u/CouldBeBetterTBH

Having more coverage is always useful no matter the Stratagem, and that goes especially for most maps where the smoke-shells are most likely going to land on uneven terrain and not properly block enemy line of sight.

The majority of the time you're never going to be dropping it on near-perfectly flat ground like in the showcase clip from the Stratagem menu in the Destroyer.

Even after the few buffs they've received over the course of two years the Shield Generator Relays are still one of if not the most underwhelming Stratagems in the Helldiver's arsenal due to the fact that at the end of the day regardless of whatever you or the enemy does they're going to shut themselves down 40 seconds after activation.

It'd be much better if the shield remained up permanently until it's popped by enemy fire while also being able to continuously redeploy after a reasonable delay so long as the Generator at the center remains operational.

All other Emplacement Stratagems remain where they're dropped until they either get destroyed or they run out of ammunition, except for the Grenadier Battlement which also leaves its walls up permanently until destroyed even when all its ammo is used up. There is no game-breaking code/technological reason for the Shield Generator Relay to not operate in the same way and be permanent until the physical equipment is destroyed. And if anyone is worried about dealing with a badly placed Generator nothing is stopping you yourself from destroying them like with any other Emplacement Stratagem, so the only way a Generator will remain in place is if you and the enemy let it.

Also, as you can see in 2nd half of the candid unscripted Difficulty 8 gameplay provided (Player names hidden by teammate request), the Shield Generator Relay doesn't have a wildly expansive HP pool that's going to somehow provide an immortal bastion for players that trivializes enemy projectiles. The shield will go down in the most basic lukewarm firefights and the moment any enemy Heavies start getting involved it'll go down even faster. At the very least though by removing this nonsensical 40 second time-limit limitation it'll become more than a minor inconvenience to the enemy so it'll see more use outside of the most edge-case scenarios imaginable like it does now. For Democracy's sake a GRENADE-GENERATOR is more widely used than the full Relay Emplacement, that makes no sense whatsoever!

Let players actually defend positions with the Shield Generator Relay instead of having them toss it down and think: "You know I probably should have taken literally any other Stratagem instead of this thing..." when it becomes useless after popping a single time or it shuts itself down after a measly 40 seconds even if it hasn't taken any noticeable damage.