Guild Wars 2

With the recent patch I really tried to be a glass half full kinda guy, as that really is the attitude you got to have when you play this class it seems. So among the plethora of build breakers in the patch notes I saw some interesting buffs to turrets

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-March-26-2013 (patch notes link if you were unaware)

As turrets where one of the main selling points for me to actually roll an engineer, I wonder if we could make a viable PvE build out of them now. Thoughts (or builds) anyone?

They really haven’t changed much. The reduced cooldowns make them deal a bit more damage, but, if you didn’t have turrets in your build before, not a whole lotta new reason to run them now. They still have the same defense, meaning aoe drops them, they still have poor ai, and they still do only moderate damage.

However, I’m going to try to use them some regardless, hopefully there’s a build in there somewhere.

On the contrary, I believe that the turrets have changed just enough to make turrets viable. Aoe does drop turrets quickly, so don’t throw them down while being chased by the zerg. They are meant to be fought around, not alone. That being said, they add less cd+ more utility. Thats a plus imo, besides, what are you going to do, run FT?

Try out a classic static discharge build with net turret and riffle turret. Ot works fine for me.

After messing around with turrets, I’m still not convinced. This patch is a step in the right direction, but they need more umph to them than just damage.

The buffs to Rifle Turret made Static Discharge even better, though. I love the added damage to Surprise Shot.

Forestnator.6298:

Try out a classic static discharge build with net turret and riffle turret. Ot works fine for me.

Actually, that’s what I run outside of tpvp. Though you can often sub in rocket for rifle for the bonus knockdown. Problem is, I don’t consider it a turret build, the turrets generally are only down long enough to be overcharged. The buffs to turrets didn’t really change the way I use them or the damage I see from them either, it’s rather insignificant.

On the plus side, we still have pistol condition elixir and tankcat, along with the aforementioned static discharge, so we aren’t completely out of builds.

My thoughts/things for consideration regarding turret builds post-3/26/2013:
1) Flame Turret, when used with Deployable Turrets, doesn’t receive the cooldown reduction at the time of this writing – here’s hoping that it’s fixed with some immediacy. Rocket Turret does receive the cooldown reduction, and all toolbelt skills have their effects changed as-listed.

2) All Utility turrets currently scale off of Explosives in some way – if 30 points are in Explosives, direct damage turrets will deal more than if 0 points are in Explosives, and Condition-inflicting turrets will have a longer duration (currently uncertain of whether this affects Thumper’s new Cripple, however).

Not sure if the same is true for Precision, Vitality, or Toughness, however, and it still only offers a potential + 300 Power/+ 30% Duration to any turret used.

Phineas Poe.3018:

After messing around with turrets, I’m still not convinced. This patch is a step in the right direction, but they need more umph to them than just damage.

The buffs to Rifle Turret made Static Discharge even better, though. I love the added damage to Surprise Shot.

yea, thats true but scary, static discharge is currently our strongest burst damage build! and with this “buff” they now have reason enough to nerf static discharge and add a 1-5s internal cool down :/

now the question is, will they nerf this before or after they nerf HGH and Speedy kits ?

Why would they nerf HGH and Speedy Kits?

Well they can’t really nerf HGH. It only does one thing, and the one thing it does is the directly result of a buff. They would have to remove it or replace it, but nerfing it would be like walking backward since it would just be undoing the update that made it give 2 instead of 1.

Phineas Poe.3018:

Why would they nerf HGH and Speedy Kits?

Excellent question! For the answer, we shall look to HISTORY!

Our early engineers had no idea what sort of treasure they had found when they picked this class. It took them a while, but soon they had discovered something amazing… Five viable builds! Each build could easy be altered to its user’s preference, but they were all good at the roles players needed them to perform. These builds were…

THE 4KIT! A micro-manager’s friend, it combines up to four kits (3 if you wanted a stunbreaker) in a cacophony of button smashing that could produce strong bunkers, decent damage, or good support. Kit refinement and this build were once best friends.

THE 100NADES! A build with balls of steel, which you would hurl at the enemy in a manner that was very unorthodox… You see, in order to use it, you must first had to have been inside the enemy! It also used kit refinement, but with very different results.

THE TANKCAT! A pure bunker build, it used elixirs and the toolkit to PRYBAR PEOPLE’S MOTHERLOVIN’ FACES OFF! It’s still around, though less prevalent due to its lapse in popularity.

THE P/P CONDITION! Your standard elixir and kit combo, it could either use hgh for more damage, 409 for more staying power, or both. It’s now our most popular and most viable build for all skill levels.

THE STATIC DISCHARGE! Static discharge uses the trait of the same name, and the short cooldown of the rifle turret’s toolbelt skill to inflict high burst damage with short cooldown. It’s our only popular build that uses at least 1 turret.

Now, these 5 builds lived in harmony for a time, until ANET realized that engineers were actually killing people! They launched a surprise nerf, disguised as a buff, that weakened our grenades by 30%. Thankfully, the builds were able to recover, and the 4kit even benefited from the new sigils they had obtained. But then came the weakening of kit refinement. You see, 100nades was powerful thanks to a single trait. ANET decided it was too powerful, and decided to weaken the trait that governed it. Unfortunately, the weakening was haphazard at best, it did not effect the 100nades, but instead hit the 4kit, making swapping between kits detrimental in combat, as the new cool down was fickle and unpredictable. Then, came the final attack, and 100nades lost its defining ability, bringing our viable builds down to 4 basic classes, with all of the bunkers of 4kit severely weakened.

Now, our only remaining burst, the static discharge, is in jeopardy, as it follows the same pattern kit refinement once did… An adept trait that defines a build, giving great power and burst to an otherwise burstless class. And its brother, the Speedy kits trait, synergizes far too well with their cousin, vigorous speed, for their own good.

The powers that be have already shown they do not like engineers having powerful burst, and certainly do not like versatile adept traits on this class, so it seems that soon we shall be down to only 3 build-trees. Fear not though, for there is always the option of “rerolling” or “playing another game until this kitten is done.” We can’t give up hope that someday, perhaps a year or more from now, the engineer will be able to stand proud in any role, with many builds and traits that actually do kitten.

Edit: Somehow I confused HGH and Static discharge… Oh well, same kitten. They’ll probably just reduce duration on our conditions, since they can’t directly attack HGH since that’d mean they had made a mistake. Or perhaps they’ll change it to be a “boon killer” that they mentioned in the last SOTG. Regardless, engineers are not looking good.

Turrets have always been useless garbage. They are still useless garbage.

And I quote “You’re tearing me APART Lisa!!!!!!!”

Kudos to those who know where this is from.

Muhai.5634:

And I quote “You’re tearing me APART Lisa!!!!!!!”

Kudos to those who know where this is from.

Everybody betrayed me! I’m fed up with this world.

I like the changes they made, but they did not address the core issue:

THE CORE ISSUE IS MOBILITY

I appreciate the reduction in cooldowns on some of the turrets, but there are still a couple problems with that as a solution. I believe one of the following must be done:

A.) Cooldowns for turrets start when they are placed, not when they are destroyed/removed.

B.) Picking up turrets allows you to replace the turret in 5 seconds. This would be universal for all turrets. (Right now picking up a turret reduces the cooldown by like 5+ seconds, this is no solution and frankly stinks.)

Anyway, that’s my two cents.

I definitely support A.) – it’s just silly to have them done like they are. You almost don’t want to use them, because then you’ll have to stand around letting the cooldown tick after the fight’s done, whether or not you pick them up or detonate them; if that doesn’t happen, you get into the habit of estimating how much of the cooldown the current fight will absorb if you detonate the longer cooldown turrets (such as the Thumper and Rocket turrets) and just slog through with base weaponry.

Also: Picking up a turret reduces the cooldown by roughly 25% (Healing and Rifle Turret are 15-second cooldowns if you can pick them up with a 20-second base, which honestly ain’t that bad with or without picking them up, in my opinion, for example, and I don’t have a problem with the Flame Turret’s cooldown now that it’s been reduced).

I also support the idea of making it so that they can be picked up and moved like the Ghostbore turrets in the Iron Legion personal story; it just makes sense. I still like the idea of having them operate a bit more like a banner, come to think of it – pick the bloody thing up and use it as a weapon until you find somewhere else to put it.

Im glad they decide that turrets are Engineers unique thing, and thuss trying to make them more wurthwhile. I think the problem lies mostly in that they break to soon.
Even with repairing and taking more dmg traits, turrets still cant take any burst dmg thus making then unreliable and useless in almost every situation.

I think they should give engineer a skill 5 sec immortality to turret or something, this will definatly make a diffrence. Because right now in Spvp, WvW or big events the mass AoE’s kill your turrets off before they can do anything good. When i see an eenemy engineer cast supply crate, i throw a couple nades on it and they are gone in 3 sec..
The best thing of supply call is the actually stun and sometimes the 1e net that gets shooted.

Im sure Thumper turret is cool now, but other skills and build will be more wurthwhile. That is ofc until they just keep nerfing other engi skills til they be wurthwhile :P

I think the simplest, most effective fix they could do for Turrets would be to have them all scale off of all stats – what improved the player would improve the turret, so if a character were built for survivability, they’d also have impressively tough turrets, or if they were a glass cannon, they’d have glass cannon turrets.

Anymras.5729:

I still like the idea of having them operate a bit more like a banner, come to think of it – pick the bloody thing up and use it as a weapon until you find somewhere else to put it.

That could be more awesome than words could ever express! My only concern is running a multiple Turret build, but I guess Warriors have to deal with the same issue.

Man, the possibilities of have Turrets become kits you can pick up… machine gun, rocket launcher, thumper hammer… wow!

I don’t think Turrets are useless like some people are saying, but yeah, they certainly aren’t as much performant as an Alchemy HGH build. But again, they do have one particulary good advantage and it is called crowd control.

People always underestimate the capability from those turrets to shut down ennemies. I personnaly play with the Net, Flamer and Rocket Turrets and it works pretty “kitten” well. You can stack burning without any extra condition duration, you get a free root and snare every 13sec +- (it should be 10, but the cycle is not working correctly), and I can overcharge my skills to blind, knockdown and stun even when I’m knocked. Or even hide in plain sight if I use a combo explosion in my smoke screen.

I think a lot of people don’t understand how to play a turret engineer because they don’t take advantage from the two most important abilities to keep the turrets alive, those advantages are:

1) Positioning! While turrets are vulnerable to AoE attacks, it is very important to set them in an area safe from AoE, don’t spawn them next to you because if you do so they will take damage from cleaves and AoE resulting in almost an instant death. Deployable turret is a godlike ability when you know when and where to throw down your turrets.

2) Toughness! There is a reason why the Invention tree is increasing your toughness. Higher toughness means you get more frequently the aggro from ennemies NPC resulting in your turrets beeing safe most of the time. I play my Engineer Pistol/Shield with a Mix of Rabid/Apothicary set and my turrets are rarely dieing because I generate so much aggro ennemies won’t take the time to get rid of them.

Now I’m not saying turrets are perfect, I also believe some mechanics are flawed, like Spacecowboy told us above, the cooldown shouldn’t start when the turret is destroyed. Also the overcharge from Cleansing Wave, Shockwave and Smokescreen should be instant, there is no reason to have to wait sometimes more than 3sec to cure your conditions or protect yourself from ennemies with knockback AoE when things go south. Those 3sec delay defines most of time if you die or survive.

So yes, the turret patch did some upgrades but none of those realy matters because turrets core mechanism is still broken.

After reading the notes—turret buffs and +100% turret healing rate on toolkit skills— I had visions of the TF2 Engineer in my head. Turret traits and Power Wrench, Healing Turret, Tool Kit, and a couple other utility turrets. I only tested it out against some PvE mobs for a bit but I was still underwhelmed. The damage was not too great, they were still not that tough, and—most disappointing of all—healing them by smacking was still incredibly slow.

Obviously, this doesn’t even touch on the mobility and cooldown issues. All said and done, I’m still skeptical about turrets. Need to test a bit more to be certain, though, and I would love to hear some other opinions.

Turrets are and will continue to be a SPVP point defense item, not a PVE or WVW item.

Seriously, half the skills on all professions are so SPVP focused that they before worthless in anything but SPVP.

After the notes my friend that play a d/d elementalist got really mad because before the patch I created not a super burst turrets/riffle build but a build that you have to choose kill me or my turrets. Only really worked in spvp/tpvp at some point

What I saw with this build was the CC I can throw out is just crazy. I used net turret, rocket turret and in spvp I switched before I got into fight between flame turret and riffle turret. For healing I used the healing turret that I always picked up after it was placed.

So how this really worked, like most of you say`d yes turrtets go down super fast but with ground targeting you have the luxury to space them out. With this I try`d to place them around me according to the range they have and what they can do. My build was made so that turrtes are strong and do more damage and at the same time that my rifle pumps out a lot of damage so it was not a turret bunker build. Then it just came down to memorize your CC coldwons of the turrtes and your rifle. What i mean with this is when to use your immobilize-knocdown combo if you do it right you can do it 2 times in 3-4 seconds. So no matter how many stun breakers your opponents have they were or knocked down or immobilize.

This build really shined in 1v1 situations or 2v2. The key really was to position you turrets and with the elite package the 5-6 damaging turrets can be a nightmare for the enemy. Only flaw with this build is vs. a pure guardian bunker and a necro minion master/condition build.

To remind you again this was before the patch and I would really like to hear your opinions on it.

TheMightyChoob.4365:

Muhai.5634:

And I quote “You’re tearing me APART Lisa!!!!!!!”

Kudos to those who know where this is from.

Everybody betrayed me! I’m fed up with this world.

Oh Hai Mark!

Turrets need to survive aoe, only direct single target hits should hurt them.

There is also an incredible illogical aspect to their repair:
to repair them you need to have them close to you (for the range of the smack-whack-twack).
But to keep them alive you need to position them FAR from you….

One of these isn’t enough:
if close than the repair won’t save them.
if far, than any aoe can destroy them without you being able to do anything about it…

Turret traits are all over the place still. The patch didn’t help there.
One trait for 30% less damage… ANOTHER trait for self-healing (weak self healing by the way).
Another trait again, in a different line for faster repair?
Seriously? Why didn’t the patch adress this.

Than we have an exploding turret traits in yet another line, and a weak grandmaster trait for 15% more damage and increased range.
This is bad developping, it really is.

Still wouldn’t touch turrets any more than this…

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQFAUlIqqbn1SfF1LJxoCMG0j6X37KqQ+/ogt0F;TkAA2CqoKyUkoIbRuikFN6A

That is if they fixed the heal turrets full cleanse to actually work.
Seems like it’d be a pretty entertaining build, a hell of a high skill cap at least (3~ blast finishers and one leap; 3 field, allot of multitasking abilities), good dmg too because of the double time from the might stacking.

SpaceCowboy.1398:

Anymras.5729:

I still like the idea of having them operate a bit more like a banner, come to think of it – pick the bloody thing up and use it as a weapon until you find somewhere else to put it.

That could be more awesome than words could ever express! My only concern is running a multiple Turret build, but I guess Warriors have to deal with the same issue.

Man, the possibilities of have Turrets become kits you can pick up… machine gun, rocket launcher, thumper hammer… wow!

Running a multiple-turret build wouldn’t be discouraged by allowing it, I think – it’d sort of balance itself out a bit, due to the whole ‘can only carry one turret as a weapon at a time’ thing; you wouldn’t have one Engineer running around with some sort of frankenturret cannon or something, but rather one Engineer picking up whatever turret seemed best for the next area and running with it to a new location.

Pros: It’d resolve the mobility issue, while also allowing Turret-users to make use of the Runes of the Engineer’s Bundle damage boost, and keeping Turrets basically immobile. Also, each Turret would allow a set of skills unique to the Turret in question, allowing for more versatility from builds that tend to be less flexible than others.

Cons: It’s similar to making Turrets a more active version of the Warrior’s Banners, I guess. I really don’t think that’s much of a problem, though.

Also – For the people calling for trait-line restructuring: That’s not likely to happen until they’ve gotten the skills themselves up to par. When skills can be said to generally be balanced, then we might see a trait-line restructure. It’s a lot more work to restructure entire traitlines than it is to modify skills, I’m pretty sure. ‘course, for all I know, they might be in the process of doing it and it’s just going to be a few patches before we see it.