Coming back after 2 years of hiatus, I checked up on what has been happening. Last I recall, there were various types of builds from shatter, mantra, signet, phantasm, etc. Now, from what I’m gathering, it seems only phantasm builds are viable in PvE, unless I’m not looking deep enough. I’ve been trying out the dungeon build on Metabattle site. When I did shatter several times while running dungeons, I was told to ’don’t shatter and just let the illusions die out’. I was surprised since I thought Shattering is part of our profession mechanics. In open world, I don’t often see many mesmers shatter their illusions, just keeping 2-3 phantasms (iswordsman, iduelist, iwarden, and iberserker) up all the time. I don’t mind playing phantasm build, but is it really the only thing mesmers got left?
Chronomancer and shield seems to bring some usage for shattering (which I’m in process of making a hybrid shatter build to test in BWE3), so that does shed some light that Shattering would be used.
The PvE community may have turned more elitist since last time you checked. So shatter builds are very possible, and maybe even more powerful than before with Illusionary Persona (you count as a clone) baseline. But the best sustained damage comes from phantasms, and shattering means destroying them (until chronomancer comes), so shattering is not “optimal”. However, because of the new trait structure, you do have access to the key shatter traits (IP and Mental Anguish) even in a phantasm build, so you can still do very strong shatters, especially to finish enemies, or against trash mobs for spike AOE damage. If you are speaking open-world PvE, anything works anyway really (even conditions, which are now very viable in PvE, though not necessarily optimal)
If you are asking about “organized PvE” (dungeons/fractals), there are currently discussion about what is the most powerful mesmer build once chronomancer comes:
maximizing damage with phantasms
maximizing support to your party with wells (alacrity + quickness)
thanks to chronophantasma + alacrity on shatter, shattering may actually be useful in the second case.
Yes, I did noticed some things become baseline as you’ve mentioned one, which is nice. I do look forward to chronomancer and I really do enjoy using the shield (it does some tweaks/fixes) and using wells (assuming they’ll be used underwater like necro wells). I don’t mind if I don’t do the highest dps, but at least be decent enough along with some utility/support/crowd control. Chronomancer does look promising and hopefully bring more varieties/alternatives to builds.
I hope the PvE community doesn’t turn too elitist to the point that they scare away all other players. But then again, that’s in every MMO.
Thank you for responding and explaining some of the things.
If you are asking about “organized PvE” (dungeons/fractals), there are currently discussion about what is the most powerful mesmer build once chronomancer comes:
maximizing damage with phantasms
maximizing support to your party with wells (alacrity + quickness)
thanks to chronophantasma + alacrity on shatter, shattering may actually be useful in the second case.
Chronophantasma really changes a lot of things for PvE Mesmer. Even a Phantasm DPS build can afford to shatter once or twice during a fight now, as opposed to never.
The usefulness of Shatter Support will really depend on the nature of PvE content in HoT. As it stands, with a “long” fight still being under a minute, I’m not sure that Alacrity recovers cooldowns quickly enough to make a difference. I’ll leave it to DnT to figure that out.
From a pure DPS perspective, though, shattering without Chronophantasma is only worth it when your target or your phantasms are about to die anyway. Maximum damage from Mind Wrack amounts to, what, 2-3 seconds of expected DPS? And it’ll take much longer than that just to ramp back up.
Just shatter to finish stuff off, but don’t shatter all the time if it is a longer fight. However, Just letting your illusions go out when the enemy is dead wastes dps. You are also free to use other shatter abilities like distortion when you have no illusions present since illusionary persona is baseline.
Ill give an example. I was just going through a pug CoF run with another mesmer in the party and we got to the part where you have to kill the flame acolytes. The other mesmer, obviously copping from metabattle or something, summoned two phantasms and started sword attacks to take the acolyte down. I just used a great sword burst shatter rotation. Needless to say, I took down my acolyte over twice as fast as the other mesmer. Summoning phantasms take time as well. In longer fights, you obviously want to try to get as many phantasms up at once. However, in shorter fights where things end faster, it may be a different story.
To be honest, if you do not shatter in PvE, then you are doing it wrong or are stuck in the past.
What on earth are you talking about? Since when hkittentering suddenly become great in PvE?
Hint: it hasn’t.
It is great, if you know what you are doing. Sorry Pyro, i know you are the wise-man of the forums but you don’t seem to know the class.
Unless you’re referring to shattering purely to finish off a mob, then you’re simply wrong.
The problem is that shattering destroys your damage phantasms for a quick extra burst of damage. Unfortunately, the total damage the shatter deals would have been dealt by those phantasms in the next 5 seconds or so. Having shattered them, now you have to spend time resummoning, during which neither the phantasms nor yourself are doing damage.
Shattering for damage is guaranteed to lower your dps unless you’re killing the mob with the shatter, there is no room for debate.
I have a question to frifox/Pyro, what would it take to make shattering viable and could chronomancer at least offer a different style for about the same or slightly less dps?
I have a question to frifox/Pyro, what would it take to make shattering viable and could chronomancer at least offer a different style for about the same or slightly less dps?
Chronomancer offers a playstyle that’s at the very least a lot more conducive to shattering, due to chronophantasma. That being said, you’ll still have to be careful about when you shatter, since it pushes the phantasms into melee range to do so, making them easy to kill.
However, chronophantasma is really just another way of dealing phantasm damage, with a side dish of shatters that actually make the phantasms attack faster. If you actually wanted shattering as a main damage mechanic to be viable, you’d probably have to straight up halve the cooldown on mind wrack at the least.
The PvE build utilize strength rune and sigil with the gs trait i can easily stack 25 stacks of might. With the signet and trait my phantasms have more hp and do not die so fast + they attack more offen
I can always adjust it so my Focus cas reflect projectiles and glamour skills duration is prolonged.
Try using shatter when solo’ing vet karka and you will discover it doesn’t work well (I found you rely more on the phantasms to keep the karka busy while you pew-pew from afar, since karka have so many evades).
Try using shatter when solo’ing vet karka and you will discover it doesn’t work well (I found you rely more on the phantasms to keep the karka busy while you pew-pew from afar, since karka have so many evades).
Yea, when you solo big bosses, of course it will suck.
But if you do the other 95% of open world content, you’ll either waste phantasm cooldowns on mobs that die in 2 seconds or you can shatter frequently to instant burst most enemies as well as deal more AoE damage for tagging mobs in big groups.
It kinda comes down to this:
More mobs, less mob health = shatter build benefits most
Less mobs, more mob health = phantasm build benefits most
The fix is actually quite easy, significantly increase the damage of shatters in PvE only. Keep the values for WvW/spvp the same as they are now.
But for some pigheaded reason they refuse to split skill balancing and what you see is us not wanting to use our main class mechanic in PvE for 3 years straight.
If shatter were doing 25k+ damage in PvE, sorta like 100b, mesmers wouldn’t have problems shattering the phantasms. Especially with chronophantasma and persistence of memory around.
Another problem with BOTH shatter and phantasms is that if verdant brink is any indication, illusions are murdered before they even get an attack in with all the aoe spam mobs are doing in PvE and the disgustingly low health of illusions and lack of aoe resistance.
I was running a chrono wells build built for shattering in Verdent Brink on BW2 and certainly it was better to use for events there. Felt a bit crap on the champs though but at least I managed to tag stuff for all that loot it was pointless picking up.
Given that with alacrity you can get a 33% reduction in MW cool down it might at least be worth looking into. Shame wells do such poor damage.
pvp spike damage keeps the mesmer hostage in pve damage. Basically they don’t want to give us any more damage or an ability with worthwhile damage cause shatter spike in pvp.
So wells will keep doing bad damage until they decide to stop screwing us over pvp.
One of the few classes in the game hostage of their class mechanics (like rangers, but also in a different way necromancers). You have to reduce damage to take into account for phantasms in PvE, but you also have to take into account shatters in PvP. But illusions die and take forever to resummon. So you’ve just got a reduced damage without compensation…
Given that with alacrity you can get a 33% reduction in MW cool down it might at least be worth looking into. Shame wells do such poor damage.
40%, as long as you keep the alacrity up.
Cooldown – 1(time) – .66(time) = Cooldown – 1.66(time) = 0, where time is the actual time til the ability comes off cd.
=> Cooldown = 1.66(time) => time = cooldown/1.66
Cooldown reduction = (cooldown – time)/(cooldown) =
(cooldown – cooldown/1.66)/cooldown = (cooldown/cooldown)*((1-1/1.66)/1) = .4, or 40%
I wonder if A-net was aware that many mesmers are not using their main mechanics and thus, made chronomancer to see if it’ll convince us to shatter more than keeping phantasms alive. Hmmm……
Edit: Don’t know why I was thinking that. I think I’m gonna blame having no A/C in the house for a couple days and uncomfortable sleeps for making me think something like this. >.<
I wonder if A-net was aware that many mesmers are not using their main mechanics and thus, made chronomancer to see if it’ll convince us to shatter more than keeping phantasms alive. Hmmm……
This isn’t a novel observation. The issue is our core mechanics should not require us to specialise, they should be synergistic as they are.
This isn’t an novel observation. The issue is our core mechanics should not require us to specialise, they should be synergistic as they are.
Yeah, I agree with you. I wish they would split skills for PvE and PvP like what they did in GW1, or actually make shatter useful again. Or even make our other weapons more viable.
Edit: Hopefully, they’ll post all the changes based on feedback from last BWE (and hopefully good changes).
