Guild Wars 2

There hasn’t been much talk of this yet, but I’m actually really excited about the new Light Aura introduced yesterday, particularly for Mesmer.

New Aura: Light Aura

• Gain 2 seconds of retaliation when struck. (Cooldown: 1 second)
• Apply 8 seconds of vulnerability when struck.

Light Field:

Leaping through a light field now grants 5 seconds of light aura.

How does this effect Mesmer? Well we have two Light Fields in the form of:

Temporal Curtain (Focus 4)
Veil (Glamour)

It’s worth noting that temporal curtain lingers a bit after the pull is activated. This means that you can definitely use the curtain and ileap/Phase retreat off of where it last was to gain the new light aura. I’ve even been able to curtain pull, ileap, AND phase retreat to gain 7 second of light aura.. and why is that important?

There’s NO ICD on how much vulnerability you can apply! No 1s cooldown! This means our Light aura works beautifully in combination with vuln-stacking abilities Dazzling (Dom 15) and Chaos Armor. It makes it much easier to stack retaliation AND punish spamming/rapid hit abilities (like rangers >_> ).

To me, this is awesome! Light Aura + Chaos Storm has been excellent in conjunction with the other buffs. Has anyone else been exploring the glorious new shiny aura?

I haven’t tested yet, but these were my first thoughts when I read the release notes.

This could be put to very good use in an anti zerg wvw build!

Especially if you couple this with the new runes that grant boons (I think it’s swiftness and fury? Can’t check at moment) when affected by an aura!

I accidentally procced the aura last night and was like wtf…took a look at the new field on the skill. I think it’s great that we got another field and that the leap aura works both defensively and offensively. We had too many ethereal fields as it was.

So not to rain on this parade, but have any of you actually tried using a leap combo on temporal curtain?

Back in the heyday of the Immortal build, the leap combo with iLeap and temporal curtain was extremely reliable and worked great. At some point though, they changed something about the field. It suddenly became incredibly difficult to reliably combo on it—the only reliable way was basically leaping down along its length, not across it.

Now, however, iLeap isn’t a normal leap. It’s near impossible to control where the clone ends up, so you can’t guarantee that it actually lands on the curtain for a leap combo. Basically, in normal play you’ll get maybe 1/10 leaps to actually work on curtain, and that’s a big problem.

Actually it works pretty consistently now. I know about what you’re talking about withe the curtain being wonky and unreliable at some point, but with the new patch I was able to grab the aura anytime I wanted.

As for comboing off ileap, the clone doesn’t have to cross the field. The leap finisher comes from when the Mesmer ports so as long as the player is on the field it works. Had no problems with Phase Retreat either.

Yeah, I’m sorry, this was a lopsided nerf to prevent retaliation stacking(which is funny considering might stacking is still around – I guess they really don’t want duration stacking on anything that isn’t stealth). The lack of ICD on Vuln sounds like a blatant bug, and… yeah, no. Vulnerability isn’t worth coordinating a self combo.

And that’s ignoring that we don’t even have double ileap combos anymore. It’s nice to have options, but spending a weapon swap and three skills when you’re under fire for negligible retaliation and some vulnerability on the enemy just does not seem like the wisest use of our resources.

Fay.2357:

Now, however, iLeap isn’t a normal leap. It’s near impossible to control where the clone ends up, so you can’t guarantee that it actually lands on the curtain for a leap combo. Basically, in normal play you’ll get maybe 1/10 leaps to actually work on curtain, and that’s a big problem.

I was not having these problems when trying it out…

Anyhow, I just don’t think it’s worth it. The runes are interesting… for my ele. Mesmers just don’t have the traits to support an aura build.

Speaking of which @ Doni, the runes only do swiftness on aura. It’s an ele trait that does swiftness and fury. I don’t think that chaos armor is even classified as an aura so the 33% duration is crap anyways.

My initial thoughts find the new aura quite underwhelming. The collateral damage retaliation nerf from being able to originally gain retal off both the leap and swap is huge, and the 1s internal CD makes it worse. Sure, the vulnerability is nice if you’re tanking a bunch of damage but in the end I think this is inferior to what we had before.

The one thing I do like about it is the animation!

Shame they nerfed our jump finishers.

Sorry but I fail to understand the purpose of it. Especially now I-leap first combo effect got removed so we’re stuck with only 1 finisher instead of 2. That said, making an immortal build will come down to either condition damage or really poor normal damage. 10% extra damage for about 10 seconds is not exactly gonna make you much stronger than before. Then also you said yourself, veil and temporal curtain. Well Idk about you but if I put my veil on my bar it’s for 1 reason only and that would be stealth. I’m not gonna blow my stealth just for a small aura for 5 seconds. Temporal curtain on the other hand is alright, it’s just that it’s cooldown is 25 seconds allowing you only to have the aura up for max 20% of the time.

As that with phase retreat: Doubt you will switch directly to staff the moment you dropped your temporal curtain. Temp. Curtain is mostly used in combo’s with iwarden which forces you to use the pull which removes the combo field.

So all in all: It’s exactly something for mesmer → it looks pretty, but does minimal.

Fay.2357:

Back in the heyday of the Immortal build, the leap combo with iLeap and temporal curtain was extremely reliable and worked great. At some point though, they changed something about the field. It suddenly became incredibly difficult to reliably combo on it—the only reliable way was basically leaping down along its length, not across it.

Now, however, iLeap isn’t a normal leap. It’s near impossible to control where the clone ends up, so you can’t guarantee that it actually lands on the curtain for a leap combo. Basically, in normal play you’ll get maybe 1/10 leaps to actually work on curtain, and that’s a big problem.

I was about to make a thread about it, but then thought I must do something wrong or just being a noob. I still don’t know how to procc it reliably.

skcamow.3527:

My initial thoughts find the new aura quite underwhelming. The collateral damage retaliation nerf from being able to originally gain retal off both the leap and swap is huge, and the 1s internal CD makes it worse. Sure, the vulnerability is nice if you’re tanking a bunch of damage but in the end I think this is inferior to what we had before.

The one thing I do like about it is the animation!

Like Pyro said, I hadn’t been able to reliably leap/swap off the curtain in forever. And to me, the vulnerability application is pretty considerable. 8 seconds PER HIT with no icd inbetween in ADDITION to effects like Chaos Storm/Armor makes both me and iWarlock pretty happy. =P

I’m not looking at the aura effect by itself. Nor am I planning to use curtain ONLY for it. What I’m saying is that the new aura is a pretty nice buff and gives a reason to remember using the leap from the curtain again.

It certainly will add to builds that stack vulnerability via the domination line, and maybe you can look at it as a buff in one sense for builds spec’d there. On the other hand, the collateral retaliation nerf hurts for sure.

I never had issues proc’ing the finisher pre-patch and seems easy enough now as well.

It’s here now, it’s certainly better than nothing and of course we’ll take what we can get. I’m just not very wowed by it.

I’d probably take Runes of Radiance over Centaur Runes if Chaos Armor was an aura. As it is now, the aura is nice but doesn’t really appeal to me. Why would I go for it? Mesmers don’t really have a hard time stacking Vulnerability if they wanted to.

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

Fay.2357:

Now, however, iLeap isn’t a normal leap. It’s near impossible to control where the clone ends up, so you can’t guarantee that it actually lands on the curtain for a leap combo. Basically, in normal play you’ll get maybe 1/10 leaps to actually work on curtain, and that’s a big problem.

I was not having these problems when trying it out…

Anyhow, I just don’t think it’s worth it. The runes are interesting… for my ele. Mesmers just don’t have the traits to support an aura build.

Speaking of which @ Doni, the runes only do swiftness on aura. It’s an ele trait that does swiftness and fury. I don’t think that chaos armor is even classified as an aura so the 33% duration is crap anyways.

Ah right, I couldn’t check at the time because I was on my phone at work No, as far as I know, chaos armour is not considered an aura, just the new Light field finisher.

Patch Notes:

Superior Rune of Radiance:
+25 Vitality
When you receive an aura, you gain 5 seconds of swiftness.
+50 Vitality
When you use a heal skill, you gain 4 seconds of light aura.
+100 Vitality
The duration of auras you apply are increased by 33%.

So, If you use the mantra heal you can get on demand swiftness, however this isn’t much different from what you can get from Centaur runes. might be nice in a Vitality/Toughness build I guess. At the end of the day, the more options we have, the better IMO.

Maybe this is a WvW thing because I’m not really seeing practical application of this new Light Aura in PvE. The problem I have with it is the “when struck” part. Optimal PvE is always going to be a damage dealing build and that is not one where you want to be “struck”. Optimal PvE is going to be about avoiding/blocking incoming damage, while doing optimal damage output. That pretty much defeats the purpose of this new Light Aura.

I would be all over it if it acted more like a blast finisher and applied decent stacks of retal and vuln in an area around the leap. This still isn’t worth potentially blocking a fire field with a light field.

As far as generating the aura via mechanics…I’ve played with it a little and it seems to generate the aura when i use ileap across TC to a target on the other side of it fairly reliably. That still leaves the issue of it not doing anything beneficial as I’m using distortion frames to not get gibbed…and therefore not getting “struck”.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

It’s worth noting that temporal curtain lingers a bit after the pull is activated. This means that you can definitely use the curtain and ileap/Phase retreat off of where it last was to gain the new light aura. I’ve even been able to curtain pull, ileap, AND phase retreat to gain 7 second of light aura..

Dont worry Chaos, i’m certain anet will fix this bug next patch. Retal is too strong for mesmers to have and is too imposing for the new players that the rest of the september patch brought it…

But seriously, I’m just gonna call it now, this will get fixed

@Chaos Archangel:
I dont think this runeset will be of any use for dps builds, but it does spark me some idea towards tanky/bunkery setup where you build to take hits.
Vulnerability stacking + Retaliation can then be used to boost your dmg output to a decent level even in your most tanky gear, making it hard for enemies to kill you.

Maybe something like this: 0/4/6/4/0