Guild Wars 2

You know, that guy from Team Fortress 2 with the hardhat and the actually effective turrets, not to mention a wrench and shotgun that hurt like a kitten.

If things dont change I’m either gonna have to get a gas mask or eyepatch on my character’s face because 90% of those engineers out there seem to be demomen and pyros!

So please Anet, start some work on fixing our turrets and tools before some big mean mother hubbard tears me a structurally superfluous new behind.

(If you don’t get it, Youtube for “Meet the Demoman / Pyro / Engineer”. )

anet’s response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvdf5n-zI14

Yeah that’s probably fairly accurate Corpus.

if you think about it, the GW2 engineer pulls aspects from more than half of the TF2 classes though
Engineer, pyro, and demoman, obvious.
scout – were the only class that can very easily have perma swiftness
medic – healing turret, elixer gun, etc.
soldier. rocket turret + rocket belt + rifle is actually a friggen shotgun most of the time

heavy – nope
sniper – nope
spy – nope

Versatility, ho!

You can already do everything that TF2 engineer does, but your turret is just a lot weaker.

i think the issue is pet’s in general are hard for them to balance in this game due to the way they designed the utility skills. Hunter pets are easy to balance because they are not a skill they are something the profession always uses and thus all their abilitys can be balanced around the pet.

In our case “as well as necro/gaurdian” you have to balance the pet to other utility skills. Example “slick shoes”.

Slick shoes is on “i beleive they nerfed it in beta to 60 second” cd. For a couple of seconds of potenetial knockdown every minute has to be balanced to something that is always doing damage or applying some kind of cc (maybe even absorbing damage). How does one balance something that is always contributing 100% of the time over an ability you can use once every minute. You have to give it down sides.

right now they do not scale. So they work best in builds that are about the profession being tanky “because your damage stats will be lost on a pet build” thus why minion master and turret heavy traits are in the “tank” trait line.

Gaurdians breaks this by most of the pet traits being in the damage trait lines. They are assuming that a summoner class always wants the core summoner to be tanky while his minions do all the damage. It makes sense on paper. Truthfully it is not working well. Nor is it satisfactory the way it is now.

“what coulda been done differently?”

You woulda locked down the game versitility a great deal if you did this. But one solution to the horrific task of balancing this LARGE number of abilitys and trait combinations is to shrink possible combinations (like they did for stats on jewlry before launch..and probably will eventually do to runes)

Look at World of Warcraft for this example. Over years (i have not looked at the panda expantion) created more and more focused talent trees to the point you were forced to heavily invest in one tree, assuming one of 3 roles..leaving less versitility of point use, but preventing the “min-maxers” who are gonna find this perfect combination across the board that is best always which will always exist due to the difficulty of balancing a game with too much freedom.

Solution they could take?

Each utility slot contains 1 weapon kit, 1 turret, 1 gadget/potion. Is this a good solution too? No. But it gives an example of how constricted you would have to make the game easier to balance and in turn allow several customizations to all be valid. I think the game really made all the right decisions when it comes to statistics and balancing (seperating dots from DD damage, not bothering with different forms of mitigations like fire resistance, ice resistance etc) but went over board on the broad options in customizations to the point including things like pets (that are not manditory over other abilitys) a very very difficult process. Currently i think gaurdian pets are the only ones that are working right as they do their job well and are temporary so easier to balance in line with other abilitys.

I predict a nerf to grenades without the much needed buffs / reworks / bug fixes to anything else. Then all of our builds will be equally as useless and thus give us options again.

We have the dispenser (healing turret) and the sentry (turrets). If only we got that teleporter, then engineer would be a real credit to team.

Zandur.5012:

I predict a nerf to grenades without the much needed buffs / reworks / bug fixes to anything else. Then all of our builds will be equally as useless and thus give us options again.

QFT…

As sad as I am to admit it, this is pretty much guaranteed. I bet someone at ANet already looked at stats, saw that something like 80% of Engis use Grenade Kit and said “Gee whiz, I guess grenades need to be nerfed, clearly they’re too strong.” And then we can all go back and play our warriors.

I’m really losing hope for this game. Communication is almost nonexistent. Bug fixes few and far apart. And while not fixing bugs and broken traits, they’re nerfing stuff that works. Just makes me want to pull my hair out. Fortunately I haven’t got any.

Really wish they’d just talk to us. Let us know what their vision for the class is. Will turrets ever scale? Or are they supposed to suck? What about all those godawful useless traits that don’t stack with anything? Etc., etc.

If that’s the case the nerf will have nothing to do with grenades performance compared to other classes and only because there are lots of engineers using them. And while they do that I hope they don’t mess with pistols, bomb kit and elixir gun performance underwater because that’s what I use mostly and even in WvWvW I gave up on grenades after the cooldown “fix” to the blinding one.

If that’s the case the nerf will have nothing to do with grenades performance compared to other classes and only because there are lots of engineers using them.

That’s just it. So far, we really don’t get told what the rationale behind the changes is.

What I mean is, OK, take last night’s patch (7/10). The thief nerf? Tons of people complaining in PvP forum. Mesmer nerfs? Same reason. Elementalist nerf? I honestly have no idea where that came from. I can honestly say I have never ever heard anyone complain about that skill. Or Eles in general.

So, why they picked on that skill to nerf it? It’s an elite with 180 sec CD that only works underwater. Was it so powerful that it needed a 33% damage nerf? Were there tons of Eles in the water doing it every 3 mins with some fantastic effect? Possibly, but again we just don’t know.

And if we’re talking elite skills, what about Mesmer’s Moa, which incidentally counters most other elites (including Necromancer’s Lich Form)? If any elite was going to get nerfed, that should have been it. But it is still here. Reason? I don’t see it.

I had just posted a suggestion in the suggestion section about some major changes that would add heavy downsides to turrets, that would counter-balance them getting some much needed buffs.

It was basically increasing the cooldown of the turret so if its destroyed its out for a good while, but also if its picked up you get a large amount of the cooldown back unlike now where you only get about 5 seconds. The return amount is based on the HP remaining on the turret, so quickly picking up a near death turret will still cause you to wait a long time before you can redeploy it. Yet picking up a full healthed turret would allow you to redeploy it quickly for your next fight.
—
I just did a Vigil story mission where a NPC gave me my Ghostbuster gun (charr story thing) that I had turned into a turret way back when, and used it to fight some undead.
I was able to pick it up as a bundle and carry it around and redeploy it where every I liked with no cooldowns attached.
Reminded me of the description of the Turrets on the engineer page of the site where it reads: “Engineers can pack up and move turrets at will,”
We can pack up our turrets at will, but thanks to the cooldown we cant exactly move them. its closer to the truth to say we can “Pack turrets up to slightly shorten the cooldown. Then redeploy them later.”
——

Any one ever by one of them sylvari mortar seed turrets? I know of an NPC that will sell them after you do an event with her. When you use it, you get a turret seed bundle that has 3 abilities, Plant a red seed turret, a blue seed turret and a yellow seed turret.
The Red is the normal one that sylvari get as a race skill, just fires a large spiky seed.
The Blue is suppose to fire several seeds around it at random areas, bombing the area and I think adding chill. But it only does this in a story mission where they have you use them. The description still says it does that but it acts just like the red (at least did last time I used it).
The yellow turret pulses healing. Pretty handy to have.

My point is, What if turrets where in the form of a weapon kit? It takes one utility slot, and you can deploy your rifle, flame, rocket, thumper and net turret.
You know what, never mind, thats a stupid idea, it would be so OP that all engi’s take it and they would have to nurf turrets even more.

Sabathius you kinda hit it on the head. No communication thus community is angry and confused. If you play league of legends “i use this examp cause a lot of people do”. They release videos atleast bi-weekly explaining all their balance changes etc. What is not explained in the videos is done through interactive threads on the forums that happen everyday giving complete break downs of EVERY LITTLE TWEAK across the board. This atleast gives players insight and understanding…and even if they dont agree atleast they feel involved and heard. Arenanet policy is still to not remark often in forums and keep distance from their players only commenting through these random well-spoken blogs that if you read between the lines are really just comes off as a "get well soon’ card in the mail while your in the hospital from your relative/friend who lives right down the road. No visit just a kitten hallmark card with a cartoon dog on the front saying “things will get better”. Im standing behind the possibility they will start doing like a recent huge success game in the e-sport scene is doing….but so far i havent seen any changes that would suggest this.

Zandur.5012:

I predict a nerf to grenades without the much needed buffs / reworks / bug fixes to anything else. Then all of our builds will be equally as useless and thus give us options again.

I also see this coming i’m afraid. It’s just the way MMO devs go about their balancing.

Personally i actually think we have too many turrets that are too weak and fragile. This causes the turrets to have a diluted effect.

Healing + Rifle could be combined into a basic support turret
Thumper + Net could be combined into a tough defensive turret
Fire + Rocket could be combined into an advanced high damage turret

This leaves pure turret builds with a free slot for the tool kit or landmine to complete the area defense or turret build.

I dont think thats really the way to fix them but i get what your trying to do. If you did that you’d have to consolidate everything else as well.

I think the biggest issue for me where the flame turret and thumper give you an extra ability to use (ae blind pulse, ae knockback) The other 3 just get a steroid. Net and Rocket get a stun/knockdown and rifle just shoots faster and puts a bleed effect on.

also toolbelt skills for when turrets are dead need shorter CD’s across the board “minus rifle”. They’re dreadfully long for something that i cant use when my turret is up anyway so they should be balanced to make up for that imo. (keep in mind us only having one weapon option is balanced by the toolbelt offering us extra abilitys NOT the weapon kits) Seriously should buff those turret toolbelt skills.