Guild Wars 2

With the discussion about Rifle and Flamethrowers going on, let’s talk about the other underwhelming things: Turrets and Gadgets.

After the Specialization changes, Turrets have been thrown into the void losing some other nice traits like deployable turrets, self-repairing turrets, explode on kill, Rifled Turret Barrels etc. It also doesn’t help that ANet hasn’t even touched any of the turrets for over 2 years now. The only one people use now a days is the healing turret. Even then it’s just treated as a Boon and Boom. One of the huge downfalls for turrets is that they simply don’t scale with your stats. They’re just fragile auto-marshmallow shooters at this point.

Gadgets have received some buffs every now and then, but they’re just underwhelming compared to the utility you get from kits and Scrapper. Gadgeteer doesn’t make this any better as all it does is just encourage Engineers to get beaten up for a recharge reduction. That’s also a Grandmaster tier trait as well.

What I think would be pretty cool is if turrets had some scaling. Even a minuscule scaling would be a huge buff for them. Also some way to bring back some old traits and possibly interpret them into the turrets.

Some Gadgets just need some tweaking to be pretty solid again. There was some discussion about Rocket Boots having evade which would be pretty nice.

Utility Goggles is just overshadowed as it’s easy to get Fury, Elixers can easily remove blindness , and as a Stun Breaker it’s beaten by lot of the better ones like Healing Mist, Bypass Coating and Elixers. Analyze is nothing compared to Detection Pulse, which is AoE and has a shorter recharge. The Vulnerability can easily be covered.

Slick Shoes and Superspeed is shadowed by Blast Gyro and Bypass Coating. Blast Gyro also has shorter recharge, does damage, pretty good blast radius, travels pretty far and also grants stability, lightning field and superspeed as long as you’re near it. Bypass Coating does the same thing Superspeed does, except it’s AoE.

Personal Battering Ram is never used today nor is it ever used in the past. It’s just a joke skill to blow people away with a pelvic thrust. Launch Personal Battering Ram is pretty good though.

Don’t really have many qualms with Throw Mine and Mine Field. They’re both pretty good for what they do and with a short recharge while at it.

What do you guys think could help out these skills to be up to par to what we have now?

TL;DR Gadgets and Turrets suck these days. Edit: For years not days.

I agree they threw turrets under the bus with HoT. I was sad to see them go, and everything that made them desirable removed. They either need to bake back in a lot of the effects, or reintroduce traits to buff them. Remove traits like soothing detonation and health insurance, and replace with some good turret traits. Honestly, in the current power creep, even the old turrets (when vulnerable to conditions and crits) would be nearly trash tier in the current meta. However, at least some people could have fun with them again. Make sure to include deployable turrets in those traits.

About gadgets, I agree with some needed buffs to personal battering ram (aoe knockback + higher damage), rocket boots (evade), slick shoes (cripple 5s), utility goggles (2 stacks of stability 5 sec). And I still think AED needs something extra (maybe protection/resistance if not consumed, 3 seconds)

The gadgeteer trait is kinda silly, but I made it work in a build, still pretty bad. Maybe make the reduction in cooldown 50%. The cooldown reduction only happens when you build up to taking enough hits, if you hold off on using your gadgets, you should get rewarded with stronger and more spamable gadgets. I even think 80% reduction would be fair, when trying to make it competitve with other traits and builds. *Getting smashed, gadgeteer procs, rocket boots, folowed by another on 5 seconds later. Each evading and travelling 1200 yards. Then you need to get smashed for a while to proc it again, and you choose which gadget to consume it on. I think it would see some use then.

Deployable Turrets was the bombdiggity and also Rifled Barrel Turrets. For what their damage is the pea shooters was at least slightly threatening when it can attack at a safe range. I think if they’re just gonna be made fragile, turrets should be a lot more easier to deploy, like make turret cooldown start right after you deploy them, similar to Throw Mine. If turrets were more spammable it could be pretty cool.

I also think overcharging the turret could be more effective. Like 50% increase of rate of fire on all turrets and make Rifle Turrets 75% firing rate. Or possibly a trait that could effect overcharge, that’d be nice too.

For Gadgeteer I think the recharge reduction should be permanent. Instead of having to take a beating it should be usable after using your skills 5 times with another recharge reduction on top of it. So basically after using your skills 5 times, your next gadget will be overcharged with a 50% recharge reduction.

Now I also believe there could be a better interesting thing you do for tanking hits, as long as you take hits for the next 5 seconds all of your gadgets will be overcharged with a 50% recharge reduction and also a boost of 200 or so toughness. The effect will trigger once you reach 5 stacks, duration will refresh if you keep on taking hits afterwords.

side note I always thought that Rocket Boots should have been a stun breaker based on the animation.

But to the main point, yes. People complained that turrets were OP so anet nerfed them to the ground. With the track record that anet is looking at underused utilities, maybe gadgets will get something good.

Turrets def need a buff of some sort. Auto repair would be nice (x%/pulse).

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

side note I always thought that Rocket Boots should have been a stun breaker based on the animation.

But to the main point, yes. People complained that turrets were OP so anet nerfed them to the ground. With the track record that anet is looking at underused utilities, maybe gadgets will get something good.

Turrets def need a buff of some sort. Auto repair would be nice (x%/pulse).

In my world turrets have allways felled underpowered…

Ya turrets always were weak. Only during one time in pvp, players abused turret positioning to make some builds struggle to steal a node from a bunker turret engie. It was pretty bad in team fights, and could hold a node from an inexperienced player. (mostly thieves) They played a similar role to dh now, but without the team pressence, or burst. They could hold a point and inflict hard to mitigate sustained damage. Classes with access to range could simple take out the rocket turret and then attack.

What turrets actually used to be good at was afk. If I had to step away, rather than log off, I used to spawn an army of turrets around my engie. That was pretty much it… They can barely take a single mob now, and they eventually go down. (before they lasted 5 minutes of near guaranteed protection in pve) You could also place them at an event of incoming waves and guard the other entrance.

Either way, they do no dmg now, survive nothing, and offer less cc than they used to. They are joke skills (although rifle turret has a useful toolbelt skill, and heal turret is still good) I tried to make a build using thumper turret, but it was really bad.

Turrets need more love than gadgets even. Gadgets biggest weakness is they are usually only good when you take 1 or 2. Having a gadget build just doesn’t work. (some of them are pretty weak too, as mentioned in my first post)

Here’s a way to buff turrets without making them afk doom bots:

Toolkit.

When traited, smack whack and thwack prioritize turrets instead of enemies. Additionally, certain attacks grant turrets boons. (JUST AN EXAMPLE, CAN BE ANY BOON)
Smack grants Protection to turrets.
Whack grants Resistance to turrets.
Thwack grants Quickness to turrets.

OTHER OPTIONAL CHANGES
Magnet:
Turns into a flip skill that pulls turrets towards you and repairs them slightly. (Call it emergency repairs?)

Experimental Turrets:
Turrets gain boons every few seconds (applied from the Engineer for source). Whenever the Engineer grants turrets boons, boons are shared in a radius.
Boon shares are like Signet of Inspiration in that they are fixed duration for each boon type (might stack count should be copied however).

Advanced Turrets: Turrets gain Power/Toughness/Vitality/CondiDamage based off the engi’s.

As for gadgets, they need to be stronger for the niche they are in. (when traited)

Battering ram for destroying defenses (unblockable when enhanced?)
Utility Goggles for hitting enemies in their weak point for massive damage (vulnerability on hit; damage on interrupt when enhanced?)
Mines for area control and boon denial (more mines when enhanced?)
Rocket Boots aimable and stun break for quality of life (immunity to soft cc when enhanced?)
Slick Shoes is pretty solid, super speed and knockdown. (gain extra knockdown per target if enhanced by trait)
AED… needs better payout for its risk, not sure what to do with it. Also static shock should grant the engi Lightning Aura for a time.

Make turrets our PvE thing. Give them some significant pve only buffs like increasing damage by 500% and have 5 second cooldown when picked up.

the problem with turrets isnt that they dont scale with stats

its that they have no base stats to begin with whereas every other class’s minions has base stats and armor hell necro minions have up to 1600-1800 armor thats a whopping 60% damage resistance right there without traits

then theres the fact turrets havent been updated at all even after HoT and the condi rework example of this is flame turret applies 1 stack of 2s burning still

maybe turrets should be replaced for a bot like the ones in Wildstar

Rezzet.3614:

maybe turrets should be replaced for a bot like the ones in Wildstar

This is honestly what I thought that the scrapper gyros were going to be, when I first read about them — I was a little disappointed to see that the attack gyros were ground-target abilities, rather than drones that follow you around.

I doubt it’d be a popular idea, but I’d rather have the gyro skills summon a permanent follower, but only allow one drone to be out at a time (sort of like the kits), however, they could also have an “overcharge” function while deployed, like turrets. For example:

Medic Gyro would continue to do it’s initial heal and periodic heal (which would likely need to be toned down, if it could be out permanently). Overcharge would grant regen to nearby allies.

Blast Tag Gyro would instead function like a mobile thumper turret, flying toward your target and periodically releasing a fire AOE (like the sigil of fire). Attack rate could be relatively slow (every 2 – 3 seconds) for this to balance it out. Overcharge would release an AOE knockdown.

Shredder Gyro could move around and unleash its AOE attack, rooting itself while channeling its attack. Overcharge would cause it pulse its damage every 1/2 second instead of every second while channeling its attack.

Purge and Bulwark could remain largely the same, with Purge’s overcharge converting conditions to boons and Bulwark’s overcharge granting an area similar to Guardian’s sanctuary.

Stealth would need some balancing to not grant permanent stealth — maybe making it’s primary function inflict blindness on nearby enemies, with its overcharge leaving a smoke AOE field as well as making the stealth drone pulse stealth to nearby allies for the duration of the overcharge.

Edit: The turrets could probably be re-worked into gyros as well, but I PERSONALLY like the idea of turrets’ strength being that you could have a bunch of them out, but with gyros, you could only have one (with its strength being that it is mobile).

Turrets, gadgets and Gyros all need some love. Gadgets I believe are in a bit better position than the others, but it would excel further if they would just fix up Gadgeteer to not have those stacks anymore. I talked about Gadgets and Gyros if you are interested:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Suggestion-for-Gadgets-and-Gyros/first#post6381727

Also I noticed an update on the gw2 reddit regarding the gw2 wiki now having a better means of looking at the past history of a skill. Most turrets seem to have not been touched for well in the 3 year mark, and even then the changes were tooltips or other small bugs. I was actually curious how much work the turrets had gotten over the game’s life time, and it seems they barely did anything to them after launch (of course the biggest change was being damaged by crits and condis).

Turrets, imo, are the ones that really need the attention. The game has changed and progressed so far that the turrets are really not in line with the current state. The only one that is really used is the healing turret, but of course we just place, overcharge, and then blast. Supply Crate is technically a turret now as well, and still holds up.

All three of categories have some from of having issues with being competitive with other skills as folks have posted above (and what I said in my link). We need a way to have a means to balance them and make the competitive. That can happen through simple stats or adding unique abilities to them. I really hope this coming year we can see this change.

i play turret engi in unranked, they are very gimmicky, and nowhere near as good as they used to be,
but they are still surprisingly good for holding a point, place them where they won’t get cleaved down and they do pretty decent damage combined with buffs for allies and some added CC.