Guild Wars 2

I come back to this game from a 6 month hiatus, and I find my engineer has been rendered lame.

Turrets are useless now.

No ground targeting because PvP players complained that the turrets were getting put in places where they couldn’t be reached with melee.

Turrets are now affected by conditions that they have no business being affected by, but can’t be buffed.

I can now have turrets that generate boons without having to spend resources or complete a quest to get that skill, but I can’t have my Mecha Legs at the same time. Since I can’t throw turrets anymore, I have to move at normal speed from one place to another, and set them up one at a time instead of in a couple of seconds.

Thanks to this, turrets last less time than they used to in PVE, to the point where it’s not even worth using one. Since I’ve come back to the game, I’ve not run across a single Engineer using any turret except the Healing Turret, which lasted about as long as dry ice on a hot sidewalk.

I may be just a casual player, and I’m not one of those PvP e-sports types, and maybe I’m crazy, but since when did the Engineer become a direct DPS/condition build? Have I missed the point of having a character with the smallest selection of weapons in the game having turrets to begin with?

I don’t have a problem with turrets taking critical hits. That’s a valid nerf, but the rest is just going overboard. Anet has pretty much taken away one of the engineer’s biggest advantages, and made that class the worse for it. Is that not the point of an engineer; To have his inventions and wacky gadgets do the heavy lifting for him?

Bottom line, I’m not buying the expansion, and I’m putting serious consideration into giving up GW2 altogether. My engineer was my primary and the class I most liked playing. If Anet is going to take away my enjoyment, I’m going to spend my free time and money elsewhere.

And just so I can silence all the “get gud” replies, I did use my kits, my elixirs, my flamethrower and my elixir gun, not just my turrets. But I combined certain turrets pretty effectively with those kits, and now, those tactics go out the window because some people complained enough. I liked my turrets. They made the engineer feel unique.

Sound salty to you? You’re right. Saltier than the Dead Sea.

Meh turret were broken, i’m glad they are no more. Still i agree they have been hit too much hard.
The point of engi is the kits tho, not the turrets. If all you cared about were the turrets i’m sorry.

I did use my kits, quite extensively, but I used my turrets as they were intended, additional firepower, or as a distraction from myself/party.

I almost never went full turret mode, but I still used them. I was a better engineer when I could throw a turret to where it was needed, and know that it would last long enough to do what I needed it to do.

Now…there’s no point. Engineers are just elemental-lite. They’ve lost part of what made them unique. Not to mention all the other trait changes they’ve recently suffered, which just makes the class less enjoyable.

Did Anet nerf turrets to make drones worthwhile? We won’t know until we see the engineer specialization and what drones do, but that won’t make a difference to me, because I’m not buying the expansion. It’s overpriced for starters, and I don’t like most of the current “good” builds for the engineer, because currently the only turret that has any reasonable use is the Healing Turret.

I have a feeling that drones will just act like minions or pets. That means the engineer doesn’t feel like an “inventor” sort of class anymore. It just feels like another type of spellcaster, and that’s not what I want to play.

I’m not a turret fan myself but i see your point. Still they said are going to yoyo balance thing pretty often in order to tweak the new traits, maybe in the next future we can see wome changes

Funny enough, I started to look at turret as abilities rather than turrets. Just like the healing turret, which is used, overcharged and either blown or picked up.

Flame Turret: Smoke field, fire field and blast finisher.
Rifle Turret: surprise shot is good for some builds, it gives fury for 5 seconds with trait, blast finisher
Thumper Turret: Knockback (delay), blasts!! (3 I believe, but I haven’t tested since the update)
Net Turret: Crazy amounts of immobilize. And an on demand stun, and blast finisher.

I won’t go over healing turret, but with a water field and all the blast finishers engineers have, its easy to make good use of water fields.

The turrets can no longer be placed and serve much purpose. But, they are still just as good as additions to builds to getting access to specific utilities.

I will miss what turrets were. But, A-Net hates AI builds, so I pray to the 6 that our elite spec doesn’t get minions.

In trailer we saw that drones fly around engi.
So I would say they will be one of following:
- Self buffs (evey X s attack nearby foe) / Self buff toggles.
- resources used by utilities in similar way that revenant do.

Of course it it anet and it could be something completely different…

And a hearty good riddance to them.

With a game as fast and dynamic as GW2, turrets always struck me as a poor idea since they forced you to camp your location.

Now if only A-Net would re-purpose them. Quite frankly, the drones we suspect come with the new class would have made a lot more sense as turrret replacements for the base class.

I only ever really used turrets to cheese pvp. (Setting up a thumper→rocket turret→net turret stun lock was hilarious…and still is if you can pull it off).

However, I am having so, so much fun with my HGH Flametank build in the Silverwastes and WvWvW, so…. maybe adapt?

Gaaroth.2567:

Meh turret were broken, i’m glad they are no more. Still i agree they have been hit too much hard.
The point of engi is the kits tho, not the turrets. If all you cared about were the turrets i’m sorry.

Correction, Turrets were broken in PVP. It’s pretty sad that they were destroyed for the few niche uses in PVE though. It was a heavy handed nerf with no precision or foresight on how it’d affect their use outside of PVP. I’m glad they’re not dominating PVP, but it’s sad to see another set of tools go the way of Spirit weapons (honestly probably worse at this point).

The main problem i have with the turrets is how Anet is trying to balance them.

There is no question that turrets were OP before, because you could get full Power Tank with high threat against Zergs (focused on a single location).

But now turrets are easy to kill and dont scale with power. They got simply nerfed to the ground.
They were never usefull in PvE – Dungeons/Fractals (my favorite game mode) and now the usefullnes in PvP is taken away completly.

The only usefull things are the toolbelt skills. but you can get semilar skills by using kits

For example: Firefield and smokefield with the bombkit instead of the fireturret (IF THE RANGE BUG WOULD BE SOLVED)

They did/do have uses in Dungeons/fractals but very few and far between. There still are a few uses, but now you have to adjust a bit.

First, the old use on Archdiviner with Net turret is dead, it gets killed by the condi fields that are negligible to players, frustrating to say the least. I’ve tried to find weird spots to put it to still use it but I’ve not had luck, if I put it on the pillar it’s killed by fire for example.

There’s a use for Net turret on Shoggorath but unlike before you need to wait until he starts running otherwise turret will almost certainly die before he starts to run in my experience, not a huge deal but a little frustrating.

Of course it’s use on Ooze (which IMO is pretty exploity) to lock him down before he gets to the Asura.

Then as you hit on there’s still a use for the thumper Turret toolbelt

Belka was another great use for turrets, you could stealth in, lay your turrets and then bounce out and the turrets would pull agro and tank for you while you freely damaged from behind. Now they get blown up because A) conditions work on them no more self repairing. Mainly a solo technique but I thought it was pretty nifty and sad it got ruined.

I’d love if Flame Turret actually dropped a smoke field, but it’s a very very tiny one that will only trigger if something is around for it to “attack” with it.

Either way this is all another great example of why PVP and PVE should have split skills. I’d go as far as to say Turrets should be invuln in PVE for them to see much more use outside the niche situations I mention (and outside HT) but of course for PVP they’re probably better now than before.

This game is terrible when it comes to minions, turrets and their ai / how you control them. The other stuff is great but they need a total rework of all “companions”.