Guild Wars 2

The big trait patch has arrived, all professions are being stirred and rattled.
When all the noise settles down, I see this incredible missed opportunity.

Dear Dev’s: was it too hard to merge the turret traits?
This is the patch where that had to happen!

Why is Accelerant-Packed Turrets up there alone in the Explosives line???
That is NOT the Turret line, we have Inventions and Tools already for Turrets. So what the heck is that trait doing in Explosives still?

And what’s worse: why isn’t this simply baseline behaviour of all turrets?

Another thing: why not merge the 30% less damage with the self-healing? Both are too weak as seperate traits.
This was the patch to merge weak traits, remember…

You try to buff Turrets in many ways the last few patches, but simple things like this you just miss…

Go over the Turret traits, all of them.
You will see that a full traited turret build uses 20/0/30/0/10 or 20/0/30/0/20 if you count Tool Kit Repairing with that.
That’s 60 or even 70 FULL trait points just to take all turret traits.

I can understand choices, but at least put the choices closer together!

Such a build has NOTHING left to trait for engineer damage, or for defenses!

As a sidenote: a stunbreaker on a turret TOOLBELT is sort of asking us to not leave it out, isn’t it?
Bit contradictionary with your intention for turrets.
But than again: picking up or even exploding healing Turret is also the better usage of that turret… something you perhaps missed as well last patch.

Im amazed at several missed chances in Trait merging this patch, but the turret ones must be the worst part.
Of all the traits that needed merging, turret traits were in the most need of cleaning up.

How could you let this pass this way?

+1

This was a huge miss.

Didn’t see much of anything done with turrets this patch. I’m guessing anet just gave up on us turreteers and decided there were so few of us it wasn’t even worth the development time to fix our bugs / bad designs

Shame…

Tolmos.8395:

Didn’t see much of anything done with turrets this patch. I’m guessing anet just gave up on us turreteers and decided there were so few of us it wasn’t even worth the development time to fix our bugs / bad designs

Shame…

they gave the toolbelt of Thumper Turret a stunbreak.
Bit odd for a turret, since the idea is that the turret is out in the fight and the toolbelt is unreachable…

They lowered toolbelt recharge of Rocket Turret.
Well: the cooldown issue of Rocket Turret wasn’t the toolbelt alone…

They increased the damage of Rifle Turret Toolbelt, which was needed.
Nice little buff for SD buids.

But the general idea this patch was: toolbelt… toolbelt… toolbelt.
Wich poses the question: wouldn’t it be better if turrets got improved at STAYING ALIVE???
Instead of improving their toolbelts as if you’re saying: we know they will die in seconds anyhow, so you might as well have a decent toolbelt…

turrets? oh those little things that explode before I can put them on the ground ? I thought those were character specific fluffy minipets…a bit stationary though…

They actualy succeeded to break Net Turret overcharge during the process.

The stunbreaker on Rumble is just, well… stupid. Its really the only word i can come up with.
You want people to take Turrets, but then if you place your Turret you first need to sack it before you can use the Stunbreaker on it.

Thats just… i mean… really?

But on the otherhand, how could you ever incorporate a stunbreaker on Turrets? I think that was just not a well thought out descision to begin with.

Put it on summoning your Turret = You cannot use your Turret because you might need the Stunbreaker.
Put it on overcharge = You must have put a Turret before stun to use stunbreaker. Or first place turret (assuming this can then happen) before you can then break stuns. Long delay. (and a mire for bugs)
And you might not want to pick up a Turret because of a lengthy time without stunbreaker on top of a cooldown on the overcharge.

There is no way you can put a Stunbreaker on a Turret skill without going against the idea and playstyle of Turrets. Bad, bad, bad idea.

Of course you can!! Put it on a trait. Something like Thumper and Flame turret overcharge break stun 35 sec CD.

GuilguiS.2738:

Of course you can!! Put it on a trait. Something like Thumper and Flame turret overcharge break stun 35 sec CD.

his point is that this would mean that you can’t use their overcharge freely when you need their real effects (like the blind of the flame turret) because you would waste your stunbreaker that you might need 10 seconds later.

I would give turrets passive buffs for the engineer, like some traits: 33% less stunduration, gain protection when stunned if turret is out… etc.

But for that to work, turrets need to survive aoe, wvw groups, and bosses first… which they don’t.

There’s use for accelerant packed turrets outside of turret builds. It can make the healing turret a stun, as well as be useful for Static Discharge builds that would use the rifle turret and also the thumper turret now that it breaks stuns. This doesn’t need much functionality out of the turrets themselves, so it is possible to use those turrets without a single point into inventions.

Many turret builds will also forgo accelerent packed turrets, instead focusing on sustaining turrets instead of destroying them. With that in mind, the only necessities for any turret build are the 30 points into inventions for armor plating and rifled turrets. I myself see deployable turrets as excess that isn’t a necessity for where I use turrets. It might be hard to think of it this way, but you don’t need to take every turret trait when using turrets. The traits all do different things, and having them all is far from necessary or even productive.

Now, armor plating is quite an effective trait for increasing the survivability of turrets, but I do agree that the regen is nigh useless in PVP, so that trait can be skipped for something else. In PVE, however, these can have quite the overpowered function, letting engineers camp events without actually having to stay there. It was due to this that the turrets of the engineer were set to a 5 minute time limit. So it is arguable that the turret regen is quite strong, given that a new game function had to be put in just to counteract abuse of the trait. The devs probably aren’t sure if they want to give that functionality to all turrets, given the potential for abuse it can cause.

Whether to trait for offense or defense is up to player choice at the minute. Right now, the inventions line several options for defense: Stablizied Armor, Protective Shield, Cloaking Device, and technically Power Shoes. They’re all so useful it is hard to pick just one. Right now Stabilized Armor makes for a somewhat decent defensive trait, since it works when stunned, which is a point that turret engineers were previously weak on. Combine that with 10 points for protection fueled injection and you can shrug off hard controls like they were nothing.

It should also be mentioned that there is no cookie cutter build for turrets. As far as I can tell, the wrong way to use a turret build is to go with 3 turrets for utilities, since that leads to overspecialization and also denies much of the utility that the rest of the engineer skills can bring. The turrets themselves constantly do damage, so traiting for turrets is traiting for damage itself. From this, you can opt for a kit or a stun breaker or some other missing utility, considering that damage and control can be taken care of.