Why were Engineer turrets nerfed? Was it really necessary?

I come back to find my favorite part of the game changed.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates/2017-05-16#Engineer

They claim that overcharging turrets wasn't "tactical", but I found the opposite to be true. Those bursts and damage and healing could make or break a tough fight. I remember trying to stall long enough to let them come off cooldown so that one last burst would give me what I needed to win without dying.I can tell you in PvP that overcharge ability would be the epitomy of tactical decision making, and extremely important to do well - You need the ability to burst out that DPS and defense at key moments during a fight. Especially since, unlike PvE mobs, players can choose when to engage or disengage, in what numbers, and choose where to place themselves in relation to your turrets, which makes it critical you choose the right time to pop overcharge for maximum effect.Granted, they won't be that tactical in a lot of PvE encounters where it just comes down to spamming DPS and healing as fast as possible, but in that case why give turret engineers a strait up nerf to their damage output and survivability? The PvP tactical aspects alone should have warranted they are worth keeping. And removing them came with no compensation to PvE damage and survivability.

Engineer is about the least popular class, and from what high level engineers have told me there's really nothing they do that others can't do better so playing one is largely just something you do because you like the style or theme. In that case, how could engineers warrant such nerfs?

Furthermore, from a design standpoint, not being able to overcharge more than once goes against the entire design and purpose of the turret as something you place down to hold an area. It's designed for prolonged combat over an area, and for prepositioning prior to a battle in order to gain maximum time saved and impact. The problems are most pronounced in PvP but exist to some extent in PvE. The new system forces you to save your turret placement until you make contact in order to benefit from their effects, which costs valuable time and lost DPS output and lost health to yourself. During prolonged battles you'll never get to use it again. And it also increases the chance you will get caught out without your turrets if you are expected to blow them up between battles over points. Or, in the case of PvE, you lose massive amounts of DPS and aggro disruption if you blow up your turrets and wait for them to come off cooldown just so you can overcharge again. It's not practical to function that way, so you never do it.

I like it better this way, it makes them more disposable, so I can detonate them for their blast finishers without feeling like I'm wasting a cooldown.

Honestly, I think they fear the whole ritualist/spirit spam mechanic issues ever becoming an issue again.

@Rhyse.8179 said:I like it better this way, it makes them more disposable, so I can detonate them for their blast finishers without feeling like I'm wasting a cooldown.

You don't sound like someone who is using an actual turret centric build, as I am (in both PvE and PvP), but rather someone who just mixes in a turret occassionally and therefore doesn't really care much if it's up or not.

Even if you wanted it to function this way, and I don't agree it's better because it runs counter to the entire design and purpose of turrets while being tactically more boring, at the very least there should have been compensation buffs to their base form to account for the fact that you are no longer DPSing as much with them in prolonged encounters and your survivability is lowered by not having regular access to blind/knockback/heal/stun.

They were gamebreakingly overpwered. Everything old spirit ranger was 2x.

@Razor.6392 said:They were gamebreakingly overpwered. Everything old spirit ranger was 2x.

How so?And why did it take nearly 5 years for this to be discovered and nerfed?

@"Razor.6392" said:They were gamebreakingly overpwered. Everything old spirit ranger was 2x.

HAHAHAHA....No.

Nothing is further from the truth. Healing turret was the only "overpowered" turret and that's only relative to the other garbage options engineer has.Now maybe if all you did was run through the turret field in PvP you'd find them OP but they were a legit joke in every other mode of play including open world PvP so much so that they along with many other "AI" centric builds had to be buffed so that unless those were being targetted directly they took 95% reduced damage.

Turrets have been nerfed for 1 reason alone, the average players in PvP are too inept to learn from mistakes and change their tactics and instead decided to whine until turrets were essentially removed from play.

Turrets got nerfed because PVP players whined and cried about them.

Even though they were purly static and a smart team could just walk away and cap two other points 5v4. It was a total knee jerk reaction which made them unusable in every game mode.

A big reason they were also really powerful in PvP at the time was condition damage and critical hits were not effective, only raw power damage did anything to them and with that old turret placement trait you could put them out of reach of melee. But now turrets are affected by condi and crits and received no health boost AND they took away auto turret heal trait and being able to throw them.

Imo now that they can take full damage from every source they should be buffed again damage wise, or at least make them scale off of player stats so if you want a powerful turret build you can't be bunker. I also miss being able to overcharge when I wanted because with some turrets the overcharge is good but useless in situations where the regular attack would be sufficient so it wastes the overcharge.

A lot of people complain that turrets are a lame build but they are actually the most fun I had playing engineer, minion builds are fun when they aren't crap.

They were nerfed because of the Turret Tank meta in pvp, pre-HoT. It was the most cancerous meta ever.

@Lahmia.2193 said:They were nerfed because of the Turret Tank meta in pvp, pre-HoT. It was the most cancerous meta ever.

To be fair, even if we rebuffed turrets back to their original point in Pre-HoT, I don't think they'd be particularly effective now.

I miss the old turrets. Having it automatically overload on placement goes contrary to how turrets are meant to be used (ie: preemptively protecting an area). The explanation anet gave at the time was "to enable usage of the tool belt skills even while turrets are placed". But the joke is that now turrets can hardly be used as anything other than blast finishers.

Pretty much nobody in the forums liked that change, but now we are stuck with it. I just gave up on them and now use gyros. Some even claim that was anet's plans to get people to buy the expansion. :/

Nah, at least I hope not cuz went I bought HoT I swiftly asked for my money back and uninstalled. It took PoF to coax me back XD

I think overcharge fix would be easy, either have turret overcharge when tool belt is used or when turret is placed tool belt is replaced with overcharge. I do however feel that just dropping turrets and effectively camping a capture point or leaving it on a capture point sounds the opposite of fun. Traps that cover the entire point are bad enough. I also feel if they are going to leave design as is then rifle, rocket and net turret need some work done as their single overcharge and CDs make them pretty crappy in current design.

I think they changed it to free up the toolbelt skill slots partly but not exclusively so you can use Supply Crate with Holosmith. This also lets you have the turret out and still use the toolbelt skills without putting the turret itself on cooldown, which is a buff for the toolbelt skills (eg. rifle turret/surprise shot). My only complaint about the new system is that sometimes Healing Turret misses its overcharge, as it takes a bit longer than it's listed 0.75s to go off, and if you're trying to blast it as fast as possible, you can lose out on a lot of healing if you're not careful.

i doubt they'll buff turrets much given their stance on "passive" gameplay as of late. the only thing i see anet do is improve the interaction between turrets and toolkit

@"derd.6413" said:i doubt they'll buff turrets much given their stance on "passive" gameplay as of late. the only thing i see anet do is improve the interaction between turrets and toolkit

Ironically they made turrets more passive by taking away a big part of their tactical decision making - when and where to overcharge.

I reject the accusation of turrets being a passive playstyle. Passive means you don't do anything.But nobody could just sit there doing nothing, thinking nothing, and win a battle with turrets.

I've seen people make the same mistake in League of Legends when discussing character designs. People mistakenly equate "active" with "the complexity and difficulty of button mashing you have to do in a short timeframe", and never realize that tactical decision making and strategic planning are both a form of fulfilling and engaging activity in themselves. There are plenty of heroes in LoL that may be mechanically simple but are very active in the sense of planning out what you're going to do and when, or analyzing and reacting to the enemy, so they end up being very fun and engaging.

Even now, without the ability to overcharge, my turret build demands a lot of tactical decision making about when and where to place them, and a lot of interaction from my weapon skills and toolbelt skills in concert with those turrets to achieve victory.

Giving me overcharge back would increase the amount of activity involved in my turret build.Where do I place my turrets? I need to make sure this is where we will be fighting. I need to lure the enemy here and not let them lure me away. And if I do have to move I'll be vulnerable for a while. I better make sure I don't cluster them or they could all be wiped out, but if I spread them too far apart they can't all help and will be picked off.I need to watch my teammate's health to see if they are within range of the healing turret and can benefit from an overcharge of healing.

Can I lure the enemy into my thumper turret and overcharge to knock them down?Who is my rifle turret targeting? Is now the time to inflict vulnerability on them for me and my team to take advantage of?Can I overcharge my rocket now to knock down an enemy? Is it necessary to do right now?Can I overcharge my net turret to interrupt the enemy with a stun, or activate the stun to combo with some of my skills like the one that adds vulnerability to stunned foes?Did the enemy just cluster around my flame turret? Nows the time to overcharge to blind them. But only if they are actively attacking me or my team, otherwise it might be a waste.

Of course it has it's counters. The thing I fear most in PvP is seeing a ranger with a longbow. They effortlessly wipe out my turrets from outside their range and then move in for the kill. If I try to confront them outside the range of my turrets I will be at a severe disadvantage.

@Rise.8259 said:

@"derd.6413" said:i doubt they'll buff turrets much given their stance on "passive" gameplay as of late. the only thing i see anet do is improve the interaction between turrets and toolkit

i put passive between Quotation marks for a reason

I would consider them being non passive game play if could at least control what they are targeting. Dropping a thumper turret in water field and double blasting while getting CC is non passive. I can’t even tell when it’s next attack is going to happen when I leave it out, I have no way to monitor that.

Turret bunker builds used to be massively OP when I played in tpvp (before seasons, etc). I am equally guilty in abusing the CRAP out of those - especially the ranged deployment - during my time in the top 100 tpvp. They were a way to have a non-passive super strong bunker build. They deserved a nerf. However, I do feel like now they've been nerfed to the ground so hard they're not really useful outside things like tagging. However, it largely stems from the side effect of GW2 devs really patch-nerfing engi things and not making sure there is any cohesion left between traits and kits, etc. It also seems to indicate that the devs don't really know WHAT they want for engi or even that they have much experience with the profession at all. Turrets went the same way as gadgets - patch nerfs and devs not really caring about making engi a complete well designed profession.

Guildwars 1 had a separate skill systems for pvp & pve. Guildwars 2 had a intergrated system for both so anything done in pve changed pvp.So the turrets quickly got complained about in spvp. People didn't use any tactics when game first released and would run in swinging so would get thrashed against turret builds. When all they had to do was use skills that reflect and rifle or rocket turrets would do massive self damage then 1 or 2 hits & they were destroyed or use block skills till close enough to destroy them, people also didnt take into account the auto heal the turrets could get on engineers trait line so would not finish off the damaged turrets and give them time to be repaired. Thus they were classed as OP and were nerfed to uselessness in PvP and WvW.

@Daedolon.4583 said:Guildwars 1 had a separate skill systems for pvp & pve. Guildwars 2 had a intergrated system for both so anything done in pve changed pvp.So the turrets quickly got complained about in spvp. People didn't use any tactics when game first released and would run in swinging so would get thrashed against turret builds. When all they had to do was use skills that reflect and rifle or rocket turrets would do massive self damage then 1 or 2 hits & they were destroyed or use block skills till close enough to destroy them, people also didnt take into account the auto heal the turrets could get on engineers trait line so would not finish off the damaged turrets and give them time to be repaired. Thus they were classed as OP and were nerfed to uselessness in PvP and WvW.

Yup. Turrets went the way of bomb healing :(

Turrets we're immune to crits and conditions. Plus a trait which Essentially gave turrets permanent protection.

The current balance isn't fair for turrets because they're immobile and can't be cleansed or healed, unlike minions, spirits, or pets. Maybe if they reworked toolkit so that it removed conditions from turrets on the final auto attack chain when repairing turrets.

@archmagus.7249 said:Turrets we're immune to crits and conditions. Plus a trait which Essentially gave turrets permanent protection.

The current balance isn't fair for turrets because they're immobile and can't be cleansed or healed, unlike minions, spirits, or pets. Maybe if they reworked toolkit so that it removed conditions from turrets on the final auto attack chain when repairing turrets.

Well, they should just return turrets to not taking crits or conditions to be consistent with their world design - because all mechanical devices in PvE are immune to crit and conditions. It's what makes them different from minions.

Like you said, minions compensate for this by being able to be cleansed and healed.And minions aren't immobile, but all mechanical device enemies are immobile.