Humangineer: Most Slept-On Platinum Kit?

Or,

Plat has more enemies with armor, each with more armor.

So, in comparison, less effective, more often?

Agree to disagree re the turret's utility. I have one of my HEs specced into it, but even after the buffs it strikes me as thoroughly underwhelming. I personally find my turretless build much more enjoyable, on Gold or Plat. Overload's shield-stripping utility, IMO, is just far too valuable to sacrifice.

One thing you don't appear to be taking into consideration in this comparison is the Scrapper's 24% damage-taken debuff from 6A of Munitions Training. Unlike the cryoturret, it:
(1) is not host-dependent;
(2) can be procced very quickly with a high-RoF weapon;
(3) is entirely cooldown-independent;
(4) is always applied to the intended target, not the one turret chooses or is able to hit;
(5) applies to all enemies, including those with large shield HP pools (e.g. Destroyers), not just armor; and, most importantly
(6) can't be ended by careless or well-intentioned idiots' detonations.

I'll certainly agree that HE is good.
As I said earlier in the thread, I think it's underutilized and I wish I saw more (competent) HEs in Plat. But in this particular comparison, the bottom line, IMO, is that the Scrapper doesn't require management of a large number of variables independent of player skill in order to maximize its potential.

-- Shitty PUGs with no coordination? Doesn't affect the Scrapper aside from ill-timed cryo detonations ending a debuff.

-- Off-host? One in 50 Flaks may lag-miss, but you're otherwise unaffected.

-- Team running all over? Only an annoyance if they're dying a lot; you can certainly benefit from more damage directed at your debuffs, but you can spit enough hate yourself that things don't linger long even without coordination.

-- Nobody brought ammo? Sucks for them. You're unaffected with the very narrow exception that your cryo debuff won't be occasionally elongated by a teammate's cryo ammo.

-- Surprised by an enemy coming around a corner? No need to worry about Overload on cooldown, just CS or Flak that motherfucker.


Can a well-played HE outscore even a well-played Scrapper at times? Sure. But the Scrapper has such inherent advantages that it's far easier to maximize his potential without minmaxing the entire team around one member's build.

The turret WILL choose the target you want it to hit if you tap the turret's key when pointed at a specific target. The turret is very obedient unlike that PITA Remnant VI.

Is there any situation in which a 5- or 6-rank Turret enables you to do something that 5- or 6-ranks in (Overload / Passives / whatever) + 1 rank in Turret would not?

The turret does an amazing job to draw aggro: it is your shield. It draws aggro from dogs, kro-bros, observers (!), from the behemot (!!). Basically as long as it is alive your aggro is halved or less. Keep it safe, keep it close. Give the turret soft-cover you would give it to yourself (corners, pillars, large crates, ect). I always go six in turret, one in overload. It still gives you a quick stagger and a detonator. Overload is not very good in shiled-stripping anyway.

The batarian is easier to play and it has a godly combo in snapfreeze-flak; but the HE can be just as useful providing an unmatched range of buffs and debuffs: armour-debuff, damage-debuff, aggro-debuff and weapon buff.

Dude, the relevant factors are on this page. Go look at seductivewizards post.

And overload does shit damage, it really shouldn't be surprising that its dps is worse. Pretty much none of what you just listed needs to be factored in either because it's all available at rank 1 except for some power damage and recharge speed. Combo damage doesn't scale with power rank anymore, the stun/priming/brief ET window is all there without any investment.

Not trying to be confrontational, but your 'prove me wrong' arguments make it hard to have a conversation with you sometimes. I'm actually with you that overloads shield damage is more worthwhile than a deep investment in turret but your arguments aren't really adding anything.

Ah apparently most the argument (in the technical sense, not the angry sense) was posted by someone on my ignore list. *heh*

It's how I am. I blame it on my ethnicity / culture (insert your own ethnic joke here, I'm not revealing anything definitive) plus too much time on debate teams.

Huh?

Am I misunderstanding, or are you saying you actively seek to limit the turret's line-of-sight to enemies?

The entire advantage of soft cover is that it allows the player to shift position constantly to maintain an optimal angle to an edge, allowing one to target enemies without being targeted. I fail to see how that applies to a static turret, unless you're literally just saying that its best use is in hiding it from enemies to preserve its aggro dump at the cost of any appreciable damage output.

Please explain.

That seems to me like it'd steeply limit its damage output and debuff opportunities. Outside of blaze hydras and sometimes fiends, armored enemies are generally the among the slowest to advance.

So, if the turret's defining advantages are: (1) its cooldown bonus, which has a 10m radius; and (2) its armor debuff, which requires a couple of seconds of sustained fire to apply, it seems like a major handicap that it can't survive the infantry preceding/surrounding armored units longer than 3 seconds. You'd either need to place it in proximity to an armored unit to have much chance to apply the debuff or closer to yourself and in cover to enjoy the cooldown bonus for a long enough time to be even justify the length of its casting animation.

I must still be missing something, because with such severe limitations I don't see how that comes close to warranting the skillpoint investment to bring it to rank 6 in place of Overload's recharge and shield damage evos.

I have used it, albeit only once (turret build specifically) on Plat. It was serviceable, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. That's why I'm asking so many questions - I like my HE build, but I want to make some use of the spare. More build flexibility makes the game a lot less monotonous. That's why I never have more than one respec at a time.

That said, if the build requires Hurricane/Rozerad to offset the loss of Overload, I'm probably not going to be willing to give it much time. I'm sick of them (and of seeing them on every damned PUG Scrapper and Avenger) to the point that I refuse to use them more than ~5% of the time. My gun du jour is the Shorty, but I'll probably get tired of it and move on before too long.

I generally prefer builds that don't require a specific gun or ammo booster (or one among a very short list) to make up for a significant shortcoming. That's one of the things I like about the no-turret HE build; it works best with a high-RoF priming weapon and cryo ammo to extend Cryo Beam's debuff, but it's not by any means required.