Guild Wars 2

Since glamour build was nerfed in april, I’ve been developing a new way to go for WvW when fighting zergs. I realize that feedback does a lot of damage, so I focused the build on reflecting projectiles.

I’ve also investigated how reflection works and how you can improve the damage done when you reflect projectiles, so in the next post there’s a reflection guide that explains all the mechanic. At the end of the reflection guide I will put some videos where you can see what this build brings and how works.

Build
Project Mesmer Build
Max Numbers (Sword/focus): 77% of critical chance (without fury), 65% of critical damage, 2794 of armor, 18,3k of health and 2644 of power.

Weapons
The most important weapon is Focus, since provides the second best way to reflect projectiles. Sword for blurred frenzy. For the secondary set, I find that staff does the best job. You won’t be using it quite a lot, so it’s only there for sigil of perception, chaos storm and chaos armor.

Utilities and elite

• Blink: For an emergency escape if you’re in troubles. It’s also good to reach a zerg, since mesmers doesn’t have good long-distance speed.
• Sharper images: It’s used basically to spam F4 so you will have at least 2s of invulnerability. Remember that in a zerg fight the most important thing is to survive.
• Feedback: Your most powerful weapon.

Optional utilities are Null field, Mimic and Decoy. The skill changed should be Sharper images, since the others are essential.
For elites, the best choice is Time Warp. Even with the nerfs is a huge combo field and also helps people.
You can try racial elites, but I’ve only tested sylvaris, and they suck quite a bit in WvW. I’ve looked a little other races. Norn has the Snow leopard form, which is great to escape. Humans have Avatar of Melandru or Reaper of grenth, I like more this last one combined with 3s of distortion, blurred frenzy… Finally, Asuras have Summon D-Series golem which is a golem that creates a reflecting bubble, but there’s only 1 video in youtube and I don’t have an alt asura to test in WvW.

Traits
The traits are based on 3 main things, maximizing the damage done when reflecting projectiles, upgrading feedback and having survivability tools.
The distribution is 0/30/0/30/10.

• Duel. Trait I for a longer blink, Trait IV for quicker blurred frenzy and Trait X for clone creation.
• Inspiration: Traits II and IX to upgrade feedback and Trait VIII to have focus as a reflective weapon.
• Illusions: Trait VI to reset shatters, so you can have 2 Distortion in a moment.

Set
This set provides you the best way to deal a lot of damage with reflection while being quite tanky, so the best choice is to run full Knight Set (armor and weapons).
For trinkets, to maximize the damage it’s better to have a mix between knight and cavalier: ascended (Knight “+precision” and cavalier) or exotic (Cavalier-Ruby and Knight-Emerald). With exotic you lose 2% of critical chance, 4% critical damage and 60 of toughness.

Runes
For runes I’ve chosen 4 Rune of Rage and 2 Rune of the Monk. Runes of Monk are for the +15% boon duration. Runes of rage provides you long fury. I’ve discovered that you get the fury when you’re stuck, not when you hit (As the description says). See the next video:
How Rune of Rage works

Sigils
For sigils I’ve changed to Perception in Sword and Restoration in Focus ans Staff. Until more tests with Sigil of Nullification, is better to go with restoration, as it provides very good healing.

Food
I’ve chosen offensive food, to bring more damage when reflecting(+12% critical chance and +10% critical damage).

Finally, one screen to show the awesomeness of reflection xd

Reflection Guide
After investigating a lot, I’ve finally found how reflection works. Most important things are:

• Reflection damage is not affected by power. See low and high power videos.
• Reflection damage it is affected by critical chance and critical damage. See low critical damage and highest damage with 1 attack (same precision) videos and compare with power videos.
• Projectiles reflected also count as your projectiles, so they activate your sigils. See Sigil of purity video.

Reflecting damage
So after seeing these things and all the videos, the best way to upgrade the reflection damage is having the best critical chance and critical damage possible.. Luckily, we can use set that hasn’t power as +stat, but also the other 2 stats are useful to us. If there was combinations like precision, crit damage, toughness/vitality, this build would be extremely op xd.

Sigils
The most amazing thing is when reflected projectiles deal critical hits. As I said before, sigils are activated by these projectiles.
But I put sigil of Nullification for a different reason, to mitigate the effect of retaliation. As you can see in video WvW reflection zerg vs zerg, when I’m using staff I receive a lot of retaliation (you’re hitting a lot of people). This caused the build to be an autokiller sometimes, so this sigil solves this.
I’ve discovered that sigils share cd, so it isn’t worth to go with 2 critical sigils.

Critical chance or critical damage?
After seeing the videos, it’s clear that critical damage is better than critical chance in terms of DPS. But I prefer to maximize first the critical chance and then put the maximum critical damage possible, mainly because sigils will activate more often.
Another reason is that if you want to upgrade a lot the critical damage you have 2 ways:

• Using berserker gear. But this build is for zerg fights and the most important thing is to survive, and power doesn’t count on reflection damage.
• Lowering your critical chance by cavalier gear.
  For example, with the same build but with cavalier weapons and amulet, you lose 12% of critical chance, while gaining 19% of critical damage. Sigils will be affected quite a lot, since they would activate a 7,2% less. It might not seem a big chance, but when you reflect like 60 projectiles, this 7,2% is a noticeable amount.
  Finally, Common critical chance is around 68%, that includes cheaper food and not all the stacks. This is a thing to consider, cause the maximum critical chance is with 25 stacks of perception sigil and best and most expensive food (25p every 30 minutes). So normally your critical chance will be lower and losing even more precision is not worth.

Videos
Most videos are made with a slightly different build. Different trinkets and 0/30/0/20/20, so there’s no Temporal Enchanter, but I got Masterful reflection instead. I tried a lot Masterful Reflection, but it hasn’t been worth in big fights, so I changed for Temporal Enchanter.

Low power
High power
Low critical damage
Sigil of purity
Highest damage with a single attack
Highest number ever reach
Awesome WvW reflection damage
WvW reflection zerg vs zerg

Reserved to updates and future notes.

v1.1
Sigils changed. Sword has Perception. Focus and Staff have now Sigil of Restoration.
Changed build and guide sigil sections to update information.

Till 19th June I have exams, so I won’t have so much time to respond

Neat build and I like the thought and testing you put into it. A couple thoughts. First I think you mean to say Mirror Images, not Sharper Images.

Second, not taking masterful reflection seems like a tragedy to me. Do you really need deceptive evasion with so much clone generation from sword, staff and mirror images? Removing that gets you the best of both worlds in Illusionary Invigoration AND Masterful Reflection in Illusions, plus more decreased cool down on your shatters (F4 being your concern).

Another suggestion for situational use would be to switch out blink for Signet of Illusions, far reaching manipulations(I) for blade training(IV) and then use blurred inscriptions(VIII) for your master trait in dueling. It’s yet another way to get immediate access to distortion/reflection. It’s versatile since you can do that without re-traiting.

Decent build! 2 cents from me: your 2 sigils on main hand and off hand both have 10 second cool down. Do u think they can be triggered together and triggered more than 1 time in 10 second? Have u test sigil of force with 5 % damage when reflecting? Or you can choose sigil of accuracy with 5% crit chance. For the cooldown sigil I prefer sigil of fire to deal more aoe damage.

I’d also highly recommend Mimic. It’s a 4 second channeled block/reflect every 25 seconds (20 if traited).

I’m sorry, but these two 30s videos are not enough to convince me that power is not a factor in reflection. Anecdotal evidence is no substitute for statistics.

I think the difference in damage of these two videos is due to the fact that the Ranger’s Long Range Shot varies with range. You can see this effect clearly in the “High Power” video. The reflected shots deal way more damage when the bot is shooting at you than when it’s aiming at the warden.

For parts:

@skcamow. I first run a build with masterful reflection, but I felt it didn’t do much job, since mostly it’s only 2s of reflection and it only reflected a maximum of 5-6 projectiles. I mainly use F4 when I’m in the middle of the enemy zerg and there you don’t receive a lot of projectiles. A 0/20/0/30/20 build could also be great.
Your trait changes aren’t quite useful to me due to my play style, but they have sense, bring more survivability and reflection. Just personal preferences. Blink is the skill that I use most, in battle and for traveling. If I don’t have blink is like fighting with 1 sword only xd

@Yuchen. Now that you say about sigils, I’ve just learned that they share CD, so when either of both sigils is activated, the other has also the same cd. With that, I’m thinking changing sigil of generosity, since I already have condition cleaning through Temporal Curtain.
I don’t know how exactly sigil of nullification and reflection works, but see “Awesome WvW reflection damage”. With feedback I receive 6 retaliations, with temporal curtain, 0. And with Chaos storm, 4. I need to test more switching between a a focus with nullification and one without it to see if it’s worth
The problem with fire sigil is that never does critical damage, it only scales with power and can hit up to 5 foes. With this build, where you rely in critical damage, fire sigil won’t do much damage.

@Zumi. I posted Mimic as an optional utility. All depends of play style. I’ve never used it in WvW and I want to test it, but now I have no time.

@Suburban. This two videos shows what I said, and there are 2 reasons.
1- They have the minimum and the maximum power you can reach in PvP. I’ve put those stats in build creator to see how much damage longbow autoattack has and what happens? Lowest autoattack (furthest shot) damage with highest power is even higher than highest damage (closest shot) with lowest power.
2- Only autoattack damage is affected by distance. Videos also show full Rapid fire (skill 2) damage, and if you see them another time, you will see that they do nearly the same final damage, when the high power build has 1388 more power than the other.

This is exciting and different, and I really appreciate how thorough your explanations are.

Thank you for sharing the build!

It does seem that reflect damage calculation has changed. I did the same high/low power switching against the elementalist npc, as well as the harathi sharpshooters in gendarran fields. Power doesn’t seem to make a difference anymore.

Had to test myself to believe it, but it seems you’re right after all.

Made some little changes. See 3rd post.

Hi, is this build still viable (even after the coming patch?)