Guild Wars 2

Assuming these highly detailed ‘leaked’ patch notes are legit, I quickly theory crafted a trait setup for gaining maximum boons while maintaining decent damage (and ofcourse the extremely high survivability with so many boonz).

Domination: 15 -> take: Halting strike (II)
Duelling: 20 -> take: Blade Training (IV) and Deceptive Evasion (X)
Chaos: 30 -> take: Master of Manipulation (III), Bountiful Interuption (I don’t know what number this will be since it is being moved to the adept tier) and Prismatic Understanding (XII, this is apparently being buffed, now applies boons every 1 second in stealth)
Inspiration: 0 -> Additionally you can swap the 20 in duelling over here and get the focus reflect projectiles, but you will lose significant clone summoning capabilities and dps.
Illusions: 5 -> this if for Illusionists Celerity

Weapons are Staff and Sword/Focus.

Utilities are Blink, Decoy and Signet of Inspiration.

General practice for the build: Use phantasms to deal most of your your damage along with Sword 3 and 2 combo’s.

Remember to maximise your chaos armour (boons) by phase retreating out of chaos storm etc. Chain your f3 daze (that applies 15 stacks of vulnerability and interrupt damage) into a focus pull (AOE interrupt damage) along with Sword 3 and 2 combo along with f1 shatter to finish someone off.

I would go ahead and explain the theory behind taking all the trait, however i’ll leave that till after the patch when we get confirmation.

The prospect of using BI and PU together is indeed intriguing, but unfortunately it also forces the inability to use Chaotic Dampening, which is a huge detriment if using the staff. This is how they properly balance the ability to use these 2 former GM traits together.

I would instead use other weapon combinations – torch for sure for PU and then for interrupts you have GS #5, Sword #4, focus pulls, pistol #5, F3 shatter and daze mantra to build around.

I am already running a 110% protection/regen uptime with PU. Thanks to the new buff. It is going to give more wiggle room and maybe I can move some traits into illusions. However I think another thing they are trying to promote with putting BI into master is to encourage people to take the scepter. I can imagine a scepter/torch sword/pistol build that can easily get 10 stacks of might and do good damage if they proc the torment from scepter block.

Interesting stuff :P either way, im definitely picking PU. I mean come on, these boons now proc once every second? the trait was amazing before.

In any case much testing must be done once the patch comes out!

Yeah Mesmer boon duration is interesting to play around with. I know for sure that we can do better uptime on protection especially with this new patch.