Guild Wars 2

I’ve been running full turrets pretty much since release, and the times that my turrets have been out for five minutes or more…well, those tend to be when I’m reading a book while farming for crafting materials or something. Never when I’m actively playing. Admittedly, my experience is purely PvE, but I still find it difficult to imagine a circumstance in which I am both actively playing and leaving my turrets standing (not even picking them up to arrange them in slightly different ways) for upwards of five minutes at a time barring a fire-and-forget ambush in which they’re essentially warning bells.

I think the change may have something to do with the Engineer’s ability to get contribution to several events simultaneously while not really being in the area of any of them or actually participating at all – no other minion-having profession’s minions can be used in this particular way, as all other minions follow their makers.

SpaceCowboy.1398:

Anymras.5729:

I still like the idea of having them operate a bit more like a banner, come to think of it – pick the bloody thing up and use it as a weapon until you find somewhere else to put it.

That could be more awesome than words could ever express! My only concern is running a multiple Turret build, but I guess Warriors have to deal with the same issue.

Man, the possibilities of have Turrets become kits you can pick up… machine gun, rocket launcher, thumper hammer… wow!

Running a multiple-turret build wouldn’t be discouraged by allowing it, I think – it’d sort of balance itself out a bit, due to the whole ‘can only carry one turret as a weapon at a time’ thing; you wouldn’t have one Engineer running around with some sort of frankenturret cannon or something, but rather one Engineer picking up whatever turret seemed best for the next area and running with it to a new location.

Pros: It’d resolve the mobility issue, while also allowing Turret-users to make use of the Runes of the Engineer’s Bundle damage boost, and keeping Turrets basically immobile. Also, each Turret would allow a set of skills unique to the Turret in question, allowing for more versatility from builds that tend to be less flexible than others.

Cons: It’s similar to making Turrets a more active version of the Warrior’s Banners, I guess. I really don’t think that’s much of a problem, though.

Also – For the people calling for trait-line restructuring: That’s not likely to happen until they’ve gotten the skills themselves up to par. When skills can be said to generally be balanced, then we might see a trait-line restructure. It’s a lot more work to restructure entire traitlines than it is to modify skills, I’m pretty sure. ‘course, for all I know, they might be in the process of doing it and it’s just going to be a few patches before we see it.

Currently, the only ways to increase direct (non-Condition) Turret damage is to have the Rifled Barrels trait and/or have points in Explosives – for some reason, their damage and condition durations are modified by the Explosives trait.

That is, unless they snuck a ‘all turret attacks are treated as if made by the player’ in somewhere.

As for suggested Turret traits: I’d suggest the Accelerant-Packed Turrets trait, above anything else; it provides an auxiliary source of damage (though I’m not sure how much) and knockback. With the Rifle and Healing Turrets, the cooldown is even almost the same as the Throw Mine skill (untraited). Aside from that, the Inventions traitline in general – Metal-Plated Turrets might not do enough, but it’s something, and Rifled Turret Barrels is pretty great for a Turret-focused Engineer. Autotool Installation’s pretty much pointless in its current incarnation, though – too long a wait for too little recovered on an item with too little survivability to begin with.

I think the simplest, most effective fix they could do for Turrets would be to have them all scale off of all stats – what improved the player would improve the turret, so if a character were built for survivability, they’d also have impressively tough turrets, or if they were a glass cannon, they’d have glass cannon turrets.

Yeah, they really just can’t get Deployable Turrets working consistently, it seems like – they change something to do with turrets, suddenly it’s all gone sideways again.

I definitely support A.) – it’s just silly to have them done like they are. You almost don’t want to use them, because then you’ll have to stand around letting the cooldown tick after the fight’s done, whether or not you pick them up or detonate them; if that doesn’t happen, you get into the habit of estimating how much of the cooldown the current fight will absorb if you detonate the longer cooldown turrets (such as the Thumper and Rocket turrets) and just slog through with base weaponry.

Also: Picking up a turret reduces the cooldown by roughly 25% (Healing and Rifle Turret are 15-second cooldowns if you can pick them up with a 20-second base, which honestly ain’t that bad with or without picking them up, in my opinion, for example, and I don’t have a problem with the Flame Turret’s cooldown now that it’s been reduced).

I also support the idea of making it so that they can be picked up and moved like the Ghostbore turrets in the Iron Legion personal story; it just makes sense. I still like the idea of having them operate a bit more like a banner, come to think of it – pick the bloody thing up and use it as a weapon until you find somewhere else to put it.

I’m beginning to think they should either remove Deployable Turrets entirely or make it the default functionality, as they just can’t seem to get it working properly.

My thoughts/things for consideration regarding turret builds post-3/26/2013:
1) Flame Turret, when used with Deployable Turrets, doesn’t receive the cooldown reduction at the time of this writing – here’s hoping that it’s fixed with some immediacy. Rocket Turret does receive the cooldown reduction, and all toolbelt skills have their effects changed as-listed.

2) All Utility turrets currently scale off of Explosives in some way – if 30 points are in Explosives, direct damage turrets will deal more than if 0 points are in Explosives, and Condition-inflicting turrets will have a longer duration (currently uncertain of whether this affects Thumper’s new Cripple, however).

Not sure if the same is true for Precision, Vitality, or Toughness, however, and it still only offers a potential + 300 Power/+ 30% Duration to any turret used.

aaand the Flame Turret’s cooldown is bugged. welp.

I’m glad they improved turrets, especially the bits about cooldown reductions. (It amuses me that their response to Turret Toolbelt skill cooldowns was “Huh, that’s a big number. Let’s just chop that in half.”) I still wish they’d make them scale with Power/Precision, at least, but I can see how that might encounter some difficulties with glass cannon builds using the Rocket Turret.

It’s also neat that they made Kit Refinement more flavorful than just triggering effects existing as part of the kit, I think; I don’t use kits, so eh.

This is a mainly-turret build I used for a little while. Works best if specced for survivability, seemed like. As noted, it’s a PvE build; it was fairly decent for kiting, and could be used to take down a Veteran Karka surprisingly easily (especially due to the Throw Mine skill and its toolbelt). https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/The-Anvil-PvE-Build/first#post1172673

Yeah, it would be nice if they would talk to the community more often, or at the very least more openly. Letting the players know that they are being paid attention to is an important thing. Otherwise, it can feel like there’s a disconnect, and that can make it even more frustrating when things aren’t working properly.

I can understand why they don’t, though – people lose their kitten easily, and some of the more vocal opponents of (X) change will oppose it regardless of the reasoning behind it, and be noisy enough about it to kitten other people off. The PR people might mostly see the ranting and decide it was a bad move to let people talk openly, or the people doing the talking might get discouraged by the response, if it’s noisy enough ranting.

His last line sounds…promising, if you run it through an “I can’t actually talk about anything definite…” filter.

“Something like that might be…already being talked about.” There’s a slight hesitation between the be and the already, like he may have been about to say one thing but then remembered what he’s supposed to say, which is functionally nothing.

The fact that he said it in general kind of gives me the feeling that it is being talked about or is on the way.

Chaba.5410:

Phineas Poe.3018:

I think that’s all well and good until you realize that the Flamethrower’s Air Blast and a Rifle’s Overcharged Shot both interrupt/launch people without investing 20 points in Explosives, and on shorter cooldowns.

Actually… there are differences. Accelerant-packed turrets do an AoE knockdown effect while those others you listed are more for single targets. P.S. Air Blast does knockback, not launch. Overcharged Shot does a launch. Chain your launches for hilarity.

FT’s Air Blast also reflects projectiles for a moment or two. Still not nearly as hilarious as playing Turret Pong.

I’m going to admit, straight out, that I stopped reading after I read the bit about ‘6 months of being patient and considered.’

There’s a reason for that, and it’s pretty obvious if you look at the posts (including my own, at times, I won’t deny) of the last six months, especially the ones around patch days. If that’s what ‘patient and considered’ looks like, man, I do not want to see what comes after that.

As a fellow turret engineer, who used pretty much exclusively turrets from levels 5-80: Turrets need the improvements. At least in PvE, they fall flat compared to kits, and the only thing they have over Elixirs in a support capacity is that they’re A ) going to do the same thing all the time and B ) can cause direct damage.

Perhaps things are different in PvP, but I wouldn’t know. I do know that part of the reason I dislike kits is because they make things too easy compared to my turrets, especially from 80 on, due to a lack of scaling which is only recently being adjusted.

The two best traits for Turret-users (at least in my opinion) shouldn’t be ‘they blow up when they die’ and ‘you can throw them.’ The best use (again, in my opinion) of the Healing and Rifle turrets should definitely not be ‘fancy-looking grenade/landmine with secondary effects if you leave it laying around.’

You can pretend they’re perfectly fine as they are, and maybe they’re even alright in PvP, but for PvE engineers, they’re…bad. And this is coming from somebody who, on the rare occasion they play, still uses a full turret loadout.

I’m not a fan of this idea. If everything’s a kit, then every kit-using Engineer is going to have access to almost every Engineer skill – they just wouldn’t have all the existing Kits. Sure, they’d have cooldowns; so what? They wouldn’t be able to spam all their skills – but they could use every single skill one after another, inhibited only by cooldowns and their knowledge of the class.

This would also pretty much homogenize the Engineer as a class – the Engineer has four skill categories, and the only one that you don’t mention turning into a Kit is the Kit category. Every Engineer would be a Kit engineer, because there would be nothing else. I don’t like kits to begin with, and if they decided to make them our only option, I’d quit instead of waiting and seeing what changes the coming months bring.

I think it makes the only Engineer Elite skill that I regularly hear of people using even better than the others. I’m also pretty staunchly opposed to the idea of yet more RNG in our skillset; I think we have far too much of that as it is.

The environmental weapons themselves don’t sound terrible (although, again, I’m anti-RNG-in-skills, which means that I don’t like the Dimension Box’s minion effect).

It would also be a terrible idea to have every other supply crate create the weapons – you’d see people waste crates just to set up for the weapon on the next one.

They scale with any stat gained from Traits, with the only non-Trait stat gains being Condition Damage/Duration and Healing Power/Boon Duration.

It would be pretty cool to be able to dye all of our gear. Weapons, Kits, backpacks, all of it.

The rule I’ve noticed seems to be “If you have the same skill on your underwater and above-water skillbars, it will move to the same place.”

Example: Let’s say you have Elixir C on your skillbar both in and out of water. If you have Elixir C on 7 above-water, it will be on 7 underwater, and swap places with any skill that would otherwise have been on 7. If you move it to 8 underwater, it will move to 8 above-water, and swap places with any skill that would otherwise have been on 8.

Whether it works like this on other classes, I have no idea.

Grackleflint.4956:

Anymras.5729:

I happen to like turrets as they are – secondary methods of attack. Replacing all turrets with boon dispensers would leave people like me, who use turrets because they like turrets, going “Well, great, I guess I’m Boony McBoon, the Boon Booner.”

If they suck, it’s because they don’t scale well enough, are too fragile, buggy in terms of AI and traits, and immobile with long cooldowns.

So if they suck it’s because of everything about them. Got it.

It’s because they’re badly-balanced, probably as a result of being able to have up to four persistent turrets per engineer, with up to four more for about a minute every time Supply Crate is cast.

If you actually consider it, it’s not really all that surprising that they’re one of the worst-balanced aspects of the Engineer, or on the underpowered side – having a class with the ability to summon up to four durable, mobile pets simultaneously, with varying effects ranging from a constant regen effect to nets, flames, rockets, bullets or shockwaves, scaling dynamically with their gear, would be a trifle ridiculous, especially if they could be resummoned at the drop of a hat.

That said: Again, I prefer my turrets to attack things, instead of be boon dispensers. I’d only be perfectly fine with them being boon dispensers if LoreChief’s customizable turret pet idea were adopted.

As far as the idea of changing the overcharge/toolbelt abilities to pure offensive abilities goes: I’d still rather have a turret that just hurts things consistently during its time on the field instead of having a turret that only hurts things when it’s either not on the field at all (toolbelt skills), not on cooldown (overcharge) or detonating.

If they rebalance turrets entirely, including a rework of the AI, and they simply can’t bring them up to par with the rest of the class at all, then I will like this idea, simply because at that point it will be obvious that they can’t be balanced properly and need to be replaced. Until then, I’d rather just have my Rifle, Flame, Thumper, Rocket, Net and Healing Turrets.

I think it’s normal; it just treats that particular type of thing in a way that can be disconcerting, where it’ll move a skill from slot 7 to 8 on land if you put said skill in slot 8 underwater. Been like that since release.

And then all the kit skills would get nerfed to accomodate for a Kit providing a total of seven skills – five Weapon skills, one Toolbelt and one Secondary Utility.

It’s probably a balance thing, is the point I’m making here.

I like this idea. I’d miss my bunch of turrets, but having one that I could customize would be a great help. Reminds me of one I had a while back, involving extra trait lines, come to think of it, though this is probably better. Having it also incorporate skinning the turrets to fit the race is a nice touch, as well. Might be interesting to include a way to determine the range of the turret, too – having a Thumper Turret with a Smoke Field and Regen ability would be amazing for a melee Engineer, while a Rapid-Fire Net Turret (splash effects only having half the duration, of course) with Space Distortion and the Red Shells would be aces for a ranged Engineer. The later bits with the hammer and all especially make me like the Thumper idea; it’s possible that this would be too much, of course.

Also, it’d be nice for our abilities to balanced to the same standard as those of other classes, which this would pretty much necessitate – with the loss of the Toolbelt would come the elimination of the ‘playing speed piano’ feel, and while it would remove half of our potential utility skills, it would also cause all slotted skills to need to be reworked in consideration of it.

While I also somewhat dislike the idea of becoming more like the Ranger, being able to customize our turret would set us apart in much the same way as our Toolbelt and Kits set us apart from Elementalists – we could choose how it works in the same way we can choose which Kits (here, being likened to Attunements due to their generally similar effect of replacing our weapon skills with something different) to use. This would let us have a single, customized companion capable of diverse effects in much the same way that Kits and the Toolbelt enable us to have a set of ‘utility-like’ skills alongside a massive number of weapon skills. It’d also, as noted above, require a lot of rebalancing to compensate for taking the Toolbelt – some things would need buffed, some would need nerfed, some would need left be.

The interaction with Traits might also need redesigned, but when haven’t Turret traits needed work? Metal Plating is useless as far as I’ve seen (and I’m still using it, for fear of how much more fragile they’d be without it), Autotool Installation is similarly so (especially in a mobile game like GW2)…I suppose that’s all of the Turret traits that immediately leap out as needing work at the moment, to be fair; Deployable Turrets and Accelerant-Packed would both need revamping as well, were this idea used.

Moving on from Turrets: I would love to have a Hammer. I would also love to have Heavy Armor, but I doubt that second one’s going to happen. Perhaps the Turret skills could be replaced with more functional Gadgets, or some sort of Signet-like skills billed as Armor Mods or something?

Edit: Or perhaps some manner of secondary turret set, which would probably be stationary boon/condition dispensers. ’s an idea.

It occasionally doesn’t work, but it does work on detonation. I ping-pong enemies around with it sometimes.

I don’t think people need another reason to either use kits or feel like they should be using kits, whether they like them or not, and having them be both weapons and passive effect generators would qualify.

Give a different set of skills passive effects, and I might agree with it there, but kits just don’t need it in comparison to our other skills.

I’ve tested it against the dummies in Lion’s Arch; it does increase the damage a bit.

As there’s no listing of the traited range or a way to check how many units away from the target your turret is (aside from checking it against your own weapons’ range), it’s difficult to examine possible range differences, or whether the AI realizes the difference.

I keep seeing people saying things about not being able to swap kits…I’m pretty sure you can still swap kits. In fact, I know you can, because I was doing it when I was figuring out the boundaries of the Kit Refinement thing for another post. I don’t even like the kitten things, but I was trying to figure out how the things worked to see why people were so kitten angry about the cooldown.

Do you mean ‘swap kits and receive the Kit Refinement from multiple kits within a few seconds?’ If so, that’s not nearly the same thing as not being able to swap kits. Besides which, you can switch kits in midair to prevent the Refinement effect for the time being. Somebody also made a post, not too long ago, about how it could, if implemented entirely and properly, actually be a boon – were the various kit refinement effects not already subject to their own cooldowns, ten seconds would be kitten amazing for at least the Elixir Gun – which even got a boost to the very thing people were annoyed about being fixed when it got bugged in a way that was favorable for us, though you wouldn’t know it by how they’ve disregarded the Elixir Gun’s buff.

I don’t even know what baffles me more, people claiming to have been stripped of some measure of their versatility due to a global cooldown on Kit Refinement being implemented, or the people whining about the Medkit being stowable, requiring them to press one more button per five seconds to extend their Swiftness effect.

I do, at least, finally understand why the devs don’t talk on these boards much – we can tell ourselves we’re constructive, and sometimes we really are, but holy kitten do we whine. We finally get buffs, and the response is “Keep the buffs, just don’t nerf Kit Refinement! Nooo!” If they told us we were getting buffs, we’d lose our kitten the moment we saw a nerf in the next patch, claiming they lied, and if they told us we were getting nerfed, we’d lose it immediately. I’m not going to lie – I’ve done the same thing as everybody else.

If we want them to communicate with us, though, I think we need to not flip out.

I’m not saying “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

I’m saying: Be reasonable. Take the time to understand the things they’ve changed, and look into why, perhaps. Don’t beg them for an explanation – they won’t give you one. If they did, it’d make people angry.
Imagine you’re in their position – you nerf something, somebody asks for an explanation, and you give it to them. “Why was Kit Refinement nerfed?” “There were particular issues in the way it was implemented that allowed people to achieve effects we had not intended and do not consider balanced.” “But I’m not one of those people! Why can’t you just nerf them?” and so forth. Whatever they say, it will anger somebody. So they say nothing.

So…don’t ask them for an explanation. One won’t be given, for their own good. There’s no point in them giving us one. Instead, offer a rational critique, after taking time to understand the change and its intentions. Come up with logical alternatives to the disliked change. They probably still won’t say anything, but at least we’ll actually be trying to be constructive instead of just being pissy.

And yes, I know, this post probably comes off as pissy, ranty, high-horsed, rambling, or any number of other uncomplementary things. I don’t particularly mind.

Take the kitten out of it, if you want. I won’t even try to defend it – everybody’s going to be too busy being angry about the change to post anything really interesting on these forums for a little while, anyway.

Arimahn.3568:

Electro.4173:

The fact that they’re unused is exactly the reason they need to be improved. They need to be improved to the point where people feel its worthwhile to use them beyond novelty.

That’s what I was getting at. Fixing a trait that’s been broken since forever isn’t really an “improvement”, it’s a necessity. Turrets aren’t underused because of that one trait but because their overall design is bad. So, personally, I wouldn’t count the bugfix as a positive thing here.

I’d consider the bugfix a positive thing, if only because it a) didn’t come with an accompanying nerf and b) it makes PvE turrets just that little bit easier to work with. They still need a lot of work, but it at least seems to show that there’s been a bit of attention thrown their way.

irakai.6891:

Please consider giving damaging Turrets some form of scaling next so they stop being completely useless.

Technicality: Condition and Boon turrets scale. Direct-damage turrets, though, are the ones that don’t. Seriously hoping they add more scaling.

Arimahn.3568:

Anymras.5729:

We’ve gotten pretty much nothing but buffs and a single, probably overdue, nerf. We even got a fairly big (for turret engineers) bugfix that they didn’t list. I’m not unhappy with this.

I just wish every listed change wasn’t something to do with Kits, except for Elixir U. Other skillsets need work, too.

Do people even use turrets? Because even with the fix, turrets seem… well, bad.

I do. They’re not very good, but they’re what I like the best of the Engineer’s skills – no RNG like Elixirs give, not used by everybody and their mother like Kits, not something something Gadgets (I just don’t particularly like Gadgets, though I can’t put my finger on why). They don’t deal very good damage, they don’t survive for long, they’ve got long cooldowns and no mobility to speak of…but they’re what I like, and I’m stubborn enough to make them work, even if I have to use them as landmines.

In PvE, the Deployable Turrets fix enables an Turret Engineer to have access to two knockbacks with twenty-second cooldowns (Healing Turret, Rifle Turret); with Throw Mine thrown in, that’s three knockbacks with twenty-second-or-less cooldowns. Toss a Net Turret in there to round it out with another relatively low-cooldown turret, and…four knockbacks, one with an 18-second untraited cooldown, two with 20-second cooldowns, and one with a 30-second cooldown.

Hopefully, turrets will get a cooldown reduction, maybe a trait, at some point.

I had a Flame Turret roast the dirt when I threw it at a Young Karka. Was embarrassing. Being able to throw them at enemies doesn’t do a whole lot if they don’t attack the enemy, after all – nor does being able to repair them do much if they get obliterated moments later. Maybe a cooldown change?

However, it is really nice to finally be able to throw them.

They did finally get Deployable Turrets working.

Also, whether there’s plans or not, we won’t know. They won’t tell us. After seeing the uproar over adding a cooldown to Kit Refinement, I finally properly understand why. If you look back on any adjustments we’ve received, positive or negative, the only one I recall seeing or hearing anything about was the HGH boost.

Oddly enough, I’m not entirely what the nerf entailed. I’m testing different kits for interaction, though.

So far, what I’ve discovered: I can switch from Grenade Kit to Flamethrower, get the Barrage and then the Blast, but the Blast seems to cut off the other Refinement. Same with Elixir Gun’s Super Elixir field – I can switch to Elixir Gun while Barrage’s animation is going, and the Super Elixir happens. Go the other way, and…nope. Likewise with Bomb Kit.

Tool Kit’s caltrops just magically fade into existence apropos of nothing when the kit is equipped, but it does not interfere with other kits, just as Grenade Kit doesn’t seem to.

So, either this adjustment was stranger than it seemed, or it simply doesn’t work properly.

In either case, you can’t properly say an answer about the Kit Refinement change would be appreciated by the ‘entire Engineer population,’ as I honestly don’t really think it’s a problem. It was probably a reaction to the 100nades build and other builds that utilize it for borderline overpowered things.

I’m glad they’ve fixed Deployable Turrets (‘bout kitten time), but turrets haven’t been improved at all aside from all being throwable.

On a similar note, the buff to repairing of turrets is great…but only if the kitten things survive long enough to be repaired. Was in Southsun to test the changes, and they got obliterated before I could repair them, most of the time, by a Young Karka’s opening volley. They also need AI changes (the only one I got to repair, oddly enough, spent most of the fight aiming to the side, attacking thin air), cooldown changes, the ability to scale with Power…

Not pleased with almost every single change being a rebalance of Kits, either. Elixir U being consistent and Deployable Turrets finally working are the only two things that weren’t Kit-related. We do have other skills, guys. Other weapons. Other aspects of the class aside from “what weird kitten backpack do I want this instant?”

But, overall, I’m not unhappy with the patch. It had something that turret engineers have been waiting on for six kittening months now, and they didn’t even have it in the patch notes. Still not happy, but it’s pretty nice that they’ve done that much.

I’ve noticed that: I can now actually repair a turret back to full health in a few seconds, and I can throw my turrets properly.

They’re still wimpy as hell, though.

In the Deployable Turrets Still Broken thread, the devs commented to say that Deployable Turrets is actually fixed, it’s just that some changes didn’t make it into the patch notes for some reason. The Flame Blast velocity change might be one.

Yeah, it did. It takes a little timing to get right, but it’s always been able to, as far as I know.

Edit: The healing timer, I mean.

Also, if you jump, it shouldn’t trigger Refinement. Guess that’s one possible bug we can use in our favor.

We’ve gotten pretty much nothing but buffs and a single, probably overdue, nerf. We even got a fairly big (for turret engineers) bugfix that they didn’t list. I’m not unhappy with this.

I just wish every listed change wasn’t something to do with Kits, except for Elixir U. Other skillsets need work, too.

I’ve seen it suggested that the trait doesn’t have a global cooldown, but a kit-by-kit one. Even so, sounds like something’s wonky with the Flamethrower and Elixir Gun.

Well, hot kitten . Now, the only thing turrets need is…well, to scale with Power and not die after a hard look.

ManCaptain.3154:

Anymras.5729:

I actually happen to like turrets.

They are still more popular than gadgets. Gadgets really suck.

Yeah. ’s what happens when the devs think the way to balance a class with a lot of skills is to make it like speed-typing, and try to make an equivalent to the passive/active effect dichotomy of the Signets of just about every single other class, except without the passive part.

I’d probably have tried to specialize the skills more, instead, though it’s really probably a really difficult thing to figure out – balancing eight skills, and so forth.

I actually happen to like turrets. No, they’re not very good; they don’t scale well, don’t survive well, they’re really kind of crappy overall, but kittenmit they’re a feat of Engineering to make, much less use, and I happen to prefer them to kits.

I don’t, really, like kits much at all.

However: I’ve come up with an interpretation, though it’s a few pages back on these forums, involving basically treating Turrets like Warrior Banners. Put them down, they do Turret things. Walk up and hit the Use key, and you can pick them up and move them around bodily, use them as weapons, put them back down, or stow them.

I’d prefer that treatment, since it at least offers a choice instead of “Aaand now you get six more kits, how fun.”

I’ve used Throw Mine in one of my better builds, oddly enough. It deals pretty good damage, when the cooldown and toolbelt are considered – I’d often see chunks of health drop off of things, along with boons.

Also: Yeah, there used to be a Mine Kit. You want to see how that worked? Go fight the first Charr Skill Challenge guy. Centurion Gearclaw or something.

I agree with the sentiment that our weapons need work, in light of the fact that I just don’t use kits.

I don’t, however, think ‘upvoting’ is a thing on this forum. It’s rather like a big, less funny game of Who’s Line Is It Anyway?, as far as I can tell.

Turrets need help, too – all of them should scale to the appropriate stat, they’re all currently too fragile, the AI is stupid, etcetera.

The best I’ve managed is to take advantage of lopsided aggro to kite the hell out of things.

I’ve seen a few suggestions to this effect, but I like the following version best:

1) Give Engineers a Kit slot as a Secondary Weapon slot.
2) Auto-equip this slot with an Engineer Kit using unique examples of all skill types available to the Engineer, or simply leave it empty until such time as the Engineer buys a Kit.
3) Allow only Kits to be equipped into the slot.

As Engineers currently have kittenall for non-Kit weapon choices anyway, but might prefer other skills to Kits (I prefer Turrets, for example), this would allow every Engineer to carry a Kit without sacrificing any of their preferred utility skills. They wouldn’t get a Toolbelt skill on said kit, of course, but it’d still be something.