Guild Wars 2

A) Whats your definition of viable? It seems to be some magic buzz word that most posters on the engineer sub forums clearly seem to lack knowledge on the definition of most of the time, so I had to ask.
B) Absolutely depends on what you want to do with it. Be more specific.
C) See line B.

Iv tryed it, but the problems I had with it is that the healing from the toolkit is so minor it doesnt matter. Another issue is that you rarly have a need to keep your turrets alive for a long time, you place them, kill the enemys then pack them up to move to the next location.
Sure there are events that send waves of enemys, but in that case your turrets either A: dont pull enough agro to ever get hit, or B: take a few hits and die.
its not like this is TF2 where you can let your turrets tank while your behind it repairing at almost the same rate they are damaging it.

I too started a engineer for the turrets, also started a necro for the minions, both are lackluster and easly killed and not really that fun to play because of it.

@coglin, I too think people are using the word viable incorrectly. but games often use lingo that isnt 100% accurate. example would be “DPS builds” they are not actually damage per second builds, that would be people who focus on applying dots. But rather a build that focus on dealing damage over every thing else.
When some one asks if somthing is viable or not I take it to mean something like " is it even half as effective as my other options?"

And in this case I dont think turrets and toolkit is viable in the terms of you might actualy not beable to survive using it.

All the above is just my opinion on the matter, no facts where involved in the making of this post

Oh don’t get me started on the DPS thing. It has driven me crazy, how so many decided to changed DD or damage dealer to fall under the all encompassing term DPS.

Turret build works for leveling really well (just watch out for getting adds you didnt want as turrets will automaticly attack other hostiles in the area). Toolkit is lackluster as its heal isnt enough to provide much purpose.

@ Xelnigma. DPS has never meant “person who focus on applying dots”. The term originated in early mmos. After every boss fight players would ask to see their (dps) to see who was putting out the most damage using a dps calculator. This was rarely the guy just applying dots especially in early mmos. So, since these classes would only be worrying about doing heavy amounts of damage over boss fights, they became called (dps). Just like in mmo’s where you had classes revolved around crowd control you would call them (cc). In everquest it was often like this "tank and healer looking for cc, 2 dps, and slower. (enchanter sometimes being the slower and cc).

As for viable, i beleive he meant it in its general form. Will it work? Using WoW as an example (as most people can relate) a feral druid with full feral gear trying to heal a dungeon might not be considered viable because they will not put out enough heals to keep the tank alive. I’ll admit this one is very very exaggerated thanks to the min/maxers suggesting anything that isnt “the best” isnt viable.

I’d have no qualms about using the phrase ‘viable dps’ I don’t understand the evolution of gamer language, and I don’t police it.
would condition damage or power best support the use of turrets and the toolkit. would precision be my second choice, should I take toughness or vitality, I’m not even sure if these are the right questions.
Thank you for your helpful response Xel, do you think mines could shore up the turrets shortcomings?

Well if you used flame turret and rocket turret I would go condition damage with P/P and the cond. dmg would effect box of nails and pry bars confusion.

Keep in mind turrets do not scale off your stats. Turrets are also in the toughness/healing tree. With that said, i think a balance of stats is fine. I leveled using turrets a lot, i just stuck to rifle/flame turrets due to their shorter cd’s then ocassionally pulled out thumper when i needed one to tank, and rocket (sometimes net) when taking down a gold monster.

Correct, but burning does stack in duration, and burns take on the highest burn inflicted. That is why I suggested condition focus.

For the longest time (and some times still) I use rifle, two turrets, (rifle and rocket) with land mine. The short cooldown and knockback on the mine is great for protecting the turrets, mixed with the net and overcharged shot of the rifle, the enemy spends most of there time just trying to get to you.

It seems like regeneration queues casting.
Example
If I’m hit with a regen by some one with 0 healing (like my healing turret) then I apply my own regeneration that has a base of say 400 healing.
It seems like I have to wait for the first regeneration to wear out before my good healing will kick in. This is really noticeable when the healing turret dies because it drops its regen down to 5 health a tick. (a known bug)
The point of telling you this, is because I think burn and poison might act the same way. But iv not tested it.

What do you mean by “act the same way” ? I can tell you they both stack in duration. Bleed and confusion are the only condition damages that I know of that stack in intensity. (vulnerability stacks in intensity as well, but it is simply a debuff condition and not condition damage)

I mean that regeneration doesnt use the strongest heal first. its more of a first come first serve set up.
Yet you say Burn puts the strongest burns at the front of the line.
Iv never tested how burn works, and we all know tooltips can be misleading.
They might not work the same.

For conditions i heard that if multiple people do a burn, you actually get 1 tick of burn per person who burned per second. So 5 burners still do the damage of 5 burns per second, but you can only see your number coming off. Like applying a bleed on something at 25 stacks might make your bleeds tick at the 25 stack rate. I havent tested this, but sounds like conditions are still good for multiple people to use if so.

On topic, i would say you can level fine with turrets. I would make sure you have an alternate damage source like grenades for when turrets won’t do the job like an event which has multiple spread out objectives that your 45 second rocket turret CD won’t be able to tackle. Usefullness in dungeons though is pretty low for boss fights, though if you combine with accelerant packed turrets, you can use them to initiate multiple knock backs on incoming trash, a cool idea i never tried personally.

Thanks for the feedback I’ll take my Turreteer out in to the world and see how he does!

Hiddekel.6527:

Thanks for the feedback I’ll take my Turreteer out in to the world and see how he does!

Just remember if you build doesn’t not work at level 20 it may work at level 40. I currently run a pistol shield turret based level 80. The best thing about an engineer is we can easily change what we do to meet the situation.

To OP:

I have found 2 ways to build out turrets and be effective.

1 method is as Coglin suggest and to go for condition damage stacking burn duration.

The build I like for this is 20 explosives, 20 firearms, 20 inventions, and 10 tools.

The key traits are incendiary ammo + accelerant pack turrets from explosives. metal plating and auto tool installation from inventions, haired trigger, and napalm specialist from firearms, and then deploy-able turrets from tools.

I run the build with Pistol / Pistol. Elixir H / Medkit, Bomb kit, flame turret, rocket turret, supply crate.

It is basically a burn build. The turrets do not do much on their own but both apply burning, and with the inventions traits flame turret / thumper turret are pretty tough if you use their utilities right.

The way you use the build is that you setup the rocket turret on a cliff or ledge out of the way and then deploy the flame turret below. Pull mobs in and chain the AoE blind from the smoke bomb, the the flame turret and then the AoE knock down from the rocket turret. If things get tricky you can use the detonate on the flame turret for a stealth with a smoke field or for a knock back, added to your glue bomb + glue shot.

It will take time to get use to the ideal turret ranges but I found the build to be fairly fun.

You will want to run + condi gear with it, and I like the + condi sigil + and bleed on crit sigil.

The damage is actually pretty good.

The build is not perfect though it could use some work.

The other build I use is not strictly a turret build but it does use turrets + the tool kit.

It’s 0 30 10 0 30. So 30 firearms, 10 inventions, and 30 tools.

The key traits are hair trigger, rifled barrels, precise sights from firearms. metal plating / protective shield from inventions, static discharge, deploy-able turrets, and power wrenches from tools.

I use it with a mix of knight / valkyrie gear.

the utilities are rifle, medkit / elixir H, tool kit, rocket turret, (open slot), supply crate

I basically use the tools static discharge power build, but place the rocket turret out of harms way to provide extra dps, burning, and it’s AoE CC. Sometimes I will use the rifle turret for its quick tool belt, or net / thumper for additional CC.

I found that if you combine the rocket turret with vuln. stacking the turret does nice damage. With 16-18 stacks it will do above 1-1.4k to most targets with 3 seconds of burning at about ~250 a tick. So about 1.75- 2k every 4 seconds. That’s not bad at all. You just need to place it in a place it can’t get hit, and keep enemies in range.

It’s nice to actually set it up as part of your rotation. Such as use net shot from rifle to ensure the knock down rocket hits, and then use jump shot / blunder buss + overcharged shot. If you time the rockets you can get the overcharged rocket and the normal rocket to hit at about the same time. ~ 2.5k instantly.

The more I use the turrets the more I realize that they actually do fairly good dps.

The big problem we have is not that they have low stats, but that their targeting AI is funky, and they will shoot at dead npc’s, stuff out of los / range. If you could pick their targets they would be a lot more useful in the long run.