Turret

Overview
 is an ability of the Engineer class.


 * Deploys an automatic miniature turret. Each pump level deals a different type of damage.  You may have 1 turret of each type active at any given time, and deploying a second of the same type will remove the first.

All ranks have an activation time of 0.666 seconds and no cooldown, and the ability has a range of 20 meters. Turrets cost 50 power and 2 Weapons Grade Micromechs and last for 60 seconds. Turrets and traps are activated in a collapsed state and take roughly 1 second to deploy and start firing after the skill is successfully used.

Usage
While an individual turret as an offensive weapon doesn’t quite pack the punch of your own weapons or that of your teammates, they can be used to draw enemy fire away from friendlies. Using turrets in association with the engineer ability Trap allow you to place down an aggravation-gathering defensive line, easily supplemented with Crab Mines for clearing the initial area or dealing with flanking foes. The armor on these turrets is reasonable and regenerates quickly between enemy waves, but they're hardly invincible -- they will fall quite rapidly under sustained fire or powerful attacks, such as a Strider's beam attack. Counteract this with numbers: the more turrets you have firing, the less likely each individual turret is to be focused on by enemy fire.

While trekking alone however, combining two or more turrets/traps in conjunction with the Bot Construction Shield Bot or Multi Bot and/or Shield Extender results in an excellent defensive/pinned down combination -- using the MMO control scheme can speed up their deployment enough to produce a reasonably quick fortress under fire. The turrets damage targets and draw enemy attention away from you and your squad while your other abilities further reduce damage to all parties involved (including the turrets themselves). Turrets are all capable of delivering critical hit effects as well, even against targets normally immune to their damage type, and given their fast rate of fire and lack of ammo/reload concerns, they can actually function as respectable battlefield control as well. It is unclear if their crit chance is affected by the engineer's Spirit attribute or not.

Turrets can reliably apply critical hit effects to enemies. Virulent snares, EMP armor-regen shutdown, sonic knockback, laser damage debuf and physical double-crit-hits. These are all quite useful.

The Turrets do a lot more damage if they are all placed on the same spot, as they choose their targets by the distance and the terrain. If they are all on the same spot, they target the same enemies and easily mow down one enemy after the other; this is particularly useful if the terrain forces the enemies to bottleneck or against a single powerful adversary. As each turret's damage is increased by the engineer's Mind attribute, with up to five turrets blasting a target at once, even a modest boost to Mind produces dramatic results. To maximize each turret's firing time, always open by deploying a Trap first -- this way, any enemy attention that would be drawn to a turret is instead drawn to an expendable trap (which was designed specifically to be attacked by the enemy), buying time for the more damaging elements of the engineer's arsenal to deploy. Additionally, if a trap is killed, its explosion transfers the attention to you, rather than your other turrets, which also helps keep them alive.

Please note, the only thing that changes with the adding of points to this skill is the type of damage the turrets do, however, since you can have one turret of each kind out, you effectively also add a turret to your arsenal with each pump. Additional turrets not only widens the spectrum of damage types you dish out, but also increases their overall damage output (through stacking) and survivability (through cover fire). This is definitely a skill all engineers should consider maximizing.

You can "heal" the turrets with a repair tool. If you stack the turrets as noted above, an area repair tool is recommended, hitting all five at once (and forcing you to be close enough to blanket them with a damage-reducing shield, further increasing their staying power). In practice, however, you will rarely need to repair your turrets: Either their crossfire and your defensive shields will them operational until their duration expires, or they are overwhelmed by enemy fire too quickly to repair.