Guild Wars 2

Anyone ever go for a swim across a lake, possibly with 10 enemy invaders frothing at the mouth behind you, and realise how much you’d like to swap to your focus, or lay a chaos storm for some swiftness, and not have anything? Only to be rundown by all that passive run speed and utility swiftness coming up your behind? Obviously we get our stealth skills, and our portal for a bit of cleaver maneuvering, but doesn’t it seem in place to add swiftness to spear 4, or 2? Without something like that, in water is the one true place mesmers have no access to swiftness or increased speed unlike everybody else.

Thoughts?

But with spear 2 and 4, you’ve got pretty good mobility without swiftness as it is.

Maybe 4 could give a swiftness buff like temporal curtain. 2 is fine as it is, considering the low cooldown.

Hm well; I’m using 7/6 centaur runes, so…

…I’ve got perma-swiftness under water if I use mirror as a heal.

But without those runes, you can indeed only place your bet on spear 2 and 4, and I’m not sure how much faster you actually are while using those. I think you are a bit faster, but not a lot. Mainly because you need to cast those skills first, which makes you stop and takes a while.

The aftercast kinda steals that extra boost it gave.

Just slot Signet of Inspiration…..

…..I’ll get my coat.

Spear is amazing. 2 and 4 sooo awesome, faster than swiftness

takatsu.9416:

Spear is amazing. 2 and 4 sooo awesome, faster than swiftness

This.

It’s worth remembering spear 4 doesn’t just boost you, the same “field” that accelerates allies, also bumps back any enemies that try swim through it so anyone chasing you must swim at an angle (further decreasing approach velocity) to avoid it; or get knocked back and totally lose you.

More frequently the latter as the field is difficult to see and doesn’t produce a hazard marker if cast in open water

takatsu.9416:

Spear is amazing. 2 and 4 sooo awesome, faster than swiftness

Yes but spear 2 and 4 are even more amazing with swiftness. Both are interpretable too with underwater drags.

So in the case of other classes, they not only have their swiftness etc, they stack that on top of their own propel skills.

I avoid water when running from 10 invaders for thsi very reason.
but what is the chance 10 invaders chase me? If theyre a 10 man zerg theyre likely to get split up and i could kill them one by one, or just run away.
With all the stealths and blinks its not that hard to escape, as long as the terrain is good.

I absolutely love my underwater spear skills, I have several characters and the mesmer is hands down the faster one underwater (note: I allways run builds with at least 20 in dueling, so I have the trait that reduces CD for sword and also spear). In fact, I miss those skills in any other profession even when they have access to almost perma swiftness like guardian, necro, engineer…

(This applies to sPVP and PVE, I haven’t experienced this issue in WvW though.)

What Saturn said. Run centaur runes. If you use a focus air runes are good enough as long as you stay out of the water, but they won’t help you (as much) while you’re in it. If you don’t run a focus, like me, you’re pretty much married to the 7x centaur setup. Also, slot mirror as your heal underwater – you’ll probably be doing much more traveling than actual fighting while there anyway. Couple that with spear #2 and #4, and you really have to fudge up to not escape.

Actually I find I often have a much better chance at escaping underwater. Thieves especially seem reluctant to go there.