Making Ripleys Relevant Again

[MrMagolor]

Ripleys are completely irrelevant on lavaland, save for the wormhole generator; and they were mostly irrelevant on the asteroid already.

 

Suggestions:

Exosuit-themed lavaland loot(upgraded teleporter from necropolis chests?)

Make lavaland increase Ripley speed like the asteroid did

Ripley Plasma cutter firing faster and/or having AoE/spread

 

If you have any other ideas feel free to post.

[MrMagolor]

Another idea would be to increase the drill's damage to mobs. It's a fuckin HUGE DRILL of course it should do a lot of damage.

[Blaze789]

Ripley that are made by miners roundstart offer only relative safety,  have super weak drill AND you have to wait at least about 10 minutes(usually, robotics make it themselves, without asking, about 20 minutes in shift), to have it made, while without it you'd be halfway done mining basic minerals.

I think Ripleys basic drill should drill 2 tiles deep. Other ripley mining tools definitely deserve buff. Fully upgraded ripley is slower, mines slower, moves slower, does everything worse than miner with RnD tools. Let it have heavy version of current tools. Give it heavy KA, that for example, shoots as fast, as 2 KA, but without their weird shooting speed penalty for double welding. Heavy plasma cutter, that shoots either 2 plasma bolts, or 1, but deeeper bolt. Give it lavaland themed upgrades. At the current state, only ripley use, is for newbies to not die.

[BeanOS]

The Ripley drill does 80 damage each use to creatures, which is double a standard KA shot, while also causing a short Paralyze.
You can use the drill once one full tick, so 2 seconds, so 40dps, which is equivalent to a KA with max cooldown.
The Ripley can take on a single Goliath and as long as they attack at every oppertunity, will survive with about 40-50% integrity remaining, which only goes up as you add Goliath Plates to the Ripley.

In my opinion the Ripley is far more useful now than it used to be, just to chew through the smaller mobs Lava land has to offer.

[MarsMond]

A ripley is nice if you use a crusher as weapon, as it'll be faster to mine with a ripley than the crusher. Fighting is handled out of the mech. In the mech, you can ignore ashstorms and lava (at least as robo-ripley). So in a way, the ripley can function as mobile base, load up a crate to work as slow-access storage.
But yeah, ripleys probably could use more slots/tools. I don't think there necessarily should be loot only usable with ripleys, but shared usability will be good, like goliath plates.
The movespeed and drill cooldown has to be fixed, checks for a pressure under 20 to work as they should be for mining, lavaland has a higher pressure.
As for buffing the drill as weapon, not sure how needed, it should work for watchers, goliaths, and tendrils, even with loot, if you are quick on loading up the crate. But the problem would be anything that has hit and run tactics or fleeing, swarmers or legions need to be clamped, which might be too weak. On the other hand, if ripleys indeed just get turned to mobile bases, might not even be required.

Related to this issue are robo-ripleys, meaning brains directly installed into the mechs, currently, not worth playing. First, you have a hard time even getting to lavaland alone, you are unable to move the shuttle or cycle the airlock, which is the only way out. Asteroid mining outpost had airtight flaps passable with a ripley at least. Then you have the inadequate weaponry, inability to repair yourself, or apply upgrades. No GPS to find out where other miners are, to get repairs and upgrades applied, or big fauna to avoid and not die. Most seem to be solvable by teaming up with a miner, which probably would be held up more, especially given the slow movement speed for the pressure, but there is also the issue that they don't have (working) mesons (might have broken issue, think was able to see space behind walls, otherwise nothing/black. There is no space on lavaland, so fully useless there). So in the end, they'll be less usefull than a Kidan miner without meson implants and active magboots.

[CornMyCob]

3 hours ago, MrMagolor said:

Ripley Plasma cutter firing faster and/or having AoE/spread

They go through 9 tiles of rock, which is 3 more than the advanced plasma cutter.

The fact they don't move fast on lavaland is a bug that will need fixing, they are meant to.

[MrMagolor]

On 6/5/2019 at 3:53 PM, CornMyCob said:

They go through 9 tiles of rock, which is 3 more than the advanced plasma cutter.

The fact they don't move fast on lavaland is a bug that will need fixing, they are meant to.

The issue is that the regular plasma cutter can be stored in a belt slot, and can be infinitely refilled.

A fucking gigantic exosuit plasma cutter ought to feel like one.