Guild Wars 2

Are there any decent turret-focused builds out there for PvE use? I haven’t played my engineer in a while but I’ve heard that the last few months have buffed the turrets a bit. Yes, I know that turrets still suffer from a ton of critical issues like poor target selection and low health, but I know there are some players that frequent this board that are still sticking with turrets and trying to make the best of them.

If you want to use turrets as good as they can be used, what traits are necessary? Are some turrets still not worth using at all? How do you tend to handle battles against groups of enemies? Against bosses? What gear setups do you go with?

Basically, any information on using turrets is welcome. Most of the recent discussions I see have just been going over what’s still wrong with them, and I’ve been having a hard time finding any talk of actually playing a turret build that isn’t months out of date.

As it stands right now. I find that turrets are only useful as niche utility skills. Kinda what Gadgets should be.

I will bring Flame turret and overcharge it and use smoke bomb when I want to keep a target blinded for 9 seconds.

I will bring Net turret when I need to keep a target immobilize and I will take the sitting duck trait with Net Turret for single target vulnerability.

Thumper turret for blast finishers. Good for stacking might or stealth.

Rifle Turret staple in Static discharge builds.

Heal turret pretty self explanatory there

I never use Rocket turret in PVE.

I ran a turret build for awhile, and they aren’t very strong in PVE. They do have their preferred situations though. For PVE, the biggest problem is that they haven’t had any meaningful changes in tactics, so those old guides from months ago are still viable.

For traits, you’ll want to go a full 30 into inventions to get metal plating and Rifled Barrel Turrets. Turrets in the pocket will melt in an instant, so you’ll need to give turrets long range and also give them higher armor. Some people swear by it, but 10 points in tools for deployable turrets is also nice to have, since it will let you put turrets at a distance without having to run there yourself. I personally avoid using this, since it messes up my timing with the healing turret. Something that can also be done is to put 20 into explosives for accelerant packed turrets, however in PVE this is not as useful due to how low damage they do and how little control actually matters.

The advantage to turrets is that they provide additional damage to whatever you are doing on top of your weapon skills, so turrets can lay on some rather high DPS in the long run. Nearly every turret has a place, and in the midsts of a dungeon you may want to switch out between turrets that often. The turrets themselves will do bleeding and burning, so having condition damage is recommended while running turret builds.

Rocket Turret: This is the best turret. It does AoE damage + burn at very far distances, along with a toolbelt skill that also does AoE damage. It also comes with an overcharge that causes a knockdown in AoE. I highly recommend this turret be on every turret build, and I have a really hard time coming up with a reason to switch it out.

Rifle Turret: This turret is average. It does light damage at a distance, and when overcharged it does bleeding damage. However, the best uses of the rifle turret come from other sources: it is on an extremely low cooldown, so it combos well with Accelerant Packed Turrets for a stun + damage. The toolbelt skill has the shortest cooldown of any toolbelt skill, and for this it is a must on static discharge builds. All in all, this turret makes for a good addition in both turret and non-turret builds.

Thumper Turret: This is the worst turret. It’s attack speed is slow, it does less damage than the rifle turret, the cripple effect is nearly useless, and the overcharge just scatters enemies out of AoEs. However, the Thumper Turret has use in an “out of the box” kind of way: It is 3 blast finishers in a single utility skill. Because of this, the thumper turret can be combined with the healing turret’s water field to cause massive healing, and for more varied sets the thumper turret can stack might in fire fields (bomb kit, flamethrower), retaliation in light fields (elixir gun), weakness in poison fields (grenade kit), and stealth in smoke fields (bomb kit, flame turret). However, these uses are almost all independent of turret builds, so I would not recommend using the thumper turret in a turret build.

Flame Turret: This turret is good outside of turret builds, but in turret builds it encounters a couple of problems. The cone burn is good, however it is short ranged and this leads to the flame turret dying rather quickly. It’s effect also becomes redundant with the rocket turret, who does the damage and burn better. The smoke field can be a help in special circumstances, but the timing and the short lifespan of the turret make it really hard to use effectively. All in all, the flame turret is inferior to the bomb kit in pretty much every way, and since you get a flame turret in the supply crate anyway, this is one to skip.

Net Turret: This is an excellent control turret. This turret is best used in situations where there is a champion that has high melee damage that is chasing people around (say, for example, the Mossman). The turret’s main effect is the same as spamming rifle #2, and the overcharge causes stun and immobilize for lengthy amounts of time. The turret is mostly a one-trick pony, but it is good at that trick. An alternate strategy is to use the trait Sitting Duck alongside of the net turret to stack vulnerability on a target while immobilizing them. It is situational, but this turret is definitely one to use.

Now, though this is my PVP spec, the following build will probably be effective in PVE as well (with some slight modifications)

Weapon: Pistol/Shield
Sigil: Battle / Whatever
Utilities: Healing Turret, Bomb Kit, Rifle Turret, Rocket Turret, Supply Crate
Traits: 20/20/30/0/0
Equipment: Carrion/Rabid
Runes: x6 Superior Rune of the Flame Legion (x6 Rune of Strength works, too).

Trait abilities:
Explosives III, X
Firearms IV, VI
Inventions III, VII, XII

The strategy is to lay down turrets, then run up to engage an enemy group using the bomb kit and the pistol for AoE damage, luring them back into range of the turrets, whether it is merely distance or if the turrets are around the corner. The glue puddle and smoke field provide defense while the concussion and fire bombs lay out damage. The shield is there for defense as well as blast finishers. At range, the combination of the bomb kit and the rocket turret will provide permanent AoE burning to the enemy group, with the rifle turret providing bursts of bleeding and additional damage. For further defense, the supply crate can be used as a stun + blast finisher + further healing, providing additional burning should the bomb kit be too dangerous to use. Swapping in and out of the kit provides might, and healing also provides might.

Note: this is not a cookie cutter setup. If you want to heal, you can use Elixir Infused bombs + the thumper turret to lay out heals. If you want to immobilize, you can swap to the rifle and the net turret to cause more immobilization. In general, you’ll want to set up turrets when you are fighting a few enemies that don’t cover the world in AoEs. If you are fighting endless swarms of enemies or if you are fighting an enemy that covers the whole map in damaging AoEs, turrets will not contribute meaningfully. Unfortunately, you get massive AoE and swarms of enemies in the majority of content, hence why it is people don’t play turrets in PVE.

NickDollahZ.5348:

As it stands right now. I find that turrets are only useful as niche utility skills. Kinda what Gadgets should be.

I will bring Flame turret and overcharge it and use smoke bomb when I want to keep a target blinded for 9 seconds.

I will bring Net turret when I need to keep a target immobilize and I will take the sitting duck trait with Net Turret for single target vulnerability.

Thumper turret for blast finishers. Good for stacking might or stealth.

Rifle Turret staple in Static discharge builds.

Heal turret pretty self explanatory there

I never use Rocket turret in PVE.

How do you stack might with blast finishers? I’m curious.

Here you go scrapped together a video real fast:

I’ve used turrets pretty much from level 5 through 80 – they’re not particularly powerful in PvE (or in dungeons), but you can make them work; their natural use is to defend a point or character, and so they work well with Mines.

In my opinion, the best base layout for a Turret build is 20/X/30/X/X; the total expenditure of trait points is 50, leaving you 20 to work with (10, if you go with Deployable Turrets; I don’t, personally, as a matter of preference). The only aspects of Turrets that currently scale to non-Trait stats are their infliction of Conditions and application of Boons, so I’d suggest focusing on increasing Condition Damage/Duration and Healing Power/Boon Duration with gear and runes.

Thank you for the information everyone. This is all exactly the kind of stuff I was wanting to know.

It sounds like if I really do want to play with turrets I should stick to using them in solo situations. Combining what has been said with the facts that dungeon groups tend to be constantly on the move and turrets have far too long cooldown times, I’d be much better off choosing skills that would allow me to contribute more. A shame, since it was turrets that drew me to Engineer in the first place (and made it my first character at release).

I have to wonder then, is it possible to have the best of both worlds? If I went with the 20/x/30/x/x traiting mentioned, and got condition equipment to buff up the turrets, is there a different, more effective build that uses the same trait points/equipment (probably determining where the last 20 points go) that I could switch to for groups/dungeons? That way I could still use turrets in less important situations.

If you want to swap out of turrets into something else for dungeons, then that is really hard to do. I would only consider the 30 points in inventions “necessary” for a turret build, so you could do a whole lot with it otherwise.

If you want to minimize the equipment changes needed from the turret build, then there is always the grenadier condition build:

30/10/30/0/0

That uses rabid equipment to maximize procs while laying down a lot of damage with grenades. Heck, you can use grenades WITH turrets and go two-for-one on that. Open with the chill grenade, then slowly walk backward into turret range to stack poison + bleeds like mad while having additional permanent burning. I think this might actually be better than the build I listed in the previous post…

There’s always the option to go for mostly power and forgo the condition damage. It is mostly burns, and burning does plenty of damage by itself. This lets you open up the gateway to other things, such as the kit based static discharge build

x/x/30/x/20

With 20 points to put basically wherever you want it. For this, the power is more important than condition damage, and static discharge can still work well with the rifle turret. You can also use power grenades if you want. Something I personally use is a coated bullets spec, and this can easily be modified to use turrets:

0/30/30/0/10

With primarily zerker gear, but carrion gear can work here, too. Here, you use the coated bullets of the pistol to do a lot of AoE damage, and follow that up with static discharge for more AoE damage.

The biggest thing to note is that there isn’t any “cookie cutter” builds for turrets. The one I listed isn’t even a PVE build at all. It’s my sPVP build with net turret swapped out for rifle turret. It all comes down to how you want to play. Heck, for all I know you could make a healing set out of turrets designed to maximize the effect of blast finishers in the healing turret. But, if I were to go with a “minimal investment change” strategy, probably the best to do would be to use a the modified grenadier build with carrion/rabid gear mixed together, since changing from the turrets to something else would be quite seamless.

Though I’m not sure if this can be called “the best of both worlds”, though. The thing with the inventions line is that, other than a few defensive procs and healing, the inventions trait line doesn’t do much but work with turrets. The grenadier build, the static discharge builds, the coated pistol builds, all of those would benefit greatly if those 30 points were invested into something like might stacking or more kits or better recharges on firearms,. pretty much anywhere else. The inventions line as a whole is the worst trait line for PVE in general.

tigirius.9014:

NickDollahZ.5348:

As it stands right now. I find that turrets are only useful as niche utility skills. Kinda what Gadgets should be.

I will bring Flame turret and overcharge it and use smoke bomb when I want to keep a target blinded for 9 seconds.

I will bring Net turret when I need to keep a target immobilize and I will take the sitting duck trait with Net Turret for single target vulnerability.

Thumper turret for blast finishers. Good for stacking might or stealth.

Rifle Turret staple in Static discharge builds.

Heal turret pretty self explanatory there

I never use Rocket turret in PVE.

How do you stack might with blast finishers? I’m curious.

Fire Fields. Any blast finisher used in a fire field gives, in a small AoE, 3 stacks of might for 20 seconds per blast. Engineers get two fire fields: Fire Bomb from the bomb kit, and Napalm from the Flamethrower.

You’ll need some coordination, but it pays off if done right. The engineer alone can get off 4 or 5 blast finishers inside of their own fire field. Just gotta get people go gather together and not Leeroy into the enemy groups.