(tl;dr at end)
It’s inescapable; at some point early in their careers, every engineer will come to the same realization: turrets suck. It’s “obvious.”
Or is it?
I understand that turrets are a difficult thing to balance. They’re a source of completely independent damage—that’s a big deal. Now, I personally think that the logistics difficulties are a significant enough downside to warrant better performance, but that’s not why I’m here.
Despite assumptions to the contrary, mathematical effectiveness is not “the problem”.
You see, I’m a grenadier at heart. I bought the grenade kit as soon as I could and I used it until 80. Many people will tell me that using just one kit is the wrong way to play the engineer, but kitten them. Due to this, I had a lot of time to experiment with the remaining two utility slots available to me. My findings?
They didn’t kitten matter. Grenade kit gave me chill, two dots, aoe blind, solid damage and awesome traits, I didn’t really need anything else. At 80 I slot Elixer C and Rocket Boots because they’re clearly effective abilities, but I rarely [remember to] use them in PvE.
So why don’t I have turrets in those slots? Clearly any independent damage is better than nothing, right? I’m not under the impression that the time it takes to set up a turret
lowers my dps by any appreciable amount, so why?
I just don’t like the turrets. They aren’t satisfying to use. My satisfaction doesn’t come from number crunching and topping the dps charts, all I need is to feel that they’re doing some good—for them to be reliable and comprehensible—to feel like they have my back.
How can we do that without improving their dps? Indeed, if we labor under the assumption that their dps is exactly where it should be? Well, why do they feel unreliable in the first place?
Randomness. Their randomness is as bad as the elixers, only by virtue of being random in timing rather than effect, and by random I mean not random at all. What I’m saying is, turrets are too kitten slow. With timers of 2, 3, 4, 8 and 10 seconds, whether what they do will be at all useful is left completely up to chance.
What if instead of doing 300 damage every 2 seconds, the rifle turret did 75 damage every half a second? The dps wouldn’t change, but rather than feeling like I never see it do anything, it’d be: Hey, that’s like a whole second poison. I wouldn’t have to be annoyed if it wastes ‘a whole shot’ on a brief obstruction.
The rocket turret and thumper turret could benefit from pretty much exactly the same thing. The flame turret I would change to something like the flamethrower’s ratio of attack/delay—again maintaining the same overall DPS. The healing turret should offer regen-level health every second instead of 8 seconds of regen every 8 seconds (I mean seriously, eight seconds?)
The net turret is a bit of a problem; it’s the worst offender at ten seconds, but it doesn’t have an effect you can just dilute… A weak form of cripple might work, or maybe an air-blast knockback (the turret looks right for it). Something could be figured out, I’m sure.
tl;dr: Making turrets faster without changing their dps will make them feel more satisfying.
Also, picking up a turret should cut the cooldown by at least half instead of only a quarter, come on, a little quality of life here? Maybe a trait that makes the reduction two thirds? Anything?
(edited by Weirwynn.2390)