Guild Wars 2

-They have no survivability. Literally none. My strongest turret, fully traited (apparently this doesn’t even work right now, but I’ll ignore that because 30% less than instant death is still utter rubbish) is lucky to get off a single shot against one veteran in Orr. A thing that, as a warrior, I’d not even get out the way of, just beat it into the dirt with an axe.

So using my turret here I get a shot for its whole cooldown. And I’m not even talking about it being out-ranged, just flattened. It’s like I switched to a kit, fired one attack and switched off for 50 seconds. Of course I can’t fire three of my kit’s attacks at once… but then, neither does a turret grant me anything like the number of skills a kit does, nor would three turrets (that deal damage) leave any room for stunbreaks or other utilities like a kit does.

-They don’t move. Well, of course they don’t move, they’re turrets. But think about what that implies. Right now, my engineer itself if sitting still firing off auto-attacks would be a very fragile turret, but it might live long enough to put out damage worthy of a 50s cooldown in cases when it wasn’t one-shot. My lvl 80 engineer with knight’s armour and berserk jewellery (exo) in a lvl 80 zone. Sitting still is so fatal that in order to be worthwhile it’d be looking at damage and/or health comparable to some players. Chances of us getting player-strength turrets? Or getting enough damage to drop three of these frail ones and alpha-strike people in PvP? Yeah, I sort of doubt it.

So, what about them makes them worthy of a cooldown? Obviously the healing turret has its heal-on-deploy, which would be a problem, but is easily solved by moving the rest of that to its active skill. The self-destruct? I suppose we don’t want people using them as infinite near-instant bombs, if they’d actually be worth using as bombs, but again the solution seems as simple as giving self-destruct its own cooldown. Is there any meaningful reason we can’t just put these silly things down whenever something breaks them?

You are right of course. I mean, it makes sense that turrets have a cool down – after all, they are meant to be area ‘control’ items and it would be a bit unfair if you could just move them around at will. However, as so many other minions, turrets just die too quickly. They need a significant health boost, along with some of the Necromancer’s Minions, Guardian’s Spirit Weapons and Ranger Spirits.

Is there any meaningful reason we can’t just put these silly things down whenever something breaks them?

Besides being absolutely OP in PvP? No.

it would be cool if there was a trait that allowed them to move around with you, like if they had little wheels or something

I kinda wish the cooldown would start the moment you placed them. But with how they are currently implemented that wont ever happen.

rivx.3267:

I kinda wish the cooldown would start the moment you placed them. But with how they are currently implemented that wont ever happen.

Well if you think about it, they almost do

Seras.5702:

rivx.3267:

I kinda wish the cooldown would start the moment you placed them. But with how they are currently implemented that wont ever happen.

Well if you think about it, they almost do

HA! Good one.

Seras.5702:

rivx.3267:

I kinda wish the cooldown would start the moment you placed them. But with how they are currently implemented that wont ever happen.

Well if you think about it, they almost do

I placed a rocket turret earlier that, as soon as I could see it, had lost ~50% hp to a random undead thing I was fighting. Not even a veteran, just random trash (I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on it: in this game veterans and such are the ones which aren’t worth the time it takes to kill them).

There reason is very obvious. Because that would mean you could pick up and put down turrets, bypassing the CD of their shots. Pick up, put down, boom, pick up, put down, boom.

However there is also an extremely easy way to make turrets suck less and I have mentioned it earlier.

If you pick up your turret, the CD on placing the turret down again should be shortened down to whatever the CD is on the turrets shot. Rifle turret would be 2 seconds and 10 seconds for rocket I think. This way you are rewarded for taking care of your turrets, but you can not abuse anything.

Sepahbod.4653:

There reason is very obvious. Because that would mean you could pick up and put down turrets, bypassing the CD of their shots. Pick up, put down, boom, pick up, put down, boom.

However there is also an extremely easy way to make turrets suck less and I have mentioned it earlier.

If you pick up your turret, the CD on placing the turret down again should be shortened down to whatever the CD is on the turrets shot. Rifle turret would be 2 seconds and 10 seconds for rocket I think. This way you are rewarded for taking care of your turrets, but you can not abuse anything.

Why if you pick it up? If it’s taking so little damage that you can run to it and save it, even from a short distance (and I’m not sure why you’d go far), you wouldn’t be having this problem in the first place.

Also the action of placing them, waiting for them to fire, and picking them up again would severely hinder mobility in a fight. I mean it’s pretty much what I do with my healing turret without waiting for it to ‘fire’ to get swiftness from my centaur runes (yes I know medkit does it easier, I just don’t like medkit and don’t want to swap in and out all the time). This is just one turret.

Net turret is 10s to refire btw. Rocket is 4, flame and thumper are 3, rifle is 2 and the healing turret doesn’t say how often it applies.

Edit: anyway, unless it’s impossible for them to code it, I don’t see why the cooldown on their refire couldn’t just carry over to the next turret instead.

Sepahbod.4653:

There reason is very obvious. Because that would mean you could pick up and put down turrets, bypassing the CD of their shots. Pick up, put down, boom, pick up, put down, boom.

However there is also an extremely easy way to make turrets suck less and I have mentioned it earlier.

If you pick up your turret, the CD on placing the turret down again should be shortened down to whatever the CD is on the turrets shot. Rifle turret would be 2 seconds and 10 seconds for rocket I think. This way you are rewarded for taking care of your turrets, but you can not abuse anything.

I’m not sure sure whether the OP meant it that way, but as I interpreted it, our turrets should have their CDs, but it starts counting down from the moment you placed them, not after they were destructed or picked up. If your turret has a CD of 20s and it gets destroyed after 10s, right now you’d have to wait the whole 20s to place it again. If I interpret the OP correctly, he suggest to start the cooldown not when the turret gets destroyed, but when you place it – in that scenario, you’d only have to wait 10s to place it again, not the full 20s. While I think that would be cool, I’m not sure how the balancing works out. Necro pets have the same CD mechanism as the turrets have now, however they are mobile…

Healing turret is 3s iirc.

ripAnubis.5817:

I’m not sure sure whether the OP meant it that way, but as I interpreted it, our turrets should have their CDs, but it starts counting down from the moment you placed them, not after they were destructed or picked up. If your turret has a CD of 20s and it gets destroyed after 10s, right now you’d have to wait the whole 20s to place it again. If I interpret the OP correctly, he suggest to start the cooldown not when the turret gets destroyed, but when you place it – in that scenario, you’d only have to wait 10s to place it again, not the full 20s. While I think that would be cool, I’m not sure how the balancing works out. Necro pets have the same CD mechanism as the turrets have now, however they are mobile…

Well I wouldn’t mind that if they made the turret remotely likely to live long enough (in combat) to be worth whatever cooldown was left over, but when it dies in seconds and has a c/d closer to a minute, not much would change.

Ultimately I’d prefer them to just live longer, but as I pointed out before, they’d pretty much need to be as strong or stronger than actual players to sit still, have no defensive abilities, and have any kind of survivability whatsoever. Which I don’t think is likely to happen, ever. And increasing the damage they put out before they die likewise screws with their precious PvP lab experiment, so that won’t happen either.

So if they can’t have the damage output or survivability to be decent in PvE or WvW, and they provide so much less utility than kits, they might as well just act like more specialised kits and have unlimited uptime with only their special skills on c/d.

Honestly, turret specced engineers should be able to create turrets just as often as mesmers create clones. The clones are mobile and do more damage.

timidobserver.7925:

Honestly, turret specced engineers should be able to create turrets just as often as mesmers create clones. The clones are mobile and do more damage.

This is exactly the argument I make, they are a stationary weapon emplacement, and should be “bunker” enough to tank (think Ursa with rangers) which is what the thumper turret was supposed to be I guess, or be long range and high damage (or crits) like a sniper turret—ideally a well-traited rifle turret.

Not being able to move should allow them MORE damage, more toughness, more HP, and generally be more like siege, which is what we are talking about. Turrets are less like pets, and more like siege.

I like the idea of multiple instances, especially since they are highly derivative of the desktop turret defense games. Perhaps a rifle turret every 10 seconds, flame every 14, net every 15, rocket every 20 and Thumper every 30. Max of 3, 2, 2, 1, and 1 respectively. Perhaps a trait that would allow turrets to save their auto-shot until you have an in-range target selected?

Imagine the crossfire zones you could set up… Net Turrets would be the new black.

I created an engineer last couple days to try out in spvp and I immediatly saw big problems with using turrets that it seemed pointless even to bother using any.

Found myself running to a new area realising I can’t put a turret down cause I left one up at the other capture point. Now i had to wait10 secs after detonating it.
Next I tried the pick up turret option and couldn’t believe I also had a10 sec cooldown. well thats kinda pointless!

I think turrets should just auto detonate when you go out of range, like how mesmer clones disappear. And I dont think there should be a CD when picking up a turret! Isnt that the whole point of having a pickup option.

multiple turrets with a cd reduction abilty seems the best way

The CD would make sense if the turrets were actually powerful enough to be a tool for area denial. As it stands now they really don’t do much, and their traits literally do nothing. Still no word from the devs on this issue?

Yeah, for some odd reason, the devs don’t seem to understand how turrets work in pretty much any other game ever. The general idea is that (especially if there are other “pets” in the game) turrets trade off mobility for an extra source of damage and staying power. But here they just die instantly with any decent attack.

Now, I don’t think that they need to necessarily be buffed in damage, but rather in toughness and vitality. The problem is that a buff in damage stacks with the more turrets you put down. So for example a 25% buff in damage for all turrets would be a 75% buff for a guy who runs 3 turrets. However a buff in Toughness/Vitality would only serve to increase the amount of time they spend on the battlefield, which currently, any time above 1 second would be nice. Then turrets would be more about holding a point and serving as just another source of damage that would build up over time. Then the enemy would have to decide between taking damage over time from the turrets, or going after the turrets and letting the engineer do his own thing for a little bit. I’d be fine if people could kill a turret quickly if they focused it for a bit, but they shouldn’t be able to just casually knock out any and all turrets like nobody’s business.

The way I see it, Mesmers have the ability to replace illusions quickly.
Necromancers have numbers and mobility.
Engineers should have Staying power.

Jericho.4521:

The CD would make sense if the turrets were actually powerful enough to be a tool for area denial. As it stands now they really don’t do much, and their traits literally do nothing. Still no word from the devs on this issue?

They are looking the other professions. :[

People always make these threads about turret cds being too long and their lack of mobility. You people need to understand that it will never happen. Turrets are area control. They were designed to be put down and remain there. The devs had to design them to be different from pets, minions and phantasms. That’s why the don’t move, don’t crit, have high cds and we can heal them, because we are supposed to put them down and control the area around it.

We don’t need to address their mobility, we need to address their survivability and their strength.

They need more toughness and health, not too much and not all of them, just the flame, net, and healing ones. They also need some simple AI improvements, like make their overcharge switch target to yours. The traits need rework, they are too widespread in lines that make no sense. I suggest Mix accelerant packed turrets with deployable turrets and put it on the tools line adept. Give auto tool instalation effect to one of the other two traits on the line or increase the healing to 10% every 3 seconds(If the turret is down to 20% health it will take 24s to fully heal which is reasonable as opposed to the 80 seconds it takes now). And last but not least give us a GM trait that’s good enough, because 15% damage and a bit more range is master trait level. Something like this: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Turrets-my-2-cents/first#post1871047.

For WvW, i can’t really say much, they will never be a good option for zerg battles. Maybe give them more armor so they can be used to defend objectives.

GuilguiS.2738:

People always make these threads about turret cds being too long and their lack of mobility. You people need to understand that it will never happen. Turrets are area control. They were designed to be put down and remain there…

The 5 minute timer begs to differ.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you, though. I would like to see a tweak that would allow the turret to become available if it becomes disabled by the timer. No cool down if it somehow makes it to 5 minutes.

The timer was implemented because people put turrets down and went afk in pve. It should not exist in pvp.

LameFox.6349:

Why if you pick it up? If it’s taking so little damage that you can run to it and save it, even from a short distance (and I’m not sure why you’d go far), you wouldn’t be having this problem in the first place.

Also the action of placing them, waiting for them to fire, and picking them up again would severely hinder mobility in a fight. I mean it’s pretty much what I do with my healing turret without waiting for it to ‘fire’ to get swiftness from my centaur runes (yes I know medkit does it easier, I just don’t like medkit and don’t want to swap in and out all the time). This is just one turret.

Net turret is 10s to refire btw. Rocket is 4, flame and thumper are 3, rifle is 2 and the healing turret doesn’t say how often it applies.

Edit: anyway, unless it’s impossible for them to code it, I don’t see why the cooldown on their refire couldn’t just carry over to the next turret instead.

Because it actually makes sense. If you tend to your turrets and keep them “safe”, pick them up, you should be rewarded vs if you blow them up or let them get destroyed. I never said this would fix turrets, I said it would make them suck less. Turrets have big issues, one of them is how the CDs work.

Letting the CD start ticking the moment you put them down would create instances where you could blow up 8 turrets in a matter of seconds. Let’s not create future nerfs for ourselves, eh?

Starting the cooldown when placed, then either do away with picking up turrets, picking them up like kits, or having them cut the remaining cooldown in half would allow turrets to be alot more mobile. While I agree turrets should not move, you have to keep in mind that this game is designed to be very mobile. Very rarely is there a situation where you set still in one location for very long. Hell even the warrior’s can pick up and move there banners! And while I love the concept of bunkering down into a location and fortifying it, the game it self is not designed for that to be useful.

Turrets are by no means area denial, they are simply extra DPS. If you want to see turrets that are area denial look at TF2 or Global Agenda, THOSE turrets are area denial.
Ah Global Agenda, thats a game where the engineer was an engineer, sadly they jumped the shark along time ago.

turrets != pets

turrets = utilities

GuilguiS.2738:

People always make these threads about turret cds being too long and their lack of mobility.

The thread isn’t about their lack of mobility, I used their lack of mobility to suggest just how strong they’d need to be to have any worthwhile survival.

GuilguiS.2738:

You people need to understand that it will never happen. Turrets are area control. They were designed to be put down and remain there. The devs had to design them to be different from pets, minions and phantasms. That’s why the don’t move, don’t crit, have high cds and we can heal them, because we are supposed to put them down and control the area around it.

Then the design has utterly failed. With the traits functioning if I took my lvl 80 into a starter zone, then maybe they’d have some kind of staying power. Anywhere actually relevant that isn’t close to being the case, and lately they’re not even allowed to remain there, nevermind designed to.

GuilguiS.2738:

We don’t need to address their mobility, we need to address their survivability and their strength.

Only if they’re willing to create the biggest discrepancy yet between a PvP skill and PvE/WvW skill.

GuilguiS.2738:

They need more toughness and health, not too much and not all of them, just the flame, net, and healing ones.

Because the others have meaningful survivability? Range without mobility in this game varies from ‘no defense at all’ to ‘maybe three seconds before death if you’re lucky’. The thumper turret was already my example of being one-shot from full hp by a single (level appropriate) veteran. With durability like that they must be expecting me to use all my turrets to fight random trash mobs 1v1.

Sepahbod.4653:

Because it actually makes sense. If you tend to your turrets and keep them “safe”, pick them up, you should be rewarded vs if you blow them up or let them get destroyed. I never said this would fix turrets, I said it would make them suck less. Turrets have big issues, one of them is how the CDs work.

Letting the CD start ticking the moment you put them down would create instances where you could blow up 8 turrets in a matter of seconds. Let’s not create future nerfs for ourselves, eh?

You can’t keep something that cannot move and dies in one or two underwhelming attacks ‘safe’. Mobs kill them as an afterthought, often even by accident.

I already covered self-destruct a few replies ago. And I’m really not worried about getting a nerf for something that’s already as bad as turrets are. Maybe if there was something to lose…