Guild Wars 2

Turreteers, as it stands now, are generally looked upon as being an extremely subpar build by many within the engineer community. This botherkittenreatly, as the main reason I wanted to play Engineer to begin with WAS the turrets.

I would like to stress that, at least at my current level, I do not feel turrets are inherently weak, damage wise, or need a buff. They actually feel halfway fine to me right now in that regard. What DOES need a change, not so much a buff but a reworking, is the mobility and survivability of the turrets.

Mobility: With the current system, if you pick up a turret it is healed to 100% health and immediately goes on cooldown. These cooldowns can range from 20 seconds to 1 full minute, and only begin after the turret has been destroyed, not after it has been dropped. That’s not pretty, especially when you are dealing with escort missions and the like. This makes the use of turrets situational, at best, meaning a turreteer will be forced to spend a great deal of time using other builds (kits, elixirs, etc). In fact, for a turreteer who wants to truly be useful, he will spend less time with turrets than he will in any other build.

SO, the two suggestions I have to fix this are as follows (mutually exclusive, so just pick 1):

A) Have the full cooldown only go into effect when your turret is destroyed, and instead a 10 second cooldown goes into effect when the turret is picked up.

B) Have the full cooldown only go into effect when your turret is destroyed, and instead NO cooldown goes into effect when you pick up the turret. To offset abuse, have the turrets NOT heal upon pickup. At all. If you pick the turret up at 50% health, you place it at 50% health. If you want a full heal, either repair it or self destruct it (which would put it on the same cooldown it has now, so nothing would change there).

C) Leave all mechanics as they are, but switch out two traits in the engineer’s trees to decrease cooldown of turrets. Both traits, at 20% each, stack. This would require the need for turreteers to take both traits, but also grant them a 40% decrease in turret cooldown.

Any of these would increase mobility for Turreteers without increasing their damage output or too greatly increasing the survivability of the turrets. For A), the 10 second cooldown is in place so that you can’t just pick up and drop turrets quickly, using that to avoid incoming damage to the turrets.

Survivability: Not a lot to say here. In dungeons, as has been expressed multiple times on the forums, a single AOE can wipe out all turrets on the field. This should at least be increased to 2 AOEs (at the minimum) to give turreteers a chance to repair their turrets. It’s impossible to repair something if the only attack it takes immediately destroys it.

I’m actually a Turret Engineer who only very rarely uses non-turret skills. Even my Elite is Supply Crate. Works better than you might think, especially with some of the shorter-cooldown turrets.

That said, mobility would be pretty handy, yeah. I’ve occasionally wondered about a possible weird version that involves having the turrets have two modes, one that lets them attack and the other that lets them move. Out of your suggestions, A is the one I like best – it’s at least the least complicated.

Survivability would also be awesome. Any kind of improvement there would be great.

I’d like to see their stuff linked in some way to the deployer’s stats, too – right now, there’s not a single thing that makes running around the edges of battlefields, naked, unarmed, and placing turrets a bad idea besides, well, the whole ‘if somebody realizes that the naked guy is the turret-master, he’s going to die as soon as they look too hard at him.’

Grandmaster Toughness trait: rifled turret barrels…. = survivability.
Why? because you’ve now just spent 30 points on toughness, your own personal armor can withstand a lot more beating, meaning you can easily take some hits instead of letting them hit your turrets. Plus, you can put them in the back row more easily (the squishy ones). Otherwise, use the Thumper turret for more of a shield. Also remember you can lay turrets down on the move, so it’s relatively easy to spread them out so that an AoE doesn’t one-shot all of them (maybe one gets destroyed, but it leaves the other 3 alive).

I actually like your ideas, especially B, except there are a few catches. First of all, I have found that even on the dullest, most mobile of events (escort quest), you have ample time between fights along the road to be able to pick up your turrets when one fight ends and be ready to lay at least two down for the next fight (especially healing + rifle). Secondly, you are at a major advantage in any defending event, where you know that they will reliably come to you. This is plainly obvious in the charr iron legion story step where you and the ash legion are setting up the Ghostbore turrets to annihilate a rush of ghosts (similar to a tower-defense game).

Anyways, what the core of the issue here is, we do NOT want to see a repeat of the SoS ritualist from GW1… that is to say, you become nearly invulnerable and dole out massive amounts of single-target damage simply by hiding behind your personal minion army (side note: Necromancers are not able to heal their minions either, so they are also in this boat of not being able to permanently hide behind adds). The core mechanic of the SoS rit was to be able to heal and simultaneously move your spirits around to kite attackers, keeping them alive and, in turn, you. Hardmode encounters were in many cases solo-able, when it was designed for 8-person parties.

What I would like to see, perhaps more than any of the others, is a more viable toolkit that works more like the TF2 Engineer’s wrench, being able to heal the (admittedly very squishy) single turret you get, very quickly. I can’t imagine that even traiting the toolkit skills would be able to keep any turret alive, currently. I say leave the turret skills all as they are currently, but make the Smack on the wrench heal just ONE turret, but at the rate of 20-40% of it’s health per second (about as fast as any powerful AoE can damage it). When given the choice, which one turret out of the 4 you’re going to keep alive, I would imagine a much more fun TF2-style engineer, whacking things left and right in the middle of a chaotic battle, as likely to lose a turret as he is to get himself killed! I like it when the turret dies, sometimes, in that build, giving you that nice explosion (traited) that knocks back the enemy so they’re on their back for a little respite.

@Anymras: Sorry I haven’t tested anything myself, but are you sure that the damage which a turret deals per shot isn’t dependent on your own Power at the time? I could give it a relatively easy test in the pvp zone today, and confirm.

If you want survivability of turrets, get Ground-Targeted Turrets.
Casually putting that Rocket Turret in an annoying spot (like on a wall) makes it hard to notice and unviable/immune to AoE.

I chose the engineer for the turrets, but have found other builds that I currently like even more, so I’m not too troubled with the current state of them (although perhaps the current state is why I ‘left’ them in the first place).

Perhaps also related, I mostly play WvW, and really haven’t found a way to make them useful there, except perhaps the net in case of a jump by one or two opponents. Maybe someone can enlighten me (I still love the idea of a turret engineer)

In PvE (except for dungeons), I found a full-turret build, together with drop supplies, pretty efficient; you get up to eight turrets down and before those mobs know which one to hit first they’re down. I can imagine that in sPvP they are pretty useful for holding or attacking capture points, but I have not played any sPvP yet.

But in WvW I have so far found that the battles are too dynamic for stationary turrets to be useful, and the supply drop is mostly useful for the knockdown and the heals, not the turrets (still, one of the best elites btw). Probably even if they were movable (you’d just be busy moving them around all the time, might as well get single shots in).

No real suggestions as to how to change that, though. Perhaps there should be a ‘move turrets’ trait or kit skill, that makes your turrets move to a target location. But doing so in any sane way would need more buttons. But perhaps even working deployable turrets with a decent range would make this a lot better.

Starfleck: Equipping and unequipping my gear definitely didn’t change the tooltip (didn’t even trigger a refresh-flip) – of course, considering how stupid the tooltips are about a whole lot of things, it’s difficult to tell. I’ll find some training dummies and see if it does anything at all.

Edit: Tested it against Skelks in Shaman’s Rookery (was farming low-level materials anyway, figured I might as well check). With me completely naked, my Rifle Turret dealt 38 points of damage per shot and my Flame Turret dealt 15 points of damage on initial contact. Dressed to the nines, same numbers.