Guild Wars 2

When can we expect engineer turrets to be addressed? Since beta the only thing that has happened is trait buffs but turrets at their core are still buggy. I’m posting this in general because I want a response, and many of the turret threads in the engineer sub-forum get deleted with no explanation.

- They did not receive the +71% pve health bonus that all other summonables received.
- Overcharging them removes the bonus range from rifled turret barrels.
- Traiting Deployable Turrets replaces all turret skills with versions that don’t have other turret traits.
- The rifle turret’s overcharge doesn’t grant +50% attack speed.

All I would like is an answer as to whether there is actually a plan to fix these bugs or not. They really have been around since beta and it’s incredibly frustrating how time and time again we get a patch with a bunch of bug fixes but turrets are completely absent every time. And we frequently get hotfixes for other bugs, but these problems that have existed from the beginning and have never been addressed fall to the bottom of the barrel. A quarter of engineer utilities are turrets, and four traits (including Rifled Turret Barrels which is grandmaster and broken as mentioned above) affect turrets. This isn’t a small issue. We’re talking about an entire category of skills that has never worked correctly since the game was created. I’ve tested and reported the above issues every single patch, but they’ve never even been acknowledged.

Is there a plan for this or not?

The thing is that it does feel like they have been trying to get turrets to become viable everytime a new patch comes out. Remember when rifled turret auto attack was like 200 damage or when thumper turret did three damage every five seconds? Well turrets are now at least way better than they were at the beginning of the game. The problem is that even tho they get some nice buff, they also get changed in ways no one asked for. No one asked for a five minute timer on them, or to remove the condition damage on rifle turret and rocket turret. The burning on rocket turret was one of my favorite reasons to take it, was at least helpful in putting pressure on stealth classes, but now its stupidly useless imo. And apart from that, theres a 90% chance these changes will brings bugs to the turrets. Loads of them. Even gamebreaking ones that went for weeks without being fixed. That month when all turret traits were useless was painful.

But anyways if there is a plan for turrets, Im hoping its to stop focusing on changing how turrets function, and start focusing on all their bugs.

I just think it’s ridiculous to attempt to balance turrets in their broken state rather than actually fixing them.

A balance patch is useless when there are horribly crippling bugs in the game. Bugs are the reason this won’t be an esport. You need skills to do what you expect.

I do admit it seems engineers are the ugly child of the group. The changes made over the past couple of patches have been mostly crippling the idea of build diversity. However there are really not that many to choose from, as the original post states, turrets in their current state are putting us into a disadvantage to other professions, the only pro to turrets is the supply crate which we use mainly for a stun and med kit hp boost, resulting in 4 utility slots practically …un worthy , couple that with the traits situated around turrets including grand master traits and it’s
sadly laughable with the outcome presented before us.

I’m aware we are a low number playing engineer. However we are still a percentage of your player base crying out for changes to happen, Only to have a lazy approach of fixing the low hanging fruit, the low hanging fruit is not the major concern, there are big rotten fruit spoiling the tree.
The low hanging fruit will more than likely need re adjusting with major changes anyway, it seems counterproductive to the outcome engineers need, diversity, (gives us an incentive to branch away from nades bombs, and bunker builds,) fix the many bugs engineers are yelling out to you.

I’m extremely supportive of the devi team, understanding of the fact that balance is not easy and some things will upset players (invigorating speed..let’s face it, it needed changing)..

Show us engineers are loved by the team, fix the useless traits, or turrets being near useless except for toolbelt.

If it’s ideas you need ask the players, find things that can work, and use them in a way that works with the dev team. I hope this didn’t turn to a rant, I wanted it to be a plea to help improve one of the most fun professions imo to play with, it’s just lacking the love and nurture of a team, or so it feels.

Turrets should give boons if you are next to them. Aegis, Vigor or Protection. Something like this

Its part of being an engineer. Other classes, they ask and/or cry about balance issues. Buffs and nerfs.

We just want our kitten to work as intended. As the tooltips say. Maybe occasionally hope that a bug is actually a feature unnoted by the tooltip. But mostly just kitten being useable.

Really, its part of the engineer experience. Nothing more immersive to the class than when you stop for a moment in the middle of a battle, and stare at your gadgets/turrets with a frown, and mumble about having a flaw in your ingenius design, a glitch in the system.

/joking

You really start to wonder what went wrong with ArenaNet, that core mechanics of classes do not work after 15 months of ongoing development.
The incompetence is just baffling. WHY would you make deployable turrets different entities from normal turrets.
Every sensible programmer would have them be the same class or entity, but for some reason they are not related to each other at all.
Skill tooltips in this game are incredibly stupid, too.
They should be automatically generated from the code that specifies the skills behaviour.
Some parts of the game are very well made, while other parts just scream utter incompetence.

Turrets are cursed. When Arenanet fix something, a new bug appears. Why it’s so hard fix the Smoke Screen field?

Tulki.1458:

- They did not receive the +71% pve health bonus that all other summonables received.

Just to point this out only three of the seven professions with summon able “pets” received this buff, (Mesmer, ranger, and necromancer I believe) while guardians (spirit weapons), thieves (thieves guild, and the one trap that summons another thief), engineer (turrets), and elementalist (elemental summons) didn’t receive this buff. warriors didn’t have a pet with health (summon able banners don’t have health)
[I could have a few wrong but I believe that’s how it went]

Minor, minor quibble: There are five traits that affect Turrets (Metal Plating, Autotool Installation, Rifled Turret Barrels, Deployable Turrets and Accelerant-Packed Turrets). Moving on.

I would love to know what the plan is for turrets. As they stand now, they’re at a bug-count of 26, unless I’m missing some; I might re-establish my reference thread.
Here’s the list, for anyone who’s unfamiliar:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/26-Turret-Bugs-Bug-Listing-Intensifies/first#post2601719

Edit: Just went through and bumped every single Turret Bug thread linked in that post, if the bug is still extant. The front page of Game Bugs is now 64% Turret Bugs. Man, it’s a good thing I listed them in as compressed a way as I could. Might not be Best Bugging Practice, but otherwise the entire front page and then some would be Turret bugs.

It’s been acknowledged by the staff, but it sure doesn’t seem to be doing anything. So far, they’ve fixed…I think three bugs from that list – one was Net Turret’s faulty fire rate (legitimized to 13 seconds), one was Rocket Turret being the wrong version with RTB active (first Turret hotfix, ever, I think), and the last was Net Turret turning off after being overcharged. I hope I’m missing one.

I agree with pretty much every point in this thread, especially the difficulty of balancing something that doesn’t work right to begin with. How can they justify messing with what Turrets do, when they don’t do it properly to begin with?

At this point…I hope they start from the ground up, and just write whole new Turret code that works. It’s obvious they have no idea what they’re doing with the current batch, as every single time they make a change to Turrets, they break something.