Guild Wars 2

http://www.thebadplace.co.uk/images/personal/ergot_traits.jpg

Here’s my current build which sadly is broken (and deliberately so it seems) in the proposed redesign.

The build centres around the staff and having as many active clones as possible, each casting Winds of Chaos and causing additional damage on crit, which they do fairly often. The idea is to keep as many clones up and casting spreading boons and conditions around, as possible. If a clone is destroyed then there is a small burst of conditions to give a bit of breathing space to summon a replacement. Crucually the clones are not meant to be destroyed, they are meant to be active … the conditions they cause when destroyed is a consolation prize. Shatter is rarely used because in order to use it there needs to be the potential to summon a full set of three clones to replace those lost … the more clones are active, the more damage this build does. The other intention is for the mesmer to conceal themselves among their clones, so avoiding triggering auras which would identify them as the “real” mesmer.

Now I concede that this build may not be the strongest out there, but I do fairly well with it in both PvP and PvE. Most importantly, I enjoy the play style of this build and I am saddened that it’s going to be pretty much broken under the new system. All retribution skills have been removed deliberately (in an effort to force us to shatter our clones rather than use them) and in the new Duelling trait line all three minors are incredibly useful, the adepts and masters not at all … but I can’t slot minors into a higher slot. If this alone were changed (ie. the ability to put traits of a lower tier into higher tier slots were retained from the current system) then the build would be altered but potentially usable (albeit without the consolation prize of booby-trapped clones) as it stands, I can’t see how I could make the build work under the new system.

tl/dr

but is it really such a big deal to lose those two points in chaos and gain 2 points in other 3 lines instead of it? I think it’s a good tradeoff

Mind explaining what you are loosing exactly? for me it sound more like something like that might become better in fact, the extra bounce you get as baseline, and the stuff you do loose is some of the glamour traits only from what i can see which it dont sound like you are building around it per say, and then you get a fair amount of extra traits you can take as you get 3 full lines

GummiBear.2756:

Mind explaining what you are loosing exactly? for me it sound more like something like that might become better in fact, the extra bounce you get as baseline, and the stuff you do loose is some of the glamour traits only from what i can see which it dont sound like you are building around it per say, and then you get a fair amount of extra traits you can take as you get 3 full lines

Actually I think that the situation isn’t quite as bad as I had thought it was! Mostly because I got confused about minor traits because of the layout on Dulfy (not Dulfy’s fault at all, mine for not translating it properly) so the build is supported by the minor traits. However what I am losing is the conditions inflicted by clones when they are destroyed which is fairly significant (cripple and bleeding, vulnerability or weakness to up to 5 targets) and something I’d rather not lose. The glamour/confusion thing is pretty big, I just didn’t mention it above (don’t ask me why I didn’t mention it … brain fart on my part) but as a build that does pretty much all of its damage with conditions (base damage on a staff isn’t great) taking one of my primary conditions away feels harsh. In the normal way of things I use a staff (rather than sword/focus) and timewarp as my PvE elite, giving me 4 glamour fields on my bar.

The new “Duelling Master” trait sounds like it would be great … except that it also sounds like it will put up a visible aura, identifying me as the mesmer which is a bad idea when playing “find the mesmer” with a pack of clones. The changes to Chaotic Dampening (I know, I don’t have it at the moment but in the new system I would if …) mean that it is only useful when a chaos shield is up, another no-no when trying to remain inconspicuous. Make the staff/trident recharge rate increase independent of Chaos Shield and I’d be happy with the trait, I only pop Chaos Shield when someone’s really latched onto me (or in PvE because mob AI isn’t that discerning), so at that point having protection rather than toughness would definitely be more desirable, even if I lose out slightly at other times.

Just so you know i did used to play a build a bit similar to what you have, play a condi shatter ATM but still im not totally in the blank about your style of build, was pretty fun

hmm i dont see any “dueling master” trait, am I blind or do you mean something else?

Also as for the whole find the mesmer thing a shatter build is actually FAR superior there in pvp, due to that any half decent player will quickly see which mesmer is you, as long as you do anything but standing completely still and auto attacking, as that is basically what you clones does, use a chaos field, or a heal or anything that is not an auto attack or generate a clone and you are almost instantly recognized. In that aspect shatters are better since the constantly pump out new clones and each new clones is just a fraction or 2 of a second before the enemy player find the right one and as it happen all the time well there is a lot of time for enemy to try and identify you again and again.

The condi glamour loss is a bit unfortunate yes, but i can understand why they removed it, if you didn’t watch the actual stream, they reasons was that glamours are intended to be a skill type that support allies mostly so it was kinda of weird to have traits that then made it too beneficial to drop it on top of the enemies (that was THEIR explanation). Also another note you said 4 glamours, while you can under the current system only have 3 glamours on your bar, since TW is not actually a glamour, although it share a lot of similarities with that skill type, it currently dont have a skill type, though they are actually changing it so it will be classified as a glamour (there will be no skill without a skill type when this new system comes in place).

And yes i see the clone death trait, again they want to discourage “unhealthy” playing habits, and purposefully getting clones destroyed or overwriting them with new clones at max clones out was one more of those habits. But do keep in mind that those traits had a 240 radius anyway, and since staff clones are already themselves ranged, those would likely very rarely hit anything that was not melee themselves, traits like that worked better with swords clones that are melee themselves or maybe scepter that spawned in melee range of the target.

So yes you are loosing some things, but the core of the build is not totally out and i believe you can make a similar build that might actually end up gaining more than they are loosing

EDIT: If i were to try and recreate such a build myself i would probably do something like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQNAW7alknpMtNqxANUrRSpxYycOClllGpCokdUOA-TRyCwAAeSB4U/RxFV45GA6WfIlGGsK/0rbYsSwAAIAzcmJzyMw1l4En4EnYA-e (in the future try use that site for showing your build to others really good one, so we dont have to go and cross check the trait numbers with wiki and stuff) I really dont believe glamours traits add much to that kind of build, and with both staff cd and illusion summon cd traits, you get a whopping 6sec cd on phase retreat (note that ingame the tooltip dont reflect this properly taking both traits but the actual cd will still be 6sec even though it shows 8sec (unless they actually fixed that not sure). And with the new system you would easily be able to get the chaotic transferance, which would be quite a bit extra condi dmg if you use rabid gear(condi dmg/prec/toughness)). Heck I think back when i actually did this build i might have had 3 dueling and 5 chaos for that reason, unsure how important DE would be for that kind of build, but with new trait setup you could easily have both (and that counts for my currently used condi shatter as well where no DE is a disaster for obvious reasons :P)

What annoyed me in the ready up is that they specifically said that they don’t like that people have builds like the OP’s build. They said that it isn’t how the profession should be played. So, a build that works, that is fun for the users, and that contributes to build diversity is being deliberately destroyed because they devs don’t like it. So much for play how you want, the devs on the ready up made it clear that you should only play the way they think you should play.