The Eureka Effect’s Wasted Potential

The Eureka Effect is one of the few weapons where a well intentioned buff turned out to be a complete nerf. For those of you who do not know the Eureka Effect is currently a wrench that allows you to teleport to your spawn and to your own teleporter exit.

Now that may sound like a ninjaneers wet dream but in exchange for this potential mobility you lose 50% repair rate and 50% build rate, which makes you take over twice as long to build a sentry. Rather than the already slow 8 swings per upgrade, you are making a staggering 16. That’s 16 times one has to jag whack the buildings before they go up a single level. The engineer has to do this 9 times if he wants a level 3 nest.

So after decades have gone by, and you have finally set up your nest and you think your all set it gets worse. The 50% repair rate makes it impossible to keep your buildings up unless you have a rescue ranger and wrangler handy. You cannot out repair a soldier spamming from miles away with this wrench.

The sad part was this wrench has so much potential. Before becoming so terrible the Eureka Effect was actually useful in setting up nests quickly in exchange for building movements. It needed a small buff to make the teleporting to spawn ability worth the lack of building mobility. One must ask why valve did not keep the old, cannot haul buildings downside and just add the teleport to your exit buff? Or perhaps just lower or replace the currently crippling downsides, with suggestions like cant upgrade sentries past level 2, or 25% less building health, or even simply lowering the downsides to 25% instead of 50%.

What makes me sad is this has the potential to be the ultimate ninjaneer wrench that promotes offensive Engineer gameplay beyond the overdone equip gunslinger poop minis alternative we have today.  Engineer needs some love in terms of new play styles and strategies. I know many people love to hate on the poor Texan but a lot of players love him because of all the strategy and though that goes into playing engineer against skilled enemies. Engineers deserve more options than just whacking a sentry or pooping mini sentries. The Rescue Ranger is a good example of this, how it encourages creative sentry positioning.

Hopefully the Eureka Effect will see a fix along with the Cleaner’s Carbine to get actual buffs instead of nerfs in disguise.