Stardusk's Guide To The Krogan Engineer

I think the problem goes deeper than that. Rage itself, even with synergy from other trees, is a subpar passive. It does a lot of things, but it does many of them poorly, and the rest don't mesh well with the Krogan in the lore or otherwise feel "off."

Numerically, Rage gives less per point than any other passive. Less health and shields, less melee damage. The regeneration is nice, but it only feels so essential because these krogan just don't have the level of protection that the ME3 ones did, so they end up seeing disproportionate returns from something that makes their health not purely ablative.

Krogan explicitly love the idea of taking on things that are bigger than them, and the bloodrage is supposed to make them incredibly aggressive and hard to bring down. Well, without leveling Rage to 6, you can't trigger Rage in a lore-compliant way, and by tying the trigger to melee kills, you discourage Krogan from throwing down with things big enough to give them a challenge, when they could run around headbutting mooks to keep Rage up. Opening the ability up by allowing it to also trigger off of repeated hits to the same target would make sense, as the addled murderturtles psyche themselves up by slamming their faces over and over into something twice their size. As it stands, the game encourages us to play krogan not as fearless champions, but as predatory bullies, when in the lore, they are undeniably both of these things in equal measure.

As much as I talk up the regeneration perk in Rage, it, too, inspires lore-breaking behavior. Kill two things, roar with fury, and... hide so your health regenerates. To encourage proper Bloodrage playing, they'd want to either remove the on-hit delay entirely from health regen when enraged, or grant a burst of health-over-time after a melee hit.

Actually, that'd be a way to turn point 5 into an actual interesting choice. Bake increased regen cap when enraged into the first three levels of the passive, and make 5 a choice between delay reduction/regen speed for a few seconds after being hit, or a burst of health over time and extra damage for a few seconds after a kill (since we all know Martial Artist is a piss-poor trap in this tree).

Still doesn't resolve Rage's lack of synergy with the engi, but I can live with that as long as the passive does its actual job better, and krogan are actually good at what they're supposed to be good at: soaking hits and killing heavies with their faces.

Maybe I'm in the minority here but I think Omnilink buff of the turret and cryo ammo are more useful on the turret than speccing all the way into rage and overload. Maybe I'm crazy.