Quote Originally Posted by Alberel View Post
I think a lot of people are missing what the word 'turret' means in the pet description. Turrets are stationary pets, they do not move or follow, they stay where they are deployed and attack at range from that location. If you go and rewatch the Machinist video from FanFest you'll see that the turret is deployed with a ground targeted circle which makes it pretty clear these things do not move (despite flying). This gives them a distinct difference in playstyle to SMN.

Now if we were to use turret based classes from previous MMOs (GW1 Ritualist, GW2 Engineer, WoW Shaman, etc) to get ideas for how they'll work we can guess a few things:

- The player will deploy a turret (or turrets, depends on how many they're allowed at once, most games allow more than one) at a set location and it will stay there until destroyed or picked up by the player.
- Different turrets will have different abilities; some typical examples are a basic ranged attack, a pulsing PBAOE, some kind of crowd control and some kind of PBAOE support effect (such as a regen or refresh effect).
- There will probably be some kind of buff that allows the turrets to temporarily use a more potent version of their basic ability.
- Their playstyle normally focuses on tactical control of the combat area. They do the most damage when the enemy is within range of their turrets and they are usually slow to reposition. In theory this means they should do extremely high damage when positioned well and significantly less when not (this typically makes such classes incredibly good at point defense in PvP). How this will work in a raid scenario remains to be seen; the amount of movement required in some fights does not lend itself well to turret-style gameplay.
- The player them self will likely have an assortment of skills to keep their targets where they want them; i.e. methods of drawing distant targets in and keeping them within range of the turrets. A class like this NEEDS some kind of crowd control to work.

The Machinist may not actually work like this but if YoshiP is being sensible he'll at least look to previous incarnations of this archetype for inspiration so we should see at least a couple of these concepts in play.
This. After rewatching the video over and over it finally clicked that the red circly targeting reticule he uses means those turrets are probably not mobile. I started thinking up interesting mechanics given different turrets, like stun turrets I could huck down a hallway or something.