So for a while, “back in the day”, engineering was all about PvP. We had grenades that stunned, helmets we could use to knock someone out for a while, net launchers to catch flag carriers, scary death-rays that had scary crits… There was no question that engineering was the way to go if you wanted to go rambo on a bunch of players.

Sure, repair bots existed back then, so the profession did affect PvE, but raiding guilds likely had to have a roll off to see who would get stuck with the responsibility of being the engineer who brings the bots.

Then, in The Burning Crusade, we got some flashy new goodies! Rocket boots that can send you out of harm’s way at the speed of a flying mount, obnoxiously loud gyrocopters, and another set of brilliant (but mostly useless) trinkets. All in all, I don’t regret engineering in TBC, but it did make me question my profession more than at any other time in the game.

And here we are now… Northrend has brought us many new goodies, and although it has taken some time for everything to become available, it seems a focus for the profession in Wrath of the Lich King has finally emerged:

Laziness.

That’s right, engineering is now a profession for lazy people like me. Let’s take a look at what I have at my disposal now to make my WoW experience that much lazier:

Need eternals? That good old mote extractor from Outlands is far more useful in Northrend. Just while out mining, I run into clouds of gas that actually give me crystalized elements that I actually need!

Need to hit up the auction house? Just chat with a mechano-gnome in Dalaran! It saves you from wasting a hearthstone cooldown, and from having to talk to a real person for your auctions.

Wasted your hearthstone anyway? Bust out your wormhole generator! Now not only can you get to the right continent with the flip of a switch, you can even pick the right relative quadrant of it!

Forget your real gear because you’re wearing your engineering RP set? Perhaps you just forgot poisons or some ankhs? Bust out your mechanical butler, who also saves you the trouble of farming materials for little old scrapbots, when your group wipes because you were too busy trying to break combat to resurrect someone with your army knife.

You know, I think I might actually be able to stand farming up enough money for a second Mechano-Hog for my new main, now that I have to waste so little of my time compared to the good old days.

So, we’re making some ground! It looks like Blizzard agrees with the large group of people that feels the Engineering glove modifications aren’t worth losing the chance to enchant them:

Increased benefits from Hyperspeed Accelerators, Hand-Mounted Pyro Rocket, and Reticulated Armor Webbing glove modifications

So while that is vauge, it is at least a step in the right direction!

Source: WoW Forums

I showed this video to a few of my friends last night, and they were blown away that we engineers can literally fly. It always amazes me how many people have missed out on seeing the Rocket Boots & Parachute combination in action.

NOTE: The above video is for educational and guffawing purposes only. At this point in time, Blizzard has made their stance clear on the matter of actually getting to use our engineering toys to do fun and useful things - Rooves that cannot be pathed to are off limits!

It seems as if amongst their grief, many engineers have forgotten the great diversity of tools that engineering provides to them. Even though some of the higher-profile items have been toned down or excluded from arenas, there are plenty of little things people often overlook.

Ornate Spyglass

This is one of my favorite engineering items. If you’re not a class with a far-sight ability, this is a passable substitute. Sure, it’s more useful in cases where you can’t just fly to scout, but it is available to any level. I used my spyglass constantly while leveling, and I still use it quite a bit in world PvP.

The spyglass is also invaluable in Eye of the Storm for checking in on towers you can’t quite see to make sure your team has things covered.

Parachute Cloak

Many of you may have the tinkered version on your cloaks, but the oldschool version does have a significant difference: You don’t need to be falling to activate it. Just last night I was helping a friend (who doesn’t have a flying mount) get out of the spot he logged off at in Icecrown. I simply activated the parachute cloak and mounted up, my friend hopped in the sidecar, and we glided in style down to the next tier of hills/walls. With a little rinsing and repeating, he was safely back to land-mount-accessible territory.

Rocket Boots Xtreme

Unless you only ever log in to be in instances (in which case you probably shouldn’t be an engineer), chances are good that you’ll occasionally have stuff to do out in the world. If you can stand to be un-min/maxed for such errands, equipping the good old-fashioned Rocket Boots Xtreme (or Light) can be a real lifesaver. I play on a PvP server, so there’s always the possibility of getting ganked while going about my business. Because of the current state of my gear (and the warlock class), if certain classes jump me I know I don’t have a chance in hell. As long as I can manage to get an instant of un-inhibited movement to use them, the boots will blast me well out of harms way. If I’m on a hill of any sort, I can then pop out my Springy Arachnoweave on my normal cloak and glide even further away. The ability to gain extreme distance on someone, or a group of mobs should not be overlooked.

Remote Mines

Okay, so this one isn’t the most practical thing in the game… but still an often overlooked aspect of engineering. For those of you who don’t read flavor text, the personal electromagnetic pulse generator on a belt can trigger explosive decoy at significant range. There’s something really satisfying about leaving a trap for players who don’t know better and smack the decoy, but it’s even more satisfying to set off an explosion at will at your unknowing enemy’s feet. You got engineering because it’s ridiculous and fun, right? If not, then you’re probably not going to be an engineer for much longer, unless you have a lot more faith than others in your position.

Wrist-rocket

The remote mines were impractical, I’ll admit, but this sucker is entirely the opposite. It is ranged, instant, and off the global cooldown.

If you’re a melee class, this is a great pulling tool, and a great finisher for runners. Why stand still and wait for your throw or shoot to go off?
If you’re a caster, this is a great out-of-mana source of damage.
If you’re anyone else, this rocket can be worked in any time you have a moment to press a keybind.

While anyone min/maxing for raids will ignore this one, I’m inclined to believe that the utility of it greatly outweighs whatever added stats you could otherwise have on your gloves.

Scrap Bots

Until things change for us, Warlocks and Hunters end up with one fewer normal bag slot than other classes. Space is even Tighter if you have a profession bag as well. A lot of vendor-trash drops in Northrend are incredibly valuable, and little is more frustrating than having to decide what to delete when there’s something you just have to pick up. Because I already have an enormous Titanium Toolbox, there’s plenty of room for scrabots in there, and the cost of the trash I vendor off to them easily justifies the cost of crafting them, in my opinion. That, and it’s a mechanognome you get to hang out with… What’s there to lose?

Gnomish Army Knife

I’m sure most of you have one of these. It was a much needed space-saver for engineers (and other professions). But why is it that so many engineers I know forget to use theirs? The jumper cables’ success rate has never been good, but it’s still often worth a shot. It can make a big difference just to have it on hand in that case that your healer(s) kicks the bucket in an instance, or a when a friend gets wrecked while out in the world with you.

These things are also great for alts and lowbies who are tight on bag space, but that need the tools of the trade.

While there are many ways in which I would like to see engineering changed, there is still some amazing stuff available to us. Not all of it is practical, not all of it is powerful, but all of it is unique and fun. While we await the hopefully inevitable improvements to engineering in the future (they threw us a bit of a bone in Burning Crusade, didn’t they?), we might as well enjoy what we’ve got now.

If there’s anything you guys think of that even I’ve forgotten or overlooked, feel free to post it in the comments.

One of the few arguments that Engineering isn’t the profession with the least Blizzard-love was, “Yeah, but they gave you guys those awesome arena boots!”

Actually, they first killed our regular rocket boots in arenas, and we were stuck with the consolation prize of Nitro Boosts on our regular boots (which wasn’t so bad, considering the added stats). Then they decided they were too good, and drastically cut the duration of the effect.

Now, they’ve just cut them out completely:

After several attempts to balance the Nitro Boots ability in the arena, we have decided that we currently do not have an acceptable solution. Until we are able to better balance this ability it has been shut down in the arenas. We fully plan to continue working on this item and we intend to adjust it in upcoming patches.
Crygil 

When someone gave Crygil a hard time about this, the response was:

We have plans to make certain that this item is still worth the investment made in it. So don’t vendor it just yet.
Crygil 

While this does hint very slightly (I’m ever the optimist) that they might be looking into engineering more seriously, it is likely that they’ll just never get around to following through on those plans.

At the very least, the more they nerf engineering, the more likely it is that the developers will finally “notice” the state of engineering.

Stay strong, PvPing engineer brothers and sisters… I know I’m sticking with engineering until they nerf it right out of the game.

UPDATE: More info from blue:

That is an option we may explore. We also have several other changes to Nitro Boots in mind. We may include additional stats to making this comparable to other boot enchants. Many ideas are currently on the table and we are narrowing them down to the very best. I hope that not too many of my fellow engineers dropped the profession because of this change. Cool things are on the way. Hang in there.

Source: WoW Forums (2) vis MMO Champion’s Blue Tracker

So it’s time for a bit of a reboot.

Fishermen tend to stay away from spam...

I just spent about an hour clearing all of the Russian spammers off of the forums, and getting everything updated. Forum registration will now be somewhat more strict, so we shouldn’t have this problem again.

At any rate, I finally have some time to devote to making this site a useful resource, and to try to foster a community. I know I currently have a grand total of zero regular readers after such a long leave of absence, but to turn that around I’m going to see if I can bust out an article a day for the next several days.

While post-wrath patches haven’t brought us everything we hoped and dreamed for, I’ve been really pleased with what has been added recently, in spite of the blatant nerfs to our favorite goodies.

I know it seems as if Blizzard doesn’t have any love for our profession as of late, and I know many of you are frustrated, but I’m not willing to hang up my rocket boots and net-o-matic in spite. The sad fact of the matter is that while every other profession is more practical and profitable, engineering is still, by far, the most fun.

I takes a special kind of crazy to be a dedicated engineer, and here’s to hoping that I’m not the only one.

UPDATE: The hog has been changed/nerfed/buffed. I’ll update below.

Yes, I finally made it a few days ago. It was neither easy nor cheap, but worth every bit of time spent getting it.

My hog at Cantrips & Crows - the official biker bar on The Venture Co server.

Sadly, I didn’t notice until after taking this shot that my front wheel had managed to dip into the “solid” dock in front of the bar.

Before long I’ll post the remaining parts of my guide for getting this spectacle of modern engineering, but for now I’ll just answer a lot of the questions folks seem to still have about the vehicle.

Is it a siege vehicle?
Well, yes and no. It is summoned just as any other mount would be, except for the fact that after the standard mount casting bar, you also have a very short animation to actually mount the bike. Once you’re on the bike, it technically counts as your minion just as any other siege vehicle would. It has its own health bar and it does take fall damage for you (even if you fall far enough for it to “die”). Enemy players and mobs are able to target the bike and attack it directly. If they kill it, you are automatically dismounted.
It is now a normal mount, except for the fact that players can hop in the sidecar. It doesn’t have it’s own healthbar, and it does cause you to take normal fall damage. The upside, however, is that it now is affected by crusader and path of frost - and dismounting is instant.

So it is just as convenient as a normal mount?
Not quite. While mounting up may be about the same, dismounting is much slower. You can’t use an ability to instantly dismount yourself like you can with a regular mount (even if you have the option set in your WoW preferences), you are still forced to wait half a second as you hop off of your bike.  Also, because the bike only has 5,000 health or so, you may not be able to run from burst DPS classes you otherwise would get away from. Say, for instance, a Mage tried to kill me as I rode by on my regular mount. I may lose several thousand health, but I have 17,000 even in my un-enchanted gear. I’ll probably be fine. If I’m on my hog, the mage could easily kill my ride and then start laying into me.
Yes. It is now a normal mount.

I heard you could park it and it would stick around for a few minutes, and you could hop back on at any time. Is this true?
Sadly, no. I think this would be an awesome feature to offset the inconvenience of the slow dismount time, and a huge huge bonus for those intending to roleplay with their bikes, but I guess Blizzard decided against it after all. 

Why does it have an attack function on its vehicle bar?
I have no clue. It seems to toggle like auto-attack, and it can’t be used unless you have something targeted, but it doesn’t appear to do anything at all. If anyone knows, please tell me! 
It no longer has this. 

Can you use this in Azeroth? I heard it was only usable in Outland/Northrend.
Thankfully, yes. You can use this anywhere you could use a land mount.

Does that mean you can give rides to lowbies?
You sure can! I drove a level 1 all the way from the Eversong Woods to the Valley of Trials to level with a friend. Sure, a mage could have made that easier, but it was a fun ride. The level 1 (though he dinged 2 just from exploring) still drew monsters with his huge aggro radius, but as long as you stay away from casters and don’t drive straight through any melee, you should be fine.

What else is different from a normal mount?
Well, as of right now, the hog doesn’t gain any speed advantage from crusader aura, and you cannot drive it on water with waterwalking. I have yet to test the death knight aura, but I suspect it will be the same. Climbing onto your hog also sometimes faces you in odd directions for no apparent reason, so make sure you’re facing the way you want to before you go zooming off. 
Again, it is now a normal mount. 

That’s all I’ve got for now! If you have any questions about it, ask them in a comment and I’ll go test it until I’ve got an answer!

One of the things Blizzard has clearly been working on recently is making our day to day lives in the game a little less annoying. Interestingly enough, it seems that WALL-E, The Disney-Pixar film, has inspired Blizzard to give engineers two huge time savers!

The first is a standard trainable schematic: MOLL-E. Sure, the cooldown is 24 hours, but it will be there when you most need a mailbox. The second is the Scrapbot Construction Kit, taught by a nice little quest to repair SCRAP-E, a scrapbot of a very similar design to those you will be able to build! All this schematic takes a short venture into The Storm Peaks.

SCRAP-E and his new clone!

Here’s what you’ll need:

Prerequisites:
-400 Engineering (425 to use the Scrapbots)
-Handful of Cobalt Boltsx4
-Overcharged Capacitorx5
-Level 77
-A flying mount and cold weather flying (Not technically required, but makes getting there much easier)

The Instructions

Go to The Inventor’s Library, located at 37.75, 45.00 in The Storm Peaks.

Kill a Library Guardian in the area and loot the SCRAP-E Access Card from the body (It seems to be a 100% drop rate for Engineers). This item will start the quest SCRAP-E, a simple quest that will allow you to repair SCRAP-E, the poor little broken scrapbot inside The Inventor’s Library.

Complete the SCRAP-E quest, and accept the follow-up, The Prototype Console.

Walk over to the console right next to you, and hand in the quest! Now you can make your very own Scrapbot Construction Kits!

Now the only thing I don’t understand is why we use cobalt based items to repair a bot that can be made solely with saronite!

For those of you who have been living under a bus for the past year, Wrath of the Lich King brings us engineers a lot of disappointment, but a few incredible things that almost redeem Blizzard in our eyes. Behold, the Mechano-hog!

NOTE: Because of the asymmetrical nature of daily quests in Wrath of the Lich King, this guide is targeted at the Horde faction only, as that is where I can gather information firsthand. However, much of this information is probably still useful. If anyone is interested in helping out with an Alliance version, please contact me! 

Complete with sidecar of death!

The Details

This seige vehicle is not quite as practical as a standard mount in a couple of ways, but the ability to carry a passenger and the cool factor make that a non-issue for most of us. What is an issue is that crafting our Hog will be no simple task. Here is what is required to craft one:

1) Exalted reputation with the Horde Expedition faction
2) 450 Engineering Skill  
3) 12,500 gold to buy materials which can be bought exclusively from smelly, greedy goblins
4) Either a lot of money, or a lot of time in order to farm titanium, eternals and cobalt, as well as the time or money for the 20 hour cooldown to transmute titansteel. 

This guide is going to focus on the first of those items, as it is probably the least intuitive of the four.

What is this “Horde Expedition”

Let’s start out by discussing the Horde Expedition reputation itself. This is the overarching reputation for The Hand of Vengeance, the Sunreavers, the Taunka, and the Warsong Expedition. Gaining any amount of reputation in any of these sub-reputations will give half that amount to your Horde Expedition reputation.

The easiest way to gain this reputation is by doing quests. While leveling from 70 to 80 I made a point of doing all of the quests in the starting areas, because nearly every quest will give you reputation you need in one way or another. Without touching Icecrown, I was able to get nearly half way through revered reputation, meaning that I only needed another 10,000 reputation or so! I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to get that far, but until I did a lot of research, I was concerned that that final chunk would prove challenging.

But then, after a couple of days of scouring Wowhead and various forums, I found that there are several daily quests that give Horde Expedition reputation. I have them listed here by zone and level.

The Daily Quests

Grizzly Hills
-Keep ‘em on Their Heels - 125 Horde Expedition
-Making Repairs - 125 Horde Expedition
-Overwhelmed! - 125 Horde Expedition
-Shred the Alliance - 125 Horde Expedition
-Blackriver Brawl - 250 Horde Expedition 

Icecrown
-Blood of the Chosen - 125 Horde Expedition
-Assault by Air - 125 Horde Expedition
-Assault by Ground - 125 Horde Expedition
-King of the Mountain - 125 Horde Expedition

Doing all of these daily quests will result in 1250 Horde Expedition reputation per day, meaning that in a bit over a week one could get finish off that last chunk to get to exalted. Please note that there are prerequisite quest chains for the Icecrown daily quests. You must complete the chain from the Argent Crusade post up to and including the Battle for Crusaders’ Pinnacle event, which when completed will phase in a building in which you can pick up the quest Orgrim’s Hamer, which will lead you to the zepplin of death by the same name.

The great part is that these quests are all quite fun, especially those in icecrown. I expect I’ll continue to do some of these just for the gold and the fun (go try King of the Mountain!).

Instances

If you’re not a fan of daily quests or if you absolutely need that last bit of reputation quickly, you can also gain Horde Expedition reputation by running any level 80 5-man instance or heroic instance without wearing a tabard that explicitly gives you some other reputation. I have yet to try this myself, so I can’t vouch for the rate of reputation gain, but anything helps, right?

Hopefully this helps anyone who was as lost as I was when I started looking into Horde Expedition reputation gain! I’ll be posting follow-ups with suggestions for skilling up engineering, as well as making the small fortune required to make this beauty. Be sure to check back!

Welcome to RatchetHead: The first WoW Engineering Community!

This site is still under construction, but please join us on the forums and tell us what you’d like to see. I’m working on user integration between the blog and forums so users won’t need to register twice.

The plan for this blog section is to post site news, information about the state of engineering, and useful guides and resources.

For those of you who haven’t looked at the other sections, we currently have a great tool in progress that will break down an engineering item into its base components. It still needs a lot of work, but it is still quite useful! You can access it either by using the “Tool” tab at the top of the page, or by dragging the following link to your bookmarks and clicking it when you’re on the Wowhead page for an item: WH->RH

We also have some forums, as I mentioned before. The focus of this site is to create a community of individuals passionate about engineering in World of Warcraft, as well as tools and guides to support that community. So please, join the forums and help us grow! The more people we have involved, the better we can make this resource.

In a related note, I’m looking for dedicated engineers with a knack for finding news and information and who have the ability to write without substituting numbers for entire words. If you’re interested, please let me know!

EDIT: This post has now also been moved to the About page.