Turtle First Impressions

(kirinichiban42) #1

Now that Turtle is officially out, what is the general consensus?

I think he is a good merc who makes up for a lack of offensive capabilities (i.e. explosives) with his shield.
My only problem is that he gets pretty bad xp for the shield.

(neverplayseriou) #2

lack of xp for absorbing damage with the shield, beyond retarded on certain maps, pushing choke points on bridge and underground is now just hopeless and you have to defend underground second objective on the objective instead of from the back. Mg’s are ridiculous now since shields can protect you on the mg.

As per usual it seems like sd barely took the time to test him and consider that there aren’t any merc limits in their game.

(TheStrangerous) #3

His shield is like a good support ability, when played offensively.

Yeah, I do feel it’s getting not enough XP.

(RectalTerror) #4

As I wrote in another thread:

  1. lack of ammo. Making it a repair guy makes it compete with Proxy & others, while the shield doesn’t make up for it. Worse, having a shield around an obj you’re repairing is bad, it pretty much tells the enemy you’re on it. I would have made him an offensive merc with his own ammo packs.

  2. shield doesn’t work as promised, you don’t need to get around it to shoot it down, you just shoot it from the front. That video saying you had to move around it to shoot it from the back, or use nades or fire, that was a lie.
    And I find it not transparent enough for the team, and too transparent for the enemy.

  3. since it only blocks bullets, it’s not good at protecting stealable objectives either (what ammo dispensers kinda do a little)

I’ve used it so far only because he’s new & fun, but I never found myself begging for ammo this much until him. Much less fun when you can’t make use of your own shield.
I didn’t find it a treat on the enemy’s side because, again, you just shoot it down from the front. So it’s not the game changer he was said to be.

I’ve also noticed the lack of XP, but being new at it, it looks normal.

(DecemberMan) #5

The shield goes down extremely quickly with any moderate amount of focus fire. I see it only being used as a safe plant / defuse kind of thing (in competitive).

(kopyright) #6

Has anybody tried whether or not the shield blocks the artillery strike marker as well?

(Aazhyd) #7

3 disadvantages of the shield:

  1. Takes too long to setup.
  2. Is easily destroyed.
  3. Is easy to bypass (nades e.g.).
(frostyvampire) #8

@DecemberMan1 said:
The shield goes down extremely quickly with any moderate amount of focus fire. I see it only being used as a safe plant / defuse kind of thing (in competitive).

Turtle is disabled in ranked

(Bestfinlandball) #9

I feel like an easy fix for most of turtles problems is adding a 1 merc per team rule. (at least to min lvl 10 and 20 servers), Since Turtle stacking is op and nerfing the shield to combat stacking would make a single turtle useless no matter the situation. Some sort of obstruction in front of mg’s should also be created to disallow turtle to place a shield in front of one.
I feel like turtle is underwhelming as an engineer, since while he has great weaponry, he still lacks the firepower to clear the objective without help from teammates.

I have to say, i do agree with @376E1AE459B1. A shield feels more like an ability for a support class, rather than engineer.

(RectalTerror) #10

Yeah I believe it was the idea for the shield to cover while working on objs, however, let’s see what the possible situations are:

-repairing EV: I’ve tried using it for that, but obviously it’s not good, & it’s only from one angle. You also just cannot use it to do the first repair (ie Bridge) as it would be pretty much a “I’m repairing” flag for the enemy.

-disarming: yeah I can imagine it usable in some places, like the 2 pods in Terminal. The enemy will just pass through it & stab you, but if they’re all far enough, and there’s no Stoker around, I guess it’ll work.
Disarming in Underground… not much useful I guess… for that it would have to be a “bubble” shield, not a flat wall. Perhaps at the end of Underground, yeah…
Disarming in the train in Trainyard… yeah, maybe (oh wait, I guess it can’t be deployed inside the train? Let’s try that…)

Perhaps Turtle is an ok replacement for Bushwacker. Not for Fletcher I suppose (I don’t play him). But he would clearly not replace Proxy for me, for the speed alone. And thus for those like me who already have an eng and a medic in their slots, he’s not a good choice for the third slot.

(Liberage) #11

@DecemberMan1 said:
The shield goes down extremely quickly with any moderate amount of focus fire. I see it only being used as a safe plant / defuse kind of thing (in competitive).

Maybe 800 hp? And a 15% resistance to bullet damage and 15% explosive damage weakness?

(Verticules) #12

Opacity needs to drop 50% for teammates.

We will need a 1 merc rule ASAP

Given there is 1 turtle and it’s a 5v5 match. I think his shield is in a good spot.

(watsyurdeal) #13

I actually like using it, it’s not the godly unstoppable shield that people were expecting, but for how I use it it works. Ie planting those god dang bombs and repairing the objectives.

Rule 1 of engineer, if you are not top deaths on your team you are not doing enough.

(Mr-Penguin) #14

Played a few games with and against him yesterday and he seems fairly balanced. Probably needs a few tweaks to shield transparency for teammates and XP gain, but he’s fine.

(RectalTerror) #15

@watsyurdeal said:
I actually like using it, it’s not the godly unstoppable shield that people were expecting, but for how I use it it works. Ie planting those god dang bombs and repairing the objectives.

Rule 1 of engineer, if you are not top deaths on your team you are not doing enough.

Yeah, but half of the time you plant as a ninja, and the last thing you need is a giant flag saying “I’m planting”. When you’re not a ninja, then you’re under the cover of teammates, and you need a shield much less.

Also, planting is very fast as an eng. In fact, by the time you’ve set it up and it has activated, you have already planted successfully.
Had Turtle been an attack merc, yeah, with a slow planting it’d have made even more sense.

(Your worst knifemare.) #16

Despite him being a defensive type merc, he is really powerful on offense.

-Teamate delivering milk cartons? Plop a sheild.
-Need a way to defend your freshly planted c4? Put a sheild where your team plans to be.
-Need to give protection to a low hp teamate? Sheilds up.
-Need to repair an ev without trouble? Wave that red flag!

(Guziol) #17

I like him a lot. And he gives me more reasons to play nader and rhino over a fagger, which i like a great deal too.

(kirinichiban42) #18

After playing with him a bit more, I have one concern:

His ability cooldown (25s I think) is pretty short and by the time I usually throw a molly or 4 nades to destroy his shield he often just drops down another one immediately.

Have you guys seen similar things?

Also, I think it would be interesting to have his shield have an instant setup time, but at the cost of having less hp.

That way it would be more offensive and disposable to make up for his lack of firepower relative to other engineers.

(GatoCommodore) #19

No spare augment on his SMG-9

seriously…

(hawkeyeguy99) #20

It’s not meant to hold other team back, it’s meant to get them to pause. I usually try to find another way around a turtle shield, charging is stupid. It makes people look for other ways to attack and for that reason I think he’s fine as is.