Guild Wars 2

Turreteers, as it stands now, are generally looked upon as being an extremely subpar build by many within the engineer community, with turrets practically being a waste of a utility slot. This bothers me greatly, as the main reason I wanted to play Engineer to begin with WAS the turrets.

I would like to stress that, at least at my current level, I do not feel turrets are inherently weak in damage or need a buff. They actually feel halfway fine to me in that regard right now. What DOES need a change, not so much a buff but a reworking, is the mobility of the turrets.

With the current system, if you pick up a turret it is healed to 100% health and immediately goes on cooldown. These cooldowns can range from 20 seconds to 1 full minute. That’s not pretty, especially when you are dealing with escort missions and the like. This makes turrets situational, at best, meaning a turreteer will be forced to spend a great deal of time not using turrets. I can’t think of another class that has to change its entire build just to suit particular circumstances.

SO, my suggestion is this: Have the full cooldown only go into effect when your turret is destroyed, and instead a 10 second cooldown go into effect when the turret is picked up. To offset abuse, have the turrets NOT heal upon pickup. At all. If you pick the turret up at 50% health, you place it at 50% health. If you want a full heal, either repair it or self destruct it (which would put it on the same cooldown it has now, so nothing would change there).

This would increase mobility for Turreteers without increasing their damage output or too greatly increasing the survivability of the turrets. The 10 second cooldown is in place so that you can’t just pick up and drop turrets quickly, using that to avoid incoming damage to the turrets.

Also, since the tilde (`) key, which is normally swap weapon, is currently unused by our class, having it force all the turrets to attack your current target would be kinda nice =D

Bump for great justice!

I like that, though I’m guessing that if an Engineer spends the traits to have turrets auto-heal, that healing is stalled for as long as you would be holding (picking up) a turret?

As to the tilde (`) key, that’s one idea… but what if the person has no turrets out? Maybe having it serve a function to your Belt would be a more sound suggestion, since no matter what, that Belt is in use by the Engineer (their one constant). Refresh all Belt abilities but double their cooldown?

Use a Elixir build instead. Turrets were made to be stationary.

The tilde key is used to instantly drop whatever kit you’re using and go back to the primary weapon, I’d prefer to keep it that way rather than having to hit the kit again to switch out.