Saturday, April 24, 2010

Robotics: fun with turrets (and drones)

After spending more time with each class, I'm starting to like Robotics a little more than the rest. The set of equipment I've settled into has: Personal turret, Hornet and Grizzly. The personal turret is a deployable with a short cooldown, short range and can fire 180 degrees around it with 100% accuracy. The hornet and grizzly are drones that automatically attack targets in range. Turrets stay alive until they are destroyed or another turret is built, while drones only appear for a short time.

In the past, I've either focused on turrets and stations and had a more bunkered style of play, or I've been super mobile, flying around and dropping drones to do all the dirty work. But lately, I have found that it's actually very effective to use both turrets and drones together. I've even ditched all my defensive abilities like shield wall and healing station.

My first priority is usually to find a super sweet spot to set up my turret. A well-placed turret can really ruin someone's day, and can be the difference that wins or loses games. The super sweet spot could be somewhere just outside everyone's field of view, or somewhere people are not paying attention to. In "escort the payload" missions, this can be in a nice blind spot around the corner that people are going to walk by, where they don't realize the turret until they're dead. However, once the turret is up, it's only a matter of time until it kills enough people and people start to notice and try to take it down. This is where I used to have troubles in the past. Someone would enter the "deadzone" behind the turret's arc of fire and try to destroy my turret. I've tried to spec for rifle damage but I couldn't kill my target before my turret died. I also tried speccing for max repair power, but I couldn't heal my turret through the damage or they'd stop attacking my turret and start attacking me instead. Then, with my turret down, my killing power would drop drastically for a while and I would have lost control over an area.

This is where the drones come in. By using drones with turrets, there are no longer any deadzones. Anyone trying to destroy my turret at close range will be welcomed into a 360-degree meatgrinder. I can also set up nice angles by using the turrets with the drones, by being in two places at once. E.g. a turret can pressure people to hide behind a rock, and I can then drop a drone behind the rock. The drones work well to take out enemy turrets too.

The following video starts of with me setting up a turret in a blind spot right outside the enemy starting point. It slaughters people one after another as they fly out. The mission is "payload escort" mission. I was on the defending team, so our goal was to make sure that all the bars in the top right of the screen don't turn red. We actually get pushed back all the way to the last checkpoint, but we stood our ground and repelled the payload. On my hotbar, C is Hornet, X is Grizzly and E is Turret.



The next video shows robo gameplay on other missions. The video ends with a short clip of me and another robo working together in a Payload mission to set up a nasty bunker in a stairwell to stop the payload. He also deployed a sensor, so you may notice that many stealthers that tried to sneak in to blow stuff up got busted and shredded.

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