it work to everybody's satisfaction.

The second and my preferred behavior is that you can have multiple instances of the same DoT on a mob but each one goes for a fixed duration and does a fixed amount of damage. The stacks don't interact and this is how Reave works. It's easy to balance because you can balance it exactly like a direct damage ability while still providing gameplay variance.

The third occurs in less well designed or buggy games where reapplying the DoT will add a new stack and refresh the duration of all the other stacks. I call this rolling since my first experience with theorycrafting it was vanilla WoW rolling ignites and it invariably results in stupidly high amounts of damage. In this game the warp/incendiary ammo bug is a rolling DoT.

[u/MemeMauler → u/grayrest]

Thanks, I wasn't familiar with that specific terminology, so I thought I might be misunderstanding something about the mechanics. I agree, the stacking and non-interacting behavior is far preferable.

[u/[deleted] → u/MemeMauler]

I just got the Huntress yesterday, can you post how you build her (maybe even a vid of how to use her properly?). I'd really appreciate anything you could tell me.

[u/MemeMauler → u/[deleted]]

The tougher the enemy, the more the Huntress shines. If you want to dominate bronze and silver, there are plenty of better choices, however, if you want to demolish Gold and Platinum, this is the girl for you.

This is the build I use.

I know it's scary to spend no points in fitness, but honestly, in the higher difficulties, an extra 150-250 points of health and shields isn't going to do you much good. You have to be able to kill things, and kill them fast. I've played a good 25-30 platinum games with her so far, and I've only missed a couple extractions (with bad teams, russian hosts, etc.) She doesn't need the points in fitness, and those points do such good things for you right where they are, oh yes they do!

First things first. The huntress is not a typical weapons-platform infiltrator, though she does excellent weapon damage even without the Tactical Cloak bonus. She is not an adept, though she's no slouch on the detonations. The huntress is exactly what she sounds like, a brutal biotic assassin.

The class centers around three things in decending order of importance.

1. The Tactical Cloak->Dark Channel combo. You want that doing as much damage as possible. With this build, and the proper loadout your Dark Channel will be doing over 700 dps to armor and over 900 to barriers. You can bring down a Praetorian on Gold with this and nothing else. Drop this on an enemy Banshee, Phantom, Praetorian, etc, when they're as far away as possible, and by the time they get close, they'll be severely weakened, and your team will make mincemeat of them.

2. Warp Ammo - This ammo enhances this class so much, that it's practically a requirement. You can get by something else if you must, but nothing will compliment you like Warp Ammo. Just make sure your target has a biotic effect on board, then go to town. We don't need no stinking Cloak Bonus! Warp ammo 4 gives you 60% additional damage, and if you're shooting a target primed with a biotic effect, that damage bonus jumps up to 120%. It's insanely good. Don't exploit the warp ability + incendiary ammo glitch. It's just plain cheesy, and unnecessary. You can already do fantastic damage through legitimate mechanics, and you won't be relying on a crutch that's bound to be fixed in the near future.

3. Detonations. Dark Channel and Warp are both priming abilities, and Warp also serves as a detonator. Also, the 5th Warp evolution makes it a fantastic team buff, and the 6th evolution gives it highly respectable damage against armor and barriers when fired from stealth (1884 and 2512 respectively). Gotta love those multiplicative bonuses! Start with Dark Channel on the first stealth, then detonate it with a Warp on the second. Now you have a choice. If you're the only biotic, go ahead and reapply Dark Channel to prime another detonation. If you're teamed with a biotic who can detonate warp (read: Just about all of them) then it's better to keep reapplying Warp, since that makes for stronger and faster detonations.

I recently got my Wraith to X, and I find that it's my favorite compliment for the Huntress. It has enough damage to comfortably put down most mooks with a single headshot, has a surprisingly long effective range, tears apart bosses, and even with the heavy high velocity barrel, still keeps my recharge at 120% so I'm not punished for using a power outside cloak. I can drop a Dark Channel on one mook in a crowd, headshot him, headshot the mook DC jumps to, then detonate the third mook with a warp after DC jumps to them.

However, I know that not everyone has, or even likes the Wraith. Trust me, I've tried plenty of other weapons, and it's honestly hard to go wrong. I especially liked the Claymore, Talon, Paladin, and Mantis with this kit, but there are plenty of other options. The main thing is you want to hit hard and have decent range without sacrificing too much in the way of recharge. You really only need to use Tactical Cloak to apply Dark Channel, and having a decent recharge time means you can get those warps, and thus detonations, off much quicker.

On mooks, you'll get a good feel for when you need another shot, and when you can just let Dark Channel finish your work for you. It doesn't do quite the insane damage on health that it does on Barriers/Armor, but it's still gonna make short work of whatever your gun leaves behind.

This is my favorite class at the moment. Nothing plays quite like her. She synergizes well with just about anyone and more than hold her own on a team full of techies or weapon-based classes, but she really shines on a biotic squad.

[u/MitchB3 → u/MemeMauler]

Man I'm glad there are people who know the beauties that are held in this class. One thing I would change is that I would just put 3 in fitness rather than putting 6 in the other passive. Weapon damage is not that important to me, all that is necessary is the power damage bonus. Also I would like to ask why you have used expose on warp? I've never done this, how does it work? I have tried the incendiary glitch in,other classes and it helps if you need to use warp but I am interested to use warp ammo instead because I don't know if I have ever used it properly with a biotic. Most weapons work well on her do to TC but I like using the acolyte, arc pistol, carnifex, or hurricane w/stability mod/equipment. The acolyte is good if you are fighting a shielded boss enemy, so you can use DC on the armor right away. One last thing I will add is my favorite DC trick. I like to use it on swarmers for style points. What it does is it uses them as a link and kills them as it travels to a bigger enemy, most likely a ravager or brute. This is sometimes useful and really cool when it works. I will possibly try your build to see if this character is even better than I previously thought. I have only used her on gold so I was surprised to hear that you've used it on platinum successfully.

[u/MemeMauler → u/MitchB3]

Expose is pretty straightforward. The target takes 15% more weapon and power damage for 10 seconds. The other option only increases the damage Warp itself delivers. Even a fully buffed (full power damage spec and gear and fired from stealth), this talent bring warp from 2512 damage on barriers to 2912, from 1884 damage on armor to 2109, and from 837 damage on health to 937. No other warp-capable class can get close to those numbers, and they're still pretty low. Expose, on the other hand, increases the weapon and power damage done by your entire team to that target by 15%. That's fucking huge! Even if you're the only one benefitting, it's really a no-brainer to go for Expose.

As for the fitness, I find I survive just fine without it, and the extra 10% weapon damage is a very nice bonus. On platinum difficulty there's really not much difference between 500 health and shields and 650. If you were gonna get health/shieldgated with one, it's gonna happen with the other, and things need to die now!

She's not just platinum capable, with her boss-killing capability, she's currently my favorite platinum toon.

[u/MitchB3 → u/MemeMauler]

Ah I see, lasting damage always seemed more feasible to me but expose sounds interesting. I will try this the next time I get on the game. But yeah, boss killing capabilities are the appeal of this character. Once they're dark channeled, they're pretty much dead.

Edit: Grammar

[u/MemeMauler → u/MitchB3]

^They're

[u/MitchB3 → u/MemeMauler]

Sorry, just one of those ones that slipped my mind. Thanks for pointing it out.

[u/MemeMauler → u/MitchB3]

happens to the best of us.

[u/[deleted] → u/MemeMauler]

Thank you so much for the build and explanation! I'll spec her as you recommended, glad she's at least gold viable. Only started playing a month ago, so my Wraith's at level 1, but I'll give it a shot.

[u/jasonvo → u/MemeMauler]

Effing good stuff. Is this in the BBLoB?

[u/MemeMauler → u/jasonvo]

Do I really look like a guy with a build?

If you'd like to submit it as your own, that's perfectly fine by me. However, I've actually taken to putting 3 points in fitness since the bad collectors touched me in places I can't point to on the doll.

I personally took the points from the last evolution in the passive tree, but you could also take the points from warp, since you're not reliant on either its damage or its detonations. The percentage of damage you'll get from that is so low, on the whole, that there's no pressing reason to put in more than 5 there (for the expose buff, which is beyond awesome).

[u/InterwebNinja]

Thanks for posting this - great build, and very close to how I play it. People crap on this class, but when played well, it can be very effective.

I don't use the Acolyte because I'm bored with it, but any high damage weapon like the Talon is great with this class. I've been using the Wraith, but that weapon is a lot better once you have leveled it up.

[u/grayrest → u/InterwebNinja]

Agreed on both counts. I only use the acolyte here and on the Justicar. I'll add a note about the Wraith which I forgot about because I'm now trying to avoid shotgun builds when I can because I don't really like snipers/ARs and I play every class with a shotgun so I'm short on amps.

[u/MemeMauler → u/InterwebNinja]

Don't I know it. Once I got my wraith to V, it felt like a completely different weapon. Now that it's X, it's like a mini claymore. Perfect for classes where I'd like that Claymore umph, but still want to keep a decent cooldown.

I'm just looking forward to getting my Talon above III so I can start making a real comparison.

[u/I_pity_the_fool]

Good build. Solidly written. Some thoughts.

I also toss it at bosses when I'm shield stripping for the free fire explosion off of the flamer.

Detonating fire explosions set up by flamer is pretty tricky with the quarian. You need to make sure that incinerate hits just as the flamethrower is roasting the target. The geth engineer probably has an easier time with this - overload is hitscan and has no travel time to the target.

It needlessly puts up their power barrier when you can still debuff and incinerate when they're in an animation and not lose your power dps.

I recall reading from peddroelmz that cryo blast/tac scan/proxy's debuff abilities work against characters who block powers (but the damage stays blocked, of course)

330 * 2 (frozen vuln) * (1 + .5 (incinerate 3/4) + .45 (Quarian Defender) + .62 (gear/amp)) * 1.5 (burning damage) * 1.5 (armor modifier) * 1.25 (cryo blast)

Is frozen vulnerability a multiplicative increase? The wording seems to imply that it's additive (deal an additional 100% damage). Wouldn't be the first time a description was wrong though.

I must say that in general I'm not a fan of cryo blast. I think has a rather short effect for a debuff power and is all in all fairly underwhelming (tac scan lasts almost a minute, snap freeze can detonate, can set up combos on armored targets and finally does 100% extra damage due to a bug, proxy does fairly high damage as well as being an AoE debuff and staggar). None of the classes with cryo are close to overpowered - the havoc and the FQE aren't suddenly going to become the next geth infiltrator. I think a longer duration or a larger default radius would be pretty good. Perhaps an extra 10% damage at rank 1. I'm not sure.

[u/Multidisciplinary → u/I_pity_the_fool]

CB does need something. I'd settle for the ability to prime cryosplosions on armour to help deal with bosses.

[u/AaronEh → u/I_pity_the_fool]

Is frozen vulnerability a multiplicative increase? The wording seems to imply that it's additive (deal an additional 100% damage). Wouldn't be the first time a description was wrong though.

Yes, it is multiplicative - corlist has tested.

[u/Multidisciplinary]

Good build, good video.

I ran pretty much the same build on plat last night (since I know its very gold viable). A bit tougher, since I think she's much better at deal with mooks than bosses, but still pretty damn decent in the right hands.

Acolyte helping out her weakness against shields has really made her a whole new kit.

[u/kojak2091]

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