Guild Wars 2

(tl;dr another cry topic)

Turrets are basicly the worst skills in engineer setup… and Arena nerfed them when they added “turrets now attack players target”.
Remove bleeding from rifle turret and burning from rocket turret even more decreased their damage output.

The only “usefull turret” (compared to rest of engineer skills) is Healing turret but when it’s used in the way which doesnt “fit” to the turrets.
Place turret -> overcharge -> blast -> destroy turret…
Is that realy how turret should work ? In my opinion it should be steady amount of healing with possibility to burst heal…

Turrets from Supply Crate stands only for 60 seconds so we dont have “typical” summon elite like rest of the classes have (Nature spirit, Flesh Golem, Elemental).

Turrets are stationary and … they deal less damage than necromancer minnions (which leechs life to their master, removes conditions from nearby allies , removes boons from enemies and MOVES!).

Even the attack speed on them is bugged…

So there’s the question: Can we dream about Turret buff ? … Or another nerf…

Interesting, because we constantly besieged them for turrets attacking our targets. Now they implemented it, and it’s worse (something similar happened to Mesmer Phantasmal Warden which can now move).

We indeed asked for them to attack our targets. What we hadn’t asked for is a buggy implementation of it that continues to change target while not attacking anything.

I wonder if they shouldn’t just scrap the whole turret category and implement something else entirely. After all, they don’t seem interested to fix them anyway – many bugs are there since more than six months ago (and some probably since the launch). Not to talk about the different treatment between them and the “minions” of the other classes…

@Manuhell
Guardian’s spirit weapons are also crappy and buggy…

Sure…go ahead. Dream.

Admittedly, Anet has buffed turrets. Several times. The problem is that they’re either the wrong buffs or they’re weak buffs. An hp increase is good in theory, but in practice they’re still 1-shot in dungeons and easily dispatched in WvW. Their AI was recently improved, but I can’t speak to the results of that buff since I still don’t use turrets.

Now obviously I don’t want any 2 professions to be too similar. But the fact is that many classes have a summon of some type: guardian spirit weapons, ranger spirits, Mesmer illusions, warrior banner, ele elementals, necro minions. And some of these are really effective (illusions, minions, banners) and some are just not (spirit weapons, turrets).

As it stands, due to them dying quickly, the most effective way to use most turrets is to drop, overcharge, pick up/detonate. If that’s what Anet intends, then they should be designed to be summoned, take no damage, auto “overcharge” and then disappear, all with a lower cooldown. So rocket turret would appear, lock on, fire, and disappear. Reduces the button dancing. But it also reduces the cool factor. After all, their not turrets anymore…they’re clunky gadgets. So then…I guess that means that they’re not meant to be summoned, overcharged, and picked up.

Which means they need to have their longevity addressed in a deeper way than just boosting their HP. This isn’t unique to Engi. Rangers want spirits & pets that can avoid 1-shots. In both cases the “fix” has been to simply boost health in PvE.

…….

Miltek.2104:

@Manuhell
Guardian’s spirit weapons are also crappy and buggy…

I wasn’t saying that others have been more lucky – i was referring about how often turrets are treated differently without reason (like the patch that increased pve hp of many “minions”, but not turrets).

They really should implement something else. While any other profession have mobile summons (you can even pick up banners), we have stationary. This is just stupid, since we engineers. Even guardians know how to make objects to move, and we can’t fix it.
I think engis deserve golems as pets with same functionality, at least.

At this point, Turrets are so heavily bugged that I can’t bring myself to think anything less than recoding them from the ground up is necessary.
It’s become obvious that Anet either does not care to, or cannot, fix them.
Frustrating, especially for those Engineers who were drawn to the class because of Turrets.

This games turrets are so far off the mark from what someone expects turrets to do that its not even funny. I have all these reasons in my head that explains why they are so horrible but its hard to get a point for where to begin. The best I can say is that fights in gw2 are fast and filled with stealths/invulnerabilities/aoes and more that just make taking stationary weps that shoot for 400 every two seconds obslete. Turrets seem to have been made for much slower gameplay than this. Also, rocket turret used to be nice right up until they removed the burning from its normal attacks, now its just another pile of squishy junk on a very long cooldown. Anet has been trying to buff turrets to make them viable for months now, but the nerfs to the good functioning turrets like that instantly destroy a years worth of buffs.

But anyways to put some life into turrets, what I really would like to see are upgradeable turrets, smacking them long enough with the wrench should upgrade them with more health, damage, radius increase, etc (while removing the 5-min timer or at least refresh it) so that they can actually defend areas,keep up with this games speed, and do whatever turrets are expected to do.

Penguin.5197:

This games turrets are so far off the mark from what someone expects turrets to do that its not even funny. I have all these reasons in my head that explains why they are so horrible but its hard to get a point for where to begin. The best I can say is that fights in gw2 are fast and filled with stealths/invulnerabilities/aoes and more that just make taking stationary weps that shoot for 400 every two seconds obslete. Turrets seem to have been made for much slower gameplay than this. Also, rocket turret used to be nice right up until they removed the burning from its normal attacks, now its just another pile of squishy junk on a very long cooldown. Anet has been trying to buff turrets to make them viable for months now, but the nerfs to the good functioning turrets like that instantly destroy a years worth of buffs.

But anyways to put some life into turrets, what I really would like to see are upgradeable turrets, smacking them long enough with the wrench should upgrade them with more health, damage, radius increase, etc (while removing the 5-min timer or at least refresh it) so that they can actually defend areas,keep up with this games speed, and do whatever turrets are expected to do.

Your first paragraph is right on. Fast gameplay does not match up with stationary turrets with slow firing rates and long cooldowns.

I don’t like the idea in your 2nd paragraph though. You mention fast gameplay but then you want to upgrade turrets by whacking on them, essentially wasting time and prepping for a battle RTS style. No thanks. I’d rather they either roll around like Daleks or change to golems that stomp after foes.

They should swap the turrets with asura racial golems and then tweak the numbers. Essentially, giving us 2 offensive golems, 1 melee & 1 ranged, and 3 defensive golems, 1 with control skills, 1 that straight tanks, and 1 with support skills. Then asura racials could be kitten stationary turrets.

Seras.5702:

I don’t like the idea in your 2nd paragraph though. You mention fast gameplay but then you want to upgrade turrets by whacking on them, essentially wasting time and prepping for a battle RTS style. No thanks. I’d rather they either roll around like Daleks or change to golems that stomp after foes.

They should swap the turrets with asura racial golems and then tweak the numbers. Essentially, giving us 2 offensive golems, 1 melee & 1 ranged, and 3 defensive golems, 1 with control skills, 1 that straight tanks, and 1 with support skills. Then asura racials could be kitten stationary turrets.

And your idea doesn’t sound better.

First of, Engineer concept is based on the Charrs lore and not the Asuras. So lorewise, you will never see any Engineer deploy Asuras Magitec Golems on the battlefield, unless they are Asuras themself.

Secondly making it mobile doesn’t make it better, it gives you no control over their placement. And if you ever played MM Necro you know pretty well the pets AI in this game is dumb and suicidal in most of the cases, so you would probably end up loosing your “turrets” even faster than we do right now.

Not to mention, some players choose the Engineer over the other “pet” profession for the purpose of putting stationary defense on the battlefield. The game is very mobile indeed but the game also ask you a lot of time to defend positions. Turrets are made for that exact purpose so making them mobile would just make it the robot MM Necro copycat build.

People always ask for improvement and mobility but fail to understand the fact Turrets were very viable well before they got squashed by tons of bugs and quick “fixes”. I’m not saying they were perfect, far from it, but when I started playing my Turret Engineer they did a good job at controling their targets. But staff at A-net started messing things up roughly when we got close to the Southsun Cove living story patch. Messing our turrets fire rate, passive traits that reenforced our turrets were down for about 3 months before they got “fixed”, and I say fixed because they implemented other bugs like Flameturret having a longer cooldown with deployable turret traits and stuff like that.

Over a couple of months I’ve seen 2 good changes for turrets,
+ Scaling condition power goes up with condition damage (and duration)
+ Healing Turret got substentialy boosted.
The first point above became timesink sinds now we only have 1 turret dealing condition damage.

But we also lost a lot in return,
- No more burning and bleeding on Rocket and Rifle Turrets, while turreteers were clearly mend to be conditioneers and needed toughness to take threat away from those.
- Less CC, net turret doesn’t shoot 2 nets in a row while overcharged, there was a bug were it shot 3 net in a row every 12sec for a while but it was clearly a bug. Now Overcharging it doesn’t even increase its firing rate. Same goes for Rocket Turret wich could shoot 2 overcharged rockets in a row and it got changed without any indication on a patchnote…
- Net turret got his firerate normalised to 13sec because it was easier to change a tooltip instead of fixing a bug…
- The new turret targeting system is a mess, it was a simple addition wich could have been much more usefull if it actualy allowed the turret to fire on the current target instead of the last “attacked” ennemy.

Well you probably understand my point, but if you realy want to fix turrets you have to do specificaly the following steps.
- Fix the hitbox issues, there is no reason your turrets should die when they are not standing in a AoE.
- Fix the targeting issues to allow turrets to attack the current selected target the Engineer is attacking instead of the last ennemy hit by an attack. Because you know, every single Engineer attacks have some sort of AoE component attached to it.
- Fix every issues related to overcharges and allow us to have 2 overcharged rockets and nets like we did before to gain our much needed control back.
- Give us back damaging conditions, there is not reason to ever play Turrets with a Rifle, because that same weapon without traiting and gearing is basicaly doing nothing good for our Turrets. Or at least make a new turret skill centered around another condition damage, like bleedings for instance. (There are fine gateling turrets model in the Black Citadel that could take this purpose)
- Give us a way to reward the player for keeping our turrets alive in prolongiated fights, there is nothing more frustrating to see our turrets vanish after 5min and see it go on full cooldown (thats not rewarding!). Picking them up isn’t enough right now and should be changed to incite you to Detonate them for the extra stamina and combo blast finishers. So my idea is to completely remove turrets and reduce their cooldown instead with detonate depending on how long they stayed alive on the battlefield, if they get destroyed by any other source they go on full cooldown to punish the player for playing the wrong way. If you use them correctly, you get to reposition them and get a free stamina and blast finisher on top of it for team support.
- Finaly, give turrets an active ability that triggers when they are hit by an AoE to soak most of its incomming damage but leaving it vulnerable to the next AoE attack should it be hit again. This way people cannot abuse it for AoE protection but Turrets get a second chance before they actualy get destroyed.

Do every of those following steps and I can ensure you you will fix 95% of the turrets related issues in game.

Seems to me all ‘pets’ in this game are buggy, except maybe Ranj0rs. Necro pets have a long complaint list, Guardian spirit weapons and our turrets. I would think if ANet fixed one it would probably fix all 3…

imo, turrets would be fine atm if they didn’t have the ridiculous 5min timer or the looooong cd.

Right now ANet should focus on adding small changes and tweaks with each balance update. While it would be great if they would fix all the issues with turrets at once time, it’d probably bring about even more bugs than it would fixes.

And I might as well throw in what tweaks/changes I think should be made.

• Reduce the cast time for placing turrets to 1/4 seconds.
• Add a tool-tip indicating a cool-down reduction when picking up a placed turret. Right now turrets get a 25% reduction on their cool-down if picked up at least 1 second after being placed. If picked up immediately they do end up going on full cool-down without the reduction, so that should be fixed as well.
• Adjust Turret Overcharges to reset the fire rate of the Turret when activated. This would allow the Turret to fully take advantage of their Overcharge, as well as possibly fix some issues with fire rate and activation.
• Adjust Rifle Turrets tool-tip to indicate a 20% Projectile Finisher.
• Reduce duration of Vulnerability for Automatic Fire (Rifle Turrets Overcharge) to 3s. Increase the fire rate from 50% to 75%. Increase the cool-down to 40 seconds. Change the tool-tip to indicate it causes piercing shots making targets vulnerable, not bleeding shots.
• Adjust the fire rate of Net Turret to 8 seconds. Reduce the duration of the Immobilize to 1 second. Increase the Overcharge duration to 12 seconds. Add tool-tip to indicate the Overcharge effect is only on the first shot after activation; shots after the first shot are only effected by the increased fire rate.
• Remove the cast time on the tool-belt skill Rumble.
• Improve Turret based Tool-belt skills as a whole.
• Adjust Turret detonations to have unique effects based upon the Turret detonated. Examples of this could include Healing Turrets detonation removing an additional 2 conditions from those in the blast radius, Rifle Turret causing 10 stacks of Vulnerability for 8 seconds to enemies within the blast radius, etc.
• Adjust the trait Autotool Installation to heal Turrets for % Health every X seconds for Y seconds upon Overcharging the Turret. Add effect that reduces Turret Overcharge skill cool-downs by 20%.
• Add a cool-down reduction of 20% for Turrets to the trait Deployable Turrets. Picking the turret back up would reduce the cool-down of the new value with the trait, not the original base value. This would mean picking Rifle Turret back up with this trait active would reduce it’s cool-down to 12 seconds, vs. 15 seconds without the trait.
• Add at least one more Turret altering, or Tool-belt skill altering trait to either the Inventions or Tools trait lines.
• Add slight stat scaling based upon the users Toughness. Condition damage is not a factor for turrets, but raw damage is, the extra bit of defense goes a long way, and would allow the trait Metal Plating to be more effective in the long run.

Kind of wish that turrets that are picked up have a slightly smaller CD than ones that blow up.

TheRiverBlues.2607:

Kind of wish that turrets that are picked up have a slightly smaller CD than ones that blow up.

Turrets get their base cool-down reduced by 25% when picked up, but they need to be down at least 1 second before being picked back up, otherwise the turret goes back on its’ full cool-down.

I don’t feel Turrets that have a reasonable range should have increased life. However Turrets that have a minimal attack range should. And the Cool Downs on all turrets should be reduced again.

Additionally, This has been mentioned before but I would completely love a rework of the pick up mechanic.

For example:
Walking near your deployed Turret and pressing the interact key would give you a 3/4 second cast where you would physically pick up and carry your turret, like an environmental object. Replacing your weapon Skills with a single skill: Fire.

This would allow you to fire your turret like an environmental weapon with a reasonable attack speed/Rate but would now be controllable. Your Tool Belt skill would remain as Detonate and your Utility Skill would remain as Overcharge Turret which, when activated would cause your shots to be Overcharged for its duration/ammo. Additionally While being held your Turret cannot be harmed.

With this change There could be a whole smorgasbord of innovative traits and combos that could be utilized! if this was implemented.

For Example:
-A trait to slowly repair the turret being held, or where 50% of damage you take is divided amongst your turret that is being held.

-Or Detonating a Turret while holding it will cause Burning to nearby enemies.

-As well as some nice synergy with the existing trait Deployable Turrets perhaps something along the lines of: When turrets are thrown they daze nearby targets for 1second where they land. Turrets can also be thrown again when picked up.

Innovative changes like these would make the game more involving as opposed to just simple number tweaking. Even though adjusting statistics is the easier approach to making Turrets more viable i feel focusing on making professions and their mechanics feel unique will lead to a much more fun/gratifying experience which I always considered To be/should be a games primary objective. This is of course, just my opinion.

Turret health as it is is perfectly fine, it’s just damage mitigation that needs improvement via stat scaling and trait additions.

As for the turret deployment/wielding idea, it sounds incredibly fun. It reminds me a bit of Warrior Banners, but more simplified and with more variety. Plus the image of a Charr Engineer walking around holding a Rifle Turret, while cranking the Pepper-grinder handle, firing out rapid shots into a crowd of foes sounds amazing to me. Granted I feel as though implementation of such a thing will take a large amount of time.

I had also a similar idea with a pickup bundle, but I kinda fear people will hate it the same way they hate Banners as a bundle.

But yeah we could imagine the Engineer picking up his Turrets wich get relocated to his 1# – 4# and make the 5# ability a swiftness buff that allow the Engineer to run faster so he can relocate his turrets more effectively.

Deployable turrets would allow you to throw those turrets back away, and Auto-tool Installation would regenerate the health of your turrets while you are holding them in your crate. (but sounds a bit difficult to script).

Doing this action could maybe resset the 5min timer on Turrets, well…

it is something we can discuss about.

well just some boon on detonation is great
healing turret —→ detonation remove condition
rifle turret --—→ might
rocket turret —-—> fury
tumper turret —-—→ protection
net turret —-——> swiftness
flame turret —-—→ stability

or implement boon on turret or reduce the CD on pick up

Dredd Spirit Caller.4082:

well just some boon on detonation is great
healing turret —-> detonation remove condition
rifle turret —-—> might
rocket turret —-—> fury
tumper turret —-—-> protection
net turret —-——> swiftness
flame turret —-—-> stability

or implement boon on turret or reduce the CD on pick up

Well detonation is already a Blast Finisher, so you can already generate Might & Retaliate by blasting those in other people fields, or on your own if you happen to use Flame Turret, Bomb Kit or Elixir Gun.

The only downside comes from the fact we sacrifice way to much of our effectiveness by doing so. Turrets should realy be about getting extra “manpower” on the battlefield (instead of improving yourself) and support your allies with crowd control, combo fields and finishers when our turrets sustained long enough and needs to move to another place.

This is one of the only ways we can stay unique compared to the other professions and be usefull at the same time.

It is why I strictly believe fixing bugs and improving the detonate mechanic by reducing the cooldown depending on your turret total lifespan would make the Turret Engineer a much more appreciated profession to play without dumbing it down to much.

Just my 2cents.

I always wanted to have the ability to pick up my turret and run it into a crowd and detonating it with the trait Accelerant-Packed Turrets. You could essentially be a mad bomber, this could create pressure in a fight when you see an insane Engineer sprinting towards you holding his Healing Turret! You know you got to have a dodge roll, stability or just play the tag game. Would be super fun!

Turrets should mechanically extend from whatever pack you have on. That way they’re mobile with you and still able to target and destroy. The detonate could just be a knock back and if you have more than one up chain react and multiply the KB distance. They should just auto attack your target.

Arenanet forbids you to dream about turret buffs.
I’m starting to think their vision for turrets is for them to be placed in far away unreachable areas where they can slowly piddle away at an enemies health bar then get 1 shot.

Merry Christmas!

I play a ranger and an engineer so I see a lot of similar AI issues.
Turrets really face bad AI decision making and how to easily fix them is not clear.
Like the pet.

Turrets doing more conditions is probably the easiest way to fix it.
Similarly, I like to say that instead of tracking, it would be better if a turret would:

1. PBAE pulse a net.
2. Whirl shoot off rifle bullets. Anything in the way gets hit.
3. For a flame turret or treat it as a napalm wall and pulse it out. X seconds of wall every z seconds.
4. Rocket should blast a cone of five rockets each doing less damage. That way you hit more. Like a rocket barrage.

The key is rather than tracking targets, the devices should shoot on a timer. This would create a very nice defensive position.

Then you can think of conditions like. . .

1) Burn- – - Flame turret napalm wall
2) Bleed – - – whirling bullets from rifle turret
3) Track/unstealth- – - rocket barrage cone
4) Net really needs nothing other than to blast out of the top of the turret to a large pbae area.

I see turrets as a very defensive area control focus.

Turrets should stay up longer too (even if you “leave the scene”) but detonate should have a leash. It would be nice if you could leave your turrets to augment one point/guards while moving off to another point (WvW or pvp).

I like turrets, especially the ones that hit everything without needing a particular target.

In all seriousness though, the thing that irks me about turrets is the lack of defense that I feel when I use them. Kits are just too versatile and provide a lot more defensive options for AoE/Focus fire situations. Turrets are so unreliable and sometimes undefensive that I find playing a build based on just turrets alone to be quite frustrating.

At best they are augments or better used as supplements to a build rather than the main attraction. For instance, not taking Incendiary Powder because you’re already taking Flame Turret.

atm i playing turrets on wvw i just want some boon (stability, swiftnes) and a breack stun to use
1 sec of stability on tumper turret tool belt skill it’s useless
for self defense i just put up some traits (alchemy IV and VI )
add some other conditions can be 1/2 solution
first we need the bug be fixed to see if turret fixed can deal more dmg and control

hmm what about when we picking up a turret we reduce CD and at the same time gain a random boon ???

I’m convinced that turrets will just never be messed up in some regard.

As far as builds are concerned, the best use of turrets I’ve seen has been the selection of 1 turret (usually rifle, net, or thumper), and then using other non-turret stuff (healing turret aside). Builds that go all turret just get so handicapped in many regards, although I think it would be nice to actually see an all-turret build that worked well (like an all-minion or all-spirit build does).

The only really effective use I’ve seen of multi-turret/all-turret builds are either node defending or general PvE.

Yamsandjams.3267:

I’m convinced that turrets will just never be messed up in some regard.

As far as builds are concerned, the best use of turrets I’ve seen has been the selection of 1 turret (usually rifle, net, or thumper), and then using other non-turret stuff (healing turret aside). Builds that go all turret just get so handicapped in many regards, although I think it would be nice to actually see an all-turret build that worked well (like an all-minion or all-spirit build does).

The only really effective use I’ve seen of multi-turret/all-turret builds are either node defending or general PvE.

At the same time, right now they are so messed up it is hard to make the situation look even worse.

And in regard of full Turret builds, they were never mend to be used for chasing people. Like you said, their main purpose is to defend nodes or do general stuff in PvE but, overall, they did well for PvE. (at least for me)

I was running a condition P/Sh Rabid/Apoth 0/30/30/0/10 build with sigils of Generosity and I had my fun for a month running with Net, Flame and Rocket turrets and after that I only saw a growing list of bugs affecting my turrets expending over the rest of the year. And with the recent changes to turret condition, I can’t even run my build like I used to because I lost to much condition firepower. Not to mention, I deal 1/3 of the Crowd Control I used to do because of bugs and tooltip “normalisation” of buged firerate into “true” firerate.

And speaking about skills and gear, what about people who spend time and effort getting laurels for their ascended trinkets? So we get a full revamp for turrets, without a patchnote (I’ve heard only the German one had it writen somewhere) and we get a big blast from the devs for people that already farmed their daily laurels to get adequate itemisation.

When I saw the last devspeak I already knew just by checking their short footage someting was wrong with the turrets but they weren’t saying anything about those issue while it was the best time to speak about those and fix them. Just look at Rocket Turret new toolbelt ability, sounds cool, look cool, but you can’t use it effectively and it wasn’t even tested underwater. And I won’t speak about the targeting system, wich could see some improvements.

Some people are devoted into fixing turrets, I saw a lot of good and bad ideas but we barely get any response from the devs in this regard while Turrets is one of the multiple core aspect of gameplay of the Engineer and it desperatly needs love.

Right now, all I want, is see my time and effort worth the investement and be able to play my Engineer the way it should always have been…