Guild Wars 2

So its been 2 years since Scrapper came out and Gyros have been in game but half of them are still rarely used: Purge, Shredder and Blast Gyro.

This is coming from a mostly WvW and PvP perspective but my suggestions would help PvE too no doubt. The effects of these gyros and their toolbelts are lackluster and for some of them the toolbelts are also the reason they are not good. They also suffer the same fates of turrets in that they can take ALL damage 100% and have low health so they die extremely quickly. So to start:

• Purge Gyro – As it is it’s a mediocre cleanse at best. The sheer amount of conditions present in WvW and PvP though overpower the gyro and considering they follow you any AoE pressure will also kill them before they can even get a second cleanse on you. so the fix should be to be remove 3 conditions every 2 seconds (up from 2 every 3) and the Toolbelt should be an AoE cleanse that cleanses 2 around you and the gyro if its up. The current poison field is useless.

• Shredder Gyro – They have buffed the damage significantly but the main issue was always its easy to avoid (even in PvE) its immobile and the radius is small (180). I’d like to see this become an effect around the player (not following like other gyros but an actual effect, sort of like the Holosmith Laser Disk). The Toolbelt is alright for the daze but I’d like to see it daze on every pulse in WvW and PvP for better area control. Also it would be nice to be able to cast this from 1200 range.

• Blast Gyro Tag – This is probably the most gimmicky of the gyros, the damage appears huge but in reality Engi has a lot of high damage abilities that don’t waste a utility slot just for 1 ability that will miss 90% of the time. I’d like to see this gyro become a sticky bomb of sorts. So you will still have to throw a tag to mark the target but if successful you will mark them with a debuff that will explode and launch foes the same way it does now, similar to Timed Charge underwater skill.

As for Gyros themselves I’d like to see them either get greatly increased health and toughness or a trait change to make them take % less damage or heal over time. We are engineers after all we’re supposed to be smart with building stuff.

What do you all think?

• Purge Gyro is one of the most ironic skills in the game – it’s supposed to be anti-condi, but dies to condis in a couple of seconds unless you purge it.

• Healing Gyro has a decent toolbelt: long-lasting, large, mobile water field that pulses protection, but the Gyro itself isn’t even remotely as good heal as Healing Turret, which has a large water field too.

• Stealth Gyro is almost alright, if not for the kittened AI – just make it stick to you god kitten it, I’d just grab the kitten thing and keep it in my hand.

• Bulwark dies way too easily, it’s okay if you are in 1v1 situation, but with more players it’s almost insignificant. I love toolbelt skill tho.

• Shredder Gyro has a decent damage, both Gyro itself and toolbelt, but only if you can stack NPCs. It’s not really worth taking if we’r in player vs player situation; it’s easy to dodge and/or destroy. It expires after a couple of seconds anyway.

• Blast Gyro is bad. Easy to dodge, stuck on the terrain really often, and sometimes will randomly switch targets. Drop Mine is waaay better, especially after recent update. Blast Gyro’s toolbelt is usefull only to speed up dollies in WvW.

Generally, in my opinion Gyros should be reworked to work like an aura around scrapper, without spawning a kittened entity.

A.I.

it will just kitten you up, regardless how you design it.

they should closely orbit us, as the function gyro does in its idle animation.
shredder, stealth and blast should be throwable directly like mines, although with a greater range (since rotors’n’stuff)

Everything that involves autonomous aiming / movement will always be broken.

Remember what happened to turrets:
- they were trash at launch since random aim.
- then a-net changed them always focus fire our targets
- suddenly they were OP and the forums full of salt
- then they got nerfed into oblivion by making them squishy a.f. and removed key-traits that weren’t even part of the issue

And a-net “learned” from this, and gave us squishy trash right from the get go, that moves in random, uncontrollable patterns and can’t keep up with us, so we often don’t even profit from our own utilities.

Even if you increase their survivability, half of the time you will be out of range when they pulse their effects, and since they can’t dodge, nor actively avoid red circles, they will eat all the aoe-dmg and condis that are flying around, which forces you to either make them invulnerable completely, or so tough that you could make them invulnerable anyways.
Sure, you could change them to always avoid red circles, reducing the dmg they eat, but this would make them move even more frantically, decreasing the chance to get their effects while they’re up, even more, and the more complex AI gets in this game, the more likely it is to fail due to pathing errors.

No more A.I.!

Arantheal.7396:

A.I.

No more A.I.!

This is why i hated scrapper the most and i could not believe they gave us an ai spec after turret. So all of hot i played very little of my old engi and i moved on to rev. Fell in love with rev. And now they give rev ai too. Guess i am returning to engi very soon haha

In terms of at least WvW, they could “fix” the gyros a little bit with simple effort IMO:

Add damage and 1s daze to the blast gyro tag. Add 2s superspeed duration on the toolbelt skill.

Add instant 2 condi cleanses to purge gyro and 5s of AoE stability. Make the toolbelt skill destroy projectiles.

Make the shredder gyro reflect projectiles. I honestly have no kittening idea what the toolbelt skill does.

You forgot the mighty function gyro…

- which was promised additional functions in pve at release.

Even a simple interact at range ability when your function gyro is ready would be more a gimmick than a real mechanic but at least it would do anything…

uhh I don’t think op has tried purge gyro in pvp because if he had he wouldn’t have said it sucks. it is a staple against condi. you are unkillable in a 1v1 while you wait for a +1. you can stall out 2 people if one is condi while your team gets a 4v3. purge is excellent.

blast and shredder aren’t great though. shredder brings nothing. blast can’t do enough but at least it has that unexpected launch that you might be able to capitalize on.

Arantheal.7396:

they should closely orbit us, as the function gyro does in its idle animation.
shredder, stealth and blast should be throwable directly like mines, although with a greater range (since rotors’n’stuff)

+1

The simple fact is that unless it’s the blast gyro, they should stay next to us. The shredder gyro might actually be useful if it could follow us. The stealth gyro wouldn’t suck if it could stay with us. The purge gyro would stop dying so quickly if it was hovering near us instead (and dodged with us!). You wouldn’t even have to make them tougher — just give us tiny little health bars above the main bar so we know how they’re doing, or the gasoline mechanic that was proposed.

The blast gyro is just bad AI — it needs to act like a projectile, not a minion. Stairs are the blast gyro’s worst nemesis, not stability.

Remove AI from the gyros, and they will be WAY better.

uhh I don’t think op has tried purge gyro in pvp because if he had he wouldn’t have said it sucks. it is a staple against condi. you are unkillable in a 1v1 while you wait for a +1. you can stall out 2 people if one is condi while your team gets a 4v3. purge is excellent.

In a duel, the purge gyro is super OP (3 condi removal every few seconds? Holy cow!). When you’re getting focused though, it’s total trash. It dies in a second or two if you’re getting focused, which kind of defeats the purpose of saving your life.

Also, watch the purge gyro get murdered by enemies who do lots of AoE damage. It’s just a sad little gyro. Half the time the superspeed it gives me heals me more than the gyro itself.

I use Bulwark and Blast gyros on my PvE open world rifle build. They work well for what I need them to do, but I tend not to think of them as gamechangers.

The only Gyros that never disappoint me:

http://yummiestfood.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Greek-Chicken-Gyros-with-Tzaziki-Sauce-and-Pita-Flatbread-001.jpg

The gyro should have never been a pet/ minion. They should have been buffs the tiny gyro around the scrapper gave you, instead they just turned out to be a mindless minions you summon.

Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921:

The gyro should have never been a pet/ minion. They should have been buffs the tiny gyro around the scrapper gave you, instead they just turned out to be a mindless minions you summon.

Agreed, not sure why they did an AI spec when everyone already knew one of GW2’s major faults is AI and how bad it is on every class that has it, and now engineer has 2 sets of it.

They should have scrapped the idea early on (pun intended) and made it ANYTHING other than AI. There are no good builds in GW2 that use AI skills at all with exception of maybe 1 skill in the set (like Bulwark, but in reality its only for the toolbelt).

I’m surprised how little they’ve done to gyros in 2 years considering they are even worse than core class utilities in every way, shape and form. I’m just glad they didn’t make Holosmith utilities useless as well.

Makes me especially sad the gyros suck considering how they nerf the core class to make the elite specs seem better.