Guild Wars 2

I’m going to calculate the maximum immobilization time before and after this change.

Dual Net Turrets before:
6 cumulative seconds of Immobilize within a given 13 second period, within a given 60-second period, dependent on an enemy being A ) within the range of both Turrets and B ) both Net Turrets hitting the enemy.
With the fire rate as it is, that’s 4.6 firing cycles…so, four firing cycles.
4 firing cycles x 6 seconds = 24 seconds.
With absolute focus on Condition Duration, if this build is accurately calculating:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcQQJAqOGRCVQCB9AAAA76zDAAAAAA-jgCBohBkmGgGAM5rIaslgBpIKsVRRTVjIqWlEzcrIa1SBAxuK-e
That’s…let’s go with (3×130%)x8, and keep the decimals just in case they’re applied.
Total is 31.2 seconds of Immobilize within a given period of 60 seconds, with some Cripple thrown in for fun. Again, maximized focus on Condition Duration.

With this change from 3 seconds to 2, the results are:
4×4 = 16 seconds without specializing in CondiDur.
(2×130%)x8 = 20.8 specialized in CondiDur.

tl;dr comparison of maximum Immobilize uptime:
24 before, 16 after, unspecced.
31.2 before, 20.8 after, specced.

I’m not going to say anything about whether this is a good or bad change.
I will say that I didn’t use Net Turret before because I thought it sucked, I’d certainly not use it now that it sucks extra due both to bugs and being nerfed.
But, the numbers are now there for whoever happens to actually have something to say about it.

I wouldn’t say it’s a bad turret, it has its uses (10 second lockdown if you take that and rifle) but from the technical standpoint they shouldn’t add this with what has happened with turret changes in the past. The change to the grandmaster perk 2 months ago or so broke net turret really bad to where there was no point taking it for the 1 shot you got from it and rocket turret tool belt got changed to where it unusable underwater or in any encompassed area from I think 3 months ago or so. Took them 2 weeks to fix that net turret bug which was a pretty big deal and rocket turret still hasn’t gotten an answer to it yet. Lets just say that their track record on balancing turrets just adds more problematic bugs to that list of yours. Unless the good stuff that wasn’t mentioned is the 20 some odd turret bug fixes on top of others, doubtful about that though. It just gets really annoying when a buggy skill set keeps getting “improved” when it still just won’t work. It just going to get harder and harder for them to fix the turrets when new functions/variables are called and changed.

Yeah, I kind of figure Net Turret will end up self-destructing after this change. Or firing two shots for every one. Or maybe it’ll immobilize the user. Something almost always breaks when they start poking at Turrets (in any way, shape, or form), and I don’t know if they’re ever going to try to figure out why.

Penguin.5197:

If anything flamethrower and healing turrets will get hit next at this rate.

I doubt they will because the healing turret his a really high skill ceiling for a heal skill and heals for a relatively reasonable amount so it isn’t exploited…

…and nobody uses flame turret.

Also sorry I haven’t updated the bug list yet everyone, I’ll try to get around to it today.

If they reduce the duration of net turret immobilize to 2sec, they should consider to drop the firerate to 10sec to make it on par with the Warrior Bola and the Leg Specialist trait wich have both a 1/5 immobilisation uptime. This way Net Turret shall have a 1/5 immobilize uptime to and it will all be fair.

I don’t see why our turret should be nerfed if the Warrior can do even better when it comes to pinning down targets.

Well considering that Engineer evolved from Ritualist(gw) why not give an effect triggering when Engineer is near turret just like Ritualist when standing close to the spirit.

For those that dont know, Ritualist have immobile spirits that work like turrets, which have various type of attacks or other suportive abilitis , many Ritualist skills have an secondary effect that only work when spirit is close, like skill beside normal dmg will apply some condition when close to spirit or even just deal bonus dmg.

Also about mobile turrets, Ritualist also had an skill that teleported spirits to him, ofc it costed him a skill slot, so why not an utility skill that will move turret to the Engineer.
Altho i dont really want turret to work like ranger pet but just because its turret it dosent have to be immobile, it could work like mini satelite turret(like drone with rotors) that will only fly in small circular area around the player with him at the center, like this turret could also be used as a temporary shield that will take dmg for the player(tho it would 1st need an hp or armor buff).

p.s. even tho spirits had smaler hp pool and lower armor than players, it still took around 4-6 hits to kill a spirit with an attack that was not specialised in killing spirits, and yes ther was a few skills that was aimed to be especialy effective againts spirits.

Ambrecombe.4398:

If they reduce the duration of net turret immobilize to 2sec, they should consider to drop the firerate to 10sec to make it on par with the Warrior Bola and the Leg Specialist trait wich have both a 1/5 immobilisation uptime. This way Net Turret shall have a 1/5 immobilize uptime to and it will all be fair.

I don’t see why our turret should be nerfed if the Warrior can do even better when it comes to pinning down targets.

Leg Specialist is unambiguously a Melee oriented trait though, while Net Turret is potentially a ranged CC. Albeit with heavy heavy counterplay, but still. The Leg Specialist trait is balanced around that.

Anyway, as I have said before, the whole discussion is moot if Turret bugs are left unaddressed. Balance should not even enter into the discussion when bugs that affect the basic functionality of Turrets are left unchecked, because “fixing” the imbalance could well leave the bug that causes the underlying issue unaddressed.

I can see where Anet is coming from with the nerf though. Supply Crate is arguably the best Elite in the game in terms of 1v1s – 1 clutch crate can turn a duel or even a teamfight. What disappoints me is that Anet has taken the lazy solution of leaving the Net Turret “unforked” – when Anet changed Healing Turret, they “forked” the Healing Turret of Supply Crate and left it as the old implementation. As it is, Net Turret is pretty under-represented in most of Engineer’s Meta builds and this change will further entrench its place in the “ignore” pile.

Didn’t read anything else in the thread but… Turrets need wheels. Make it a gm trait or something. It’d be pretty funny to watch.

Actually on second thought. kitten that. This game doesn’t need more AI clutter.

Maesk.8753:

Didn’t read anything else in the thread but… Turrets need wheels. Make it a gm trait or something. It’d be pretty funny to watch.

Actually on second thought. kitten that. This game doesn’t need more AI clutter.

No. We do not need another MM necro, or Spirit Ranger, or Phantasm Mesmer.

MonMalthias.4763:

Leg Specialist is unambiguously a Melee oriented trait though, while Net Turret is potentially a ranged CC. Albeit with heavy heavy counterplay, but still. The Leg Specialist trait is balanced around that. .

Well, I disagree with your fact Leg Specialist is a melee oriented trait. It can also serve its purpose on a Rifle build and have a 1/8 uptime on a single target at 1200 range. Not to mention most Crippling attack from the Warrior are ranged attacks, the trait just emphasis better with Sword/Mh and Spear because you can spam cripple with the auto-attack.

You didn’t mention anything about the Warrior Throw Bolas, wich has a 4sec immobilize on 20sec CD (16sec CD when traited) that’s a 1/5 up to 1/4 uptime 900 range immobilize with similar trajectory paterns. The différences are :
- We need to trait our turrets to get the same range.
- The immobilize source comes from the turret instead of the Warrior.
- If it gets destroyed or if we need to move on it goes on a longer cooldown (between 22,5sec to 30sec).

The only advantage we currently have are :
- We can spam a second turret up to 1/3 uptime, and this only if it survive long enough.
- We have a toolbelt skill that immobilize 3sec every 45sec, toolbelt skills are design weaker in mind of utility skills.

But again, we are not the only profession with multiple immobilize sources, so it still doesn’t justify why we should have the short end of everything.

MonMalthias.4763:

Anyway, as I have said before, the whole discussion is moot if Turret bugs are left unaddressed. Balance should not even enter into the discussion when bugs that affect the basic functionality of Turrets are left unchecked, because “fixing” the imbalance could well leave the bug that causes the underlying issue unaddressed.

That’s a true fact, and I totaly agree with you on that, but there is only a problem, the devs are going to balance turrets anyways even if the bugs aren’t fixed yet. So if we only speak about bugs, it won’t prevent future bugs in the game because the devs are already working on rebalancing turrets.

MonMalthias.4763:

I can see where Anet is coming from with the nerf though. Supply Crate is arguably the best Elite in the game in terms of 1v1s – 1 clutch crate can turn a duel or even a teamfight. What disappoints me is that Anet has taken the lazy solution of leaving the Net Turret “unforked” – when Anet changed Healing Turret, they “forked” the Healing Turret of Supply Crate and left it as the old implementation. As it is, Net Turret is pretty under-represented in most of Engineer’s Meta builds and this change will further entrench its place in the “ignore” pile.

Again, the game wasn’t balance around 1vs1 fights and it should never be done this way. Supply crate is indeed a good elite, but not because of the turrets dropping out of them. Those get destroyed in team fights pretty quickly and only serve the purpose of slight distraction. The real trouble makers are the bandages wich can together heal the Engineer for a fairly high ammount of health.

In the end the change to net turret doesn’t fix any issue related to it, and as you said above, it “further entrench its place in the ignore pile”.

@Ambrecombe:
I agree with your points on leg specialist and your notes that Leg Specialist is not the sole source of Immobilise, though this is kind of taking the thread off topic.

I do agree that it is the bandages that can turn 1v1 fights in Supply Crate to some degree, but watching streams of higher level play and Blu’s shoutcasts, you can clearly see instances of Supply Crate AOE stun and single target Immobilise (quickly covered by Flame Turret Burning) can allow a team to quickly follow up that single target lockdown to burst it out and turn an even teamfight into an outnumbered fight.

Crate unambiguously, as a very potent CC, is a fight turning Elite. And that is as it should be – it doesn’t deal ludicrous burst damage or transform you for gimmicky effects – it just gives you that extra CC edge you need while being a goodly heal while having ample counterplay by having easily destroyed turrets and little heals you have to run around and collect and (most likely) not be dodging in the mean time. It’s a pity that not more Elites are as well designed. A nerf while justified doesn’t justify having knock-on nerfs to an ancillary utility in the form of Net Turret.

I would like to see Anet “fork” the Net Turret utility from the Elite Net Turret, but that further complicates Turrets and could very well lead to more bugs. It’s an absolutely no-win situation, and it sucks.

Here’s the bug list so far. I will continue to iterate on it. Feel free to give me suggestions for it.

• Turrets cannot attack epic world bosses
• Turrets have oversized hitboxes
• Some turret fire rates are a slower than tooltips would suggest
• When overcharged, the Rifle and Net Turrets do not benefit form an increased fire rate as the tooltips indicate.
• In exception to the above, if overcharged immediately after deploying, the Rifle Turret fire rate is permanently increased until it’s destroyed.
• On all turrets, the first shot after deploying benefit from the Rifled Turret Barrels trait or scale to your current level.
• The RocketTurret’s overcharge skill does not last as long as the tooltip indicates.
• Deployable Turrets can be detonated twice – once in midair before landing, and once after landing.
• Once overcharged, the Rocket and Thumper turrets no longer benefit from the range increase granted by the Rifled Turret Barrels trait.
• When traited with Rifled Turret Barrels, the Flamethrower turret’s overcharge ability does not activate if it’s target is not within it’s untraited range.
• Turret tooltips indicate that their damage/healing scales with the engineer’s stats however their actual output does not appear to.
• Turrets do not trigger the Runes of Perplexity on interrupt.
• With a few exceptions Turrets do not contribute to combat dailies.
• The red mark on an engineer’s skill bar indicating that a target is out of range does not reflect the range increase of Rifled Turret Barrels on turret skills.
• Deployable Turrets do not receive a range increase from the Rifled Turret Barrels trait.

I’m at work now so I’ll catch up on everything during my downtime and try to stir up some discussion.

Manuhell.2759:

And that’s without considering the nerf – no, they call it bug fix – on the overcharge…

You know, I’m not really aware of what the bug was or what the fix did. Care to clarify?

adrianz.9672:

Manuhell.2759:

And that’s without considering the nerf – no, they call it bug fix – on the overcharge…

You know, I’m not really aware of what the bug was or what the fix did. Care to clarify?

Mh, sorry, but i may be wrong about that. I was talking about the net turret shooting more than a single stun net in overcharge that was fixed some months ago. I thought they purposefully removed the increase of rate of fire in overcharge to avoid the issue, but as it is still mentioned in the tooltip, it could be just another bug added when they fixed the old one (dunno about the actual number of stunning nets that should be shooted, though).

Assuming they won’t fix as they did with the normal rate of fire – that is, change the tooltip.

The firing of multiple nets was a bug that occurred similarly to the Rifle Turret’s permanent fire rate increase: the fire rate increase doesn’t function if Overcharge is activated after a certain amount of time, so people overcharged it on-placement…which somehow caused it to fire several nets in a quick burst, after which it operated as normal (including the bug) or stopped functioning entirely (difficult to replicate, but I’ve seen it happen).
It only happened when the Turret was overcharged immediately, as far as I know, just as Rifle Turret only gains its speed boost (which becomes permanent as a side-effect) when overcharged immediately.

At release, Thumper and Rocket Turrets had an Overcharge Duration sufficient to ensure only one shot fired with the Overcharge.
Net Turret could fire…two, I think? 10-second firing cycle, 10-second Overcharge duration, 50% fire rate increase…I guess it could just barely manage two Electrified Nets, if you triggered it at just the right time, as the fire rate would be 7.5 seconds. 5 seconds, after all, would be a 100% fire rate increase, as it would mean doubling the fire rate; if that’s what was supposed to happen, then obviously the issues with turrets originate between chair and keyboard.
…
Well, more obviously.

Edit: It strikes me that we’re probably all a bit bitter about this whole Turret situation. On the one hand, I want to take the high road and be like “Let’s try to keep this friendly,” but on the other…after the series of bugs that’ve plagued Turrets from day one, from Deployable Turrets to the current list, after the relentless attempts to balance what does not work, almost unfailingly breaking them worse…
I find myself rather more inclined to go “They brought it upon themselves. If they don’t fix what breaks, they should expect backlash, embitterment, and players being driven away. If they don’t like it, they should do their jobs and fix their game.”

Anymras.5729:

Edit: It strikes me that we’re probably all a bit bitter about this whole Turret situation. On the one hand, I want to take the high road and be like “Let’s try to keep this friendly,” but on the other…after the series of bugs that’ve plagued Turrets from day one, from Deployable Turrets to the current list, after the relentless attempts to balance what does not work, almost unfailingly breaking them worse…
I find myself rather more inclined to go “They brought it upon themselves. If they don’t fix what breaks, they should expect backlash, embitterment, and players being driven away. If they don’t like it, they should do their jobs and fix their game.”

I’m not really bitter at all.

My mood is not affected by how well balanced virtual machines that fire virtual bullets into virtual enemies are vs. other virtual weapons. If it were I would be miserable.

I thought maybe I could take what I’ve observed from the productive CDI threads and try to make a productive turret thread because I like character building and I wanted more options. Obviously I don’t take video games as seriously as most of the people that have replied to this thread. It’s not fun != not a good use of my time. You guys can take it from here.

adrianz.9672:

Here’s the bug list so far. I will continue to iterate on it. Feel free to give me suggestions for it.

• Turrets cannot attack epic world bosses
• Turrets have oversized hitboxes
• Some turret fire rates are a slower than tooltips would suggest
• When overcharged, the Rifle and Net Turrets do not benefit form an increased fire rate as the tooltips indicate.
• In exception to the above, if overcharged immediately after deploying, the Rifle Turret fire rate is permanently increased until it’s destroyed.
• On all turrets, the first shot after deploying benefit from the Rifled Turret Barrels trait or scale to your current level.
• The RocketTurret’s overcharge skill does not last as long as the tooltip indicates.
• Deployable Turrets can be detonated twice – once in midair before landing, and once after landing.
• Once overcharged, the Rocket and Thumper turrets no longer benefit from the range increase granted by the Rifled Turret Barrels trait.
• When traited with Rifled Turret Barrels, the Flamethrower turret’s overcharge ability does not activate if it’s target is not within it’s untraited range.
• Turret tooltips indicate that their damage/healing scales with the engineer’s stats however their actual output does not appear to.
• Turrets do not trigger the Runes of Perplexity on interrupt.
• With a few exceptions Turrets do not contribute to combat dailies.
• The red mark on an engineer’s skill bar indicating that a target is out of range does not reflect the range increase of Rifled Turret Barrels on turret skills.
• Deployable Turrets do not receive a range increase from the Rifled Turret Barrels trait.

I’m at work now so I’ll catch up on everything during my downtime and try to stir up some discussion.

Did I miss the rocket launcher tool belt skill under water?

Dev’s, please clean this list up.

Anymras.5729:

The firing of multiple nets was a bug that occurred similarly to the Rifle Turret’s permanent fire rate increase: the fire rate increase doesn’t function if Overcharge is activated after a certain amount of time, so people overcharged it on-placement…which somehow caused it to fire several nets in a quick burst, after which it operated as normal (including the bug) or stopped functioning entirely (difficult to replicate, but I’ve seen it happen).
It only happened when the Turret was overcharged immediately, as far as I know, just as Rifle Turret only gains its speed boost (which becomes permanent as a side-effect) when overcharged immediately.

Yup I remember that bug, it shot 3 consecutive nets in a row every time it was cycling trough its next attack. It was very problematic, especialy for PvP where a single turret could lockdown a target in place for quite an ammount of time even if immobilize wasn’t stacking yet.

But when they fixed the issue with the triple net turret bug, they also broke the firerate bonus we previously had with the overcharge ability, while rifle turret remained buged too.

Anymras.5729:

At release, Thumper and Rocket Turrets had an Overcharge Duration sufficient to ensure only one shot fired with the Overcharge.

I think your are slighty mistaken about the rocket turret overcharge. I only had a single rocket if I overcharged the turret rougly 1 or 2sec after its attack cycle. If you actualy activated the power a second before the next attack or right when it was attacking you could get two overcharged rockets.

There is a bit of margin of error – the overcharge durations were typically arranged in such a way that you could pretty much overcharge and have it last until the next firing cycle, guaranteed.

Why they didn’t just make it so that the next X attacks would do it, I don’t know.

Personally, I see a turret fix in one of two ways:
1-Increasing Power and Toughness scaling, since their damage is negligible at best, and it only makes sense for toughness to increase turret armor, not to mention the main turret trait line is based on toughness.
2-Allowing turrets to crit, and maybe increasing their power scaling a tad as well. If this is the case, then fine, let them die easily, they are now considered a threat, and this emphasizes smart turret placement.
Of note: Power scaling could replaced with an increase in attack rate, something the multi-barrel design would lead you to believe to be high.
This of course means I disagree with the disposable turrets theme, I think they should stick around to provide fire support, like turrets are supposed to do. Also, turrets should definitely stick to pure power-damage, we (engineers) have enough condi-based builds as it is.
On that note, the Flame turret could be replaced with a new defensive turret, providing a pulsing shield against ranged attacks, or providing Protection (boon) within a radius, or both. Or just, you know, taking a look at all the turrets and revamping them.
As a final note, am I the only one who misses when the Mortar was considered a turret? Sure it’s terrible, but there’s no reason we can’t gather it under our wing here and improve it along with its automated brethren.

digiowl.9620:

I suspect that a large reason for the deploy and destroy behavior with healing turret is that turret cooldowns do not start until after the turret is destroyed. As such, leaving the turret out is much less cost effective in terms of health pr second than using it as any other healing skill (fire and forget).

This is why the other turrets are getting so much flak, because they have long cooldowns, that only start after destruction, and have paper thin armor.

My personal fix would be to remove overcharge and detonate fully, and rebalance the turrets around being disposables. Meaning that once deployed they stay out until destroyed, and utility skill cooldown starts on deployment.

This would make fighting a turret engineer an escalating threat unless the enemy makes sure to keep the turrets culled.

And it would fix the issue with turrets being a siege mentality while the rest of the game is about mobility.

I love that idea, but the potential for performance issues is high. If for whatever reason, the turrets are not killed fast enough, the engineer could build up a ridiculous number of them in a protracted fight. Stacking turrets out of combat would also be a huge issue. There would have to be a hard limit on the number of same turrets deployable, like mesmer clones.

That’s totally an easy fix on paper, but now you gotta think about skill balance. If the engie is allowed to deploy, say, 3 of every turret maximum, then how much damage should that many turrets be allowed to do? How easy should the turrets be to kill? How long should the cooldowns be for dropping those turrets?

My suspicion is the cooldowns would have to be rather high and the vitality of the turrets rather low. Right now with traits, turrets are pretty darn sturdy in small-mid scale fights. Partly because people don’t prioritize killing turrets, especially well placed ones that are out of harm’s way.

Turrets are pretty godly in 1v1’s…and that’s about it.

• Their CC , damage , and utility is almost entirely single target focused , or extremely short ranged . This makes them potent 1v1 area control tools, but introduce just 1 more target and it all goes to pot.

• I agree with some of the earlier posters in making the Turret CD trigger as soon as it is placed – in that way, losing a Turret to AOE isn’t as devastating if you’ve been well established in the area; whilst losing a Turret straight away is. Would force Engineers to think carefully about placing their Turrets. As it stands, the current thought process when an Engineer loses a Turret is “welp, that was useless”. Turrets are undervalued as a result.

Traits for Turrets need to incorporate more utility into the skills instead of merely extra Toughness , range or damage . Turret builds lack the following: Condition clear, Down State Control, Support.

• Moving Accelerant Packed Turrets to Adept was a good start to enhancing Down State Control (pushing enemies back trying for a Stomp) but Turret builds still lack any appreciable Stability uptime or Poison . There is a reason why Bomb/Nade and/or P/S are dominant. The combination provides all of the above even untraited

• Turret Toolbelts need to be more than just about damage or CC. Where are the Interrupts? Or Mobility to save Turrets?

Until Turrets become a more complete toolkit in and of themselves, they will always be undervalued compared to the sheer utility that Kits can bring. Adding more utility and support into Turret traits and Overcharges as well as increasing mobility of Turret builds through Cooldown manipulation is necessary before any strong Turret builds outside of trolly 1v1 specs see the light of day