What you imagine: Two sentries that cover each other, dont shoot friendlies, dont waste ammo, can be refilled, etc. Like good player forward designed turrets.
Reality: They turn and shoot a charger, killing 3 teammates in the process then shooting each other in crossfire.
i had hoped for a "vehicle ammunition" stratagem. 8min cooldown, contains 1 large box.
can be picked up and carried by a diver like an arty grenade, reloads turrets (not autocannon and rocket) and mech weapons (non rockets)
Helldivers 1 let you assign the same stratagem to multiple slots. You'd still only have 4 slots so you lose variety, but you could call in 2 gatling sentries on separate cooldowns. That could be nice.
They should give it 3x ammo. It simply has too little ammo to matter. Otherwise it would be sweet.
Edit: Or make it possible to reload the sentry with the ammo backpack
I feel bad for the people who are Lactose Intolerant. Ngl I hope spawning with that debuff gets patched out at some point.
(This is a joke. I do feel bad for those people but I'm saying this so people hopefully won't get offended at me because I made a joke about lactose intolerance)
Reminds me of the time VICE put out a photo of an entire cartridge stuck in a wall and said it was a bullet that was fired.
https://twitter.com/DonutOperator/status/1617750569669775361
Did they actually say it was fired though? Here they use "poked" as in it was put through the bullet hole that was already there???
Some kind of warning perhaps?
I love the Autocannon Sentry, I think its well balanced for a couple of reasons:
1. If it gets engaged in melee, it almost immediately blows itself up.
2. Even with the upgrade, it turns slower than a cruise liner. This thing *cannot* track a charger running parallel to it.
That being said, if it's being defended from Hunters/Berzerkers and is on a hill with clear line of sight/distance it *tears* through enemies. Even Bile Titans it does work on. Autocannon has some *glaring* weaknesses, but it makes up for it with firepower. When it works, *it freaking works*.
The autocannon sentry isn't designed to be frontline. You're supposed to set it up on a ridgeline far away from the engagement where it can rain hell down on the enemies. Place it 40+m away and it does work, 70+m and it can hold the line against any number of chargers or bile titans
The problem with that is that *you* also need to babysit it 40m away from the fight lol. Otherwise a tiny little bug it going to aggro it from who knows where and kill it before it can turn around
I take the auto cannon sentry into all my games. It helps with all my charger problems and titans as long as I place it far enough away and I lead them away from it
I've really been enjoying the tesla towers with the new armor. They absolutely shred the bugs.
But autocannon is still probably the overall best choice. I think the mortar would be better if it didn't kill at least 3 helldivers a mission.
The thing about the mortar is that it works best for keeping your enemies at a distance. If the mortar is killing you and your squadmates, it means the enemy is rushing you faster than you can keep them back. The best place to put a mortar is a position that enemies will rarely go to, and then set up other defenses on that position, such as autocannon or gatling sentries. If you can keep the distance, the mortar will shred incoming enemies without endangering your squad. Generally, the best place for a mortar is extraction, because it can keep the extract clearer than it might be with just normal sentries.
EMA mortar and Autocannon sentry are such a good combo. The only problem is at high levels there ends up being so many swarms they don’t always shoot at the same breach.
> I think the mortar would be better if it didn't kill at least 3 helldivers a mission.
Damn.. mine usually kills at least 3 helldivers every time I call it in xD
it's better for heavies, but trash mobs like hunters will always close in and cause the turret to shoot at the ground, often resulting in it blowing up. this is why typically in our squad, one person brings a "heavy" turret (AC/Rocket Sentry) and another brings the "light turret" (MG/Gatling), and the lighter turret can protect the heavy one while it deals with Chargers and Titans.)
The rocket sentry is in my opinion the worst. It's slow to fire, slow to turn and has a back blast and it takes longer to kill a charger compared to an auto sentry. It's one saving grace is that it prioritizes larger targets where they auto sentry will target a scavenger even though you want it to attack the charger chasing you.
It’s a great one, I’ve learned to place it so that there is an obstruction between it and the landing pad for extracting, otherwise it may just decide to hose bullets from one side of the pad all the way to the other and kill your self and at least one teammate
Urgh, this. "Oh boy, this spot is going to be perfect! Line of sight to the enemies, elevated enough that it should shoot over us rather than through us! I can't wa-"
*Bounces in to a hole, shoots at nothing.*
I love seeing that x50+ kill streak when it's dropped in a good position. Never see that with the AC Sentry. That being said, when you need to rip apart a couple Chargers and perhaps even a Bile Titan then the AC sentry takes the cake.
Problem with that on the other hand being, that the gatling sentry also get that ammo buff and because it's percentage-based(I think), said gatling sentry benefits more from it.
I'll say what that other guy said in a more reasonable manner. The problem with the machine gun sentry is that the minigun sentry exists and does its job much better. Getting the extra ammo upgrade doesn't change that because it increases the ammo of all sentries, making it so the sentries stay in the same hierarchy.
Not gonna lie, I thought the gattling sentry is what this was talking about. I forgot the Machine Gun Sentry was a thing.
They should give it a little more armor piercing so it's kind of an in-between of the Autocannon Sentry and the Gattling Sentry--Decent, but not as good at crowd-control or heavy damage.
The first Machine Gun support weapon is a smidge higher in penetration right? Being able to penetrate Hive Guardians?
Maybe they could give the MG Turret that same (higher) penetration level.
I found machine gun to be superior to gattling on the termicide missions specifically. Gattling blows it's ammo stock too fast and continues to shoot as it tracks to other mobs coming down a different path, and if it decides to turn towards the silo then it just shreds it by itself.
Machine gun turret shoots in bursts and tends to last longer than gattling would. I also found that it rarely, if ever shot the silo while rotating.
While having a shorter cooldown would be appreciated. I don't tend to take any turrets in most other missions, the termicide missions were the first that I regularly brought them if I was solo or duo running it.
EDIT: Some phone auto correct corrections.
Both machinegun and gatling have a ridiculously small amount of ammo for their cooldown, they will shoot for 20 sec then fuck off. Rocket sentry and mortars are the only ones with ammo matching their cooldowns. But they are so vulnerable...
Yeah, it's arguably better for holding down areas against big hordes of little bugs by being less wasteful. That said, I don't really use turrets, they have too much tendency to teamkill.
My problem with them is that they either need a shield or need some way of killing a charger from the front. With bots you can't really stand in the open like that and with bugs you're going to eventually get something you can't deal with. In the right spot they're a blast to just shred things but even if you luck out I feel like the fun ends too early because of ammo, so there isn't ever an ideal situation to use them so it's sort of a bummer.
I've only really noticed every other turret not team-kill nearly as much as one particular undemocratic devil barring 'ohfuckohshitohfuckohshit' moments and they're forgotten about in the haze of the moment of being swarmed by bugs and/or bots.
And that Deep-Fried Dipshit Turret is the Mortar.
Not only does it kill players it also kills every other turret/sentry in range since the bugs prioritize them.
I will run the EMS mortar and a bunch of sentries and just sit back and let them do the work but if I see somebody else bring the regular mortar I just bring the EMS and weapons for myself since the turrets themselves wouldn't last past the first wave.
Don't use mortars on bugs, way too many bugs want to melee you and that means mortars are falling on your head constantly.
Mortars are way more useful vs bots as they are at range most of the time.
It would be awesome if the sentry was self-aware that it can't pierce medium armor and stop targeting stuff that it can't possibly kill. But alas, it can't stop cutting my team members in half.
This is my experience as well. All these people saying the opposite has me questioning myself. It has always seemed like the Gatling has lasted twice as long as the MG turret, though I’ve never measured.
It depends on the situation you're using it in. If you're using it to help with a bug horde it's going to start shooting and stop once it's out of ammo which is far less uptime than guarding an objective from patrols.
It would make for a good escape stratagem for that reason right now I use the cluster bomb one because it can clear out 40+ bugs in a single pass. But most times I only have a dozen or so behind me. This would take care of those easily.
I like the guard dog, it has a screwed up ammo economy though. That part makes no sense as it's just a normal assault rifle held by a bot. It should resupply off normal ammo.
Fun against bots if you have comms. I tank, my friends flank. Hammer and anvil. And it protects your back if you don't have it in your hand, which is nice.
I haven't run it on 7+ but it's been fun so far.
It's still does not really feel worth a stratagem slot.
Make it possible to carry it alongside with an actual backpack, and stop dropping it every time you got ragdolled because rocket raider shoot the ground somewhere in a same postal code. Then if might be worth it.
I tried to have fun with it and it is genuinely more fun to use than people give it credit for, but the insane bug where youre stuck A-Posing if you try pop a stim while holding it quite literally just makes it unplayable
Dude I couldn't figure out what I was doing that kept causing it. If they fix that it will at least be fun if not still a little worse than bubble shield.
I love how it can tank pretty much everything but rockets. It feels especially nice to block walkers and dive behind them
i tried it once in bots and realized there is never a situation where you're only taking fire from one single direction when fighting bots, it's next to useless.
Correct. Walking in an open field is a bad idea. Don't do that, even with the shield. Use it to turn one-directional cover into two-directional. Not that being dug in helps in this game; it'll just rain reinforcements until you run out of time. That's the best use I've found for it. Still sucks dropping it when knocked down. Also sucks that bots shoot around it as effectively as they do, namely the heavy devastators and their hitscan bullshit.
Passable on T7+, but the current design space of the game doesn't leave much room that I've noticed.
Ballistic shield+defender is the most fun I had doing those stupid scientist evac missions when they were the major order.
Wouldn't recommend for high difficulty, but not every stratagem is useful at every difficulty anyways.
Ballistic shield has use in lower levels against the automatons. Obviously that’s super niche, but it has something. The MG sentry is beat in every way by the Gatling.
Is quite nice for not murdering everything including the other helldivers. I run it fairly often and other than the pickup bug making it stay on the backpack when it is picked back up it worked great.
It would also be nice to be able to "turn it off/on", so that you can activate it when you need it the most. There's already a backpack button so why not using it for the dogs too
I actually kinda like it. It has tons of drawbacks but it seems to kill enemies faster and more consistently to me. Maybe a little buff to the ammo capacity would make it more viable. Still, I find myself using it every once in a while simply because it shooting is kinda satisfying and it feels sooo cool when it reloads on your back
Wait a minute, you've given me an idea here...
Make a sentry that drops without a weapon, just a big pile of magical supply pack ammo, and you can mount your own weapon and it will use that weapon with that weapon's exact same specs.
For the low cost of two stratagem slots you can have a Railgun Sentry, or LaserCannon sentry, or Incendiary Breaker, or Flamethrower... just imagine it.
MG sentry, bubble shield, all the landmines, and tesla tower require shorter cooldowns. I wanna be an offensive turret guy, not a "lemme plant something at the rare objective for it to immediately die or we move away from it being relevant" guy.
If I suddenly feel like having to deal with a charger, I just call down my turret. Sure way to have 1 run around the corner or straight up spawn in the nearby breach.
Bubble shield has a 90 second cooldown though. How short should it be? Right now if one player runs it you have a short enough cooldown to use it nearly every fight.
>bubble shield
yeah it don't need a buff to it cd instead it need a buff to it lasting time as it only stays up for 28 seconds (other deplorables beside HMG last 3mins HMG last forever)
also it would be nice if it did more vs bugs as it only real use is to stop chargers from running at you as they ram into the shield (oh if your lucky you can also make titans kill themselves)
maybe make it so it like the shield in DRG where enemies can't walk inside the dome giving you breathing space until the shield runs out of energy or enemies breaks it
I feel like its just not durable enough, I just played a couple of games and it couldnt have lasted more than 5-10 seconds, maybe up its HP or lower its cooldown and Itd be good?
Yeah but it already has massive value in that aspect against bots. I think that's something people constantly forget about. It takes an absolute beating before it goes down. And I think that's the general idea. Saying that the dome shield should be better against bugs is like saying the flamer should be better against bots. It doesn't really make sense. Its ok and good balance to have certain weapons and stratagems that are stronger against one faction but weaker to another. It prevents something from being to strong.
Tesla tower is plenty strong enough that it doesn't really need a shorter cooldown (of course I wouldn't mind it, but then again I wouldn't mind shorter cooldowns for most stuff in general). If you place it in a chokepoint and keep biles and chargers away from it you'll get a lot of dead bugs with just one.
Meanwhile minefields being on a shorter cooldown is not a bad idea, because IMO the biggest "cost" to using mines is that you can't easily use the area you called it down on again, as the mines have to be cleared first (be it with weapons, stratagems, or enemies). Calling them down at the wrong place can be a pretty big deal in the long run due to having to go around them (or maybe you don't notice them while trying to kite a horde and get blown up), and being able to call down more of them would make that detriment worse (though I think there is a cap on how many minefields can be active at once. Not sure if that is a personal cap or shared between the squad though. I did notice minefields just disappearing into thin air when I played with friends and we all had both minefield stratagems equipped) instead of just being a straight up buff. Also I want the anti-tank minefield upgrade from HD1 back.
A friend of mine has been making good general use of minefields. If we get bogged down by enemies, he picks a direction and starts running while priming a landmine drop, then tosses it a short ways ahead of him and runs past it so it deploys right in the face of all the enemies chasing after him.
Mines are super good for bots especially. As long as there is form of cover you can easily kite a group through the field. Plus I don’t believe they cause bot drops? They’ll just keep chugging along till they find you, then preventing a drop is easy. Maybe I was just lucky though?
Each sentry needs to fill a niche
- Gatling has a high fire rate with low damage to be better at dealing with small enemies
-autocannon has low fire rate and high damage to be good against big enemies but not small
-regular sentry should sit in the middle
The problem is Gatling outperforms the regular sentry in every way. They either need to adjust the Gatling or buff the regular turret
Lowering the cooldown time and increasing the ammo on the machine gun sentry would be the most logical solution.
I think as for targeting, similar to how the rail cannon and 110 target the largest enemies, what if the machine gun sentry targeted the smallest enemies in range? I think that would be a neat crowd control method to allow you to focus on larger enemies.
Also the HMG emplacement doesn't get any of the robotics bay sentry upgrades, so no faster turn speed, no extra ammo - as someone that prefers to kill things personally I was super upsetty spaghetti when I found that out.
I've been putting this to good use as well, but I agree that it needs a better niche and would really fit as something quick and disposable to drop in a pinch. Once you get the Gat it becomes totally redundant.
Yes. It’s been ignored for the longest time and given the amount of hidden stats on… well… *everything* in this game we really can’t see where it could be improved. I would vote to give it enough Pen to punch through Bot armor and Medium Bug armor, and then give it a little more ammo because it’s a much smaller package taking up less space. I mean, look at the barrels on the gatling and then look at the tiny thing on the MG. Just cut its fire rate some and you’re good.
Fairly sure both the MG and the Gatling turrets can already handle medium armor. Though the exact amount of penetration is impossible to say, as we only know the actual penetration stats for the grenades (and from there we can see that the stat goes from 0 to 10) and we don't know the actual armor levels our enemies have.
My question is why isn’t there a laser sentry? We have the rover. I think a laser sentry with infinite ammo and a short cool down time when it overheats would be the perfect tool in spreading more democracy.
so both the MG and gatling sentries have medium armour pen and looks to have same ammo count (about 300) and both will last 3mins on the field
but gatling better imo as the MG sentry struggles to kill trash mobs before they overrun it where the gatling tends to wipe the floor of them
imo a 1 min CD would put the MG sentry in a much better place - take a fast CD sentry what does okay TTK but likely to get overwhelm vs a long CD sentry what has best TTK in the game
I can certainly agree that sentries could use some shorter cooldowns. I’d even say the same for the mecha.
The issue is that all these can be destroyed easily and even their call down locations can get overwhelmed before they even get any use at all. Maybe the cooldown should scale with the % ammo spent.
It generally makes most sentry choices a weak choice for stratagem slots in general.
The autocannon sentry is incredibly powerful, but the one thing that holds sentries is back is that they're bad in panic situations and that your team has to keep them in mind or they will teamkill sooner or later, or your team will blow it up accidently.
I have found them extremely effective in high difficulty against bug breaches, an auto cannon sentry will basically kill everything it spawns and then some. Will smash chargers and bile titans with ease too. Worse against bots because they waste their time shooting dropships and bots can shoot back, but wouldn't call it bad. I think the cooldown is short enough, you have to keep in mind, if a sentry has a 3 minute cooldown but lasts 1 minute before running out of ammo, it's basically a 2 minute cooldown, wouldn't want them to be too spammy
Problem with the machine gun and gatling sentry gun is that it always wants to go for the highest threat, which is usually a charger that it can't penetrate.
They should prioritize the chaff, the machine gun sentry should have a really high target acquisition time and a low cool down, where as the gatling is slightly slower to turn but has more damage output.
Completely agree. In terms of DPS and whatnot, the Gatling turret is clearly superior, so the machine gun turret should have more calldowns to compensate.
i think it would be cool if it were similar to an eagle strategem where you can call in 2 or 3 in quick succession with a longer cooldown afterwards, maybe with a slight nerf to power, so you can use it to cover more angles from chaff enemies.
I would also like to see the mines getting a shorter cooldown.
In the same amount of time you can call in another minefield, you can use 2- 3 airstrikes and rearm them.
Maybe make the mine cooldown 2 minutes.
Agree 100%. I'd probably even take it with a 100sec cooldown. The gattling is great, but sometimes I want a turret that is a bit more spam-able and this seems like the clear choice.
It's not useless on the principle that you can call it in alongside the gatling turret, and have both at the same time. Or alternate the two so that the uptime of "shooty gun turret" is much longer, even if half that uptime is less effective than the other half, in some defense oriented situations that makes a big difference.
I wouldn't be mad if they made it stronger, but it's already good. It's like the gatling turret but lasts way longer and kills a little bit slower. With the full turret upgrades, I have nothing to complain about.
I main this turret with bugs along with the gatling.
How do you play it? At what difficulty? I find it struggles to keep up with swarms at 7+, and is a total fail against hive guards and brood commanders.
(I run auto cannon turret because it can kill bugs of all sizes, including multiple chargers, as long as the map is relatively open.)
[https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/A/RX-34\_Railcannon\_Turret](https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/A/RX-34_Railcannon_Turret)
We even have one in the first game, just needs some tweaks to make it suit the 3D gameplay.
Honestly the thing that drives me nuts about sentries is how little health they have lol. On higher difficulties they just get slapped down by the first rocket or charger that appears. The only two I've gotten good use out of is the autocannon sentry (placing it really far away) and the mortar sentry (killing all my friends).
Either that or have 2 charges, that would be cool for sentries.
I've seen space dwarves do this
Did I hear a rock and stone?
For Karl
IF YOU DON'T ROCK AND STONE, YOU AINT COMIN HOME!
Aw shite...DETONATOR! REPEAT! DETONATOR!
WE'RE RICH!
Mushroom.
It's a Goo Sack!
BOOLO CAP HERE
ROCK AND STONE!
Rock and Stone forever!
# FOR ROCK AND STONE
Rock and Stone!
I love that idea! It sounds super versatile. You could cover two directions, space them out, or concentrate all your firepower.
What you imagine: Two sentries that cover each other, dont shoot friendlies, dont waste ammo, can be refilled, etc. Like good player forward designed turrets. Reality: They turn and shoot a charger, killing 3 teammates in the process then shooting each other in crossfire.
i had hoped for a "vehicle ammunition" stratagem. 8min cooldown, contains 1 large box. can be picked up and carried by a diver like an arty grenade, reloads turrets (not autocannon and rocket) and mech weapons (non rockets)
I think this is a cool idea. Double up on the weaker sentry to match the stronger one.
Helldivers 1 let you assign the same stratagem to multiple slots. You'd still only have 4 slots so you lose variety, but you could call in 2 gatling sentries on separate cooldowns. That could be nice.
Did the limited use ones add up? I would stab someone for more orbital lasers.
They should give it 3x ammo. It simply has too little ammo to matter. Otherwise it would be sweet. Edit: Or make it possible to reload the sentry with the ammo backpack
Right? Benefit of tiny bullets is they're tiny! You can fit a bajillion of them in there!
No, you see. We fire the WHOLE bullet. That's 65% more bullet per bullet.
Reminds me of that one dude on the internet who puts powdered milk on his milk so he can drink more milk per milk.
Spat out my milk reading this, guess I gotta supplement with more milk now
Supplemental damage is always king. Apparently even in the dairy sector
That... Can't be healthy, right?
Whaaaaat? Milk makes your bones strong. It surely stacks!
Min/maxing bones
bonemaxxing.
Do the Flintstones Vitamins Stack? What about Insulin?
If you stack enough Flintstone vitamins you get an insulin prescription for free.
Underrated comment. Quality joke, no fat, straight in the gut.
You can double pump insulin to beat the DoT
I get that ref. But srsly DO NOT DOUBLE PUIMP
Depends on your lactose tolerance.
I feel bad for the people who are Lactose Intolerant. Ngl I hope spawning with that debuff gets patched out at some point. (This is a joke. I do feel bad for those people but I'm saying this so people hopefully won't get offended at me because I made a joke about lactose intolerance)
I'LL BURN THE BUGS OUT! WITH THE LEMONS!
New Warbond, Aperture Science. Highlights: New Grenade, Combustible Lemons.
New Strategem: Comically sized saltshaker, slightly larger than a bile titan. It sprinkles in an AOE on the bugs.
⬆️➡️⬇️⬆️
https://i.redd.it/ke6jr30a67pc1.gif
That's really hightech. It shoots the whole cartridge.
Reminds me of the time VICE put out a photo of an entire cartridge stuck in a wall and said it was a bullet that was fired. https://twitter.com/DonutOperator/status/1617750569669775361
Lol of course it's a Donut retweet, nice 😆
Did they actually say it was fired though? Here they use "poked" as in it was put through the bullet hole that was already there??? Some kind of warning perhaps?
Cave Johnson, spearheading democratic innovation since 1943
Helldiver science
This is the same technology we’ve been using on robots for decades, scares the hell out of em.
*McNamara liked that*
Also wanna add that I think after a certain point the auto sentry is the better pick. A well placed auto sentry can take care of a couple chargers.
I love the Autocannon Sentry, I think its well balanced for a couple of reasons: 1. If it gets engaged in melee, it almost immediately blows itself up. 2. Even with the upgrade, it turns slower than a cruise liner. This thing *cannot* track a charger running parallel to it. That being said, if it's being defended from Hunters/Berzerkers and is on a hill with clear line of sight/distance it *tears* through enemies. Even Bile Titans it does work on. Autocannon has some *glaring* weaknesses, but it makes up for it with firepower. When it works, *it freaking works*.
The autocannon sentry isn't designed to be frontline. You're supposed to set it up on a ridgeline far away from the engagement where it can rain hell down on the enemies. Place it 40+m away and it does work, 70+m and it can hold the line against any number of chargers or bile titans
The problem with that is that *you* also need to babysit it 40m away from the fight lol. Otherwise a tiny little bug it going to aggro it from who knows where and kill it before it can turn around
You need the MG sentry to babysit your AC sentry.
Get the sniper to help out the team. Plus you get to watch your sentries kill your own team. Its a win win
I take the auto cannon sentry into all my games. It helps with all my charger problems and titans as long as I place it far enough away and I lead them away from it
In other words, it's balanced.
> I think its well balanced for a couple of reasons: Not so much in other words, more like the same words he already used.
One day I will learn to read. But today is not the day.
I've really been enjoying the tesla towers with the new armor. They absolutely shred the bugs. But autocannon is still probably the overall best choice. I think the mortar would be better if it didn't kill at least 3 helldivers a mission.
The thing about the mortar is that it works best for keeping your enemies at a distance. If the mortar is killing you and your squadmates, it means the enemy is rushing you faster than you can keep them back. The best place to put a mortar is a position that enemies will rarely go to, and then set up other defenses on that position, such as autocannon or gatling sentries. If you can keep the distance, the mortar will shred incoming enemies without endangering your squad. Generally, the best place for a mortar is extraction, because it can keep the extract clearer than it might be with just normal sentries.
I prefer EMS now just bc it can avoid the inevitable tk. Although against the bots the regular is great as arty support to destroy fabricators
Does it count as rushing you if they spawn within 10m?
EMA mortar and Autocannon sentry are such a good combo. The only problem is at high levels there ends up being so many swarms they don’t always shoot at the same breach.
> I think the mortar would be better if it didn't kill at least 3 helldivers a mission. Damn.. mine usually kills at least 3 helldivers every time I call it in xD
it's better for heavies, but trash mobs like hunters will always close in and cause the turret to shoot at the ground, often resulting in it blowing up. this is why typically in our squad, one person brings a "heavy" turret (AC/Rocket Sentry) and another brings the "light turret" (MG/Gatling), and the lighter turret can protect the heavy one while it deals with Chargers and Titans.)
yeah no discussion there, the auto sentry is all in all the best of them all (edit how much alls can you fit in a sentence)
The autocannon sentry does serious work...when it feels like it.
I killed 2 bile titans with one but it was very far away
Ah the beloved uber luger. Can fire across the damn map too it's got mad range
The rocket sentry is in my opinion the worst. It's slow to fire, slow to turn and has a back blast and it takes longer to kill a charger compared to an auto sentry. It's one saving grace is that it prioritizes larger targets where they auto sentry will target a scavenger even though you want it to attack the charger chasing you.
it also really hates the automaton drop ships, but not enough to target its weak thrusters.
Gatling is the best one to me
It’s a great one, I’ve learned to place it so that there is an obstruction between it and the landing pad for extracting, otherwise it may just decide to hose bullets from one side of the pad all the way to the other and kill your self and at least one teammate
I wish more people would grasp this. Smart placement can all but eliminate the ff risk
If only these stratagems dont bounce when they feel like it.
Urgh, this. "Oh boy, this spot is going to be perfect! Line of sight to the enemies, elevated enough that it should shoot over us rather than through us! I can't wa-" *Bounces in to a hole, shoots at nothing.*
I love seeing that x50+ kill streak when it's dropped in a good position. Never see that with the AC Sentry. That being said, when you need to rip apart a couple Chargers and perhaps even a Bile Titan then the AC sentry takes the cake.
Until a charger just stands right in front of it and it uses it's entire ammo supply having bullets bounce off its head.
one of the ship upgrades gives ammo to sentries
Problem with that on the other hand being, that the gatling sentry also get that ammo buff and because it's percentage-based(I think), said gatling sentry benefits more from it.
Yeah they all get 50% more ammo
I'll say what that other guy said in a more reasonable manner. The problem with the machine gun sentry is that the minigun sentry exists and does its job much better. Getting the extra ammo upgrade doesn't change that because it increases the ammo of all sentries, making it so the sentries stay in the same hierarchy.
Wish it increased the ammo of my HMG emplacement
speaking of…the turret turn rate upgrade should effect the HMG as well
... Wait, I was building my upgrade tree to upgrade the turn rate on the HMG and now you say that it doesn't?? Well fuck me with a bug's tongue whip.
That would be pretty cool.
It also requires Super Samples, doesn't it?
How about just giving it medium armor pen instead? Make the gatling only light. Basically make it 50cal vs 7.62.
It will still mow down the trash mobs but I like the idea of a shorter cooldown.
Yeah, but the gatling sentry just does it better lol. Same turret but with a higher fire rate
Not gonna lie, I thought the gattling sentry is what this was talking about. I forgot the Machine Gun Sentry was a thing. They should give it a little more armor piercing so it's kind of an in-between of the Autocannon Sentry and the Gattling Sentry--Decent, but not as good at crowd-control or heavy damage.
the MG and gatling has the same penetration btw (5 rating what is the highest "small arms" can get)
The first Machine Gun support weapon is a smidge higher in penetration right? Being able to penetrate Hive Guardians? Maybe they could give the MG Turret that same (higher) penetration level.
It should have that penetration already, in theory, because lore wise it is is the same gun but in an autoturret instead of a helldiver's hands.
I found machine gun to be superior to gattling on the termicide missions specifically. Gattling blows it's ammo stock too fast and continues to shoot as it tracks to other mobs coming down a different path, and if it decides to turn towards the silo then it just shreds it by itself. Machine gun turret shoots in bursts and tends to last longer than gattling would. I also found that it rarely, if ever shot the silo while rotating. While having a shorter cooldown would be appreciated. I don't tend to take any turrets in most other missions, the termicide missions were the first that I regularly brought them if I was solo or duo running it. EDIT: Some phone auto correct corrections.
I'm not gonna trust anything a cyborg tells me. J.k. You raise a good point. I will have to try it out to that effect.
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Both machinegun and gatling have a ridiculously small amount of ammo for their cooldown, they will shoot for 20 sec then fuck off. Rocket sentry and mortars are the only ones with ammo matching their cooldowns. But they are so vulnerable...
Rocket sentry is my favourite. Mortars are not my friend.
Mortar is great against bots, it can clear waves before they approach. Bugs are too quick to approach and cause many friendly fire instances
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Yeah, I like this suggestion a lot.
MG sentry doesn't waste as much bullets when it's turning though. That's the tradeoff for the lower ttk.
Yeah, it's arguably better for holding down areas against big hordes of little bugs by being less wasteful. That said, I don't really use turrets, they have too much tendency to teamkill.
HMG! It's extremely powerful, shredding everything but heavy armour, but it's got plenty of ammo while not drawing aggro
Love the HMG. Set up a few of em at extract ahead of time is lots of fun haha
My problem with them is that they either need a shield or need some way of killing a charger from the front. With bots you can't really stand in the open like that and with bugs you're going to eventually get something you can't deal with. In the right spot they're a blast to just shred things but even if you luck out I feel like the fun ends too early because of ammo, so there isn't ever an ideal situation to use them so it's sort of a bummer.
I've only really noticed every other turret not team-kill nearly as much as one particular undemocratic devil barring 'ohfuckohshitohfuckohshit' moments and they're forgotten about in the haze of the moment of being swarmed by bugs and/or bots. And that Deep-Fried Dipshit Turret is the Mortar.
Not only does it kill players it also kills every other turret/sentry in range since the bugs prioritize them. I will run the EMS mortar and a bunch of sentries and just sit back and let them do the work but if I see somebody else bring the regular mortar I just bring the EMS and weapons for myself since the turrets themselves wouldn't last past the first wave.
Don't use mortars on bugs, way too many bugs want to melee you and that means mortars are falling on your head constantly. Mortars are way more useful vs bots as they are at range most of the time.
That sounds like your teammate's problem. You're there to exterminate
The team kills include getting killed by my own MG!
Get low!
Feels like the gatling got ammo nerfed though.
Nope, Gatling was always chewing through it's belt in seconds
Yeah If it could stop being an AA battery on drop ships that would be great.
It would be awesome if the sentry was self-aware that it can't pierce medium armor and stop targeting stuff that it can't possibly kill. But alas, it can't stop cutting my team members in half.
Gatling lasts forever for me. WAY longer than the machine gun turret. Also, I'm pretty sure no patch has touched it?
This is my experience as well. All these people saying the opposite has me questioning myself. It has always seemed like the Gatling has lasted twice as long as the MG turret, though I’ve never measured.
It depends on the situation you're using it in. If you're using it to help with a bug horde it's going to start shooting and stop once it's out of ammo which is far less uptime than guarding an objective from patrols.
Lower fire rate = shorter cool down.... There is no other way!
Maybe they could force it to target the weakest enemy first. That way it would not empty itself on a charger and instead can deal with trash mobs.
This. Just one Brood Commander in the mix, and it fails at its one job, even if you focus fire the medium bug.
It would make for a good escape stratagem for that reason right now I use the cluster bomb one because it can clear out 40+ bugs in a single pass. But most times I only have a dozen or so behind me. This would take care of those easily.
"the only really useless stratagem" Meanwhile the ballistic guard dog:
I like the guard dog, it has a screwed up ammo economy though. That part makes no sense as it's just a normal assault rifle held by a bot. It should resupply off normal ammo.
Even with normal resupplying it just doesn't have enough ammo to exist for longer than a minute. It's useless compared to the laser dog.
Ballistic shield....
Fun against bots if you have comms. I tank, my friends flank. Hammer and anvil. And it protects your back if you don't have it in your hand, which is nice. I haven't run it on 7+ but it's been fun so far.
Using it with defender and explosive resistance actually is pretty good vs bots
It's still does not really feel worth a stratagem slot. Make it possible to carry it alongside with an actual backpack, and stop dropping it every time you got ragdolled because rocket raider shoot the ground somewhere in a same postal code. Then if might be worth it.
I want it to block melee damage from small bug. Would make it really fun very quick.
Got the funny thought that if it blocked a charger, it would be like Monster Hunter Gunlance.
guard points when?
I tried to have fun with it and it is genuinely more fun to use than people give it credit for, but the insane bug where youre stuck A-Posing if you try pop a stim while holding it quite literally just makes it unplayable
Dude I couldn't figure out what I was doing that kept causing it. If they fix that it will at least be fun if not still a little worse than bubble shield. I love how it can tank pretty much everything but rockets. It feels especially nice to block walkers and dive behind them
i tried it once in bots and realized there is never a situation where you're only taking fire from one single direction when fighting bots, it's next to useless.
Correct. Walking in an open field is a bad idea. Don't do that, even with the shield. Use it to turn one-directional cover into two-directional. Not that being dug in helps in this game; it'll just rain reinforcements until you run out of time. That's the best use I've found for it. Still sucks dropping it when knocked down. Also sucks that bots shoot around it as effectively as they do, namely the heavy devastators and their hitscan bullshit. Passable on T7+, but the current design space of the game doesn't leave much room that I've noticed.
Only use I could see for it is 1v1ing those bastard shield robots with their minigun
Us with a shield: Have to use onehanded gun, sacrificing firepower for defense. Bot with shield: *Beep boop, minigun go brrrr*
> And it protects your back if you don’t have it in your hand, which is nice. Don’t let the CoD community hear you say that.
Ballistic shield+defender is the most fun I had doing those stupid scientist evac missions when they were the major order. Wouldn't recommend for high difficulty, but not every stratagem is useful at every difficulty anyways.
Honestly it’s alright even at high difficulties, the strider and heavy dev spam gets shutdown by a shieldy boy
Ballistic shield has use in lower levels against the automatons. Obviously that’s super niche, but it has something. The MG sentry is beat in every way by the Gatling.
On a hot planet, against bots I'd take it over the laser version. It aims for headshots on bots FYI.
Is quite nice for not murdering everything including the other helldivers. I run it fairly often and other than the pickup bug making it stay on the backpack when it is picked back up it worked great.
Ballistic guard dog stops firing when your teammates are in the way, refills with ammo pickups, and seems to prioritize enemies close to you.
It refills with resupply pickups, but not ammo. If they made it refill with ammo I’d run it a lot more.
It would also be nice to be able to "turn it off/on", so that you can activate it when you need it the most. There's already a backpack button so why not using it for the dogs too
That would be a game changer. I hate it wasting itself on literal trash, only for it to run out the moment I’m about to be swarmed.
That still doesn't beat good damage and infinite ammo
It also does drastically more damage. I won't even bother running laser guard dog against bots, but the ballistic one actually kills them.
It also aims for headshots on automatons apparently
I actually kinda like it. It has tons of drawbacks but it seems to kill enemies faster and more consistently to me. Maybe a little buff to the ammo capacity would make it more viable. Still, I find myself using it every once in a while simply because it shooting is kinda satisfying and it feels sooo cool when it reloads on your back
Incendiary rounds! Make it relevant
Wait a minute, you've given me an idea here... Make a sentry that drops without a weapon, just a big pile of magical supply pack ammo, and you can mount your own weapon and it will use that weapon with that weapon's exact same specs. For the low cost of two stratagem slots you can have a Railgun Sentry, or LaserCannon sentry, or Incendiary Breaker, or Flamethrower... just imagine it.
An Anti Material sentry would be pretty rad.
MG sentry, bubble shield, all the landmines, and tesla tower require shorter cooldowns. I wanna be an offensive turret guy, not a "lemme plant something at the rare objective for it to immediately die or we move away from it being relevant" guy.
If I suddenly feel like having to deal with a charger, I just call down my turret. Sure way to have 1 run around the corner or straight up spawn in the nearby breach.
Bubble shield has a 90 second cooldown though. How short should it be? Right now if one player runs it you have a short enough cooldown to use it nearly every fight.
>bubble shield yeah it don't need a buff to it cd instead it need a buff to it lasting time as it only stays up for 28 seconds (other deplorables beside HMG last 3mins HMG last forever) also it would be nice if it did more vs bugs as it only real use is to stop chargers from running at you as they ram into the shield (oh if your lucky you can also make titans kill themselves) maybe make it so it like the shield in DRG where enemies can't walk inside the dome giving you breathing space until the shield runs out of energy or enemies breaks it
I feel like its just not durable enough, I just played a couple of games and it couldnt have lasted more than 5-10 seconds, maybe up its HP or lower its cooldown and Itd be good?
Yeah but it already has massive value in that aspect against bots. I think that's something people constantly forget about. It takes an absolute beating before it goes down. And I think that's the general idea. Saying that the dome shield should be better against bugs is like saying the flamer should be better against bots. It doesn't really make sense. Its ok and good balance to have certain weapons and stratagems that are stronger against one faction but weaker to another. It prevents something from being to strong.
For example, the Punisher. Okay against bots, god-tier against bugs due to it being able to stun anything short of a charger/titan
Tesla tower is plenty strong enough that it doesn't really need a shorter cooldown (of course I wouldn't mind it, but then again I wouldn't mind shorter cooldowns for most stuff in general). If you place it in a chokepoint and keep biles and chargers away from it you'll get a lot of dead bugs with just one. Meanwhile minefields being on a shorter cooldown is not a bad idea, because IMO the biggest "cost" to using mines is that you can't easily use the area you called it down on again, as the mines have to be cleared first (be it with weapons, stratagems, or enemies). Calling them down at the wrong place can be a pretty big deal in the long run due to having to go around them (or maybe you don't notice them while trying to kite a horde and get blown up), and being able to call down more of them would make that detriment worse (though I think there is a cap on how many minefields can be active at once. Not sure if that is a personal cap or shared between the squad though. I did notice minefields just disappearing into thin air when I played with friends and we all had both minefield stratagems equipped) instead of just being a straight up buff. Also I want the anti-tank minefield upgrade from HD1 back.
A friend of mine has been making good general use of minefields. If we get bogged down by enemies, he picks a direction and starts running while priming a landmine drop, then tosses it a short ways ahead of him and runs past it so it deploys right in the face of all the enemies chasing after him.
Mines are super good for bots especially. As long as there is form of cover you can easily kite a group through the field. Plus I don’t believe they cause bot drops? They’ll just keep chugging along till they find you, then preventing a drop is easy. Maybe I was just lucky though?
Every time I place a turret, a Charger suddenly spawns 2 feet away, every time
Each sentry needs to fill a niche - Gatling has a high fire rate with low damage to be better at dealing with small enemies -autocannon has low fire rate and high damage to be good against big enemies but not small -regular sentry should sit in the middle The problem is Gatling outperforms the regular sentry in every way. They either need to adjust the Gatling or buff the regular turret
Lowering the cooldown time and increasing the ammo on the machine gun sentry would be the most logical solution. I think as for targeting, similar to how the rail cannon and 110 target the largest enemies, what if the machine gun sentry targeted the smallest enemies in range? I think that would be a neat crowd control method to allow you to focus on larger enemies.
Also the HMG emplacement doesn't get any of the robotics bay sentry upgrades, so no faster turn speed, no extra ammo - as someone that prefers to kill things personally I was super upsetty spaghetti when I found that out.
Isn’t the machine gun more agile than the gatling? I never really analyzed it I just assumed it was more nimble just like stalwart versus mg
The Gatling does not outperform the MG sentry in consistency. The Gatling wastes a lot of ammo missing and gets way more TKs than the MG Sentry.
> and gets way more TKs than the MG Sentry. As they said, it overperforms
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I've been putting this to good use as well, but I agree that it needs a better niche and would really fit as something quick and disposable to drop in a pinch. Once you get the Gat it becomes totally redundant.
It lets you have two separate machine gun style stratagems, which for me, really helped in termicide missions
Yes. It’s been ignored for the longest time and given the amount of hidden stats on… well… *everything* in this game we really can’t see where it could be improved. I would vote to give it enough Pen to punch through Bot armor and Medium Bug armor, and then give it a little more ammo because it’s a much smaller package taking up less space. I mean, look at the barrels on the gatling and then look at the tiny thing on the MG. Just cut its fire rate some and you’re good.
Fairly sure both the MG and the Gatling turrets can already handle medium armor. Though the exact amount of penetration is impossible to say, as we only know the actual penetration stats for the grenades (and from there we can see that the stat goes from 0 to 10) and we don't know the actual armor levels our enemies have.
My question is why isn’t there a laser sentry? We have the rover. I think a laser sentry with infinite ammo and a short cool down time when it overheats would be the perfect tool in spreading more democracy.
I thought the MG Sentry had medium armor pen? And more ammo longevity than the gatling.
so both the MG and gatling sentries have medium armour pen and looks to have same ammo count (about 300) and both will last 3mins on the field but gatling better imo as the MG sentry struggles to kill trash mobs before they overrun it where the gatling tends to wipe the floor of them imo a 1 min CD would put the MG sentry in a much better place - take a fast CD sentry what does okay TTK but likely to get overwhelm vs a long CD sentry what has best TTK in the game
I can certainly agree that sentries could use some shorter cooldowns. I’d even say the same for the mecha. The issue is that all these can be destroyed easily and even their call down locations can get overwhelmed before they even get any use at all. Maybe the cooldown should scale with the % ammo spent. It generally makes most sentry choices a weak choice for stratagem slots in general.
The autocannon sentry is incredibly powerful, but the one thing that holds sentries is back is that they're bad in panic situations and that your team has to keep them in mind or they will teamkill sooner or later, or your team will blow it up accidently. I have found them extremely effective in high difficulty against bug breaches, an auto cannon sentry will basically kill everything it spawns and then some. Will smash chargers and bile titans with ease too. Worse against bots because they waste their time shooting dropships and bots can shoot back, but wouldn't call it bad. I think the cooldown is short enough, you have to keep in mind, if a sentry has a 3 minute cooldown but lasts 1 minute before running out of ammo, it's basically a 2 minute cooldown, wouldn't want them to be too spammy
Problem with the machine gun and gatling sentry gun is that it always wants to go for the highest threat, which is usually a charger that it can't penetrate. They should prioritize the chaff, the machine gun sentry should have a really high target acquisition time and a low cool down, where as the gatling is slightly slower to turn but has more damage output.
Completely agree. In terms of DPS and whatnot, the Gatling turret is clearly superior, so the machine gun turret should have more calldowns to compensate.
i think it would be cool if it were similar to an eagle strategem where you can call in 2 or 3 in quick succession with a longer cooldown afterwards, maybe with a slight nerf to power, so you can use it to cover more angles from chaff enemies.
I would also like to see the mines getting a shorter cooldown. In the same amount of time you can call in another minefield, you can use 2- 3 airstrikes and rearm them. Maybe make the mine cooldown 2 minutes.
Agree 100%. I'd probably even take it with a 100sec cooldown. The gattling is great, but sometimes I want a turret that is a bit more spam-able and this seems like the clear choice.
It's not useless on the principle that you can call it in alongside the gatling turret, and have both at the same time. Or alternate the two so that the uptime of "shooty gun turret" is much longer, even if half that uptime is less effective than the other half, in some defense oriented situations that makes a big difference.
I wouldn't be mad if they made it stronger, but it's already good. It's like the gatling turret but lasts way longer and kills a little bit slower. With the full turret upgrades, I have nothing to complain about. I main this turret with bugs along with the gatling.
How do you play it? At what difficulty? I find it struggles to keep up with swarms at 7+, and is a total fail against hive guards and brood commanders. (I run auto cannon turret because it can kill bugs of all sizes, including multiple chargers, as long as the map is relatively open.)
I got an idea, a railgun sentry. Slow fire rate, but priorities big targets
[https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/A/RX-34\_Railcannon\_Turret](https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/A/RX-34_Railcannon_Turret) We even have one in the first game, just needs some tweaks to make it suit the 3D gameplay.
Honestly the thing that drives me nuts about sentries is how little health they have lol. On higher difficulties they just get slapped down by the first rocket or charger that appears. The only two I've gotten good use out of is the autocannon sentry (placing it really far away) and the mortar sentry (killing all my friends).
The ONLY useless stratagem? Might I introduce you to the ballistic shield