Guild Wars 2

Josh Davis.6015:

A few notes:

• You can cleanse conditions from turrets.
• You cannot heal turrets – nothing has changed in this area. (The exception of course being Thwack, Whack, Smack, and Autotool Installation.
• While boons do not currently affect turrets, this is something we might consider changing in the future depending on how the changes I mentioned in my original post pan out.

Well, thanks for at least clearing that up.

I still think it’s the wrong way to go about this, but at least now it can be said that Conditions can be cleansed and Boons may, at some point probably six months to a year in the future, be able to be applied to Turrets. I’m pretty sure nobody will be using them by the time that happens, of course.

Darksteel.8412:

Anymras.5729:

And somehow, it still makes sense to you that the nerf they pick is ‘turrets take more damage,’ when the non-stat-reliant DPS is the problem?

you adress me to take more damage, remember your own words…before talking dumb…all I did was answer to your very own statement…the fact that you reply like you did with your last comment shows…kittenis Inflictus? enjoy your day buddy XD

Okay, I have no idea what you’re saying. I’m not mocking you, at least not for your English. I’m going to guess it’s not your first language, so there’s obviously going to be some things lost in translation. Maybe you’ll explain.

“You address me to take more damage, remember your own words before talking dumb.” What? Like, I get what the second part, after the comma, says…it’s the first that’s confusing. I’m not sure what ‘you address me to’ means, aside from post, which is one of the ‘Did this get mistranslated or something?’ moments.

I’m not telling you to take more damage, if that’s what you’re saying. I’m saying it makes no sense that they would increase the damage taken by Turrets, as opposed to reducing the damage dealt, or making the damage dealt actually rely on a stat.

My last post to you was actually exactly what you said, that I was responding to in the quote right there, except formatted to match how I read it, with a question regarding how exactly it was supposed to be read if not the way it was. You still didn’t bother to explain, so I’m really just leaning toward ‘you have no idea what you’re talking about, and are just yammering endlessly.’

“Bunker guard DPS is almost nonexistent. Turret engi dps is capable of taking down cele amulet players.” How exactly was that supposed to be comprehended, aside from ‘their DPS is a problem?’

Also, I don’t care what you’re rolling. I never have. This isn’t about that.

And somehow, it still makes sense to you that the nerf they pick is ‘turrets take more damage,’ when the non-stat-reliant DPS is the problem?

As far as I’ve seen, counting solely things said in Grouch’s posts, the intent is to:

• Allow conditions to be applied, but not boons.
• Nothing was said about cleansing conditions from or healing the turrets.
• Allow incoming crits to be inflicted, but not outgoing.
• Potentially allow marks to trigger on Turrets alone.

Before I continue, I actually have no problem with the mark thing. The issues I have originate in the apparent ‘so, giving things nothing but the disadvantageous parts of the mechanics is balance, right?’ philosophy.

I’m going to go ahead and suggest a complete rework of the skill set. Barring that, I’ll make one suggestion at the end of this post.

Turrets, for some reason, are simply not in line with a lot of other things. Can’t receive boons or conditions, can’t crit or be crit, don’t scale for the most part (or the scaling doesn’t work, in the case of Healing Turret, which only scales its on-placement heal, not that anybody’s bothered to fix that in the months since it was reported). Can’t move, so they don’t even fit in the basic concept of the game’s combat, aside from the one place they’re evidently too strong.

The proposed changes essentially take the only advantages they have, and don’t give them anything in return. It’s likely a result of the existence of Turret traits; Autotool Installation + Regeneration would be quite a lot of passive healing, Metal Plating + Protection would be 66% less damage taken, Flame Turret and Rifle Turret would pump out Might and Fury for each other…it almost makes sense, especially with Rifled Turret Barrels. But, then I think of the Grenade Kit, which had its baseline damage nerfed because the Grandmaster Trait gave a +50% boost to their effectiveness. There seems an innate terror of changing traits, and that’s stupid - what’s the point of a balance team that’s afraid to modify traits?

So, assuming traits are the problem…rework them. Make them interesting. The bar was set low enough with ‘oh, my turrets will take less damage,’ and ‘oh, they’ll heal on their own,’ that it’s actually a furrow. Give them interesting, active traits, and rework turrets to fit the traits. Go back to the drawing board, come at the problem from a different angle to start with, and it might be far more effective.

For the current iteration of Turrets, my only suggestion is to implement scaling. Nerf the base values – all of them – and allow non-trait stats to affect their performance. High-damage, low durability Engi, high-damage, low durability turrets. High defense, low damage Engi, high-defense, low damage turrets. Give the player something to think about while building the character, as opposed to ‘do nothing but not die,’ as it is currently. Give advantages and drawbacks.

No, they can’t crit. And they’re about to be made able to be crit, while not allowing them to crit, even if that would include nerfing the base stats – which I would actually support, as long as it came with the addition of non-trait scaling, because that’s another large part of the problem; with the current Turret design, the Turret-user can build entirely for tanking and still deal a considerable amount of damage because of the lack of scaling. Yes, scaling and implementing turret-crits would likely increase their damage…for certain builds. These builds would also have Turrets made of glass.

And no, learn to play for the person fighting the Engineer. There’s a nest of turrets on Point A? Don’t contest Point A alone. Funny story, that Engineer is pretty much chained to the point, and terrified of their cooldowns, because if their Turrets go down, they have nothing but their toolbelt and their purposefully anemic mainhand weapon. Similarly, if they step outside the range of the turrets (by being drawn, or knocked back, anything), they have nothing. If they’re full Turret, the only stunbreak/stability they have, barring traits, relies on the Thumper turret not being on the field. Rocket and Thumper both have long cooldowns – 50 seconds each.

If you can’t figure out how to handle Turrets, and Turret-users, obviously the Engineer has chosen their build well, and if the build works, then why do they need to learn to play? It seems like they’ve pretty well got that in the bag. Predict their skills. Know what the turrets do, learn the windows when they won’t use things. The same thing you do against everything else.

Also, did you stop reading when I said ‘It is a learn to play issue?’ I specifically explain why asking for different ‘descriptions’ isn’t something that would work. You’re just too busy making excuses for why you shouldn’t have to learn to play against a set of immobile objects, and claiming that the only reason people are saying that there should be a rework is because they’re being nerfed.

(As a side-note, I used Turrets because I liked them, not any question of viability. PvE is easy enough, for the most part, for a full turret build to work…with some difficulty.)

Speaking as someone who’s used Turrets from Day 1, and used to curate a fairly extensive buglist regarding them: they’ve needed a complete rework for years.

I didn’t do PvP, because it didn’t interest me, but for everything else, they suck, and they always have sucked. Now they’re not even good for the niche uses they’d found, aside from reflect-doming. Until they’re used as primers for Epidemic, maybe. Then they’ll just be ‘do not be near that’ objects.

They’re being unilaterally nerfed, with the most obvious compensations being explicitly ditched – they can have conditions inflicted, but they can’t benefit from boons. They can be crit, but they can’t inflict crits. They don’t scale to stats that aren’t derived from traits, they don’t move, they don’t fit the mobility theme of the gameplay.

Why not rework them? Obviously they’re not a particularly good skill-set to begin with, given how many things are stacked against them, how many basic rules of the game they simply do not involve themselves in. The only place they shine is Beginner PvP, and that’ll still be a thing, because these changes don’t do anything about the damage output of the turrets, just the input. People will still try to ignore the turrets and end up getting melted while they try to fight the Engineer. Learn-to-play, indeed.

Suggesting a difference between PvE and PvP skill descriptions is actually not a particularly effective idea, either. Anet has specifically decided to try not to do those, after all, and even if there’s a difference between the PvE and PvP variations of turrets, turrets will still suck in PvE, while continuing to do exactly what they’ve been doing in beginner PvP, where they’re actually a problem.

The ideas have been kicked around for years. Anet hasn’t listened, though, so Turrets continue to be terrible, and will become more terrible as a result of the nerf.

That said, both 1 and 2 have been popular ideas for improving Turrets and their playstyle.
Number 1 would be a good way to handle, I think, the apparent issue of consistency (what with the issue being ‘turrets are too tough, turreteers are too tough’), as well as introducing a reason to do something besides ‘So, I’ll just go Soldier, Turrets, x/x/6/6/x, and be the most annoying tanky bunker ever.’
Number 2 would address something else that’s been hitting Turrets hard – they’re relatively static in a game that wants to be dynamic.

Unfortunately, I doubt either will happen. 1 would cause nerfs to Turrets or other skills, most likely, as a result of people using Turrets in Berserker builds, and 2 would actually require effort, something I really doubt I’ll see from the Anet that can’t be bothered to fix Hobosacks.

Another indicator that Anet just wants to nerf Turrets, and likely won’t bother doing anything but ticking ‘can be crit’ and ‘can receive conditions’: They’ve explicitly stated that Turrets will not be able to receive boons or do any critting themselves. The most they’ve said is “well, they’ll still be immune to CC, and they don’t currently trigger marks on their own, but we can change that second one.” It seems evident that they don’t really care what happens to Turrets, as long as people stop whining about them being too good.

Given how little is known about Revenants and how they work, I’m not really sure if there’s going to be an actual answer as yet, as opposed to conjecture.

Sagat.3285:

Spasticlese.2358:

What about making turrents scale off your stats/amulet?

This, all AI need to, I’ll be waiting for viable turrets at higher level.

I’d support this; nerfing their base values, in exchange for adding scaling, is something I’ve thought they should do for, literally, years.

Other than that, though, I’m pretty sure Turrets need reworked from the ground up. They’re static in a very mobile game, which ends up making them pointless everywhere except for King of the Hill/Domination, where they end up just drawing complaints from people who don’t bother to learn their counter-play. On top of that, of course, is the Engineer reliance on Kits for weapon swapping, etcetera, which becomes an issue for Turret builds because traiting for Turrets is cripplingly expensive, trait-point-wise, which can make it difficult to work a Kit into the build without it feeling like at least part of that investment was wasted.

I’m not sure what I’d suggest as a rework, though. It’s been a long time since I played at all, much less regularly enough to really have any ideas that aren’t just half-remembered.

Engineer’s got a lot of variety to it, that makes it difficult to really say how difficult it is to use. Different skillsets will have very different floors and so forth.

The setting is also very important – PvE is generally pretty much “Remember to look at the screen. You win,” with a few tougher areas (such as dungeons and some of the newer zones), while PvP has a whole other set of things.
For example, a turret build is good for doing hotjoin sPvP, from what I hear, and is very easy to use in that setting. A full turret build in PvE will not often work very well, by comparison; the combat in most of the game is too mobile, and those situations where placing turrets isn’t more trouble than it’s worth generally just result in the turrets being obliterated.

Unfortunately, if it can be posted, people will start requiring that it be posted, with a similar effect to the Inspect function. It’d just create an extra hoop to jump through for the same data, to the same effect.

I’m pretty sure there is or was a thing where dungeon parties would require pinging of gear and /kick people who chose not to ping or pinged the ‘wrong’ gear. If that’s never been a thing, I’m confused about where I got the idea for it having been, and surprised.

…That would be really weird, given that all stunbreaks are likely the same function, called by the skills.

Then again, this is the same crew that managed to release a half-patched Rocket Turret.

Thagyr.4136:

Sold Out Again.4129:

Nah, mail carrier customization was definitely the most important thing ever.

(That came out shortly after the last dev reply saying ‘We have more important projects right now’.)

Money is all that is important. Mail carriers are used by everyone. Hobo sacks are engineer exclusive. Even if they made us pay for them (which I am willing to do), it still is a specific product aimed at a smaller demographic of the playerbase and doesn’t have as much profit lined up.

On the same token, how much money do hobosacks lose Anet? I know they’ve been a reason for me not to buy gems, even after Turrets were finally fixed. The lack of interest in actually resolving an ancient issue has pretty much killed any enthusiasm I had for the game, too – not because I’m actually that invested in hobosacks, of all things (I’ve never liked that we’re balanced around Kits, and I barely use them when I can avoid doing so, on the increasingly rare occasion that I play), but because of what it represents.

To me, it represents that they do not care about the chunk of their playerbase that mainly plays Engineer. They’ve balanced a class around something, given that something an aspect that prevents them from fully engaging in the cosmetics-driven endgame, and continuously move resolving that problem to the back of the queue in favor of many and various other items and functions. Everything, or nearly so, that was initially mentioned as something that came ahead of hobosacks in the pipeline has been finished – so now it’s just that this doesn’t matter to them. They stopped even bothering to give real reasons, just saying they don’t have the resources.

Meanwhile, Mesmer Phantasms will now properly display their back item. There’s a talking back item, too, for that matter, among a plethora of other interesting-looking back items, some of which look perfect for the Engineer. Granted, neither set of things is quite the same as adding a UI component and maybe modeling a hand-item…but neither is much more difficult. Given the number of changes to the Hero Panel that have been seen since release, the plethora of customization options that’re constantly being added onto…six new icons, six new weapon models (really, only four, as EG and FT both have perfectly good models already) shouldn’t be much to ask for. It really shouldn’t. It should have just been a minor thing, and been fixed when the other primary projects were completed, because it really shouldn’t be much effort.
This isn’t a major thing, it’s just that it’s been left to fester.

But here we still are, and I’m not giving them another cent until this thread can be put to rest.
They’ve lost, through their inaction, literally every dollar I would have spent if they’d actually bothered, at any point since release, to fix this – and I’d certainly say that I’m generous with my money when I feel it’s being earned, given that I’ve dropped $300+ on some games via microtransactions. Every single item in the Gem Shop that I’d thought of buying, I would have, but their continuous disregard for this issue made me wonder if they’d be the kind of company I’d want to continue to support. If they’d like to explain what it is that makes this issue so difficult to address they apparently need enough resources to program the game from the ground up, maybe they could change my mind – but they won’t, and their Ivory Tower mentality just exacerbates the issue.

Dethl.2875:

Moving into and out of the first person camera removes your hobosack until your next kit switch. Quick, someone make a macro to have your camera ping pong back every time.

inb4

Bugfix: Engineer Kits now properly displayed after leaving first-person perspective.

One of the devs did mention they were thinking of doing a fanny-pack thing.

Yeah, it’s a bad argument. It’s also probably what they’d say if they were asked to justify it.

There’s a general pattern of ‘if people don’t seem happy in a thread, devs don’t talk in it.’
Devs haven’t responded – as far as I am aware – to any threads about the Thief trait Last Refuge, no devs ever responded to the many Broke Scope threads that initially littered the Engineer boards (until somebody posted one to the sPvP boards, whereupon it had to be demonstrated that just because the script looks fine, doesn’t mean it’s working, as pretty much anybody who’s tried writing code should know)…it’s a pretty clear pattern. They’ll usually try not to get into a conversation in a less-than-hyped thread, and if they do appear in one at all, the responses are usually businesslike and/or noncommittal.
‘We do not have the resources right now, but we would really like to do something about the issue,’ being the response seen re: Hobosacks.

…not that this stopped them from making Mesmer Phantasms show back items properly; whether that’s a bugfix or an addition, it sort of jumps out as a ‘well, obviously Mesmers are viewed as more deserving of the resources’ sort of change. Real nice, that. And I really love that they added many more camera options (complete with UI support); it’ll let us get a really good look at the hideous burlap sack-tumors. Surely, that couldn’t have waited two more weeks (if at all) while they fixed a long-standing QoL issue afflicting an entire profession (which is, of course, balanced around the things that bring the issue to light).

Man, it really is too bad that there isn’t a sarcasm font.

Eh, odds are that it means nearly nothing for the resolution of Hobosacks – they can’t hide behind some ludicrous balance argument when trying to explain why Mesmer phantasms don’t show the Mesmer’s back items. In fact, they could maybe manage an argument for why they should, if the purpose of phantasms is to confuse the enemy as to which target is the real one.

Meanwhile, they claim there’s a balance concern that warrants keeping a set of (mostly) nearly identical, brown sacks that’re only visible from behind the user, two of which can only be differentiated (without skill use) based on a tiny, tiny wrench (smaller than any weapon I’ve seen) in one hand. The only two that can be differentiated easily, even from behind, are the two that can be identified from in front, as they give a Rifle-sized indicator in the character’s hands. … but this bit was stale two years ago, so I’m not going to keep ranting about it.

Point is, they can pretend there’s a balance concern to Phantasms not having a back item, just like they pretend it matters from a balance standpoint if Kits give Hobosacks.

Ronin.5038:

Remove the Hobosacks. Replace them with an icon, just like the elementalist.

Truthfully, I’m expecting this to become the new 25+ page is complaints about the Hobosack as ANet continues to make excuses as to why they can’t fix it.

They don’t even bother to actually make excuses, though.
They’ve just gone “We don’t have the resources” every single time they respond. First there was Colin, maybe a few months after release, going “We have to get things like spectator mode and custom arenas done first,” among other things that I can’t recall but am pretty sure have been in the game for quite some time, then there was Bill, a few months later, going “We’d like to do something, but we don’t have the resources. Here’s what we’re thinking, though,” and then the thread got ignored for…pretty sure it was a year or more. Then Gaile comes in and says, of course, “We don’t have the resources, but there’s talk of what they’d do about it if they could.”

So, they want to fix it, is the impression I’m getting, but every time they can, they get told to do something else instead. Not that this stopped them from making a Mail Carrier customization option, complete with new UI elements.

Ezekel.6394:

You do actually get the toughness, it just doesn’t display correctly.

In general, with GW2, don’t trust the displayed numbers. They often insist things are working, when they really aren’t, or give the impression that they aren’t, when they really are.

Oh, yeah, focusing on the expansion is fine and dandy. No complaints about them focusing on that. Gotta have it working, etcetera. Then again…they’ll always have something else to focus on. Something ‘bigger,’ something they can put on the Gem Store.

This has been getting the “We don’t have the resources” response from close to release, when they were working on spectator mode, along with a few other things. It made sense, then, too, because…well, they wanted to be an esport, Spectator Mode is pretty necessary for that. But, then they got those working, and the resources just kept getting reallocated. They keep getting reallocated. At this point, they’ve said “we want to fix it” every time they’ve responded, following up with “but we can’t do it right now, we have bigger projects.” Which, really, is part of the point; this is such a small thing that it could probably be resolved very quickly, if they bothered to.

If we just keep trying to get them to acknowledge it, they’ll just set up a routine. Every few months, they’ll go “We’re reading this thread, lots of great ideas, our people are spitballing some things around the office, but we don’t have the resources to work on this at the moment. We’ll get to it!” Right there, I’ve pretty much paraphrased every response received regarding this, so they really might have already come up with a routine.

Acknowledging is no longer enough. We’ve been strung along for years on this, and it’s honestly kind of disgusting.

Does it scale with power now? Last I knew, it looked like it scaled with power, but it had no real effect (tooltip said yes, testing said no). I’d test it, but I’d think that’d be one of those changes people would have talked about (and I don’t want to contribute logins until the hobosack issue is fixed, since I don’t even really play anymore anyway).

I’m not entirely sure, but I’d definitely rate this as ‘doubtful.’

My reasoning: Turrets are affected only by traits, and stats gained by points in traitlines, with the exception of Condition Damage, Condition Duration, Boon Duration, and Healing Power. The only known ways to increase direct damage, as far as I am aware, are Rifled Turret Barrels and points in the Explosives traitline.

Gaaroth.2567:

This thread wont be dismissed so easly! :-D
A word from devs would be so good, even a “we are planning on fix it not in HoT but on one of later patches!”

I ‘unno if that would actually be sufficient, anymore. See, every time they respond to it, it’s “We don’t have the resources right now,” and there’s never even conjecture about when they might. They occasionally tell us they’ve been spitballing ideas, but they just never do anything, and so far we’ve let them just keep going “We don’t have the resources.”

We have no way of holding them to anything they say, obviously – aside from playing or not playing, buying gems or not buying gems – but at this point, I don’t a word will work anymore. The first time or two, sure, whatever, but now it’s just getting stupid.

Oh, boy, yet another back item Engineers will only see 10% of the time if they’re using the Kits they’re balanced around.

Well, at least that isn’t new.

From here, it seems like you’re just trolling. “I’m just trying to save you all the bitterness of disappointment” is a nice, sanctimonious cover for “I was trying to get people to get mad, and it didn’t work.”

If you’re not trolling, then…honestly, I don’t know what to tell you, besides ‘do you really think, after almost three years, you are going to stop this thread?’
At this point, we’re not even hoping, just being annoyed. The picket line’s got tired eyes, and the paint’s peeling off the signs.
If they fix hobosacks, great, I’ll buy two copies of HoT. I said I would, after all; maybe I’d even play.
If they don’t, I stopped playing when they wedged an advert for their expansion announcement into the final episode of the Living Story. (On a side-note, that’s going to look really weird to people who play it after the announcement, but I doubt Anet cares about that.) I really only keep the game installed for nostalgia; I liked it when it came out, when I actually had some hope that Anet wouldn’t do exactly what it’s done, and thought the game could be great.
Now it’s just a business zombie, rolling along, groaning for money and hoping that it can keep pulling people in fast enough to cover the people who get bored, or exasperated, and leave.

The controls are still the same. There have been mods for the ‘mouselook’ style, much like TERA’s combat, but it’s prohibited. … I think.

@ Machiavell: If that were so, somebody would’ve mentioned it earlier, oddly enough, considering that this has been a thorn in the side of Engineers since beta. From what I hear, the Charr was a Warrior, and Flamethrower is already an Environmental Weapon in Southsun, at least – if an event involves Flamethrowers, odds are they’re not going to limit their access to Engineers. Also, given people’s tendency to latch on to stupid, stupid things, they probably wouldn’t demonstrate that an event uses flamethrowers by showing an Engineer with a flamethrower; they’d have a lot of dumb people saying a lot of dumb things about how it’s implied that only Engineers can contribute to the thing, just because Flamethrower is already something Engineers have access to.

Trust me. As soon as they declare that ‘the hobosack is dead, long live the hobosack,’ the Hobosack threads will stop dead, with the final posts being “HOLY CRAP THEY DID IT,” “About freakin’ time,” “aw, I liked the hobosacks,” and me going “…You know, I really didn’t expect that to happen. Guess I gotta pony up for two copies of HoT now, huh.” Implications don’t do the trick, though.

Turrets just aren’t really very…good. At all. As somebody who used a Turreteer build almost exclusively from release in PvE, it really doesn’t do a ton (but it’s more challenging, I find, to work with the limited tools than to walk around with three kits and remember which button combination does what you want). Quick tip: Healing Turret’s really just a Water Field bomb. Place it, overcharge it, and either detonate it or pick it up, so you can have it available and not feel chained to it.

That said, it’s not a faux pas to use Turrets, and it’s not trolls completing them in a way that Turrets can’t contribute to, either. A lot of people have been playing since release, and a lot of old content has grown stagnant; instead of playing how Anet might (or might not) have intended, people have found the fastest/most efficient/most effective ways to clear events as quickly as possible to get the rewards. That’s all it is – somebody playing to clear events as quickly as they can. Turrets, being static objects in a dynamic game, don’t always work very well for that.
If you’d really like to use Turrets to get contribution, place them near the spawn points, so they can tag monsters before the monsters are dead.

Grenade #1 might actually have a reason for not being an AA, though. If it was made into an AA, it’d have to either lose the Ground-Targeted AoE part of the skill (so that it could be a sort-of-homing attack like other ranged auto-attacks), or it’d miss constantly at particular ranges.
That said: If a compromise were reached, where Grenade #1 was still a GTAoE, but would auto-fire to the cursor as long as the kit was equipped, maybe it’d work. Or it’d just end up being ‘and now every Engineer with a GKit equipped is spamming ’nades all across the screen because they made Grenade #1 something like an auto-attack.’

Ranting and rhetoric aside, it would be really nice to have some kind of response as to whether this is being fixed with HoT.

My question:
“Will Engineer Hobosacks still be a thing, or has their wait in the pipeline finally ended?” or “What is ahead of Hobosacks in the pipeline, and when was it put in the pipeline?”

Context:
There’s been a thread about them for two and a half years, with every response being “We don’t have the resources right now.” In that time, the first wave of things that was mentioned as taking up the resources have been finished, various customizations implemented (including mail carriers, custom finishers, and a few other things), and generally the impression I, at least, have been getting is that the resources to fix hobosacks will never be allocated because they will always be on something else. The criteria for ‘more important than hobosacks’ has thus far seemed to consist of ‘does it exist?’

I’ll be the guy who didn’t buy the expansion because of hobosacks.

If they do fix hobosacks, I’ll probably do both.

Do you have the recipe? With the newer sets of gear, they often require acquiring the recipes before they can be crafted.

Yeah, I’m bumping this – this issue is pretty much why I’m not buying HoT, and have never bought gems. In all probability, I’m not the only one. Ignoring an issue because ‘we don’t have the resources’ will hurt the bottom line, even if it’s seemingly minor – especially if other projects keep arriving that just happen to suck up the resources before they can be used. That just makes people feel ignored, or put off, treated like they don’t matter; it’s nice that staff seem to want to fix the problem, but it’s a lot nicer if they actually do fix it.

The thought counts, but only so much.

I can say for a fact that this bug was reported, too. Did it myself, in-game and on-forum.

Given that I, at one point, had something like thirty items on the Big Turret Bug List, before they were almost all resolved, I think they either rotate through or cherry-pick problems in order of difficulty. The Turret fixes all came within a period of a couple months, it seemed like, after six months to a year of absolute silence (as I recall), but the Turret skillset also seemingly has the most redundant, overcomplicated system that I’ve heard of, which has caused some bizarre bugs including a time when Rocket Turret was at a half-patched state.

Knighthonor.4061:

Chrury.4627:

Well wait…if the Legends change every skill on the right side of the bar, will you even be able to slot racial skills? or Antitoxin Spray?

I’m probably confused but it read to me like you could only swap Legends.

I doubt that’s how it works, because if that was the case, than this would be the only class with no utility skills since all skills are from weapons and channels.

I believe that the class gets utilities, but utilities get a unique spin on them when it comes to channels.

Similar way that Racials have Toolbelt effects for Engineer’s class mechanics..

This is pretty much how I expect it to go.
The class will likely have a choice of utilities, but their utilities will change based on the Legend – much like Elementalist Glyphs change their effects based on Attunement, is how I’d look at it.
Alternately, perhaps the class will have separate ‘pools’ of utility skills, and F1/F2 will swap between presets, more or less, like how there’s presets for underwater and on-ground skills. If I were to design this style of Utility swap, I’d have each skill bought unlock one skill for each pool.

I built Celestial mostly so I could dork around with any build I wanted, or adapt them on the fly, without having to switch gear. Works well for that, and I found that it felt pretty okay even when I had a build picked – it doesn’t have any major weaknesses besides that it doesn’t have any real strengths, after all, and if you stack Might, you’ll end up with a fair amount of damage anyway.

If you’re looking for a bursty build, though, just go with Berserker or Assassin, I think; Celestial isn’t as good for bursting if you don’t have a bunch of Might stacks.

Sold Out.7625:

krixis.9538:

I think they should also reduce the size of the kits on humans / charr / norn / salads as they are far to big and laughable.

on asura how ever they are scaled perfectly and are small and look very goon on asura engineers.

the “hobo sacks” are here to stay and are a part of the class mechanic / iconic look so best of luck getting them removed.

basically the effort involved to fix the kits is just to much and they cba to change it.

Actually, we have -three- confirmations that they want to remove the Hobo Sacks on the big, big, biiiiiiig thread about it by now. They just don’t know how to because they are busy making things like mail carriers. :>

They also confirmed that they wanted to remove it in the old Legendaries thread, where Colin Johanson specifically mentioned that he rarely saw his 8-Bit Backpack due to Kits.

But, yeah, mail carriers.

My stopgap against Conditions with my Turret builds is pretty much just the Sigil of Purity; it only works once per ten seconds, and only clears one at a time, so it’s still pretty bad against conditions, but it’s something.

Dirame.8521:

You say condi turrets but no flame turret.

Yeah. If you’re running condition turrets, you want the Flame Turret. It’s the only Turret that inflicts a directly damaging condition, after the changes to Rocket Turret.

Personally, I’d go with Rifle, Flame, and Thumper if it’s three-turret, or Thumper, Flame and Throw Mine if it isn’t – with Thumper, you can keep enemies in range of Flame more easily, as well as get the one stunbreak that Turrets offer. Rifle Turret’s pretty much just there for the Vulnerability stacks, Blast Finishers, and traited Fury, really (along with, of course, APT). Throw Mine makes being in that area around the Flame Turret even more unpleasant, with Mine Field providing boon-stripping and a spike, and Throw Mine also stripping boons and providing ground-targeted, push-button crowd-control (as well as a blast finisher), so it can be used to push enemies away from the Turret if need be…or, of course, right back into it.
In combination with Shield #4, Thumper Overcharge, and Shield #5, it can manage an irritating amount of keep-away, if that’s your thing.

It does have something to do with HoT – HoT might take a hit from Engineer mains not wanting to continue being treated as non-participants in the cosmetics-driven endgame, and thus deciding to not spend money on it. I’ve played since release, and I haven’t so much as patched my launcher since HoT was announced as a paid expansion, partially for that reason, in fact. They’ve ignored it, or put it off, for almost three years now, and it’s going to hurt their sales in some capacity.

As for reasons to bundle the fix with HoT: There are none. This should’ve been fixed before the game ever released to begin with, it could’ve been fixed at any point, and it just…got passed over. “We don’t have the resources,” has been the only response, when they bothered to say anything.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with “Hey, guys, when HoT’s done, it’d be nice if we maybe got an intern or somebody to put a couple lines of code in and sketch some indicators,” and I don’t think there’s a better forum to put that request in than the one that they’ll be looking at to try to drum up hype.

They’ve not entirely ignored it, but every time they talk about it, it’s just “We don’t have the resources available. Also, please buy this thing from the Gem Store that surely required far more resources than would be required to fix Hobosacks.”

Seriously. Mail Carriers, fancy gathering tools with special animations, a voice-acted back item…and they’ll probably tell us there’s no resources for fixing Hobosacks until the servers shut down. I can understand needing to make money, but Ivory Towering and refusing to even perform the most resource-considerate version of a no-Hobosack fix just…it’s part of why I will not buy gems until Hobosacks are fixed. I will not buy Heart of Thorns unless they’re fixed. I haven’t even logged on since HoT was announced as a paid expansion. They can’t even be bothered to commit the manpower to resolve this Quality-of-Life issue after two years of having Engineers be the only class who often can’t see their back item, why should I give them more money?

Dante.1763:

Mo Mo.1947:

There was already a thread about this. Dev feedback in the thread said they are looking at options to solve the hobosack issue.

Quite a while ago if i do remember correctly think its a year old now, i know this has been asked about many many times, and there still hasnt been a change on this issue. So, really dont see the harm in the OPs opening of a new thread.

Every time there’s any kind of response to the Hobosack issue, it’s pretty much “We’d like to do something, but we don’t have the resources. The guys’ve been spitballing some ideas, though!”
…and then they put out Mail Carriers as customization.
…they add animations for gem-store only infinite gathering tools.
…they add a voice-acted back item.
…they argue against capes for almost exactly the reasons Hobosacks are a bad thing.

At this point, it seems to me that they will never have the resources, because they will always be tied up in one project or another, especially, of course, projects that get put on the Gem Store. They don’t seem to care about Hobosacks, especially compared against literally anything else, as long as they can put it on the Gem Store it seems like.

The problem is that they’ve never bothered to actually implement anything, even the absolute most resource-considerate interpretation of “If show back item tag is checked, Kit does not cover existing back item, even if it’s invisible; if show back item is not checked, Kit does show up,” accompanied by an indication similar to the Elementalist’s attunement badges on the boon bar.
There’s no real sPvP balance threat in making the kits less noticeable (not that Kits are even reliable as a tell – two of them are almost identical except for a wrench-in-hand on one, characters tend to be obscuring the Kit, and those who use Kits heavily tend to ping-pong between them with great speed).

This is all contributory to my personal disinclination to buy Heart of Thorns, or even gems.
Why would I give them more money than I did buying the game on release at full price, when they couldn’t even be bothered to perform such a simple Quality of Life adjustment sometime in the years between then and now? Why should I?

As for whether there’s a need for more threads about Hobosacks, as I’ve gone off on a bit of a rant – we still have them, don’t we? Besides, the only time we get devs to pretend they care is when we go, find them, and call them out on it in threads they actually seem to consider worth responding to; the last dev responses we received in the Hobosack thread started a few days after I went into a thread about Capes and pointed out the hypocrisy involved in their arguments against, before which there was a resounding silence of something like a year, year-and-a-half.

I haven’t played since HoT was announced as a buy-to-play, but…

I’ll alter my original ‘fix hobosacks and I’ll buy a bunch of gems,’ and instead make it ‘fix hobosacks, and I’ll buy HoT for both myself and my girlfriend.’

I used to have that problem a lot, when I actually did dungeons. I’d literally enter a room, and an enemy across the room, fighting another party member, would hit me with a Warrior Sword #1 auto-attack. From across the freakin’ room, I repeat. Even glitches had aggro on me!
At the worst points, I’ve had eight enemies peel off my party members and all dive on me.

I really doubt DPS was a problem for me, too – I was probably running Cleric’s, or Knight’s, or some combination thereof, and using Turrets. Old Turrets, too, the ones that attacked whatever they wanted, were bugged so heavily that I went and compiled a nearly thirty-item-long buglist on…those ones. They didn’t even scale to anything at the time.

I…didn’t do anything about it, besides go “WELL DON’T I FEEL IMPORTANT” and run around screaming. Even happened in world boss fights, and other ‘event boss’ things, so much so that I could reliably kite the Modniir, for example, through literally everyone’s attacks and not lose aggro. I couldn’t get it to stop, and once I got used to it, I kind of liked it. So I ran with it, and built for tanking; I fine-tuned my builds to handle the greatest number of enemies at a time, with little concern for speed…after all, they wouldn’t leave me alone, so as long as I could survive them, I’d grind them into dust.

I tried Kits at various points in leveling. Never liked them. Not because they’re difficult to use, which they really aren’t unless you’re going for some kind of optimal performance build in PvP, but because they made things too easy – I could mash buttons and do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, because there’s so many skills that some of them are bound to be off cooldown. It feels spammy to me, being able to chuck so much random crap.

Kadin.2356:

Their “to-do” list shouldn’t take over a year to cycle through. I understand prioritzation but this was straining credibility 6 months ago, now it’s just embarrassing.

It can’t be a hard fix, there are plenty of already existing spell effects that grant “invisiblity” instead of stealth. Seriously just fix it already.

Engineer hobosacks are in a similar situation – since launch, there’s been threads about them, and the response has always been ‘We just don’t have the resources at the moment.’ My theory is that they just keep shoving things into the pipeline, which keeps pushing seemingly small fixes back; if I’m right, then we can expect Last Refuge to be fixed at the same time as Hobosacks: roughly a year after the game has, for all intents and purposes, died.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Gimli.9461:

This player promptly scapered when I mentioned in map chat that Anet player was with the zerg, so I don’t have their name, or I’d have reported them in-game and wouldn’t post here.

reported for what, exactly?

I am also confused what they’d be reported for.
They’re not resurrecting people? They’re not changing maps for…something to do with breach failures? Neither was any other player in that zerg, from the sounds of it. Would you have reported every single player in it? Why? They’re just playing the game. Nothing more. I don’t always resurrect people when I’m running along, with or without a zerg, whether or not they’re howling for it – in fact, if they’re yowling, I’ll leave them there out of spite. Is that reportable?

They’re disregarding you? Maybe they have chat turned off. I turn it off myself, sometimes, when people are being too puerile or I’m just having a bad day and don’t trust my self-control against wanting to jump down somebody’s throat if they say the wrong thing. Report me for that, too.

Is it that it was an Anet employee playing the game in this way that you think should be report-worthy? That’s just going to make them not play, or at least not want to show that they’re affiliated with Anet. They’re not company reps, they’re just employees who happen to be spending some free time (presumably, unless they’re doing some kind of research) playing the game they work on.