Guild Wars 2

So it dosent take a genius to realize that turrets are in a bad spot due to bugs and out right just not stacking up to other utility’s atm, so these are just my thoughts on how they should be changed, also who knows how good turrets could actually be after the bugs are fixed so these suggestions are for the event that all turret bugs are fixed.

First thing id like to say is i really think turrets need to be effected by your stats, but only threw traits, potentially forcing engineers down a path that makes them have to build for what they want to get out of there turrets, essentially programming there turrets when making your build.

I’m going to start with the traits because that’s the biggest part to running a turret build, any values i use are subject to change based on what everyone thinks of suggested changes where new traits should be placed.

Trait changes:

Inventions:
Metal Plating: Adds 50% of your toughness to turrets, Reduces cooldown on turret overcharge by 20%
Autotool Installation: Adds 50% of your vitality to turrets, Turrets are self-repairing.
Rifled Turret Barrels: Adds 25% of your power to turrets, Turrets have longer attack range

The only issue i could see is that potentially turrets would be to hard for condition based builds to fight due to larger tanks and turrets immunity to conditions, then again someone running a condition based build should know to stay away from an engineer using turrets and would an engineer running full turrets be more susceptible to condition builds due to lack of counter measures like condition removal.

Adding a cooldown reduction on turret overcharges would also tempt more engineers to actually use the healing turret as a turret while the addition of toughness would allow all turrets to safely stay alive longer to use the overcharges more often.

The other traits are fine as is imo, now i want to suggest some new traits im not really sure where they should be placed in the traits though so any ideas on that would be welcome.

New Traits:
Mobile Factory: Reduces cooldown on turrets 20% (turrets do need a cooldown reduction, but a trait like this would conflict with healing turret potentially making it way overpowered, so would you increase the cooldown on healing turret so it drops to 20 seconds or would that make it obsolete on current builds?)

Threat evasion system: Turrets will evade away from enemy’s that deal over 50% of turret health (i think this would be beneficial to both pvp and pve, it relies purely on thinking your opponent can hit that hard and taking certain traits i suggested could in some case’s make this trait obsolete, it could also be less beneficial if the turrets were to evade away from the point they were set to defend)

Overdrive Command Software: Turrets in Overcharge will Critical hit based on the engineers Critical Chance and Critical Damage (this i feel should at least be put over the current Rifled Turret Barrels instead of the base increase to damage, it could only be truly utilized in less defensive and more burst builds)

Virus infection system: turrets now have a 10% chance to inflict 2 seconds of poison and weakness with a 5 second cd (grandmaster trait i think, but would open up more areas for full turret builds to be used effectively with conditions, also adding a good countermeasure to fighting anything that uses heavy burst that could easily destroy your turrets)

Thats all for the traits now the turrets them selves, i think turrets really need both a condition and power side to them to open up there usefulness in more types of builds as well as improving there overall effectiveness considering the fact they are immobile and are no longer effective the moment a target leaves range, ill also stay away from the toolbelt skills as they are already effective in certain builds and cooldowns is also something i think needs to be discussed.

Skill changes:

Healing turret: its great as is

Flame turret Leave as is. Overcharge: Shoots a Flame bomb that Explodes inflicting damage, 5 seconds of burning(essentially the rocket turrets current overcharge but without the knockback and adds a range factor to the flame turret that can help make up for its low hp as you would be able to place it a bit further away and still utilize it)

Rifle Turret: Vulnerability on every shot. Overcharge: Shoots 5 projectiles in a cone piercing and inflicting damage and 2 Bleeds lasting 5 seconds to everything struck by projectiles (projectiles would shoot 1 at a time moving in a fan across the area of the target, that would make it less effective at long range and more beneficial to players who would take the time to set it up)

Rocket turret: leave as is. Overcharge: Shoots 3 homing rockets in fast succession (these rockets use the same damage as the normal rockets but would add an extra burst factor to a turret builds seeing as right now they are completely sustained damage, also the rocket turret has 3 barrels so it seems fitting i think)

Thumper Turret: Leave as is. Overcharge: your thumper turret launch’s foes within 280 radius and pulls foes within 280-500 radius.(this change would make thumper turret more universal in its use, pulling foes in also seems like a better function since the thumper turret deals damage and cripples at melee range)

Net turret: leave as is

Mortar: is an actual turret with big range using, Launch Concussion Barrage will be its overcharge, each rocket from concussion barrage also leaves caltrops, maybe decrease the radius a bit

Anyway that’s my thoughts on it, there are potential good combinations there as well as not making them to overpowered since an engineer will literally never be able to fully utilize everything to its best potential and will rather have to decide how he wants to use his turrets rather then there being 1 generic turret build, like taking soldiers for tankie turrets that deal some damage or berserkers for hard hitting turrets that will go down alot easier, or even a condition engineer using bombs with thumper turret and tool kit to really keep something in range.

Discuss away and provide any idears/suggestions and hopefully anet takes the time to read not only my post but every one who provides constructive post’s and hopefully we all get to see better and hopefully funner to use turrets one day

Thank you for some great ideas. I made an engineer shortly after launch due to my interest in turrents. Since then I’ve been largely let down with turrents and subsequently have given up on my engineer.

What I’ve come to realise is that the work relative to the reward is why turrents fail. That is it takes too much investment from Anet to make turrents effective for only a niche element of the community that uses them and how many people use engineer’s to begin with?

Perhaps if ANet took to your ideas it would make turrents more viable and therefore people would use them more? We can always hope.

After playing Borderlands 2 and the “Commando” class, why not making a trait that would make turret create a protective dome that destroys any projectiles on overcharge ?

Kizzu.5826:

After playing Borderlands 2 and the “Commando” class, why not making a trait that would make turret create a protective dome that destroys any projectiles on overcharge ?

me and a friend did talk about this and would like to see an elite turret that can periodically apply protection and it’s over charge being a protective dome like guardian’s sanctuary, as an elite though would it stay out for a set duration before going on a long cooldown or would it be preferable to have no duration seeing as it could be destroyed

To be entirely honest, turrets won’t work in many cases until they can be mobile. Even in tpvp and spvp where there are points to defend turrets are just not viable.

Give them the ability similar to rangers:

Grandmaster Trait XI Spirits Unbound Spirits can move and follow you.

turrets have fanbelts attached to them like the hacked robots of bioshock and move with you. This would be Grandmaster Trait in inventions. They don’t need buffing they just need to move.

ninjabiscuit.8052:

To be entirely honest, turrets won’t work in many cases until they can be mobile. Even in tpvp and spvp where there are points to defend turrets are just not viable.

Give them the ability similar to rangers:

Grandmaster Trait XI Spirits Unbound Spirits can move and follow you.

turrets have fanbelts attached to them like the hacked robots of bioshock and move with you. This would be Grandmaster Trait in inventions. They don’t need buffing they just need to move.

^This

poses.5198:

ninjabiscuit.8052:

To be entirely honest, turrets won’t work in many cases until they can be mobile. Even in tpvp and spvp where there are points to defend turrets are just not viable.

Give them the ability similar to rangers:

Grandmaster Trait XI Spirits Unbound Spirits can move and follow you.

turrets have fanbelts attached to them like the hacked robots of bioshock and move with you. This would be Grandmaster Trait in inventions. They don’t need buffing they just need to move.

^This

No.

Making them mobile will guarantee they stay weak.

What makes turrets appealing is the fact that they’re strong yet immobile to have strong area denial/punish.

They need a really low cooldown on pick up, that will instantly fix the mobility issues.

Knote.2904:

poses.5198:

ninjabiscuit.8052:

To be entirely honest, turrets won’t work in many cases until they can be mobile. Even in tpvp and spvp where there are points to defend turrets are just not viable.

Give them the ability similar to rangers:

Grandmaster Trait XI Spirits Unbound Spirits can move and follow you.

turrets have fanbelts attached to them like the hacked robots of bioshock and move with you. This would be Grandmaster Trait in inventions. They don’t need buffing they just need to move.

^This

No.

Making them mobile will guarantee they stay weak.

What makes turrets appealing is the fact that they’re strong yet immobile to have strong area denial/punish.

They need a really low cooldown on pick up, that will instantly fix the mobility issues.

And nullify the use of tool kit and traits for turret repair. The only way this could work is if ANet stored the state of a picked up turret, so that it has the same health as when it was picked up and so on.

ninjabiscuit.8052:

To be entirely honest, turrets won’t work in many cases until they can be mobile. Even in tpvp and spvp where there are points to defend turrets are just not viable.

Give them the ability similar to rangers:

Grandmaster Trait XI Spirits Unbound Spirits can move and follow you.

turrets have fanbelts attached to them like the hacked robots of bioshock and move with you. This would be Grandmaster Trait in inventions. They don’t need buffing they just need to move.

the whole point of turrets is point defense, and they could be very effective at it but they don’t stack up to other utilitys/traits the engineer has, spirits also dont deal periodic sustained ranged damage, turrets sit back and focus fire the nearest target to death (or kinda just tickle it every now and then atm) spirits on the other hand provide team wide buffs and utility’s that activate pbaoe from the spirit.

Turrets lack the ability to actually bring out there full potential, sure you could say that they deal so much dps over a certain duration of time but that duration of time is a long time, and unless your fighting a full condition build they wont get the chance to be out that long and also chances are you don’t have the ability to tank those conditions long enough for the turrets to do there job and versus a power build they can just rip your turrets to shreds very quickly and mobile turrets wont help you, they will put your turrets in a prime spot for not only the turrets but also your self to be burst on.

what turrets really need is a way to better focus on the task they are required for and right now they just don’t have that, you can trait them to add the extra damage but its still very small, now that the rocket turret no longer inflicts burning its damage is half of what it used to be, there is also no burst function to turrets (out side of using s/d builds which takes away from the idea of using a turret if you only mean to use them for the detonation you also have to sacrifice tank for burst damage) so any target knows there is no chance of suddenly getting wreaked, meaning they can literally back out as they choose instead of being forced to go defensive because there is the chance they could be burst on, i cant even stress that problem enough now that turrets have clearly been moved into a more power based damage output.

id like to point out that the idea of this is to have turrets buffed so we can run turret focused builds, everyone throws turrets into there builds but only to support the build and not an actual turret build.

Like I said before, adding mobile turrets isn’t the best fix for them and would probably make them too similar to Minion Master Necros and Spirit Rangers.

There are other ways to make turrets mobile wich doesn’t include wheels or fans. If you make them a bit more resiliant with active defenses and a couple of synergy between the self destruct to allow toolbelt skills to reduce their cooldowns depending on how long your turrets stayed alive I am sure it is possible to make them much more appealing for a lot more content.

Wrench should also have more synergies with turrets, the smack (repair) skill is very counter productive to use and Autotool-Installation trait could use a buff (maybe double the healing factor when equiped with the Wrench?).

Also they need to fix every bugs first before anything else, turrets are in a very bad state right now and could use some help.

I’m a relatively new Engineer, having played most of my hours with Ranger and Guardian. But I’m coming up to speed on Engineer play and am enjoying it. I like the idea of turrets but agree with the ideas above that they need a bit of help to be truly effective. I believe that turrets should not be mobile. However as they are today, they are simply too fragile and the cool downs (especially on pick up) are just too long.

Some of the ideas posted above are very good. Even though I’d like to see them implemented, I’d be happy if turrets were just made a bit tougher (especially to AoE) and make the cool downs shorter.

digiowl.9620:

Knote.2904:

poses.5198:

ninjabiscuit.8052:

To be entirely honest, turrets won’t work in many cases until they can be mobile. Even in tpvp and spvp where there are points to defend turrets are just not viable.

Give them the ability similar to rangers:

Grandmaster Trait XI Spirits Unbound Spirits can move and follow you.

turrets have fanbelts attached to them like the hacked robots of bioshock and move with you. This would be Grandmaster Trait in inventions. They don’t need buffing they just need to move.

^This

No.

Making them mobile will guarantee they stay weak.

What makes turrets appealing is the fact that they’re strong yet immobile to have strong area denial/punish.

They need a really low cooldown on pick up, that will instantly fix the mobility issues.

And nullify the use of tool kit and traits for turret repair. The only way this could work is if ANet stored the state of a picked up turret, so that it has the same health as when it was picked up and so on.

What? They’re already squishy as hell, who cares if someone could pick it up and place it down 10 seconds later to heal it….

That’s still 10 seconds of no turret lol..

Knote.2904:

poses.5198:

ninjabiscuit.8052:

To be entirely honest, turrets won’t work in many cases until they can be mobile. Even in tpvp and spvp where there are points to defend turrets are just not viable.

Give them the ability similar to rangers:

Grandmaster Trait XI Spirits Unbound Spirits can move and follow you.

turrets have fanbelts attached to them like the hacked robots of bioshock and move with you. This would be Grandmaster Trait in inventions. They don’t need buffing they just need to move.

^This

No.

Making them mobile will guarantee they stay weak.

What makes turrets appealing is the fact that they’re strong yet immobile to have strong area denial/punish.

They need a really low cooldown on pick up, that will instantly fix the mobility issues.

You my friend are making some very unfounded assumptions, and bad ones at that if you ask me. After over a year, they have already stayed weak. That is the only guarantee you can make about them.

Although I do prefer my stance I have been posting since beta, that you appear to support. A low recast, allowing us to simply reset at another location. I feel that is the best way to go. That would make them more akin to use of phantasms then spirits. While still being different in there function and use.

Something for you guys to consider… do you really want turrets to be able to follow you? For those who use a flamethrower or tool kit, such a trait would make the turrets completely useless. Think about it… the only “melee” turrets are the flame turret and the thumper turret. If a rocket turret or rifle turret can move, that means it can put itself in harm’s way when you enter combat. When I place one of those turrets, I place it with purpose: at the edge of its range, usually at an elevated position that’s hard for mobs to reach. Whenever I use turrets, I visualize their range and the mobs’ positioning. I want those turrets to stay where they are.

I think turrets should be immobile, but they should be strong. A nest of three engineer turrets shouldn’t be something that a berserker illusion can spin through and completely destroy without even dying itself. If you see a flamethrower, rocket and thumper in a single spot, it should make you think twice about getting close. Moving between them should really hurt. They need higher health, toughness, and damage.

In addition, make the Mortar elite skill both a usable siege weapon AND a turret. When it’s being used the player should have direct control, but if nobody is manning the mortar then it should launch its 1 skill automatically, perhaps with an overcharge (~45s CD) that will make it remotely fire its barrage skill.

Tulki.1458:

Something for you guys to consider… do you really want turrets to be able to follow you? For those who use a flamethrower or tool kit, such a trait would make the turrets completely useless. Think about it… the only “melee” turrets are the flame turret and the thumper turret. If a rocket turret or rifle turret can move, that means it can put itself in harm’s way when you enter combat. When I place one of those turrets, I place it with purpose: at the edge of its range, usually at an elevated position that’s hard for mobs to reach. Whenever I use turrets, I visualize their range and the mobs’ positioning. I want those turrets to stay where they are.

I think turrets should be immobile, but they should be strong. A nest of three engineer turrets shouldn’t be something that a berserker illusion can spin through and completely destroy without even dying itself. If you see a flamethrower, rocket and thumper in a single spot, it should make you think twice about getting close. Moving between them should really hurt. They need higher health, toughness, and damage.

In addition, make the Mortar elite skill both a usable siege weapon AND a turret. When it’s being used the player should have direct control, but if nobody is manning the mortar then it should launch its 1 skill automatically, perhaps with an overcharge (~45s CD) that will make it remotely fire its barrage skill.

^ Why is this guy not a dev!?

Tulki.1458:

Something for you guys to consider… do you really want turrets to be able to follow you? For those who use a flamethrower or tool kit, such a trait would make the turrets completely useless. Think about it… the only “melee” turrets are the flame turret and the thumper turret. If a rocket turret or rifle turret can move, that means it can put itself in harm’s way when you enter combat. When I place one of those turrets, I place it with purpose: at the edge of its range, usually at an elevated position that’s hard for mobs to reach. Whenever I use turrets, I visualize their range and the mobs’ positioning. I want those turrets to stay where they are.

I think turrets should be immobile, but they should be strong. A nest of three engineer turrets shouldn’t be something that a berserker illusion can spin through and completely destroy without even dying itself. If you see a flamethrower, rocket and thumper in a single spot, it should make you think twice about getting close. Moving between them should really hurt. They need higher health, toughness, and damage.

In addition, make the Mortar elite skill both a usable siege weapon AND a turret. When it’s being used the player should have direct control, but if nobody is manning the mortar then it should launch its 1 skill automatically, perhaps with an overcharge (~45s CD) that will make it remotely fire its barrage skill.

really good comment. thats exactly how feel with turrets.

Kizzu.5826:

After playing Borderlands 2 and the “Commando” class, why not making a trait that would make turret create a protective dome that destroys any projectiles on overcharge ?

oh cool. out of curiosity is this 2012 or 2013.

Turrets = passive game play. I’d rather see ANET focus on other areas of the class

style.6173:

Turrets = passive game play. I’d rather see ANET focus on other areas of the class

People seem to think that turrets are passive, and while Supply Crate makes them passive (can’t detonate), a build encorporating Accelerant Packed Turrets and Fortified Turrets would be extremely active, especially if you plan on getting the most out of Fortified Turrets.

Someone rezed a long dead thread by simply quoting themselves without adding any additional comments or reasons for bumping?

As a former forum spammer of some repute, I must say that I respect you, sir/ma’am.

Viking Jorun.5413:

style.6173:

Turrets = passive game play. I’d rather see ANET focus on other areas of the class

People seem to think that turrets are passive, and while Supply Crate makes them passive (can’t detonate), a build encorporating Accelerant Packed Turrets and Fortified Turrets would be extremely active, especially if you plan on getting the most out of Fortified Turrets.

As the Viking says – it might seem passive at first glance, but I can personally tell you that it’s anything but passive when you’re trying to coordinate your own actions with the attacks, overcharges, ranges, and detonations of your turrets, as well as trying to keep said turrets up.
Turret Engineers seem to acquire way more aggro than expected, as well, so it’s not exactly an easy playstyle.