Guild Wars 2

please bear with me since this is quite a wall of text, i did try to touch base on the main problems with turrets (bugs aside) and add a viable means to potentially making turrets a viable option, im not going to go to in depth about exact changes rather a more mechanic change that will make them more viable in a better array of situations

if you bring turrets to a power fight your turrets cannot survive more then a few attacks and with the lengthy cool-downs renders them useless, if you bring them to a condition fight they may have the potential to deal more damage but the damage output is very low even if you consider what the sustained damage is, bomb kit alone can bring more to a fight then all turrets combined (besides healing turret) and is only limited by cool-downs where as turrets not only have lengthy cool-downs also have range and mobility factors as well as surviving factors to how well they can be utilized, in fact every kit does in some way bring more to a fight then any combination of turrets.

The best defense is a good offense, this is as simple as forcing your opponent to use healing/buffs skills, dodging attacks and simply trying to avoid damage in order to recover instead of actually attacking, the problem is forcing some body into this position requires the ability to burst.

As of right now you can add burst potential to turrets but that requires taking gear and traits that lacks defensive options and it also requires you to sacrifice your turrets, doing this makes the engineer very vulnerable and takes away from what it means to use turrets, and there are much more optimal builds if you want to deal burst damage, so we need a way to deal burst damage threw the use of turrets, and a way that keeps the idea of turrets which is point defense with out making them to overpowered at it, a simple option is to change the overcharge functions so they work more like a fast barrage rather then a duration of time where the default attack is improved, for example the rifle turret currently in over charge inflicts 1 stack of vulnerability and shoots 2x as fast for 10 seconds and the alternative could be shoots 10 rounds in 2 seconds, with out a change to the cool down you now know your rifle turret will deal an impressive amount of damage within a short time frame when you want it to while also applying a light amount of sustained damage between bursts.

Adding a burst function to turrets rather then the current lackluster overcharge mode is imo the quickest way to make them a viable option, if you are fighting someone rocking a berzerker build your turrets have the potential to burst them down forcing them to retreat and the current traits that improve the defensive capability’s will have more potential to be better utilized while the opponent is in retreat mode, if we face someone who has more bunker the sustain from turrets will achieve much more potential damage by being able to not only apply constant sustained damage but potentially break tanks with a burst function, its balanced because it has the potential for great damage but cannot chase an enemy down, they also cannot be relocated quickly.

It also adds more defense to fighting conditions, a full turret engineer has very low condition removal 2 every 15 seconds, being able to force a condition users onto the back foot or retreat mode gives the engineer breathing room when he needs it, dropping a turret and bursting it once before its destroyed makes it damage potential more effective for the short term situations as well, you drop your turret and it does its burst, deals some good damage and then is destroyed in the middle of combat knocking back people in an aoe further hampering recovery from said burst, in team fights you would be able to put them at the back of a fight creating defensive line that would be able to punish anyone who dosent take precautions as well as giving team mates a great area to fall back and recover

okay well i think ive gone in depth enough on it, if you did manage to read the whole thing good on ya and hope you like my idea for improving turrets, and i do realize that turrets are in need of alot of fixes but i don’t think that fixing there current bugs are the best way to make them truly viable.

tl;dr

make turrets scale with us and crit > issues fixed > turrets viable.

Fixing Turret bugs might not make them truly viable, but it would be amazing to not have to worry about which of more than two dozen bugs might apply to any given Turret build, and having them function properly should be a priority, I think.

Now that I’ve said that:

I disagree with making Turrets crit-capable – or at the very least allowing their Critical Chance to scale with their user, though I’m definitely a supporter of allowing Turrets to scale with their users in just about every other respect.

Here’s why: Any given Engineer can have up to three damaging Turrets, two of which (Flame, Thumper) AoE on every attack, and that’s just on their Utility bar.
Drop Supply Crate? Now there’s another pair of Turrets, if you trait for it.
Even if you don’t, and let’s say Supply Crate Turrets couldn’t crit anyway for the purposes of this, if Turrets could crit, that would mean a full-Turret Engineer would have four potential sources of critical damage.

Berserker gear, I feel I should point out, is already the subject of several threads on these boards. I don’t think any other profession can crit from four distinct sources of damage at once, though I could be wrong – feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken.

If Turret critical chance could scale along with the user, either Turret base stats would be nerfed into the dirt, the scaling would be so lackluster as to be pointless, or Turrets would end up being nerfed into the dirt immediately after somebody decided to try ’zerkTurrets.

turrets and pets critical should be related to the used pet and not to the master regardless of master build. However power should scale with master power the same condition damage does. Scaling power would fix all pet dpsing issue and make prety much all pet build viable for hybrid control/damage specialisation.

Power scaling could be implemented as a grandmaster trait to pet traitline for instance

Ranger beastmastery 30 = Of fang and claw – pet power is increased by 50% of the ranger power

Enginer Invention 30 = Balistic – turret power is increased by 50% of the Enginer power (or condition damage someone would prefer it that way)

Necromancer Death magic 30 = Might of the grave – Minion power is increased by 50% of the necromancer power