Guild Wars 2

One complaint I’ve often seen regarding turrets is their fairly passive playstyle. While the suggestion below won’t make them as active as a multi-kit build, I do believe it’d have the potential to lend them some depth in the form of time management and decision-making.

The basic idea is this: allow Tool Kit’s auto attack to reduce the cooldown on a turret’s overcharge ability.

There were two basic numbers I had in mind for this. Either 10% of the cooldown per hit, or a flat 2 seconds regardless of the original cooldown.

Given about 1 second per wrench swing, a 10% reduction leads to a focused cooldown of roughly 6 seconds for Healing Turret, 7 seconds for Rocket Turret, and 8 seconds for the rest.

With the 2-second option, the focused cooldowns are instead approximately 5 seconds for Healing Turret, 7 seconds for Rocket Turret, and 10 seconds for the rest.

Now, 10 seconds between each stun or 5 seconds between each 3k heal and condition removal may sound a bit powerful, but bear in mind that it requires focusing exclusively on hitting the turret, the turret itself is stationary and predictable, and they’re all relatively fragile and/or low-range. The reality would likely be more of an occasional swing or two in passing while fighting around the turrets, choosing to sacrifice a bit of pressure on the enemy in the present in order to put extra pressure on them in the near future.

It also gives some actual incentive to keep the turrets up, rather than detonating them or picking them up immediately after the overcharge to avoid having the enemy take them out halfway through the overcharge cooldown thus making you wait even longer.

Another potential facet of such a change, if you’ll allow me to dream big for a while longer, could be to have each wrench hit knock a second off of the cool down on the Experimental Turrets trait, allowing you to trigger the boons more often so long as you put in that dedication.

Now, I will be honest and say that I am not currently a PvPer. I’ve certainly psyched myself up for it as of late, and will be trying to get into it when I return from the road trip I’m on. As such, my theorization on how such a change would play out is built on a foundation of theory in itself, rather than one of experience. I am mostly excited for the idea in regards to PvE, but I know that sPvP is where the theoretical (and actual) balance really matters, hence why the “argument” I am making for it is from an attempted sPvP perspective. I hope that any experienced sPvPers will be gentle in any objections they have to the numbers or the core concept. :P

I do like the idea you have as its very unique, would be cool to try to play with the suggestion you made.

IMHO though I think the only way turrets, especially a full turret build would be viable anymore after the nerfs its had is to make turrets follow the player (like Necro minions) or make some traits that boost health a lot and bring back auto-repair.

Turrets are extremely weak now, being that they can take physical AND condi damage, the highest health turret, Thumper Turret only has 12k health and the others are all lower, literally 1 good sweep from a zerk war’s GS per se could wipe out turrets.

Another thing Tool Kit is the only real synergy trait paired with Turrets and having to sacrifice DPS to whack a turret to repair it (very low % too) is ridiculous. Plus the fact that you have to be melee range to heal it with tool kit most skills will end up hitting the turrets just because you’re near them, and kill the turret.

All of my opinions are based from a WvW perspective, I don’t do much PvE but I did do (I think a fractal) once where the Net Turret was pretty well used keeping this Tar Elemental boss from retreating or something. So that was good. But outside of niches like that I don’t see turrets being good in WvW again.

Hm, quite true. I’ve seen people suggesting using the “Playing Favorites” Mistlock Instability for summoned entities in general, reducing all damage taken by half unless the summon itself is targeted. I’m sure Ranger and Necromancer would appreciate such a base change, too.

Alternatively, an increase in Tool Kit’s healing amount might help.

Or, perhaps their fragility should be justified when made more powerful via cooldown reduction. X) Could take some testing to determine for sure.

Turrets would need a complete rework, and so far the only game I’m aware of that got turret play in a PvP environment right is TF2.

How does it work there?
Your turrets have so ridiculous offensive capabilities that it is viable for the engineer to camp next to them and keep them in check against incoming dmg, since turrets require frequent refills of ammunition & healing because of their fragility.
The turrets are viable there because maps are usually very narrow, and therefore make it hard for attackers to out-range them, and even then engis can decide to take direct control over their turrets (with the right loadout) & deal with that. the true hard-counters are soldier & demoman, who can spam aoe-dmg and therefore denying the engineer from properly supporting his turret, or even kill him in the process, while ubers from medics allow invulnerability for other characters, which then can spam the turret unpunished to death. And ofc there is the spy, who can just sap the turret & focus on the engi while it’s down.

Gw2 already has classes that can place aoe’s on high ranges, certain classes can temporarily ignore dmg, while still attacking, and stealth is accessible for various classes as well.

So in order to avoid the old bunker-turret cancer, I’d like to keep turrets as squishy as they are currently (maybe with slightly increased hp to counter insane condi-ticks), but allow engineers a way more active interaction with them.

First of all, turrets should receive their 1.5k range back. Most PvP maps are wide & open, so having a narrow range punishes turrets unnecessarily already. Turrets are meant as areal denial, and they should perform as such.
2nd, toolkit #1 should heal turrets to full health with each strike & remove a condition from them. That would punish single-target spammers, trying to outperform the turret heal of engis, since that is our advantage with them: easy maintenance. But since turrets would still be that squishy, unguarded turrets would still die fast, and if the attacker is using AoE, the engineer is in great danger of killing himself if he focuses too much on healing & keeping up his turrets.
3rd, Turret overcharges get reduced by 1 second per strike with tk #1, effectively halving the cd of any overcharge if an engi keeps maintaining them with toolkit (since the timer of the cd would still be running in the background as well).
4th, Turrets should have 0 cd if they are picked up. This allows for viable mobility on turreteer builds, especially if their position gets bombarded by meteor showers, or other heavy aoe, or is compromised by melees. The downstate penalty is already punishment enough for a build as fragile as turreteer. This would not reset their overcharge-cd’s tho, so moving them also punishes the engi with increased downtime on their overcharges. To make exploits with healing from healing turret impossible, the heal on placement is removed, but healing burst gets an increased healing output to compensate for it. Turrets still go on full cd if they are destroyed or blown up.
5th, to balance turrets against meele attacks, each melee attack on them stuns them for 1 second, with the exception of thumper turret, which in fact receives a dmg-output buff, that increases with each target within its vicinity by 10% (up to 50% due to the aoe-cap).
6th, turret dps should be buffed greatly, so head-first approaches are futile. In Tf2 killing a single character can happen quite fast, and one-shot kills are common. For Gw2 that would be totally overpowered tho. Still, to make turreteer builds viable, turrets should hit like a truck, and receive a 100% dmg increase on each skill. That would still prevent them from 1-shotting people, but ensure that attackers either have to use stealth, invulnerability, reflects or smart LoS’ing to approach them safely. And once they’re there, the 1sec stun on turrets from melee attacks would make the effort worth it.
Optionally, turrets should not be able to be picked up while suffering from this stun.
Another optional change would be to proc fortified turrets each time you overcharge your turrets, to prevent rangers from free-casting from +1.5k range away.

I guess these changes to turret mechanics would still conserve the currently favored playstyle (drop, overcharge, pop), but also enable engineers to bunker down and deny areas for a prolonged time, if they position themselves skillfully and keep an eye on their turrets.
Since turrets would still be very fragile on their own, and would become even weaker against melee-attacks, this also should prevent the old turreteer point-bunker-cancer from ever coming back. I assume choosing an elevated, hard-to-reach position, off point would be the most valuable approach to playing turrets with these changes successfully, which is indeed exactly like you’d play engi in tf2 as well. And if you ask me, that would be great fun.

Arantheal.7396:

-Tons of stuff-

A lot of good ideas here, however I am worried that toolkit becomes to much of a must for turrets. Skill interaction is nice, but we should try to figure out a way for turrets to be viable in diffrent ways. (maybe not as viable as toolkit, but you get what I mean).

One possibility could be to let turrets receive boons so Over Shield and Experimental Turrets can benefit them. This would also add more active gameplay like attempting to stack might, fury or quickness to your turret for extra dmg. (Turrets can’t crit at the moment, but should get a 20% chance under the effect of fury).

In addition, it would add more design possibilities for what toolkit does on the auto attack chain. If they went with your idea of having melee attacks stund the turret, toolkit AA could add 1 sec of stability to let enginers struggle to keep their turrets functional, or they could make it give 1 sec of quickness, or a few sec of might to improve dmg output.

Other small QoL changes I’d like to see to turrets:

• Advanced Turrets should put out the reflection shield instantly or it should last longer. As it is now, it is to slow to use reactivly, but lasts for a to short time to force ranged enemies into a diffrent position or strategy.
• Overcharge abilities should happend right away without a delay for more active responsive gameplay, like using them to interupt an attack you see.
• Flameturret/Thumper turret should not require a nearby target to overcharge since they both have utility effects (thumper is a blast finisher and flameturret is a smokefield).
• Turrets should just benefit more from some engineer traits. For example, Adrenal Implat could have an additional effect of making your turrets evade when you evade (or turn invulnerable). Or Iron Blooded could also count for turrets, thus adding more gameplay around granting boons to turrets to keep them alive.

I don’t think that turrets would become dependant on Tk with these changes, since you still could run them in their current fashion, by drop, OC & blow them up.

Tk would just become necessary if you prefer the camping option & therefore balance campers by eating up a utility-slot in order to make it work. They’d still have supply-crate (healing turret, net turret, flame-turret), additionally to another healing turret & 2 optionally chosen ones. While rocket & rifle turret would be the obvious choice, an additional net-turret could make this build into a decent cc build as well, while thumper would come with decent camp-protection from melees, and a additional flame-turret could potentially bring enough burns & blinds to make this into a valid on-point condi-bunker, that still allows for enough counter-play.
Alternatively the upcoming hammer could fulfill the same functionality with turrets, as well as mace if we ever get it with a future specialization.

Since tf2 has the only successful turret-balancing in PvP environments throughout all genres, I think it’s not a shame to copy the basic principles and balance turrets on that foundation to make this concept work for gw2 engis as well. Learning from a great successor is definitively a smart step, especially since I doubt that a-net already has a new concept for this utility-type.

Also, I don’t ant to become any class in gw2 to become a copy of tf2 classes. Engineers would still have kits, elixirs & even gadgets to have a very different playstyle to tf2 engis, and we’d still not have access to teleporters, like tf2 engineers would have…

Double-posting since something just truck my mind:

Supply-crate is kinda weird. the supposed 3 blast-finishers are just 1, the overcharge is a 50/50 chance for you to blast either a smoke or a waterfield, unless you run a mile to clearly stand in the right one & overall you really just drop it for the 2sec-stun, something you have faster & more effective access to with moa now…

So what makes supply-crate special? The med-kits? The single-target immob?

I’d like to replace it with the following: Mobile mist-teleport device (tf2 inspired).
It would work like this:
- Drop the first half of the portal on your current position. It stays there for 5min (just like all other turrets).
- Once it’s dropped, it changes into a second skill that lets you place the 2nd teleporter node where ever you want.
- Once both are placed, both go on a 150sec cd if one is destroyed or timed out.
- Once they are placed, the overcharge can be activated to open it for 10 seconds every 30 seconds
- Like mesmer portals, they’d have a 5k range, but even tho 2 nodes can be connected frequently, this one can not be picked up again, therefore has a higher cd than mesmer portals if they are used in combat (and therefore get destroyed fast) but way bigger utility if you want to run supplies in WvW or support people in PvE with frequent teleports between important places or events
- Their advantage for this trade-off is that they cause continuum rifts into the mists each time someone passes trough them, causing around 1-2k dmg on the target destination whenever someone passes trough it.

In my oppinion portal bombs would definitively still be a mesmer thing, since they have the stealth to back it up, and since the portal nodes from engis can be destroyed easily, they’d clearly not become such a thread to defenders as well.

In case we really see the turret rework, it could be quite interesting for an engineer to serve as bridge-head into PvP maps, since in legacy of foefire he could set up one of the nodes in a safe spot behind the lord-gates, and then protect & maintain the other mid-field with the help of his turrets.
Last time I checked the blog-posts, a-net wanted the classes to have more distinct roles, especially in terms of support. Why not give us this one?

The problem turrets that now they are not targeted are not under one type of game. They are weak in the same PVP and in the open world. Another problem is that if they are strong, the engineer would be too easy to play. Turrets have to be completely reworked. Personally, I believe that the skills should be the likeness of turrets mantras Mesmer (Ie skills overload turrets should be recharged more quickly and have a tactical character), for example:
Rocket Turret: do not attack automatically, when you activate the skill is a massive bombing in a place where the player will indicate, but not more than 5,000 from the turret, 1000 the player. 5 seconds cd
rafle turret: a strong attack automatically in the chosen direction, the maximum deviation of 60 degrees, with the activation of the skill changes direction within 2 seconds. 2 sec cd
I have already suggested something similar a year ago.
I also believe that the skills should be belt to protect the character that the player chooses that it is more important at this moment, the survival or active turret.