I can totally understand adding some kind of range limit, where if you go too far away from your turrets they blow up, but a 5 minute timer makes them kind of useless.
I like defending places, it’s one of the main reasons I was enjoying engineer… now I place my turrets in nice strategic places, wait for enemies… 5 min later (if they don’t blow up while things are attacking me and I die), then I have to put them back again. It’s just annoying. Especially considering I can get to some really nice spots with Jump Shot as well. I really enjoyed doing that.
Now there’s also really no point whatsoever in having the 30% turret damage reduction, or the self-repair trait… they’re not going to last anyway, so why even bother?
This is stupid, please change it back… add a range limit, or something else to prevent AFK farming or whatever, but don’t ruin perfectly legit uses of turrets just because some people were abusing it.
Make the 5min self-destruct timer only activate if you’re a certain range away from the turret… like maybe 5000? And then the timer should reset if you come back within range… so you can still move around a bit without worrying about losing turrets too much.
And/or make it so they don’t self-destruct if you’ve used their special ability recently (like, say, in the last 5 minutes).
Or both.
As it is now, turrets are just totally disposable things you throw around as a distraction and a bit of extra damage. There’s just absolutely no point even trying to place them strategically anymore.