Guild Wars 2

The Engineer has a variety of issues, and this past patch has done little to address most of them; most of them, however, are not ones I have dealt with as a consequence of my playstyle choice.

See, I used to use Turrets. I say ‘used to’ because I now only use Kits, and that pisses me right the kitten off. Here’s a list of the various issues I’ve found Turrets to have, and how they might be addressed.

1: Turrets are weak. They can’t take a hit, and they deal subpar damage, requiring several to do the job of one kit. They scale only with player traits, ignoring gear bonuses; for a game which places such an emphasis on gear and the bonuses it provides, this is…irritating, to say the least. Ever watched a creature one-shot several turrets simultaneously? Go fight a Risen Knight with fully-traited Turrets. Go into a dungeon. Doesn’t matter how heavily invested in them you are, they’re tissue paper.
Suggestion: Have Turrets scale, even if to a reduced extent in light of their potential numbers (potentially: 1 Rocket, 2 Rifle, 2 Flame, 1 Net, 2 Healing, if Supply Crate is traited properly), to gear, including Vitality/Toughness enhancements.

2: Turrets are immobile. Well, freakin’ duh, they’re turrets – generally not things viewed as paragons of agility. However, they are both immobile and have long cooldowns, both on placement and overcharge. Sure, picking one up can reduce the cooldown by 25%; that’s still a long wait, in most cases, and if you happen to be separated from it, then you’re SOL to begin with. In a game where mobility is such a factor, this is problematic.
Suggestion: Reduce their cooldown time. Fixing Deployable Turrets would help a little as well, but it’s only useful for placing them. Perhaps change Deployable Turrets to a trait that gives them a movement mode, or add such a function? Or, more realistically – Autotool Installation is worthless. Why not Zoidberg slip it a bit of the ol’ 20% Cooldown Reduction to make it worth bothering with, even if that means discarding the 10% HP/10 sec Turret regen? Hell, maybe have the turret cooldown start upon placement of the turret, so if you have it out for long enough, you can blow it up and place a new one immediately?

3: Turrets have terrible AI. Seriously. Go find some furniture. Place a turret. Watch it destroy the furniture…and keep shooting at the space where it was, like it’s trying to kill the very concept of “that couch that was here a minute ago THAT I KILLED ‘CAUSE I’M A TURRET and that’s what I do. Oh, what, something’s killing you? That, uh, that sucks, bro. Did you see me kill that couch?”
Suggestion: Give the user some way to refocus Turrets, or improve the AI. Preferably both.

And thus ends the ‘This is actually problematic’ section. I’m not even going to comment on the various bugged traits (like Accelerant-Packed Turrets, basically every Explosives trait that could or should be triggered by Turrets, or Deployable Turrets) except to mention that I’m not going to talk about them. They don’t need to be talked about; they need to be fixed. Moving on.

These are suggestions that are likely somewhat silly and/or unrealistic, but could be interesting.

1: Custom Turrets: It would be interesting to be able to modify our turrets to suit our playstyle, beyond just using the same old set. Being able to switch out different types of ammo, different barrels, etcetera, would just be kinda neat, y’know?

2: Elite Turret: Don’t even talk to me about Mortar. No. It didn’t happen. There should be an Elite Turret that actually acts like a turret, such as, for example, firing on it’s friggin’ own, being able to picked up to reduce the cooldown, and having an Overcharge. Maybe there could be a few of them, offering different combinations of regular turrets: Close Combat could be a Flame Turret + Thumper Turret, Offense could be Rocket Turret + Rifle Turret, Support could be Healing Turret + Net Turret, etcetera, I guess.

3: It’d also be interesting to be able to equip turrets with sigils. No idea how to balance it, as part of me is going “It’d probably be best to keep it just the one on the main hand weapon…” and another part is going “But it’d be more interesting to have each turret have a different sigil.” Maybe have each turret be able to equip a sigil 20 levels lower than the user’s level?

I agree on this. Turrets feel like a gimmicky afterthought ATM. They are the reason I chose engineer, and I have stuck to them from day 1 of headstart until today (over 400+ hours of gameplay), hoping to see a patch to fix them. It’s been months, half a dozen+ patches, and nothing to address these issues. That’s just sad

Agreed on all counts. Especially #3. I don’t nessicarily think turrets should be “commandable” (Commanding pets is Ranger’s profession mechanic and I don’t think other professions should get it) but for the love of pie the AI firing at dead world objects absolutely NEEDS to be fixed. No other pet / minion in the game gets stuck attacking an object thats not there any more.

Though on issue #2, I have my own suggestion. If you play the Charr Iron Legion storyline, during one of the earlier missions you’re given a few redeployable turrets. You can grab these turrets from a cart (as you would grab a rock from the ground or whatever), walk to a location, and press “1” to place the turret where you’re standing. More importantly though, you can then pick them up again, move them to a different spot, and put them back down.

Engineer turrets should work this way. Instead of interacting with them simply making them disappear and reducing cooldown a bit, let interacting with them put the turret into your hand, so that you can move them around. While in your hand, pressing “2” would stow the turret completely (exactly how it works now, with the cooldown reduction and turret disappearing from the world), while pressing “1” would have you place the turret back on the ground at the spot you’re standing (or with deployable turrets, at a ground-targeted location). Turret health would have to be kept constant between moves in this fasion, so it would still be beneficial to stow the turret completely sometimes to heal it up, but it would let you make minor adjustments to turret position without waiting for the cooldown every single time.

I’d say this would probably be just fine as default turret functionality. But I’d be fine with it even being a trait that enables this function, integrating it with one of the other turret traits. Either Deployable Turrets because the name matches the functionality, or Self-Repairing Turrets because as mentioned that trait is just kind of meh.

That’s a really cool thing they let you do with turrets that I completely forgot about (and one that’s always getting the Ash Legion that Ghostbore stuff, for that matter). That would also be an awesome way to handle it.