Guild Wars 2

Alright so I want to share my ideas on bringing back turrets but making them an active play-style rather than a cast and forget kind of thing.

Knocked Over status effect:

This mechanic will serve as a way to temporarily disable turrets so the engineer has to re-enable the turret for it to function again.

• My idea on how this will work is by giving each turret a certain number stacks of Stability that last 5 minutes (this way you can see how long you have before your turrets self destruct)
  Healing – 1 Stacks of Stability
  Rifle, Flame, Rocket – 2 Stacks of Stability
  Net – 3 Stacks of Stability
  Thumper – 4 Stacks of Stability

• When a Turret gets CC’ed without stability it gets a Knocked-Over proc which is shown as a turret knocked over on its side and renders it useless until the engineer comes to fix it (explained in Operate skill function)

Operate function:

Instead of Picking up a turret when you press F while targeting a turret, you will now go into an operate function similar to operating Siege Equipment in WvW and your 1-4 skills will be replaced with these. (While operating a turret it will regenerate rapidly.)

1. Rotate Left – This skill rotates a turret left until you stop channeling this skill.
2. Fix & Fortify – This skill will pick up any knocked-over turret (it takes 1 second to pick up a turret), reset their timer to 5 minutes, and re-apply their stacks of stability.
3. Rotate Right – This skill rotates a turret right until you stop channeling this skill.
4. Pick up – This picks up the turret and reduce the Cool-down by how the percent HP the turret has left (Ex: a Rocket turret with 65% health would have a CD of 18 seconds when picked up.)
5. Create a reflective dome (4 second duration) around your turret and give it additional stability (Cd – 45 seconds)

Build times:

This would make it so the engineer can not just run onto a point and drop all of their turrets to have an immediate advantage against their opponents. This will force the engineer to
A.) Find an empty point to set up on (for PvE I guess a safe spot)
B.) Co-ordinate with their team to get help and secure a point.
C.) Clear the point themselves.
There are more scenarios that can happen but as of right now I am thinking of Ideal examples.

• These are the current build times I have in mind at the moment but if anyone feels like these are too long or too short.
  Healing – 2 Seconds
  Rifle and Flamethrower – 4 Seconds
  Rocket and Net – 5 Seconds
  Thumper – 6 Seconds

Nerfs:

• All turrets damage shaved by 20-50% if applicable (will edit and give specifics when I get home to test some things out.)
• Rocket, Rifle, and Flamethrower turrets can no longer pivot 360 degrees but instead have a 180 degree cone in which they can target opponents (Turrets will face wherever the engineers camera is facing when it is created.)

This will allow people to negate most turrets by literally standing behind it, requiring the engineer to place these strategically or safe guard their turrets manually.

Buffs: (I’m not good with coefficients so I will need feedback on this)

• Allow Turrets to scale with engineer stats and crit.
• Allow Turrets to receive boons. (With a low priority so players will get buffs before the turrets do)
• Increase health for Turrets but still allow them to take conditions (except for Immobilize, and Cripple) and criticals
  Health – 9000 HP
  Rocket, Rifle, and Flamthrower, 10,000 HP
  Net – 12,000 HP
  Thumper – 17,000 HP
• Higher net velocity

Reworks, More buffs, and Tweaks
First thing I want to address is when turrets are deployed to switch their overload skills with from the utility bar and put them onto the class mechanic bar, and move the self destruct down to utility.

• Turrets:
• Rifle turret: Increase its range to 1,200 but keep the rate of fire at 2 Seconds and make the penetration baseline and add a 3 Second Bleed to the over load.
• Flame turret: Increase its range to 600 and allow it’s attack to function like the flamethrower kits #1 that applies Two (4 second) burns at the end of the animation and increase its rate of fire to 4 seconds.
• Thumper – Add a reflective shield that lasts for 4 seconds to the Overload ability.
• Net Turret – Increase its range to 900 and replace the Overload with a Pull similar to Scorpion Wire
• Rocket – Increase range to 1,200 and change the Knock-down to a Knock-back. Now applies 1 stack of burning for 3 seconds.
• Healing – not too sure about this one.
• Supply Crate – Change this turret to a “Chain Gun Turret” with low damage but a high fire rate. The overload would cause it’s projectile finisher to become 50% instead of the 20% base.
  HP – 14,000
  Build time – 5 Seconds
  Cooldown – 80 Seconds
  Rate of Fire – 1/2 second
  Damage – xxx (but very low)(undetermined coefficient)
  Field of Vision – 120 degree cone.
  Range – 900
  There is even concept art floating somewhere on the wiki that could be used for this design.

• Traits
  *Replace Experimental turrets (this trait would promote stacking all your turrets in one place) with expedited Construction which increases build speed by 20%.

• Fortified Turrets no longer gives a shield on build but instead add a #5 skill on the Operate mechanic that gives a 4 Second shield and gives affected turret 1 additional stacks of stability.

*Add Auto-Tool Installation to Power Wrench.

—I want to suggest an overhaul for Overload mechanic to something that provides a great benefit at the cost of damaging the turret but I don’t have many ideas on potential skills though—

TO BE CONTINUED

ran out of time for the time being but if this thread actually gets some traction I’ll work on it some more and take in suggestions.

If you are one of the people who strongly believes turrets should just stay buried at the center of the earth please help me figure out some alternatives to replace these utilities.

If this thread gets popular enough I’ll even start doing concept sketches of making the turrets look a little more aesthetic.

Thank you for reading and leave any suggestions, critiques for me to see.

Interesting idea, however I don’t know about the static play style. They’ve always tried to move away from that, even tho I like the camping play style myself I don’t rly see them going down that path again :P

An idea that I just came to think about is:
Turrets cannot die – when they reach 1 hp they become inactive and must be fully repaired e.g. with tool kit to work again.

Picking up turrets gives them a 5 sec cd before u can place them down again.

Ofc the bloody healing turret is messing up all ny ideas too

I can understand if this never gets implemented but I got bored and had some downtime so I decided to come up with something.

I just want them to not be totally useless even if it is only for PvE, and offer Ideas in-case A-net has been trying to think of ideas (if this is even on a to-do list of any type.)

If anything It gives me a reason to chat about something on the forums and get some constructive ideas (hopefully).

About your idea, I’m worried about how that would interact AoEs and Cleave affects. Would the turrets become a static background item that become basically intangible by everyone but their Engineer, and would auto-tool (if it came back) passively bring it back up and running after 1 minute of being left alone?

skill 5 could be activate reflect shield and gives temporary stability. and the rifel turret can be upgraded to a sniper turret like in the iron marshes and allow crit when operated.

I think a rather easy fix to turrets is to make them medium health, highly damaging but have crap range. That way they could be used to control space in competitive game modes and introduce a new play style for engie, also giving us a rest from the mind numbing boringness that is grenades in both pve and pvp

@cyberzombie – I like that idea with the #5, made it a traited skill from fortified turret so it still has a place as a GM trait with damage reduction and a shield on demand. (Should it give a knock-back to push people out of the dome or would that be a little OP?)

As for the rifle turret I did want to make it like a sniper rifle turret since I wanted to suggest the “Chain gun”. I was thinking of pretty moderate damage on a 4 second Rate of Fire, I just couldn’t think of what to change the Overload to.

Cheshire.2465:

I can understand if this never gets implemented but I got bored and had some downtime so I decided to come up with something.

I just want them to not be totally useless even if it is only for PvE, and offer Ideas in-case A-net has been trying to think of ideas (if this is even on a to-do list of any type.)

If anything It gives me a reason to chat about something on the forums and get some constructive ideas (hopefully).

About your idea, I’m worried about how that would interact AoEs and Cleave affects. Would the turrets become a static background item that become basically intangible by everyone but their Engineer, and would auto-tool (if it came back) passively bring it back up and running after 1 minute of being left alone?

I gues I never had the hp regen trait in my theorycrafting. One way you could solve it is by making everything connected to the turrets (traits, buffs etc) go inactive until you’ve manually repaired it.
Regarding the aoe problem, there are a few way to implement active defenses and reduce inc dmg in different ways.

eg: making the reflect bubble pulse aslong as the turrets are up (unless they’re inactive) with maybe 10sec downtime.

While I commend you for trying to look into the Engi’s problem with turrets, I’m afraid this has too much micro management and static gameplay.

I’m not sure how long you have played the game, but the Engi Mortar kit used to be just a mortar that we could place and then control rooting the engi without any additional defensive bonuses except for a perma stability(that could be stripped/stolen). It was pretty bad and didn’t offer much support nor DPS for an elite skill on top of other issues it had( minimal range boundary, slow arcing projectiles, no critical hits, exposure to high damage… perfect setups for backstab thieves). Rarely, if ever, engi players used the Mortar and there was much relief when it was finally turned into an effective kit.

Back to your suggestions though. I don’t like the knocked over status nor the operate function as those two present micromanagement that would just be highly annoying in a battle. The fact that you have to operate the turret then use a separate skill to bring it back to operation is a lot. I would scrap these two ideas.

The build times could still be of use, but reduced from what you have posted. Guild Wars 2 is a fast paced gameplay, and something that takes 6 seconds to build is just too long. You have to ask yourself if turrets can be destroyed during the build phase, which would the cause a series of problems such as them being destroyed before being finished. Turrets already have issues staying up in PvP situations.

I would keep 360 degree rotations. But I’ll take a base damage nerf if the turrets get to scale with engi stats and to receive boons( something that we’ve been wanting for a while). TBH, with HoT I think we could revert the turrets back to resisting at least condi damage. Like I mentioned before, turrets have issues staying up with the amount of damage that gets thrown around.

I do like your overload abilities as that would bring some better functionality to them. However, as much as I would want a chain gun turret elite, I believe supply crate would be better to keep as that is a more supportive elite to have.
The trait suggestions I would scrap.

So in summary, in my opinion:
Scrap the following suggestions:

• Traits
• Kncoked Over status effect
• Operate Function
• 180 degree roation
• Chain Turret

Keep the following suggestions:

• Build times (however reduced, and the least likely to be kept)
• Buffs to scaling/boon application, ability to critically hit
• Overcharge abilities
• Outgoing Damage reduction to balance scaling

Now, for some suggestions in combination with yours.

• If build times are kept, have it so the Engi doesn’t have to sit there and build. Place down it automatically and have it build itself. Reason being other placement skills such as wells and traps have little to no cast time, which is why the build times suggested need to be greatly reduced. Either that, or make the turrets(besides the healing turret) in-line the cast times of the necro minions.
• I would personally like to see an old trait come up: deployable turrets. It would still allow the Engi to strategically place the turrets but away from the middle of a fight or not have to take time setting up turrets off point.
• Some sort of defensive or specialized boon from turrets. I think turrets could be more sportive or have some sort of specialized boon like the necro minions.
• Reduce some incoming damage to turrets so as to not be so ‘paper-thin’. Or like you suggested, increase the health but keep condi/criticals

I know this removes a lot of the more ‘active play’ elements you were going for, but I think they would prove to be more a hindrance than a benefit. However, some parts you suggested are good imo. Either way, it is a good to talk about this set of skills especially since they have fallen so far in good functionality (and a small set of the gyros as well)

~Drago

As far as the old mortar, I found it pretty useful in WvW for seige defense and blob scattering also it provided damage out of line of sight. As far as futher turret suggestions, I would like to see rifling to come back in addition to thrown turrets. It provided a tactical advantage in PvP.