Because making them useless is the only solution, right?
What about, dunno, redesigning the overcharges or the whole turrets to start with.
But no, why bother, let’s just kill a whole category of utilities.
It isn’t like i can’t read your other posts on the matter, you know?
You don’t care about anything you wrote above – you just want turrets to be useless, thus obviously you’re happy as long as that result is achieved.
Also, glyph of elementals and glyph of lesser elementals say hello.
These look like good changes. I wonder what the implications for Supply Crate will be though, given that celestial rifle engis don’t trait for turrets so their turrets from SP are quite weak anyway.
Good? This change does nothing to address the passive playstyle.
It just makes turrets really glassy, along with the disadvantages they already had.
They’re catering to the whiners and nothing else. And all those whiners want is for turrets to be nerfed to oblivion. They don’t care about a whole category of utilities being made unusable.
Obviously, Supply Crate will suffer the implications. Do you think someone even cares?
Let’s be frank, if someone cared about fixing turrets, we wouldn’t be talking about nerfs or “bringing them inline” (that, on a class that isn’t inline with the others to begin with, sounds like a lazy excuse). We would be talking about a redesign, either of the overcharges or of the whole turrets.
Yeah just like how an elimentalist can swap between weapons. and before you say attunement change dont forget kits
Except that attunements are given by default. Kits aren’t. Engineers have to spend utilities for them. And a turret build won’t necessarily have them…but they will still have a single weapon.
Unless you’re saying that engineers should get multiple kits for free. I may even agree with that.
TL;DR: your comparison is moot; engineers don’t get additional weapon sets by default; elementalists do.
So, since engineers utilities have to be “inline with the rest of the game”, when shall engineers get their second main weapon? You know, to be “inline with the rest of the game”.
Also, funny how they talk of bringing them inline with the rest of the game.
So, our utilities have to be inline with the rest of the game, and we still have to deal with having a single main weapon unlike any other class in the game. Logic at its finest.
So, they keep all the disadvantages they already had -unmoveable, cannot crit, cannot receive boons, cooldown start after their death – and they also get common disadvantages of other minions – being vulnerable to crit and conditions.
To bring them inline, you say? Engineers weren’t never inline to begin with. They have to focus on utilities – since they lack a second weapon, you know, and they never got brought inline about that – and if those utilities end up being terrible (and with the uptime they’ll have after these changes, turrets will be terrible, since they won’t be able to stand five seconds even in a fully traited build) they just don’t get used. And turrets will end up like that – unused.
Oh, i realize you’re doing so to cater to the whining userbase, it isn’t surprising. I already expected them to be smitherbooned when i saw they were been worked upon.
But i still had a small hope of seeing them redesigned to see some proper active use and micromanagement. Instead, they just get their survivability nerfed to oblivion.
So, keep all the disadvantages of being an unmoveable turret that can’t crit and whose cooldown start after being killed, and give them all the disadvantages of the other minions.
They will melt in seconds and end up useless. Oh, but at least the whiners will be happy.
Well, it has no proper animation because while the skill is more like a trigger, and the actual skill consists in the engineer leaving that oil where he walks over a period of time. Assuming those poodles weren’t made so incospicuous on purpose, giving them some decent tell would help.
Making it ineffective while standing still would be the laziest counter ever seen, though – one could avoid that by literally doing nothing.
Thus i would rather propose to add another layer of complexity to the skill.
Alas, giving the engineer some interactions with the oil via the use of some fire-based skills.
By using one of the aforemented fire-based skills (blowtorch or flame jet, for example) the oil would be ignited, prompting some animation on the poodles (it could have a duration of half or three quarters of a second). It is important to point out that crossing them at this point is safe; it will cause no knockdown, as the oil just started to burn, and will cause no damage either;
After that time, though, the oil will burn and cause damage and/or burning (either for some little time, or in a single blow; imho, the latter solution is the better one, else it would just clutter the terrain with little aoes).
By doing something similar, there would be quite some positive effects on gameplay.
First, there is counterplay for the oil slicks- standing still – albeit quite an easy one; but there is also counter-counterplay on the engineer part that can burn the area and force the opponent to either react properly or take damage.
Obviously, this also means that the engineer can’t just spam skills at random. If he wants to ignite the oil later, he will need some skills that can do so; likewise, if he wants to knock down an enemy, using a fire skill at the wrong time would foil his plan.
Also, it would be doable in a gadget build as well, via rocket boots or rocket kick; thus adding some value to an underused build.
cut
Two main issues here, imho.
To make up for the lack of AA damage, some turrets would end up having to do high burst damage unlike anything the profession has ever seen. Particularly the rocket turret.
Net turret has a slow autoattack to start with even now, so it would pose less of an issue.
Flame turret would just end up with a long, easily cleansable burning (in your example it didn’t even account for all the autoattacks it should have done during that period, though, so it would just be really bad; one would just use either the flamethrower or bomb kit instead).
I don’t even think they would be kept in such a state. Everytime we got a way to deal proper burst damage, it got nerfed shortly thereafter.
Second issue, and the most glaring one, is that such a roundabout way of working doesn’t make sense to start with.
In practice, they would end up used as put down, overcharged, and picked up. Cause if they don’t do anything there is no reason to keep them down to begin with, especially if they still have their cooldown starting after their death.
Frankly speaking, it makes no sense for it to work like that from a gameplay standpoint. What’s the point of having a pet that does absolutely nothing most of the time, beside being a target for other people to destroy, especially since it cannot even move?
It seems designed just to be overly obnoxious and detrimental to use.
We could just have an item that gets put down, does the effect of those overcharges, and gets destroyed (thus going on cooldown). It would have the same, exact gameplay effects, without being an hassle to use. Sure, it wouldn’t be a turret either, more like a gizmo, but at least it makes sense working like so.
Imho, they should rework how overcharges work and in doing so make turrets’ playstyle less passive. They need to deal damage – after all, we still lack that second weapon, so utilities have to take its place – but at least that damage will be mostly dealt via player commands, rather than autoattacks. I’ve posted an example of a possible rework in another thread, anyway.
Some trait could be rebalanced, like autotool installation, or even reworked as well (tied to overcharge use, maybe). I still can’t agree with that proposed elixir-infused bomb switching, anyway.
What i think won’t solve anything is doing some change on a vacuum – their current properties are all intertwined. They are sturdy because they’re supposed to stay on a point, tank damage (not that they have other choices, being unmoveable) and stay alive until the next overcharge, since their cooldown starts only after they die (or get picked up). If the engineer goes away, they can’t follow him; the engineer will have to make up with the lack of their utilities slots while he’s away, and can’t properly make them work without an understanding of the situation (at most, he can overcharge his abilities randomly). Also, they have to be effective enough to balance out the lack of a second main weapon.
Unless they change their whole design, changing anyone of these factors would impact all the others. Making them easily destructible would make the player unable to use overcharge for long periods of time, and people would just end up using them like they already do with the healing turret – put down, overcharge, destroy or pickup and repeat – basically thwarting their supposed use. Destroying them when the engineer is over a certain range would just be redundant – them being unmovable is already a liability, and an engineer that fights somewhere else has to do so without his utilities (or toolbelts) – they’re still locked wherever he left them, and he can’t even use their overcharges well if he has no understanding of the situation. Diminishing their offensive capabilities may make them not effective enough as to counter the lack of a second weapon, and thus worthless to use.
If they plan to fix the situation by just changing some hp, defense or attack value, they may as well redesign them anew. Cause it won’t solve anything – either they’ll smithersboon them or make changes so small that will end up irrelevant in practice.
Albeit, what will likely happen is that they’ll “accidentally” end up making them useless just to appeal at the whining crowd.
- A.E.D. becomes a insta-cast
Imho, A.E.D.’s main issue lies in the opportunity cost – normal healing skills can be easily used a couple times before the time of using A.E.D. even comes. Rather than make it insta-cast, the low-healing processing could just have a reduced cooldown (like, 20 or 25 seconds).
// Super elixir places a water-field instead of a light-field
That may easily make it too strong, especially considering the uptime that field may have. What about just no field at all, and just increase either the radius or healing a bit to compensate for it?
// All bomb animations get hastened to be as fast as its underwater-behavior. The current pre- and after-cast stretch a single bomb attack to 0.86 seconds, which almost justifies the tooltip to display a full second.
I’m on the fence on this one. The delay on activation is supposed to be a drawback, after all – they’re probably balanced taking in account that factor as well. We may have to give up something in exchange for it.
- Low Health Response system triggers at 75% health
It would kinda miss the mark. It is called low Health response system, after all.
- Elixir Infused Bombs switches place with Experimental Turrets
I can’t agree here, and for the same reasons i described in the other thread.
- Kit-refinement does not trigger out of Combat. Additionally its skills do not share a global cd anymore. Switching into the Grenade-kit -again- release a grenade barrage to the players feet, like explosive fall does.
- gadgeteer switches place with Kit-refinement.
It would be nice to get kit refinement back to a decently usable form, but by giving it back the grenade barrage, we may risk seeing a return of a sort of 100-grenades build…and that was the exact reason that caused a nerf of the trait, back in the day.
Also, having it as a grandmaster may be quite a steep cost, seeing as kits themselves are already quite trait-dependant.
I would rather see it working better as a master trait (with separate cooldowns, and without the grenade barrage of sort). And i think Gadgeteer would be more deserving of a master-trait spot as well, too (some of the boons are quite nice, after all). But there would be the problem of making them fit there. Maybe Scope could be moved up to grandmaster and gain some additional effect (maybe something related to toolbelt use, since we lack such traits). Then Packaged Stimulants may be moved to adept – maybe it is just me, but i never see people using it; or the med kit either, anyway.
Your facerol build will get nerfed soon, don’t worry. The amount of turrets engis in PvP is higher than all other 7 classes stacked together. Arenanet said they will fix the brain dead AI in few patches.
I don’t usually use turrets, outside of the healing one and supply drop.
And i stopped playing pvp some time ago, anyway. Also, i still think that one of the major issues are the braindead players, rather than the braindead AI – a lot of players are just terrible, but don’t want to realize it or improve themselves – usually they are the ones that come on the forum and whine upon anything that defeated them.
I don’t think i’m that good as a player either, but at least i’m aware of my own mediocrity.
Anyway, if they can fix the “braindead” AI, that’s good. Turrets could use a more active playstyle – i just don’t think these suggestions can give them one. Making them paper mache isn’t a solution, unless they plan on redesigning them completely; and neither would make them inherently more active.
The problem is about how you can have a full turret build, with a single main weapon, and still have active plays while the turrets are down, assuming that they won’t change some fundamental designs about them (like being immobile, relatively sturdy, and have their cooldown start after their death). Also, they would still have to work with the limitations of the command inputs – as now, we have at most two buttons per turret, one of which is used to destroy them.
The only way i can see, with these premises, would be to rework the overcharge system, along with shifting some power from the turret autoattacks to overcharges (not too much, though, else they become too bursty). Maybe multiple tiers of overcharges? Overcharges would work akin to chain skills as far as inputs go, assuming you’ve got the energy costs to pay for them, and there would be clear tells to understand what overcharge tier is being shot right now (albeit, unlike actual chain skills, it would only use one overcharge at a time). Tier 1 would just be a stronger autoattack with a relatively short cooldown, whereas tier 2 would be the current overcharge. In doing so, the autoattacks’ importance would be diminished, whereas the relevant attacks become more clear (and thus are more avoidable if ones wishes so).
If we want to do things more complex, turrets could have some kind of energy system. Like, they start with X energy when they’re put down, enough for a tier 2 overcharge. Turrets gain Y energy every Z seconds, and overcharges have different energy costs based on the tiers but also have lower cooldowns, thus leaving more micromanagement to the player’s hand. In doing so, there may even be a tier 3 overcharge with high energy costs, so that it needs some build-up time before it can be used after the turret has been put down (like, at least 15s, for example).
Turrets’ energy could then be displayed above each turret’s icon on the skill bar, as a sort-of boon when clicking on turrets, or may even be displayed as graphical changes on the turrets themselves (they could shift to a different model once they have enough energy to use an higher tier of overcharges).
also, since I’ve reached post limit in the last one, one more point I’d like to discuss:
elixir infused bombs < – > experimental turrets (in the current trait environment)
as it is currently experimental turrets forces turreteers to go full into alchemy, and while the boon duration itself is nice for the trait, these are 6 points into a line that brings not much synergy with the turreteer.
That line doesn’t bring synergy with anything that isn’t an elixir, to put it bluntly. Apart from a couple master traits, anything else is either some general defensive buff or is elixir-related.
Turreteers will just get some general defensive buff – they can make good use of it either way, since turrets as they are now are mostly about sustained damage, thus the engineer has to stay alive long enough as well.
Or they can just avoid that line and take something else – if they want to take some different buffs, it’s their choice.
elixir Infused bombs surprisingly has the same issue in the inventions line. A bomb-build merely profits from any trait in the inventions line, but by switching the traits you get this:
turreteers now have 6 points free that they don’t need to drop into alchemy anymore, so they could buff their rifle via fire-arms, or get explosive powder which not only buffs the rocket-turret directly (the +10% dmg is actually stacking with the +15% dmg from rifle barreled turrets), but also each explosion from blown up turrets, and maybe even pick deployable turrets. They also could choose to get infused precision with invigorating speed f.e…
A bomb build that uses elixir-infused bombs benefits quite a bit from traits on invention line, if only for automated medical response alone (and performance enhancement if you plan on going cleric – and with elixir-infused bomb, you are likely to do so). As a close range fighter, protective shield also helps, and if you may want to eventually get reinforced shield as well for extra utility if you use shields as well.
now bomb-builds on the other hand would receive a decent buff as well.
since most go 6/x/0/4/2 anyways, they now finally have the valid option to drop the remaining 2 into alchemy and run bomb-heals, on a build that is not mutilated and has picked all the important traits you need for staying highly mobile.
Yes, one could argue that you also have power-shoes in the inventions-trait line, but that is no real mobility, just movement speed. for melee-brawling you need the vigor from invigorating speed + speedy kits, else your build will heavily under-perform.
It seems to me that you’re forcefully mashing together two different bomb builds for the sake of your argument. As i said above, a bomb build that actually aims to get elixir-infused bombs isn’t mutilated at all by that choice. It probably won’t even use the same gear and stats as the other build you’ve described. They’re just different builds.
so yea, while elixir infused bombs would trade synergy to the healing-power from inventions, and experimental turrets would loose the automatic boon-duration, both traits suddenly can be used in way more powerful builds since both builds in question suddenly have 6 points to play around with, which is a lot.
An elixir-infused bomb build would have worked better on the invention tree to start with, for the reasons i explained above. Another bomb build could as well avoid to take the trait entirely – it serves a different purpose.
Likewise, saying that a turret build has now 6 free points is misleading – you are just unable to take two grandmaster turret traits and thus you’re forced to take something else. You can already do that, if you aren’t interested in the experimental turrets.
And they aren’t necessarily more powerful either – cause either turrets or the user ends up weaker by the lack of the second turret-related grandmaster trait.
That’s what you’re aiming for, anyway, so nothing surprising here.
the turn of the coin is that your turrets are not that sturdy anymore, but against melee’s you now have indeed powerful means of counter-play, rewarding a more skillful use of turrets, therefore punishing brainless pug-farmers and giving them more versatility for experienced engineers.
Where by “counter-play” you mean “run away leaving the point uncontested and hope the enemy won’t be able to finish the turret from a distance when i’ll have teleported it after it has been beaten during all that time”. Surely that will work well. Especially versus enemies that can outrange them. Or people that can just shadowstep or blink to it.
turrets would actually become very efficient by just picking the trait accelerant packed turrets and tele-turrets, since it’s not mandatory anymore to go full in inventions to make them viable, allowing turrets to be used more effective in various actually potent builds.
Very efficent? Hah, nice joke.
With your changes, turrets wouldn’t even be as sturdy as before, they would be easily outranged and they would have no means of self-heal, making them much easier to kill.
And if you get that tele-turret trait, you aren’t even able to use the overcharge freely – the enemy can just pummel the turret to death after that. Along with the user, eventually – since they’re both there. And that’s even if he’s been hit with a CC, as long as he has a stunbreak ready.
The only change that we would see is for them to not be used at all, apart for the healing turret.
Yes, these changes are a big nerf to brainless afkers on a node, but for those who play the engi as inteded (always on his toes, dropping chaos where he can) this is actually a great improvmeent of life and would make turrets way more akin to the class itself.
That’s your definition of engineer, not the developers’ one.
The engi “as intended” can take control of an area by placing turrets. At least, the page of the profession on the official site says so.
Masters of mechanical mayhem, engineers love to tinker with explosives, elixirs, and all manner of hazardous gadgets. They can take control of an area by placing turrets, support their allies with alchemic weaponry, or lay waste to foes with a wide array of mines, bombs, and grenades.
turreteers as they are currently are not engineers.
they don’t have any active sustain, have no mobility, and have a very, very low skill-cap that does not go beyond basic positioning. This is why turreteers are so in-effective in a match full of skilled players.
If you like simple games, play dungeon defenders or LoL / dota 2. But Gw2 is meant to reward a active, fast-paced play-style. In that regard turrets are a big hindrance to the class, limiting new layers more than helping them to become better.
As i’ve written above, devs don’t seem to agree with your definition of engineers.
Anyway, your suggestions do nothing to solve those issues, apart from making turrets weaker as a whole and clunky to use (with that tele-trait). They would just end up being useless.
If you want to change the playstyle, you won’t achieve that by weakening some traits here and there. You have to overhaul turrets as a whole. Good luck with that – i can’t think of any feasible solution to the slew of issues that come on with changing how they work.
Still, your idea of healing turrets for a certain amount on overcharge is actually a nice idea for auto-tool installation, coming with great synergy to what I’d like the changes to be.
Because i just took whatever the trait did and put it in a way that was active, but didn’t harm the functionality of the skills affected. Cause while they’re both situational, they usually share the same situations of use. Unlike the tele-turret trait you suggest, that would just end up as the next kit refinement, whose use is far too much situational compared to how kits are usually used.
The point is to rework turrets for more active play.
And your suggestions did nothing about that. Adding separate effect to overcharges doesn’t make them more active, it just makes them bloated with different effects. Making them less sturdy doesn’t make them more active, it just makes them less sturdy.
They are meant to be out-ranged since turreteers actually leave their turrets completely alone, caping map objectives, just to come back on the node and find a dead thief within them. while the theif itself might be a n00b, this build is rewarding a too careless playstyle, therefore a bad brother of a class that actually requires high apm and proper map-awareness to be used effectively.
If they can cap a target without their utilities, good for them. It means they aren’t that braindead after all. Leaving turrets at home is a liability for the engineer as well – he’s more than halving his potential by doing so (since he can’t even properly use the overcharges if he doesn’t know what’s going on). And it is supposed to work like that…since they’re turrets.
Also, if someone can’t even deal with some unmanned turrets, well, that’s just his fault and his alone.
Turrets are not meant to be sturdy, they are there to deny the area as long as they are up. You are not meant to run only turrets, because even with the suggested tele-turret trait, running full turrets would really hurt yourself in terms of mobility.
Well, they’re turrets. They aren’t supposed to be mobile. And since they can’t move, they just have to tank whatever hits them (and retaliate, when they can). Also, unlike other minions, their cooldowns start after their death – if they weren’t tanky enough to survive some beating, they wouldn’t be worthwhile at all, since they would be on cooldown most of the time.
So…yeah, they’re meant to be sturdy, else they wouldn’t work, at least in their current design.
The thing is what you perceive as a nerf is actually a buff to active playstyle.
These new traits would make the rocket-turret way more survivable.
the following situation:
khylo clock-tower
a warri with stability enters the room, rushing for your rocket-turret, which is placed outside the node, next to the wall. with the current traits you have no options of counter-play, your rocket-turret goes down and you eventually as well since your pressure is gone and he covers the node with hammer-cc’s.now imagine you run fortified turrets, tele-turrets and reactive plating:
you jump off the node, leaving your rocket-turret alone, since getting a gentle hammering while he has stability is a bad idea. You run for the crates, jump up to the window, run down the balcony and while he still is at the rocket-turret, you trigger its overcharge, teleporting it to your position, up in the window where he can’t reach it with hammer anymore. He then switches to bow, but since your turret got deployed there, fortified turret triggers and you get the bubble, while also firing the overcharge from a now safe distant.
maybe it just takes away a stack of stability, but you can run back to the node, deny him the cap (he propably had enough time to decap if you have not spotted him early enough when entering clock-tower), but his initial rush to the rocket-turret failed so you still have the dps-backup from it so you can outlast him.
and after 20 seconds you still have the option to jump off the node for a sec, trigger the overcharge again to call the rocket-turret in while he has stability on cd and get the knockdown off on him.
So you ran away instead of actually fighting the enemy on point just to put the rocket turret somewhere else, where he’s likely to hit it anyway assuming he isn’t stupid enough to not notice the fortified turret’s bubble, and assuming he won’t kill it in the meantime (or that he doesn’t kill it later – cause if it is fast enough for you to put the turret there, it will be fast for him to go there as well). And that’s assuming he just makes you run away at your leisure and does all according to your expectations.
And that’s the favorable example you chose, heh.
Most of the times people would just be costrained to either use the overcharge but end up with a turret in an unfavorable place, or to try not using the overcharge at all to avoid the issue.
As i said before, they’re too situational to be put together in the same plate.
Fixing the air-turret bug is fine and all. The accelerant-packed one can be interesting as well.
But most of those suggestions end up being plain nerfs, especially when taking all those suggestions together. And they wouldn’t make the playstyle more active either – just nerfing it heavily.
First of all, switching elixir-infused bombs with experimental turrets would make both traits unaffected by their new trait lines, thus indirectly nerfing both of them.
If you want to remove the possibility to stack grandmaster turret traits, they could as well delete some entirely and and replace them with some toolbelt or gadget trait instead, since we haven’t got many of those.
The change to metal plating would be a major nerf. 50% reduction during overcharges is nothing compared to the 33% constant one of the current trait. Also, it would be useless versus opponents outranging the turrets (wasting an overcharge to get a couple seconds of reduced damage is counterproductive to say the least).
About autotool installation…like above, this is yet another change aimed to make them less sturdy. And making them sturdier is the whole point of the trait. Want to change it to something more active? Make it heal the turret for a certain amount (something like 33%, considering the current values on the trait and the average overcharges cooldown) when using an overcharge. While healing and using overcharges are both situational actions, they usually occur amidst a fight (especially if you’re overcharging a turret that is currently targeted). Thus it shouldn’t pose issues on that regard.
Doing so would limit the healing capabilities during a fight, and the attacker would be free to burst them during the interval from an overcharge and another. Also, unattended turrets wouldn’t heal by themselves.
About rifled turret barrels…the point of that trait is to make the long-range turrets not outrangeable, since they can’t move closer to the opponents to retaliate. So you suggest to change it…to make them outranged even with the trait. What’s the point of it, then? You say that the engineer would be forced to react? Oh, sure, let’s just leave all the turrets behind and come there with just a rifle. That will surely work well…for the opponent, at least.
Come on, it wouldn’t make sense. And it wouldn’t even deserve a grandmaster slot anymore, imho.
That deployable turret trait change, imho, wouldn’t work in practice. You’ve basically plastered together two highly situational, different functions – moving them, and using their overcharges. Sure, it may work with the close range ones, but why should i even want to move a rocket turret or rifle turret in my current position if i want to use the overcharge – they’re supposed to work at a certain range to avoid being mauled all together, after all.
Imho, it would just end up unused.
If we want to give some limited mobility – as turrets, they aren’t even supposed to move, after all – what about making tool kit’s magnet work on your own turrets with an highly reduced cooldown (like, 6s).
Oh those poor engineers and those instant main ability swap with 0 cooldown (compared to elementalist, who too has no secondary weapon).
You know, the ele goes into cooldown when it switchs attunement. Engi doesn’t.
An instant main ability swap to nothing, by default.
Elementalists get 4 attunements by default, it’s their class mechanic. Engineers have 4 variable toolbelt skills instead. It is the only class that, by default, has no weapon swap.
Sure, they can use kits…but they’re optional. The class shouldn’t be balanced over using them, else they aren’t optional anymore, and should be given as a default, like attunements are.
Thus an engineer with a main weapon and 4 kits must be as potentially efficent as an engineer with a main weapon and 4 turrets. Even if the latter ends up quite more passive than the former.
Don’t like it? Blame the design of the class. Cause unless they change that to start with, they have to balance the class the way it is.
No. I try to turn this to a proper form.
Turret protection against criticals or conditions still could be traits.
Cause people don’t whine about turret traits already, right?
It would just shoehorn turret users further onto full turret builds, anyway. Even more than now, assuming they wouldn’t end up in the same trait lines of the existing ones.
Either way, the comparison is moot. Classes are designed and balanced differently.
Engineers’ even lack a second main weapon, so they have to rely even further on utilities. Thus such utilities can’t even be balanced as the other classes’ ones to start with.
Unless they change the whole design of the class, they can’t make them weaker unless they wants to make them completely useless (and to be blunt, that’s exactly what some people in this forum are aiming for; i assume they’ll have to live with it).
Good player donning defensive gear in an action game doesn’t compute.
Because they have no reason to do so, if all that defensive gear does is passively reducing damage you’re already blocking in some other way if you’re good enough to do so(be it dodging, blinding or blocking).
Give them other, active uses, and good players will have some reasons to use them.
I would say it is indeed broken. As now, a good player has no reason to use anything but zerk gear unless the game forcefully make some of those stats useless (see: uncrittable world bosses). Skills depend only upon an handful of stats, mostly the offensive ones. Healing Power is used by very few skills and building on it requires to find a lot of non-native sources to just be able to use said stat (be it traits, runes, sigils or foods) and even then, they just end up being passive processings, so no skill involved.
Boon Duration gear (aka: giver) is a bad joke, thus raising boon duration heavily impact upon upgrade slots and food that could be spent better in other ways.
And defensive stats aren’t tied to any active skill at all. Unlike offensive skills, defensive skills are the same whether you use zerk or soldier gear. Thus a good player that wants to don defensive gear has no way to make use of the stats his gears provides, while being made inefficent due of the stats his gear lacks.
Basically, the more you get good as a player, the more are restricted by gear to make use of your skill.
It was an item for content that had limited availability with no set release schedule. It was quite obvious back then. If you chose to ignore that then it’s not really Anet at blame here. They provided an item that gave infinite lives in SAB. Everyone that bought it made use of it during World 2’s release. Anet plans to release the next world in the future so it’ll be used again.
SAB was released two times in less than six months during the first 15 months since the launch of the game. If anything, it was “quite obvious” at the time to expect constant releases, especially after they put an item such as the ICC on the gem store.
And it is useless that you keep repeating that they plan to release the next world in the future. Words are just that, words. Until they become something more than that, they’re completely and utterly useless. Words won’t make that coin work. A release will. Maybe along with the hobosacks’ removal, since us engineers have been waiting for them for more than a year as well. Again, something that they were supposedly looking upon and that never saw the light of a release.
It’s ok, they have done similar things. You bought the coin for SAB, you used it several times. You assumed there would be new worlds later, you assumed. You won’t get a refund for assumptions.
Uh, that’s not an assumption, though. We even had hubs for them already on the SAB main plaza. And SAB:Back to School ended at start of the first stage of the third world.
Anyway, we knew there would be four worlds since the first release. That’s, like, the only thing we’re certain of.
I don’t think you’ll ever see a refund for that coin. And i don’t think we’ll ever see SAB again as well.
They had all the time they could need to make a third world and put it ingame after the living story ended (since putting it during the living story wouldn’t have been good, or something like that). They just chose not to do it. And it isn’t like they didn’t knew that they would have to work on the expansion later on.
When the expansion will be out, there will be some other excuse, and so on. They’ll just procrastinate it forever and ever.
It isn’t even the first time they do so. Just have a look at the hobosack thread on the engineer section. And we’re talking about 5 skins and some code there. Yet they seem to ever lack the resources to do so (guess they are too busy doing gem store skins, heh).
Defensive playstyle is already pretty powerful, I believe I linked some videos. If not then:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1mxlA13ICk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMx9VJYD78s
If anything, they just further demonstrate what i’ve written above. They’ve spent a lot of resources to increase healing power, but they haven’t even got enough native ways to make use of it. Thus they have to resort to runes, traits and sigils (and food in warrior’s case) just to use said stat, and that in turn means they’ll have to neglect anything else. Again, just to have ways to use said healing power, not to make said healings stronger.
And many of those are basically passive procs, thus nothing that could really be called a skillful play.
Even then, they still had to rely on defensive skills (thus not tied to any stat) to protect themselves from burst damages, or even kite in some cases to passively heal while doing so (warrior vs. bear form mossman). At least those involved some skill, if only to time them well enough.
In the end, it is as i said above: there is a lack of native, active ways to use said stats. For some, one can partially make up with runes, sigils,food,traits (but it will usually end up in passive processings). For others there are just no ways to actively use them.
Also, reactive healing should never be as good as proactive protection. The required skill level is on a completely different level. You can compare how hard it was to compete in gvgs as a fuse and as a prot in gw1.
I can agree with that, but healing as now just does that, and it even needs outside sources to be even worth of investment. Even if we had proper,native skillful ways to use said stat, it would be useless if it wasn’t efficent in the only thing it can do. I still think that broading its scope of application would be a better choice, though.
Likewise, having some active defensive skills tied to some defensive stat would be interesting as well (prevent X damage – dependant on vitality or toughness – during the next Y seconds, for example).
They want their sentinel’s or even nomad’s gear to have the same efficiency as a full glass cannon gear without all the disadvantages of having much less passive defense. That’s why their suggestions are like that.
Obviously they shouldn’t be as efficent as a full glass cannon in the damage department. But they should be comparatively as efficent in the defensive (or healing, or whatever) department, according to the gear used, and assuming their skill level is on par.
As things stand now, they can’t do so – as i explained before, there is a lack of skills using such stats, thus there are no ways to skillfully use them.
But i would also add that as there are ways for players to make up for the lack of defense by using dodges and defensive skills, there should be similar ways for players to make up for some of the lack in offensive stats while using defensive gear, maybe using endurance as well.
For example, they could tie toughness to endurance and/or endurance regeneration, maybe lowering toughness’ passive effects a bit to make up for it, and put good offensive skills on certain weapons with additional endurance costs (vigor may have to be rebalanced as well in such a case). In doing so, people with high toughness may have less passive defense than now, but they would be able to choose to either dodge more or use that endurance for offensive purposes (and likely getting some damage in return, albeit softened by toughness).
Some of those skills could even have particular mechanics involved – good base power and with relatively low endurance cost but unable to crit, for example; such a skill would be tailored for a power/toughness/something that isn’t ferocity gear user, for example. And i can’t see anything wrong with that – right now, most of the offensive skills are tailored over using power/precision/ferocity gear. But that isn’t set in stone either, after all. Or sacrificing a percentage of your current endurance in exchange for an offensive bonus (based on the amount of endurance spent; thus making it more convenient for people with high endurance).
In short: just put skillful, active ways to use other stats as well, and whatever those stats do, make them equally efficent in their respective regards.
It’s like flogging a dead horse. The OP and people like him want their gear to matter, not how they play.
If anything, it is quite the opposite. As it stands now, gear already matters…but only as long as it is zerker gear (condition damage has its own, other issues; no use discussing about them here).
Cause the large majority of the skills, being offensive, use all of those stats. But there are just few to no ways to use the other stats. Defensive stats just aren’t coupled to defensive skills, healing power is used by few skills and usually one must have dedicated builds just to use said stat, let alone raising it (and as we want to avoid having healers, it can’t even have really sensible effects, even when focusing on it; imho, they should just couple it with boon effects as well and rename it support power, enlarging its scope and thus the possible applications).
Boon duration surely has more applications…but the amount given on armors and trinkets is laughable – 11% at most, and there is a single gear giving those – giver’s/snowflake, with a “toughness/boon duration/healing power” stat distribution that won’t ever be used by anyone. Could as well just use platinum doubloon on any other gear, at least you can get to reasonable amounts with those.
Basically, either they lack uses, scale badly or are given in laughable amounts. Or a combination of the three.
As now, people already have skillful ways to use offensive stats. They just have to give skillful ways to use the other stats as well. Else there won’t ever be any point for good players to use any gear other than zerker.
Mh…i was hoping they would put back the SAB mini packs. Seeing those mini on BLC makes that nil chance void. And gambling for them is a no-no for me. Guess i’ll have to abandon my hopes of getting those (should have bought them at the time, but still…).
As above. Engineers’ aesthetics seems to be the least of their concern since the launch of the game. We’ll continue getting backpack skins as rewards, and we’ll continue putting them away cause using them is a waste if we can’t even see them most of the time to start with.
Healing isn’t a binary function that suddenly becomes good the second you have all healing stuff turned up to 11. Why else do you think celestial is great on engi or ele in the pvp meta? It’s not that they maxed out healing power. They have a lot of little sources of healing that add up really well. If you don’t believe it’s the encounter design of PvE or healing power scaling that is the problem, then PvP rules apply here as far as good sources of healing being completely viable at mid tiers of healing investment. Same for power/condition dmg with those classes/builds: zerker and rabid are better at each individually but being a hybrid and utilizing both at 60% efficiency is still great.
I don’t think that having healing power is what makes celestial good, rather than all the rest. Being hybrid classes, having an hybrid source of stats (especially the offensive ones) works well with them. Even more with some might added in. It helps that both classes already have some common means of using that – be it healing turret’s water field, ele staff or elixir gun (you do have to spend an utility, but at least it doesn’t involve traits).
Guardian mace 1/2 and staff 2/4 and F2 have built in healing. Ele staff 1/3/5 and ice bow 1 have built in healing or just ele water attunement in general.
Healing turret, well of blood, signet of vamp, healing springs, healing breeze are also all heals that affect your allies but (except healing turret) are all worst at personal healing than other selfish heals. Is that not what you just asked for?
I did say that we would need more weapons with built-in uses for healing power. The ones you mentioned are basically all we’ve got ingame now, that’s the issue. Thus the need of finding other sources to use it, be it traits or whatever.
And the other skills…well, are healing skills. Of course they use healing power. But we only have a single dedicated slot for them.
At this point I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree because I don’t see a moderate investment in group healing as useless and some imaginary switch suddenly makes it viable. I also don’t agree with someone investing in healing should be able to make use of their dps stats as well as a full glass cannon and I disagree with the idea that someone investing in healing power suddenly does crap dps. There are many shades in between.
Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. Imho, natively lacking the means of using healing power is an issue. There are weapons tailored for various uses – be it power, condition, even both together – but very few tailored to use healing power, or healing power along with offensive stats, and mostly limited to a couple classes.
Imho, that should change, along with giving more different uses for said stat (even if they were to rename it, dunno, support power).
My post was not only directed at you (Manuhell). There are multiple people giving different ideas of what’s wrong with HP that I disagree with and the common idea is that scaling is bad.
Well, actually, they aren’t entirely wrong about that. Scaling is bad…but it is bad on purpose. Cause having a good scaling would either unbalance the encounters or introduce healers. And we aren’t supposed to have healers. Or unbalanced encounters, either.
For you specifically:
So the whole part about a meta engi in zerker gear or even zealots having minimal dps loss while being able to utilize healing well is…. irellevant to your idea that we need more ways to use healing? A zerker necro changing a single trait and suddenly becoming an effective healer in death shroud is “too much of a sacrifice to heal a bit”?
You can’t have a minimal dps loss and use healing well together. Not if you lack the means of using said healing. And as now, many of those depend on traits, runes, sigils, even food.
As i tried to explain above, whereas offensive stats already have many means of application, and defensive are purely passive anyway, healing power has very few native means of application. That’s, imho, the issue. Usually you have to invest a lot to be able to use the stat to start with.
And about the necro…that’s a grandmaster trait that could have been spent better elsewhere, especially if you are using zerker stats. Instead it is used just to provide a mean to use healing power. Albeit, at least it is integrated in the mechanic of the class.
Your argument sounds the same to me as someone saying I have max condition damage/dire gear but I don’t want to use a condition weapon and condition traits so conditions are broken. It’s ludicrous that all weapons should have healing built into them. So of course you need to spec into healing somewhat/choose the right weapons/traits etc. Why should someone NOT have to trait for healing to become better at it?
Trait to become better is fine.
Trait just to use the stat to start with isn’t. That’s the problem.
You make the example with condition…ok, but how many weapons natively use healing power? Apart from the couple you described below, i can’t remember anything else.
Tldr:
Don’t just say there is a problem. GIVE ME A “GOOD” SCALING NUMBER! If you can’t, there is no point in continuing this discussion.
What about actually reading my post and making a reply that actually makes sense in regard to whatever is written there?
Especially seeing as i’ve already written multiple times that a straight increase to scaling would be likely to cause balance issues. And both times that part has been ignored.
Even the part you quoted was completely unrelated with the reply you did, anyway.
I’ll repeat it here: as the majority of the skills are offensive in nature, you will always have ways to use the stats provided by zerker equips. You have the means to use said stats, and runes,sigils,traits,foods either empower them or give other means to use them. And this is true even if you aren’t doing a purely offensive build. Toughness and vitality work passively, anyway. And whatever amount of power, precision and ferocity you have, you’ll use them either way – as i already said, the majority of the skills are offensive in nature, thus scaling with those stats.
Healing power, on the other hand, mostly depends on runes,sigils,traits,food just to be used. Having high healing power means nothing if you have no means to use it.
And the few means givens by the skills are, usually, provided by utilities. Often that alone makes them mutually exclusive with whatever you would have used to improve your dps otherwise. Same applies with traits, food, sigils, runes, by the way. Instead of having a choice, you end up being forced to use all those together, cause mixing all up would end up being terribly underperforming.
Because then either you then lack the means to use it – thus you’ve mostly wasted those points of healing power – or you’re diminishing either the means to use or ways to empower your other stats – thus making the other offensive stats you may have got less useful.
And all of this matter, that i also explained in the post above, has nothing to do with whatever you replied to me.
I’ll repeat it again: what we need are the means to use said stat, not some high scaling that would just create balance issues.
For that purpose, we can have some healing skills that scale well with it – so to provide an alternative for people that increase said stat, while leaving the other healing skills to people who don’t want to improve it. And we can have main weapons and utilities that natively use such a stat. But then this may cause another issue – piling up healing effects would be similar as increasing the scaling. That’s why we need other ways to use healing power – ways that aren’t related to healing hp. Thus increasing the scope of the stat. As i said above, an horizontal power-up, rather than vertical. It would do more things, rather than doing just one really good. Cause in healing power’s case, “doing just one really good” means being an healer, and the game is balanced over not having an healer, thus we can’t have it.
I hope i won’t have to explain this another time.
You don’t equip zerker gear and suddenly do massive damage. You equip the right food, runes, sigils, traits/skills weapons etc that you mention. It’s all a sliding scale of more of increasing 1 thing means not increasing another. Keepers gear still has high power/low precision and is only a ~14% dps loss compared to zerker. Those rice balls are dirt cheap too compared to max dps food that can cost upwards of half a gold.
But zerker gear (or whatever gear, for that matter) doesn’t inherently depend on such food/runes/sigils/traits to be used. Or either skills, for that matter – the offensive ones are the large majority, anyway. Sure, they increase their effectiveness quite a bit, but they aren’t strictly needed just to use said stats.
On the other hand, healing power is either all or nothing. Any in-between is just a waste of points, as many of their applications – especially the prolonged ones – rely on master and grandmaster traits that could be used for better purposes. Same with runes, sigils and so on. Without those you don’t even have the means to use the aforemented stat. As very few skills use it (and, as we said above, they don’t even scale that well).
It ends up being a build tailored to use a single stat…leaving all the other ones in a vacuum. As you said yourself, you need all those things to increase damage…but you had to spend them just to being able to use healing power. So not only you end up lacking one (or more) of the offensive stats, but you also miss all the other means of increasing your damage, even if you still had one or more stats – depending on the stat combination used – that could have done good use of them.
In the end, the main issue is that while you can specialize heavily as a zerk – because those stats all work together toward a single purpose – you can’t do the same with healing power and whatever stat it is on such a gear. They inevitably end up working toward different purposes.
I should add that the rice you mentioned is dirt cheap because no one uses it. And for the same reasons i explained above.
Again, those builds I posted were healing about 2k per second in an aoe. At what point will buffing healing power suddenly become useful? Will 10k healing per second make you happy? 30k per second? At the end of the day, experienced players that can use active defense (which includes support/CC) won’t need those heals no matter how high they are. As much as people think zerker just blow stuff up and don’t know how to dodge, how else do you think those same zerker players solo bosses like mai trin and lupi? I don’t go full tank/heals for those.
Let’s go the other way, what if you take like 1k "unavoidable damage per second?
Then you just get a 5 warrio zerker meta with 6/5/3/0/0 for healing signet, adrenaline health and life steal food to counter it. Is that any better than what we have now?To clarify, I want more bosses like mai trin and lupi so don’t pull this kind of crap argument because I disagree with making healing mandatory.
And indeed, in the post you quoted, i did say that a straight power-up wouldn’t be the solution. Healing power isn’t supposed to be a necessary stat, thus skills that use said stat end up scaling at most moderately with it, while having good base values overall. Any significant change in that regard would impact the overall balance of the game. Albeit, there could be done some tweakings and some healing skills could be tailored toward a better use of the stat (like having low base value, good scaling and some particular effect added in).
As i detailed above, rather, what is lacking are the means to use said stat. As now, you basically have to build specificatly just to use it, let alone optimizing its uses.
That could be changed. There could be more weapons that natively have uses for healing power – maybe even some skill tailored to scale well with it – but most of all, there could just be other uses introduced for said statistic, thus increasing its scope. An horizontal power-up of the stat rather than a vertical one, so to speak. It wouldn’t do a single thing drastically better – that’s what we want to avoid, for balance purposes – but rather, it would be used to do more things (and thus increasing variety).
Even the healing builds provided had basically to focus on piling as much bonuses (food, runes, sigils) and the few traits/skills that would make use of healing power to make such builds even minimally useful.
But that basically means that unless you use some very specific build, healing power isn’t worth of being used. Especially since you’re greatly diminishing your dps in doing so.
And mostly because unlike offensive stats, there are very few skills that use healing power to any avail. And, as noticed above, with low scaling factors.
I can agree when people say that making base healings low and scale H.Power higher would make such a stat basically required, and should be avoided (albeit, i would still see well some tweakings on that regard, and some healing skill revised for the specific purpose of making them work really well with healing power). The only other way to make it more useful, then, is to increase the ways healing power is used. Either giving bonus effects that scale purely with healing power (and thus with little to no base values) or giving it additional uses.
I would avoid making it work with either precision and/or ferocity, though, cause it would end in the same exponential issue that makes zerker so efficient compared to other stat combinations (and thus make those healings far too powerful).
That grandmaster trait scales well with healing power, though – 0.4 makes having some healing power quite effective.
But that’s kinda an exception to the rule – usually the scaling isn’t so good. Traits like elixir-infused bombs only have a 0.15 scaling, for example. Even the regen you mention scales only per 0.125 healing power. The vampiric mark should have a 0.2, but i may be wrong. Basically, the only significant scaling of a frequently used skill is the only one you’ve mentioned in detail.
And obviously, you must have all those ways to use healing power. Either you have some trait like the ones mentioned above and some utilities/weapons skills/mechanics that can heal, or you end up using it just with the healing skill and little else (making such a choice a waste of points).
In the end, the major issue of such a stat is that it is heavily limited in its application and effects as to avoid it ending up being necessary (and having to sacrifice a lot of dps for such limited effects makes it mostly useless in practice – even in the video above they used berserker jewelries to improve damage, as a full cleric wouldn’t have added much healing, but sure it would have hit like a wet noodle; anyway, they also fixed fiery rush, so such a run done now would end up even slower; and boring, i would add).
Imho, either they change how stats are distributed in equips (if it is supposed to be limited in application and not as effective as other stats, maybe they should review how equips give stats – make cleric give power,toughness, healing power and some boon duration for example, so that the scope of such an equip is enlarged) or they change the stat directly to add other effects on it, like increasing the effect of active defensive skills (and rename it something else, dunno, support power).
Or they could give additional effects on skills of some specialization dependant purely by healing power (or with very low base effect, unlike the skills we’ve got now). That would enlarge its scope of use, too.
They didn’t get it yet, that’s the point. It will come out some day (i hope, for both them and us) and some people would still have got skins they shouldn’t have got otherwise.
I sure hope that’s just art.
Tribulation mode skins are the only skins so far that properly rewarded a player for his effort and skill, without any RNG involved – you complete the content, you get a skin, and you can’t get it otherwise. No easy way like buying it at the TP.
Giving them away in an RNG raffle would make no sense, beside cheapen out their significance and value.
Either they mean to release it as an april fish again (and thus cannot spoil the surprise) or we won’t see it for a long time.
Assuming there is even any intent to do it. Cause they didn’t want to release it during living story seasons, and ok, that’s fine. But even when they’re done, they still seem to have no intention to release it either. And when they’ll have finished focusing on the expansion it will likely be living story time again, henceforth still not a good time for SAB…
I wanted to fly~
but as an engineer~
no wings for me~
Haiku to hobosacks, 2015
turrets should have their regen cut in half and despawn if engineer goes +1200 range of them.
More like (of course, just my opinion):
- Thumper needs to change to add 1 stability for 4 seconds every 10 seconds instead of protection so that they’re a bit squishier (of course post-stability change).
- Turret HP needs to increase about 20% but:
– Conditions affect them, but at 50% reduced duration added to plated turrets.
– Removed Regen (see next point).
- Remove the 5%/3 sec healing trait. Replace with: Reduce the starting cooldown of non-healing turrets by the percentage of remaining health when picked up. This way turrets can roam better, turrets have more counter play and people have to manually manage them better. That may even include picking them up before an anticipated assault on one. That said, if they’re exploded or killed, full recharge.
- Make the Rifled Turret Barrel trait range baseline, and rework the trait, effectively lowering Turret damage as they no longer gain 15% damage. Instead, rework it to “Turret Modded Weapons: Weapon attacks also let out a burst of 100 damage per turret ability slotted.” (Wording might need cleaning up) But essentially, it shifts more damage to the engineer and even give incentive to use more power/crit/ferocity over strictly running Sentinel, if the scaling is appropriate.These are the general rough steps I’d take to correcting it. Feel free to weigh in.
Baseline speaking, they would melt in a few seconds with just a 20% hp increase. Even with the plating, aside from the thumper one, i can’t see them alive for more than 10s (and even then, we’re talking about a few seconds more, and thumper is already on point anyway). Turrets with long cooldowns would be gutted by such a change, on virtue of being on cooldown the large majority of the time.
Sure, there is the other trait you suggested…but what would the point of it be? Roam better? They are turrets, they aren’t supposed to be something you can freely move. Picking them up before an anticipated assault? And so you stay there trying to resist an assault with utilities you can’t even use because they could just take them out? How are you fighting then? If you can’t even rely on them to be actually used, you could as well not take them and get a kit instead. At least you don’t risk it being destroyed, beside offering more versatility and being generally better.
(i should also add that it would likely make the fortified turrets trait totally broken…you could just deploy some short cooldown turret to get the reflective shield, pick it up, and repeat; it would likely end up nerfed to the ground after such a change)
About the grandmaster suggestion…according to how it actually works, it can go terribly wrong (per hit? flamethrower or grenades and turrets = scorched earth). Even without kits, those bursts would just empower the autoattack most of the time. It would just end up being a strong passive bonus that still offers no counterplay either.
I would rather see that power directed upon overcharges. Make it reduce the overcharge cooldown and increase the damage (or effect, if they don’t deal primarily deal damage) done by the overcharge. That would not apply to the healing turret, of course.
Anyway, imho, there is a conceptual issue people aren’t considering here.
A necromancer can afford an army of disposable minions, but the engineer is different – his companions are limited in numbers, and they must shoulder all the more the weight, especially due of that lack of a second weapon. They must be alive and working most of the time and do something to be worth a slot.
Sure, there are ways they could rework them while still maintaining reasonable uptimes. They could lower their hp and/or make them susceptible to conditions, shorten some cooldowns and make their cooldowns recharge while they’re down up to a certain amount (let’s say, 50% of the cooldown – they would be generally easier to defeat, and doing it quickly would take them out for a bit and put the engineer in a pinch, but at the same time this guarantees that properly defended ones will be usable most of the time; maybe rework fortified turret onto overcharge use as well, to avoid issues). And they could shift power from the turret autoattack to the overcharges (albeit, shifting too much power could make them too bursty). Or even changing how overcharges work at all (something like "weak autoattack normal mode -> using overcharge makes it work nicely for a certain amount of time (after that it goes on forced weak autoattack mode for a bit) -> using again the skill during overcharge releases a strong attack, but forces the weak autoattack mode for a longer period of time).
Actually turret engi is good I just think the net turret in the supply drop need to be change out to thumper turret or somethin…hence it why most of us are eating that dmg
And since it couldn’t be overcharged itd just be a cripple instead of immob and no added CC. I think that’s fair.
Could be an idea. Albeit, if they do so, i sure hope they revert the nerf they did on net turret…since it was stated specifically that they were done due to supply crate.
Just make them explode on less incoming damage taken, they are too tanky as-is for something so passive, and shorten the recasts to compensate. Treat them more like a Mesmer Phantasm—Whaaaaaaaa- – you cry out, baffled with shock, confusion and awe at such a ludicrous suggestion?—No.. really, they got perfectly good range as-is, even if they are stationary. If you were to run away for that range on a Phantasm, it’ll disintegrate on its own, even if the Mesmer stays on you the whole time. At least your turrets can stick around, right?
Sure, that’s something that could be done. Did you think about the consequences, though?
Lessening the cooldowns means also increasing the times that accelerant-packed turret and fortified turrets will process.
That, or the very least make some conditions work on them. Bleed can be seen as oil leakage, Burn could be seen as fuel catching fire, etc.
They could, but probably that would also require a rebalance on their health points, else they would just melt in a few seconds. After all, they likely have their current hp balanced over the fact that they can’t be harmed by condition. Thus explaining why their health is relatively low, despite being static targets that can be outranged without retaliation (at least when untraited for).
The most common turret placement is:
1) Thumper turret dead center on a point. The knockback can remove most players trying to cap the point.
2) Flame Turret on the side of the point (just within range of anyone trying to cap, but outside of aoe range).
3) Rocket turret off point, in a hard to reach place. On a cliff, in mid air, etc. It has 1000 range and an aoe knockback attack, so it can hit the entire point from quite a distance.With this placement, you don’t even need the self-repairing and metal plating traits. I rarely use those traits since my turrets don’t get killed enough to warrant them.
I was thinking more along the line of rifle/rocket/thumper (and traited for range, plating and self-repair). Unless the point you describe is really small – and imho, that’s another issue altogether, as i also mentioned before – such a tactic won’t work.
(by the way, rocket turret overcharge is single target)
Players get a few choices:
1)Try to snipe rocket turret (which has 7.5k base hp, is immune to crits and condi damage), as you suggest, and waste quite a bit of time not decapping the point while I’m helping my team fight 5v4 on the rest of the map.
I don’t see at as a waste of time, though. In doing so, you used up an utility and will have to wait for an hefty 50s cooldown. And, more importantly, he can get the point. If turrets aren’t traited for range, he may even not get damaged in doing so, depending on his build.
Also, his team isn’t fighting versus “5” opponents either way. Having a single weapon, utilities are all the most more important for an engineer than other classes. And knowing that you use turrets (and thus that you can’t have utilities available, aside from the healing and the elite) makes you even an easier prey.
It would be more correct to say that there is a 0.4 defending a point and 4.4 fighting versus 4 (the 0.2 lost is due to the lack of efficency in managing turrets while away from them)
2) Try to decap the point, and get knocked back by thumper turret + rocket turret and eat a bunch of damage and get nice and softened for when me or my allies come to defend the point after we’ve crushed the team 5v4 on the rest of the map.
The worst choice, imho. Rushing forcefully is a recipe for failure. As it should be.
3) Go look for me somewhere on the map where I am assisting in the team fight, where I still have my supply crate, tanky build, and plenty of CC (immob + knockback) with rifle. If we’re not winning the team fight, I just blow up my off-site turrets and use the tool belt skills for the extra utility + dps (all of which are quite strong). Being without my turrets does not make me a “free kill” and if other engis are feeling that way, they need to L2P.
That’s assuming you successfully arrived at the team fight (intercepting you before it happens would be the worst outcome).
Even then, supply crate has still a 3 minute cooldown, so it isn’t like you can spam it as will. Sure, you may detonate all your turrets and use toolbelts. Even then, your enemies still have a second main weapon, their class mechanic and their utilities available. Beside knowing that you are an opponent with a serious lack of condition cleanses (by using 3 turrets you can’t have other utilities, and that’s something they can easily see for themselves during the battle). That alone makes you the perfect target to be focused upon.
Of course, assuming that the last enemy isn’t fast enough to properly help his allies and force you in a 5vs4.4 fight, kill you and then go get a point now devoid of turrets (and maybe also attack you before you can get to the point and set up your turrets).
Full berserker warrior, 10 stacks of might, over 2500 power: Unattended turrets easily live through a full 100b + whirlwind + arcing slice + arcing arrow combo (tons of aoe damage) while doing over 10k damage to the warrior and interrupting/knocking him back (thumper + rocket turret ftw, right?). Don’t believe me? Go try it out vs a traited turret engi. The same applies to thieves and all condition specs (since turrets are immune to conditions). Anyone who thinks it makes sense for a passive build (you can literally afk) to counter 2/3 types of builds (condi & berserker). If you want to capture the point, you somehow have to live long enough or kill the turrets.
And dealing with the rocket turret first would have greatly helped. Something that you didn’t seem to do (and that turret would have been annihilated by that combo, by the way).
Instead, you rush into the point with a glass cannon build, inside the range of all the turrets, try to take down the tankiest turret (the only close range one of the lot, by the way)…and then complain that you died. Frankly speaking, you deserved it. That’s, like, the perfect example of what someone shouldn’t do in such a situation. You were playing completely onto the engineer’s hand. Even if he wasn’t there.
If you manage to blow up some turrets, they explode and knockback + damage you for quite a bit too. I used to run a build entirely around exploding turrets because the knockback + damage is quite significant (and the lovely blast finishers are great). The tool belt skills more than compensate for having your turrets on cooldown after blowing them up.
Yeah, but that’s another trait (and i’ve just tested it, around 1500 damage with soldier amulet versus a light golem – not bad at all, but it still requires to detonate or have a turret killed, after all; albeit, the detonation activation will be likely done only with the healing one (it would be a waste with the others, as the toolbelts aren’t that good as you make them seem and there are the cooldowns to take care for; better wait until they’re killed).
You can sit off point and plunk away at the turrets with a bow, wasting (literally) 2-3 minutes while your team is fighting 4v5 on the rest of the map. Doing this WILL make your team lose, so it’s not a viable strategy. The only real solution is to rush the point with 2-3 players, at which point you’re leaving the rest of the map undefended in a 2v5. Turrets allow engis to hold a point without being physically there. That is a serious problem.
To refresh people’s memory: The community was in a huge uproar over ranger pets being able to go to a nearby point (effectively allowing rangers to guard two points at once). Ranger pets can at least be killed rather quickly. This was promptly fixed with the leash range on pets getting reduced so they couldn’t do that anymore.
Guess what, pets also move. Turret can’t. Or shall we move the ground along with them?
Of course they stay there – they are turrets. They can’t move. Comparing them with something that can move – any other minion/pet/whatever ai in the game – makes no sense.
And as i’ve already said above…if the engineer isn’t on point, then he’s somewhere else with only his rifle available. And no way to properly use his overcharges, as he hasn’t got any idea of what is going on. And if the engineer dies, the turrets do as well. An engineer that does so is putting himself (and the point) at risk.
And if you don’t give him the time to go to the point and set himself up, all he can do is either waste the turrets in some alley (he can’t setup himself before the cooldowns are up again) or fight with his rifle and little else (and probably lose in doing so, as without turrets it can’t do much at all).
(edited by Manuhell.2759)
Defining trait heavy are some/all of the skills completely useless without some/all of associated traits/seeming balanced around the traited versions as oppose to the baseline skill.
Fine. And since there was a discussion about such a trait just some posts above your last post – rifled-turret barrels (a grandmaster trait) already ends up being one, since without that range increase rifle and rocket turrets are just sitting targets (but at least you get other traits from said line). So they’re already partially inclined toward that route, at least as far as pvp goes (in pve they’re useless, anyway).
As i already explained before, it wouldn’t make sense for them to disappear either. Wherever the engineer is, he’s there just with the rifle if the turrets are all somewhere else. And if he’s killed, the turrets are gone as well. He already takes a risk in doing so, beside making the protected point weaker – as if he can’t kitten the situation, he can’t be able to properly use the overcharges either.
You kinda do. Thumper is really, really durable and ranged damage tends to be weaker than melee damage. Unless you’re a pewpewranger or an ele.
Points bigger would help considering turret engis are noticeably weaker on large points like mid at Foefire…But I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon, and Turret engis only thrive in pvp…so it’s the format they should be balanced in.
If you have to go melee and the engineer is staying near the thumper turret, you could as well maul the engineer directly, though. If he tries to move away, he will just make things harder for himself.
Another solution could be having a relatively normal ranged point, but that moves programmatically inside an area. In doing so, the engineer would have to follow the point to not let other capture it, thus reducing the time he can protect himself using the thumper turret as a shield since it wouldn’t be always inside the capture point area (and also working well toward aoe barrages, as people should still have to aim for a moving area, while giving inventive uses to trap-like skills and such).
There are so many steps to finally taking out a turret engi that you’re pretty much wasting your time trying to solo one off a point. And that’s where my issue comes in. You’re better off ignoring them throughout the whole game then you are trying to take their point back.
Well, it is a point holder build – keeping the point is exactly what they’re heavily specialized to do. And more than steps, we should talk about not just rushing blindingly inside their safe haven – playing how an engi turret wants you to do is a recipe for a loss.
What engi needs is to have more dodgeable skills. As it is, turret engi is just a bunch of AI all attacking you at same time, with a rifle that has skills without a tell.
If Overcharged turret did more damage and turret base damage was lowered, that would actually help…because overcharged actually has a tell. So if an engi isn’t able to hit you with overcharged turret, he will take a big hit to his damage. Hence actually being in line with risk/reward. Of course, rifle needs to be fixed as well, since Overcharged shot has zero activation time, he could just combo the skill with Overcharged turrets.
…and that’s what i referred for as “people complaining later”. Unless they rework what it does, overcharged shot won’t and can’t lose its zero activation time.
I would also add that doing sustained damage is basically a theme of the engineer, be it with kits or turrets. Burst damage type skills are quite limited in that regard due of the possibility to chaining them all together (often this means making them aoe with moderate power, like grenade barrage and big ol’ bomb, so that you won’t kill someone by just chaining them; and if a way to do that happens to be discovered, it gets nerfed -100grenades says bye here).
The most damaging turrets are single targeted, though. So would their bursts. And if you think a rocket does damage now, well, don’t do any calculation on what it should do later if you shift even just 25% of the power by normal attacks made on a period equal to an overcharge recharge time.
Some attacks would have to be reworked, too. Rifle turret overcharge just makes it shoot faster. Just shifting the damage would be problematic (10s of high fire rate and moderate-to-high damage? what about no?).
Basically, any such proposal isn’t something that would be simple to balance. They would probably require a detailed rework of all the skills involved. There is no bandaid solution that can work here.
(edited by Manuhell.2759)
Why should that skill set be the consider for such treatment there, there are skill sets across numerous profession that are trait heavy dependency by design?
Define “trait heavy dependency”. Cause in turret’s case we’re talking about at least 4 or 5 traits, eventually with multiple grandmaster traits involved.
Also, the other professions have two weapons (or four attunements). They are balanced differently to start with. If you want the engineer to be like them, give also the same advantage they all share – a second weapon. Cause the toolbelt alone doesn’t warrant its lack.
It can be really hard to target it considering its range (1500 when traited…so is rifle turret for that matter) and how turret engis place them these days. Especially on certain maps. Sometimes they’re completely unreachable thanks to deployable turrets trait.
Well, going in and out LoS or turret range may help. Still, such an increase is indeed steep, but what is the alternative? Turrets can’t move, so anyone staying far enough could snipe ranged turret down without any retaliation if there wasn’t a way – a costly one, it is a grandmaster trait after all – to raise their range. And that alone makes it necessary.
What they could change there is about the increase damage part of the trait – maybe change that to a reduction of overcharges cooldown or an increase of their damage; it would still increase the overall damage, but the engineer has to actively use the skills.
Two of the five they take directly help the turrets sustain while two of the others help the engineers sustain…Which is just as bad.
The one that doesn’t is a problem on its own. It’s the whole reason turrets have insane range.
As i said above, there aren’t actually other choices. Being able to hit even the ranged turrets without retaliation would make them worthless if it wasn’t so. And it still requires a grandmaster trait to do so, on a tree that already offers very limited choices for anything that isn’t a turret (thus only a full turret build can afford to get it, unless they want to waste the other traits).
That single CC is on a 15 second CD and it has no tell so it’s essentially unavoidable unless you get lucky and dodge roll just as it goes off. Also, that’s hardly all Turret engi has for CC. Overcharged rocket knocks down, overcharged thumper knocks down, and exploding turrets knock down. Turret engi conveniently has net shot too, so he can just fire that right before an overcharge to guarantee it hits.
Well, you said pingponging, thus i assumed you only meant the instant ones (the “exploding turrets” you mention of – and that’s still another trait, by the way – and overcharge shot). And that the rocket turret would already be dealt with (meleeing the thumper with the rocket turret still active would be a suicide).Overcharge shot should have a discussion on its own, instead (it lacks a tell because of the self-knockback…acting as an aftercast delay instead of a proper cast time; and because being reliably able to reflect back the launch on top of the self-knockback it already inflicts on the user would make it far too risky to use; basically, any change on it being instant is tied with a change on the self knockback).
It deals too much damage even with its rate of fire. That turret combined with the other turrets and the engi’s auto attack damage is just too overwhelming. The rocket turret makes the largest impact as far as damage is concerned, though.
Rocket turret is indeed the most damaging out of them – that’s why killing it first is a must (and with its 50s cooldown, the battle will be done before it can return to the battlefield).
Of course. Traiting for turrets is the only thing turret Engi needs to be viable. The fact remains those traits make thumper too tanky. If there needs to be turret traits, then don’t make every single one compound how tanky they can be.
Well, actually, the defensive turret traits are 2 out of 8.
Albeit, a turret build will likely get most of them.
It doesn’t need to move when it’s right smack in the middle of a point.
Killing turrets from a distance just isn’t viable except for a few builds that got the AOE damage to do it. You can’t even AOE them most the time because engi’s place their turrets around the point, while thumper is in the center..Leaving almost all of them outside of AOE range. Unless it’s an ele’s meteor.
Define “viable”. If you expect to deal with all of them quickly, you’re basically asking to make them useless. Those 3 turrets are all the utilities that engineer has got, and they must make up for the lack of a second weapon as well. Without them he’s toasted.
And meleeing thumper is a joke. Engi will ping pong you all over the place.
With a single CC? Or yet another trait (and even then, he must detonate turrets to do so…while doing that with the healing turret isn’t an issue, anything else would decrease his offense).
Assuming you even need to melee the thumper one, anyway. Its radius isn’t that big, after all. Imho, it is more a matter of some capture points being too small, and should be made bigger, so that aoe can’t take the entire point (and that would also work versus grenade spam, since it would force the user to aim a bit at least).
And by the time you do kill them (if you even can), the engi already has ticked so many points from that point while you were being worthless that he already has a moral victory, anyways.
If engi turrets had some risk or skill involved to them, I might agree. But they’re more than viable and the counterplay needed to beat them should not exist in GW. It’s basically avoid point or 2v1 engi.
As i said above – if you expect them to go down quickly while being fully traited for, you’re asking them to be useless. Without them out, the engineer has just a single main weapon that is even weaker than other main weapons by design. The engineer is nothing without his utilities, whatever they may be.
And it isn’t like the turret engineer has no risks, anyway – you can’t CC or condi his turrets, but sure you can do that with him. And when he has 3 turrets out, he can’t have stun breakers (outside of detonating thumper turret and use his toolbelt) or condi cleanse (only the two provided by the healing turret). The engineer itself ends up being the weakest link of the chain, but it couldn’t be otherwise – everything is spent to make turrets better.
And what i would like to avoid to see is another “grenade kit” situation, where they completely gutted the base kit because piling up a ton of traits made the traited kit strong. Forcing people that wanted to use said kit to trait for it to be viable.
If they have to trim down turrets because the traited ones are an issue, just delete some of those 8 traits instead.
But even then that won’t solve the second issue – you can’t expect much active play when you have only 5 weapon skills at your disposal, plus some turret overcharges. And turret overcharges can’t be simply shortened down, as they’re often tied with CC.
Sure, they could lessen the autoattack damage and make overcharge skills deal more damage, but what would change then? People would complain cause their bursts are too strong. The situation isn’t something that simple to solve.
And making them useless like many want to isn’t a solution, anyway.
It won’t make them useless, just bring them more in line with other pet/AI. Adding “all these weaknesses” is just allowing them to be affected by game mechanics that every other player/class/pet in the game is subject to.
They don’t need more HP- the thumper already has the health of a raid boss anyway-, they don’t need more damage, cc, or increased rate of fire. People are saying they would like turrets to be subject to the rules of the game that everything else has to abide by if they stay in their current state so that there is actual real counterplay against them. Otherwise, if they remain immune to everything except direct damage please drastically lower their HP, damage, cc etc.
Other pets also move, can crit and usually tend to have higher hp and/or better fire rates. Beside being on classes with multiple main weapons or attunements. The rules aren’t the same to start with, and something has to make up for those, like it or not.
In turrets’ case, their resistance to conditions and CC.
You can’t just expect them to have all the weaknesses of the other minions in addition to their owns – and i specified that before as well, but you conveniently avoided that part – and pretend for them not to be rebalanced to make up for it.
And thumper turret is a melee range turret, anyway. Of course it must be tankier than the other turrets, else it would be quickly destroyed from a distance without even being able to counterattack (since, you know, it can’t move).
Again, the aim of these proposals is only to make them useless.
Rocket turret deals too much damage and the range on that thing is nothing short of ridiculous….
…and that’s why it has a fire rate of 4s and slightly less than 7500 hp. Beside being a static target. Also, max range is 1250, but it requires a grandmaster trait.Else it is 1000.
Thumper turret has too much HP considering it can self heal,
when traited for
has permanent protection
again, when traited for
and can’t be crit or condition spammed.
It’s literally about as hard to kill as the treb in Khylo. Maybe even harder.
and like the trebuchet it cannot move, thus being just a nice target that can’t counterattack if you deal with it from a distance, or until you come close enough.
Also, you can’t expect for them to be balanced over a fully traited build like the one you’re likely mentioning. Traits are there to make things good, not barely viable. Especially if you pile multiple traits up. They must have a sensible effect.
Cause doing so means the engineer itself will have few to no traits upon himself (or the main weapon). A tradeoff, basically.
(edited by Manuhell.2759)
I don’t see how adding the weaknesses of other classes AI/pets in addition of their owns would bring them in line. If anything it would make them far weaker, unless they are rebalanced in accord to the changes involved (a sensible increase of their hp, at least, and some tweaks in their fire rate to account for their new weaknesses). Guess what, though, no one ever talks about rebalancing them when they talk about adding all these weaknesses.
Not that i’m surprised by that. As far as i’ve seen, all these proposals are aimed only at making turrets useless.