AV Mana turret - Give it a zoom please. A long range AV weapon with no aiming aid makes no sense. - Also, please give it a shield. Right now setting up and using an AV turret is a 5 second countdown to getting one shotted by a tank or sniper. SpitFire Turret - Massively increase spitfire damage. Right now people can walk up to it and knife it. That is just useless. They are easy to kill, which is fine. Its a gun on a tripod. But it should do enough damage for people to want to avoid it. - Ability to move spitfire turrets. We only get one, fine, but we should be reclaim and re-position it unless it gets destroyed.
A zoom on the AV turret has been on my short list of wants for a long while now but I think the lack of zoom and the lack of protection it neglects to offer is the price we have to pay for a weapon that, when placed correctly, can be devastating to enemy vehicles. As for the Spitfire, I feel like I'm one of the very few people who never understands why people say this turret is so bad. It's not a TF2 turret that you're able to just dump somewhere and let it rack up kills for you, it's an Engineer support turret, it's their to aid and support, not do your work for you. The turret has a lot of potential for a lot of things. It can be used as a distraction, it can be used as a way of telling people there's 'something' in the 50m vicinity, it can be used to aid on DPS output on an enemy and probably even more. As with a lot of things in this game, it's about placement. Putting the turret where it's exposed to several sides and it's alone, it's bound to get destroyed. However, putting it amongst at least 2-3 teammates where it only has to look at a 180 degree arc or even less, it's going to be a lot more useful. Sometimes when I'm in a tight spot and can't move, knowing there's at least 1 enemy nearby, I'll use my turret to take the blow for me. If an enemy sees my turret but they don't see me, naturally they'll aim for it first, allowing me to take the time to take them out and be on my way.
In planetside 1 we could place multiple turrets, and their purpose was to guard areas. There was AA turrets, anti-infantry spits, and stealth spits. Clusters of them well placed were deadly for the unwary. The one spit we get here is...underwhelming. Not really worth the certs in its current state. It can act as a motion sensor, but a real motion sensor does that better. It can kill someone with low health unless they take cover or shoot back. Whee. I think they should either buff it considerably, or drop the cert cost by 50%
Imho if the AV Mana had shield and zoom it would simply be devastating. It's already one of the most hated weapons in the game... But I agree on the Spitfire. It's valuable only for the locking sound, which basically works like an alarm. But it's total crap for the rest. Imho the problem is not the damage output but it's the very low resistance: it should take more to destroy it. After all more Engineers can place more turrets in the same place allowing the to focus fire, it's not so smart to increase damage too much. Then yeah, I also think we should be allowed to redeploy the turret with a cooldown. But in my personal Engineer's whishlist there is a thing we've been asking from beta and devs always ignore: a deployable shield / barricade. Probably we will never see anything like that.
