Guild Wars 2

I do enjoy setting up turrets from time to time. Having all 3 turrets properly placed can be fun to watch, but it has its drawbacks. I personally believe that the 5 minute limit anet imposed on the turrets was unwarranted and in doing so, they should have given us deployable turrets for free since turrets are now truly disposable items. I think that would have been a fare trade off. All the other boosts they gave turrets are moot in comparison. That’s how I feel anyway.

The CD is kind of ridiculous too after you pick up your turrets. Turrets don’t have wheels so you’re required to run over there to pick them up. And for what? A mere 25% CD reduction? Might as well be lazy and detonate them and wait the full CD. Meanwhile a necro enjoys summoning his pets once and they all run around freely.

I don’t agree that the CD should be counted at the time of placement because that would honestly be OP, but I do feel anet needs to work on their CD numbers, especially if you take the time to pickup a turret.

Of course, before making any more game changing adjustments, I’d rather anet fix what’s there. Update the tooltips with the correct dmg and ranges with rifled turret barrels. Right now rifled turret barrels do not give 15% dmg boost because I see the same numbers whether it’s on or off. The range does increase a little bit though, but how much I don’t know. Improve the UI to show actual time left on the turret, and show us a report of their health somewhere on the HUD so we have an idea where we stand.

The mortar is another turret I would love to see get some attention too. One of the reasons I went engineer was for the mortar, but I was let down when I actually saw it in action. In fact, to this day I still laugh that my fully spec’d arms are strong enough to throw grenades as far as a fully spec’d mortar shell at like 2 to 3 times the speed and damage. The logic just isn’t there.

Nice vid Mask, although I can’t help but notice your opponents are not that good :P Reviving a dead guy in the middle of a battle? whoa.. I do like your strategy with the elixir S though. I will have to start trying that out.

Goloith, T1 matches are quite difficult when you’re up against a zerg. The real problem is skill lag though, which is why I’ve given up on HGH. To many times I couldn’t trigger my elixirs and I was kitten the entire fight. It’s why I now use turrets since they do fire and pierce, adding a decent amount of extra dmg (if placed properly before combat!). I’ll switch to back to elixirs and bombs if it’s not that bad. Unlike Mask, I chose to go with condition duration instead of boon duration. 2x mad kings, 2x lyssa, 2x giver pistols, 30% condi duration in power trait, and a veggi pizza for an extra 36% for a total of 106%. Static shot, prybar, and confusion bomb add a lethal dose of confusion. There are tons of condi removers and notwithstanding their finite use, they too suffer from skill lag. I know when that happens because the bags just pile up at my feet. Nevertheless, when I play engie I feel like I’m more of a supportive role. Zerk warriors and bunker guardians can go in and level a group, but my engie helps keep pressure on them. Static shot is a such a fun AOE skill to troll from the edges, but if it’s getting rough, I’ll run into the thick of it and plant a confusion bomb. My going away present to the zerg

Anymras, I can understand that being a problem, but the solution to that is to enforce an AFK policy on the server, not enforce a time limit on the turrets (imo). Additionally, I would completely understand if there was a game rule that would destroy your turrets if you venture to far away from them. In fact, that’s how I originally interpreted how turrets would function. I was surprised to learn that I could be on the other side of the map and my turrets would still function. IMO that’s a core problem that could be solved, but a 5 min timer would be an odd solution to that problem.

In my particular case, I might setup a rocket turret and rifle turret near the entrance of the fort, or perhaps on the wall. At first, they’re not likely to see any action, but I will patrol the area and/or escort Dolyaks nearby. If I get jumped, then I will need to rely on those turrets to help bail me out. In this particular case, if the turrets are destroyed during combat due to the timeout, that would likely result in me losing the fight. Conversely, deploying turrets during combat gives the enemy a tactical advantage while the engie is busy setting up. More so if you to run around to deploy them first since you don’t want your turrets within AOE distance of each other.

I’m just curious what anet’s reasoning is behind this. I never roll with turrets when I’m roaming wvw, but sometimes I like to use them for the fun of it when defending a fort. It’s rare, but every now and then I want to do something different. With an invisible 5 minute countdown however, I can’t imagine any engineer now willing to risk putting their life in danger when their turrets explode at the wrong time and you’re stuck with a lengthy CD and no skills to save your butt. Pets don’t disappear after 5 minutes, so why did they decide turrets should? I find this very bizarre especially when you consider:

1. It takes time to plan and position your turrets so they’re not easily accessible by the enemy. More so if (like me) you don’t have or want to waste points for the ground targeting trait.

2. There’s no UI to indicate the amount of time remaining.

I’m hoping anet can shed some light on this and explain the reasoning for it.

Just wanted to post a status update on this. I didn’t know a similar discussion was going on in the Personal Story forum. Looks like the issue was already known.

In my particular story, under the Vigil I decided to get the char engineers rather than the Norn. They build a large canon near the courtyard (see screenshot) and just before you fight in the courtyard, it’s one of the sieges you have to regain control over so you can’t miss it. It starts off broken at first, but it will be repaired by the downed char once you rez him. Following that, you can use the canon to destroy the risen in the courtyard later. I always thought it was a prop and not an actual weapon I could use.

I’m not sure if the difficulty is suppose to scale on the grounds that such a powerful weapon is used or if even the trebuchet’s should be used. It generally doesn’t feel that way when you’re in the thick of it, so I’m one the fence here. I only tried this route because it was mentioned in the other forum post. Maybe some sort of in-game dialog to remind the gamer that they should either fight in the courtyard or use sieges.

In the personal story quest retribution, you are trying to retake claw island. At one stage in the quest, you have to wipe the risen from the courtyard before you fight the dragon. I counted about 3 veteran acolytes and 2 or 3 veteran captains that were summoning a horde of risen. My allied NPCs were destroyed very quickly and I had to retreat. Only 1 or 2 friendly NPCs would respawn and enter the courtyard to assist me at a future time. At this point, the veteran acolytes once again spawned in more risen and they just ripped through anybody in the area. The mission became impossible to win and I had to leave.

I didn’t have problems with this mission before, so either something has changed since or there’s an edge case in the gameplay that can make the mission impossible to beat. From my point of view, the acolytes need a much longer cool down on their ability to spawn in new risen, or perhaps remove their ability to spawn in any new risen at all. By the time I’m done taking out 3 spawned risen, another 10 spawned risen are on me and I just can’t do anything about it. The friendly NPCs get wiped out to quickly for me to do the damage I’m trying to do on the veteran acolytes and captains. Another alternative would be to spawn in more friendly NPCs to counter the number of risen spawned.

FYI, I tried to complete this level 59 quest on my level 72 warrior with full darksteel knight’s armour and weaponry. Technically I should have an edge over the risen, but it’s no where near enough to compensate for the sheer number of risen that continuously spawn on me.