Engineering: All the cool kids are doing it

Trinket that fires a lightning bolt for upwards of 3k damage? Check.
Gauntlets that fire a rocket like Boba Fett? Check.
Gizmo that lets me see and extract elemental essences from little steam clouds? Check.
Auction house in Dalaran useable only by Grand Master Engineers? CHECK
Personal robotic butler that will buy my junk, sell me reagents, act as a bank and fetch my dry-cleaning? Double Check!
Gadget that rips apart space-time creating a worm hole that will transport me all over Northerend??? Giggity check check!

Sorry for the nerd-gasm, but the last 3 on the list are a few of the many engineering profession changes slated for patch 3.2. Rorik was my first character and my only lvl 80. I started with Engineering, went to blacksmithing and then went back to engineering shortly after hitting 70 because blacksmithing is boring. Engineering suits me to a perfectly and I’ll never drop the profession even though it’s been moderately useless in raiding situations.

Engineering isn’t for the min-maxer who wants to do 7k DPS. Engineering is for the cool people. The people who want to paint sharks teeth on a turbo charged flying machine. The people who know what a turbo charger even is! We gadget freaks have been shunned by both Blizzard and the general WoW player base for quite a while. Not any longer. Say I’m in the middle of a raid and one of our healers drops out and we need someone to switch specs quickly. Not a problem, I’ll just call on Jeeves to bring me my healing gear! He’ll even press the dings out of your chestplate and offer you Earl Grey to go with your stack of reagents. The addition of the auction house is just beyond awesome. I can scan away while listening to the sweet sounds of the chopper idling outside the entrance of “Like Clockwork”. With all the new engineering gadgets and the old stuff I currently have, I’ll be able to check my mail, sell my junk, buy reagents, access my bank and teleport myself to various places around Northrend without being in a major city. The only way it could get any better would be if they added machine guns and a saronite bomb dropper to the roflcopter.

There are plenty of other more minor changes too, like potion injectors doing more to engineers, cobalt frag bombs incapacitating characters and lowered cooldowns for a bunch of devices. There’s even a mind control dish that can be integrated with your helmet. I’ll be very curious to see how that device works and also to see how it alters the look of my goggles.

Maybe Blizzard doesn’t hate engineers quite as much as I had previously thought…