Guild Wars 2

When I take a turret, I’m sacrificing a skill slot that can do one of three very important things to me:

1. Remove conditions
2. Stun breaks
3. Kits. Enough said

Turrets can’t move, picking them up only reduces their cooldown by 25%, they attack anything within range thus drawing aggro, and they can’t simply be detonated and redeployed ASAP in the middle of a fight to prevent loss of utility/damage.

Just exactly what role are turrets supposed to fill in PvE?

Their only use is control in pve, except the rifle turret which shines in Static discharge builds.

But they are nowhere near as useful as other skills, they are static which means you can’t easily use them while leveling, except in certain events, and they have a long cooldown, which keeps them from being able to be repositioned quickly.

Suggestion: Make picking up a turret only cause a 5-10 second cool down. Re-work healing turret into something akin to HoT for the engineer when deployed, so there is a reason to keep it down, rather than immediate drop, cleanse, and detonate. Increase damage on the direct damage turrets or let them have their damage scale with the engineer’s (even just giving them crit and crit damage based on engy would work). Increase their base health slightly, so they don’t die to accidental aoe, or don’t so that engineers will have to learn good positioning.

I know many engineers came into the class hoping turrets could be a build in and of itself, and were severely disappointed with the way they were implemented (heck, they still don’t attack some world bosses). They shouldn’t be overpowered killing machines, but let them be something on their own.

Turrets are actually quite useful, if you know what to do with them. If you just throw a bunch of turrets for utilities, you aren’t doing it right.

In particular, turrets are blast finishers. When pulling a group, laying down a fire field then detonating the turret stacks might and does quite a bit of damage. This can also give additional bursts of heals, weakness, stealth, and retaliation from engi fields alone. This is an added utility that goes with nearly any turret, but this is only useful if your build has combo fields.

Healing turret: Condi cleanse, water field, AoE heal, blast finisher, short recharge. It is an awesome in-game heal.

Rifle turret: This turret is useful with static discharge, since it is a useful projectile with a short cooldown and a no activation time. This also has the shortest cooldown on turrets itself, making it an excellent blast finisher.

Flame turret: This turret does 3 things: #1: it is a fire field on tooltip with a very solid burn duration. #2: It is a smoke field on activation, and also works as a secondary blind field for engis. #3: the turret itself inflicts a near permanent cone burn, making it an excellent source of condition damage.

Net Turret: This turret is great against bosses that are deadly in melee (such as the Mossman). It has arguably the best immobilization stacking in the game, and also stuns in a pinch.

Rocket Turret: This turret is best for PVP, since it lacks the specialization that all of the other turrets have. Regardless, it is the second highest damaging turret outside of flame turret, and also has excellent range to do so, so if you have an empty utility (not sure how that can happen with an engi), and want to do more damage, you can throw this 1200 units back and let it snipe enemies.

Thumper Turret: This turret is deceptively strong, in that it is the only turret that is actually 3 blast finishers in one. Though it is probably wiser to keep rumble for its stun break than to use it for a third blast, but that option is always available. The high health of the turret makes it less likely to be destroyed before firing off its effects, which can actually be a problem for other turrets on occasion.

There is no point to turrets in PvE.

Rifle is used not because of the turret itself, but because of its toolbelt skill which works very well with a S/D build.
Healing turret isn’t even used as a turret, but more as a quick heal bomb.
Flame turret is inferior to bomb kit which does the same, but much better.
Rocket turret has way to long of a cooldown to be viable in pve.
Thumper turret, again too long of a cooldown. Toolbelt skill only used for stacking stealth.
Net turret is the only turret that can actually be used as a turret. Even then, it’s pure control.
Mortar is much worse than supply crate, especially with turret hitboxes fixed. Only time it really shined for me was during the marionette event and that was for it’s #4.

Untraited, they’re bad. Traited they’re still bad.

The main problem with turrets is that they’re better in doing anything other than being turrets.
People use them as blast finishers – putting them down just to destroy them a second later – or for their toolbelt.
But not for their supposed use as turrets. Because they’re usually terrible in doing that.

Manuhell.2759:

The main problem with turrets is that they’re better in doing anything other than being turrets.
People use them as blast finishers – putting them down just to destroy them a second later – or for their toolbelt.
But not for their supposed use as turrets. Because they’re usually terrible in doing that.

That’s exactly what I’ve been doing when I experimented with adding turrets to my builds.

Turrets attack anything within range and draw too much aggro. By default they should target your target and attack only when you’re attacking.

For me, combat encounters rarely go past 45 seconds and the time between combat encounters rarely go past 15 seconds. Assuming I bring a rifle turret and healing turret, I’d technically have two turrets ready between combat encounters. However, if I brought a net, flame, thumper, or rocket turret, I’d have one or two other slots out of commision because their non-pickup cooldowns are over 20 seconds.