Turrets + tool-kit idea

[TheGPX.8130]

If turrets aren't meant to be deployed for long, maybe it might be interesting to rework them with that concept in mind? They don't have a lot of health, and now they only overcharge as soon as they're deployed.

Experimental Turrets does give incentive to keep them alive longer for their boons, but imo it's not that big of a buff (that, and the reflect is also only active for the first few seconds). 

 

Otherwise, I like the concept of defending a point with turrets that would last long; but if I recall correctly, there was a bunker meta in PvP that was just unfun (which presumably led to the nerfs?). 

 

I had the idea to give the turrets a lot more health, but it would gradually lose HP (e.g. 50k health with a degrade of 5k/sec so that it would last 10 seconds on its own; but this is just an example). They wouldn't last up to 5 minutes like they do now (sorry AFK farmers :-P). Enemies could still attack the turret so that it would go down faster, but it would still require some effort. 

 

Since turrets wouldn't last that long on their own, a damage buff would be nice. It shouldn't be that big since we still have access to our weapons/kits; but hey, the option's there :-) (like the flame turret, I still internally cry when I see that 1 stack 3 sec burn on each attack). 

 

But what I definitely would like to see expanded is their interaction with the tool-kit. The tool-kit now repairs turrets which by themselves don't do a lot of damage and are squishy by nature. It's usually better to pick-up/destroy the turret and blast the enemy with your other skills instead of hammering down on your mechanical buddy. 

 

But what if the turret gets an additional upgrade when you start clonking on it? The tool-kit wouldn't repair it anymore, but instead it would receive more power/utility since you're not actively attacking enemies yourself (which would just switch the DPS/healing/cc from you to your turret).

Naturally, you wouldn't be able to hit enemies with your wrench when they're right next to your turret; otherwise it might be a bit OP in some scenarios ;-)

Also, you need to whack the turrets a few times before it activates the effect. An additional bar to visualise this would be helpful. 

 

Just imagine this:

 

Your rifle turret would turn into a gattling gun with super rapid fire (I think I saw something like that in Drizzlewood Coast, makes me jealous ._. ).

Your flame turret would create a ring of fire that burns enemies around it. It would also give a fire field for allies to use (not constantly, but often).

Your healing turret would remove two conditions and apply additional healing with each upgraded pulse. It could also add a water field. 

Your thumper turret would have a bigger range and apply additional weakness, but it wouldn't be able to this more than twice or it might be going a bit overboard (even though I love seeing enemies being flung in the air :D).

Your rocket turret would knock down the target area with each shot and cause additional bleeding.

 

The net turret is a bit difficult to be creative with, but the current overcharged version shoots an electric net. Maybe a thwonked net turret would create an electric field that dazes/stuns foes when the field is created? The electric field would last for a while so that you could use if for yourself (which is nice when playing Scrapper). 

 

This gives the engineer more options for DPS/support, and the turrets have a limited lifespan so that they wouldn't quickly turn OP. Most of the effects wouldn't activate more than three times for example.

 

There might be issues going on with this idea and other stuff might need to be reworked too, but I mainly wrote this for fun (and to make turrets great again :v ). You might say this is my Wintersday wish list :-) 

[Kodama.6453]

Unfortunately, making turrets that reliant on being hit with your toolkit, which is melee, would give incentive to no longer position your turrets strategically and the optimal playstyle would be to just dump all turret on the same spot to keep hitting them with the toolkit.

You usually shouldn't want to place your healing turret right in front of the enemy together with the tanky thumper turret. Same for rifle and rocket turret....

[Lynx.9058]

The whole point of turrets is for bunker-down playstyle, if they only last 10 seconds they might as well just be gyros at that point.

 

[TheGPX.8130]

3 hours ago, Kodama.6453 said:

Unfortunately, making turrets that reliant on being hit with your toolkit, which is melee, would give incentive to no longer position your turrets strategically and the optimal playstyle would be to just dump all turret on the same spot to keep hitting them with the toolkit.

You usually shouldn't want to place your healing turret right in front of the enemy together with the tanky thumper turret. Same for rifle and rocket turret....

Yeah, now that you mention it, just constantly hitting turrets doesn't seem that exciting. But at the same time, turrets wouldn't last long on the battlefield; and paired with their cooldowns, there should still be room to use kits/weapons inbetween the thwacking for a more optimal rotation (well, in my head at least :P).

There's also the option to not use the tool-kit for more stategic placements, like placing a rocket turret from afar after which you run to the enemy with your bomb kit. It does get hampered by the limited uptime of the turret, but that's just how it would work :s

I didn't even think about placing turrets together like that, just imagine being able to overcharge them all together >:) But that's probably too unfair, being able to hit just one turret would be the way to go. 

[TheGPX.8130]

24 minutes ago, Lynx.9058 said:

The whole point of turrets is for bunker-down playstyle, if they only last 10 seconds they might as well just be gyros at that point.

 

They would indeed be similar (except for maybe the rocket and rifle turret due to their range). I personally never felt like I could bunker well with the turrets. The thumper is an exception, but I otherwise feel the need to pick them up for the reduced cooldown + to be able to place them again for the overcharged attacks (and maybe for the reflective shields which are very nice in some fractals).

If only we could time the overcharge ourselves with their own cooldowns like we were able to in the past ._. Oh, and the reflective shield would activate again when you overcharge the turret like that, that would be awesome. 

[Matoro.9708]

Turrets used to be much cooler with things like auto repair and such, but Anet abandoned the TF2 inspiration awhile ago. Sad :c

[Lynx.9058]

Not sure many people here have played global agenda (it's a dead game these days), but they did the robotics class with turrets in the most perfect way possible, and I loved my robotics main there:

The robotics class had four turrets:

• 1. Personal turret (180 degree targeting arc, 65 foot range), worked like a submachine gun

2. Autocannon (90 degree firing arc, 100 foot range), had a "spin up" time but once it was firing did a little more damage than the Personal Turret.

3. Rocket Turret (90 degree firing arc, 150 foot range - which was for the longest range weapons in the game), Did aoe damage with tracking rockets, but fired slowly and had low DPS overall

4. Flame Turret (360 degree targeting arc, 30 foot range), shortest range but highest DPS of the turrets, and the only one that could fire any direction after placement.

In addition to turrets, the Robotics class also had drones (short-duration robots that were basically mobile turrets but had less health, and would only work for like 30 seconds), forcefield walls/domes to block enemy fire (wall was a standard ability, dome was the equivalent of an elite), and "support stations" (medical, power, and sensor stations) that healed, restored power, or tracked enemies and removed stealth.

 

The key to robotics though was that, as part of the class' armor, you had a "third arm" that came out of your left shoulder.  This arm acted as a secondary weapon (kind of like a kit here) and when in use it allowed you to fire a beam that rapidly repaired turrets, or helped construct them faster (they had a build time - with no repair arm helping they could take 10-15 seconds to build, but with the arm most were a 2-3 second build).  What made Robotics amazing in pve content - able to solo a lot of content that other classes couldn't - is that it could, with the right repair arm equipped, out-heal most damage dealt to one of its turrets, and the turret could subsequently take aggro and tank for the robotics character when dealing with instance mobs/bosses.

 

I tried to use my engineer that way while leveling up, but it was clear from a low level and became increasingly apparent at higher levels that the turrets in this game, with or without tool kit for repairs, just don't function well enough for that kind of gameplay.  Imagine if they did, though?

•  
• 1. Change the Toolkit Kit to properly function as a support kit for turret gameplay, since it quite obviously isn't used in other builds currently.  I'd do the following:
  • Change Toolkit's appearance from a wrench into some kind of asura-inspired energy gun
  • Change Toolkit 1 from a melee attack into a ranged attack (600-900 range tops), which fires a beam at the target.  If fired at an enemy, the beam does minor damage.  If you fire the beam at an allied machine target (a turret, golem, etc.) it heals that target or possibly grants that target barrier.  This should work similar to how the new specter allied-target healing works with their scepter.
  • Change Toolkit 2 into a confusion beam that, over several seconds, applies several stacks of confusion to the target (this works in with mechanist or other condition builds)
  • Change Toolkit 3 into a Repulsor beam that knocks enemies away from you.
  • Change Toolkit 4 into a Grappling beam that pulls enemies towards you.
  • Change Toolkit 5 into a "forcefield wall" that blocks projectiles and stops enemies from passing through it.

 

2. Change turrets:

• All Turrets now overload again when hit by the toolkit repair beam (interval 10 seconds)
• All Turrets have increased damage output
• Thumper Turret and Harpoon Turret now generate significantly more threat and/or taunt enemies to attack them.  These two turrets have increased hitpoints and toughness compared to the others, and essentially serve as "tank turrets" for the engineer when soloing.
• Rocket Turret should apply confusion to targets it hits when overcharged.

 

 

[TheGPX.8130]

18 hours ago, Lynx.9058 said:

Not sure many people here have played global agenda (it's a dead game these days), but they did the robotics class with turrets in the most perfect way possible, and I loved my robotics main there:

I've never heard of that game before, but it sounds rad 😉

 

Some of these ideas are also nice. I doubt we'll get any significant changes to the tool-kit, but maybe it could be our next e-spec 😛

Healing turrets from afar like the beam would be dope. I remember Throw Wrench being able to do this, but it sadly doesn't appear to work anymore. 

[Lynx.9058]

19 hours ago, TheGPX.8130 said:

I've never heard of that game before, but it sounds rad 😉

 

Some of these ideas are also nice. I doubt we'll get any significant changes to the tool-kit, but maybe it could be our next e-spec 😛

Healing turrets from afar like the beam would be dope. I remember Throw Wrench being able to do this, but it sadly doesn't appear to work anymore. 

It was a great game.  Unfortunately the developer, Hi-Rez Studios, completely cut off support for Global Agenda after they started up on the Tribes: Ascend franchise.  Global Agenda hung around for another couple of years after that, with no new content but a lot of dedicated players still, until Hi-Rez finally killed the servers for it, now you can't even log on at all.

It was a third person shooter, four classes (Assault, Recon, Medic, and Robotics), had pve and pvp content, and had an "AvA" (Agency vs Agency) mode where basically guilds could fight over a giant map of territories in a hex-like grid, and winners of each match would take over that hex.  You'd have 50-100 agencies fighting over a map of about 50-60 hexes, and at the end of each season the top 3 agencies (those with the most territory) won a bunch of stuff from the developers and titles on the leaderboard in the main city.

The classes were really well done, too.  I already explained Robotics, which was meant as a 'support' class but was really just a jack of all trades that was well rounded enough to fill any role needed.  The others were:

Assault: Big tanky class that could use large artillery/mortar type guns, gatling guns, I think a flamethrower maybe?  And rocket launchers.  They were the tanks in PvE missions, usually using a gatling gun to saturate and draw threat on enemies while using personal shields and buffs to survive damage.

Recon: The damage class, could be set up either as a sniper for long range, a submachine gun skirmisher, or a melee sword-wielding ninja.  They had stealth, were great for scouting ahead and disabling enemies, and could do the most damage, but were the squishiest class and would go down in a few hits if they didn't avoid them.

Medic: Probably one of the only healers I ever liked playing in any kind of game.  You had a variety of different 'medical guns' that you could shoot allies with to heal them; some applied healing over time and were better for healing the whole group, while others were lock-on beams that provided sustained healing to a single target.  Also had healing grenades and devices they could throw/place.  Medics also had poison guns and toxin grenades (and a nifty syringe-knife) for dealing damage or pvping, and were kings of damage over time effects.

 

Every class had a personal jetpack for mobility with limited (but regenerating) boost/fuel, and a lot of times fights ended up being aerial at least for short durations as you avoided effects on the ground or moved between platforms.

[The Boz.2038]

18 hours ago, Lynx.9058 said:

Unfortunately the developer, Hi-Rez Studios

This describes all of their games.

[TheGPX.8130]

On 12/19/2021 at 11:30 PM, Matoro.9708 said:

Turrets used to be much cooler with things like auto repair and such, but Anet abandoned the TF2 inspiration awhile ago. Sad :c

Yeah, probably for balancing reasons. Imagine if they went all the way with it 😛 An engineer is running through a PvP map being like "Wha- Thief's sappin' my turret!"

[Hiki.1947]

Soon you will be play with 1 big walking turret. I mean Mechanist spec

Edited January 18, 2022 by Hiki.1947