Guild Wars 2

Since my first beta experiences with mesmer i have been trying to make a viable interrupting Build.
Due to lack of efficiency combined with the huge amount of skill needed to interrupt the “right” skills i left the idea.
Now that I have played my mesmer a long time i atempted to build an interrupting mesmer again and ofcource started of by testing related traits. I was so heavily disapointed i wondered if arenanet intended to troll me personally.

The Traits existing wich relate to interrupting:

Domination Expert Major trait: Halting Strike. Deals INSANE … no… 200 Damage on interrupting a glasscannon while self being fully specced for direct damage. I even proceeded to check if it scaled with conditiondamage instead of power, because making a trait to choose next to 20% and 15% Damage boosts wich does basically no damage atall while providing no utillity ither seemed unlikely. Nope. Speccing for condition instead gave me 100 damage.

Domination Expert Minor trait: Quite neet, 3 stacks of vulnerabillity on interrupt. Still rather useless if you dont just interrupt to get bonuses but really want to interrupt keyskills with short cast times.

Duelling Grandmaster Major trait: Furious Interruption – Joke? 4 Seconds of Fury for Interrupting in a Grandmaster slot? It would still be weak if it were in a lower tier, but grandmaster? Ok, one has to consider Chaosstorm random interrupts stacking quite some fury if lucky, and interrupting unimportant long casttime skills might make this senseable too. But still it doesnt compete if you want to actually Interrupt aimedly.

Chaos Master Major trait: Chaotic Interruption random condition on interrupt. Again only balanced for random chaosstorm interrupts, else senseless.

Chaos Grandmaster Major Trait: Bountiful Interruption – Like chaotic interrutption totally useless if not in a chaosstorm interrupting multiple targets.

Now, whyt is the point of this. All of this is clearly only meant to support chaosstorm, but not to allow real interrupt gameplay. Why add such traits? And Dominations Halting Strike is – even in chaosstorm – so useless it actually hurts.

I dont expect this to be ballanced for usefulnes anytime close aslong as chaosstorm is in the game, but please, then give us something useful instead!

These traits had a purpose at one point during the beta events.
Greatsword #3 was a targeted daze. Anet haven’t change the traits every since the nerf

this sort of thing is sort of viable but works better as a lock-down build than interrupt. dazes, stuns and knockdowns (i.e. focus pulls) count as interrupts if the opponent is using a skill, which is very often in pvp/wvw.

the grandmaster dom trait turns dazes to stuns, and maxing daze/stun duration improves this. making the opponent stand around like a dummy is apparently quite possible. someone posted a build called stunway or something like that.

also some of the things you mentioned,like the domination traits that apply vulnerability…there is also a similar major trait. together and using diversion, it is quite easy to quickly apply 25 stacks of vulnerability (and with another trait, you can make this work in aoe). pair this with a few back to back daze/stuns and a dps ally and you’ve got a dead opponent. even without the ally, you can do some good damage with phantasms in an interrupt/control build.

you are right that they are hard to play well, though…I certainly havent mastered it, just seen the potential.

Blimm.5028:

Duelling Grandmaster Major trait: Furious Interruption – Joke? 4 Seconds of Fury for Interrupting in a Grandmaster slot? It would still be weak if it were in a lower tier, but grandmaster? Ok, one has to consider Chaosstorm random interrupts stacking quite some fury if lucky, and interrupting unimportant long casttime skills might make this senseable too. But still it doesnt compete if you want to actually Interrupt aimedly.

This GM Trait is not that bad. It has no CD. SO If u use some AOE Interupt and u get 5x interupt.. Well 20sec fury… Not bad.. But not handy enough too… Hahaha…

Nevhie.6079:

Blimm.5028:

Duelling Grandmaster Major trait: Furious Interruption – Joke? 4 Seconds of Fury for Interrupting in a Grandmaster slot? It would still be weak if it were in a lower tier, but grandmaster? Ok, one has to consider Chaosstorm random interrupts stacking quite some fury if lucky, and interrupting unimportant long casttime skills might make this senseable too. But still it doesnt compete if you want to actually Interrupt aimedly.

This GM Trait is not that bad. It has no CD. SO If u use some AOE Interupt and u get 5x interupt.. Well 20sec fury… Not bad.. But not handy enough too… Hahaha…

wait, so mesmer has access to 3(ish) aoe interrupts; diversion (traited), chaos storm and focus pull. they actually go nicely together as you could focus pull guys into warden, swap to staff, drop chaos storm, get some confusing bolts, hit diversion. bam 4 seconds of no one getting hit on your team, and if you’re against 5+ players/mobs, thats potentially 60 seconds worth of fury – the 4 seconds or so to do the combo. so lets say 20-40 conservatively. add in runes of altruism, and thats perma-fury. add in signet of inspiration, and you’ve got perma-fury on your whole team.

i think I see a build shaping up here.

bobross.5034:

Nevhie.6079:

Blimm.5028:

Duelling Grandmaster Major trait: Furious Interruption – Joke? 4 Seconds of Fury for Interrupting in a Grandmaster slot? It would still be weak if it were in a lower tier, but grandmaster? Ok, one has to consider Chaosstorm random interrupts stacking quite some fury if lucky, and interrupting unimportant long casttime skills might make this senseable too. But still it doesnt compete if you want to actually Interrupt aimedly.

This GM Trait is not that bad. It has no CD. SO If u use some AOE Interupt and u get 5x interupt.. Well 20sec fury… Not bad.. But not handy enough too… Hahaha…

wait, so mesmer has access to 3(ish) aoe interrupts; diversion (traited), chaos storm and focus pull. they actually go nicely together as you could focus pull guys into warden, swap to staff, drop chaos storm, get some confusing bolts, hit diversion. bam 4 seconds of no one getting hit on your team, and if you’re against 5+ players/mobs, thats potentially 60 seconds worth of fury – the 4 seconds or so to do the combo. so lets say 20-40 conservatively. add in runes of altruism, and thats perma-fury. add in signet of inspiration, and you’ve got perma-fury on your whole team.

i think I see a build shaping up here.

Stun grandmaster is still better. With Diversion you statistically guarantee* yourself a stun.

*: As much as statistics allow. Without iPersona, a 3clone F3 will give you a 12.5% chance of not stunning and/or stunning only once. With iPersona, a 4shatter F3 will give you a 6.25% chance of not stunning and/or stunning only once.

If you position your clones well, you could potentially lock someone down for a while if they don’t have a cc-break or if they blow it too fast. Not sure how you’d finish them with this build, but it would be nice to stun someone while bursting them, especially with the “cookie cutter” shatter build traits of applying vuln on F3 so your MW(F1) will do massive bonus damage. I mean, you’re basically serving them to yourself on a platter by stunning them and applying vulnerability. You also give yourself some might (if you have iPersona) and can dish out some good joojoodamage. The only problem is you might have to trade out Deceptive Evasion making your shatter factory reliant on skills alone, not dodges.

Esplen.3940:

bobross.5034:

Nevhie.6079:

Blimm.5028:

Duelling Grandmaster Major trait: Furious Interruption – Joke? 4 Seconds of Fury for Interrupting in a Grandmaster slot? It would still be weak if it were in a lower tier, but grandmaster? Ok, one has to consider Chaosstorm random interrupts stacking quite some fury if lucky, and interrupting unimportant long casttime skills might make this senseable too. But still it doesnt compete if you want to actually Interrupt aimedly.

This GM Trait is not that bad. It has no CD. SO If u use some AOE Interupt and u get 5x interupt.. Well 20sec fury… Not bad.. But not handy enough too… Hahaha…

wait, so mesmer has access to 3(ish) aoe interrupts; diversion (traited), chaos storm and focus pull. they actually go nicely together as you could focus pull guys into warden, swap to staff, drop chaos storm, get some confusing bolts, hit diversion. bam 4 seconds of no one getting hit on your team, and if you’re against 5+ players/mobs, thats potentially 60 seconds worth of fury – the 4 seconds or so to do the combo. so lets say 20-40 conservatively. add in runes of altruism, and thats perma-fury. add in signet of inspiration, and you’ve got perma-fury on your whole team.

i think I see a build shaping up here.

Stun grandmaster is still better. With Diversion you statistically guarantee* yourself a stun.

*: As much as statistics allow. Without iPersona, a 3clone F3 will give you a 12.5% chance of not stunning and/or stunning only once. With iPersona, a 4shatter F3 will give you a 6.25% chance of not stunning and/or stunning only once.

If you position your clones well, you could potentially lock someone down for a while if they don’t have a cc-break or if they blow it too fast. Not sure how you’d finish them with this build, but it would be nice to stun someone while bursting them, especially with the “cookie cutter” shatter build traits of applying vuln on F3 so your MW(F1) will do massive bonus damage. I mean, you’re basically serving them to yourself on a platter by stunning them and applying vulnerability. You also give yourself some might (if you have iPersona) and can dish out some good joojoodamage. The only problem is you might have to trade out Deceptive Evasion making your shatter factory reliant on skills alone, not dodges.

interesting, so you might start with warden, force pull, chaos storm, phase retreat while casting iwarlock. if you started at medium range that should give you one pb, one med and one long shatter for diversion. follow up decoy and mirror image, MW and run away stealthed. really very close to shatter-cat’s combo, but you got more stuff on cooldown, and the target is probably stunned for some of it.

Made a thread about this like 7 months ago and all i got is “back in betas mes had much more stun/dazes and for the final game they were removed because it was OP”… At the end the reality is, back in betas when Mez has much more rups these traits were useful. Rupts were removed because anet wanted GW2 to be a casual spam fest with no classes that can dominate another by shutting it down as it was perfectly possible in gw1. Rups were removed cuz its easy to remove but when it comes to traits they didn’t bother because you can’t just remove them, you need to replace them and they’re way too lazy for that.

loseridoit.2756:

These traits had a purpose at one point during the beta events.
Greatsword #3 was a targeted daze. Anet haven’t change the traits every since the nerf

No kidding; we still have seperate “Illusions do more damage” and “Phantasms do more damage”, even though clones no longer deal damage, essentially making the skills duplicates

Ryuujin.8236:

loseridoit.2756:

These traits had a purpose at one point during the beta events.
Greatsword #3 was a targeted daze. Anet haven’t change the traits every since the nerf

No kidding; we still have seperate “Illusions do more damage” and “Phantasms do more damage”, even though clones no longer deal damage, essentially making the skills duplicates

Nah man, what if your Clone does 10 damage? Now it does 11.5 damage.

Esplen.3940:

Nah man, what if your Clone does 10 damage? Now it does 11.5 damage.

They should nerf that…seems way op’d.

Any traits mesmers have for interrupts are pretty much useless…. Why? Because interrupts are useless… They interrupt for a small amount of time and the interrupts do negligible things. Interrupts were worth something in the BWE’s but were deemed OP and nerfed. The traits surrounding them were never addressed though. I think a good step in the right direction would be to remove the ICD on mantra of distraction… If mantras are supposed to be instant cast… why does this have a CD it completely goes against what a mantra should do.

Meh… Interrupts are only “OP” if ither chainable for a long time or while playing agianst people who cant play. The 2 sec CD on interrutption is ridiculous, just made up my mind… interrupting builds would even be useless if Domination 2 dealt 3-4k Damage, because the mechanic it builds on is useless in itsself… Well, i have a lockdown mesmer. I can chainstun/daze people for 15 seconds straight and longer, but being able to usefully interrupt a single skill is op in anets eyes…
Interrupt builds would add in a hard-to-play component to the game. At the moment there is NO build wich requires skill to be effective, skill only slightly improoves efficiency. But hey, lets have a noob game where there is nothing a master of his art can excell at…
Seriously, at the moment builds are ither meta, 1o1 powerful but tourney useless or utterly useless.
And meta is so easy to play… I can play my shatter mes with closed eyes. Not 1o1, but in a group fight il still deal my tonns of damage.

if frequent interrupts can lockout just one skill-like a self-heal, it can be very powerful. not sure at what point it becomes OP’d but I get why a nerf like that may have happened….I think what they’re going for with interrupts is keeping the opponent off balance, rather than making them incapable of acting.

But you dont get youre opponent of balance atm. You have to blow tons of cooldowns to reliably interrupt a keyskill that reappears every 2 seconds. And now tell me, what brings your oponent more of balance?
15-25 seconds permanent stun/daze at a 1.2k range or
3-5 Interrupts setting potentially uselsess skills on a 2 second CD?

Nuka Cola.8520:

Made a thread about this like 7 months ago and all i got is “back in betas mes had much more stun/dazes and for the final game they were removed because it was OP”… At the end the reality is, back in betas when Mez has much more rups these traits were useful. Rupts were removed because anet wanted GW2 to be a casual spam fest with no classes that can dominate another by shutting it down as it was perfectly possible in gw1. Rups were removed cuz its easy to remove but when it comes to traits they didn’t bother because you can’t just remove them, you need to replace them and they’re way too lazy for that.

So much (sad) truth.

Especially no classes that can dominate another by shutting it down as it was perfectly possible in gw1.

Man, everytime i see ppl complaining about mesmers for no reason (not saying that every complain has no reason. but a lot are just QQs), i laugh inside thinking what those ppl would think about GW1 Mesmer.

THAT was a pita class to play against in pvp, if the player was skilled.
Rupts, Diversion, both meele and caster hate hexes, degen, armor ignoring dmg, mana depletion/stealing, faster casting of any spell, hexes punishing skill type use, or any type skill activation plus hexes punishing not activating skill…..and much more.

GW1 Mesmer puts GW2 into shame at 360°, when comes to CC and domination of enemy and battlefield.

I freaking miss skills like Panic, Vision of Regret and Wastrel’s Worry/Demise.

Getting vulnerability on interrupt is fine as is. If you’ve committed yourself to all that you’ve created a net of vul stacking methods that keeps your target at a high vul stack. Any problem with that has more to do with slowing down your target so you can get your melee attacks off. Thats a sword issue.

The boon/condition on interrupt is all garbage. The duration times are a joke. Even if you were to use staff and trait for aoe diversion shatters (which is what these traits have to be balanced against) you are not seeing any real “juice” out of that purpose (which would be to Interrupt a group then spread the boons to your team via the signet). Maye his has some viability in wvwvw but I don’t play that so I cannot comment from experience. Still you diversion at every 30-some seconds at that point.

Off all the trait lines domination is the most messed up due to it trying the hardest to cater to two different playstyles. A small and very welcome change would be taking the chance for vul on clone death from dom trait 5 and swapping it with the cripple in the power line. A staff user can accept loss of damage for cripple, even if that isn’t helping % 100 of the time (I.e. ranged opponent).

The conditions caused via interruption require longer durations and need to be: chill, poison, or weakness. These are all universally useful conditions (the viability of weakness withstanding however the premise of the condition is what we are considering).

The boons gained via interruption need to be longer duration. Also it needs to be (at least) 3 stacks of might instead of one. It would also be nice if fury and regen were not available as they are not universally ‘useful’ but thats much more in the realm of opinion.

Should have said condition memser not staff user. Editing on gs3 can be a kitten.

Blimm.5028:

But you dont get youre opponent of balance atm. You have to blow tons of cooldowns to reliably interrupt a keyskill that reappears every 2 seconds. And now tell me, what brings your oponent more of balance?
15-25 seconds permanent stun/daze at a 1.2k range or
3-5 Interrupts setting potentially uselsess skills on a 2 second CD?

yup, I don’t get that either…didnt want to mention in case someone with a nerf stick saw it….it certainly doesnt make sense that daze/stuns (hard locks) should be more effective than confusion (an increasingly soft lock) or interrupts (skill-based lock) seems like they should be reversed.

i think, if there was an op’d element of interrupts, rather than making cooldowns trivial, and interrupts slower, there should have been counterplay elements. foe example, make it costly to miss an interrupt (e.g. 1 second self-stun). so if you suspect interrupts coming you could cancel your own skills and dodge to try to fake out mesers, and cause them to hurt themselves….alas we got a useless mechanic instead.

bobross.5034:

Esplen.3940:

Nah man, what if your Clone does 10 damage? Now it does 11.5 damage.

They should nerf that…seems way op’d.

Yeah, imagine if they had 1,300 clones out; you’d do almost as much damage as a warrior!

Hey! Thankfully for you, I’ve spent the time (and gold) making an amazing Stun Build.

Personally, I think you just have to think of it from a different perspective. You don’t want all your damage coming from interrupts, so all those other damage on interrupt, etc, is kinda useless. However, what you do want to be able to do, is control the enemy.

Basically, the way I saw it, was that if I could have my clones pump out significant damage, while isolating the target, and keeping them locked in place, there’s nothing they can really do right? I also took into account that I usually run in duos (Not saying this build can’t be ran solo, just interrupt builds in general are more successful in group play.)

The power of daze → stun, is truly amazing. With enough practice, you can basically lock people in place for up to 10 seconds. Now situationally, this can be amazing. With 2-3 Mesmers, timing with this literally keeps people perma-stunned (so much fun in WvW when you don’t do damage and let them just Alt + F4, cause they can’t do anything.)

I kinda hope that this clears things up for you, gives you inspiration etc. etc. and helps you work out a stun build of your liking

If i havent mentioned yet: I´m using a stun build for 3 months now. It works, it stuns long enough to kill every bunker without perma stabillity and often enough to counter every amount of stunbreakers.

This is not the point of this topic. The point is that all traits related to build an INTERRUPT spec are broken and interrupts in theirselves are totally useless.

And if you spent alot of time on such an stunlock build thats really sad. Mine took me 10 minutes, stuns for 15-25 seconds straight and does kittenloads of damage.

Nuka Cola.8520:

Made a thread about this like 7 months ago and all i got is “back in betas mes had much more stun/dazes and for the final game they were removed because it was OP”… At the end the reality is, back in betas when Mez has much more rups these traits were useful. Rupts were removed because anet wanted GW2 to be a casual spam fest with no classes that can dominate another by shutting it down as it was perfectly possible in gw1. Rups were removed cuz its easy to remove but when it comes to traits they didn’t bother because you can’t just remove them, you need to replace them and they’re way too lazy for that.

Agreed. And now, after the dreaded confusion nerf we are cluttered with even more “traits that used to be viable but were nerfed and never replaced”. We need these traits REPLACED with new ones.

In two months we will have just shatter for a viable build, simply because anet nerfs phantasms to only do one atack and then despawn cus ppl are crying and other nerfs, but no fixes on those traits. Were really close to a point where there is only one “set” of useable traits left!