Guild Wars 2

DarkHorse.1059:

Turret being conditioned is immersion breaking. You’re breaking my immersion. This is unacceptable. A turret isn’t alive how can it be poisoned or suffer bleeding?

Bleeding oil.
Burning parts.
Damaged (Weakened) mechanics misfire.
Mechanical malfunctions (Confusion)
Vulnerable (Damaging armor plating)
Taint fuel with poison.
Cripple/chill/fear/immob need not apply (doesn’t do anything, but still explainable).
Torment, well… It must be tormenting not having a soul and only being used for war, th torment is real.

#BeCreative.

DarkHorse.1059:

Turret being conditioned is immersion breaking. You’re breaking my immersion. This is unacceptable. A turret isn’t alive how can it be poisoned or suffer bleeding?

NEW CONDITION

corrosion

:P

DarkHorse.1059:

Turret being conditioned is immersion breaking. You’re breaking my immersion. This is unacceptable. A turret isn’t alive how can it be poisoned or suffer bleeding?

Since a fire elemental can burn and an ice elemental can be chilled, we’ll get used to poisoned turrets.

Talking of poison: Does it reduce the healing from Autotool Installation?
Edit: Nvm, Josh is faster at answering questions than I can ask them.

After my original reply on this topic, I went back and actually played turret engineer, and against turret engineer in a combination of unranked and custom arenas. I used the turret build from here: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Engineer_-_Turret.

Turret engineers appear to be successful because of two things: 1) a common misconception that you should always attack the turrets first, and 2) people who won’t even engage. To make turrets effective, the eng has to put everything into the turret traits—there’s very little flexibility here. This makes non-turret skills ineffective, and also makes the player extremely vulnerable without turrets (e.g., so they can’t help at another cap point, or move in Courtyard).

On the first point, some classes/builds can do well attacking turrets first (and if you’re 2v1 vs. the eng., it’s fairly easy to clear turrets for most pairings). The only time I had trouble was on thief, or condi necro. I’m not a pro thief, but in a 1v1, a good thief or necro can take out the eng. if they ignore common wisdom and just go for the player. Or to put it another way, the known hard counters mentioned with the build above actually work.

On the second point, it should never be the case that your build should be able to 1v1 every other build, so it makes sense that some people don’t engage 1v1. Although it looks like players who could engage successfully aren’t doing so.

If the build were as OP as I had thought (based on playing it 12-18 months ago), I would expect to see more turret engineers. Perhaps Anet has statistics on the builds being played, but there don’t seem to me to be a lot of them. Also, turret engineer is not in the current meta game according to the site referenced above.

Hopefully Anet makes any decisions about changes to this build based on actual statistics (number of players using the build, their success rate, etc.), and play testing. As it stands now, the crit change would make it tough, as the engineer is essentially useless until CD on the turrets. With the additional condition damage change, I don’t see turrets as a viable build, as every class and practically every build could clear the turrets easily, leaving the engineer with little offense/defense.

I think this is a really good start.

The only thing that I still think needs to be looked at is the Rocket Turret. It’s damage and rate of fire is what makes the turret engi as dangerous as they are. They deal a lot of damage on a fairly regular rate. My concern is that an engi can be tanky and still deal a lot of damage because of it’s high base damage rate.

Would it be impossible to make rocket turret have a lower base damage rate, but to compensate make it scale with power enough to where it can be as powerful as it is now if the engi is using offensive stats?

Both the ideas suggested by the balance team are bad. This is what should be implemented to balance engis in general.

1. Turrets damage needs to scale with the engineer. If an engi chooses to run with the sentinel, the turrets should do very little damage. If they choose to run zerker, it should hit a lot harder. Engis need to choose between damage and sustain. Right now they get both and that is the issue.

2. Healing turret. This skill is broken. It gives engis too much sustain being able to blast their own water fields. It would also help balance the other broken engi spec, the cele, rifle, nade spam spec. Two options here: 1. Remove the water field from healing turret, OR 2. Add a cooldown so that a turret can’t be blown up for a certain period of time after it is deployed. Right now there is no counterplay. I really like option 2 because it allows people a change to destroy the turret before it is blasted.

3. Crit damage. This should go both ways. Turrets SHOULD be able to take critical damage, but also should be able to deal critical damage. Tied to point 1, crit chance should be tied to the stats of the engi. Those bunker turret engis would basically never crit.

So… Will this change also affect mortars?
Just a sanity check of sorts…

Its mind boggling how many people are arguing about “realism” and “immersion” for turrets taking conditions like poison and bleed.

• You’re playing a game. Probably don’t need to go further than this, yet we have to.
• You’re playing a game where you can cast electric abilities and spells under water. Big pieces of land mass float high in the sky.
• 4 turrets twice the size of the asura engineer that placed them seemingly appear out of thin air. One of them is literally a blunderbuss on a stick, yet fires by itself and intelligently finds enemy targets.
• Unlimited ammunition fired semi-automatically out of a flintlock-style pistol!
• An Asuran using a tiny sword to block multiple attacks from a gigantic norn’s 2h hammer
• Super Adventure Box
• Siegerazor

Will ANet ever accept that PVP balancing is detrimental to PVE and just split the darn skills? They did it with confusion, it can be done, now use this in more areas! Please!

Turk.5460:

Its mind boggling how many people are arguing about “realism” and “immersion” for turrets taking conditions like poison and bleed.

• You’re playing a game. Probably don’t need to go further than this, yet we have to.
• You’re playing a game where you can cast electric abilities and spells under water. Big pieces of land mass float high in the sky.
• 4 turrets twice the size of the asura engineer that placed them seemingly appear out of thin air. One of them is literally a blunderbuss on a stick, yet fires by itself and intelligently finds enemy targets.
• Unlimited ammunition fired semi-automatically out of a flintlock-style pistol!
• An Asuran using a tiny sword to block multiple attacks from a gigantic norn’s 2h hammer
• Super Adventure Box
• Siegerazor

You don’t know how strong all asura are. That’s racist.

I understand these changes for PvP, but in PvE turrets still feel really underpowered for the long cooldowns and the damage output, not to mention in most fights they don’t last but a few seconds.

Adding condition damage on top of that will completely invalidate turret engi in pve IMO. Unless you want to sit there in every fight hammering away with a wrench only to watch them fall apart anyway after a few hits, this doesn’t seem like it will enhance, or encourage the pve side of engi play.

So will I be able to bleed and burn the trebuchet too?

XALTJC.5103:

So will I be able to bleed and burn the trebuchet too?

Because replying with a quote from some one else means i’m supporting this notion.

With all due respect..people talking about immersion are being quite ridiculous, hey want to talk about immersion? Think about this:

A tornado that get stunlocked, sniped..when by contrast a thief spinning on the ground can reflect projectiles O_O

Supreme.3164:

With all due respect..people talking about immersion are being quite ridiculous, hey want to talk about immersion? Think about this:

A tornado that get stunlocked, sniped..when by contrast a thief spinning on the ground can reflect projectiles O_O

If you wanna talk about immersion: You can completely evade an orbital death ray by smacking someone with a pistol and wildly swinging a sword around.

But well this still isn’t bad. Wanna know what breaks immersion?
Quaggan backpacks and wings!

Immersion is everything. I have to have 100% immersion all the time or I will QQ. Don’t break the immersion or the game will be a ghost town!

Come on people. Let’s be realistic when we understand Turret Engi isn’t even the best build for their own class. I say this as a mesmer main who can get mauled by them. Be glad Anet is touching them at all. It’s the rock paper scissors game. None of the three is ever going to be satisfied.

Can we please finally just segregate the PvE builds and people from us PvP people? We dont want your builds in PvP. Change things for PvP and leave the PvE for someone else.

dannymichel.6019:

Can we please finally just segregate the PvE builds and people from us PvP people? We dont want your builds in PvP. Change things for PvP and leave the PvE for someone else.

It appears they’re going all in on Stronghold so that they can take the easier way of letting players figure it out themselves. It seems like they’re just going to put bandaids on whatever the forums QQ about until they release HoT and cross their fingers in hope that ppl give up on Conquest.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

Mustafa.7684:

EnemyCrusher.7324:

Mustafa.7684:

Its a game… get over it!

Please leave the forums if you don’t care.

I care which is why i am here.

Then why post rude an unproductive posts like that one, and then falsely flag my post? If all you’re going to do is insult other posts with rude comments, it’s better to not comment at all.

Hey man, I didn’t falsely flag you post. It was anet not me. I also got the infraction. But yeah if your only concern is how some conditions effect turret/mechanical object, just remember that there are enemies that are susceptible to condi damage when in reality they shouldnt be.

Considering that every game I played today were against 2 or 3 turrets engis that bunkered up in capture points I’m going to change my mind and say that this nerf may be entirely fine.

This completely destroys the build in every aspect of the game, if these changes go in as is.

serenke.4806:

They cannot do that, the metrics show that “make them take condition damage and be crittable” has been asked for more times than “scale with amulet”.

They shouldn’t be balancing solely based on what more people are asking for. That’s and idiotic practice. The average person doesn’t understand what makes good game design. Those people are just asking to make it easier for themselves in the simplest way possible.

Stark.1350:

This completely destroys the build in every aspect of the game, if these changes go in as is.

THANK YA JAYSUS

Uhmm… shoot me for sidetracking this thread for a single post, but since it got all the engineers’ + developer’s attention I cannot resist.

Any chance we’ll ever see Stow Weapon stop build-ups on kit abilities? I don’t want to drop my Flamethrower + stow the rifle to stop Auto-Attack hitting Retaliation.
Same buttons for the same purpose would be nice.

/me Gear Shield, ducks, runs for cover

What’s with people trying to use real life logic into inanimate objects taking poison, confusion and any other fantasy condition?

This is a game, folks. Move on. The Force isn’t real. Lightsabers are not real. People cannot be turned into Moa’s or summon magical kitten from their hands.

phokus.8934:

What’s with people trying to use real life logic into inanimate objects taking poison, confusion and any other fantasy condition?

This is a game, folks. Move on. The Force isn’t real. Lightsabers are not real. People cannot be turned into Moa’s or summon magical kitten from their hands.

+1000.. LOL i know right..

Plok.5873:

Uhmm… shoot me for sidetracking this thread for a single post, but since it got all the engineers’ + developer’s attention I cannot resist.

Any chance we’ll ever see Stow Weapon stop build-ups on kit abilities? I don’t want to drop my Flamethrower + stow the rifle to stop Auto-Attack hitting Retaliation.
Same buttons for the same purpose would be nice.

/me Gear Shield, ducks, runs for cover

what? weapon swap cancels channels. “drop _”, the button that replaces your utility, does not cancel channels. you do not need to push 2 buttons to cancel a channel while a kit is equipped. only 1.

style.6173:

Both the ideas suggested by the balance team are bad. This is what should be implemented to balance engis in general.

1. Turrets damage needs to scale with the engineer. If an engi chooses to run with the sentinel, the turrets should do very little damage. If they choose to run zerker, it should hit a lot harder. Engis need to choose between damage and sustain. Right now they get both and that is the issue.

2. Healing turret. This skill is broken. It gives engis too much sustain being able to blast their own water fields. It would also help balance the other broken engi spec, the cele, rifle, nade spam spec. Two options here: 1. Remove the water field from healing turret, OR 2. Add a cooldown so that a turret can’t be blown up for a certain period of time after it is deployed. Right now there is no counterplay. I really like option 2 because it allows people a change to destroy the turret before it is blasted.

3. Crit damage. This should go both ways. Turrets SHOULD be able to take critical damage, but also should be able to deal critical damage. Tied to point 1, crit chance should be tied to the stats of the engi. Those bunker turret engis would basically never crit.

1 and 3 are nice ideas, but you can’t ask them for just Turrets; Currently other than with Condition Damage, only Mesmer phantasms base their damage off of their owner’s gear, and they and ranger pets are the only ones that can crit (and the latter uses their own Precision stat to determine their crit chance) if you’re going to ask it for turrets, you should be asking it for Necromancer Minions and Guardian Spectral Weapons as well.

As for #2, I’d rather see Detonate Healing Turret no longer be a blast finisher, and Engineer’s would have to use another skill if they wanted to blast that water field (it’s not like we engi’s are lacking in the blast finisher department…), but that doesn’t really mater, as none of those possibilities would solve anything, because… well, assuming no Healing Power:

Drop->Cleansing Burst->Detonate= 2520 + 2520 (Drop + Burst) + 650 (Regen from Cleansing Burst; Cleansing burst’s 5 sec regen will override HT normal 3 sec regen pulse) + 1320 (water blast)= 7010 HP with a 20 sec cooldown which equals 21030 hp over one minute (20sec x 3 = 60sec) or 350.5 health per second (21030 divided by 60, or 7010 divided by 20).

Drop->Cleansing Burst->Pickup= 2520 + 2520 + 650 = 5690, with a 15 second cooldown (picking up a turret reduces deployment cooldown by 25%) which is 22760 over a minute(15 sec x 4 = 60sec), or 379.3_ health per second(22760 divided by 60 or 5690 divided by 15).

Drop->Cleansing Burst->Leave for Regen/future Cleansing Bursts=2520 + 2520= 5040 (initial burst + blast deployment)+ 1950 (15sec Regen)= 6990 for the first 15 seconds or 466 health per second. 2520+1950(Second burst + next 15 seconds of regen) = 4470, or 298 health per second for after that first 15 seconds, which comes to 20400 for the first minute (6990+ 4470 + 4470 +4470) or an average 340 health per second (20400 divided by 60) for the first minute.

Elixir H= 5560 (initial use) + 650 (15 second regen with 6 points in Alchemy + Potent Elixirs divided by 3 to denote the 1 in 3 chance of actually getting regen)= 6210 average use with a 20 sec cooldown (using Fast-Acting Elixirs) or 18630 health over one minute, or 310.5 health per second.

We’ve tricked ourselves into thinking Drop->Burst->Blast is the best way to using Healing Turret, when in truth, while it has the highest burst (which don’t get me wrong, is great if your worry is about getting downed much sooner than 15 seconds), it has the worst healing over time for the first 15 seconds, barely second best over the first minute of fighting, and, before I forget, heals only 6 conditions over that minute vs. the other two method’s 8 condis a minute… and the “worst” way of using it is still better for the first minute of fighting than Elixir H traited to maximize possible healing

Also, fun fact, (and totally not meant to mean anything… kinda), the mean of 379 and 350 is 364, which is really close to another number…

Doing anything to Healing Turret’s water field or Detonation ability won’t solve the “problem” of Healing Turret being better than the other healing skills, that requires improving the other healing skills.

insanemaniac.2456:

what? weapon swap cancels channels. “drop _”, the button that replaces your utility, does not cancel channels. you do not need to push 2 buttons to cancel a channel while a kit is equipped. only 1.

To stop attacking I need to drop the kit/bundle (which I don’t want) + cancel the normal weapon’s auto-attack after that.
For everything but kits/bundles Stow Weapon suffices to stop build-up and auto. Without an involuntary switch.
I’m asking for a standardisation.

Hey grouch, let me start by saying I think turret engis are an absolute plague to PvP, as it requires no skill to be able to 2v1, and only some skill to 3v1.

Having said that, these are good ideas as a start. I agree that turrets should be able to be critically hit. things don’t need to be alive in order to have weak points that cause more damage (IE star wars death star). Conditions don’t make sense, though. Burning would make sense, and maybe vulnerability, but I can’t honestly think of how other stuff could pass. Unless there are already inanimate objects in game that are affected by conditions, I would steer wide away from this.

As others have suggested, there are a few other things I would apply in the stead of the conditions, or as well as:
1. Turrets in air? Just switch turrets to using ground targeting. For some reason, this is actually a trait a person can take… but no one ever will because it’s literally a nerf to how they work without it. Make the ground target work just like crate drop.

2. Make the turrets less damaging by slowing the attack cycle time. Only need to be slowed by 1 or 2 seconds, but with the crits and ground targeting, they are much less viable for a 3v1 or 2v1 with this added change.

Just scale them down to support role with lower dps and hp. Make engineers immobile for 1 second (like when harvesting) when deploying turrets other than the healing turret. Blow turrets when engineer goes further than 1700 range. Adding all that to having them vulnerable to critical hits. If that’s too much nerfing, too bad — go learn a non-AI build.

Is the possibility of switching the positions of Experimental Turrets and Elixer-Infused Bombs being considered?

Xillllix.3485:

Considering that every game I played today were against 2 or 3 turrets engis that bunkered up in capture points I’m going to change my mind and say that this nerf may be entirely fine.

Do you play unranked?
Because every game I played yesterday were no turret engis at all on the enemy team and only once a turret engi on my team.
A shame, because I was actively hunting for turrets with my engi, who took a break from turrets and went for condi bombing, but I guess, in ranked they are just too rare.

The people who have those amazing win records as turret engi are either playing unranked or are playing in organized turret groups.

Meh! Judging from Grouch’s comments, these changes are already live on the internal servers so these will probably be the final changes that they release! I guess a discussion on proposed changes was merely just informing us of changes already finalized!

To reiterate what I said before, these changes are awful! “Bringing turrets in line with other forms of AI” is just a flawed concept since in comparison to other forms of AI, turrets cannot crit, cannot move, and leave the Engineers pretty much defenseless without any forms of extra dodge, weapon swap, etc! Turrets needed a change but theses “fixes” are just awful! But oh well! What do I know!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

naphack.9346:

Xillllix.3485:

Considering that every game I played today were against 2 or 3 turrets engis that bunkered up in capture points I’m going to change my mind and say that this nerf may be entirely fine.

Do you play unranked?
Because every game I played yesterday were no turret engis at all on the enemy team and only once a turret engi on my team.
A shame, because I was actively hunting for turrets with my engi, who took a break from turrets and went for condi bombing, but I guess, in ranked they are just too rare.

The people who have those amazing win records as turret engi are either playing unranked or are playing in organized turret groups.

The fact you did not meet any in unranked doesn’t mean there are no turret engis there. I’ve actually met plenty of them in both ranked and unranked.

Plok.5873:

insanemaniac.2456:

what? weapon swap cancels channels. “drop _”, the button that replaces your utility, does not cancel channels. you do not need to push 2 buttons to cancel a channel while a kit is equipped. only 1.

To stop attacking I need to drop the kit/bundle (which I don’t want) + cancel the normal weapon’s auto-attack after that.
For everything but kits/bundles Stow Weapon suffices to stop build-up and auto. Without an involuntary switch.
I’m asking for a standardisation.

meh i dont see it as an issue i guess. ive never found myself wishing i had my stow weapon key in a more convenient place than " ’ ", weapon swap on ~ is convenient/good enough.

• if you dont want to autoattack, unassign it.
• kits have almost negligible cd, and nades has 0 cd traited.

i think i can understand a situation where i might want to cancel the auto after swapping — when i cancel a magnet pull i may not want to rifle auto the person and let them know even more than i already did that im targeting them. but… i think i always want them to be aware of my focus and the dangers associated with it, because then theyre focusing on reacting to me at least as much as theyre focusing on whatever they were doing before i decided to try to pull them.

but even wanting to cancel anything besides magnet is super rare for me, engi has so many short cds that i always have something else up when my first choice fails. kind of a nice effect of having 3 weapon skill sets all at my fingertips at all times.

I think it would be easier to just remove turrets altogether. I don’t get why instead of making certain skills useful, the balance is always: let’s make what is really good so bad that nobody uses it.

That being said, at least nobody will use turrets anymore so when you spot a turret engi it’ll be like seeing a spirit ranger, AH bunker guard, etc. a relic of a bygone age.

Still, it’s kind of sad to add to the already substantial amount of useless skills in game.

serenke.4806:

I think it would be easier to just remove turrets altogether. I don’t get why instead of making certain skills useful, the balance is always: let’s make what is really good so bad that nobody uses it.

That being said, at least nobody will use turrets anymore so when you spot a turret engi it’ll be like seeing a spirit ranger, AH bunker guard, etc. a relic of a bygone age.

Still, it’s kind of sad to add to the already substantial amount of useless skills in game.

Don’t be sad, as if game content is being taken away from you. Be satisfied in that A.I has more of a place than most garbage-tier utility types. (Edit: Like Engineer Gadgets, Ele Glyphs, Ranger Shouts, Thief Traps.)

Spirit Rangers, Spirit Weapons, Minionmancers, Turrets,

These are all inherently useful for beginner players to artificially raise their battle strength, past what their mechanical skill corresponds with. Nobody that’s passionate about this game, and subsequently posting on these forums will (likely) fall into to category of people that these Turrets are designed to be used by. All games have cheese strategies that rocket you past the complete noobs when mastered.

So many people are disillusioned into thinking that A.I should have the potential to be optimal (meta), and if it isn’t, then it’s simply nerfed into uselessness. Yes, it may become useless for you, those who should have long mastered other strategies. It’s never a thankful reaction when one takes the bike out for a spin and finds out that Dad took the training wheels off while they slept.

In my opinion, for the good of the community, Turrets should join the background as a novelty/starter build and far away from the meta comp list. Currently, Turrets are strong enough to be meta, whereas Spirts, Sprit Weapons, Minionmancers, these are where they should be. Turrets represent a blatant error in balance philosophy where a day 1 entry build yields such comparatively strong results.

Making turrets vulnerable to conditions wouldnt make much sense.
Its okay if they recieve critical damage, but wtf conditions XD. Condition build are already too much OP in this game, that they really already counter easily burst class, why they should counter turret too.
The main problem with engi turret is the TONS of CC he can do and the hp of the turrets.
Just reduce turret’s HP and make the thumper’s attack cd longer.

Chaith.8256:

Don’t be sad, as if game content is being taken away from you. Be satisfied in that A.I has more of a place than most garbage-tier utility types. (Edit: Like Engineer Gadgets, Ele Glyphs, Ranger Shouts, Thief Traps.)

Spirit Rangers, Spirit Weapons, Minionmancers, Turrets,

These are all inherently useful for beginner players to artificially raise their battle strength, past what their mechanical skill corresponds with. Nobody that’s passionate about this game, and subsequently posting on these forums will (likely) fall into to category of people that these Turrets are designed to be used by. All games have cheese strategies that rocket you past the complete noobs when mastered.

So many people are disillusioned into thinking that A.I should have the potential to be optimal (meta), and if it isn’t, then it’s simply nerfed into uselessness. Yes, it may become useless for you, those who should have long mastered other strategies. It’s never a thankful reaction when one takes the bike out for a spin and finds out that Dad took the training wheels off while they slept.

In my opinion, for the good of the community, Turrets should join the background as a novelty/starter build and far away from the meta comp list. Currently, Turrets are strong enough to be meta, whereas Spirts, Sprit Weapons, Minionmancers, these are where they should be. Turrets represent a blatant error in balance philosophy where a day 1 entry build yields such comparatively strong results.

Well, we just have different opinions.
Imho, for the good of the game, any build should be relatively strong in the hand of a skilled player, and bad in the hands of no skilled ones.
Day 1 entry builds shouldn’t exist to begin with, and if something works like that, it just means there is some design flaw that permits to do so. And thus it should be fixed.
I think that having skills designed to be useless over a certain skill level is an extremely stupid concept: it just reduces your options as you get better, instead of broadening them.
Sure, you can’t avoid meta builds – something will always end up being better in accordance to its current metagame – but that should happen based on the situation, and as that happens, by having skills of equal strength, people can go against the meta and eventually change it. Unlike what happens now, where the meta changes only via dev intervention to make skills more or less strong.
Sure. i do realize that what i hope for isn’t easy to accomplish. But i don’t even see them striving in that direction to start with.

I’m more interested in WHEN these changes are coming.

I also find it hilarious that some people are also talking about buffing spirit weapons…

Chaith.8256:

serenke.4806:

I think it would be easier to just remove turrets altogether. I don’t get why instead of making certain skills useful, the balance is always: let’s make what is really good so bad that nobody uses it.

That being said, at least nobody will use turrets anymore so when you spot a turret engi it’ll be like seeing a spirit ranger, AH bunker guard, etc. a relic of a bygone age.

Still, it’s kind of sad to add to the already substantial amount of useless skills in game.

Don’t be sad, as if game content is being taken away from you. Be satisfied in that A.I has more of a place than most garbage-tier utility types. (Edit: Like Engineer Gadgets, Ele Glyphs, Ranger Shouts, Thief Traps.)

Spirit Rangers, Spirit Weapons, Minionmancers, Turrets,

These are all inherently useful for beginner players to artificially raise their battle strength, past what their mechanical skill corresponds with. Nobody that’s passionate about this game, and subsequently posting on these forums will (likely) fall into to category of people that these Turrets are designed to be used by. All games have cheese strategies that rocket you past the complete noobs when mastered.

So many people are disillusioned into thinking that A.I should have the potential to be optimal (meta), and if it isn’t, then it’s simply nerfed into uselessness. Yes, it may become useless for you, those who should have long mastered other strategies. It’s never a thankful reaction when one takes the bike out for a spin and finds out that Dad took the training wheels off while they slept.

In my opinion, for the good of the community, Turrets should join the background as a novelty/starter build and far away from the meta comp list. Currently, Turrets are strong enough to be meta, whereas Spirts, Sprit Weapons, Minionmancers, these are where they should be. Turrets represent a blatant error in balance philosophy where a day 1 entry build yields such comparatively strong results.

I don’t think you got what i meant. Having totally useless skills is bad for the game. I am not using turrets because that build has several inherent weaknesses that have been explained a million times already. Bottom line is, why have X number of skills/traits for every profession if only half of them are anywhere near viable at any level of competition. Be it AI or otherwise.
They should just nerf slick shoes to oblivion as well, because honestly there is nothing extremely professional about running around in circles.

Also the more i think about this, the more i think that the whole change is being done only because of a certain team’s (with 3 turret engis) relative success against a relatively “pro” team recently.

Agreed, when can I stop getting multiple turret engi matchups? Especially on daily engineer winner days.

Josh Davis.6015:

Hi all,

As a follow-up to my post from last Friday, I wanted to give you a run-down of the changes we’re looking to make to the engineer’s turrets:

• Engineer turrets will be able to be critically hit. (Edit for clarity: this change means the turrets can take critical hits against them, but they still cannot deal critical hits themselves.)
• Engineer turrets will be able to be affected by conditions.

Considering most minions/summoned pets are already susceptible to the aforementioned changes we feel that this is a fair way to bring turrets more inline with the rest of the game. These changes should only slightly affect the viability of turrets in PvE/WvW (low creature crit chance/condition application), while providing for more counterplay against turrets.

We’d love to hear your feedback on these changes. Feel free to respond below with your comments.

-Grouch

finally

Manuhell.2759:

Well, we just have different opinions.
Imho, for the good of the game, any build should be relatively strong in the hand of a skilled player, and bad in the hands of no skilled ones.
Day 1 entry builds shouldn’t exist to begin with, and if something works like that, it just means there is some design flaw that permits to do so. And thus it should be fixed.
I think that having skills designed to be useless over a certain skill level is an extremely stupid concept: it just reduces your options as you get better, instead of broadening them.
Sure, you can’t avoid meta builds – something will always end up being better in accordance to its current metagame – but that should happen based on the situation, and as that happens, by having skills of equal strength, people can go against the meta and eventually change it. Unlike what happens now, where the meta changes only via dev intervention to make skills more or less strong.
Sure. i do realize that what i hope for isn’t easy to accomplish. But i don’t even see them striving in that direction to start with.

Yes, ArenaNet has not shown interested in striving towards that ideal. There aren’t going to be more resources allocated to overhauls before the xPac, Turrets are a problem right now. Also, we’re not sure what the expansion will bring yet for skills and balance, I hope they do shift their balance philosophy to put effort into making all utility types purposeful. I actually don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, it’s just missing the practical component of what can be done while focusing on conserving resources for the looming expansion pack.

Chaith.8256:

Yes, ArenaNet has not shown interested in striving towards that ideal. There aren’t going to be more resources allocated to overhauls before the xPac, Turrets are a problem right now. Also, we’re not sure what the expansion will bring yet for skills and balance, I hope they do shift their balance philosophy to put effort into making all utility types purposeful. I actually don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, it’s just missing the practical component of what can be done while focusing on conserving resources for the looming expansion pack.

The practical component means nothing if there isn’t any will to do anything about it, though. Like you said as well, they haven’t been striving toward that ideal at all.
That’s my issue with this nerf and others – whenever they’ve put something in the garbage bin, they ended up leaving it there.
If this was intended as a band-aid fix with a larger goal of a redesign down ahead, it would be more than fine. But right now, it just seems they plan on making them near useless and stop there.

Chaith.8256:

Manuhell.2759:

Well, we just have different opinions.
Imho, for the good of the game, any build should be relatively strong in the hand of a skilled player, and bad in the hands of no skilled ones.
Day 1 entry builds shouldn’t exist to begin with, and if something works like that, it just means there is some design flaw that permits to do so. And thus it should be fixed.
I think that having skills designed to be useless over a certain skill level is an extremely stupid concept: it just reduces your options as you get better, instead of broadening them.
Sure, you can’t avoid meta builds – something will always end up being better in accordance to its current metagame – but that should happen based on the situation, and as that happens, by having skills of equal strength, people can go against the meta and eventually change it. Unlike what happens now, where the meta changes only via dev intervention to make skills more or less strong.
Sure. i do realize that what i hope for isn’t easy to accomplish. But i don’t even see them striving in that direction to start with.

Yes, ArenaNet has not shown interested in striving towards that ideal. There aren’t going to be more resources allocated to overhauls before the xPac, Turrets are a problem right now. Also, we’re not sure what the expansion will bring yet for skills and balance, I hope they do shift their balance philosophy to put effort into making all utility types purposeful. I actually don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, it’s just missing the practical component of what can be done while focusing on conserving resources for the looming expansion pack.

If the plan was to just put on a band-aid fix, temporarily removing sentinel amulet would do just fine.

Arenanet needs to think this through and not act like a reactionary kiddo. Remember what you guys did to silk? The “community” said “Oh, silk is worthless, make it worth something anet”. What was your reaction? “Oh let me make an SQL query, yup the community is right, there’s too much silk, and silk is too priced too low, better make it 1000000000000000 silk per ascended mat” Two years since then, and three years, four years and beyond, people will feel the repercussions of this “genius” suggestion of the community. I’m glad arenanet listened before, but please think things through a lot more than before. Make changes, but make Heimerdinger still viable, not useless, as some knee-jerk kiddos here would like to happen.

HaxTester.9816:

Arenanet needs to think this through and not act like a reactionary kiddo. Remember what you guys did to silk? The “community” said “Oh, silk is worthless, make it worth something anet”. What was your reaction? “Oh let me make an SQL query, yup the community is right, there’s too much silk, and silk is too priced too low, better make it 1000000000000000 silk per ascended mat” Two years since then, and three years, four years and beyond, people will feel the repercussions of this “genius” suggestion of the community. I’m glad arenanet listened before, but please think things through a lot more than before. Make changes, but make Heimerdinger still viable, not useless, as some knee-jerk kiddos here would like to happen.

I remember, when silk was 7 copper and gossamer was like 5 silver.
Nowadays, you get 6 scraps of gossamer for the price of 1 scrap of silk. I’ve started to use lower quality salvaging kits to increase the chances of getting silk… Yes, I may get more silk with a high quality kit… But the high quality kit is more expensive and has the chance of giving me something, I don’t want.

It’s a sad state for a game, when max tier mats are regarded as junk and people feel ripped off, when they randomly get a higher tier mat.

Niko Stark.8932:

Just scale them down to support role with lower dps and hp. Make engineers immobile for 1 second (like when harvesting) when deploying turrets other than the healing turret. Blow turrets when engineer goes further than 1700 range. Adding all that to having them vulnerable to critical hits. If that’s too much nerfing, too bad — go learn a non-AI build.

I bin saying that forever.. geeeez!