I've been playing dust since the second batch of private beta testing went out, using m/kb since chromosome, and I've been using turbo enabled devices for the better part of 9 months. With the current worrying of the scrambler rifle and m/kb I thought I'd just share my experiences and hopefully bring to light issues and dispel some myths.


My current setup uses an Eagle Eye to plug in my mouse and keyboard to simulate a controller, this has its own pros and cons. K/M had its own set of difficulties in chromosome, namely issues with sensitivity that made you choose from either having an awkward and jittery crosshair or relegating yourself to slow-mo scrolling, but it was workable. In uprising things got really wonky. There was various phases of awkward mismatched scroll speed and sensitivity, wonky hit detection, and more cross hair stability shenanigans. At the onset there wasn't any sort of aim assist so you still felt like you were doing the best since both inputs were heavily flawed.

By the time aim assist came by, things were terrible for the k/m setups fixes in hit detection seemed to rely on aim assist which didnt work for k/m setups, even still a mouse was simply acting like a virtual joystick, you can google all you want on virtual joysticks but the vast benefits people expect from a mouse just don't exist on dust. That said strafing is much easier on a keyboard though its certainly possible to get the same tight back and forth "**** you hit detection" strafing on a controller, it just takes much more practice, many of the now gone top level players can agree to this but I'm sure theres a few still sticking around.

So after a short break I came back to dust and bought an Eagle Eye. This did a few things for me. First, I was able to customize controls I mean jesus who mapped the melee and grenade keys on the raw input? I can actually use those and not stop moving in certain directions! I got to keep aim assist which would have just bugged out my aiming directions before and now lets me take advantage of most of the improvements in hit detection. Now the downside is, despite endless recalibrating and multiple mouse trials I can't quite get the nice spin that you can on a raw mouse input but I think the benefits out weigh my losses here. I do still get some of the weird bugs that you get on m/k setups, sometimes my character tries to randomly open the menu, and he'll try to swap weapons on his own but those are bugs dating back for ages.

Oh, and I got on demand turbo for any of my buttons.

So scrambler rifles, if you didn't already know, use a copy and pasted heat mechanic from the laser rifle in a weird time saving lazy programming attempt. I actually posted that you could abuse this to fire a variety of different numbers of shots before over heating the first or second week the scrambler rifle actually came out. I was mocked off the forums amusingly. Depending on the lag gods I can technically squeek out an extra 2 -3 shots before over heating if just fire till I over heat, but in a burst I generally only really get 1-2 shots more, which really isn't the end of the world, especially since I don't want to over heat ever so you burst your shots anyways. Its a slight edge, its probably not the only reason some one dies but occasionally I look down at my health after a fight and see that Im down to about 100 hp left and I'll know it probably saved my bacon. On the other hand I often lose concentration and giggle at Cruor Abominare committed suicide. You could actually make this irrelevant by just fixing the the heat mechanic anyways to a per shot basis to begin with and fix the sloppy code.


Amusingly, the actual benefit to turbo comes in two distinct areas. First is actually sidearm swapping. Dust does this weird thing that if you try to fire too quickly after a swap your gun just doesnt fire, this is especially annoying with the smg or switching back to an automatic primary. Since the turbo is spamming I don't I have to worry about this awkward coding and simply know that yes my character will actually fire once finished swapping. This more than any other affect has saved me the most and is painfully apparent when I have turbo off when I need to fire something like the rail rifle, a turret, or a swarm launcher (sometimes I forget this one and hilariously die wondering why I wasnt locking on).

The other, and I'm honestly afraid to say it because I'd rather it not be put down like the tac rifle, is the CR. This weapon is just more of a dream hipfiring, between this and the scram its clearly the one that gets all the perks from actually using turbo. Granted if you're aiming down sights and try to keep the turbo going fully blast it'll kick everywhere like a coked up rail rifle, mm but that hipfire no spread max skills is just sexy.

so tl dr , turbo on a scram rifle? Fix the heating mechanic problem solved, and if you're going to turbo use the CR