>>659551
>How good is Caesar's cope option compared to her actual ball?
Basically, it's simple and complicated.
Caesar's W-Engine effectively follows the same pattern Limited Stun W-Engines do, aside from maybe Trigger's.
It's not particularly strong, and for her personal kit it actually doesn't matter that much.
However, it's affectively a Support ball on a non-Support agent.
Like, yeah, her shield scales with Impact and yadda-yadda, but who cares about the shield - its size will matter like a couple times a year maybe.
She has a few decent cope options among Defense W-Engines: Seth's is pretty good - it allows her to shift towards Assault buildup for possible Anomaly shenanigans, Spring Embrace (BP W-Engine) is alright - provides a boost to Energy Generation Rate (affects active ER as well) you can pass onto your DPS, and any Stun W-Engine can be used if you need her to actually build up Daze (and scale her shield, I guess).
However, see how none of those provide you with an off-field source of damage - that's the value of her W-Engine.
If you compare Caesar to, say, Lucy, you'd go something along the lines:
>Lucy gives 600 ATK - Caesar gives 1000
>Lucy gives 10% CRIT DMG - Caesar gives 25% DMG
>Lucy does off-field damage - Caesar has powerful Defensive Assists
>Lucy enables Astra - Caesar... can carry Astral? Or at least enables Proto
>Lucy gives ~12% in-combat ATK from her W-Engine - Caesar does fuck all without hers
You have effectively voided all advantage Caesar had with her stronger buffs because she's completely missing one buff source.
So, basically, it's very important due to the nature of the deal, but objectively speaking, it's not particularly strong and Caesar herself doesn't really need it - it's just about maximizing your access to buffs per agent slot used.
And because all of the above remains true for any Defense agent, Caesar's W-Engine is currently BiS on all of them (unless you're playing them as DPS of course).