No Techmarines? Standard Devastator Marines being blessed enough by the Machine God to conduct repairs? Heresy.
I like the allied repair vehicle, frankly. It encourages tanks to return to a centralized caravan for resupply rather than perpetually sustaining themselves on the frontline via exp-farming pubs, and it provides a target for coordinated troops who want to disrupt the sustainability of the entire vehicle line. If there's one thing vehicle combat really needs, it's attrition, and PS2 always drove me nuts with how little tank damage meant due to the sheer number of random engineer pubs hiding behind the frontlines ready to repair all damage. I'm fine with vehicles repairing and sustaining a armored frontline, as long as there's some kind of "mission" I or my team can undertake to disrupt it, the same way targeting the enemy medic works in squad vs. squad, or sabotaging a supply line in world-scale metagame. It provides direction and unison to the entire battle, both on the offense and the defense. Getting an elite tankbuster squad to take out that techmarine repair rhino via deep strike is an objective. Simply saying "try and gather enough troops that we can overwhelm their repairs" is not. If we must have engineers, I'd like them to have some kind of requisitioned limit to their repairing ability, so that we could at least try and backhandedly attack the issue by sabotaging mobile troop transports or something. Otherwise we'll just have these PS2-style massive, self-repairing, indestructible armor zergs that cannot be worn down by damage attrition, and it will suck giant squig bullocks.
Prehaps a cooldown of repair abillity and some form of vehicle Disablement i.e. unable to move or completely disabled for the duration of the repair.
Devastators with repair abilities would be very problematic, especially as a group of them could easily use a vehicle as one big moving piece of cover will happily firing away. (Fish of Fury, anyone?) I think a dedicated support class with more limited firepower would do a better job. As for the vehicles themselves, I suggest that repairing them requires some time (that is, "Repair" would be a channeled ability that would restore XY health to the vehicle but also immobilize it). If the vehicle takes damage while under repair, the process is aborted. If this too works out to make vehicles all-to invincible, I suggest any attacks on a vehicle that is being repaired should deal extra damage, giving players a very good incentive not to try and repair their vehicle while enemies are nearby. Should we see a component damage system for vehicles, I also hope that it will be possible to permanently disable the weapons of vehicles, eventually turning them into overpriced and possibly very slow transports.
That could work but would the repair be able to start up straight after it was cancelled or would there be a cooldown.
I suppose a brief cooldown wouldn't be bad, but nothing more than a few seconds. Decidely longer than it takes to reload a lascannon or a rocket launcher, though.
This should balance repair in the feild well, just for clarifaction would repair be cancelled from any damage or would have to be above a set number of damage\ health points.
It would be cancelled from any damage. It is surprisingly difficult to repair stuff when there's bullets left and right hitting you and the vehicle, and the gameplay mechanic should reflect that.
Yes but if a bolter is shooting a tank that takes minimal damage from it and stops the repair this could cause rage in the Techmarines. (Or other race examples)
The entire idea is that you should only repair vehicles if you know that no-ones going to shoot you. Think about it, would you jump out of your tank and start hammering away at it while you know that there's some goon around that wants to tear you a new one?
