Guild Wars 2

Player Character.9467:

HELLruler.4820:

Do you guys see more space for condi thieves with Bloodseeker ulti Torment?

Torment is only 50% effective on stationary enemies, pve mobs are typically stacked and kept perfectly still…

Lot’s of bosses move around. Some move quite a bit.

@Bright

I don’t even know that I want mesmers anymore in fotm 48. Sure they are useful in uncategorized and can do the portal strat on cliffside but for the most part a 3rd dps guard or a 3rd warrior has been better in the runs we’ve done lately.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

@Bright

I don’t even know that I want mesmers anymore in fotm 48. Sure they are useful in uncategorized and can do the portal strat on cliffside but for the most part a 3rd dps guard or a 3rd warrior has been better in the runs we’ve done lately.

idgi… Mes have just as much anti projectile as guard with similar support capabilities but with higher melee (with some phantasms) and ranged dps. Why you hating?

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

@Bright

I don’t even know that I want mesmers anymore in fotm 48. Sure they are useful in uncategorized and can do the portal strat on cliffside but for the most part a 3rd dps guard or a 3rd warrior has been better in the runs we’ve done lately.

Queue Byron telling us how our mesmers are terrible and mesmers are super useful in high-lvl Fractals…

But yeah, I sort of agree. I’m not saying they’re useless, but tbh, the smoothest Fractal 48’s I’ve done were 2 guard 3 warrior groups. I’m pretty sure an ele replacing one of the warriors would be even better, because the combined AoE blind spam from the DPS guard and the ele and the fact that the ele can hold it’s own DPS-wise in comparison to the warriors means I think it’s a better choice than a mesmer.

The only place I see 1 ele or 2 eles being a real liability is the dredge fractal because your armor is made of wet tissue paper and blinds don’t work anyway… The only way to solve that tbh is smart use of Fiery Greatsword and LoS’ing..

randomfightfan.4091:

idgi… Mes have just as much anti projectile as guard with similar support capabilities but with higher melee (with some phantasms)

Have you really played both classes ? Mesmers have much worse dps than dps guardians. Talking about phantasms at lvl 48..? by the time you ramp up enough phantasms to deal an equal amount of damage vs a dps guard, the group of trash mob is already dead. Mesmers make the dredge fractal MUCH worse. One more warrior or dps guardian means burning the trash down a lot faster.

By the way, reflection skills work on less stuff than absorbs. Shield of the avenger is more useful (and even a thief’s smoke screen) than wall of reflection, feedback, temporal curtain and phantasmal warden. For that alone, mesmers are not equal to guardians. Shield of the avenger will block things that go through reflection and thus feedback.

As for ranged dps, mesmer’s ranged dps is also much worse when it can’t use phantasms, which is absolutely the case for boss like the Ice Elemental and Dredge Mining Suit where clones and phantasms can be a real detriment because you want aggro to stick on you at all time with the boss moving as fast as possible from trap to trap. And the guardian’s Smite on scepter deals heavy dps on targets that have large hitboxes. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if our dps guardians did more damage than our dps warriors at range..

And after having done a fotm run on my fresh ele, and despite having zero muscle memory on the elementalist skills/control, I can assure you that I’d rather take a squishy LH conjure elementalist than a mesmer. I have a lot more experience and skill on my mesmer and despite that I can safely say, it’s been a while (can check up my posting history) since I started getting the thought that this class has been overrated to death. It’s not that useful. I couldn’t bring myself to even try to level my mesmer in higher lvl fractals, it’s such a sad sight this class compared to the other two we use.

If you have MORE than one mesmer in your fractal run, at lvl 48 it will turn things like the dredge into a nightmare. Well, compared to a run where you stack actual dps that works on trash mobs.

@Weth
You answered your own question.

Not like current meta warriors ever change to axe in their damage rotation.
Nothing will change except the builds used.

Nikaido.3457:

@Weth
You answered your own question.

I’m not sure if I can know what you are thinking but I guess you meant latter even though you talked about former.

Wethospu.6437:

Nikaido.3457:

@Weth
You answered your own question.

I’m not sure if I can know what you are thinking but I guess you meant latter even though you talked about former.

Did you just do it again?

Siv.4351:

Khisanth.2948:

Where are you getting the idea that it stacks intensity? If we are reading the same leaked notes it just means there is a cap on the weakness duration.

Possibility is high I read it wrong/read different notes. The thread I was following that was discussing them has since expired. Either outcome, the change is still a sPvP focused one, like most everything else. I’d be very surprised if any dungeon groups that for some reason still play will bother to incorporate weakness into their meta. I mean, I can think of dozens of places where it might be useful, but I doubt it would be effective.

Well there is two sides to Weakness. Being used by players and being used against players. The notes were only about skills, the full patch notes would be including other things. On the other hand they never seem to bother with including dungeon changes so it’ll require playing through every path to find out what actually changed. If more mobs start using Weakness or get increased crit rates and/or crit damage. It would probably take something very obvious to get people to notice though. Something like required fight that has low HP, high armor, slow attack speed(so the damage numbers do not get buried in an avalanche of numbers), high crit rate and high crit damage.

Weakness will only stacks with itself up to 5 times for duration purposes just like stealth currently does, nothing hard to understand guys.

Bright.9160:

Zenith.7301:

It won’t change the meta because what imbalances the warriors against everybody else’s damage is the base numbers — the traits are just gravy.

You can play a warrior and any other class, at any level from 20-80 and notice a vast difference in damage output straight away, with only thief being remotely close.

It’s the numbers and modifiers on the skills themselves — no change to traits will change that. If you want to see a change to the meta, base warrior damage numbers will have to go down. Guardian utility like spirit shield and wall and boon sharing will need to take a hit.

But that won’t happen, because a )warriors are not good in spvp— the OP damage is all they bring, and b) Guardians rely on that boon sharing and utility for wvw and spvp.

They say they will make split changes, but they won’t obviously if you saw the recent patch where they gave pets universal increases in health and now say because of it they gotta nerf pets because of BM rangers. So it will affect even pve ranger who were already bad.

Except, it will change the meta. At least it will change our meta. We’re already incorporating eles in most runs right now. When the update launches and indeed, eles can pump fury, we’ll probably start running something like 1 Guard – 2 ele – 1 mes – 1 warrior. And the only reason we’d be taking warrior would be to be banner b*tch pretty much..

Eles could have already been incorporated prior to these changes. The difference still is not such that you’d replace a warrior or guardian for one, and ESPECIALLY PuG runs are not a place where LH eles will fare well.

I need people to keep up burning for me on my targets, which pugs often fail to do for me, so I have to carry signet of fire just to slap a long duration burn.

And quite frankly switching out one warrior for something else means little as the meta still revolves around bringing a warrior or two, and a guardian.

You can’t make an efficient group without a warrior or a guardian, and THAT’s a problem.

It also surprises me that people took this long to realize mesmers were overrated. I’ve been saying it since release. Their DPS is really bad in any scenario where lots of mob cleave happens, and that’s most PvE scenarios.

I will say that it’s a tad unfair to call them weak in dredge. Null Field helps a lot with stripping the dredge clean out of their 33% protection boons. A mesmer on the dredge boss also keeps him free of boons with just autoattacking. And if you’re bringing a phantasm mesmer they have easy access to vigorous revelations for group vigor without forcing anyone in the group to run deficient weapons to achieve it.

This changes nothing at all. The empower allies is buffed so that will make everything go even faster.
30/25/0/0/15 3war
20/25/0/10/15 1war
These 2 builds were establish a LONG time ago.

The changes to axe/mace are also good. They buffed the axe 2 skill. I don’t see why peopel are griping over the axe chain. Just end on the third chain of the third attack and swap.

Zenith.7301:

Bright.9160:

Zenith.7301:

It won’t change the meta because what imbalances the warriors against everybody else’s damage is the base numbers — the traits are just gravy.

You can play a warrior and any other class, at any level from 20-80 and notice a vast difference in damage output straight away, with only thief being remotely close.

It’s the numbers and modifiers on the skills themselves — no change to traits will change that. If you want to see a change to the meta, base warrior damage numbers will have to go down. Guardian utility like spirit shield and wall and boon sharing will need to take a hit.

But that won’t happen, because a )warriors are not good in spvp— the OP damage is all they bring, and b) Guardians rely on that boon sharing and utility for wvw and spvp.

They say they will make split changes, but they won’t obviously if you saw the recent patch where they gave pets universal increases in health and now say because of it they gotta nerf pets because of BM rangers. So it will affect even pve ranger who were already bad.

Except, it will change the meta. At least it will change our meta. We’re already incorporating eles in most runs right now. When the update launches and indeed, eles can pump fury, we’ll probably start running something like 1 Guard – 2 ele – 1 mes – 1 warrior. And the only reason we’d be taking warrior would be to be banner b*tch pretty much..

Eles could have already been incorporated prior to these changes. The difference still is not such that you’d replace a warrior or guardian for one, and ESPECIALLY PuG runs are not a place where LH eles will fare well.

I need people to keep up burning for me on my targets, which pugs often fail to do for me, so I have to carry signet of fire just to slap a long duration burn.

And quite frankly switching out one warrior for something else means little as the meta still revolves around bringing a warrior or two, and a guardian.

You can’t make an efficient group without a warrior or a guardian, and THAT’s a problem.

It also surprises me that people took this long to realize mesmers were overrated. I’ve been saying it since release. Their DPS is really bad in any scenario where lots of mob cleave happens, and that’s most PvE scenarios.

I will say that it’s a tad unfair to call them weak in dredge. Null Field helps a lot with stripping the dredge clean out of their 33% protection boons. A mesmer on the dredge boss also keeps him free of boons with just autoattacking. And if you’re bringing a phantasm mesmer they have easy access to vigorous revelations for group vigor without forcing anyone in the group to run deficient weapons to achieve it.

For DPS purposes even a Ranger with a dead Pet does more dps then a Mesmer. The thing that makes a Mesmer shine in groups is boosting everyone elses dps with Signet, moving mobs to walls, TW, boon stripping with sword and/or null field. Then the reflect isn’t bad either with Focus/Feedback. 1 Mesmer will always be good in a group, but never 2+.

Zenith.7301:

I will say that it’s a tad unfair to call them weak in dredge. Null Field helps a lot with stripping the dredge clean out of their 33% protection boons. A mesmer on the dredge boss also keeps him free of boons with just autoattacking. And if you’re bringing a phantasm mesmer they have easy access to vigorous revelations for group vigor without forcing anyone in the group to run deficient weapons to achieve it.

We have ran 2war/2guard/1mes a lot in fractals. And we have also ran 3war/2guard. I can tell you null field is not worth the loss in dps. Yes, removing their protection boon is not as worth as having one more war.

As for vigorous revelation it brings nothing of worth in a meta group. “Run deficient weapons”? Warriors regenerate their endurance through burst skill and vigor on crit is a 5 points trait on guardian.
And if anyone in the group relied on your mesmer for endurance regen… they’d have a terrible, terrible time in the grawl fractal against the end boss. And making use of this thing kittens your dps even more as a phantasm mesmer since you really ought not to shatter anything.

Bar a few tactics that most mesmers wouldn’t even be able to pull at 48 (like cliffside portal thing, which takes a really competent and extremely quick to react mesmer at this level to achieve without turning this into a group wipe), mesmers are completely useless in fractals. Because in fractals you kill a lot, lot of trash mob too the time gained by using time warp on boss is less than the time lost by having one party member with terrible dps during trash fights. None of the mesmer benefits outweigh the con.

Some of the things that makes mesmers good in classic speed runs would completely disappear if more dungeons were made like fractal with parts featuring unskippable trash such as dredge.

You only shatter for vigor when the phantasms have attacked and your summon cooldowns have refreshed. The vigor to the group is stupidly long, longer than a shatter cooldown.

Of course, it’s of little value to guardian or mesmer since they have vigor on crit, but not too bad for an ele who can forego renewing stamina for something more valuable like arcane power at 75% health or whatever, and same for warrior traits.

I never said mesmers are not bad, just that they’re not completely useless. Guardians and warriors are better, but I think nobody would debate the fact that guardians and warriors are OP relative to everybody else. At least the LH ele needs to give up support utility and run a completely niche spec to do damage. The guardian and warrior make no such sacrifices and their baseline durability is much better so they got way more room for error.

It will do nothing to the meta as long as the bosses do NOTHING to boons while having so many anti condition mechanics. If bosses had boon stripping or stealing boons that would remove the benefit for stacking warriors. Hell I want to have the banners be killable.

http://overpower3d.com/Patch%20Updates/guild-wars-2-sky-pirates-of-tyria-complete-trait-list-1/

Seems like we’ll really get our elementalist-as-war-replacement. This “persisting flames” trait looks godly. A for great justice with no cooldown. Fury + the might stacking from having constant blast finishers on fire fields ? Aww. Maybe we’ll do a special war build whose sole purpose is to buff the group, with traits like empower allies, two banner slotted etc. With only one war in the group who’s not the primary DPS dealer anymore there is some room to get creative here.

My bet is on moving around some trait points, MAYBE change up some weapon/utility skills, and then carry on like nothing happened.

Meta needs a much deeper shake to be changed, imo.
Or proper PvE DG mechanic testing team builds, instead of raw DPS.

AndrewSX.3794:

My bet is on moving around some trait points, MAYBE change up some weapon/utility skills, and then carry on like nothing happened.

Meta needs a much deeper shake to be changed, imo.
Or proper PvE DG mechanic testing team builds, instead of raw DPS.

Ele if built well and with a good group can start to replace the warrior as the primary DPS in a organized group. So the meta is changing, in fact im pretty sure my guild will drop another warrior role for another ele going to 2 ele/1mes/1guard/war in our runs just due to the ele’s crazy dps potential with proper support.