Human Engineer guide for Gold -- Use the turret! (66166)

Testing turret and omni-link effect now...

Safe to assume Elemental Tech also increases the Salarian Operator's gun damage by 35% if he has an ammo booster equipped and leaving 1 point in Overload is probably optimal for him as well then (as long as you can spare the ammo boosters)? I was thinking 4 in Overload for him but will probably drop that to 1 instead now.

Tested with cryo ammo 1, with and without elemental tech: I use invasion, and then shoot. Same damage for first bullet.
Tested with elemental tech, with and without cryo ammo 1: I use invasion, and then shoot. Almost same damage for bullet damage (just the 2.5% damage bonus, no 35% bonus).
Verdict: Invasion is not a status effect, which is kinda ok since the debuff from it is already great. What that means is that you need to rely on your weapon and overload to apply status effects.

EDIT: weapon considerations:

What that means, IMO, is that to take full advantage of elemental tech with the Salarian Operator, you want either:
--A very high ROF weapon, if you want to play more at close range: Hurricane, Revenant, Thokin (clip is too small), Equalizer.
--Or, if you value accuracy/range, one of the weapons, among guns with at least 380 ROF that has the highest damage per round (once you divide the ROF per the number of bullet shots per bursts; example: the Valyrie says 500 ROF, but it's really 250 which is too low to consistently and quickly apply status effect). That leaves us with two great accurate guns for an optimal ratio of damage per round and decent status effect: Raptor and Sidewinder.

I think there's a badass Salarian Operator build to make! For weapons either:
--the Revenant as a primary, with the Sidewinder with scope,
--or just a Raptor (that foocker is heavy).
Most of the time you'll get your status effect in no time --even when your rank 1 Overload is on cooldown-- thanks to the high ROF. With the enemy defense debuff from Invasion (25%, or 35% if you go with 5b) stacked with the increased 35% damage from elemental tech, combined with the awesome survivavibily of this character, this is going to be a great engineer build for Gold!

I've played the Human Engineer both ways: 1 point in Turret and 6 points in Turret.

Here are the problems with the 6 point Turret build.

* Extremely long cooldown means that when you need to reposition your Turret, you're using up a significant portion of the wave (~25%) just waiting to do so.
* You need to stay close to the Turret to get the bonuses BUT this game is relentless about forcing you out of cover.
* Even with all possible boosts the Turret health it is still incredibly flimsy. Also because there is no actual health bar on it, you can't strategically detonate it early when it's about to die (with any level of confidence that you're not wasting a bunch of its health).
* Turret takes AGES to start using its Flamethrower even with enemies in its face.
* Flamethrower does not prime targets reliably. You'd be better offer with a fast-firing weapon and Incendiary Ammo.
* There is not indication of: when you are within range of the Turret for cooldown/healing boosts; whose Turret is whose; Turret's health (mentioned above). These may seem like minor things but they are also basic parts of giving the player feedback on what the #@$%! the game is doing.

All in all I can't justify spending 20 points to max out a power that is so damn annoying and worthless. As bad as Overload is, I'd rather have that.

The game doesn't even talk about "cooldown reduction", only about recharge speed, so it's better not to use that "cdr" abbreviation at all.

I finally decided to give it another try and specced for full turret flamethrower. Turret is actually unkillable on bronze and very sturdy on silver. Priming more or less works and it does quite some damage. Have not tried it on gold yet, I'm still level 5. I plan to try a combo heavy build with maximum recharge bonus for more overload.

I tried to check whether killing the turret actually detonates something similar to ME3 combat drone but radius of explosion seems to be very small and hard to coerce some primed enemy to be there when the time is right. Overall, looks quite promising IMO.