I put some numbers into Excel and made a heat map to get a visualization of the damage distribution between Engis and non-engis. Red is higher damage per second, green is lower. No Solar Turret because it skews the map and I'll be adjusting it later. All vanilla damage -- no subclass bonuses, no magic modifiers, no linking. Turrets have a damage range, so the alt-fire values are the top end of the damage and primary fire is the low end.

Here is a map of the current DPS values for all weapons and turrets.


Here is one for the next build, 205B, where all I've done is lower the Ball Turret DPS.


I personally think it's more balanced in the latter with some more red shifted back into weapons, but there doesn't seem to be any in-betweeners for Engineers like there are for non-engis, and Minigun Turret may be the strongest. I'm thinking I could lower the minigun turret and energy turret DPS to those of alt-fire shock/link/mini/flak, all mostly yellow, so mid-DPS. Also, because minigun and energy turret are insta-hit, they should be closer to values like the shock primary or lightning which are more green because of hitscan. Any thoughts on this? I know some players loathe engineers while for others, it's all they play.

Problem is--ball has a lower rate of fire, mini has the highest rate of fire and the energy is in between. As such, the ball being nerfed to such an extent that it will be worthless at 148 DPS.

In trying to balance the turrets, you also need to take into consideration the rate of fire as well as the DPS.

Yep, rate of fire has been taken into consideration. The values in the table are (projectile damage) / (fire rate). Odin for example has around 200 damage per shot, but because it has an 8.75 second firing rate, it's damage per second is considerably low. So it turns out that Ball Turret has the highest DPS of any weapon or turret -- even by a large margin compared to the second highest DPS at 154.

220 DPS seemed not just a bit, but quite excessive in my opinion, being much more powerful than the already super powerful Linkgun.
I dare not even think what the DPS is at while linked.

148 DPS still means it would basically be an infinite Linkgun, with faster projectiles, a huge shield and tons of HP. With the ability to be linked and still become even more powerful. Like this it's basically a LinkGun (DPS wise) and can be like a linked Linkgun and that's still powerful!

Engineer already has a lot of firepower, and the fact that they have the most superior DPS, while having Dsents too might be a bit much.
Like this Engineers might have to choose something else than the Ballturret for big outdoor maps (just like every other class have to adjust their weapon usage according to map), so Engineer shouldn't be different.

DPS isn't everything. You also have to consider both projectile behavior (projectile speed, rate of fire) and typical usage.

The ball turret isn't hitscan like the mini or energy turrets, or guided like the lynx. To be competitive with them, it absolutely needs a higher DPS. Perhaps not as high as it is currently, but not just a smidgen above the others, as proposed. I made a similar mistake with the mercury, adjusting its DPS to be similar (a bit higher iirc) to the lightning gun/classic sniper, and that made it far less useful.

If anything should be lowered, it's the mini turret, which I had buffed quite a bit from its previous all-but-useless iteration. I significantly reduced the spread (increasing accuracy) and increased the damage.

The Ball turret can make use its higher DPS if it can shoot down a corridor, for example, but fares much worse in open areas. You might want to look at the original values in Druids and adjust to a value midway between the current and old values, but remember that back then the Ball turret saw very little use. Everyone stuck to energy turrets, with its more annoying shooting behavior (no autofire.) Mini turrets were like nerf toys for newbies.

Thank you Jefe. As folks have noticed, I use all three turrets available to a base builder and have the same scores overall on each. It depends on the map and location of the base.

Correct, Ball Turret is worse in open spaces and really does depend on the map, and projectile speed is an important factor that DPS doesn't take into account. So let's look at the projectile speed. The speed that the Ball Turret projectile travels at is 8,000 UU and accelerates to 100,000 UU. For frame of reference, link gun speed is 1,000 - 4,000, cosmic skaarj 4,000, and mercury launcher 3,000 - 25,000, Raptor vehicle 1,500 - 12,500. 100,000 is excessive and that's because it's a space turret meant to shoot down spacefighters. The Druid version hasn't modified these values to fit invasion -- same rate of fire, same damage, same projectile speed as the AS-Mothership ball turret. I lowered that speed in 205 to 6,000 - 20,000. Most likely though, you haven't noticed a difference because it's better used in close quarters as Jefe mentioned.

I'll lower the Ball to around 170-180 DPS instead of 148. I do agree that Mini (and maybe Energy too) will need to be reduced a bit.

Here's another way to look at things: most magic modifiers have a damage bonus of 5% per plus including Null, Force, Freezing, Infinity, Knockback, Penetrating, Protection, Quickfoot, Vampiric Leech. All very common modifiers. Anything above 5% jumps to 10% for Vorpal or Rage, both rare. So let's use a Null Entropy +5 to +7, which will be 25% to 35% extra damage. A good most-likely case scenario. A link gun with 35% extra damage will do 202.5 DPS -- still lower than a Ball Turret. All it takes for turrets is one linker to get 75% damage, 2 linkers at 125% and 3 at 150%. At 2 linkers, that is beyond a Rage +10 (100%). The only players that can fare with a linked turret are subclassed WMs. Tank and Proficiency can go beyond that admittedly, but they have higher risks in my humble opinion than a turreter.

So I'll peg the Ball around 170-180 and lower the Mini. Let's see how it plays in the next build. If it feels like a big downgrade, I'll of course notch things up.

Look at me go rebelling against the two who pulled DC and DEK together

hollon wrote:
Look at me go rebelling against the two who pulled DC and DEK together

Snicker.............