The community has spoken and Anet listened. Here are some suggestions I have that might positively affect the engineer turrets.
The primary thought process with what needs to be done with turrets is getting rid of the AI aspect of them and making them skillful to play and fair to play against. A turret, with these proposed changes, would act more like an extension of your weapon instead of like a pet. Engineers do not get a second weapon set because they have kits. When an engineer does not use any kits, they have significantly fewer options than any other class. The key with this post is to not only make the turret engineer build viable and fair in PvP, but also a build that functions well during PvE and WvW content.
1. Turrets will no longer have an auto-attack
a. Turret abilities will be treated as an additional weapon skill.
b. I will elaborate on potential turret abilities in the second section.
2. Turrets will detonate after the engineer moves 2000 units away
a. Turrets will no longer remotely detonate, but they can still be picked up and would still explode when destroyed (triggering APT)
b. I don’t believe the intent for turrets was to place them and immediately detonate them for a blast finisher. The idea is to make it that you wouldn’t want to do that.
c. The range is needed not only because being able to run across the world and have your turret fight is silly, but also because turrets will need your target to attack, and that is not possible if you are too far away.
3. Turret placement will be ground-targeting as a baseline
a. Ground-targeting is seen as both a pro and a con, but it is useful for strategic placement, which turret engineers always need to consider to be effective
b. This would fall in-line with the upcoming Necromancer well changes
4. Turret placement will be instant (Currently cast time is .5 sec)
a. The floating turrets need to be addressed and this should solve that issue. The alternative is making the cast time ~2 seconds (would this be better, constructing the turret? Please discuss this)
5. Turret damage will scale with the stats that the engineer currently has
a. This damage will adjust in real time as the stats change
b. Treating these new turrets as part of the weapon the engineer has means they are only activating when you tell them to and at what. That makes them like any other damaging utility skill, at least in that regard
c. This would include any food buffs, boons, etc. The numbers would need to be adjusted accordingly
6. Turrets will no longer receive conditions or critical hits, but now they can critically hit
a. This change would seem counter-intuitive to the whole rework, but only if you consider turrets as they are right now.
b. Since all turrets would be activated by the player (no auto-attacks) there would be less concern for having them survive while you get downed and the engineer is halfway across the map (even though they would be detonated by this point with these new changes)
c. Any reflects or retaliation effects triggered by the turrets will affect the turrets