Guild Wars 2

Greetings!

I’m playing engineer less than a month, but from the beginning I knew – no one likes turrets. Maybe somebody uses them in PVE, but they really useless in PVP.

Dear developers! Please – make two forms for turret skills.
One form – fixed on the ground, with some bonuses for this.
Second form – flying golems, which can follow you.

And make more health for them, while they on the ground.

I started playing engineed because of such tools.
But can’t play with them, because they are ineffective.

P.S. Sorry for my english =) If there any kind moderator – please clear my post from mistakes, and after that, from my post-scriptum. Thank u.

MotorshoW.3291:

I started playing engineed because of such tools.
But can’t play with them, because they are ineffective.

You, sir, just perfectly summed up the problems the engineer profession has.

Turrets are very bad right now. There are actually a lot of good things about the engineer—the profession isn’t as bad as a whole as everyone thinks. However, turrets are not part of the “good things.”

Let’s try to make this as clear as possible. What is wrong with turrets? Be specific. Here’s my list:

1) They are easy to kill.
2) Rifle Turret’s damage is terrible, even when overcharged.
3) Taking too many turrets makes YOU play more passive, which is boring
4) Odd delay on overcharge abilities
5) Turrets do not attack your target if you switch targets

Solutions:

1) Either make them harder to kill, or make them more worth being alive.
2) Raise damage or give it a more meaningful condition. Think utility, not damage.
3) Make the tool belt skills more interesting. Make the secondary skills more active. Rifle Turret, Net Turret, and Rocket Turret are all passive and there’s hardly any reason to not have their overcharge up constantly during a fight.
4) When I activate an overcharge, fire that skill IMMEDIATELY. It could lead to some interesting builds that require you to think about your positioning related to your turrets.
5) This is fine for normal attacks, but for overcharge, this is down right not okay.

In short:

*Make the overcharge effect immediate on activate and have it take my target. *

I think it pathetic that our stationary turrets go down quicker than a mobile illusion.
A weak AoE spell can basically negate our entire Supply Crate drop basically just turning it into a few med packs on the ground.

I think turrets need to have something like 10-15 health but can only be hit for 1-2 damage. With their current weak damage this would at least keep them useful because you could rely on them to stay up for longer than 3 secs and would encourage enemies to actually want to focus Turrets rather than just shrug them off.

I actually use turrets as part of my Anvil build. I’ve used them for most of my time playing my Engineer, as well.

My suggestions, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way:
Let Turrets scale with gear – this would be a massive improvement.
Allow more Traits to apply to Turrets – the current treatment of Turrets leaves them in the cold for the majority of traits that seem like they should improve them.
Add a Trait that reduces Turret cooldown, apply that to an existing trait, or perhaps allow the cooldown on placing turrets to continue while the turret is active – this would make them more viable by allowing them to function better in the mobile engagements so common in GW2.
Improve/Rebalance Turret Toolbelt skills – many of them are ineffective, despite their cooldowns being some of the longest the class has.

I almost always run with the Thumper turret in Pve.
It is awesome for blast finishers since it can do 3 quickly all by itself so it pairs very well FT and EG.

But the traits are just dismal and uninspiring,
if added health still can’t prevent them from all being 1-shotted by weak-med AoE than what is the point.
Deployable turrets doesnt even work and really we should be able to deploy turrets this way untraited. You should be able to deploy a turret onto an enemie’s head and stun them.
Accelerant packed turrets should also be how turrets work untraited. If a turret gets destroyed than it should explode, if you detonate a turret is should knockback.
The traits really need to be redesigned so you can enhance turrets to more than one use. So stationary but more powerful or mobile but used as more of a DPS/utility burst.

Tabula Rasa made a very capable turret class. The game itself had many faults, but it’s turrets were great.

The Engineer in TR could deploy 5 turrets at once, plus multiple spherical shields (as large as GW2’s capture points) to protect them, plus they had a tool which healed armor, which applied to turrets and acted as an AoE cone heal (other classes also had the same tool, which could also heal your turrets if I’m not mistaken.)

The turrets themselves fired very quickly, and each could both crit, and apply special effects when it crit (based on its damage type. Sonic criticals knocked back, etc.) Their targeting, while not perfect, was adequate and a far cry better than the turret targeting in GW2, and their fast fire meant they could miss a shot or two without too much to worry about. They had no cooldown, and no cast time (though after you placed them, it took 1 second for them to pop up.) They could also be set up anywhere within 20 meters of your toon. This was all stock, no traits required (you had to level up the “turret” skill to gain access to all 5 turrets, that is all.)

You also had access to “traps,” which were fake turrets which dealt only minimal damage, but exploded for extreme damage when destroyed. They looked identical to turrets, and had a high aggro coefficient (drawing mobs away from your other turrets.) While dealing almost no damage, they could still crit on each attack for special effects, just like turrets. You could have a possible 5 different traps (which dealt different damage types) but only one could be placed at a time. Like turrets, they had no cooldown.

In GW2, we see a stark contrast in almost every way. We can only take a maximum of 3 turrets, which sacrifices everything else, even the ability to heal them with the Toolkit. Our turrets fire very slowly. We have no way to protect them from damage. They are placed at our feet unless we take a specific trait. Our turrets deal significantly less damage. The targeting of turrets in GW2 is far inferior. Our turrets have long cooldowns.

The life of the turrets is about the same (TR’s turrets were slightly beefier) but the Engineer class was specifically designed to protect them, with armor heals, protective barriers, and “traps” to taunt with. This offered a lot of synergy that is lacking with the GW2 Engineer.

This also allowed you to be a support character (the shields and armor repair tool affected players as well as turrets) while simultaneously using turrets. With the Engineer, we must commit fully to turrets, and yet they are worse in every way to TR turrets. Let me also assure everyone that turrets were in no way overpowered in Tabula Rasa. The damage of the 5 turrets plus the player weapon was balanced well against the damage output of other classes.

-Travail.