Hey guys

Another potential change for you to chew on. While the Large Missile Turret is already getting it's damage profile fixed, there's another change we're considering.

At the moment the Large Missile Turret has a very long reload time. While this means that you have to be careful with when you fire and when you choose to reload, encouraging a hit and run playstyle we feel that this limits the turret more than is healthy. So in trying to find a middle ground, we came up with the idea of making it a single reload weapon just like the shotgun (that is, it reloads one round at a time).

Current numbers we are sitting on are the following:

Reload start time (delay before rounds start loading once you start a reload): 4 seconds
Time to load round (delay between loading each round): 0.5 seconds

This will mean that reloading an empty magazine will take 10 seconds which lines up with with the current reload time. On the other hand, reloading a magazine with just a single round fired will only take 4.5 seconds.

One other thing to keep in mind is by making this change Large Missile Turrets will also be able to interrupt their reloading sequence and start firing any rounds that are already loaded, just like a shotgun.

We're aware that this alone will likely not make Large Missile Turrets on par with the other turrets, but it's a nice usability and combat buff that we can put out and see if it improves things to give us a better baseline to work with when we next take a look at it. I'll be looking specifically for feedback on just this change in this thread.

Please also note that this does not affect the Large Missile Installation, which will remain as a burst fire weapon.

At this stage, the reload skill will only affect the base 4 second reload delay. However, we have the option of making it apply to the per round time as well.

If you have missiles still left loaded, firing while in the reload delay will interrupt the reload and fire a missile.

I am open to moving more time into the upfront delay and less into the per round reload timer, or even just increasing the overall reload timer for a full magazine. I'm not particularly keen on reducing the total time to reload an empty magazine to under 10 seconds, but if you have a good argument for it I'm all ears.

Hmmm...Might just be me I use a proto missile turret exclusively because it's a tank destroyer. I go around the map and am usually able to destroy other tanks super quick (2-3 seconds if I get them in my sights). Often even if I'm outnumbered. Infantry and AV are much harder to deal with because without a direct hit the damage is pretty low. Plus infantry can get cover much easier. Most of the time a ton of swarms are what actually kill my madruger.

The reload time along with the low splash damage I thought balanced it. It means that if you start pecking at infantry a railgun tank sneaking up on you has a much better shot of taking you out. As is even if someone gets the drop on me as long as I can unload a full salvo on them it's over. I just make sure to always have no less than 5 missiles before reloading.

The ehp changes to vehicles as well as changes to projectile damage against shields might cover some of this though.

My fear is that if you change how it reloads without adjusting the other stats then it will be much better against infantry as well. It won't have a good enough counter. Maybe something for Echo but imo the direct DPS is is already borderline broken.