There are plans for Gunner area suppression lasers and different missile types built from rare commodities. I would like to finish the engineer stuff first though.

ETA on all of this is next uni, which should be here in less than a month.

gunners should be before dm's... dm's have enough stuff

No class has "enough stuff" yet.

Now thats the right attitude!

i mean engineer's have way more stuff than gunner's... I think gunner's should get some nice stuff first before engineer's get even more

Yeah, who wants a healer than can heal, anyway? It would be way cooler if they could force enemies to microwarp, instead.

[/sarcasm]

What Nuromishi probably meant was that Shield Monkey is a boring class, because they just heal. Few Shield Monkeys use slaves and in most cases you can get away with locking yourself on your target and going afk.

I also agree Shield Monkeys are overpowered, judging purely by comparing the numbers of monkeys that were needed to do an uber X before the rebalance and now.

For now I will stick to what was promised though.

Before and After the re balance i am still using 2 Shm in emp, So the above statement is false.

Shield monk is ftw, i have 2

Personally I feel that Shm is a fun class, I like being a healer. I agree it's a bit overpowered though, takes too few healers to tank the ubers.

Yes, ShM are way overpowered at the moment, you can easily build yourself a decent ShM with a budget of about 5b-ish. Get two decent monkeys and you will have barely any problem with outhealing ubers. However, nerfing ShM won't change much. It might require teams to bring a third monkey, but that's about it. I don't think it's the ShM class that needs to be changed, it's the ubers. All ubers follow a similar pattern: uber keeps shooting tank, ShM heal tank. If ubers were more tricky, i.e. suddenly emitting an aura that turns healing into damage, AoE damage, unexpected reactions (copper blob, love it) or other mean stuff, it'd force ShMs to do more than just auto-fire-afk-heal. A wider array of healing weaponry might be cool as well, AoE heal, Heal over Time, maybe even healing fighters for ShM capships. However, the usefullnes of such weapons is right now, without any change to higher-end content, is questionable.

The problem with healers is that they just heal constantly and dont need to think. I would like if monkeys had a variety of healing weapons which could be used depending on the situation. Bosses would use a wide variety of attacks forcing monkeys to react and use the right healing method for the situation. Some examples of weapons I would like.

Healing Wand: Similar to current healing weapons, used to keep the tank topped off and to heal other squad members

Monkey Blast: This weapon would dish out a huge heal, it will drain alot of elec and sheild for this heal but would be essential for keeping the tank alive for burst damage. Cant be spammed or it will drain the monkey quickly

Splash Wand: This would function like a splash laser and will heal for a relatively small amount very efficiently, used to keep squad members alive if the boss is using heavy AoE

The Sheild Monkey's 3 subskills would each focus on a different type of healing, so a level 500 Monkey might be very good at tank healing but be less than average at groupwork.
The more specialised healing means that boss encounters can involve far greater amounts of damage than before, forcing more Monkeys to be required than previously.

These new healing methods would require new boss mechanics, the boss could emote that it is charging its plasma blast so the monkey has 2 seconds to prepare for huge damage on the tank and dps know to stay clear of the tank to avoid splash damage.
Perhaps the boss has a laser that does a set amount of damage spread equally between everyone it hits. If it only hits the tank he is one-shot, if the squad stacks up then the damage is spread between them and can be easily healed through.
Fights should be mobile, the boss drops an unkillable drone that creates a damage aura, forcing the group to move away and pull the boss with them

Variety is the spice of life, and that is the kind of thing that I feel SS needs to compete with other games.
Yes I drifted off topic, but it is just a few things I think would be great to see in the new UZ. Basically a complete redesign of the Sheild Monkey Class.

^^ Agreed with above post very much.