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Turrets Feedback

edited January 2019 in Feedback
As a newbie engineer, you're asked by Sprocket to learn 30 lessons in Turrets. This is entirely useless. Not as an exaggeration for effect, or as a metaphor for turrets offering a noticeable but subjectively inadequate benefit, but in the sense that your character gains absolutely zero mechanical benefit from having learned that many lessons.

30 lessons in turrets gives you four skills: Construction (creates a turret object in your inventory), Deploy (places the turret as a mob in your room), QPCBoost (increases the turret's listed charge), and Laser (modifies a turret to inflict thermal damage when it fires). Unfortunately, 30 lessons does not give you the ability to have your turrets actually fire. At 30 lessons into the skill, you can build as many turrets as you like, but all they do is sit there inertly, accomplishing nothing. This initial disappointment is, unfortunately, emblematic of the state of the Turrets skill as it stands.

But let's suppose you did learn up to Sentrymode instead, and your turrets work. At the cost of 15 to 21 seconds balance (3 to deploy the turret, 3 to place your workstation, 3 to engage sentrymode, 3 to recover your workstation and at least 3 to QPCBoost the turret so it has enough charge to fire, but ideally 6 or even 9 since it takes multiple boosts to fully charge a turret), you will now have a stationary defense which takes 5s to select a random enemy in the room with it (if they leave before 5s is up, the turret fails to hit), then starts shooting for ~60+(Power/100) thermal damage (so ~150 with a maxlevel toolbox) every 6 seconds for a maximum of six shots before it runs out of power entirely and needs boosted again.

Flamethrower does even less damage, but afflicts with scorched iif targets already have 15% muscular damage. Forcewave deals a tiny amount of internals damage, smaller than I've been able to measure (they regenerate it before a trigger to OPERATE HUD fires). Repairarm is A] bugged so that it doesn't actually do anything at the moment, and B] does something that engineers don't need done, because our bots don't typically take damage. Strobe disrupts balance with a duration based on mind damage on a class that can't afflict mind damage. The only vaguely useful turret barrel is the shardflinger, which still does awful damage, but does apply a single shard proc which could then theoretically be used with Magnetize (if EM damage was implemented), or with Magnotron (which converts the shard into damage).

On top of that, there's a few other general issues with Turrets:
-You can't tell how much power one of your turrets has without learning TURRET STATUS.
-You can't disassemble other people's turrets without subverting them first.
-The Efficiency and Battery mods are redundant - QPC is always the better choice.
-Even if they weren't redundant with QPC, they're also redundant with each other.
-Focus is pointless, as you can just unenemy everyone but the person you want shot.
-Turrets do not inform you who they're shooting at or where. You just get a "you deal X thermal damage" message, at best.

The subversion/transfer/encrypt dynamic is a good one, and an interesting take on the melds/groves system in other IRE games. So is the turret transfer system, which allows a non-engineer to help run a turret network. Both of these can be left as is without issue. All in all, Turrets has the potential to be a fine addition to the engineer's toolkit (pun intended). It just needs a few small fixes:

1. Increase turret damage across the board. (I leave the specific numbers up to the admins.)
2. Move Focus down to 5 lessons into the skill, make it not require the workstation, and allow it to target mobs.
3. Have turrets alert you with their turret number, turret target and room name when they shoot someone while you're not in the room.

...and maybe one or two tweaks:
1. Swap QPC and Efficiency in the skill tree, so that Efficiency sees more use early on.
2. Replace Battery with Collapsable, which allows you to TURRET COLLAPSE [turret], returning it intact to your inventory on a 3s balance.

Comments

  • edited January 2019
    E: The comment I was replying to has vanished. Somehow.
  • Hmm. Spam filter decided to eat my last comment so lemme try again...

    -You can't disassemble other people's turrets without subverting them first.

    It should be this way. Turrets are a pvp skillset, if you want to get rid of other peoples' turrets, you need to take an aggressive action - subvert or destroy it.
  • Would it make sense to give engineers an active target skill that only works in-room against NPCs?

    I think the fear was having turrets farm for engineers outside of the area, but that would fix the issue and give engineers some more toys to play with.  If they go into an area to hunt and setup a network that can be used room-to-room as they hunted, that would be pretty cool.


  • edited January 2019

    2. Replace Battery with Collapsable, which allows you to TURRET COLLAPSE [turret], returning it intact to your inventory on a 3s balance.

    I'd rather have battery than efficiency, tbh.

    Would it make sense to give engineers an active target skill that only works in-room against NPCs?

    I think the fear was having turrets farm for engineers outside of the area, but that would fix the issue and give engineers some more toys to play with.  If they go into an area to hunt and setup a network that can be used room-to-room as they hunted, that would be pretty cool.
    Aside from the enormous setup time and resources required, this would also collide with other engineers frequently.

    Might be more practical to have something like a pve-only mini turret you can easily setup and takedown as you move.
  • I'd be pretty upset if I stepped into an area and got one-shot by a turret, as if it were a Cosmpiercer guard.

    I'm not sure about the whole charges thing, we're in what century, and an engineer needs to manually re-charge their turret after 6 shots? 6 shots which deal less damage than being punched by a big man in a big bad suit? Having some downtime might justify an increase in damage, but I don't get the manual recharge stuff.

    Not being able to do anything in a skill with 30 lessons invested in it is bizarre, the first abilities should give you something to do with it.

    I think maybe they wanted to avoid Engineers being able to create Totems? Though in my opinion, turrets would be better if they acted like Totems, but maybe less devastating than totems are in other IRE stuff. 

    Looking into how totems work compared to turrets or other room-embedded defences might give some ideas for how things could be changed, since that's a rough counterpart to what I imagine was the spirit of this stuff.
  • I'd be pretty upset if I stepped into an area and got one-shot by a turret, as if it were a Cosmpiercer guard.

    I don't think he's suggesting bumping up the damage to 5k+.

    More than a mosquito bite might be in order, though...
  • edited January 2019
    So far the only skill I've noticed in turrets with any use is SURGE, and since you're blowing yourself up with it the skill is risky. I mean, I love it, and I don't want it changed. At all. Please don't abuse it and get it nerfed. 

    I actually brought up the pathetic effects of forcewave and strobe and was told that turrets were only meant to augment damage output, and not win fights on their own - which I feel was missing the point of what I said, honestly, as I just wanted enough internal damage output for it to actually STICK and not be instantly healed by normal WW regen. Not WETWIRE REGENERATE or anything, just... Standing there regen.

    I don't really get what the purpose of these two is? As stated, we can't inflict mind damage, and doing the setup to MAYBE try to coordinate with the forcewave turret if it's somehow a damage multiplier is a less effective use of time than just clawing things to death. I get engi's supposed to be like, the support class from the ability descriptions, but if our support abilities are so useless that just using our default attack is always going to be more efficient, what's the point?

    Don't want turrets to work on mobs though, feel like they'd get nerfed even further into uselessness or cause too many issues if they did.
    Feraluna has called for the honoring of Razzy for the following reason: somehow setting Reynolds on fire, killing someone, and then calling for her own besmirching.
  • I feel like turrets being useful outside of PVP would need the long set up time and either luring people into them or using them to keep people away from areas. 

    See: Totems.
  • Don't want turrets to work on mobs though, feel like they'd get nerfed even further into uselessness or cause too many issues if they did.
    That's a bit of my worry too. I'd prefer to have turrets be decent in pvp than be useable in pve but super weak (for, as mentioned before, enormous setup effort)
  • Tecton's already mentioned in the Discord that he wants to make turrets not PvP-exclusive, on the basis that it's the only skill in the game that has no PvE application. I agree, though, that turrets should focus primarily on being PvP-useful that that PvE applications are a secondary concern.

    Turrets do not need to do enough damage to actually kill someone on their own, or even necessarily enough to chase someone out of the room - they just need to be enough to give a meaningful benefit to the side who has control over the turrets in an area. Enough of a benefit that it might be worthwhile to have your side's engineer/scoundrel take them out, at the very least.
  • edited January 2019
    Been playing around with the PvE turret stuff since the update just rolled out. Gotta say, I'm pretty satisfied with the damage output increase when bashing relative to the effort involved in setting up turret networks. Thanks, staff!
    Feraluna has called for the honoring of Razzy for the following reason: somehow setting Reynolds on fire, killing someone, and then calling for her own besmirching.
  • Razzy said:
    Been playing around with the PvE turret stuff since the update just rolled out. Gotta say, I'm pretty satisfied with the damage output increase when bashing relative to the effort involved in setting up turret networks. Thanks, staff!
    You don't need a network now, your carrybot can carry them around.

    It does reduce carrybot damage, so junkjet attacks might be a good alternative to use when in this mode.
  • Yeah, but I like my carrybot attacks and QPC-charged multibarrel network.
    Feraluna has called for the honoring of Razzy for the following reason: somehow setting Reynolds on fire, killing someone, and then calling for her own besmirching.
  • My area is too big for good coverage with a QPC turret, so I'm resigned to carrying it around for now....

    Still great one way or another.
  • Yaaaaaaaaaaaay <--(My best response (>^^)>*)
  • Unless Junkjet and Magnetize do a wombo combo amount of damage, there's no reason to use it while hunting, at least around level 30.

    Junkjet does the same damage as Bot Claw while carrying the turret, but Claw adds bleeding immediately. Junkjet requires extra time to begin adding bleeding stacks. Also, Junkjet damage is reliant on Aim, Bots and Turrets use Techcraft.
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