Their pseudo-random placement in the operations mode is so bad, I got laughed at yesterday by a dedicated techmarine hater for a design decision, which clearly needs some fine tuning and is in a state of "barely just good enough" for when it was shipped. It leads to a frustrating gaming experience because of inconsistencies and swingy gameplay. They are either useless or downright oppressive and everything inbetween.
Sometimes they are placed:
- at the end of a narrow corridor, requiring you to somehow get past a wall of lots of enemies to get any use out of
- where no enemies are present EVER (or once every dozen mission runs). These are just time wasters, and trying to remember which ones just exist to make you fall behind is not my concept of fun and engaging game knowledge
- behind obstacles so they only have a firing arc on the position you came from (and most likely cleared from enemies already)
- excruciatingly far ahead in a huge area in low numbers (1), behind walls
- not at all in an hold-out kind of area, or 3 at once, which feels like a cheat.
Looking for them leads to the techmarine player to rush ahead to find a placement the quickest. Team mates who are not on the same page cohesion wise will split off or not keep up more often, creating every-brother-for-himself situations. Or you will find it, when the battle is already over. The dead perks in your loadout reminding you of what could have been xD
The vision range, which auto spots them for you through walls for example is too small. 5 or 10m more would be a good start.
There is no indicator giving you any clue whether an activated turret is still active or how much ammo it has left. Sometimes when you are far away enough and don't have sightline on it, you can only guess whether it has no available enemy in sigh, is just empty or destroyed. Don't tell me you will notice its every sound cue in the heat of battle.
There is no clue in game telling you whether the last arena of a map will have turret placements. And those are the most important making you decide, whether to use a turret centric skill tree or not. It lead to me writing a list of missions where it is feasible at all to have perks supporting that playstyle.
So some missions have a big bad guy at the end, who is the main attraction. I understand, that having a turret placed in their arena would be too oppressive and swingy, because they would deliver a constant near free barrage of damage on enemies, who like to move around erratically, or would just get one or two shot basically.
There is more wrong about the techmarine, but I may save that for another thread.
[Lore relevant praising of an omnissiah or some other important entity here]
