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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.
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.
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.
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Comments
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.
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 don't think he's suggesting bumping up the damage to 5k+.
More than a mosquito bite might be in order, though...
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.
It does reduce carrybot damage, so junkjet attacks might be a good alternative to use when in this mode.
Still great one way or another.
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.