Guild Wars 2

I am recently returning from a long break. I see a lot of power builds, meta builds, condition builds etc. I made an engineer back in the day because I liked the turrets. Is there really no viable build for turrets, even 2 turrets and grenades or 2 turrets and bombs? Anything solid?

I am a PvE player who does more solo stuff with some dungeons mixed in.

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Turrets were never really very good in PvE, and they are much worse now.

There are not really any builds using them. That said, unless you are in an optimized dungeon group, you can run whatever you want to pretty decent success.

SD builds usually have healing and rifle turret, does that count?

the tool belt skills from the turrets seem pretty good, the turrets themselves usually a wasted slot. theres no build that can rly make use of turrets, they are competing with kits and elixirs for space on your bar.

Turrets used to be useful for trolling hotjoin, and that’s about it. But due to the massive uproar of qq, Anet made sure to gut turrets to such an extent that nobody would ever think of making a turret build ever again.

Turrets were nerfed into the ground.

They have no survivability. You can kill one by blowing on it hard enough.

Healing turret is still amazing because using it “properly” has you detonate or pick it up as soon as you put it down. It’s a healing water bomb, not a turret.

Rocket turret is still situationally handy because it’s still pretty high power AOE. There are a select few boss fights in PVE, like the boss of HotW p1, where you can slap one in the corner behind a totem and let your turret take care of it, and it rarely gets hit, if at all. Though most other bosses just one-shot it 3 seconds after you put it down. In PvP you can plant one far off of a point as a distraction because it does a bit too much damage to ignore so people either eat the extra hits or have to go out of their way to deal with it. (But once they do, it’s dead in 3 seconds) It’s also the only thing that will let you destroy structures at any reasonable speed if you’re geared for pure condi damage.

Rifle turret is for spammable toolkit skills on a static discharge build. I don’t really see SD builds much anymore, but the real value of the turret is it’s low CD. If you have the trait that give turrets shield bubbles, between the rifle turret and heal turret, you get some frequent shields which is handy against rangers and such in PvP, since it forces them to engage you at melee instead of arrow spamming. The fact that the thing actually shoots bullets is a very minor side benefit.

Thumper turret, Flame turret and Net turret are near useless except for very specific situational applications, like the net as part of a perma-immobilize set-up.

Basically, if you’re going to use turrets, you can add one to a build, but only if you’re counting on it as being disposable. If you’re traited for it, they can be extra reflects and extra knockbacks, and it’s at the point where most turrets are used for those rather than to actually stay put and do damage.

Full tureteer is dead.

Tl;dr: they were overpowered in a special SPvP situation only(!), so they got nerfed to such a great extent they became mostly unviable everywhere.

Conjunction of over-nerf with collateral damage. ^^

Synosius.9876:

SD builds usually have healing and rifle turret, does that count?

the tool belt skills from the turrets seem pretty good, the turrets themselves usually a wasted slot. theres no build that can rly make use of turrets, they are competing with kits and elixirs for space on your bar.

^This

Though if you are intent on making a build for open-world PvE and even dungeons, I’d suggest going along the line of Inventions for traits. If you decide to go with Experimental Turrets for the group-based buffs or even for your own: I would suggest choosing rifle and flame turret, as they provide damage boosting buffs such as fury and might, respectively.

The real crux of turrets are that they are clearly not a reliable source of damage, well not a good source anyways. Now, as mentioned above you can go for SD (Static Discharge) build that utilizes the Tools trait line and you can get some sweet procs off the Kinetic Battery grandmaster trait and you’ll also have the sweet speedy-kits for open-world exploring.

Personally, I’d use an extra slot for Grenades as they by far are the Engineers most potent form of damage. Every single skill it has, save flash grenade, will out-damage anything your turrets have to offer, but with the added boons if you’re bringing along experimental turrets will synergize quite nicely and with added bonus of granting those same boons to your allies.

The real question is what stat combination do you want to use? Also, runes, sigils?

Here’s an example of what I came up with the above theory-crafting:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFAUlUUhaqYVVwELw6FLdGU4xjaT/m9t394DCQ3B-TBSBwAUuAAFV+FRJ4N1fGu/AKdAIM/B4BAAA-e

I’m sure you can run a bombs variant as well that could work nice with condi gear.

I used to do full turrets, even way back when everyone said they were bad. Made it to top 500 in PvP rather easily.

Having deployable turrets made a huge difference between dead, useless turrets in bad spots vs the opposite. I could have turrets on walls, being unreachable by melee users and cover more area as they weren’t LOSed. I could throw turrets onto people far away to get a heal or water field or smoke field or a huge launch, you name it. I could chain CC with rifle by #4, #2, then proceed to turret juggle them to death.

Removing that trait killed it. Everything above I mentioned is now unpractical or impossible to do. It takes time to set up turrets in good spots, and by that time the good spot has changed.

Full turret builds are weak in pve because of earlier mentioned reasons. I would however recommend to use them in several situations:
Thumper: its toolbelt skill is a blast finisher. Use it when pre stacking might or stealth and swap it back to nades for example.
Net: very good when fighting the soggoth thing in arah p1.
Flame turret: another fire fields, also very strong in full burning builds, however I prerer rocket boots for those.

There are some niche uses for turrets in pve. Net Turret is very useful at Tar in Arah p1, Crate summons another Net Turret, very useful. I have also seen some reflection builds with turrets (uses the inventions grandmaster trait).

However, Turrets got heavily nerfed because of pvp. Turret Engineer was a brainless build, we had an engi with full defensive stats (usually sentinel) with full turrets on skill bar. These turrets were quite tanky since back then they could not be critcally hit or hit by conditions (they were completely invulnerable to condition builds and even power builds took some time to destroy them). So they got nerfed to get vulnerable to condi and crit without adjusting their health.