Guild Wars 2

Alright, so i am an avid WvW roamer with mesmer and lately i have found alot more people from enemy servers have been adding me to call me out for a duel because they want a rematch for whenever i melt them in WvW.

Instead of using my roaming runes (centaur) I want to buy another zerker set and add different runes (this set would also be used if I am in a roaming group which already has high swiftness uptime).

My build is 20/20/30/0/0 power build, 100% zerker, its heavy on phantasm damage, and utilizes multiple stealths for defense/defensive boons, it also gets 5 stacks of might/random boon on interrupts.

Since most of my damage is coming from phantasms I want runes that also affect their damage, which brings up to choices I have come up with, ruby orbs/boon duration gear.

100% ruby orbs: 12 crit damage, 120 power, 84 precision (roughly 4% more crit chance for me and my phantasms)

2 Sup water/2 Sup Monk/2 Sup Hoelbrak: 50% longer might, 30% longer boons. I currently use the 20% boon duration food, so this would give me 100% might duration, 80% boon duration. Defense wise these are obviously superior to the ruby orbs, I’ll have longer vigor/protection/regen boons, but one thing I am curious about, is with the extra might duration I think the overall DPS could beat out the ruby orbs as well. Gsword #2 would give 6 stacks at 20 second duration, and bountiful interruption would give 5 stacks for 20 seconds, and sigil of battle will also be adding 3 stacks when I switch weapons.

I think the boon duration runes would overall increase my dps more than any other rune setup because I will have quite a lot of might at all times, power is picked up by the phantasms and crit damage isn’t

What do you guys think of my analysis, would this work well? Do you have any other ideas for runes that would also work with this setup?

Thanks,
Xel

With the prismatic build I’ve found all boon duration runes amazing. Sup water, major water and monk. Use the extra 10% boon duration from 2 major water runes instead of Hoelbrak. The overall boon duration is better than 10% might duration you’ll have. With the extra length on the stealth, protection, regen etc.. it lets me dump torch for sword/pistol or focus.
I’ve had lots of fun and a lot of success using this build 20(III,IO)20(II, IV)30(II, IV, XII)

If you are using gsword or staff, and pistol i would recommend trying out bountiful interruption in the chaos tree, with the longer boons you will be able to stack up might easily, and the other random boons it gives will be longer as well.

My build is more offensive, so the 10% extra might is better for me than 10% more protection, (the extra duration on regen/aegis isnt really that important). I switched over to two sigils of battle as well, going to try and see how easily i can keep 15-25 stacks of might up in duels using this setup.

Xel

Update: Well, i used the boon setup for a few hours last night, and let me say it was a blast. My first fight with the runeset was against a necro, i got 25 might stacks and my phantasms melted him before he knew what was happening. Throughout the rest of the night i generally had at least 15 might, and in battles against 2+ i was getting to 20-25 pretty regularly. The boon duration helped survivability quite a bit as well, took out a zerg of around 20 with just 3 other people, and won quite a few 1v2-3’s.

Only problem is i was actually roaming with these runes, which are really slow, so i would just swap to focus get speed, then swap back to gsword, and with the boon duration runes i still probably have 80% swiftness uptime and all it takes is a second to get focus speed up and back to gsword.

8’)

I hope people realise that it’s pointless to duel a phantasm mesmer. However, I would probably suggest 6x Runes of the OP, with a Sigil of Ridiculous (on GS.) You could probably get away with a Sigil of Juststupid on your offhand, it works extremely well with Sigil of Invisspamautopilot.

Goodluck

Hello Xel,

I disagree with your analysis. Crit damage does affect phantasm damage by every test I’ve ran. If you test it, make sure to hold everything else constant and average the numbers over like 20 phantasm swings.

However, what doesn’t affect phantasm damage is you having Might or stacks of bloodlust. Anything that adds a “green” buff in your stat window instead of “white, stats” buff doesn’t transfer to phantasms. So, I don’t see the point in stacking might.

My recommendation is stack as much power as possible because that seems to best impact phant damage. I’d recommend 5x scholar and 1x any 25 power rune.

lolwut?

I know people have done tests showing that phantasms don’t get your crit chance, they get the transferred precision, so i guess i was assuming they didn’t get crit/damage as well.

It is fairly obvious they do get boosted from might though , and with the boon duration runes in the past day i have been having at least 15 might, if not 25 might on me, which i think increases overall damage quite a bit more than the dps runes would, as well as providing me with longer protection/regen/vigor.

Xel

Phantasms are affected by your power, precision, condition damage & duration, boon duration, critical damage, armor, and healing power.

Phantasms do not inherit Vitality , nor does Weapon min-max damage affect them.

I’d be delighted to be proven wrong because that would mean I can increase the damage of phantasm more and/or replace my crit damage gear with toughness or something. Again, when I held everything constant but some crit damage, I saw an increase in phantasm damage. Let’s see some SSs or tests/averages.

In terms of might, with full glass cannon and 0 might my izerker hits for around 7-8k on lvl 80 glass targets in WvW. If your might transfers to your phantasm and you have 25 stacks, you should be seeing 11k+ zerker swings. Is that right?

I’m not running a full glass cannon build, i am using a stealth phantasm build. My build doesn’t hit for as much as a normal phantasm build; but yes, with might my phantasms have been doing 2-3k more damage than normal.

Xel

Ok, I’m wrong about might stacking. Average with no might over 10 tests was 3.9 for izerker, 4.75 with 7x might. That’s cool! I probably hadn’t tested it with enough might when I tried it long ago.

I did just test the crit dmg stuff the other day tho. Saw an increase with runes and with gear. Again, I’d be happy to learn I was wrong and had been using a wasted stat.