The day has come when traps are no longer the objects of fear but the objects of constant pursuit. When I first heard about trap extractor, I thought to myself, "How is it like to be a trapper?" And now, I got to try it out.
While breezing through the Materials, I got a really good start. I was able to find several hacking suites from operators and got a schematic for trap extractor from manual hacking one of the terminals (rating 2 item is really easy to get). Later in the first Factory floor, I was able to fabricate an extractor while obtaining a datajack. And from then on, that's where I went crazy with traps. Here are some of my thoughts about trapper.
Pros & Cons:Traps are little interesting pieces of weapon that come in a variety of effects such as explosion, alarm, stasis, etc. One of the benefits of using them is to weaken or even obliterate the enemies before they can get to shoot at you. This is especially effective if you're armed with guided weapon which you can lure them to a choke point filled with traps. One time, I was able to completely annihilate a Behemoth without a single scratch. That was pretty awesome.
However, using traps come with a lot of negatives. First, they're one-time use in limited quantity, so it's easy to have too much fun with them.
Thus, it's practically impossible to use them as your primary weapon.
Secondly, they take up a lot of storage spaces. Everytime I find a fresh pile of traps, I constantly thought to myself, "What should I drop?"
Because I sacrificed a lot of combat items in favor of traps, I'm very weak at actual fighting. I had to use stealth items such as sensor array to avoid as many enemies as possible. But if you're caught in a big fight, you're in a lot of trouble.
Trap Review:Blade and Segregator Traps are definitely my favorite. One time, I got caught by a group of 2 grunts and a duelist. I ran into a room and quickly placed down 3 blade traps near the doorway. The first grunt went in, his weapon got cut off. The second grunt went in, his weapon also got cut off! And finally the duelist went in, his weapon didn't get cut off, but his legs did! So then, I safely got rid of it at a distance.
Segregator traps are especially useful against prototype enemies since you'll get to have some of their awesome parts! I didn't get to try that out in a full extent (I was getting ganged up by too many enemies), but it's so satisfying when that happened!
Explosive traps are deadly, but they have surprisingly little use! They can't be triggered together or else they'll destroy each other. They also blow off walls so they'll get rid of your defense.
On the other hand, EM bomb traps are much more helpful! They can be chained together to set off a great firework, and they don't destroy walls! Their EM damage also increase corruption, making it easy to terminate enemies with additional EM attacks.
Shock and EM Surge traps purely increase corruption but by a large amount. Shock traps increase by 50-80%, but EM Surge increase from 80-120%. Robots get terminated when they reach 100% corruption, so EM Surge has 50% chance to outright kill in one shot! Even better, those who are weak to EM (e.g. Hunters) are guaranteed to die, but those who are resilient (e.g. Programmers) have less effect.
Stasis traps are generally not very useful to me, but they're great against melee attackers. They tend to get out of stasis in several turns, so be sure to get rid of them quickly. But what's awesome about stasis traps is that they can be reused multiple times! If you dispatched the enemy before it escapes from stasis, the trap stays on the ground! You can then equip a trap extractor and get it back into your inventory again! (How cool is that?!)
Chute traps are definitely the most fun. Do you see a marching Sentry? Now you don't.
Unfortunately, being an OP trap means you can't extract it at all (since it's connected to a branch area), but it's good to setup an escape route.
Other traps such as alarm and ambush traps cause no positive effects for you and can't be extracted, so don't bother reprogramming them unless you want to cross the road to get to the other side. (Hehe!)
I do wish alarm traps can signal an alarm signal to you after an enemy steps on it. Does it communicate wirelessly (since you can transmission jam it)? If so, it would be great to give it some use.
Ambush traps would be too powerful if they convert all underground army into allies, but why not give a small percentage to convert some of them? That would be cool and probably not overpowering. Quite understandable that they can't be extracted.
Overall, I've been having a lot of fun! Not a good build for serious play (too much pressure in item management and tricky combat), but if you're looking for something new, give it a shot!
