About The Usefulness Of Helios

[Huryiade]

I recently acquired a Helios (before U13), so i leveled him up hurriedly thinking how easier it would be for me to fill the codex without having to actually stop, become a still target for enemies, and waste time scanning myself the enemy type i haven't finished scanning. But there are some obvious problems with it. I put it on the account of this being a beta, but i'd still like to point out some of the bad things i found with this, and some possible bugs. Also, i place the Investigator skill in the first skill slot, so it should take precedence over all other skills.

 

1) The investigator range : as far as i've seen, Helios seem to not scan beyond 10 meters or so, sometimes it's even 5 meters. Seeing that with the scanner we have a bit more reach, why would a scanning sentinel to have the same reach? The short range makes it piratically impossible to scan anything since most of the enemies are dead long before they come that close, or we get that close to them. This eliminates automatically most of the usefulness a scanning sentinel would have had.

 

2) The speed of scans : it's slow, as slow as the manual scanner, maybe even slower. In the mission i did right before writing this, i would usually need to be less than 5 meters near a target, and wait for 5 seconds before it would decide to scan it. Seeing that it was a survival mission, an enemy staying alive for 5 seconds happens only right before the team decides to evacuate. It's hard to scan anything if we're not doing a stealthy approach. In that last mission we stayed for over 40 minutes, and out of the 100s of Anti-moas we killed, i saw Helios scan only around 10. That's a pretty low ratio for a scanning sentinel in my opinion.

 

3) The bug : as i said, i saw it scan around 10 anti-moas, When i went in the codex to see how much scans i had left to do, i was surprised to see that only 1 (yes O.N.E.) scan was accepted/counted. I went to the inventory and saw that around 20 scanning modules were used (Helios scanned some snipers too). So how the heck did it count only 1?

 

All in all, Helios is too bothersome and pretty much useless to be used at the moment. It's much faster for a player to manually scan their targets than try to get close enough to their targets before they are killed, either by Helios or other players (ever tried to scan Rollers or some of the rare crawlers before they're killed? even worse with Helios).

 

Is it possible to actually make it worth our time and resources to craft and use a Helios?

Edited May 4, 2014 by Huryiade

[Groovylicious]

they need to rework it. the most expensive sentinel and so useless ....

[AveryJ]

300 oxium thinking i could get my completionist fix and instead its all been wasted. I'm so glad i didnt pay for the stupid thing.  i cant even use it as a paperweight because it freaking floats -_-

[djldot]

I agree, my codex was small before I got it, it hasnt got much bigger and, I took it on a survival mission, like you said no scans

[NitroMidgets]

It is pure garbage. I made the mistake of getting it. Used it a couple of missions before realizing it was garbage. I immediately switched back to Hoover Vac Sentinel. I haven't used Helios since then and no intentions to until it finally gets fixed. If I could sell the damn thing, I would. Assuming I could find a buyer.

[Himpapawid]

They should make Investigator scans instant at max rank, or something. Waiting for Helios to scan an enemy before I can kill it isn't good. I don't care if it scans completed codex entries again, that's the price of automating and speeding up the process of scanning, I guess. It could be a pro v con of scanning things yourself, or letting an AI scan for you. Codex ammo isn't that expensive anyway.