Guild Wars 2

Remove the need for a target when casting smoke screen.

This is a small change, but i think it would make the engineer much more fun to play considering you can use it to stealth. I think it would make the mechanic much more fun when you can have an on use stealth which doesn’t require you to be in the middle of a fight.

I know you can use the smoke bomb, but it’s just too slow when you want to escape, also i dont like bombs.

I support this idea. You would see this turret showing up in a lot more builds if smokescreen worked this way.

+1

+10000

It would be nice if so but I think the flame turret was designed to be of more use than just deploy, overcharge, detonate. altough turrets over all are used this way, for example I do this all the time with my healing turret so I agree !

So much this. Also, thumper turret needs to activate without foes nearby as well. Them blast finishers!!

Mannn if flame turret overcharge worked like healing turret’s overcharge does? It’d be a more mandatory skill than rocket boots or rifle turret with Static Discharge Trait for me. I think if they did it, they’ed nerf it back the very next build since we’d have guaranteed, fast stealth techniques like other classes do and that would cause too much of an uproar in non-engi threads.

magical giant.8650:

It would be nice if so but I think the flame turret was designed to be of more use than just deploy, overcharge, detonate. altough turrets over all are used this way, for example I do this all the time with my healing turret so I agree !

I think the original concept was for turrets to be “living dots” with utility overcharges. But somewhere during implementation something went horribly wrong.

I always thought that this was what it was suppose to do, when I found out it didn’t I was immensely confused. 100% supported the idea.

It was like this originally, dunno why they changed it. I would prefer it to activate without enemies too, smoke field combos are better with no nearby enemies imo. (stealth fails if you hit sb with the blast finisher).

To clarify, turret overcharges such as Smoke Screen don’t require a target for skill activation, rather the effect activation requires a target due to the way overcharges work.

Overcharges enhance/replace the turret’s regular bolts, meaning the effect won’t activate until the time the turret fires.

(This explains why Cleansing Burst differs in that it works without an enemy target, because Healing Turret targets you and your allies.)

This lack of effect activation control makes overcharge skills unreliable (including Cleansing Burst), so don’t be so quick to detonate/pick up!

A simple yet effective solution is to allow overcharge skills to reset turret rate of fire upon skill activation; installing control; eliminating frustration!

Addressing your suggestion Daffern, removing Smoke Screen target requirements for effect activation is a fine idea, as it’s effect isn’t target dependent.

So what are the ramifications to removing this dependency?

Well when you consider scenarios where this would be advantageous, the dissociating factor is of offensive cause, meaning the only times where target-independent-Smoke Screen becomes useful is when using the ability for aggressive means.
E.g. Combo finisher > Stealth: Surprise attacks.

Stealth is the exception to this rule, as characters in stealth can not be targeted; inventing unique defensive strategy!

Whether this change is warranted?

There are too many elements of profession design for me to consider in order to derive a conclusion (it would be easier to practically test and judge by feeling), but I have a feeling it wouldn’t hurt/further imbalance profession individuality