Guild Wars 2

Hello fellow engineers. I’m not sure if anyone in this forum has known of this, but something monumental has happened in the ranger forums as of late. There was a developer reply related to a concern a lot of rangers have been having (One of the reasons I put my ranger alt on ice for the last month to level a mesmer) regarding pets and dungeons. In response to the developer post a thread was created in the ranger forum a day ago, the thread is the following:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Robert-Hrouda-on-pets-in-dungeons/first

The thread is a day old and has received 9 developer replies. Robert Hrouda has not only made me want to keep going with my ranger, but he has also made me regain all the faith I had lost in the gw2 devs over the last few months (After all these buffnerfs we’ve been getting every patch). Also, he has rekindled the thought of opening some kind of dialogue about things that worry and concern the gw2 community.

This thread most likely will not get any dev love and if it does I certainly don’t expect as much attention as the ranger pet dungeon thread. Regardless, I want to try to open a dialogue about something that we engineers hold dear to us but feel frustrated with, the role of turrets in dungeons.

Right now turrets only benefit from our healing power and our condition damage. They offer very little in terms of direct damage, the conditions they offer are short lived and due to being stationary they die very quickly in encounters involving aoe fields.

I’ve greedily read most threads involving turret builds for dungeons and PvP here on the engineer forums and try to take as much information as I can with regards to how to use them effectively. Personally, I haven’t had much luck with them in dungeons (only slotting them here and there during “safe” fights to see them in action), but what I’ve taken and realized about them is that they can offer some very humble assistance in fights when they are placed completely out of the way and offer some CC if destroyed.

What I wonder is this, will turrets always be limited to this? is this what developers always intended for turrets to be?

As it stands most kits and elixirs seem to be a better use of your utilities. The former giving you a wealth of useful abilities, and the later increasing your damage and or survival. When slotting turrets I always need to keep aggro off them (not hard for a grenadier) and work around them to get any use out of the slot. If I don’t they usually get crumpled under the foot of a champ and I have to wait for the duration of their (rather long) cool-downs to get my slot skill back.

When it comes to the detonations, I feel like I might as well bring in bomb kit and use BoB every twenty seconds and get a few more skills out of it.

Most of the time I feel like I’d rather take a kit or a stun breaker as opposed to have to babysit my turret through out the encounter. I usually feel like they burden me as opposed to help my build, which kind of hurts considering they were one of the things that made me choose an engineer to level first.

This thread doesn’t ask for a redesign of turrets, it asks if the devs will dialogue about the role they want turrets to fulfill (specifically in dungeons), whether they do this, and whether there are plans to bring turrets in line with the rest of our arsenal. If all else fails, this thread also asks for insight and advice on how we should “help” our turrets help us during dungeon encounters.

I wouldn’t hold your breathe. The only developer we’ve gotten in MONTHS was Peters telling us the Deployable Turrets trait works now. (Still bugs)

Rangers loose a lot of functionality with the death of their pets because it is their profession mechanic. Engineers do not when Turrets die. It’s not high on list of priorities I would assume.

P.S. I would love a Developer come in here and make me eat my words, don’t get me wrong.

We got one quick reply on feb 26 telling us that deployable turrets was indeed fixed. Apart from that I highly doubt we’ll get a response soon. Not because they hate us (though that factors in), but just because they are busy working on more content again.

Though I would really love to be proven wrong.

I’m currently testing my first serious build that includes a turret, a WvW build. It’s actually working out amazing, but unfortunately engineers have no “bread and butter” turrets, only creative niche uses.

That said, the devs are smart to approach it this way. Ranger is a very popular profession and the pet is obviously the most important part of the profession concept, so it only makes sense that they’d start there. Following the same logic, I’d imagine they’ll discuss necro minions next (and probably warriors in PvP after that—they’re absolutely awful in tournaments).

If what Robert is saying is correct, then we might be looking at a general change in minion design – aka minions dynamically inheriting stats from the PC. If that happens, well, let’s just hope that turrets are dynamically tougher than the rest of the minions present, so that from general nuisance it becomes an effective area denial strategy.

NevirSayDie.6235:

I’m currently testing my first serious build that includes a turret, a WvW build. It’s actually working out amazing, but unfortunately engineers have no “bread and butter” turrets, only creative niche uses.

That said, the devs are smart to approach it this way. Ranger is a very popular profession and the pet is obviously the most important part of the profession concept, so it only makes sense that they’d start there. Following the same logic, I’d imagine they’ll discuss necro minions next (and probably warriors in PvP after that—they’re absolutely awful in tournaments).

I’d actually thought of this myself, mid way through the post, I just couldn’t help myself and gave in to the ripple effect this dev’s had on the forums.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Devs-are-talking-pets-in-Ranger-forum

It’s a shame but we’ll probably be thought of last when it comes to UP classes again. Sometimes it really does feel like the engineer is the odd step child class.

Did they change turrets to take condition damage now? I haven’t checked in a few months, but last I did turrets didn’t take condition damage, which is why I quit using them in PvE for awhile.

I am not sure that the turret’s weakness in dungeons is something that will ever be looked at. Mostly because turrets can do well in so many other places. In the main map, zerg events benefit well from turrets that automatically engage enemies and are usually safe from harm, increasing the engineer’s damage and monster tagging. Against large bosses they also offer meaningful damage and control effects (looking at the net turret there) and can, again, enhance the damage done by an engineer. In WvWvW turrets are great for supplemental pressure, defending points, attacking from behind walls, and as a signal to sneaking enemies. In sPVP turrets have the most potent and plentiful control effects in the game, and with minimal effort can apply permanent burning to multiple players.

But in dungeons… oh boy they do suck. Even with armor plating, they go down in very few hits. The enemies in dungeons use a lot of AoEs and will swarm and scatter enough so they’ll attack the turrets, causing them to go down very quickly. Because of this, they don’t contribute that much. But… there is the question on how to fix this. If you make them more durable, then they become too powerful in PVP. If you make them do more damage, then they become too powerful in PVP again. The closest thing I can think of to a solution would be to make them have shorter recharges, which would let them be placed more often and wouldn’t severely affect their PVP performance.