I have not tried or tested this at all yet, just a concept. The general idea is that you place down the flame the thumper turrets next to each other, then pull the enemy into the turrets and use the wrench to hack away at them. You will automatically repair the turrets as you are whacking, making them as hard to kill as yourself. If things go sour, you can activate the flame turret’s smoke field, use the thumper overcharge to knock them back and get a blast finisher, detonate all your turrets, then use the thumper’s tool belt skill plus the shield’s magnetic field blast finisher, giving an extremely long-duration stealth buff for escapes. Of course, the main counter to this build is AoE.
My engi character is only level 31, so I admittedly know little about the engineer, so I’d like some seasoned engineer mains to take a look and give their input before I continue leveling him up and put this build into practice. I’m on a quest to find a way to make turrets viable, and I won’t stop until I do.
(edited by The Colorless Wolf.6703)
Alltough the combo may seem nice at first (especially for PvE, but everything will work in PvE really), I doubt this will work in WvW. The wacking is just too slow to kill an enemy..
I have a tank build in my sig. Just please dont ever use it in pve
I run turrets myself.
With no power your Thumper won’t do much damage. You might consider going with Net. The immobilize messes with people a lot, and you can hold them in place for burns and condition application.
Also, 20 points into Tools and no Speedy Kits? It’s so good.
The passive regen on turrets isn’t the great, they’re still going to get killed — and fast (not so much the Thumper, but it’ll still go down). If you’re going for a tanky build, you might consider picking up the traits that grant Protection on crit and CC. Protection Injection in particular is a beast.
The only other problem I can foresee is that you have next to no Condition Removal and no Automated Response.
With no power your Thumper won’t do much damage.
Power doesn’t increase the damage of any turret at all.
@op depends on whether you want to run your build in pve or WvW / pvp.
I only play my turret engi in pve and as far as I can tell, you shouldn’t stick with one turret combination there. Besides that you have to switch to power for pve nomatter the build, you should learn the encounters of every dungeon and then plan ahead.
-defending magg in FZ p2? Build a defensive/tank base infront of him with the combo you’re currently running.
-max dps on a boss with no serious AoE damage? switch to rocket turret + rifle turret. They use the same traits after all.
-your team has almost no melee but you still want some extra damage? (not very common I know), use rocket turret + thumper turret for 2 knockbacks, soaking damage and extra blastfinisher in your waterfield.
There is no real chance to save your turrets or extent their life in a meaningful way, so you should consider to swap the repairkit for a damagekit or another turret at least.
(edited by Escadin.9482)
With no power your Thumper won’t do much damage.
Power doesn’t increase the damage of any turret at all.
I just logged in real quick to verify that — with my amulet on my Thumper Turret hits for ~645, with it off, ~349.
Same for my Rocket Turret
Amulet On: ~1452
Amulet Off: ~786
Wow. I gotta test this when I get home. Last time I tried it only the tooltips changed and not the actual damage. If they actually fixed that it could be a game changer.
Wow. I gotta test this when I get home. Last time I tried it only the tooltips changed and not the actual damage. If they actually fixed that it could be a game changer.
kitten — Nope.
I was only reading the tooltip. You’re correct. The damage doesn’t change at all!
My bad!
Yeah tooltip has been bugged for turrets some time now to make it look like they scale with power.
Wow. I gotta test this when I get home. Last time I tried it only the tooltips changed and not the actual damage. If they actually fixed that it could be a game changer.
kitten — Nope.
I was only reading the tooltip. You’re correct. The damage doesn’t change at all!
My bad!
And my hopes are dashed. Curses.
Yeah tooltip has been bugged for turrets some time now to make it look like they scale with power.
I guess I’m the big noob.
My engi character is only level 31, so I admittedly know little about the engineer, so I’d like some seasoned engineer mains to take a look and give their input before I continue leveling him up and put this build into practice. I’m on a quest to find a way to make turrets viable, and I won’t stop until I do.
It is sad to say that Turrets just aren’t in the state they should be right now for 27 reasons. It takes a lot of maneuvering on your part and stupidity from the other player(s) to die by a turret build. As much as I hate to admit it, you will rarely see turrets used in any other form than a “drop n’ pop” mentality. If you are looking at Engineer right now solely on the basis of turrets, I would wait to see what happens during the next patch, but I’m not holding my breath as most of these issues have been present for more than a year and others have just recently been added to the list as of a couple months ago.
As for the actual build, I’m not sure what you were expecting in terms of functionality, but turrets do not possess the level of survivability you might imagine. The idea of placing turrets together itself is a very bad idea, as you would see if you checked out the link I provided, because of the issue regarding their insanely large hitboxes; meaning they are susceptible to receiving damage from attacks that would otherwise not damage other targets. If you were to experiment with other turret combinations I would highly recommend using Rocket Turret and Rifle Turret as their incredible range with Rifled Turret Barrels proves incredibly useful; keep in mind to not overcharge them or use with Deployable Turrets as these will both revert the turrets to a previous build’s specs. I might as well leave it here as there are too many factors to mention as to why they will not work as intended without creating a wall of text regarding it. It is a sad state of affairs when the number of bugs for a single profession’s skill theme would literally take up more than an entire page’s worth of threads in the forum window.
Ignoring the turret choices, some common suggestions are as follows:
1. While the small bonus from kit refinement may be useful, try speedy kits. It’s a great way to enhance your mobility if you decide to slot a kit, which is extremely important to have in any PvP scenario. This is particularly true since engineers have no teleports, and limited access to stealth and stability.
2. Sigil of malice will not benefit this build greatly. A total of +6% condition duration will not amount to much. If you use a non-damaging condition, such as cripple or blind, you would have to have a high base duration to really notice any results. For instance, the cripple applied by your toolkit would be boosted from 2 to 2.12 seconds (the increase doesn’t even appear on the tooltip), and the vulnerability would be increased from 6 to 6.36 seconds (shows as 6.25 on the tooltip). A such, the benefit is extremely minimal.
For damaging conditions (i.e. bleeding, burning, poison, torment), they only inflict damage every second they are on the enemy. So in order for condition duration to increase the damage, it must be enough duration bonus to receive and extra “tick”. For instance, explosive shot from the pistol applies 2 seconds of bleeding. In order for condition duration to cause this ability to do more damage, you will need to boost the duration to 3 seconds, meaning you would need at least +50% condition duration.
As such, I would recommend swapping out the sigil of malice for either a sigil of bursting (more condi damage) or a sigil of energy. In particular, a sigil of energy is very useful if you want to make a tank type build since the extra dodges provide a very strong method of staying alive.
3. While runes of the engineer would be somewhat useful, I don’t think the bonus they provide is ideal for this build. The 6 piece bonus will only affect direct damage, and this build has no power to speak off. It also does not enhance combat with the pistol or shield.
Since the build is focused on condition damage and has high toughness, runes of the undead would be a very fitting choice. Alternatively, runes of Melandru would provide a nice way to help handle conditions and deal with CC. Something like runes of the dolyak would also work, or you could use runes of the traveler if you didn’t want to swap into the speedy kits trait. Runes of perplexity might also work out with this build since the shield and magnet can be good for interrupting, and you have confusion on both the pistol and pry bar.
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