So I took a glance at gw2buildcraft.com to look at how Arenanet have structured their profession design and it would appear that all the professions (bar the Engineer) follow these rules:
• Five utility skill types
• Four utility skills of each type
• Twenty utility skills in total
• All have a summon type (Conjures, Spirit Weapons, Clone/Phantasms, Minions, Traps, Banners)
• All have a passive type (Signets)
The other three types seem to vary between control, support, offence, defence and conditions depending on the professions ‘style’ and what the other types/weapons/profession ability offers.
The Engineer on the other hand has:
• Four utility types* (Elixirs, Gadgets, Kits, Turrets)
• Five utility skills of each type
• No passive type
*gw2buildcraft combines the Mesmer Clone/Phantasm’s into one type but not the kits. The game treats the kits the same way so I’m bundling them together.
This stuff doesn’t matter too much it just illustrates the difficulty that Arenanet are having with creating an Engineer that fits inline with the other professions.
Someone on the profession balance team recently talked about how the turrets were viewed as the ‘passive style’ skill set for the Engineer, which would mean it is viewed as being analogous to signets. However, from my point of view, playing with turrets is currently anything but passive and requires a great deal of micro managing to make good use out of them. Whereas a signet provides you with a permanent buff of some sort (condition removal for example) until you pop it and you briefly lose that passive until the cool down wears off.
That’s not to mention that many of the signets the various professions have are extremely powerful with both strong passive and active abilities. Usually these active abilities grant the player a powerful boon of some sort (e.g. stability). For me, turrets are far from being the Engineers passive utility skill option and any attempt to make them so will result in the PvE Ritualist problem where the vast majority of content is trivialised.
The Tool belt profession ability does throw somewhat of a spanner in the works because it grants the Engineer a ‘two for the price of one’ deal on all of its utility skills. We can’t have passive abilities because of our tool belt but we need our tool belt because of our kits and lack of weapon swap. Both the kits and tool belt are genuinely excellent ideas that make the Engineer unique and fun so we need to find a way to keep them while bringing the profession closer to the others in terms of structure.
I propose we look at the utilities as such:
• Elixirs are the support option.
• Gadgets are the control option.
• Turrets are the summon option.
• Kits are the passive option.
When you have a kit on your utility bar it grants you a passive ability just like a signet would. If you equip the kit you keep the passive ability and gain access to the weapon set. When you activate the tool belt skill you lose the passive.
To me this seems to fit with Arenanet’s vision for the passive signet play style where the player just wants to focus on his weapons and ‘pure’ combat abilities. I also feel it fits in with their vision for the kits and depending on what the passive abilities were could open up many options for ‘mixed utility type’ builds (“versatility”).
A Kit Refinement tweak could then see the global cool down removed but the tool belt skill go onto cool down. If placed high enough in the trait line (e.g. 30 and with worthwhile enough spells) it would probably please those who want to kit dance and Arenanet who seem to want to avoid the Engineer basically turning into the Elementalist.
Turrets can then be worked on as being a more active style of playing the game, which seems to be the only way they can make them useful without making content trivial.
