Guild Wars 2

Update: I tweaked the Mesmer and Ele builds to be a lot more aggressive, because the Guardian will benefit from harder hitting range than support and cleanse shatters.

Cleanse shatters can be useful, but if it requires someone getting on top of the Guardian the whole time then any time there isn’t you’re at a disadvantage, so I acknowledge that. Illusionary Persona still requires gap closing, so I went with the huge AoE Diversion trait because we’re already denying boons so why not smother them with CC when they aren’t built to handle it? Faster shatters and illusion cooldowns too.

The staff Ele is using Valks/Zerker with Fresh Air so that you can hit them with Lightning Surge and a couple autos between Fire for more damage. This will increase your damage output in 1v1 too, especially if you have strong command of the CC the build has. There is a big difference in this style of play though, so if you duel a friend with a S/D thief spec as practice you can start getting used to what you will see in these types of matches.

I’m going to start listing posts in the Q&A section on the document that are relevant to the build. I am open to suggestions, and made these changes based on constructive feedback. I am pretty experienced in the game, but nobody knows everything

jmatb.6307:

Update: I tweaked the Mesmer and Ele builds to be a lot more aggressive, because the Guardian will benefit from harder hitting range than support and cleanse shatters.

Cleanse shatters can be useful, but if it requires someone getting on top of the Guardian the whole time then any time there isn’t you’re at a disadvantage, so I acknowledge that. Illusionary Persona still requires gap closing, so I went with the huge AoE Diversion trait because we’re already denying boons so why not smother them with CC when they aren’t built to handle it? Faster shatters and illusion cooldowns too.

The staff Ele is using Valks/Zerker with Fresh Air so that you can hit them with Lightning Surge and a couple autos between Fire for more damage. This will increase your damage output in 1v1 too, especially if you have strong command of the CC the build has. There is a big difference in this style of play though, so if you duel a friend with a S/D thief spec as practice you can start getting used to what you will see in these types of matches.

I’m going to start listing posts in the Q&A section on the document that are relevant to the build. I am open to suggestions, and made these changes based on constructive feedback. I am pretty experienced in the game, but nobody knows everything

That is a quite standard shatter spec and this is where the problem starts… seeing every other mesmer build is not good you rely on the good old shatter which can be very effective, but due the current meta, it can be easily countered as well.. Null field you’ll want to use it nearby the big “action” so you take the full benefit of it, to not only cleanse your condis but also the condis of your allies, and if you’re close them them, you’re eating all the damage from the engineer/necro/ranger. If you position yourself decently in range (and use blink for a gateaway for example) to be able to range with your GS like a baws (Xeph style) guess what? S/D thief will be on you no matter your positioning, why ? Because their class mechanic makes them able to teleport to you no matter where you are and on top of that they’ll eat you alive since they can evade all your damage and you barely have any ground target aoe/cc and the ccs you got he can easily evade… which means the elementalist needs to peel for you opening himself and your guardian for some condi damage now, so instantly you’re on defensive and they can simple keep pushing more and more… because condis can be reapplied over and over and over again without risk or penalty while cleansing (Ele dagger 5 for example) blow very good cooldowns while condi pressure is on auto-attacks (like burning – which is utterly kittened).

The way to make mesmers viable like this is specifically in team fights where you must KEEP the pressure so they won’t have time to react to the mesmer, but its just not possible because:

If the necro is going down he pops plague, if engineer is going down he pops elixir R and you have to hold your damage while he cleanse his condis or you risk a free ress, rangers and guardians have so much sustain that you’ll only be able to pressure them after a while once they start using their cooldowns, S/D thiefs can reset the fight and have easy cleanses and evades a.k.a. sustain. What mesmers have? Once pressured they’ll pop distortion which does not stop condi damage, same for blurred frenzy chaos storm and so on, those are very good for DIRECT damage, not condis. Then you’ll be forced to use Null Field which also is not fast enough compared to the pace you’re recieving condis & direct damage, and if you blink away you’re a very easy pray for a S/D thief not to mention that the condis will keep ticking… i’ve often died even while getting out because condis kept ticking and any good team will exploit that.

Again the main problem with meta and spvp in general right now, its not much the balance of classes but how conditions are designed to be mindlessly spammed without risk or thought, there is just no depth or penalty for using them at WILL.

Conditions should be some sort of support to bring down the target, much like debuff works in other games, just like you use CC to support focus fire in which you’ll kill the guy, they should not be able to kill people on their own, and definitely not as fast and as effective as they are now. Its a game design flaw.

Ya I added a section where everybody gets a friend or teammate to run the copy+paste builds in duels so they can get used to the training they’ll inevitably see.

S/D thief does train hard. I’ve found though, that even on mesmer, once you’ve faced the build enough you know when to CC and shatter quickly. If you duel on the rotation maps at mid you’ll get that familiarity with them in the most relevant way to.

Is it a strong 1v1 spec? Yes. Is it invincible? No.

If you can end up winning the duels with it, then you’ve just evolved into a better player

Just continuing my rant about why mesmers are not viable in team fights due their lack of sustain:

If you add to all of that the amount of sustain that engineer/ranger/necro/guardian/thiefs have in comparison its not even funny the amount of times i’ve went to a team fight and downed 2 players and they still managed to get themselfs ressed and healed up and then owning me.

Shadow Refugee only way to prevent stab stomps, very good skill in a very low cooldown.
Elixir R, goes without saying this gives an amazing sustain and pretty much a second life either for him and can also be very good used to ress multiple people.
Spirit of Nature i’ll not comment because we all know how kittened that is and how strong it is even when not activated to ress it still helps a huge load.
Necromansers once they’re going low they go into plague form which is also immense because all your “burst” will be negated to him.
Warriors have immense sustain right now with berserker stance and the signet heal.

So as i was trying to mention before, the way that the mesmer can viable is keeping pressure, but against those classes there is just no way to do it.

Sorry for long post, but i’m a frustrated mesmer – open way.

great post. its refreshing to see somebody make a serious attempt to alter the meta. regardless of others’ opinions, I hope you give this team comp a shot. goodluck

ps don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

Old Traits nobody uses needs to be redesigned.

Old Skills nobody uses (I’m looking at you Physical Skills, Venoms.) need to be redesigned.

5/15/25 Traits should be select-able like every other trait.

Underpowered Traits need to be looked at, and redesigned.

jmatb.6307:

Ya I added a section where everybody gets a friend or teammate to run the copy+paste builds in duels so they can get used to the training they’ll inevitably see.

S/D thief does train hard. I’ve found though, that even on mesmer, once you’ve faced the build enough you know when to CC and shatter quickly. If you duel on the rotation maps at mid you’ll get that familiarity with them in the most relevant way to.

Is it a strong 1v1 spec? Yes. Is it invincible? No.

If you can end up winning the duels with it, then you’ve just evolved into a better player

I definitely agree with you, i’m not saying its 100% loss ratio to the mesmer, anything can happen because we’re also talking about the player’s skill which will help define the outcome of the fight. The issue here is, while the S/D thief is keeping you busy, they got a necro and an engineer nuking your guardian/warrior/elementalist, while you’re not able to pop your very good range burst.. besides you’ll also never be able to kill any decent S/D thief because he can reset the fight at will – anytime. So even if you do better then him he’ll just disengage. And if you’re somewhat low or have some condis on you due fighting triple range condi classes such as ranger, engineer and necro in the mid fight. He’ll just pop right back at you with basilisk when you don’t have your cooldowns and you’re down – a complete liability for your team due your lack of sustain when you compare with every single other class out there.

I believe this is an honorable idea to discover the best way to go anti-meta. In fact, I believe that an anti-meta does exist with a little more prying and prodding. There are a few things I believe this comp does well and a couple suggestions I have. First, it is smart to use a dps thief and stun warrior. Both of these are fantastic at melting rangers and necromancers. In addition, the guardian builds looks good. The weapon choices are good support for the team.

Here are my suggestions: One, instead of having a backpoint warrior, use an engineer build with immune to condis at 25% health. Not only would this make the engineer impossible to kill without burst, but it would also make him last for a long time, making it easy for the team to aid him in a fight. However, this does not need to replace the warrior and you could still use a stun warrior and send him to the backpoint to kill the ranger. Spirit Rangers have zero stunblocks and would melt under stun pressure. With constant pressue to the backpoint, the team would either lose their home point or midpoint trying to defend home.

With the thief you suggested and the stunlock warrior locking onto the necro and ranger, killing them would be easy. Next, I think it’s important to mention that in order to add an immume condi engineer we need to eliminate either the mesmer or ele. I suggest the ele if only because they are so easy to kill when focused. Next, instead of the mesmer, I suggest getting another engineer. This time, his purpose is to be offensive and aid in the fight, spamming condis on the midpoint while the thief, warrior and guard dominate the point. The engi would provide condi pressue, be immune to condis at 25% health, and help rez downed allies with the elixer. However, the current meta is ranger, ranger, necromancer, guardian, and thief [the last slot is optional]. Thus, we are completely eliminating necros and rangers from this comp. With this comp, even if the enemy manages to down you, the warrior will have the banner, the thief Shadow refuge, Guardian rez knockbacks, and the engi the elixer. All of this in combination should eleminate the threats one after the other.

All these ideas are not necessarily going to work perfectly, but it is possible they could defeat the meta.

15charactersblahblahlah

Guess that’s why we have conquest and not other gamemodes. So we fight the other team’s tactic and not only the players.

JonathanSharp.7094:

This is a very interesting thread, thanks for keeping it so positive!

As devs, we’re always watching the meta and trying to make sure we don’t “force” the meta in one direction or another. Metas are always driven by player perception, so our goal is to provide the players with multiple viable choices, and let them decide how they want to approach the game.

Perception of balance is key in how players approach the game, so our goal right now is to open up more options through balance without completely taking away the condition “meta” option.

Things can only be so much perception. Mathematically there is going to be a best option for some things. And I think that is why we see some things take dominance.

Perception would be conditions are stronger than burst for example. But I could argue that burst specs do just as much damage as conditions.

Mathematically however, weakness for example is direct burst counter. No amount of perception can change that.

JonathanSharp.7094:

As devs, we’re always watching the meta and trying to make sure we don’t “force” the meta in one direction or another. Metas are always driven by player perception, so our goal is to provide the players with multiple viable choices, and let them decide how they want to approach the game.

If players perceive that conditions are the strongest meta, what good does adding more conditions and buffing condition application do?

The meta drastically shifted after the change to power builds via quickness changes etc, and condition damage was already on the rise before that. Many players, including myself are perplexed as to why the dev team chose to make changes that would snowball the meta to where it is now; the player base knew exactly what would happen when the update went live.

One of the issues I see is that it’s incredibly easy to build a powerful condition build while being very defensive as well (e.g., Rabid) due to the nature that condition damage only needs one stat.

Power builds require a multitude of stats to perform well (which generally requires a significant loss in defense) and are heavily affected by blinds, blocks etc on their large attacks. Condition builds can easily reapply conditions with very little difficulty.

Toughness serves as passive defense against power builds, while condition damage has no passive defense — condition removal is the only active counter to it — and condition damage is much more easily applied than it is removed.

Until some of these core issues are resolved, I don’t think we’ll see a heavy shift away from the condition Meta for some time.

Toughness should do something else, imo.

Have a question for you guys:

What would you think of Warrior Mace/Shield Greatsword instead of the staff ele?

Here’s a link to Defektive’s guide as a starting concept

http://intothemists.com/guides/571-defektives_tpvp_gs_mace_shield_analysis

I think it would be risky, but the coordination between the Mesmer and Warrior at mid would be pretty vicious. Plus Battle Standard gets the Guard right back up and fighting.

The biggest weakness I can see to running anti-meta right now all comes down to risk vs. reward. Sure, you could build the perfect anti-meta team, but it will be very high-risk, high-reward team (like that proposed here). If you mess up vs. a meta team, they still win. Meta comps, on the other hand, are low-risk, high reward in all of the specs. While you can increase the reward side of the equation, the price you pay in increased risk is just too much for a rational player. The best changes you will see are slight tweaks, swapping one low-risk, high reward build for another that matches up slightly better (i.e. bringing a warrior instead of a 2nd ranger perhaps).

Thats why it will be so satisfying to crush them

Nice post! We really need more post like this to help this community, not like someone keep posting some useless things in warrior’s forum to just make himself famous.

SO guys, as ever green has mentioned before this might work vs top 500 lb rating people but NOT in the high tier tpvp against really good teams
why?:
because they know how to position themselves and before you reach them you got a signet of spite in your face and are slowed to death.. same goes for your whole team (epidemic)
also do you really think teams are playing condition only? of course not

HERE IS THE MAIN REASON WHY IT WONT WORK:

Since your whole teams speccs for the highest burst dmg possible their s/d thief can easily focus you out in the middle of the fight (and yes every team has one)

I really appreciate your time and effort for creating this topic but to be honest this will never succeed, people have tried this burst meta against condition meta and it simply doesnt work at all

I am so very ecstatic to see Staff Elementalist within!

REVENGE

It’s an idea. Like I said in the document, if people aren’t willing to try it I really don’t care.

Daecollo.9578:

Toughness should do something else, imo.

Good.

1 – Remove Condition Damage from game.
2 – Makes damage via condition scale with power (due might actually affects power and condition damage).
3 – Replace the status Condition Damage for a new status focused in speed (it’s lacking in this game). The new status could be Agility, its a bônus like Critical Damage, Boon Duraction and Condítion Duraction, that affects actions and movement speed.
4 – Makes Toughness affect damage via condítions. If Power affects damage dealt via condítion, Toughness affects damage received via condítions.

Are a huge change, but provides more fun and options for players.

JETWING.2759:

Daecollo.9578:

Toughness should do something else, imo.

Good.

1 – Remove Condition Damage from game.
2 – Makes damage via condition scale with power (due might actually affects power and condition damage).
3 – Replace the status Condition Damage for a new status focused in speed (it’s lacking in this game). The new status could be Agility, its a bônus like Critical Damage, Boon Duraction and Condítion Duraction, that affects actions and movement speed.
4 – Makes Toughness affect damage via condítions. If Power affects damage dealt via condítion, Toughness affects damage received via condítions.

Are a huge change, but provides more fun and options for players.

Great ideas! This would completely destroy the role of condition damage, and kitten build diversity!

Not destroy
I can see much more diversity with this implement.

Power = Damage.
More power = More raw dmg and condition dmg.
More power + More speed/agility = More raw dps
More power + More condition duraction = More condition dmg

I think the best attempt to make a burst dps comp work and beat the meta would be DPS Guard, Mesmer with Time Warp, S/D Burst Ele, Mace/Shield GS War with Frenzy, and D/P Burst Thief with Haste. You play it like an old school glass burst comp, where you zerg 4 to a point and use stealth and quickness to burst people down and get 1 stomped quickly before the condis get a chance to take over and out-sustain you. The quickness is also needed to try to make sure and stomp/kill faster than people can react with res utils to extend the fight. Fights lasting more than 20-30 seconds or so are not what this comp is looking for, so this would be most effective when piloted by very good players who can coordinate bursts together well and call out when people are using their quickness so it doesn’t overlap.

So I’ve been digging around on intothemists and tried a couple more builds. One thing I’ve found is that Guardian DPS is absolutely incredible, on par with the Warrior build actually.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAR7flYgqCHHSNEf4Eh1kittenQ/V9Ie3TfXFcIA-TsAg0CnIQShkDJDSSksIN+Y9xuAA

This is a very slight variation of iSylvir’s Roam Guardian build. I tried Guardian DPS because I was recently introduced to how incredibly vicious a zerker Guardian is 1v1.

LeBubbles gets a shoutout that dude is all kinds of deadly 1v1 with his build.

Also, 30 Trickery on Thief with the two boon traits and the interrupt makes for very, very strong 1v1 ability with D/P, which is something I noticed Caed changed in his build. The daze is so great for peeling and its 1200 range.

I’m noticing there are better options in Guardian and Thief. The Mesmer and Ele builds aren’t that great in 1v1s, so I’m thinking about changing them for another Thief and Guardian.

One of the advantages of the Guardian build is you are attacking and cleansing conditions at the same time if you utilize your light field with Greatsword. You have great control, range, gap closing, and the damage is addicting.

DPS Guard is alright 1v1, the main problem is that while the damage is good, it’s very kiteable by classes with chills and cripples, even with the jumps and teleports. Guard doesn’t have much Swiftness outside of Staff, and very little in terms of cc/snares. It will work ok until you get to upper tier play, at which point it basically falls apart against Necro/Engi/Ranger unless you catch them on cooldowns or off-guard or something. As for team fights, you have a similar issue as GS War always did with being forced to melee and eat cleave damage, except you have less mobility and lower burst.

Also, I would recommend changes to that 30/30/10 build you mentioned: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-73lFc;0NFV10G3RG-90;9;4TT9;018B39A4;6LNV45;1sV2DsV2D5BT

In the end, though, it’s probably better off that you go 10/30/30 instead and pick up Monk’s Focus and 2-3 Meditations rather than running 30/30/10 and having a bit more damage but no sustain.

jmatb.6307:

Thanks for the response Jonathan!

Even when the post contained nothing of any value, except of course the corny added in by the PR team.