Striker drone / Assault turret issues
The health bars on the drone seems to have been fixed, but there are other issues with these skills:
First and foremost: sometimes they just decide not to shoot. They might follow enemies with their laser pointer but won't ever shoot them. This happens mostly with the turret, more rarely with the drone.
There's then the issue of them getting stuck.
For the drone it's literally a matter of stopping moving midair, which requires a recast with 12-15 seconds of lost DPS.
For the turret it's about falling into the geometry of the world, which again requires a recast with 12-15 seconds of lost DPS.
The damage taken by the skills is quite inconsistent, sometimes they fare well against 3 NPCs, others they get killed in 3 seconds by a single NPC. I've seen minigun dogs being chased and killed by the drone, and I've seend minigun dogs melting my drone as if it was made of paper.
The turrets gets instead instakilled by fire: any fire that gets in contact with the turret quite literally melts it in seconds.
Targeting issues: once cast, the drone needs to be told to attack an NPC even though that NPC is actively engaged in combat with us, and the drone does not accept inputs for a couple of seconds after being cast, this causes a delay that sometimes means death.
The turret, on the other end of the spectrum, attack enemies that are not engaged and are hundreds of meters away from our position, this causes our position being compromised by our own skill, especially when it engages NPCs behind our backs.
In summary: if an NPC is fighting against us it should be automatically targeted, otherwise the player has to have the choice when to start an engagement.
Lastly, the most annoying issue: the skills do not respond to the player's commands. The moment a skill decides it has to finish off its target before switching to another one, we completely lose control over them.
If an NPC is low enough HP, the skill stops taking commands, no matter it's tactically detrimental for the player. This is akin to a rifle deciding to deal damage only to one NPC and refusing to hit anyting else until that NPC is dead.
This also affect another very problematic aspect of engagements: when dogs are about to explode with an EMP we players have NO WAY to recall our drones because they consider those enemies still on low health. So we lose assets and DPS not because of our mistake, but because of the game's programming.
7 people found this helpful