Guild Wars 2

I really like the idea of gyros. Engineer has been my favourite class ever since the beta of the original game and I was super-excited when the Scrapper was finally revealed. However, right now the gyros don’t feel as meaningful as I expected them to be. Most of them have short durations, making them feel less like entities with battlefield presence and more like fleeting effects. The blast gyro is more of a missile than a drone and the shredder mostly seems to remain stationary most of the time, so it could just as well have been a turret.

Generally, I expect gyros to function a bit like flying turrets, but with shorter durations and perhaps slightly stronger passive effects to compensate for the lack of duration. The offensive gyros should be attacking the player’s target, just like turrets do, while the defensive ones should just circle the player (instead of trying to follow him, cause this requires pathfinding, which is more difficult to get right, while it is very important for them to stay close).

Instead of just having the option to detonate them, I feel they should have an active effect as well, again similar to turrets. The detonate option could then replace the toolbelt skill. A nice twist would be to have an actual fuel system here, with a number of charges that decreases over time. Using the active effect skill would consume a charge. The passive effect and the power of the detonation would decrease as the charges run out. Once a drone runs out of charges it would just crash, without doing any damage.

This would give players some meaningful choices in how to use gyros: Keep them up as long as possible for the passive effect, use the active effects or detonate them as fast as possible.

I realise this suggestion goes beyond a few simple balance adjustments. But to me, the gyros right now are not effective or fun enough to keep them around.

One more thing: the new traits introduce even more ways to reduce incoming damage or get heals. I like them, but such traits don’t synergize well with AED. Engis have quite a few options to buff their healing / improve toughness and armour already, so the list of traits that should be avoided when using AED has grown. And its not like AED sees much use as it is already. A simple adjustment to AED like “falling below X% of health” instead of “lethal damage” to trigger the extra heal would solve this.