They're really good if playing with random players who don't have the best 'battle awareness' (the kind a single infiltrator can get in the midst of and take down 3-4 of them with a knife before they realize). Stay with the spitfire, it'll alert you to enemies you might have missed, you spot and shoot them & your allies do the same. If you didn't have the spitfire up, that LA might have got your sundy, or picked off a few of you. If there's a stalemate in a base or a lot of action at a certain point, the place for the spitfire is guarding spots you can be flanked from. It's impressive how much damage a single engineer can do with sticky grenades & bandoleer if they flank and nobody notices them. Saying "I'll watch the door, you watch the stairs?" (the '?' shows respect when talking to a random who doesn't have to do anything you tell them) is nearly as good as a spitfire when guarding a room, sometimes better because a spitfire doesn't alert you fast enough if someone gets the drop on you. The health is in an ok place for a spitfire you can deploy more than once, making it stay up longer under fire from another player when you're repairing it with max repair tool would be nice. The damage is enough to get a kill assist or take down LA's eventually (can you use a medkit in midair? might solve some problems LA's have with the spitfire)) The size would almost work in your favor if you could crouch behind it and repair tank in a 1v1 situation. Being able to place it on slopes would be nice. It's been on live long enough to know it's nowhere near OP, it's safe to increase the carrying limit.
1) First of all, I can almost guarantee you that the "shooting wildly at the terrain" is the spitfire harassing an infiltrator who decloaked long enough to drop a mine or a pop a shot. Those things are really the bane of my existence when I play Stalker. 2) Honestly, the buff these things need is the same small arms fire reduction that MAXs get. When sniping, it's about 3 shots to kill a spitfire, and I make a habit of doing it whenever I see them. They should be at least as difficult to kill as a Flash.
Useless pieces of equipment unless you can get 3 engies to deploy them around a LA prone sundie.. then you get to watch them skeet shoot.
LOL. Nice video I got it directly at release and have been using it since, but haven't auraxiumed it yet. I myself have complained about it, but now I re-evaluate some of those views. https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/rethinking-the-engineer-turrets.210344/ My view shifted somewhat from my original impression. At first I thought it was totally useless. Then I learned that one has to use it properly to make it somewhat efficient. It is notoriously bad at shooting enemies that move sideways, hence in buildings it should be placed so that it will have a direct line of fire if possible. Also it should never be possible for enemies to take shots at it from a safe distance/angle. Importantly, it is not meant to be abandoned. You more or less have to babysit it, but it can cover your back. Also, it can be surprisingly efficient in groups! I've seen players farm bases like subterranian nanite analysis on amerish with 5+ turrets i the lower level (that base needs two additional capture points on the surface, or a SCU on the surface, or another major edit, but that is a different story). What would I change? A buffed variant that is more accurate/has more HP would probably be OP, unless: one option would be to make engineers give up their primary weapon when using the auto-turret (similar to stalker infiltrators), should the turret ever get buffed. That way they could still be mobile and repair MAXes etc, but be restricted to their secondary to dish out more damage. Most of all the limitation that one cannot re-deploy it. The MANA turrets still give cover when unmanned, but using the Spitfire as cover is a waste. I'd be fine if there was maybe a ~30s countdown on it, enabling you to replace/relocate it every now and then, but now allowing you to spam it. This per se, would be a buff already. Alternatively maybe a nanite tool dependent setup, wreckage repair or decommissioning could be conceivable (cf. older post). A cert line would be nice for the Spitfire, too.
