Guild Wars 2

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I’m not really an expert on Sigils, but this comes to mind:

Sigil interaction

A character can always equip two sigils at a time (either one sigil each on a main-hand and off-hand weapon, or two sigils on a two-handed weapon). In general, the two sigils will both provide their effects independently as long as the base sigil is different. The exceptions to this are the stacking sigils: only one stack effect can be active at a time.

well… crud. I guess I’ll just abandon one of the sigils then.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Oh!…and it should state that fact on the Sigils you are using, I believe, as well.

Good luck.

It says “attribute” stacking… So, since the demon summoning one wasn’t +attribute, I thought it was exempt.

Hi,

I’ve got a rather frustrating little issue here. It could be some caveat that I am missing, but I can’t seem to figure out of it’s a bug or if it’s my character causing the issue I am experiencing.

It starts with this. I’m playing a necromancer (lvl 80) and doing something I’m calling a “death nova build” . The goal is to summon tons of quick summon, weak, short lived minions, to die and explode all over the place, poisoning and damaging everything.
I have runes of the lich, death nova trait, bone minion skill, and the problem child:

I have a staff, Final Rest, with two sigil slots. The first is the superior sigil of corruption: Monster kills grant stacks. Stacks to 25 and gives +condition damage per stack.

And the issue: superior sigil of demon summoning: Monster kills grant stacks. Stacks to 25. At 25, it summons a minion.

And here’s the kicker: Sigil of demon summoning will only stack to 24. Sigil of corruption will continue and gain it’s 25th stack, but sigil of demon summoning stops dead at 24. One below the threshold, leaving the whole sigil destitute and unused.

I thought “maybe I have too many minions in my control” but no, I’ve had 24 stacks with 0 minions in play and I still gained no purchase. “Maybe I have too many sigil stacks” but that can’t be right, since corruption gains stacks at the same rate as demon summoning, just one gets to 25 and demon summoning stops dead at 24. So really, I don’t know what’s up with it.

Anyone else having this issue?

I’m getting the same. I’m wondering if maybe the gem purchase system crashed…

Vermillion Hawk.9037:

You were fighting orcs in GW2? And what is this strange new “Illusionist” profession?

orcs are in the lvls 1-15 Charr starting zone

mesmer= illusionist

Kusumura.8642:

DeeJayPownThree.1268:

I’ve been forced to use pistol and shield. Just for the knock back. It’s rare for my turrets to shoot my targets unless I drop them right on top of them. And even then it’s not guaranteed they won’t get excited about some boxes or a mob that has nothing to do with the current.

Likewise with regards to the knockback. The rifle 4 skill is fine and dandy… but I’ve nearly shot myself off a sheer drop one too many times for it to really be viable. I don’t even use turrets; they’re pathetic and as dim-witted as the rocks that I’m better off throwing at my enemies. It’s a 10% chance they’ll actually shoot what I /need/ them to shoot. The 90% being random vacant spaces.

Boosh. Yeah, if it wasn’t for that channel time before the rifle knock back, that’s what I’d be using. But the fact that it moves me, when the shield just “does it” with no strings attached is the deciding factor.

Also, I’d drop everything for more explosives if there were explosive abilities in higher trees. Also: I don’t think the explosive talent effects anything in either elite tiers.

ickytwerp.9086:

Turrets attacking destructable objects at times can be annoying yes but other than that I don’t see your other points. I’ve never had a problem with controlling the enemy, use offhand pistol AoE slow/immobilize and kite like a boss. I can easily kite 6-7 mobs around my turrets with minimal to no damage, net turret has a special(not overcharge) ability that allows you to net your target then throw down the turret for another net, likewise rocket turret has a knockdown overcharge. Even if they go off on objects you still should have plenty to kite just with the offhand pistol ability and dodge rolling.

My turrets rarely attack any appropriate targets, much to the dismay of my last dungeon group. Pulling mobs, attacking dead gargoyle wall traps, had to discard turrets all together (which is a HUGE problem for any video game. Why make abilities that players will just abandon?).

Your 6-7 enemies in what amount of time? Running around like a chicken with it’s head missing for 2-10min is not how I’d like to do things. My attention span isn’t nearly that long for a single mob. And my question “how to you contain agro”? If you get rooted, like many enemies do, do you just die? I know I just have to run and forget things for a while. I remember several important mobs where I had to wait 15min for another player/class to come along and do most of the work for me before I could get a couple hits off without pulling lethal agro (can’t really kite ranged units).

The net tool belt ability is handy, sure….. until you use it once, it lasts 3 seconds…and then it’s on a big cool down. Drop the turret…. and it fires into a fresh mob, agroing that to the party… yay. The mobs focus the turret, hit it once, net turrets life span ~4 seconds.

The rocket turret knock down 1) takes forever to “charge” the turret. 2) really slow bullet, and can be dodged by PVE enemies. 3) quite a few enemies can’t be knocked around.

Dodge rolling works twice, and then death.

I don’t think the intention of the game is to just kite everything, and quite a few things won’t kite.

If they lasted longer and had a way to choose better targets, maybe I could agree with you. But I’m just going to drop turrets all together for other things, and hope it works… but that’s about most of this game “hoping random stuff works cause nothing else does.”

(also this is discussing turrets as turrets as rezable objects and not other abilities, really)

The question stands: “what’s the point?”

ickytwerp.9086:

As for turret survivability, what do you want? they survive for awhile as it is and when they do blow up that just means I can use their special abilities :/ they aren’t meant to stay up the entire time. This game isn’t supposed to allow you to just easy mode it behind your pets, you gotta keep moving and changing your strategy. If you want more turret survivability spec into metal plating, 30% is a pretty substantial boost.

I want turrets to BE turrets. Plant and forget. minimal health and ignored by enemies. A turret should not pull agro. A turret should have no agro until all player characters are down. A turret should not be affected by AOE’s or at the very least take greatly reduced damage from them.

And by “aren’t supposed to stay up the entire time” what you should say “can’t survive the very initial burst damage in the first 3 seconds of any fight”.

30% isn’t that big. 30 of 100 is 130…when an aoe blast deals 2k…

Mostly, I’m not saying “easy mode”. I’m saying "give us abilities that can be used and mixed into combos and strategies and stuff as their tool tips explain and as they are meant to by inherent and obvious design. Not one off useless abilities because they don’t last enough to use or have random effects, poor target selection ai, and such.

The deal is: a turret shouldn’t be this strange choice of “do I want useless abilities that enemies focus down in the first moments before they have a chance of doing anything?” or other abilities. Turrets should be able to be mixed in, dropped here and there and dramatically affect the play and control of the battle field. As they are now, they barely have any affect what so ever….other than pulling more mobs for me to run away and have to just drop entire zones as well as important activities and simply move on.

Dylucke.5389:

I personally use dual pistols and the healing, rifle and rocket turrets myself.

I also get annoyed from time to time about not being able to pick up loot when turrets are near them cos it makes you pick up the turret near the loot instead. Not a big deal unless your other turret pulls another 2-3 mobs like i mostly get myself.

I’ve been forced to use pistol and shield. Just for the knock back. It’s rare for my turrets to shoot my targets unless I drop them right on top of them. And even then it’s not guaranteed they won’t get excited about some boxes or a mob that has nothing to do with the current.

My only issues with dungeons are:

Every mob AOEs for crazy tons of damage with very little differentiation between attacks.

Attack animations are fast and nearly impossible to tell what’s going on when.

traps are forever with no disables or turn offs (so if there’s a trapped hallway that’s nearly wiping your party, it’ll be there, always nearly wiping your party, even after a really really tough boss stomps your face.

Some mobs require tactics that require a taunt feature. But so far, there’s no real taunt feature so how agro is divided out, I don’t know. No one in my guild has figured out how to separate the 2 bosses from touching each other… they just “do” for a while… (I think we just kept respawning in untill they were dead).

poor boss placement. Gold regenerating (trap immune) troll at the top of a very long spiked hallway. So after everyone is nearly 1/2 dead or is dead from the shear number of traps and the fast respawns far exceeding the dodge rolls. We get rofle-stomped regardless.

No differentiating “feel” between normal mobs and bosses. It’s all aoe chaos so it all becomes the same. Every mob is a wipe, which makes every mob a wipe. Greys everything out so far. Blending it together.

Some things that I enjoy in dungeons:

Very nice visuals. Overall map design is pretty to look at and interesting to explore.

Cinema scenes add story and depth to “plot” while dungeonearing.

The “length” from point A to point B is juuust about right. Not too small a map, not too daunting a run.

But yeah, classes need a lot of balance. Heals need bolstering, cc’s need lengthening, hp needs adjusting. Every mob being a boss mob is a little much. A challenge is good…unplayable areas are not. (My last group was a bunch of 80’s, and even with their gear we couldn’t really get through an area where we had to “protect 2 points” with no way to get agro, mobs just ignored us, spawned next to the points and took them out. We had no effect on gaining attention.)

I’ve been playing around with a few of the classes as well as partying with a couple of friends spanning the ones that I have not yet had the chance to play as of yet. There are some things that have become quite apparent, and it’s not good.

It’s most blatantly obvious with the engineer, slightly less with necromancer, a little less than that with illusionist, and bottoms out with ranger. What is the role of “extra objects”? I’m just not seeing any sort of usefulness to them at all.

Lets talk turrets. Lets talk turret A.I. Has anyone found out a way to mark enemies and have the turrets follow? Or do they really just shoot “whatever” is most inconvenient? For instance, I was fighting a mob of orcs. Dropped a net turret and a flame turret. The orcs were the closest enemies near me. Both turrets immediately ignored the orcs and started attacking helpless boxes that were twice the distance away from them and myself as the aggressive mob. On top of that, they kept attacking the spot where the defeated boxes once stood. Take that boxes! Your foul villainy of holding things now knows my vengeance… sadly for me, I had to pick up and run like a wuss, barely surviving with my 2 dodges per 30-60sec.

Turrets don’t like to get hit. At all. Like myself, turrets can only take a stiff breeze before falling to scrap. There is a skill to “heal” the turrets, if you can call it healing. It’s funny, the animation is great, but it’s just not viable at all. They gain about 1% hp every 2-3 sec when they are 1-2 shot kills anyways. You can’t even use your turrets to effectively escape. (I.E. drop them down, let the baddies attack that as you dodge and run. In the end, they 1 shot the turret and are on your heals, no sweat)

On top of that, (one of the problems the necromancer has) they pull agro like nobody’s business. Ignore the large rifle barring charr, that net turret looks suspicious! So low HP, pulls agro. What could be worse? They take full damage of A.O.E. attacks. Which means they don’t last long enough to really have any sort of effect (the illusionist’s problem).

With all of these issues, in dungeons especially, the turrets are dead all the time (the ranger issue). In a dungeon, every monster throws out aoe’s. Every aoe does ~2k damage a tick. My turrets have, at max 100-150hp (I myself have ~2.5k hp). “Placement” is incredibly difficult as they will attack random targets randomly, so putting them close enough to an enemy so they will have the highest chance of knowing “what” to attack and pulling agro is apparently a must. They last maybe 1-2 sec, sometimes not even squeezing a shot off. It’s incredibly frustrating having such long cool downs on such, nearly useless PVE abilities.

I also want to wonder about the PVE use/effectiveness of the mortar canon. It is fun, true. Though not being able to move, having a very shallow max range and narrow min range makes it really hard to actually be of any use. In dungeons especially, since every mob aoe’s there’s no time to stand still for a few minuets to attack, or as soon as you drop it, enemies will auto-focus you down. And it has just slightly more life than a turret. So it might not go down in 1 hit, but 2 for sure.

Now don’t tl;dr this and spout things like “learn to dodge/play/skillz/eat oranges and k” as this is an objective look on turrets and other deploy-able objects through a PVE stand point.

Any other engineers have any better solutions than using turrets? Are turrets where they “should” be, and actually using them for what their tool tips suggest not what they should be used for? Anyone know if there’s any patching in the patches ahead for turrets? Anything? Anyone?