[Suggestion] Boris overhaul idea

At first blush, I kinda like it...I don't relish the idea of removing the turret because everyone is upset about it. There has been turrets in other titles without all of this chaos. The issue is him taking a decade to T1, so maybe? Requires some consideration.

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@UP_Hawxxeye wrote:

As the discussion on the topic https://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Discussion/Boris-turret-is-useless/td-p/11858553 shows,  Boris is a very unlikely choice for a specialist after his turret was nerfed a couple of times.

His kit is the turret and a passive that empowers the turret when he is near it. So everything special about him is built around his turret with zero reasons to use him for other things.

As a sizable portion of vocal players has argued, automated turrets are not a nice thing to have in a BF games. In the past I was suggesting that that it could be changed into a manual turret, but then came Crawford with his own manual turret so there is an overlap.

So I came up with a different idea this time: He can become the engineer equivalent of Falke by having instead of a turret a gadget that repairs vehicles from a distance with limited ammo like the syrrette pistol !

Gadget:

Nanomachine pistol: Fires bullets that release nanomachines that can slightly repair a vehicle/trigger its automatic regeneration (Nano-machines Son!)

For the passive he could get something similar to what I saw for some subclass in BF1 (I think?)

Passive ability:

Expert Gunner: Reduced overheat time (or longer to reach the overheat) when operating any Passenger seat weapons.   (this would highlight his utility as the buddy for a vehicle pilot.)

How does that sound like ladies and gentlemen? It seems to both give Boris an actual use while pleasing the anti-autonomous-killing-robots faction. Or have I once again accidentally predicted the kit meant for a future unreleased specialist?

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I think the word useless is being used to harshly.   That being said, these are good ideas.

Playing devil's advocate for sake of discussion.

Giving specialists vehicle 'buffing' abilities is tricky.  None of the current specialists currently offer any sort of vehicle buffing ability*.  So you can be certain if a specialist offers some sort of vehicle buff all the vehicle mains will use that specialists.  The buff provided by the specialist now becomes a sort of global buff for all vehicles.

I can see a few metas developing for a deployable repair station.

• AA Tankers - These guys are generally stationary most of the game anyway.  The driver would get to their campground, hop out, deploy the drone, hop back in.  The extra repairs might make these guys tough to kill.  
• Tankers - Similar to the AA tankers I can see the more passive/defensive tankers plopping a repair station near their campground.  Take a few hits, then retreat back to safety for an accelerated repair and then back into the action.  Tankers playing aggressively would be at a disadvantage if they ever come across another campy tanker supported by a repair station.  I think Battlefield plays better when aggressive tanker play is encouraged. 
• Fast Armor (Bolte/EBLC-RAM) - These players generally rely on hit and run.  They could plop a repair station down somewhere along their 'recovery' lap route to shorten the time spent away from the action
• Heli's  - Although I understand there's problems landing Heli's at the moment I could see a similar tactic as the fast armor.  Pilots could deploy the repair station in some remote location or on top of a building.  Make this part of their recovery lap for extra fast heals.

I guess the obvious solution to those problems is to have the repair drone de-spawn once the owner enters a vehicle.  But if that's the case would anyone give up their gadget to help a campy armor player?

Another thing to consider is how stacking repair stations would work.  If an AA tank had 2-3 repair stations nearby could they out heal the DPS from an attack heli?

Also Transports/Heli Gunners - If someone intends on spawning into a transport or heli gunner seat choosing Boris with his newly added gunner buff would be a no brainer.  I suspect most vehicle gunners would be Bori which results in a sort of global buff to vehicle gunners. Transport gunners have seen a lot of nerfs lately - are we ready to see them indirectly buffed by a specialist ability?

*Irish's sentinel seems like it'd offer a good synergy for campy armor players, but I've never seen it used in practice so I'm guessing it's not that great in that application.

@ATFGunr 

Yup, good times harassing them helicopter mains 😁

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@AngrySquid270 wrote:

Playing devil's advocate for sake of discussion.

Giving specialists vehicle 'buffing' abilities is tricky.  None of the current specialists currently offer any sort of vehicle buffing ability*.  So you can be certain if a specialist offers some sort of vehicle buff all the vehicle mains will use that specialists.  The buff provided by the specialist now becomes a sort of global buff for all vehicles.

I can see a few metas developing for a deployable repair station.

• AA Tankers - These guys are generally stationary most of the game anyway.  The driver would get to their campground, hop out, deploy the drone, hop back in.  The extra repairs might make these guys tough to kill.  
• Tankers - Similar to the AA tankers I can see the more passive/defensive tankers plopping a repair station near their campground.  Take a few hits, then retreat back to safety for an accelerated repair and then back into the action.  Tankers playing aggressively would be at a disadvantage if they ever come across another campy tanker supported by a repair station.  I think Battlefield plays better when aggressive tanker play is encouraged. 
• Fast Armor (Bolte/EBLC-RAM) - These players generally rely on hit and run.  They could plop a repair station down somewhere along their 'recovery' lap route to shorten the time spent away from the action
• Heli's  - Although I understand there's problems landing Heli's at the moment I could see a similar tactic as the fast armor.  Pilots could deploy the repair station in some remote location or on top of a building.  Make this part of their recovery lap for extra fast heals.

I guess the obvious solution to those problems is to have the repair drone de-spawn once the owner enters a vehicle.  But if that's the case would anyone give up their gadget to help a campy armor player?

Another thing to consider is how stacking repair stations would work.  If an AA tank had 2-3 repair stations nearby could they out heal the DPS from an attack heli?

Also Transports/Heli Gunners - If someone intends on spawning into a transport or heli gunner seat choosing Boris with his newly added gunner buff would be a no brainer.  I suspect most vehicle gunners would be Bori which results in a sort of global buff to vehicle gunners. Transport gunners have seen a lot of nerfs lately - are we ready to see them indirectly buffed by a specialist ability?

*Irish's sentinel seems like it'd offer a good synergy for campy armor players, but I've never seen it used in practice so I'm guessing it's not that great in that application.

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Irish sentinels are awesome since they introduced the EB-RAM, they ended up fixing them into reacting to many more projectiles including liz missiles.

I have seen rush servers where a parked Wildcat with a couple of sentinels is practically impervious to any explosives infantry can throw at it. One either has to snipe the sentinels, use tank shells or to dive bomb with AGMs (they go so fast that they have done the damage by the time the sentinel destroys them).

@Tank2042Mantechnically it does but they either fly so fast that the damage still happens or that pilot was able to use a window of opportunity by releasing the missiles very close up.
For example in that case my screen was like :
Projectile destroyed
Projectile destroyed
You are dead.

This used to also be an issue with recoiless rockets due to their speed but somehow they fixed those when they introdued the EBL-RAM's active protection which apparently made them update the active protection coding for the Irish APS system.

But now  lets close that  diversion (I will make another thread for it) and focus on promoting Boris from a comedic relief with a beeping distraction gadget into an Engineer extraordinaire