Guild Wars 2

I play a Shatter Mesmer in WvW and I’m looking at ways to improve my build. Since Mesmers make use of Power and Condition Damage (Winds of Chaos, Bleeds, Confusion) I’m taking another look at the Might Boon. This isn’t a revolutionary approach but I’d like to hear others’ thoughts on it.

• Build is 0/20/0/20/30 for Might on Shatter
  • This may not be optimal (no +Boon Duration from Chaos) but it’s a build I enjoy.

• Runes of Hoelbrak for 20% Might Duration, 150 Power, and -20% Condition Duration
  • -20% Condition Duration helps with low Condition Removal
  • May switch to Runes of Strength when they fix the +5% Damage under Might

• Sigil of Battle on each weapon set
  • Not using Sigil of Strength (or any On Crit Sigil) since a proc before a weapon swap would prevent Battle from procing due to shared cool down

As a conservative estimate I would have about 6 stacks of Might up after my weapon swaps granting +210 Power and Condition Damage. After a round of Shatters I’d temporarily have around 12 stacks of Might.

• Is it worth stacking Might as a Shatter Mesmer in WvW?
• Are there any arguments strongly in favor or against this approach?

p.s.: Sorry if this has been discussed before. Searching for posts containing “might” brings up a lot of threads that aren’t about the boon.

knackyknave.7469:

I play a Shatter Mesmer in WvW and I’m looking at ways to improve my build. Since Mesmers make use of Power and Condition Damage (Winds of Chaos, Bleeds, Confusion) I’m taking another look at the Might Boon. This isn’t a revolutionary approach but I’d like to hear others’ thoughts on it.

• Build is 0/20/0/20/30 for Might on Shatter
  • This may not be optimal (no +Boon Duration from Chaos) but it’s a build I enjoy.

• Runes of Hoelbrak for 20% Might Duration, 150 Power, and -20% Condition Duration
  • -20% Condition Duration helps with low Condition Removal
  • May switch to Runes of Strength when they fix the +5% Damage under Might

• Sigil of Battle on each weapon set
  • Not using Sigil of Strength (or any On Crit Sigil) since a proc before a weapon swap would prevent Battle from procing due to shared cool down

As a conservative estimate I would have about 6 stacks of Might up after my weapon swaps granting +210 Power and Condition Damage. After a round of Shatters I’d temporarily have around 12 stacks of Might.

• Is it worth stacking Might as a Shatter Mesmer in WvW?
• Are there any arguments strongly in favor or against this approach?

p.s.: Sorry if this has been discussed before. Searching for posts containing “might” brings up a lot of threads that aren’t about the boon.

I have ran a similiar set up with Hoelbrak runes. Though I was Condi built.

Your build looks pretty solid to me. With something similiar in a 20/0/20/0/30 build I’d usually have 6-9 stacks in a fight without really trying. The one thing you’re going to miss out on that I did have was teh 20% boon duration from toughness.

It’s pretty hard to keep more than 9 stacks up without having to put alot of thought into it. You can’t go wrong with the sigils of battle though, especially considering how much mesmers weapon swap.

You can also hang out near a couple of staff guardians since they’re going to be cranking out 12 stacks of might each every 20 seconds via Empower. I do that sometimes and it helps a lot. ^^

On-crit sigils and on-weapon swap sigils do not share internal cool downs.

That’s odd. I tested the cool down with Sigil of Battle and Sigil of Strength in the Mists.

I attacked a dummy until Strength procced for one stack of Might. I immediately swapped weapons and did not receive the additional three stacks from Battle.

The wiki Sigil entry has this quote:

All sigils that have a cooldown share the same cooldown timer; while the timer is active, no other sigil with a cooldown can trigger. For example, if you are using a Sigil of Fire (flame burst on critical) and a Sigil of Battle (might stacks on swap), you will have to wait after swapping weapons (Sigil of Battle activated) before the flame burst can trigger on critical.

This is just my case (Strength and Battle) in reverse.

Since I want three stacks of Might on every weapon swap I’m avoiding on-crit Sigils.

knackyknave.7469:

That’s odd. I tested the cool down with Sigil of Battle and Sigil of Strength in the Mists.

I attacked a dummy until Strength procced for one stack of Might. I immediately swapped weapons and did not receive the additional three stacks from Battle.

The wiki Sigil entry has this quote:

All sigils that have a cooldown share the same cooldown timer; while the timer is active, no other sigil with a cooldown can trigger. For example, if you are using a Sigil of Fire (flame burst on critical) and a Sigil of Battle (might stacks on swap), you will have to wait after swapping weapons (Sigil of Battle activated) before the flame burst can trigger on critical.

This is just my case (Strength and Battle) in reverse.

This has also been my understanding as well. If they do stack that’s great but from my information they do not.

Anyone know for sure either way?

Yea I am pretty sure weapon swap sigils internal cooldown will put the on crit on cooldown also.

Well If you wanted to go all out on might stacking going for duration would be better, by boon duration runes or might duration since you can get 60% 100% might duration is easy to get. Then you have the might on dodge food probably would want to run staff for the bounces from WOC i think you can get that to 10 secs of might from WOC also. GS would allow good might stacking to from Mirror blade. I tried this method with shatter I was able to get around 15 stacks of might pretty easily if the fight lasted more than 10 secs.

I run a build giving might, but I use altruism runes. they trigger any time you use the heal skill, and have a 15 second cooldown, so this is perfect with one of your heals, or you can use the mantra heal if you’re doing mantra healing. My default is 0/20/20/20/5 with 5 points to play with.

Altruism gives 3 stacks of aoe might, and gives it to me + vigor. I usually also play a chaos field on me and allies. Then I swap weapons, for sigil of battle, and get 3 more stacks. If winds of chaos is working, with clones, I may have a few extra stacks now, but conservatively thats 6 + fury + chaos storm boons. Then I pop signet of inspiration and now everyone in my party has 9 stacks of might, 6 on a 15 minute cooldown + other boons. The regular heals mean that I can keep up 6 stacks of might in aoe around me indefinitely (3 from sigil of battle, since it has a long duration).

That’s interesting, I’ve always understood that on-weapon swap sigils had a separate timer from on-crit sigils, but I could certainly be mistaken. I’ll have to do some testing on that.

I havent played a lot with this in wvw, but the other thing to keep in mind is you dont get bags for party buffs, and your build has the added bonus of being decent offensively. the other thing to keep in mind when using signet of inspiration is that other classes will be spreading might around too, so passing that along with signet turns 13 stacks of might on you into 25 on your allies…which is the cap. having a build that focuses solely on might will therefore quickly yield dimminishing returns when running with a random group. so it’s good to have multiple roles. for mine it’s healing/reflecting and tanking. for you it’ll probably be shatter aoes.

You know what would be nice? If the devs put up a webpage that showed how all the sigil cooldowns interacted with each other instead of the players having to do all this ridiculous testing to find out. I can understand them hiding jumping puzzles for the allure and excitement of discovery but this is a convoluted mess that gets in the way of optimization.

Crossplay.2067:

You know what would be nice? If the devs put up a webpage that showed how all the sigil cooldowns interacted with each other instead of the players having to do all this ridiculous testing to find out. I can understand them hiding jumping puzzles for the allure and excitement of discovery but this is a convoluted mess that gets in the way of optimization.

I agree – though I think certain games can get away with obscuring game mechanics behind vague descriptive language. GW2’s tooltips are specific enough that one may think they understand what is happening, but then it turns out it doesn’t work that way.

I am doing something like this myself, using staff/sw+focus battle/bloodlust sigils and 3xHoelbrak and 3xFire runes and the might on dodge food. 0/20/20/0/30 traits to give a total of 60% Might duration. Rampager armour/weapons and ’zerker trinks for that glass cannon look (my other 80 is a condition necro so I wanted something very different to play from that).

Seems to work ok although if I switch sw+focus for a GS then Mirror Blade really gives a major boost to it especially as I take Illusionary Elasticity. I just can’t stand the lack of swiftness getting around the map though so I don’t use that very often.

As I suck at playing this game though it’s hard to tell whether it’s good or not though