Thoughts on Engineer and support in general in BfN

@Pheesley I have to agree on your points. Healing feels too good right now and Scientists that focus on healing don't do as well on the boards as those that go aggressive. Also if you play a heavily healing focused scientist, you have to shoot or use healing hose. This is a huge change from GW1 where you had to rely on placing your heal station down and GW2 where you used the beam that was much like the Sunflower heal beam or the station, supplemented if you liked with the mega-heal ball. All of these allowed you to shoot while healing so even while playing an aggressive scientist, you could still heal your team. In BfN  you have to choose to focus on healing or shooting. The Heal Thingy helps with this, but I'm not surprised at all that many scientists just go aggressive and ignore the healing hose altogether. The Steam Blaster merely magnifies the lure of going full on attack as a Scientist, especially with 3 instant warps.

I was playing some GW1 recently and the difference in Sunflower healing (I didn't play Scientist) between that game and here is very obvious. It took me awhile to get a cactus from almost down to full health in GW1, whereas in BfN it's very fast, even taking the lower health cacti have here than GW into account. they mentioned looking at healing before, and it really looks like they need too. I wouldn't mind other healing classes added eventually, but first they need to deal with the healing as it is now.

Engineer is in a weird spot. He’s a support class that rewards players by going to him, and not the other way around. Of course, he could always go to you. 
His abilities are great, though. Bullhorn swarm pretty much blocks out any glass canons. Heavy helper stops drones. And double time makes a great escape option. 

He feels more like a defense class more than a support class, but I guess the defense upgrades would be too powerful on him.

I’m fine with steam blaster scientists not being centered around support. In games like TF2, you can customize your favorite character to fit a playstyle more comfortable to you. You’re making a trade with each descision. With scientist, you could either bolster your healing capabilities, or go ham as if it were the good ‘ol days. The point of steam blaster is to transform him into an assault class, but without making him too OP with assault upgrades (like combo and low life). 
We were able to do this kind of thing in GW2, with different variants and abilities.It would be a shame if this part of BfN is also ruined.

@Iron_Guard8 I have the exact same problem with Engineer. He feels too much like a defense character and he isn't a good enough support.

Here are my design issues with the character.

1.  Engineer has a get out of jail free card with Double Time, making it less focused on supporting and more on selfish use.

2. The turret feels too strong. it has no build up time, fairly good range, fairly good damage, too much accuracy, and can watch Engineer's back without much skill involved.

3. His main support ability feels to lackluster when it actual comes to supporting. The boost isn't that effective on that many characters, and the range is not that big, so not that many zombies can use it. It is made to be used more selfishly.

4. His primary fire does very high damage, which has its negative qualities mostly removed when camping by a turret. Again, rewarding selfish players.

Now I think there are many ways to resolve this issue, but I do not think we should resort to excluding Engineer from his own boost. I think Engineer needs a rework/major tweaks. This is less due to him being unbalanced, but moreso for how he is played. Although I think larger aspects should be looked at first, damage dropoff, differing speeds, etc., Engineer should be a balance priority along with the enjoyment and balance of other support characters.

The thing about healers in Bfn is that they serve a different purpose than in GW. In GW, the self health regen was much worse so healers were more for keeping a team at full health because it would take a long time after battle to self regen. In Bfn, self health regen is much faster so there is less of a need for a healer to restore health after conflict. So in order to have a better purpose Bfn healers need to be able to perform significant healing in the middle of a fight so they have faster heal rates and as a result are very good at pocketing, making it harder to vanquish who they're healing.

I personally don't have a problem with Bfn's healers because they don't feel as necessary. In GW1 you would only regen up to half your max health so it felt like healers were just there to offset that mechanic and force the use of healers. In Bfn they feel like their main role is to keep others in a fight.

One quick note I want to make is about overhealth is that I think the decay rate should be percentage based so that characters with lower health don't lose it so quickly and AI bosses don't practically keep it.