Guild Wars 2

Gonna miss my Rampager Rifle build (using distracting strike), but its definitly going to help it when it comes to Dps with a Berserker build.

sorudo.9054:

when they announced new faces i was hoping for some new faces to try out, what really happened is disappointing and that is an understatement.

i checked all the faces of all races, tried every different points of view but i can’t call this “new” faces but recycled faces with a paint job.
asura: just 1 face with different patterns
sylvari: reused the previous new face with a new pattern
human: same face as release face but with different make-up and such
norn: same face as released face with different make-up and such

the only single race that has actual new faces is the charr, not that they look pretty in the slightest but that could be me.

so to warn anyone, don’t buy in to this, they reused old faces and simply edited it with photoshop.
it’s a cheap and lazy money making strategy, a real low blow IMO.

we want actual new faces with new face structures and new face expressions, we want new options to make our characters look exactly the way we want it to look and we want the new stuff to actually be new.
i know that Anet is getting more and more greedy but advertising this cheap crap really makes my blood boil, both as a player and as a game designer it’s a disappointment to see Anet go so low as to simply edit an existing face and sell it at the full price.

Yeah realy disapointed too, I was hoping to get a couple of new faces for my charrs and most of them are basicaly reshaped or repainted versions of already existing models. And for what’s left, its pretty underwhelming…

Very unsatisfied with this character makeover update!

I play my Rifle build with Rampager gear with 4/6/0/0/4 traits. I loose a lot of burst capability but I do have high sustained damage with the mix of both bleeds and physical dmg.

The Rampager build also works great with Sword&Board as secondary weapon set because it takes full advantage out of Distracting Strike and condition damage while keeping enough power and a bit of ferocity to take down opponents with small bursts. The shield also gives some additional tools for survival, wich is always a good thing sinds you are very fragile.

On another note, you do have a lot of issues with that kind of build. The lack of team synergy is one of them, wich you can make up for it by bringing the CCs into a fight. But also the fact you are neither specialised in direct damage or condition damage, making it pointless for you to team up with condition builds sinds yours are slightly less powerfull.

But it does well in Pvp, you might be glassy like a Berserker build, but the variety of controls, conditions and direct damage output makes it effective against a large variety of builds, wich will have difficulties to adapt their gamestyle against yours.

Arkvan.3561:

Fairly sure For Great Justice gives you the same, aside from affecting less/more people in a bigger/smaller range. The buff is the same afaik.

I’d like to add that you can’t even use racials in sPvP so this really only applies to WvW.

“For Great Justice” :
Radius – 600
CD – 25sec
Might – 30sec (3stacks)
Fury – 8sec

“Battle Roar” :
Radius – 1200
CD – 35sec
Might – 15sec (2stacks)
Fury – 7sec

So “For Great Justice” is clearly a winner, yeah it might have shorter range, but with the actual game mechanics and target limitation that extra range is very situational at best.

bobomb.5209:

You haven’t seen any of those because racial skills are worthless. Worthless skills are not balanced.

While it is not the most constructive comment I have seen over here, it is certainly one of the most intelligent thing I’ve read today on this post!

Thank you my good fellow!

Arcades.4689:

I’m pretty tired of this.

Why? Because you don’t give me a single valid point why it shouldn’t be done sinds you started this conversation?

Arcades.4689:

Did you ever saw a guardian silvary having a binding jeopardy build with grasping vines?

Actualy, I did see it multiple times! Grasping vines and take roots are both very popular in WvW.

Arcades.4689:

have you ever saw a warrior charr using shrapnel mine together with leg specialist and opportuinist?

I use it on my condition build for PvE and it is a wonderfull skill for soft CC.

Arcades.4689:

if you made battle roar in to a shout, would shout based warriors use it? Yes->Charr warriors would get an advantage over other warriors.
Those skills are useless, but if you give them a type your character would be allowed to get them a lot of buffs (catual buffs, not simply interaction like the one you quoted) and that would that make actually useful. ?

Warriors would still use For Great Justice (for optimal play) over Battle Roar simply because “For Great Justice” does everything better, and as a shout Warrior “On my mark” and “Shake it off” are much more valuable to 2 stacks of Might for 15sec and 7sec Fury. But it would give a bit more versatility to Rangers and Guardians, wich is never a bad thing, without making their other abilities subpar.

Also wth is it wrong to make a useless skill actualy usefull? You realy got me confused on that one???

Arcades.4689:

Since there are already a ton of balance issue in the game, we should try to avoid creating more of them.

That’s where you don’t get it sony, by ignoring those skills you create issues like Technobable 6sec stun builds. I was the first one to imply what the change to Rangers Moment of Clarity would do to racial abilities. And guess what, they ignored it and now we must face the so called lame technobable ranger in WvW because they balanced a single trait around 1sec daze/stuns and 2sec fears but completely ignored the racial 3sec daze.

You must always adjust the balance around every available features, otherwise you just fail very hard at doing so.

Arcades.4689:

Do you really want an answer to that?
1) ranger, guardians and warriors are not the same category. Warriors and guardians are soldiers, rangers are adventurer.

Please may you refrain yourself from changing the things I say? I was specificaly speaking about Shouts and trooper Runes, on that paragraph, and specificaly said Ranger, Guardians and Warriors (shouts) were in that same category.

Arcades.4689:

2) racial skills are influenced by traits =/= giving type to racial skills. Doing so would allow them to benefit from reduced cooldown, runes, whatever other traits and would allow making a certain build work better only on a certain race.
The only example I can think of is technobabble for a stunlock ranger, but that is a pretty stupid build.

This is already the case, Sylvaries have a lot of skills like Seed Turret and Taking Root giving them full advantage of Warriors traits, that same race can stack 25stack of vulnerabilities in a couple of seconds with Grasping Vines and the Guardian trait Binding Jeopardy. And I remember when the game was released, Healing Seed with the elementalist Cleansing Water used to cleanse 1 condition, to everyone in the radius, every 3sec for 30sec. Thieves with Reapers of Grenth were also able for a while to stack weakness with Lotus Poison before they added the 20sec cooldown. And the Charr Scrapnel mine can take advantage of Deep Cuts, Leg Specialist and Opportunist to make your mine give Immobilized, Cripple, Fury while the target bleeds for 30sec.

And there is more!

So explain me how does a couple of extra category to some of the racial skills makes them sudenly gamebreaking elements of the game? Didn’t you say yourself they were useless at best?

Arcades.4689:

3) if you really wanted to give a type to racial skills, you should be doing that for all of them, so you’d have to rework all of them.

While this thread only speaks about Battle Roar, i totaly agree with you on this! If you add categories to most of the racial skills you open the game to even more variety of builds and this is always good for the game. And sinds most of them are not game breaking, and can’t be used in SPvP, this wouldn’t be an issue at all for tournements.

Arcades.4689:

4) since most racial skills are useless, just deal with it. It’s not going to happen.

This isn’t a good reason to not make them usefull (to some extend) at one point!

Larynx.2453:

If you want racials defining your character, play a different MMO. It’s literally as simple as that. Racials are flavor, and are never meant to be better than profession skills.

Not only are you rude, Sir, but you didn’t answer my question wich is based on valid observations.

So I repeat myself : Why should one racial skill be excluded by profession traits and rune effects while the other racials do work with them?

Arcades.4689:

No racial skills has a type attached to it, (except for the norn ones, that are transforms. But no trait/rune/sigil interacts with transform skills) to prevent a race from gaining an advantage in playing a profession.

So if I follow your logic, why does Asura Rangers get a 6sec stun with technobable? Why does the Sylvary Guardians can easely stack up to 25 vulnerabilities with grasping vines? Not to mention Hiden pistol works with Mobile Strike sinds it is a mobility skill, so that shouldn’t happen either! So explain me why should other racials have synergies with class traits while Battle Roar shouldn’t?

Not to mention, Guardian, Rangers and Warrior shouts get the benefits out of runes of the Trooper, they are not of the same professions but are still in the same category, shouldn’t it make sense for Battle Roar to also work with those runes and be categorised as a Shout?

Not only is this a bad synergy on a backstab build, but if I would rely on my elite to put low conditions and backstab/stun my ennemy, I would rather use the Runes of Tequatl for the actual poison and fear my target so I don’t have to move around my foes back.

Does it also works with runes of Kraits and Oriens when it comes to apply Bleed and Poison when struck by a hit?

I play a Ravager Rifle/Sword&Shield 20/30/0/0/20 (or 4/6/0/0/4) condition build in PVE and I believe I saw “Fear Me” apply confusion mutliple times on ennemies when I cancelled their skill with it.

I tell you what, when I get back home I’ll run a test and confirm my claim if I am right, but right now, I’m almost sure it interupts ennemies.

Edit : After further testing, I can confirm, “Fear me” interupt counts toward Distracting Strike! So it is possible to use Flurry, putting massive amounts of bleed stacks on the target and interupt it should it try to break the focus of your skill with a CC. So it can hard counter interupts and penalize an opposing player even further should he try to break out of the stun because of the additional confusion! It’s just wonderfull!

I don’t know why but I just tried out my Rocket Turret and it shoots continual Overcharged Rockets, wich is OP, otherwise hitbox is definitly much smaller! And by the way, nice bug fixes A-net!

Lupanic.6502:

yes, this describes it very well. I which they would replace them.

Not realy, sinds he didn’t put any traits into his turrets. Its like trying to demonstrate something is wrong with grenades when you don’t put any trait points into the explosive traitline.

I can leave my fully traited turrets in Orr during defense events and even in low density areas of ennemies and they are able to take one or two ennemies on their own (and with auto-tool they actualy last their 5min) depending on what kind of ennemies they are fighting. (Brutes are the exception of course).

Finaly I rather see Turrets improved and fixed before I see any of the abilities beeing replaced by some other gadget like gimmick build.

It is funny, when we were theorycrafting and making suggestions on Anymras posts I actualy gave a very similar idea based on the current “issue” with the underwater rocket turret.

I explained how it could potentialy improve the gameplay of a turret Engineer, by increasing its mobility and synergy with blast finishers.

I find it ironic that I have this previous suggestion confirmed, and see it work as it should be, by a simple bug.

Dirame.8521:

As a class with a lot of knockbacks, we don’t really have to have Thumper in the centre of the point and even if we did have it in the centre, it wouldn’t die as fast as other turrets would.

And now you are proving my point from above. This GM trait is alienating the use of the Thumper turret, so basicaly you are giving up the crowd control for boons instead by laying it in places you wouldn’t otherwise making the synergy with the other turret traits inexistant while A-net has stated numerous time GM traits should be build defining traits that work well with the lower traits of the same category of skills.

Dirame.8521:

If you want to be a selfish player then that’s up to you but the fact is, for a team who wants to have a constant supply of boons, turrets would be the way to go. And the most important ones come with advantages.

Realy? Selfish? You can share the Might stacks and condition cleans to a lesser extend with almost every toolbelt version of your Elixirs and this is without including their base effect. So I wouldn’t call the Elixir build selfish…

Dirame.8521:

You guys are thinking, “this is how I need to specc it to make it viable” and I’m thinking nah, “forget all that noise! I’ll place the turret down myself and put points where I feel it matters.”

No, you are just assuming things we aren’t even saying and you seem to fail to understand the base concerns and issues related to turrets and why those traits doesn’t fix anything for turret builds.

I am not the one to tell you how you play. You play the way you want, and I don’t care. If you can’t understand why it makes no sense to add a turret trait based on boons in the Alchemy line, wich is primery based on ELIXIRS and FLAME/ELIXIR KITS than I have nothing else to speak with you.

And sinds I do not wish to end this post on a flame and hit the brick wall, i’ll end this with simple note.

Peace!

ellesee.8297:

also i hate hammer guards. if anyone has a guard alt, do not run hammer guard in pve ever. run sword/focus + scepter/shield or torch like a pro and stop dropping dam symbols. every freakin time AREA RETAL AREA RETAL AREA RETAL.

Well a good Hammer guardian should always bring some consecration abilities, I use Consecrated Ground and Purging Flames and people usualy don’t have any issues with might stacking sinds you can use both of those ability separetly before putting a Symbol of protection to overdrive the Light Field.

Not to mention you don’t need perma Fire Fields, you just need it long enough to stack 25stacks of might, after that Light Fields are much more beneficial for the condi removal on combo projectiles.

Also if you have issues with people droping Light Fields, I personnaly use Blasting staff on my Elem and put my Fire Field a bit more on my right to still deal the dmg and leave room for the Fire Combo Blast Finishers. Wich works just fine if people bother to strafe 2inches on their right side.

Dirame.8521:

You think i am underestimating how easy it is to get boons and I think you’re underestimating how lazy people are. If people can gains boons by simply standing in one place, they bloody well will.

And by standing near of your turrets to get the boons they will unfortunatly draw aggro from AoEs/Cleaves wich will result in the destruction of your turret. Leaving your utility on cooldown and your team without a single boon.

Dirame.8521:

Perma prot requires you to be in melee, might stacks require combos, on the other hand turrets require placing them in a safe place, guess who wins? .

You can already get plenty of might just with your turret self-destruct ability and what’s the point to place your Thumper away from your ennemies if you can’t Snare, Combo Blast/KB the ennemies by putting your turret in a safe place? Not to mention Protection is not that important for ranged characters because, unlike melee characters , they only have to worry about ranged telegraphs and AoE ground targeting.

Dirame.8521:

Also you seem to think that you have to invest all your points into turrets to use that trait when the reality is, that’s not what this is about. I’ve always said that turrets are a supplement to a build, if you don’t want to take Incendiary powder, you can take flame turret and now if you don’t want to take Protection injection, you can take Thumper turret with the Experimental Turrets trait and that leaves space for another trait.

The problem is, if you don’t invest at least points into turret surviability and deployable turrets you are going to see your utilities on cooldown more often than you would like to see it. While on the other hand, an Elixir build can give you more utility and boon stacking and this in a much safer way.

Please, don’t get us wrong, Adamantium and I don’t believe the trait is actualy teribad, we just think it is rather inadequate for the current Turret situation and cripples the turret gameplay more than it is benificial to it.

Dirame.8521:

Ambrecombe.4398:

Well, to be fair, I am not impressed by the new Turrets GM at all. I’ve played my Turret Engineer for a long time, still playing it, and the only things I am looking forward are the Turret bug fixes and the Runes/Sigils update.

The 2 new turrets GM traits, while they do offer another approach of gameplay, are mostly lackluster and way to much counter productive for the following reasons :

1) Experimental Turret is a good GM to buff your party with a variety of boon but it is located so deeply into the Alchemy line that it makes it worthless. It means you have to give up 2 Major trait slots that could have been spend instead for your turret utility/surviability instead.

It’s a very powerful trait. That’s one trait that deserves to be in the GM tier simply by virtue of how powerful it can be. 4s of Prot every 10 secs? I don’t think any other class can have that much prot uptime apart from a stealth spamming Mesmer. 3 Stacks of might that last for 14s every 10s? With a Guardian that’s 15stacks at the start of a fight and a constant stream of 3 stacks with intervals in which you’ll have 6 instead. With a flamethrower build that’s a perma 9/10 stack.

I seriously can’t see how that trait could ever be a waste.

Dirame, I’m not saying its a bad trait. I am just saying it is not worth the investement.

You are going to give up a lot of trait points for a skill line that doesn’t provide any damage bonus to your character. Not to mention, you will still need to spend points in your invention traitline if you don’t want to see your turrets get blown even faster than they already do.

So you will probably go for at least a 0/0/20/30/0 if you want to make your turrets a bit sutainable to have the best out of experimental turrets leaving very few places for more offensive traitlines, wich is a shame.

If your turrets get destroyed you don’t get the buffs anymore, and some of the turrets have some very nasty cooldowns (especialy Thumper). So it isn’t as powerfull as you try to make it sound like.

Does it deserve to be a GM trait? Yes definitly!

Does it deserve to be an alchemy GM? Hell no!

PS : For your information, Hammer Guardians with Symbol traits can stack protection with ease just by using their auto-attack.

Well, to be fair, I am not impressed by the new Turrets GM at all. I’ve played my Turret Engineer for a long time, still playing it, and the only things I am looking forward are the Turret bug fixes and the Runes/Sigils update.

The 2 new turrets GM traits, while they do offer another approach of gameplay, are mostly lackluster and way to much counter productive for the following reasons :

1) Experimental Turret is a good GM to buff your party with a variety of boon but it is located so deeply into the Alchemy line that it makes it worthless. It means you have to give up 2 Major trait slots that could have been spend instead for your turret utility/surviability instead.

2) Fortified Turret is a very bad turret trait. If I learned something when i played my Turret Engineer, you can’t afford to get close to them or else they get destroyed by AoEs/Cleaves. That trait doesn’t prevent any of those two effects and actualy gives you the bad idea and to your team instead to get near of them so they can easier get squashed out in the massive AoEs/Cleaves fest. This is a huge issue and this trait would have been much more interesting for a Gadget build.

3) Fortified Turret trait also shares the slot of Rifled Turret Barrels, this trait (in conjucture with deployable turret) is what allows good Turret Engineer to keep their turrets alive. That extra range is the factor to your turrets surviability and will decide if your turret are going to get stucked by AoEs, Cleaves or just take aggro because they were to close from your foes. Not to mention RTB actualy makes Flame Turret pretty decent at burning multiple ennemies and increases the radius of the Smoke Field overcharge.

Overall, I don’t mind the additional traits, but I do think A-net could have come with some better ideas instead of those…

I don’ t have any bugs with persisting flames, my lava fonts hits 6 times and my lava tombs 10 times so they both get the correct icnreased duration from the trait.

Only issue I have is with the tooltip showing an incorrect value.

I think it’s because Sword/mh used to apply bleeds way slower when Final Thrust was still on the chain skill and also probably because Flurry, as a skill, is pretty weak if you don’t have any condition duration to support it.

Also Warrios didn’t had acces to Torment before, Distracting Strike was less powerfull, and so he was dealing most of his condition damage trough slow application of long duration bleeds.

I already posted my point elsewhere, but hier it goes again.

The idea to have two seperated ways to “destroy” your turrets, I believe, is wrong. If you completely remove the cooldown from turrets when picked up you make the self-destruct toolbelt skill a very punishing option to use.

I think the best way to improve turrets would be like Anymras said : “Cooldown starts when turret is placed”

But I would elaborate that option a bit more to not make Turrets about drop and forget but instead give its upside with a couple of downsides too. Those are my following steps to make turrets gameplay more appealing :

1) Fixing every turrets related bugs

2) Remove the pick up option from turrets and leave the self-destruct toolbelt skill for every turret abilities.

3) Cooldown starts when turret is deployed, is confirmed when self-destructed, but is negated if the turret gets destroyed.

If you follow those three steps you get a whole new dynamic of gameplay. Instead of focussing around droping and picking up turrets for their overcharge, you instead drop them at full extend and use the self destruct to recover some of their cooldown while also supporting your party with very precious blast finishers, thus rewarding you for micromanadging them and at the same time making them more mobile on the battlefield.

On the other hand, if an ennemy destroy your turrets you get punished and get full cooldown, wich incite the player to watch out for his turrets.

(PS : My idea also gives the Engineer a reason to keep his Healing turret deployed.)

Young Somalia.1706:

Re: every “Exploiting Spider Queen” post ever

If being melee, which restricts a foe from using ranged-only attacks, is exploiting, then staying at range to keep enemies from hitting you with melee-only attacks is exploiting. Nerf all longbow exploits!

Auesis.7301:

This. For the love of God, don’t people understand anything about this game? People just find excuses to be anti-meta.

A simple difference between melee and ranged attacks from a boss is suddenly exploiting. What is this world coming to?

May I please ask you to read my post again… I said I’m against people exploiting BROKEN INGAME MECHANICS, if someone exploit his range abilities to kite an ennemy because he has the tools at his disposal to do it, he is playing the game and exploiting his abilities at best (and it’s fine).

If someone finds a small spot where he can attack an ennemy while avoiding all his AoEs during a whole fight (like Arah p3), there is probably an issue right there and the guy exploiting that spot is using a broken element of the game to gain unfair advantage over a challenge (and that’s not fine).

In the case of the AC spider, the AI is just broken, depending to how you confront her she will use her ranged poison fields even if everyone is in melee range, exception made if everyone is packed very close together. Don’t you see a problem right there? Why would she not use her ability, wich works on melee targets, while i’m glued to my allies while she still does it when I just take a step on her flank while still staying in that same melee range? It meens her attack is supposed to target a secondary critter and something is causing an issue in her aggro table when everyone is glued together.

If that’s not broken in some way than I strongly disagree with both of you!

I have two things to say about this topic,

1) I don’t have any issue with ignoring ennemies when A-net officialy stipulated you weren’t supposed to beat every encounter you saw in a dongeon. (can’t remember where I saw it, but I definitly saw it somewhere).

2) Stacking is an issue in some ways, not because melee can’t keep up with the target (there is enough cripple, immobilized and chill applications to keep it Under control), but instead because of the following issues :
- Sinds combat in GW2 was badly designed and resolve around speed clear.
- Sinds fire fields generate might with blast finisher and those are all about staying packed together and help to speed clear ennemies.

On another note, I think the real issue isn’t related from ignoring the ennemies or stacking properly. The real issue is about using exploits to ignore AI mechanics. AC is a good exemple, because in this case, stacking the party together will unallow some ennemies to use their skill properly, exploiting broken parts of the game to make cheesy runs when players should at least have a bit of challenge.

So to conclude it isn’t stacking or speedrunning we should condemn, but the AI for beeing very badly designed and the players taking advantage of that poorly designed AI to exploit every single broken part of the game.

The thing that kills me the most in this case is the fact Engineer get a nerf on both his Turrets while the Warrior bola skills works similary without the downfalls, has higher uptime and can be stacked with sword Flurry to lock down ennemies for more than 10sec with enough condition duration. And this every 20sec.

While the Engineer has to rely on a very unreliable uility skill and his ultimate skill to get similar results. And this every 3 minuts for a 1/3 uptime if his turrets doesn’t get destroyed first.

But the Warriors stays untouched. Find the logic…

I have a couple of suggestions for Turrets Engineers,

1) Flame Turret : Smoke Field should pulse every second instead of every two second.
Why? Because every other blinding fields work this way and it would help the turret survive against pulsing AoEs wich usualy destroy it (the Hitbox size doesn’t help either).

2) Turrets in General should have more damaging conditions.
While they do extra physical damage, traiting for them is expensive and realy decreases our personnal DPS output. Not to mention, doing so would allow better burning manadgement for Pistol&Shield while giving the control options to the Turreteer to keep our Turret “safe”.

3) Turrets cooldown should start when it is deployed.
My idea : Remove the pickup fonction, and refund the utility cooldown with the self destruct skill depending to how long the turret stayed deployed (if it is destroyed it goes on full CD).
If you do that, you actualy give a reason for Turreteers to keep their turrets alive, and doing so allows the Turreteer to build up the fight with extra buff without sacrificing to much of its DPS while making it more mobile too.

Dusk.4708:

there is no issue with hitboxes,…

Dude there is an issue with Turret Hitbox, if you don’t believe us watch the video I made on youtube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL-BWRKWkLY

This was made a while ago, but the issue still persists…

Stalima.5490:

cleric is by far the best stat combination as you benefit from toughness healing and power, and maybe only take 2 turrets with 1 slot for some utility such as elixir U ( which can be used to protect them from ranged attacks and up your damage output.

Turrets do not benefit from power, the tooltip is wrong. And condition damage affects only Flame Turret with the recent change, so if you don’t use Flame Turret that much your stat combination depends on toughness and your weapon of choice.

You will end up with a full/mix of Knight and/or Cleric if you use a Rifle. And you will end up with a full/mix of Rabid and/or Apothecary if you use Pistols or Pistol&Shield.

If you don’t care about the healing power and are looking for more vitality you will probably end up mix your equipement with Soldier or Dire gear depending on your weapon.

Escadin.9482:

But they won’t.
I’ve been playing my engi with turrets ever since it was created and have no intention to swap to kits or some other BS just because Anet doesn’t pay attention to this subject outside of the nerfing alley.^^ .

Good for you, I have the same problem you see, while I tested many builds, I’ve created my Engineer for the sole purpose to use turrets but unfortunatly I am barely using him anymore because those utilities are clearly broken (wich spoil my fun).

And yes, they might eventualy die, but they will die sooner if you go full glasscanon wich is not something you want when you go in the Invention traitline. You realy want to increase their life span as much as you can, because turrets are an important secondary source of your sustained DPS and helps with burn application (at least it was at greater extend before the change when you played pistol&shield).

Escadin.9482:

Honestly though, almost every highlevel mob in orr, or explorermode will have some sort of AoE. It is very very rare that your turrets survive even if you plant them midway up the walls with deployable turrets+rifled turret barrels so they still can actually shoot stuff.

It depends if the AoE is radial or targeted, how your ennemy AI works and especialy the people you are playing with. If you have high toughness and can manadge to keep the ennemies on you while keeping the targeted AoE’s away from your turrets, they can remain alive for their whole 5min, even in a strong encounter. Exception made when your champion has some kittened and huge life leech AoE wich destroy everything in a 1200 radius, than you are better not using turrets at all.

But otherwise I have to disagree, it is possible to keep most of your turrets alive it just requiere three things :
- Deployable turret trait
- Crucial positioning
- Allies who cares

Escadin.9482:

You should see the whole turret concept as a single skill. There isn’t only the turret itself + it’s overcharge but also accelerant packed turrets, detonation and the other toolbelt skills.
If you run berserker gear, that tactical missle offered by rocket turret will hit for 8k-10k. The flame field created by your flameturret’s toolbelt skill is one of our strongest burning sources. .

First, please do not assume things for me, I am perfectly aware of the current situation and wouldn’t post anything if I wouldn’t know anything about it. (and I also would like to keep this thread as clean as possible)

Secondly, accelerant packed turrets, while it has its use, is probably the most counter productive trait if you couple it with the invention traitline. Basicaly what it does, it gives you some pretty decent control but it forces you to place turrets where you would not put them otherwise and make you waste valuable blast finisher, unless your ennemy happens to be near of one of your turrets while you are waiting in a combo field at the exact same time(the odds are very small).

When I see this trait i’m asking myself the following question : “Why would I use some traits to keep my turrets away from harm if I end up using a trait instead wich forces me to put my turret closer to it to get anything out of it?”

Than again, you could always separate Turrets in 2 different playstyles :
1) Beeing a bunker build that rellies on (Deployable Turret, Metal Plating, Autotool Instalation and Rifled Turret Barrels) wich will have a much better use in a condition build to optimize its DPS while keeping some good defenses and a way to keep ennemies away from your turrets.
2) Beeing a more offensive build that rellies on ( Deployable Turrets and Accelerant Packed Turrets) wich would be much more flexible when it comes to weapon selection and allow a better use of turrets in a power build. Sinds it wouldn’t be requiere to drawn attention away from them so you can freely choose your gear.

But personnaly, I think it is a bad design decision.

Like Anymras told you the only stat suplementing your turrets are Condition damage, and Duration + Healing Power and Boon duration. But again, most of those stats only affect a couple of your turrets, not all of them so you need to choose wisely depending on your play style.

Toughness can also indirectly help your turrets build out. There is nothing more frustrating to drop your turret down and see it get destroyed right away because ennemies decided to ignore you for a moment. Most of the ennemies rely on multiple aggro tables to check who they are going attack first, your maximum toughness and if you equip a shield will increase your priority in that table making your turret less susceptible to take aggro a thus increasing their chance to remain intact for the rest of the fight.

I was wondering, does this trait work with the Asura Technobable racial utility? It could potentialy become a 6sec daze with this trait. :P

I had a conversation with Josh Davis and explained that situation while comparing it to the Warrior immobilize capabilities. To make it short, he explained to me the Devs think the immobilize condition is a bit over the top and they look at possible solutions to limit its impact for both Pvp and Pve.

But yeah I think reducing the condition duration is not a good idea, active counterplay sounds a more approriated solution to me.

Anymras.5729:

The firing of multiple nets was a bug that occurred similarly to the Rifle Turret’s permanent fire rate increase: the fire rate increase doesn’t function if Overcharge is activated after a certain amount of time, so people overcharged it on-placement…which somehow caused it to fire several nets in a quick burst, after which it operated as normal (including the bug) or stopped functioning entirely (difficult to replicate, but I’ve seen it happen).
It only happened when the Turret was overcharged immediately, as far as I know, just as Rifle Turret only gains its speed boost (which becomes permanent as a side-effect) when overcharged immediately.

Yup I remember that bug, it shot 3 consecutive nets in a row every time it was cycling trough its next attack. It was very problematic, especialy for PvP where a single turret could lockdown a target in place for quite an ammount of time even if immobilize wasn’t stacking yet.

But when they fixed the issue with the triple net turret bug, they also broke the firerate bonus we previously had with the overcharge ability, while rifle turret remained buged too.

Anymras.5729:

At release, Thumper and Rocket Turrets had an Overcharge Duration sufficient to ensure only one shot fired with the Overcharge.

I think your are slighty mistaken about the rocket turret overcharge. I only had a single rocket if I overcharged the turret rougly 1 or 2sec after its attack cycle. If you actualy activated the power a second before the next attack or right when it was attacking you could get two overcharged rockets.

MonMalthias.4763:

Leg Specialist is unambiguously a Melee oriented trait though, while Net Turret is potentially a ranged CC. Albeit with heavy heavy counterplay, but still. The Leg Specialist trait is balanced around that. .

Well, I disagree with your fact Leg Specialist is a melee oriented trait. It can also serve its purpose on a Rifle build and have a 1/8 uptime on a single target at 1200 range. Not to mention most Crippling attack from the Warrior are ranged attacks, the trait just emphasis better with Sword/Mh and Spear because you can spam cripple with the auto-attack.

You didn’t mention anything about the Warrior Throw Bolas, wich has a 4sec immobilize on 20sec CD (16sec CD when traited) that’s a 1/5 up to 1/4 uptime 900 range immobilize with similar trajectory paterns. The différences are :
- We need to trait our turrets to get the same range.
- The immobilize source comes from the turret instead of the Warrior.
- If it gets destroyed or if we need to move on it goes on a longer cooldown (between 22,5sec to 30sec).

The only advantage we currently have are :
- We can spam a second turret up to 1/3 uptime, and this only if it survive long enough.
- We have a toolbelt skill that immobilize 3sec every 45sec, toolbelt skills are design weaker in mind of utility skills.

But again, we are not the only profession with multiple immobilize sources, so it still doesn’t justify why we should have the short end of everything.

MonMalthias.4763:

Anyway, as I have said before, the whole discussion is moot if Turret bugs are left unaddressed. Balance should not even enter into the discussion when bugs that affect the basic functionality of Turrets are left unchecked, because “fixing” the imbalance could well leave the bug that causes the underlying issue unaddressed.

That’s a true fact, and I totaly agree with you on that, but there is only a problem, the devs are going to balance turrets anyways even if the bugs aren’t fixed yet. So if we only speak about bugs, it won’t prevent future bugs in the game because the devs are already working on rebalancing turrets.

MonMalthias.4763:

I can see where Anet is coming from with the nerf though. Supply Crate is arguably the best Elite in the game in terms of 1v1s – 1 clutch crate can turn a duel or even a teamfight. What disappoints me is that Anet has taken the lazy solution of leaving the Net Turret “unforked” – when Anet changed Healing Turret, they “forked” the Healing Turret of Supply Crate and left it as the old implementation. As it is, Net Turret is pretty under-represented in most of Engineer’s Meta builds and this change will further entrench its place in the “ignore” pile.

Again, the game wasn’t balance around 1vs1 fights and it should never be done this way. Supply crate is indeed a good elite, but not because of the turrets dropping out of them. Those get destroyed in team fights pretty quickly and only serve the purpose of slight distraction. The real trouble makers are the bandages wich can together heal the Engineer for a fairly high ammount of health.

In the end the change to net turret doesn’t fix any issue related to it, and as you said above, it “further entrench its place in the ignore pile”.

If they reduce the duration of net turret immobilize to 2sec, they should consider to drop the firerate to 10sec to make it on par with the Warrior Bola and the Leg Specialist trait wich have both a 1/5 immobilisation uptime. This way Net Turret shall have a 1/5 immobilize uptime to and it will all be fair.

I don’t see why our turret should be nerfed if the Warrior can do even better when it comes to pinning down targets.

MonMalthias.4763:

As an Engineer, Turret buffs would be appreciated, but care needs to be taken to keep them from turning Engineer into turning into yet another Spirit Ranger.

Well the only way Turrets would become the next Ranger spirit build would be to give them wheels and allow them to follow the Engineer in combat with a trait. I am pretty much against that idea. Turrets should remain stationary battle tools supporting players in combat with the extra control et synergies they provide between each other.

I also see another problem if you make them mobile, they get to stay all around you and will get hit by any occuring cleaves and AoEs targeted at you or any of your turrets. Wich means you are probably going to loose them way sooner than expected and all together because of such a trait.

Finaly we already have a deployable turret trait, what is the point to keep this trait if another would make our turrets mobile and follow us right away after throwing it at a distance?

Traits should always work together, not against each other.

MonMalthias.4763:

Net Turret and Rocket Turret Overcharge have (potentially) the greatest amount of recurring CC in the entire game – as long as they’re actually targeting your opponent.

Correction, those had a great amount of recurring CC when they were still affected by the entire duration of the overcharge and not limited to a single CC. Rocket Turret overcharge now has a pretty standard cooldown for its utility and Net Turret remains a bit superior to the rest but still nothing close to what it used to do.

MonMalthias.4763:

Fixing their AI should take priority before re-evaluation of anything about Turrets. Even the Cooldown starting after placing a Turret should be carefully considered only after fixing Turret bugs. Speaking of which, Anymras, any news on your buglist?

Fixing their AI shouldn’t be to difficult, A-net clearly showed us they could create a new concept of AI while keeping the older AI in fonction. They just need to swap the last target hit script with an Engineer current target script to solve the whole target acquisition with turrets when using AoEs.

I think there are 2 very big issues with turrets,

First one beeing the countless bugs related to them. I think Anymras covered very well the extensive bug list and I think if they could fix the bugs and bring back the turrets on par with their state back in March 2013 (the only month they worked as intended and without any bugs) they would already been a lot more appreciated by people.

Secondly, some changes needs to be done about turrets overcharge abilities. Right now they are all about fire and forget wich doesn’t reward reactive gameplay. They could be render much more attractive and usefull for both PvE and PvP if they were instant abilities, at least most of them.

- Flame Turret wouldn’t need a target to activate the smoke screen giving more versatility to the turret. Would it be by covering your rifle turret and combo it with the smoke screen or just use it to allow your team/self to stealth finisher for infiltration.

- Rocket, Thumper and Net Turrets don’t need any overcharge duration sinds the maximum of shots got reduce to 1 instead of 2 (without any patchnote). Making it instant would grant Turrets Engineers some counter play against CC builds, by CC backfiring at them. Currently, overcharge abilities are instant and can be used while under a CC but there is no effective counterplay if you have to wait 3sec for your turret attack cycle, we need something that reacts fast.

- Thumper Turret instant would also work very well in conjunture with Flame Turret (+toolbelt) and Healing Turret feilds, allowing the overcharge to be a lot more responsive and effective at the same time.

- Rifle Turret is probably the most important of all of them, I think this one should have its overcharge replaced by some bursting ability, I was thinking about a short volley of projectile shooting 9 times over 3sec and applying 1stack of vulnerability, per shot, during 10sec.
I also think the auto-attack should be at least a 100% finisher, this way the Rifle Turret would actualy become a key ability for team play in the Turret Engineer gameplay allowing many synergies for extra condition application or removal and with its rather slow firerate (2sec + rotation time) I don’ t think it wouldn’t be overpowered.
*if you disagree feel free to debate.

Finaly, some traits should be fused together, Auto-tool instalation is a very underused trait and I could see this trait work with Powerwrench from Tools to make a new master trait wich could be called “repair specialist”. This way players playing with the wrench and turrets don’t need to go deeper in tool traitline and focus on turret traits. Auto-tool instalation becomes a nice bonus trait and it leaves room for a new master trait in the Tools line wich could, and should in my oppinion, be focused around gadgets and give them some additional cool special effects.

Edit : to add something on Turrets cooldown, they should indeed reward the play for keeping turrets alive but at the same time punishing them if they die to fast.
I already posted that idea on other threads, but basicaly, I would remove the clunky pick up function, and put the CD reduction on the self destruct instead and change it so instead of reducing the cooldown by 25% it reduce the cooldown for each second it stayed alive.

Doing so rewards the player for keeping the turrets alive by giving more mobility to the Engineer and you also get some free blast finishers each time you effectively build up a fight.

On the other hand, destroyed turrets get on full cooldown and would punish the Engineer for beeing careless with his turrets.

Edit 2 : Also, we need Healing Turret underwater!

What about giving a boss stability whenever he is affected by a crowd control, this way you can still not chain stun a champion or Legendary ennemy but some of the professions can use their boon striping abilities to take advantage of their temporary stability?

I hope they’ll get those bugs fixed and do something for people using a condition build with turrets. I lost a lot of firepower sinds the Rocket and Rifle Turret change, I also tried to adjust my build but it didn’t work out the way I wanted. And I wouldn’t like to see my 65 laurels spend on trinkets going to waste because of a random change in an update.

It is the ennemy skill, imps shoot very predictable but powerfull projectiles, this one probably got reflected when you used Magnetic Shield and dealt critical damage.

To confirm what Da Beetas said, the first combo field laid is the one wich trigers the finisher effect, if you put a larger field on top of a smaller field it is possible to select the desired effect (note : it doesn’t work if the larger field was applied first) with some positioning but it does requiere coordination from your team.

Now for the Guardian issue, it isn’t realy an issue unless you can’t figure out the guardian hammer rotation, wich can be simplified to : 1,1,1,2,1,1,1,1,1,2,1,1,1…
3,4,5 are just utilities, so your guardian won’t spam those unless he doesn’t know his rotation.

A hammer Guardian can only keep his field up 100% of the time if he only uses his auto-attack and also if he took the trait to extend his symbols duration. Whenever he use his blast finisher you just have to wait his first 2 swings and times he puts his symbol back on the ground with his 3th slower smash you will be largely capable to lay down a fire field and allow the guardian to blast might instead of retaliate when he uses his mighty blow again.

Also Hammer builds favour consecration skills because it can support those with ring of warding to prevent ennemies from escaping, and good to know, 2 out 4 consecrations are fire fields. depending on his traits that guardian will be capable to generate between 1-2 Fire blasts with Purging Flames and 2-3 Fire blasts with Hallowed Ground.

Taking this information into consideration, an Elementalist can take control of the field but must be aware of the hammer guardian cycle to be effective in doing so. But it is doable, I play a staff elementalist with my guildmates and we got a hammer guardian in our team and I never had any issue figuring out when I could lay of my fields.

It just ask you to open your eyes instead of following the meta to be effective, but nothing close to impossible.

Yamsandjams.3267:

I’m convinced that turrets will just never be messed up in some regard.

As far as builds are concerned, the best use of turrets I’ve seen has been the selection of 1 turret (usually rifle, net, or thumper), and then using other non-turret stuff (healing turret aside). Builds that go all turret just get so handicapped in many regards, although I think it would be nice to actually see an all-turret build that worked well (like an all-minion or all-spirit build does).

The only really effective use I’ve seen of multi-turret/all-turret builds are either node defending or general PvE.

At the same time, right now they are so messed up it is hard to make the situation look even worse.

And in regard of full Turret builds, they were never mend to be used for chasing people. Like you said, their main purpose is to defend nodes or do general stuff in PvE but, overall, they did well for PvE. (at least for me)

I was running a condition P/Sh Rabid/Apoth 0/30/30/0/10 build with sigils of Generosity and I had my fun for a month running with Net, Flame and Rocket turrets and after that I only saw a growing list of bugs affecting my turrets expending over the rest of the year. And with the recent changes to turret condition, I can’t even run my build like I used to because I lost to much condition firepower. Not to mention, I deal 1/3 of the Crowd Control I used to do because of bugs and tooltip “normalisation” of buged firerate into “true” firerate.

And speaking about skills and gear, what about people who spend time and effort getting laurels for their ascended trinkets? So we get a full revamp for turrets, without a patchnote (I’ve heard only the German one had it writen somewhere) and we get a big blast from the devs for people that already farmed their daily laurels to get adequate itemisation.

When I saw the last devspeak I already knew just by checking their short footage someting was wrong with the turrets but they weren’t saying anything about those issue while it was the best time to speak about those and fix them. Just look at Rocket Turret new toolbelt ability, sounds cool, look cool, but you can’t use it effectively and it wasn’t even tested underwater. And I won’t speak about the targeting system, wich could see some improvements.

Some people are devoted into fixing turrets, I saw a lot of good and bad ideas but we barely get any response from the devs in this regard while Turrets is one of the multiple core aspect of gameplay of the Engineer and it desperatly needs love.

Right now, all I want, is see my time and effort worth the investement and be able to play my Engineer the way it should always have been…

Qaelyn.7612:

Ambrecombe.4398:

Says the Mesmer using a Scepter!

If they put an autoattack on a weapon you like, pray they don’t use the mesmer scepter as the model.

Well, I never mentioned it was a good auto attack, I just responded to his misconception of the game. And anyway, Axe necro is also a 2 ranged chain, even if its effect is exactly the same on both attacks.

Dredd Spirit Caller.4082:

well just some boon on detonation is great
healing turret —-> detonation remove condition
rifle turret —-—> might
rocket turret —-—> fury
tumper turret —-—-> protection
net turret —-——> swiftness
flame turret —-—-> stability

or implement boon on turret or reduce the CD on pick up

Well detonation is already a Blast Finisher, so you can already generate Might & Retaliate by blasting those in other people fields, or on your own if you happen to use Flame Turret, Bomb Kit or Elixir Gun.

The only downside comes from the fact we sacrifice way to much of our effectiveness by doing so. Turrets should realy be about getting extra “manpower” on the battlefield (instead of improving yourself) and support your allies with crowd control, combo fields and finishers when our turrets sustained long enough and needs to move to another place.

This is one of the only ways we can stay unique compared to the other professions and be usefull at the same time.

It is why I strictly believe fixing bugs and improving the detonate mechanic by reducing the cooldown depending on your turret total lifespan would make the Turret Engineer a much more appreciated profession to play without dumbing it down to much.

Just my 2cents.

Dojo.1867:

Vuh.1328:

I actully think the pistol #1 could use some sort of auto attack chain(ranger SB #1 could need one too)

That would be a huge break in design patterns since ranged weapons never have auto chains.

Says the Mesmer using a Scepter!

I had also a similar idea with a pickup bundle, but I kinda fear people will hate it the same way they hate Banners as a bundle.

But yeah we could imagine the Engineer picking up his Turrets wich get relocated to his 1# – 4# and make the 5# ability a swiftness buff that allow the Engineer to run faster so he can relocate his turrets more effectively.

Deployable turrets would allow you to throw those turrets back away, and Auto-tool Installation would regenerate the health of your turrets while you are holding them in your crate. (but sounds a bit difficult to script).

Doing this action could maybe resset the 5min timer on Turrets, well…

it is something we can discuss about.

Well you probably understand my point, but if you realy want to fix turrets you have to do specificaly the following steps.
- Fix the hitbox issues, there is no reason your turrets should die when they are not standing in a AoE.
- Fix the targeting issues to allow turrets to attack the current selected target the Engineer is attacking instead of the last ennemy hit by an attack. Because you know, every single Engineer attacks have some sort of AoE component attached to it.
- Fix every issues related to overcharges and allow us to have 2 overcharged rockets and nets like we did before to gain our much needed control back.
- Give us back damaging conditions, there is not reason to ever play Turrets with a Rifle, because that same weapon without traiting and gearing is basicaly doing nothing good for our Turrets. Or at least make a new turret skill centered around another condition damage, like bleedings for instance. (There are fine gateling turrets model in the Black Citadel that could take this purpose)
- Give us a way to reward the player for keeping our turrets alive in prolongiated fights, there is nothing more frustrating to see our turrets vanish after 5min and see it go on full cooldown (thats not rewarding!). Picking them up isn’t enough right now and should be changed to incite you to Detonate them for the extra stamina and combo blast finishers. So my idea is to completely remove turrets and reduce their cooldown instead with detonate depending on how long they stayed alive on the battlefield, if they get destroyed by any other source they go on full cooldown to punish the player for playing the wrong way. If you use them correctly, you get to reposition them and get a free stamina and blast finisher on top of it for team support.
- Finaly, give turrets an active ability that triggers when they are hit by an AoE to soak most of its incomming damage but leaving it vulnerable to the next AoE attack should it be hit again. This way people cannot abuse it for AoE protection but Turrets get a second chance before they actualy get destroyed.

Do every of those following steps and I can ensure you you will fix 95% of the turrets related issues in game.

Seras.5702:

I don’t like the idea in your 2nd paragraph though. You mention fast gameplay but then you want to upgrade turrets by whacking on them, essentially wasting time and prepping for a battle RTS style. No thanks. I’d rather they either roll around like Daleks or change to golems that stomp after foes.

They should swap the turrets with asura racial golems and then tweak the numbers. Essentially, giving us 2 offensive golems, 1 melee & 1 ranged, and 3 defensive golems, 1 with control skills, 1 that straight tanks, and 1 with support skills. Then asura racials could be kitten stationary turrets.

And your idea doesn’t sound better.

First of, Engineer concept is based on the Charrs lore and not the Asuras. So lorewise, you will never see any Engineer deploy Asuras Magitec Golems on the battlefield, unless they are Asuras themself.

Secondly making it mobile doesn’t make it better, it gives you no control over their placement. And if you ever played MM Necro you know pretty well the pets AI in this game is dumb and suicidal in most of the cases, so you would probably end up loosing your “turrets” even faster than we do right now.

Not to mention, some players choose the Engineer over the other “pet” profession for the purpose of putting stationary defense on the battlefield. The game is very mobile indeed but the game also ask you a lot of time to defend positions. Turrets are made for that exact purpose so making them mobile would just make it the robot MM Necro copycat build.

People always ask for improvement and mobility but fail to understand the fact Turrets were very viable well before they got squashed by tons of bugs and quick “fixes”. I’m not saying they were perfect, far from it, but when I started playing my Turret Engineer they did a good job at controling their targets. But staff at A-net started messing things up roughly when we got close to the Southsun Cove living story patch. Messing our turrets fire rate, passive traits that reenforced our turrets were down for about 3 months before they got “fixed”, and I say fixed because they implemented other bugs like Flameturret having a longer cooldown with deployable turret traits and stuff like that.

Over a couple of months I’ve seen 2 good changes for turrets,
+ Scaling condition power goes up with condition damage (and duration)
+ Healing Turret got substentialy boosted.
The first point above became timesink sinds now we only have 1 turret dealing condition damage.

But we also lost a lot in return,
- No more burning and bleeding on Rocket and Rifle Turrets, while turreteers were clearly mend to be conditioneers and needed toughness to take threat away from those.
- Less CC, net turret doesn’t shoot 2 nets in a row while overcharged, there was a bug were it shot 3 net in a row every 12sec for a while but it was clearly a bug. Now Overcharging it doesn’t even increase its firing rate. Same goes for Rocket Turret wich could shoot 2 overcharged rockets in a row and it got changed without any indication on a patchnote…
- Net turret got his firerate normalised to 13sec because it was easier to change a tooltip instead of fixing a bug…
- The new turret targeting system is a mess, it was a simple addition wich could have been much more usefull if it actualy allowed the turret to fire on the current target instead of the last “attacked” ennemy.

K U T M.4539:

teg.1340:

@Ambrecombe: Thanks for that info. Do you know how it works for stacks of conditions? E.g. I have 5 stacks of bleed on me. Does all 5 stacks get converted from me to the enemy or just one?

All 5.

Yup, I can confirm this information, it transfers the whole intensity of a condition with its remaining duration on the target by taking in priority the first condition that was applied on you. (It also takes advantage from your condition damage bonus)

So , for instance, if a Warrior starts with a rifle Brutal Shot followed by a couple of Bleeding Shots, you will transfer the vulnerability instead of the bleeding effect because the vulnerability is on top of your condition list.