Guild Wars 2

As you all know, a turrets cooldown doesn’t start until the turret is picked up, killed, or destroyed (with the cooldown being reduced slightly when you pick it up). I have come here to suggest a change to how turrets are put on cooldown, to make them a bit more mobile and hopefully more fun to use/more viable.

Cause the turret cooldown to begin the moment the turret is placed, as opposed to it occurring when it is despawned. If the turret is picked up, no additional cooldown is added. If the turret is killed or manually destroyed, a cooldown is added (either a flat duration like 5 or 10 seconds, or a duration based on the original cooldown), mechanically working somewhat oppositely of the current model.

You can for your own opinions on what this would allow. Mechanically it would keep turrets largely immobile (promoting good placement) but be readily available should combat move locations. The added cooldown on turret death would promote picking up your turrets, and prevent needing to blow up your turrets on cooldown, and still give incentive for enemies to kill turrets.

This would also keep turrets functionally the same, meaning no traits or skill would need to be changed or added (as opposed to the idea of creating a turret kit, which I have seen brought up a few times).

All in all, I like playing the engineer, and I am especially fond of the turret mechanic. I I am on the other a bit sad, as turrets in their current state aren’t very viable to use, as the immobile nature of turrets, on top of there extensive cooldowns, means they become very non-viable when you have to move. I would like to see them changed in some form or fashion, as using turrets is just too detrimental in most types of situation.

well i hate to be negative but i dont see engineer getting buffs anymore. for the past year all ive seen is nerf this that. So i can’t really see this game being successful.

I also aggree with you not only turret need help but kit too because apparently the main guy who develop the engineer gave up and slap a RnG effect from other class and expects us to do well.

And what more is that Ive determine that engineer is just a CC tank machine nothing more. We dont have damg we dont have reliable heal or escape tool. So im stuck with telling enemy no you cant kill me i will survive your zerg and massive mob aggro.

Quite fun to be the one guy that does CC for your team to allow easier boss fight killing that elementalist that likes to Lightning out.

oh and if your looking for loots to drop just use a FT to tag em. Well have fun

Agreed I dislike this change after recently starting to play turrets some in spvp I have had them despawn on me at some inopportune times… basically like you said make it 15 mins instead of 5..

A lot of people just use turrets for the self-destruct blast finisher, and maybe in conjunction with the accelerant packed turrets trait. To me it seems like a waste, but that’s how some people feel they’re best used. It’s things like the long cooldowns and now this despawn timer that make people do that though.

I think the main problem with them was afk farming in PvE, which I agree was an issue, but I also agree that 5 minutes is too short.

As far as PvP goes, if a player isn’t able to take a capture point because it has nothing but turrets on it, then they don’t deserve that point.

I made a thread about the 5-minute life of turrets and was quite disappointed nobody except me seems to care, but now that I came here, I see this

Agreed I dislike this change after recently starting to play turrets some in spvp I have had them despawn on me at some inopportune times… basically like you said make it 15 mins instead of 5..

Yamsandjams.3267:

A lot of people just use turrets for the self-destruct blast finisher, and maybe in conjunction with the accelerant packed turrets trait. To me it seems like a waste, but that’s how some people feel they’re best used. It’s things like the long cooldowns and now this despawn timer that make people do that though.

I think the main problem with them was afk farming in PvE, which I agree was an issue, but I also agree that 5 minutes is too short.

As far as PvP goes, if a player isn’t able to take a capture point because it has nothing but turrets on it, then they don’t deserve that point.

Didn’t you mean to reply here instead? Temper said nothing about turret life durations, and the “15 mins instead of 5” sounds oddly familiar…
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/5-minutes-of-turret-duration-is-too-short/first#post1741067

Roo.2037:

I made a thread about the 5-minute life of turrets and was quite disappointed nobody except me seems to care

Ha, I care! I was pretty disappointed when we finally got turrets buffs, we also got some lame time limit. I mean you don’t see ranger pets exploding after 5 minutes so why would ours?

Although I got to say its not game breaking and I can live with it, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of me being able to kill. If it does then I’ll definitely complain more.

I definitely agree with this suggestion! It’d even make the 5-minute time limit a non-issue, something that really only prevents farming without having much of an impact on their actual usage, given that you can pick it up and immediately replace it.

And the low turret health means that it’s still entirely viable for an enemy to just take out the turret in order to get a considerable window of opportunity against a newly-defenseless Engineer. Kill a Rifle Turret immediately after placement, and that’s 30 seconds (going off of the flat 10 second additional cooldown variation) of reduced Engineer firepower. Other turrets, the enemy gets an even bigger break!

I love this idea. Minor change that’s obviously workable given how Trap utilities work (and possibly others? Not certain.), makes Turrets FAR less frustrating and more viable, and yet doesn’t make them overpowered. Even compliments their current state, health and all! I would definitely like to see this idea enacted.

Temper.5478:

Cause the turret cooldown to begin the moment the turret is placed, as opposed to it occurring when it is despawned. If the turret is picked up, no additional cooldown is added. If the turret is killed or manually destroyed, a cooldown is added (either a flat duration like 5 or 10 seconds, or a duration based on the original cooldown), mechanically working somewhat oppositely of the current model.

I absolutely love this idea. (Incidentally, a guildmate and I were playing around with turret play in sPvP this weekend)

It’s awful to feel stuck bunkering a spot because the moment you leave or pick up your turrets to move, you feel utterly defenseless. You have no utilities and no weapon swap (unless you sacrifice a turret for a kit), except some marginally useful F1 skills. Running between points with my turret cooldowns active, I felt extremely naked.

There is a lot of potential though. There is turret positioning, overcharge timings, destruct timings, a lot of cool mechanics that have potential for a high skill ceiling.

There are still some other issues I am working my head around, that might have solutions I just haven’t found yet. Condition removal seems lacking, and the healing turret in general seems mediocre compared to medkit (Too much regen overlap diminishes healing overall). And how our weapons are very weak on their own, and it seems necessary to drop a turret in favor of a kit, just to be able to do non-turret damage. And the extra supply drop turrets very often make the difference between make-or-break for encounters.

That awful cooldown is definitely the bottleneck though.

Honestly, the reason the turret buffs have taken so long to come out is because the devs are terrified of engineers just leveling AFK. I’ve played with turrets since I started my engineer and while underwhelming, I’ve found that full turret builds don’t make for well rounded or engaging gameplay.

Looking at Mesmer clones we can tell what the best summon or “pet” is in the game. They do good damage and are short duration. They only attack one target, which the player has to select like any other ability, and de-spawn after the target dies so there’s no chance of AFK farming. Turrets should not be just like mesmer clones, but they should hit a lot harder than they do and a single turret should provide enough to a player to outweigh the utility of a kit.

I agree that our turret cool-downs should start ticking when we place them. I also agree that turret cooldowns should be taken down as well. What I suggest however is to reduce the uptime of turrets even more, to ~30sec, but have them do a lot more damage.

My suggestion goes like this:
.-Have turrets have a cooldown that starts ticking down from the moment they are placed (lets say 40 sec).
.-If you let them go for 30 sec they auto-blow and you have a 10 sec cooldown before you can bring one up.
.-Every 10 sec they are up you are allowed to upgrade their damage (to double their damage).

Having a shorter uptime before blowout will discourage afk farmers even more, while ensuring that players who use turrets strategically will have use for them. The 10 sec cooldown between turrets ensures that the player needs to do more than just spam turrets over an area and hope that they do all the work (again discouraging farmers). And the upgrades to turret damage ensures that the turreteers that have to put up the the former suggestions get a fair trade off.

I find that something like this won’t just be a hassle, but instead will be something more engaging than the toss, fight around, hope they don’t get aoe’d or their AI works, turrets we have now.

Simple and effective suggestion from the OP.