What's the use case for Lucifer?

I've been struggling to see a use case for building Lucifer rather than Cerberus.

First, looking at the pros and cons of Cerberus vs Lucifer

• Pro: 50% greater range (>2x area covered)
• Pro: AoE
• Pro: Can be buried for defence

• Con: Half the single target DPS
• Con: Slightly more expensive
• Con: Less accurate
• Con: A bit more fragile

Seems ok, right?
But when would you want what Lucifer offers?

The roles a heavy turret can take are

• Stopping assaults by:
• Light units
• A mid weight army
• Heavy units
• Shieldballs
• Pushing the enemy back
• Taking out high value targets

So how do Cerberus and Lucifer do?

In practice the AoE and extra range mean that a Cerberus will do more damage to assaulting medium weight units than a Lucifer. This gets even more lopsided when considering that both will mostly be firing at radar dots, with a Cerberus doing 3x or more damage.

Even a group of 6 Minotaurs takes about 50% more damage from a Cerberus.

What about heavy units? Well, for striders, scorps and ultis are cloaked, merlin outranges the Lucifer(!), Funnelweb is a joke, Paladin is too tough to snipe and can just move in and out of range, repairing at will (in fact, due to greater range difference the Cerb will do much more damage). So it's just Detriment and Dante amongst the striders where Lucifer might make a difference (and against a Detriment not even that much of one due to only having 400 elmo more range than the Obliteration Blaster, not that a few Lucifers will do anything to a detri anyway...). What about Demistriders? Well, monospamming Grizzlies take more damage from a Cerberus (and their escorts take MUCH more damage), so it's basically Cyclops and Jugglenaught that it might work better against (and given Cyclops has terrible DPS and Juggles can't attack turrets, neither are something you need a heavy turret for).

Against shieldballs you'd think the higher DPS of the Lucifer would make a big difference, but in practice the greater range and mild shield penetrating properties of the Cerberus makes it the better choice against almost all shieldball compositions. Particularly as, once the shield is penetrated, the Cerberus AoE is devastating.

And for area denial something with greater range and able to hit radar dots (or even be blind fired) is MUCH better.

For sniping there are three circumstances to consider, units in vision, units as radar dots and buildings:

• Radar dots are a clear win for Cerberus.
• Buildings don't move, so the longer range of the Cerberus makes it the better option (you're very unlikely to see a missile silo or fusion in Lucifer range, but you'll occasionally see one in Cerberus range).
• Units in visual range are better sniped by the Lucifer, but how many can actually be efficiently killed by it? Lances, Impalers and Emissaries are taken care of just fine by the AoE (and indeed, a Cerebrus shot can kill several). Merlins outrange a Lucifer (and, notably, NOT a Cerberus!). The only good snipe target is a commander, but these will rarely be alive, exposed and unupgraded by the time a Lucifer could be built.

So Lucifer has a couple of use cases then?

Sniping commanders and killing Jugglenaughts are somewhat niche, but why would you build a Lucifer for that? The Lance is superior to it for anything you could want!
With greater burst per cost, cloakability and the ability to move in and out of range a pair of lances are better than a Lucifer in every conceivable circumstance (this isn't strictly true, a buried tremor or snipers on a fixed front would make the Lucifer better than a Lance, but in those cases the Cerberus is far superior to the Lucifer).

Isn't the Lucifer's extra hp a factor?

Not really, if a bunch of ravagers get close enough to target it it's probably dead either way and both take 2 tac missiles to kill, while fragile arti struggles to approach a Cerberus.

So what could be done?

Making Lucifer cheaper or longer ranged would worsen the WW1 feel of a lobsterpot, so I'd instead up the damage per shot to 8000 (this requires a change in beam appearance though, can't have two identical weapon visuals with one dealing 2x of the other), making it lethal to demistriders.

An increase in fire rate is another alternative, though one that does slightly increase the trench warfare.

quote: Funnelweb is a joke

A jaded and cynical one.

cerb /ffa/team/bot/chicken
deso /ffa/chicken
luci /

lucifer can close up which is nice.. and i like to raise them a bit.. umm yeah they dont really seem that good. they are sort of like blastwings only completely different.. yknow cool but meh

but they can 1 hit ulti and stuff better then cerb

i kinda like to make 1 and close it to soak tac nukes and arty =P

cerb is op .. good unless they spam shields

des is op .. sooo goood in a bottle-neck unless they have arty.. they always have arty =P

luci is hard to make cost but does do well vs crabs and griz and.. well probably allot of heavies that would normally retreat once damaged but can sometimes get 1-2 hit KO

Yes, I think it could be buffed. Would doubling the damage make it too powerful though? Would 8000 damage in such a short time feel too annoying if you're the target?

How about also upping the reload time by at least 3 seconds?

I'm generally voting against buffing static defense because they're reasonably easy for experienced players to take out (especially with shockly or just silo in general) so it wouldn't make a difference, or because they're extremely hard to handle for less experienced players. How many games have you witnessed where two new players are porc'ed up and can't breach each other?

Making towers in general even more powerful means that you either get tower pushed early game and don't know how to counter it, or late game heavy porc creates an impassable wall that players send lone striders against and watch get decimated as more and more towers and shields are stacked.

Making towers even more powerful reinforces porc play, and porc play is boring to me.

I think luci serves the purpose of potentially taking out mobile artil that is visible (countered with terraforming, cloaking or jamming) and that doesn't have merlin level range. It also does decent, step out of my zone damage to striders. That's good enough a niche for me. Making it any better decreases the number of viable units or strategies in mid/late game.

The only scenario I would agree to that involves buffing lucifer with more damage and/or range would be that its auto fire gun is replaced by a manual activation skill.

Galamesh : As I mention in my post, it's worse against arti than a Cerberus and only striders the damage is relevant against are Dantes and Detriments.

Low level games are just fundamentally broken right now, with each side refusing to do a simple attack-move with arti. Even a 2x damage Lucifer wouldn't really change things there (striders just can't face off against heavy porc at close range right now, not enough damage and range).

quote: only striders the damage is relevant against are Dantes and Detriments

I do not understand that statement. Do you mean dets or palas? Scorps? Because if you consider the damage to be relevant vs dets, it should be relevant against pretty much any strider or demistrider.

It fights krow much better than cerb.

why have an imoobile lance for 1k more damage? and more than double the cost? its pretty useless if you ask me.

a raised ddm or 2x lances is so much better