Guild Wars 2

The problem with turrets currently is that there’s no clear purpose of it. Why use something immobile, weak, and does mediocre damage when you have more useful utilities like grenade kits and bomb kits which can be used on the fly? It doesn’t serve a clear purpose.

Turrets, because of its inability to move, should be a weapon aimed for a clearer purpose. It should be able to lock enemies out of a region, and make that area the engineer’s playground. Right now however, turrets are very confused. It’s an instant cast, yet immobile with a longish cool down. Are turrets meant to be an offensive tool, or defensive? It tries to be both, but fails miserably at both.

A good solution to this problem, is to change the turrets in a way that it focuses them on the idea of area denial. Instead of being an instant cast, turrets should take 20-40(depending on balance) seconds to set up, and if damage is taken while setting up, you will stop and have to start over again completely. In turn, turrets should be much tougher, have significantly higher health, and tons more damage. Instead of having a cool down timer, turrets should have a set up timer.

This solves a few design problems with the turrets. Most importantly, it gives turrets something to excel at. Turrets will become the go to tools to prevent enemies from entering a specific area. On the flip side however, they will have no offensive capabilities whatsoever. But that’s the whole point, that’s the purpose it serves. It defends, and it’ll be able to defend well, unlike the current turrets. This will also give the engineer class something to excel at. An engineer with a bunch of turrets beside him should be a sight to behold. Anyone who tries to go into an engineer’s nest will be at the engineer’s mercy, but if an engineer exits his nest, his/her lack of offensive utility slots will make him/her an easy prey.

I know this might be a difficult system for ArenaNet to implement, because it needs to change the whole turret idea completely. ArenaNet, if you’re reading this, maybe you can take some of this idea to heart and for the next expansion, change the turrets up a bit so us engineers can finally some fun with it.

YES.

That was one of the things I’d thought of for turrets, myself, having a really long cast time. But I wasn’t really sure anyone would approve of it.

Personally, so long as the boost to their capabilities is SUBSTANTIAL, I’d be all for it. If triple-turrets were to have at least the effectiveness of a Level 3 Sentry in TF2 (proportionally, of course, as dealing 128 damage per second and having 216 health would be garbage), they might actually be worth using. If EACH ONE were to have the effectiveness of a TF2 Sentry, that’d be even cooler, though possibly problematic in lower-scale matches against just a couple people at a time instead of the swarms of WvW. PvE, dunno.

The basic idea of sentry gun turrets in ANY other game is area denial. I’ve seen it done really poorly in quite a few games, most of the time on the underpowered side, but Guild Wars 2 takes the cake on botched turret implementation.

I think that this is a pretty bad idea to be bluntly honest. This change would effectively make engineers the go to class for both sPvP and siege defense in WvW, while making turrets completely useless in all but a handful of boss fights in PvE, where they would once again be literal gods of the fight.

This suggestion lacks any semblance of balance and would be a terrible change.

Don’t get me wrong, area denial is a great role for turrets to be specialized in, but even a 10 second cast would be prohibitive in almost all open world PvE and dungeon settings. Not to mention that increasing the power to a level that anyone who tried to enter the area was significantly injured or killed without the engineer even needing to be present is a terrible change for sPvP, where the entire point is to control an area.

How about:
Turrets do much more damage and fire much faster
Turrets have a 20 seconds deploy time
The more time they are deployed,the more health and armor they’ll have
You can manually stop the turret deployment
Turrets will stop deploying,becoming ready for use,if the player gets downed
Turrets have 10 seconds cooldown if the deployment is anticipated
Turrets are invincible for X seconds (i’d suggest 5) from their deployment

This way them will also be able to be used as last resource defense system: almost dead? cool,your turret you just deployed is shooting enemies…however it has like 500 hp and no armor…better than nothing!

That’d finally make me roll turrets in my kit…specially in PvE

Then there could be traits like:
if you get downed turrets will be automatically deployed with X% health
turrets deploy X% faster
manually deploying a turret creates a blast finisher
manually deployed turrets will deal electric damage to nearby enemies/while deploying turrets deal electric damage to nearby enemies
if you get downed all turrets are healed to full health and armor
healing turret will try to revive allies if fully deployed
turrets will absorb X% of damage you’d take instead
while deploying turrets will have reflection
Being in the range of a deploying turret buffs you and nearby allies

How cool would it be?!?

20s casting time? No.. just no…

Just buff the crap out of them.

ButterOfDeath.2873:

How about:
Turrets do much more damage and fire much faster
Turrets have a 20 seconds deploy time
The more time they are deployed,the more health and armor they’ll have
You can manually stop the turret deployment
Turrets will stop deploying,becoming ready for use,if the player gets downed
Turrets have 10 seconds cooldown if the deployment is anticipated
Turrets are invincible for X seconds (i’d suggest 5) from their deployment

This way them will also be able to be used as last resource defense system: almost dead? cool,your turret you just deployed is shooting enemies…however it has like 500 hp and no armor…better than nothing!

That’d finally make me roll turrets in my kit…specially in PvE

Then there could be traits like:
if you get downed turrets will be automatically deployed with X% health
turrets deploy X% faster
manually deploying a turret creates a blast finisher
manually deployed turrets will deal electric damage to nearby enemies/while deploying turrets deal electric damage to nearby enemies
if you get downed all turrets are healed to full health and armor
healing turret will try to revive allies if fully deployed
turrets will absorb X% of damage you’d take instead
while deploying turrets will have reflection
Being in the range of a deploying turret buffs you and nearby allies

How cool would it be?!?

Also good!

My personal favorite “make the stinking things usable” idea was similar to this, only that instead of an automatic growth, the boost comes in the form of a stackable, long-duration HP/damage/fire-rate buff ability that replaces the Overcharges. Either infinite duration with a cap on the stacking, or simply a long duration that allows you to boost it a certain number of times mathematically provided you’re on top of things and hitting that boost button whenever it’s available.

As far as them being too powerful, as Gurt is worried about… First off, obviously, it would need to be balanced out properly. Secondly, going back to the example of TF2 where the Engineer’s Sentry is perhaps the most balanced turret system in any game on the market, you can see that it’s still relatively easy to deal with in spite of the fact that few classes could really “duel” with it. If the Sentry and its target are firing on each other the whole time, the Sentry will usually win. However, if the enemy fights it in certain ways, it becomes a cakewalk.

In TF2, you can shoot it from outside of its range, you can use cover to pop in and out hitting it before it has time to lock onto you, and if you get close, you can circle it with no possibility of it ever catching you.

In Guild Wars 2, viable approaches would again be firing from outside its range, utilizing cover (except in the case of the wonky Flame Turret), using the NUMEROUS available defense abilities to get close, pulling the Engineer away from his nest if you have such an ability available… And yes, from what I’ve seen both using and fighting turrets, the circle-strafe method works just fine, as well.

Now, granted, in both games, fighting the turret alongside the Engineer is considerably harder. However, in both games, the Engineer is severely gimped without his turrets. In TF2, this is by design, as the Engineer has the lowest possible default HP, normal movespeed, and lackluster weapons. In GW2, the Engineer is giving up a Utility slot for each turret, meaning he’s down either a multi-functional weapon, or a potent self-buff.

In its CURRENT state, GW2 Engineer turrets have all the weaknesses stated above… Plus one more weakness. One other approach that enemies can use to deal with turrets. And that is…

Just waltz right in and kill the Engineer anyway. It’s not like the little tripod-mounted peashooter is DOING anything.

We’ve stilled got a gimped Engineer when turrets are in use, but their potential power isn’t transferred to the turret(s). It simply vanishes into thin air, leaving the Engineer to be less than the sum of its parts.

Yeah, this is…no. If you make turrets take twenty seconds to set up, you’ll only ever see them possibly used in a handful of situations.

As somebody who actually uses turrets, regardless of their issues, this would leave me with absolutely nothing I could do unless I saw something coming from a mile away (barring a respec, of course, into the developer’s darling kits). You might think you’d use them afterward, but twenty seconds of doing nothing but setting up a turret is going to make them frustratingly unusable, and doubly so for people who might actually be using them.