Thumper Turrets should have more HP

Battleborn Open Beta Open Beta General Discussion/Feedback
#1

I feel like it’s too easy to take down thumper turrets playing PvP for the amount of value in map control they provide. A lot of characters can take it down in just 4-6 seconds of fire. As a consequence the team who loses said thumper also has a very small window to respond to their thumper getting killed. Usually by the time you make it to whomever is killing it, it’s already dead unless you were at some other area of the map. The majority of ranged characters can do this too such as Marquise, Benedict, Oscar Mike, and Ghalt can do it very fast and can do it very safely because it’s done so fast.

I come from playing a lot of dota and when you take out an emplacement, there is usually some form of advantage that you have to have before you can take a turret down from 100% hp to 0%. Even if there is no one in the immediate vicinity, there should be some sort of danger if every player is alive. And also like dota, to take out the thumper you’ve got to put youself somewhat close and outside your own safer side of the map to take out the thumper. However a lot of the time (in Battleborn) it’s taken out it feels like a hit and run while I had little time to respond and even if I do it’ll be destroyed anyway 90% of the time anyway.

Giving it more hp would certainly add to the depth of the game and make the thumper dying an real event rather than an inevitability similar to getting middle thrall camps on overgrowth. I can’t speak in specific numbers but if it took someone like Marquise 15-25 second to kill a Thumper solo rather than 4-6 seconds it would open up interesting decisions for both teams when players decide to target the thumpers.

And i’m strictly speaking about the thumpers in PvP btw, i’m not sure what I think of shock turret and stinger HP and what I would like to see done if at all. I’d also like to make those harder to kill, but I can’t think of how and/or to what degree.

#2

I agree. I think the turn speed of the turrets is too slow. I find them very easy to circle strafe them and they are down in a few seconds, I feel like turrets are only valuable in pvp if the enemy team is inexperienced. That and xp.

#3

The point is more for people to be constantly rebuilding the buildings. Snipers taking out the thumpers from across the map is a problem with the game, I will give you that. But shards are made for the fact that buildings go down quickly. You need to keep them up to keep your defenses. There is a builder/shard gatherer role in battleborn, and they do what it says on the tin.

I feel like they have fine health, it’s just a matter of teams being on top of rebuilding them. Also sometimes leaving them down, and rebuilding them as an enemy team is approaching is a good strategy, because they think it’s down, and suddenly it’s not.

This isn’t a moba tower, because moba towers never come back, hence their destruction has to take longer, making it more impactful. The sentries in incursion are more along the lines of a true moba tower, doing absolutely massive damage and (sort of) requiring minions to get there to reliably/“safely” allow you to damage it.

Thumpers are strong, and between them and accellerators these buildings allow you, if you’re out of position, to gtfo. They usually then die, but that’s what shards are for. And maybe next time you won’t be out of position alone, and won’t have to run away, letting your buildings die in the process.

The best way to perhaps look at it is like an engineer sentry/dispenser in TF2. It’s impactful, but not hard to take down overall if it’s not guarded. The point is to keep it guarded, and if it isn’t guarded then you need to be ready to rebuild it. Except in this game, everyone can be an engineer. Just like my mommy always said, I just have to dream hard enough and I can be anything I want.

Battleborn Suggestion List
#4

Yea thumpers aren’t a huge shard investment or as huge a loss as with actual mobas, but mainly i’m trying to say is that the turret killers have such a forgiving window to kill the turret that it seems like whenever a turret is killed there was little to no risk involved. On incursion (for example) whenever the enemy takes their melee thralls, you can feel the impact. Either one or two players wont be there for a 20 to 40 seconds, and for the other team that’s a lot of time to work with if you wanna make something happen knowing they’re potentially 1 or 2 men down for the moment. With thumpers as they are, a thumper dying is something that just happens because theres so little time to do anything with such information.

I make the tie in with dota just to further expand that towers should have some risk associated with killing it, even with all the differences Battleborn has with the general moba formula I still think it would benefit the game at all levels of play if towers were given more significance this way. I just want it so where if you’re trying to kill the thumper solo, either you’ve got your team behind to back you up or my team will punish you for trying to kill it. And the reward for for this skirmish should at least be the thumper living or dying, right now it’ll just die in almost any circumstance. Of course you can bring it back up, but there’s so much value in those turrets but I feel there’s just too much effort needed to keep them alive. I’d forsee that this issue would come up again if we would look at high level play.

#5

I think the main issue comes with range advantage to killing them, specifically marquis and thorn, and benedict with the angles he can get on them. If all buildings took less damage the farther you were away from them, it would feel like being a melee character against a thumper didn’t mean spending half your hp to do something marquis can do in 3 shots across the entire map.

#6

Considering the range, and the huge debuff they have, it’s super risky to take a Thumper out.
I don’t think they need any kind of buff (Plus, there rockets actually block shots)

#7

I do feel like all turrets should have better turn speed. Being able to circle them point blank and not take damage is just sorta dumb to me.

#8

I never really had the opportunity to circle around a thumper turret though, and those are usually the most impactful. Lightning and stinger seem to mostly just be to add DPS to a fight and help keep minion waves pushed. I dunno, maybe turn speed should be increased.

#9

I think it´s difficult …

While it is an issue that ranged characters can take them out quite easily, they are the nemesis of melees during early or mid game, making chasing etc. often impossible. Increasing their life total might not help much against the ranged but make them even more annoying for melees.

And as others have mentioned … they are also intended as a way to spend your spare shards and thus lvl up. I was often stuck with quite the load of shards during the Beta. Increasing their durability could make matters even worse.

I think the real problem is that too many people just wouldn´t care about shards and buildables and just yolo into the fray … as expertise will grow after the release, players will probably check and -if necessary- rebuild their buildables more frequently.

#10

Turrets aren’t enough of a threat in my experience, killing them is something of an after thought and only thumpers or the middle lightning turret on Overgrowth pose even a little threat, and thumpers only due to their slowing effect. Having a better turn speed would go a long way but the damage from from both stingers and thumpers is largely ignored during a team fight. I would prefer a bit higher damage on them so they could function as actual deterrents to players, which would also up their value as a prime target to protect/destroy.

#11

Thumpers certainly do need to be buffed especially in Incursion. Right now, the only thing Thumpers are useful for, is preventing Benedict from jumping above the Thrall camp and sneak into the back to destroy the thumper and healing station. Even then, I can easily just use the wall to block it from targeting me or if it does, use Hawkeye + homing to the side to hit it without it hitting me back.

It’s seldom useful when someone tries to backdoor from the closed space or attack from the front

Biggest issue with the thumper is that

MOST OF THE SHOTS ARE BLOCKED BY THE SENTRY YOU’RE PROTECTING.

The Sentry is always walking around. If it walks to the shard side (away from the minions), Thumper will actually hit something.

However, if it’s current position is closer to the minion position where Marquis can abuse and snipe, The thumpers will block all of the shots.

This needs a fix.

#12

Rather than buffing the turret directly, have the items that currently reduce buildable cost also improve what is build (better shield at rank 3, and so on). There’s already a legendary doing that, so we know it’s possible,but that kind of effect should be on all of that type of items. And the legendary should have something better instead.
Currently items lowering the cost of buildable are seldom used by players because it just doesn’t bring enough to be interesting. Rather than simply reducing the cost, have them ameliorating the built turret as well, should give more incentive to have someone in your team using one.

#13

I use the building cost reduction items on reyna. My build on her was increased movespeed + reduced recoil on reload. Increased sprint speed + reduced recoil on reload. Reduced build cost, reduced skill damage.

That was my support setup, and I liked it.

@lokohryu All turrets do a lot of damage if you don’t deal with them. Some of my death feeds have had like 1,200 damage taken from a stinger turret because I was too busy fighting someone else. They’re powerful enough, for sure.

#14

that’s extremely rare. I started with using some on miko as well but noticed that even without it passed a certain amount of time in the match I just had too much shard to spend them all anyway, so may as well take something buffing me instead. Those items should really give more than simply building cost. They are definitely NOT on par with the rest of the items here. And that would solve the problem pointed out in this thread, at least partially.

#15

Whenever I fought a good team, our buildings went down left and right, and we were collectively low on shards to keep rebuilding. It’s mostly a matter of people not trying hard enough to break key structures, rather than the structures themselves having a fault. People simply don’t know how to play the game yet. It takes 1200 shards to completely rebuild a turret, and 900 to rebuild an auxilery building. That’s a lot of shards, and with how easy they can die, you’ll be spending that often to get them back up.