This has to be a joke post. What you are saying is Tesla is meant to hit multiple enemies, so it is fair and balanced when it gets to two/three/fourshot light/medium/heavy hulls in one-versus-one scenarios respectively, with adrenaline. This is equivalent to saying Thunder should be ohkoing enemies if it doesn't hit multiple people, or Shaft should be the best melee turret because it's meant to be a backline - you don't make other characteristics unnecessarily strong when it's meant to be doing something else. Please. It's completely busted. If your argument is that it needs to be strong enough fighting multiple opponents, you can just change the damage division so it divides doesn't divide linearly (i.e. hitting two opponents will deal 80% to both, hitting three opponents will deal 60% to all three) and reduce the base damage to 750 or something, so it doesn't get to stomp in 1v1 scenarios. @TheCongoSpider already went over how it has increased base range, the ability to extend it unlike other melee turrets, infinite firing, and the 20% crit rates, so I won't mention those, but as an addon to the crit rate - Tesla deals full damage to everyone reached on critical hits. You say " do understand that when attacking only one enemy makes it frustrating for only one enemy to not have a change to destroy you, but that overpowering problem will need to be accepted by players because Tesla is mostly intended to damage multiple enemies at once, rather than destroying only one enemy head on" except Tesla doesn't just make it impossible for one enemy to not have a chance to destroy you, but for an entire group. I refuse to believe you're not trolling right now.

Thanks, Spy.

Any ETA or explanation for the delay? Or is "later" all you can give?

Fair enough that nerfing strong garage augments isn't ideal, buffing the others would be better for balance. However, the issue here is that the devs have created a problem (crits) and sold the solution (armadillo). It's like what happened with status effects and immunities, there is no winning here ?.

I guarantee you that autocannon as whole causes more grief in the game than every buyer combined; autocannon utterly destroys the balance at low ranks, and the balance between smoky augments. You are not arguing for balance, you are arguing to keep autocannon broken. The majority of players are F2Ps, and I think you should worry about balance based on populace rather than on personal bias. While making critical prots available to everyone would be an ideal solution, it is very clearly not going to happen, Armadillo is meant to be expensive and meant to serve as an advantage, Hazel has said so himself. The best case here for balance would be to nerf Autocannon. Point form for if you don't get it: - Most people do not have Armadillo - Autocannon is overpowered against people without Armadillo - Therfore, nerf Autocannon so it stops being overpowered against most players

You said it yourself, the chances of them putting Armadillo in the garage is "unlikely to happen" (It's never going to happen, it's like crisis. It will never go into the garage). You say "we must consider all modules, and all equipment when thinking of balance" yet you completely ignore the other Smoky augments, which are all virtually useless compared to Autocannon, which unquestionably dominates all other Smoky augments, with maybe the exception of EMP. Also, you are not considering the players who do not have Armadillo - the majority of players, who consider Autocannon to be unquestionably broken. In a similar vein, you do not consider the viability of the Dolphin module; it is completely useless against the majority of endgame Smokies. You cannot cherrypick evidence for balance.

...??? I can't tell if this is ironic or not, but I'll try to explain. Firstly, regarding DPS - there are other factors for combat effectiveness. Railgun requires far less exposure time than Striker does, and its shots are hitscan, meaning there is no travel time and they cannot be dodged. As well, Railgun has significantly higher impact force that is more consistent as a result of the hitscan, and it has much higher base damage per shot, letting it end engagements far earlier given circumstances (oneshotting unprotected light hulls and medium hulls on criticals, and potentially protected ones with Round Destabilization). Factors such as exposure time, impact force, and projectile type work in conjunction with reload to define the role that a turret plays. Striker is meant to engage in closer combat with less cover compared to Rail, which might hang back and peek out only to fire, whereas Striker will have to be exposed more often and thus take damage more often. A railgun is not meant to win in a straight shootout with a Striker, there is no issue here. As for splash versus penetration - penetration is harder to make use of, but simultaneously carries no risk of self damage. There are equally good augments for both turrets that make use of their mechanics (RRE and Hyperspace) and aside from that, they are also merely characteristics that define the role of the turret. Striker gets to attack clustered tanks more effectively from close quarters but risks self damage, and Railgun gets to punish clustered tanks at the cost of lining up shots - which both just define the roles of the turrets. Lastly, the salvo. The salvo requires at least 2.8 seconds of exposure time, more for the missiles to travel. This is the same as was explained in my first paragraph, there is a significant tradeoff for the salvo, and it fits exactly into their roles; Striker requires more exposure time but gets to do heavier damage, while Railgun gets more safety from cover. Striker and Railgun are different turrets, and fill different roles. They behave differently, and their statistics reflect that.

Unfortunately, not everyone has all the augments for hulls they use. Also, there is only one hull augment slot, so matches with multiple status augments on each side essentially turn into rock-paper-scissors from what I've seen.

Preventing your enemies from playing the game 2/3rds of the time is just annoying. I see.

So would HCs be just a direct augment? After some thought, I don't think there are any particularly huge issues with HCs being a direct upgrade to stock in that it just can charge longer for more dmg (33% slower charge and 33% more damage, so it peaks at 4000 over 6 seconds instead of 3000 over 4, same charge/sec), as Adrenaline, Healing Emitters, Short-Band Emitters, and Armor-Piercing Sight all have pretty much the same deal going on with their sniping shots.

I'm waiting for your justification as to why HCs should charge faster than Stock. Go on.

????? I established why an HC buff without increasing charge time would make it a problem. Your proposal just is a buff, at all charge levels - a 40% power buff with a 33% chargeup penalty it has more damage than Stock, whereas current HCs only surpasses it once it has been charging for longer than the 4 seconds required for Stock to hit cap. You mention a reload time decrease - I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant increased reload time following a shot, but still - I would rather not play with parameters in such a manner. That literally just tells people "CAMP WITH HEAVY CAPACITORS, IT HAS GOOD STATS, CAN HIT HIGHER PEAKS, AND CAMPING MEANS YOU CAN SAFELY BYPASS THE RELOAD." (I assume this is pretty much why people camp with Rapid-Fire Memes.) If Shaft is going to sit at 3000 damage on a full charge, HCs is best off being shifted to a 33% power increase so it oneshots heavy hulls at full charge, as stock does medium hulls, in exchange for even more additional chargeup time further than the 2 seconds it has now, as otherwise there would be no reason to play stock over heavy caps.. It just makes no sense to give stock 3k damage and have it charge slower than HCs relatively. tldr; HCs has to charge slower than stock, otherwise why play stock/sbe/adren when you could play HCs, lose nothing, and get to oneshot heavies.

For the first point - I think 8 seconds would be excessive, same with a rotation speed reduction. That's why I wouldn't want it to receive a power buff and have to deal with an extra set of corresponding nerfs. As for the second point - sounds good (alternately, the arcade range could be extended past the range of a melee turret...) Lastly - I don't understand the third point you're making. Damage buffs/nerfs on such a small scale for augments (which don't enable killing in fewer or more hits) don't equate to the way that Shaft operates very similarly at low/high ranks, which is the issue.

Hoo boy, there are a lot of hot takes here. I really don't think Shaft needs a damage nerf in just the low ranks, nor does it need a reduction of the arcade mode firing speed. The issue with low rank shaft is the way that Shaft scales similarly to the rest of the turrets over modifications. This seems fine in theory, but put into practice, there is the issue of hulls being slower, and thus needing more time out of cover. Shaft's parameter that corresponds almost directly to this, the charge-up, does not change over modifications. If it were up to me, I would be nerfing that. (Also, why should it not be able to deal adequate damage until the load bar is completely exhausted, except heavy capacitor? That's pretty much how heavy capacitor ordinarily works, doing less damage than stock and other augments up until it has charged at least an extra half a second. Not sure why you'd flip that.) Agreed, but I would give Light Capacitors a buff so it still has enough damage to finish off medium hulls with 1 arcade + 1 fully charged shot - if they needed two, I'm not sure the playstyle would survive for anyone without Booster/Crisis. If you are buffing HC's damage increase by 40% - will you be increasing the charge time nerf too? If you do this alongside those damage reduction nerfs to shaft as a whole, you're basically telling people to go camp with HCs. Doing so, you decrease Light Capacitors' peak damage from 2475 to 2250, and simultaneously change Heavy Capacitors' damage at 2 seconds from 1980 - below stock - to 2100 - well above this new nerfed stock (approximate values, based off my knowledge of how shaft chargeup works.) This effectively removes any reason to play any augment other than Heavy Capacitors, in almost any role you could give Shaft. Armies of Shaft campers would only continue to grow (and I don't see anywhere that shaft "became" EZ to use, unless you mean they fixed the html5 scope bug.) Are you aware this is, as far as we know, only achievable through the critical system right now? Sorry to have to disagree, but I'd rather not give shafts a 50% chance to ignore protection like Railgun. Also - Shaft, even during the damage spread prior to the critical update, never had any variable damage from its charge. Charge time meant more power, and I think it should stay that way. Same thing as with Onion. You might have crisis for LCs, but the rest of us will be suffering.

I believe it will work in the same way that Crusader did, where you will still be able to get Tesla out of the Old Ultra Containers, but if you buy it for crystals, the reward will have been acquired and thus you will not get Tesla, as it will not be in the drop pool. However, I doubt that Tesla will be sold for crystals before the Winner bundle has finished being sold, as there is still UFO Day (and thus, another opportunity for Ultra Containers to go on sale) left.

Yeah, pretty much. I wouldn't say EMP is stronger than Autocannon though, at best they're equals, and especially not Stun. Also yeah, UC Rail augments >>>>>>>>>> UC Smoky augments.

The only smoky players I've ever seen do well are EMP and Autocannon. Are you saying you want to remove all the options Smoky players have to do well? As for DPS of AP Smoky vs MLH - Smoky is a turret with a higher firing rate, and therefore higher dps. All turrets follow this trend - higher exposure time/requirement = higher dps. AP Smoky, despite having the ability to literally ignore protections, is somehow so statistically behind that it is outgunned by a crystal augment for a turret that has less of an exposure time requirement. It's ridiculous, and AP Smoky can't even make use of its critical AP to help teammates, because 3 seconds on an RNG timer? Yeah, your teammates are definitely going to react to that. (The dps issue applies to Smoky as a whole, and is part of the reason Autocannon is considered the strongest augment for it - because it gives you the DPS Smoky needs for the exposure time it needs.) Also, yes Paralyzing Rounds is only annoying, did you read what I wrote? You might think "wow that's overpowered" when you get stunned and drop the ball, but how many are they going to get a stun per match, and how many times is it going to matter? Maybe only 2 or 3 meaningful stuns in ASL, with only 1 or 2 being impactful in CtF and Rugby. It also has halved critical shot damage, which utterly cripples your damage output in favour of stuns "every now and again." Compare that to Stun Rail and Stun Striker. They get their stuns constantly, and they can even chain them permanently with a 10% chance and with a small delay for you to move, respectively. Rail still hits ludicrously hard after the buff and its crit damage nerf is as a result far less significant, and Stun Striker doesn't even lose anything except the salvo. My proposed changes to Paralyzing Rounds gives it a 10% chance to get another paralyzing shot after the opponent has 1.2 seconds to move - longer than Stun Striker, with the chance to stunlock Rail gets, and still an overall comparatively terrible damage output. Seriously, it's bad. EMP Smoky and Autocannon are relatively low-tiered "overpowered" augments. Neither will have as much of an impact on a game as an AP Hammer, Rail, or Gauss. I don't think it would be a good idea to nerf them, because that would get rid of all the "overpowered" options Smoky players currently have, and I think that the other legendary augments are seriously lacking and are deserving of a buff.

I wouldn't call them OP by any means, they all suck except for EMP. I fought an Explosive Rounds that tried to get me around a corner with splash, and all their shots simply bounced off the floor. They weren't able to do anything, and when my team was clustered up, the pathetic radius made it trivially easy to separate ourselves to avoid taking any splash, which is why I think a bigger splash on crits would help. I also fought a Rubberized Rounds Smoky who I basically just drove up to, ignoring their bounced shots because Stock Smoky is lacking in terms of damage output, to say the least. Lastly the Armor-Piercing Smoky I saw had less DPS than Missile Launcher "Hunter", even when they got lucky and crit every fourth shot (I would know, I sat there spamming locked shots at them and they died first. Every time). Feels bad :(. As for paralyzing rounds, I've seen them be annoying, but that's it. No effect on the outcome of the battle, virtually nothing to help their team except maybe one stun on a flag in ASL. Seriously, these augments are bad. I think they should be put on at least the same level of EMP and Autocannon, given that they're equally hard to get to the former and even harder compared to the latter.

I was reading through some posts on the legendary smoky augments, and I think that they could definitely use a buff. From what I've seen, EMP Smoky is only just about on par with Autocannon, despite the fact that it has a status effect attached to it, and all the others are far out of their league. I think they could do with either less of a penalty, or some added buff to make them synergize with what they're given, similar to how the Armor-Piercing augments go about it. Armor-Piercing Rounds could be reworked to be more similar to AP Rail, with a longer status effect duration(buffed back to 5 seconds), but stronger normal shots and a lower crit rate, and Paralyzing Rounds could have less of a critical hit penalty(maybe reduced to only a -25% penalty for critical step chance, given the halved crit damage) so it has the ability to stun enemies more reliably(a -25% critical chance step penalty would have it reaching max critical chance on the 5th shot at mk7+, as opposed to on the 6th as it is now) like Stun Rail and Stun Striker (before you ask about yet another overpowered stun augment, I ran the numbers here, the luckiest it can get is to win the 10% crit chance on the 3rd hit, which would still give you 1.2 seconds to move - better than the infinite stunlock that Rail gets for its 10%, and the 1 second you get to move no matter what from Striker). As for some synergistic buffs, Rubberized Rounds could have a higher step chance on bounced shots, and Explosive Rounds could have a large splash distribution similar to Gauss lock-on shots for critical hits.

In my experience, Sledgehammer and Stock striker aren't too far off one another, as they're still different enough in what they do. Striker trades immediacy and a bit of reload time (0.05 seconds) in damage-dealing for consistent damage over distance, double damage crits, and a secondary mode to punish exposed players, in comparison to Thunder. However, once you start comparing the Missile Launcher "Hunter" augment to Sledgehammer... things don't look good. There isn't even an argument for Striker being harder to use, as the missiles from MLH are tracking, and you can spew them out every 1.58 seconds (better than Sledgehammer's reload) just by repeatedly spamming locked shots (and you can fire an arcade when you know said arcade shot will kill, letting you drop your reload to 1.02 for only the last shot). The only real advantage Sledgehammer has is impact force, projectile speed(barely), and better reliability from the low ground over MLH.

Microupgrades of supplies are already in the game in the form of drones :/

I would say I'm competent at RRE (when focused) but I still have Armor-Piercing missiles and Missile Launcher "Hunter" for lower effort Striker gameplay. I'm fully aware of the supply drawbacks of each drone. The main thing I'm contemplating between the two is the value of being able to not only attack people from angles they wouldn't expect, but deal heavy damage, with booster, versus the ability to force people into certain pathways and eat hits where they can't fight back with saboteur. However, I was under the impression RRE was able to fire 2 rockets in booster's timer, I'll definitely keep that in mind. Thanks for the input, you two. Edit: Wait, can you fit two missiles into booster's timer with MLH? A locked shot has reduced reload so you can fire a locked shot and then an arcade shot in less time, does that enable it to fit in booster?

What would synergise better with the Striker augment Remote Rocket Explosives - Booster or Saboteur? SPECIFICALLY and ONLY that augment. I intend to be using Hornet and Hunter.

Do you think cover doesn't exist at midrange? You literally brought it up yourself, a Striker targeting a Thunder or Smoky on equal footing will complete its targeting and kill with its salvo. Why is Striker being able to move as it locks a point here? Gauss can too. I don't necessarily disagree with your opinions on Gauss and Striker regarding stealth, but keep in mind the way they are balanced regarding range, damage, and locking time in addition to the issue of laser vs no laser, which all play a significant role. As such, I personally think 2 seconds of recovery is simply far too lenient for the campier role that Gauss plays. It doesn't need two seconds to be effective, two seconds just enables people to fight with it at close range and get locks. Lastly, I never said that Striker needs a high retention period, just that it definitely doesn't need one lower than Gauss, given that when it is in use, it will be in a much more pressure intensive situation due to its range and it is already more difficult to hit as a result of the laser and the projectile speed. I honestly think 1 second for each turret would be fine. 2 seconds is simply excessive and turns both into crabhand turrets. (I do agree that Striker buffs have been somewhat excessive, it really didn't need double damage crits or reload nearly as fast as sledgehammer. Or Stunning missiles.)

Striker missiles accelerate, yes, but they still take a rather significant time to reach their target, and their average speed over their acceleration period(3 seconds) is 365 m/s for stock. On average, they take quite a bit longer to reach their target than even sledgehammer, because they typically won't be fired at a range where they'll use their full acceleration period. Lastly regarding Striker missiles, it's trivially easy to dodge salvo missiles if you stay near cover. If you wait until they're almost finished the lock(or even until they have finished it and they've already loosed a missile or two!) and then move behind cover, all the missiles will slam into the wall and you can continue firing at them. Regarding Gauss, if Gauss is meant to be hidden, it should have less aim recovery time, not more. It should "in theory" get hit and have its aim thrown off less, as it is hidden, justifying a shorter shorter retention period - not to mention the fact that salvos are hitscan and would, even with my proposed nerfs, still be dealing rather obnoxious amounts of splash damage for the amount of burst that Gauss does. On the topic of stealth, I haven't even brought up the fact that Striker has a laser, while Gauss does not. The laser makes it infinitely more obvious as to when and where a Striker is aiming a salvo, and should justify an equal, if not higher, retention period for Striker even further.