Guild Wars 2

F1 is weak if not focused on. If traited and supported by your build it is actually quite strong, especially considering you only need to produce a single Clone and then fire it.
F2 is so/so. It can apply 6 stacks of Confusion + 3 stacks of Vulnerability, but it’s rarely worth the 30s CD and the Clones lost. The problem here is more in the duration of the debuffs though, not the actual amount of existence.
F3 and F4? Weak? Hrm…
Especially since you can make F3 AE.

F1 is for me the highest dmg in sPvP.. 10k .. f1-f4 are the best skills a mesmer have ^^

I think you guys need some perspective.

Shatter might feel “strong” if you’ve never played any other class. But an engineer can put out far far higher DPS, faster, more reliably and with a larger AoE just by mashing the #1 key on his grenade kit.

Shatter is incredibly weak for it’s setup criteria. that said people shouldn’t be making “shatter builds” or “phantasm build”, they should be leveraging the synergy between all of their skills to achieve a greater end result.

Ryuujin.8236:

I think you guys need some perspective.

Shatter might feel “strong” if you’ve never played any other class. But an engineer can put out far far higher DPS, faster, more reliably and with a larger AoE just by mashing the #1 key on his grenade kit.

Shatter is incredibly weak for it’s setup criteria. that said people shouldn’t be making “shatter builds” or “phantasm build”, they should be leveraging the synergy between all of their skills to achieve a greater end result.

Well, you aren’t suposed to spam them, are you? Personally, I don’t think they are either weak or strong, I just use them when needed. But then again, I haven’t PvP’d on my mesmer..

(I did play some other professions)

Yeah, if only Shatter was my #1 attack, so this was actually comparable…

Mind Wrack is a significant source of burst damage if you build around it, otherwise it is not worth using unless 1. you only have crappy Clones out or 2. you’re sure the Mind Wrack will kill the target.

Cry of Frustration deals a significant amount of Confusion damage for condition damage builds and can be very effective in PvP. For non-condition damage builds however it is relatively useless.

Diversion is an unreliable interrupt (Illusions need a variable amount of time to run up to the target) that wastes Illusions (Daze doesn’t stack) and has a relatively long CD. You need either IP or ID for this Shatter to work well, the former makes it a reliable interrupt/CC that doesn’t require Illusions (though you need to be in close range) and the latter makes it AoE.

Distortion is a life saver when used at the right time, and is also excellent for securing a stomp in PvP. This is the only Shatter that is always useful regardless of your build.

The problem with our Shatters really is: How much of our potential do we want to be in Clones / Phantasms?
It’d be comparatively easy to make Clones the alpha and omega of our defence, and Pohantasms the same for our offence. That would then imply that Shatters would be extremely powerful effects (since they still need to be worth it).

But do we really want to be so dependent on the images?

Lol this really depends on the situation. There are fights where they won’t last more than one attack, so it’s np to shatter them after they hit once. Then there are times where youc ould just summon a phant, swap and summon another one along with a clone. Then wait until phants CD is up again, shatter them all and resummon, though this would be particularly powerful with Phantasm fury trait, and Mind Wrack +crit and +dmg traits. The confusion shatter is weak no matter how you build for it, I’m using Rampager’s gear and the only time I would ever considering using that is if Wrack isn’t up. Maybe with Carrion gear, you could get enough damage out of it to try to control someone in PvP, but for PvE it’s no way.

Only reason somone think shatter mecanics are weak is that they do it wrong imoa. Lie winterfell said Shatter is the strongest ability we have not only in dmg but in utility aswell.

have a look at some shatter build vids:

Osicat.4139 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btL7-ynAH9A&feature=player_embedded

Flimp: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSBRyJZGrAY&feature=player_embedded

Winterfell.8915 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6WA3M2IbJI

How can this be considered weak? You call for perspective, I do the same. The ppl who got their faces melted sure hope our class shatters to be stronger yes?

There was a very thoughtful writeup on this just after release, let me see if I can find it.

Yep, here it is – Shatter’s Severe Design Flaws.