Comments on engineer turrets

Just to put a comment on turrets and their use, well mostly about the ball turret (sry if i put this in the wrong forum)

I see the mini and the link used more often then the ball mostly due to a few simple things.

Mostly the ball turret has only a few advantages over the mini and the link turret far surpasses it, so its not worth building it

I'll put forward some examples

The mini and link where they both have large side profiles have narrow frontal profiles so don't seem to get hit as often by random fire if they are facing it, but the ball turret has the same profile either way so gets hit more often, so it seems to take more damage.

Both the mini and the link have greater downward angles available to them about 45 degrees down from the horizontal wher the ball is only about 15 degrees down from the Horizontal, because I want to set up a turret where it gets the widest range of fire it often gets set up on an edge of some walkway where it can fire down into the lower levels and up into the upper areas, my reason for this is to max the damage I can do, And I'll say most engineers feel the same.

As Grizzled_Imposter said (in another post regarding balance) the fire pattern is very wide, so anything that gets within a certain range you have to get out to kill it or hope it runs back a bit so you can shoot it.

The last thing about the ball turret is the high point of vision so in narrow coridors and or close to walls you wind up not being able to see down the coridor as well as if you had set a mini or link turret up instead.

The only advantages for seting up a ball over a mini is 100 extra armour and a shield.

So I think the reason the ball turret is used more often is because until you can build a link the mini is more usefull the the ball.

So a few things that might make it more popular are,

Changing the view point on the turret making it lower and thus easier to see from.

and (and this one is most likely a coding nightmare) allow the ball turret to align with a different facing --

Ie stuck to a wall or roof vs the floor (might mean 4 artifacts for the ball turret {floor, left, right, roof}) with same range of movement as it currently does, but it gives somthing to the turret that sets it aside from being what looks like minor advantages to the mini turret would make it useful for smaller maps where it can be set up but not impede the movement of players

the 2nd idea thou tedious and troublesome is a nice one and i like it ..

it wuld def increase its popularity..thou its practicality is iffy (seeing they say the enginneers are over powered) alogn wiht he fact you neeed to use the trans locator to set it...and well....trans locators dont land on walls..:S...

but eh im no coder so i dunno..

...id give ur idea 1¾ thumbs up( im keeping the other quarter so i can still hit the space bar..

..)