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Buff Hammer

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Spud Nick:
Those poor buff engineers. They never get to see the sun rise or watch the birds fly by.

Thomas:
Engines: 3 seconds to buff, lasts 2 minutes
Guns: 6 seconds to buff, lasts 20 seconds
Hull: 10 seconds to buff, lasts 2 minutes
Balloon: 7 seconds to buff, lasts 90 seconds


This time is usually just about doubled, as players like to buff and prebuff components, effectively doubling the duration of the buff and allowing them more time to focus on other things in the middle of an engagement. Depending on the skill level and loadouts, engagements don't last all that long. And the time it takes it buff something often works well the cooldown of repair. You repair something, give it a few buff smacks and head out to something else that needs attention (depending on the level of damage you're sustaining).


Spanner: 40 HP, 2 seconds (5 rebuild)
Pipe Wrench: 120 HP, 5 seconds (4 rebuild)
Mallet: 250 HP, 9 seconds (2 rebuild)

That's about 20 HP/s, 24 HP/s, and 27.8 HP/s respectively.

When taking a buff hammer, you're either giving up the ability to put out fires, or giving up the ability to both rebuild and repair as quickly. However, all the tools for rebuild, repair, and fire already have their individual pro's and cons. By taking the pipe wrench, fire ext, and buff kit; you can still rebuild and repair and put out fires while still being able to buff. If someone is great with chem spray, or the enemy isn't fire intense, you can opt out of the fire ext and bring spanner, mallet, buff. Essentially you're sacrificing very little, or nothing at all. (the pipe wrench takes roughly 1 second longer than a spanner to rebuild most broken components (and about half a second for things that rebuild fast).


I suppose a tool you can compare it with is the chem spray, since that takes a lot more upkeep and is only good at prevention. It can still put out fires, but much less than the fire ext. The buff hammer just adds a buff, there's no downside to it. Increasing your armor, weapon power, balloon lift, or engine output doesn't balance out with anything. Take a look at charged ammo that increases the damage but drastically reduces the dps and only slightly increases the damage overall (depends on the gun really). The ammo, like the other engineer tools, sacrifices something to improve something else; where the buff hammer doesn't do that.

I think my suggestions are in order. This also lets a buff engineer choose what to buff better, instead of giving a huge + to everything. Do you want to turn faster, or go forward faster? You can get both, but the overall effect would be a little less. If you make your ship tankier, you won't be as agile. If you improve your up and down speeds, you give up some of your horizontal mobility. And of course I don't think the buff should increase gun damage, but increasing the gun HP (or damage if left unchanged) makes the gun harder to move about.

Crafeksterty:
Then the issue is not the buff hammer, but rather the wrench. Choosing the buff hammer, something that cannot help, at all, only enhance is a sacrafice a person makes when trading off something that helps. There is a reason why you have Incindiary ammo, as well as fire chances on weapons not much expected to make fire.

Not only that, the new buff suggestion is complicated and goes against itself. Your natural order with the buff tool is to make things better, so with these suggestions, you buff everything. Then all of a sudden you are having these completly different behaviours that, stack and dont stack. In odd ways and well im not sure if the drags are going to stop the power or liftforce that you have. And etc etc.

Right now, its very simple. Buffing offencive enhance the offence, buffing the speed nehances the speed, buffing defence enhances defence, buffing baloon enhances the balooning. Simply choosing the buff hammer is allready at bane. Like i said, it does nothing but enhance, not really help. If you think you are not sacrifing alot because of the wrench is good enough to be replacing spanner and mallet. Then it is the repair tools you have to look at. And many full time engineers just downright prefer spanner mallet buff more than wrench buff ex.

On top of that, you also want gunners to be updated for the better. Right now you simply want engineers to nullify damage% with their buff hammers while what we need is gunners loadout to be fully utilised so that maybe engineers arent the answer. Because, as of now. The pilot has a vaierity of tools that work at best and worst depending on ship choice. The gunner has a vast number of Ammo types that also are at best of worst depending on the Weapon choice.
Now the engineers have 2 basic tools, 2 which are partners of those basic tools. 2 Generaly effective on its own way. Very simple stuff. Add in another tool, and youve just made every engineer hesitate on what to bring. Unlike how pilots and gunners bring their tool for the situation.


The simple number of the simple tools means alot. Allready the buff hammer increases hull rebuild time. As well as how component health changes how they are being rebuilt.

RearAdmiralZill:
Havent read all the long posts yet, but to the OP:

I can't agree that a buff hammer also needs to have downsides. Time was already stated as a downside, but also the fact all that buff and pre-buff is gone once something is disabled. When that happens, you just have wasted time.

I can totally get behind a change to what the buff hammer does to guns.

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