Guild Wars 2

Turreteers, as it stands now, are generally looked upon as being an extremely subpar build by many within the engineer community. 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 or need a buff. They actually feel halfway fine to me 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.

I think this post has very good ideas. I have a level 56 Charr Engineer (Lugg Knut), and I am finally starting to understand their roles. We did the lvl 40 dungeon on explorable mode last night. I equipped supply crate, net turret, and my weapon was a rifle. Throughout the boss fights, I was able to almost maintain immobilization on the single target almost throughout the duration of my supply crate. In the process, I am throwing elixirs to remove conditions and apply boons. With their lacking DPS, I found the control role was best suited for the Engineer. I do love the turret idea though. One thing I’d love to change is to be able to bind a different key to pick up turrets. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve picked up a turret mid fight thinking it was loot…

I would also love to see a “Focus Fire” button for engineers, that forces the turrets to attack your current target instead of… well, whatever looks good. Currently the tilde key, or “swap weapon” for everyone but engineers and elementalists, is unused. That would be an excellent key to assign that command to, so that if you are targetting something and press it, all of your turrets will then focus their fire on that target.