And they'll be starting with these two immunities constantly. A part of doing consistently well in battle is getting many kills in addition to completing game mode objectives. How do you do that? You have to have the ability to survive for extended periods of time while also having burst damage and/or sustained damage. Meta drones allow you to achieve this but how well you achieve it depends on the map, how well your teammates can back you up with their equipment against the enemy team, and the enemy team's equipment. The two statuses in the game that kill longevity are AP and EMP. The huge thing keeping some players in check in battles is the fact that they cannot protect themselves against both. If they are immune to you reducing their damage output, their first layer of defense, their speed and disabling their repair repair kits temporarily, then they will not be immune to you disabling the effects of their damage reducers, and vice versa. This is the main argument against adding a second immunity slot. You won't be able to artificially reduce the lifespan of some players, which brings in room for Isida trains to come back comfortably. Where there is longevity, healing makes it worse. Sure, they won't be able to protect themselves from the other 4 statuses, but they themselves or their application methods are not potent/widespread enough to dethrone AP and EMP Immunity's effectiveness when looking to dominate with oppressive equipment.

Currently, the only augments you should consider buying for Shaft are Adrenaline or Short-Band Emitters. The other augments are not worth the cost, especially with how horrible the current economy of the game is.

If it wasn't obvious from some balance changes in 2021, they do seem to want some equipment thrown under the bus badly, for reasons the players can only speculate because they didn't give explanations. But you can definitely trust that they know exactly what they're doing when these things occur. They know their numbers and main interactions. All that is left for the players to do is call out blatant inconsistencies as early as possible. Huge changes to a Stock turret warrant relevant changes to its augments. For a long time this particular problem occured with Incendiary Mix and Corrosive Mix. After a very long time, that debate has been settled. They're both good in their own ways. One offers practically infinite ammo with delays between spurts while the other offers slightly less normal damage for an extended duration with triple damage critical hits but less longetivity due to the reload. When you have another pair of augments such as Compact Fuel Tanks and Shock Freeze, one of them is bound to get the short end of the stick due to Stock paramaters and the status effect of each turret being different. This time around, its Firebird's and afterburn's time to shine. So all you can do is call out the inconsistency and appeal for consistency as early as possible. Good on you for making the topic. Context matters here. All modifications of Freeze have the 100% limit. It does not need directly tampering with compared to Firebird, which has a hard limit on modifications because it applies a different status effect with its own properties that needs to be balanced across modifications. Their explanation was to push Freeze more in the direction of normal damage output. For sure they screwed up with the paramaters and I am surprised it's taking them this long to make a change to it. Perhaps they're still gathering data on it before making a move.

I'll be recording some of my battles of varying lengths on two separate accounts that main Shaft. One of them is F2P-esque, where it is below Legend, using basic crystal augment, an unmaxed Crusader/Ares with one hull augment, a small set of upgraded protection modules, and a low-tier drone. The other is P2W-esque, where it is quite after Legend, using Armour-Piercing Sight and Healing Emitters, a number of maxed hulls with Immunity options, every relevant protection module decently upgraded to at least 40%, and a near meta drone. Here is the link to the playlist. It will periodically have newer recorded videos being added.

A nice example of that here. Screenshot taken a bit late. Tesla Viking with Overdrive ready spawns, activates it and gets a critical hit on the first shot of the Overdrive, isntantly killing my 4 allies behind me. It then killed me on the 2nd shot.

What needs to happen first is to remove Freezing status' ability to disable it.

I've confirmed that Jammer does make Miner lose its mines if it is killer while Inflicted with it. So if you're using Miner, watch out for Hunters, Wasps and Paladins as they are the most frequently-occuring sources of Jammer in any give battle.

They are Legendary because they're an option not meant to be readily available to the general playerbase. In the case of Cryotron, it comfortably applies a status effect that slows you down and disables the effect of your damage enhancers during the duration. It also increases your Twins' range all for the low cost of having halved critical damage, which doesn't matter that much if what you're getting in return for that significantly weakens your enemies more than it weakens your overall damage output.

There is this from the RU Forum. Auto-translated, or course. I suppose we should wait until Contracts arrive to see if the current economy comes out of the gutter. Here is the topic if you're interested. https://ru.tankiforum.com/topic/308212/

No. Tesla with Viking's Overdrive was brought up to the level of other melee turrets and Vulcan 2 days after Frederik posted that. Under the influenceuence of Viking's Overdrive, it can now one-shot an unprotected heavy hull. And with Dictator's Supercharge increased to 9 seconds, a Viking Tesla can clear out a Siege point quickly.

Ah right thanks, I forgot about that. I still use Railgun protection semi-regularly. It doesn't help as much as before but it helps.

Oh I don't know, like, every augment besides Incendiary Band? There were swarms of IB + HI Vulcans in battles. The nerf finally came and what happened? Instead of them going towards actual Vulcan augments, many of them simply went to Heat Resistance. Months, and months, and months, and months passed and to this day, a plethora of Vulcans are still using Incendiary Band. So much so that I was genuinely surprised they gave it away in the last Challenge. I would have thought the Devs would want some variety and put Reinforced Aiming Transmission. The conclusion made is that people liked Vulcan for Incendiary Band and not normal Vulcan gameplay. It's fun and that's what matters to them. Most of the playerbase is casual after all.

Yet the playerbase continues to use it en masse. I say let's leave them to their deeds. I'd rather not have something like Incendiary Band be a meta augment for Vulcan. Save that for the Vulcans that play the way it was intended.

What rank is this account? Afterburning is a fixed number which is fatal at low ranks but passable/an annoyance at endgame. Incendiary Band Vulcans are the least potent Vulcans there are in the big picture up there. You're better off fighting that than a Reinforced Aiming Transmission or Adrenaline Vulcan.

@Opex-Rah Would you mind elaborating to us or giving us the gist of what your plans are for Smoky's critical hits? The two main augments that the Patch Note in January claimed was affected have become weaker, with one of them being pitifully weak from the beginning and has turned into something not worth considering in your garage. Whatever change was intended for Smoky in that patch, it doesn't seem to be working. Here is an auto-translated snapshot of what you said on the RU Forum.

No, they just complained about their low brainpower gameplay being rightfully nerfed and went right back to camping as usual, not wanting try out the feature that the nerf was centred around.

You start by cursing the Matchmaking System for pitting you against these players despite your obvious rank and GS differences. Your current Gear Score is a tad bit underwhelming for someone being thrusted into endgame battles. Is your Brutus upgraded? Finish upgrading that. There are readily available ways to mitigate Vulcan's effectiveness and ways that are locked behind RNG. The readily available ways are Vulcan protection modules and movement. I emphasise the latter, especially after recent changes. Keep your distance against Vulcans and drive perpendicular to them. They will have a hard time keeping their train of bullets on your for maximum DPS. You do not want to be stationary against a Vulcan. When one starts shooting you, start moving immediately. The more you move, the less bullets they consistently connect, the longer they take to kill you, the more time you have to deal serious damage to or kill them in return. The ways locked behind RNG are Stun augments, Cryo augments and Vampire Nanobots. Every Stun augment except Stun Smoky and Stun Tesla can chain their stuns in enough time to wreck a Vulcan's damage output. In the most extreme case, Stun Striker stops the Vulcan user from playing the game entirely. Vampire Nanobots when paired with a Vulcan protection module and a hull that is low to the ground can outheal the damage from Vulcan. Another readily available method to counter Vulcans is melee range combat, but you are in no position to do that with your subpar garage fighting Legends. Freeze is a prime counter to Vulcan now where it can circle strafe it and cut its DPS in half at the same time. Cryo augments let you do that from range. Vikings and hover hulls are harder to hit at melee range when they're competent.

Incendiary Band was meant to have self-damage while also igniting the enemy. An Isida coming in between that shatters the purpose of that limitation. A relatively easy way to circumvent that limitation, especially since the IB change last year that made it easier to use, is to have an Incendiary turret or augment ignite you and you continue applying that ignition to yourself. It is counted as the enemy's ignition and not your own. This already happens in-game. You don't gain score for self-damage but you gain score for damage inflicted by the enemy. If you were at half HP, with 20% of your HP being taken by self-damage and 30% being taken by damage inflicted by the enemy, you will gain score for the 30% HP lost to enemy damage. So in my view, this topic is asking for Isida to be able to gain score from self-damage on a Vulcan.

Turret diversity has been increased what with most of the turrets getting buffs. Whatever protection module you deem mandatory is usually a result of what you see in your own battles. I don't have that much of a problem with Shafts most of the time. My starting trio of protection modules since December has been Smoky, Striker and Gauss, with Gauss being the wild card that is most often changed, but they all can be changed depending on the diversity of turrets or enemy skill levels on the enemy team. While Striker protection is seen as a must, its potential can be quickly dashed away with one critical hit. You see your protection module working for the first two shots then suddenly you're near death on the third. Striker has unfair stats, yes. You have to hope that they aren't lucky when you're fighting against it. Just like Freeze. The only protection module that you can say has dropped off from its overall value is Thunder. The turret is so bad now and turret diversity is much better than the few years prior that more people are using other turrets now than Thunder alone. While there are select bottom tier turrets overall, I do not believe that any of them are so weak that it would be a crime to protect yourself against them. Thunder while it has poor stats, still has a template that is dangerous when under ideal circumstances. It's a common template with no additional gimmicks, but still fits the template. Subcalibre Rounds enhances this template a bit.

Everything there is still relevant for their purposes.

Ares' actual ball lags behind the visual ball. It's less immediately noticeable now because the speed has been doubled. If the radius shrinks over distance, that would make it worse.

It seems clear now that you have no plans on actually nerfing Striker. Just like with the Freeze change in January. "(Note) We are slightly moving focus from critical to ordinary damage. We are glad that you like the new Freeze, but we needed to moderately nerf it in order to keep balance." Of course, the scores of cries on the forum and in the game for Freeze to be nerfed meant that we liked it the way it was. Again, this is not enough. If you're keeping the ball speed that high at 18m/sec, you need to considerably increase the damage/healing radius, not slightly like you've been doing. If you're worried about it becoming too brain-dead in the gameplay at lower ranks, you always have the option of making that damage an upgradable paramater.

I like the approach that they took for Shaft's gameplay and think they should also take it for Saboteur in a way. Let it place subsequent rings of mines quicker but the number of rings in total is harshly limited, for starters, 2 rings at maximum. A Saboteur user can partially shut down an area quickly but can do nothing further than that. If they want to shut down another area, they will have to lose their mines in the first area. I have three problems with my suggestion though: 1. Saboteur is a defense drone so pushing it towards more offensive gameplay doesn't seem logical. 2. This would make Saboteur able to be used offensively with little drawback besides a constant high outflow of mines from the player's inventory. It would solidify that it is better than Miner. 3. Can pose as a constant problem if there are multiple users of this new Saboteur in a team. Not only can they block off entrances to bases or flags, they can easily shut down routes leading to those objectives, and even outside of the enemy's base during a blowout.

Just like every other Railgun that uses Stock's damage. If you have Death Herald and Booster, there is no reason to use RAT. Railgun already turns fast enough in conjunction with the hull and you're downgrading your auto-aim, which is already the lowest out of all turret classes. Then that's not Reinforced Aiming Transmission. If you want more normal damage, you have Round Stabilisation, Hyperspace Rounds, AP Railgun and Large Calibre Rounds. Railgun has a ton of augments that alter its main parameters (which Railgun does not have much of compared to other turrets). The Devs have made it clear that they want long range turrets to need fewer shots to kill certain targets, Railgun being the prime example of this. It would make more sense to heighten the gimmick of this augment by making it easier to hit aerial targets or those much higher than them. Make it unique.

This is Assault Rounds' job now.