Guild Wars 2

So I’ve been playing around with a Prismatic Understanding build that focuses on direct damage instead of conditions, and am looking for some feedback. After playing a variant of Blackwater for a while (which is great), I was looking for something different, and thus have been using this, and having some success. Video forthcoming if I can get fraps working. But I’d love any thoughts or feedback.

Build is 30/10/30/0/0 with Greatsword & Sword/Torch. It draws on blackwater and the hidden fire builds, but is dps focusd instead of condition. Right now I’m using knights gear with cavalier trinkets, but I may add some zerker in as I get better at it. Runes of the Traveler are key as well for WvW (though I’ve using runes of hoelbrak instead in PvP).

Traits are Domination 30 (15% phantasm damage, torch skill, greatsword skill); Dueling 10 (sword skill); Chaos 30 (Master of Manipulation, Illusionary Defense, Prismatic Understanding)

Slot skills: Decoy, Arcane Thievery, Blink, Mass Invis.

This is basically a Phantasm/dps build that relies on iZerker, blurred frenzy, retaliation, and the occasional shatter. But it has excellent speed (Runes of the Traveler), mobility (traited blink, illusionary leap), cc (lots of cripple and some immobilize and interrupt), high toughness, and active defense (invis). And it has great condi removal as well (traited torch and traited arcane thievery), plus good boon and condi duration (good for long cripples)

The key is getting up your phantasms and then wearing down with other skills and using invis in between. iZerker and BF allow for some AOE, and iMage is not completely unuseful in applying retal. The rest of the torch condis are mostly to add cover conditions for the cripple and immobilize. The other nice thing about the weapons and runes is that they allow you to chase fleeing opponents. While you have no access to swiftness, you have the +25% run speed from travelers, combined with good access to cripple and immobilize.

The weaknesses are a low health pool and lack of burst. I like running Mango Pie to try to mitigate the first problem, but the lack of real burst is somewhat problematic. I only make up for this with the ability to chase and wear down, but some more burst would be nice. Maybe if was good enough to run full zerker…

Anyway, I’m going to continue to play and work on this, but I’d love any advice or feedback. And I will try to post a video soon as well.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNAR8flwzKqXTTmGb9IhpH9m4An0DV/6UXqAvB-jECBYLCyEEQkIBOBqIaslhFRjVvATdiIq2noIa1yAYuFA-w

I’ve been playing a direct damage build that’s similar in style

http://bit.ly/14SIa7E

I like offhand pistol so much that I just can’t take torch. I don’t have quite the condition removal that you have (you can use veil to remove conditions, but it’s tricky). The pistol is just so nice for burst damage, and magic bullet is great for stopping runners (and the interrupts help with the might stacking)

I play this build primarily in WvW. I sometimes will lose a 1v1, but I feel like I can win any 1v1 fight. The travelers runes really help.

Good luck with your experiment. I may talk myself out of the pistol someday – and then I’ll try your build.

Yeah, I would have liked to make it work with pistol, but I figured that I might as well try to maximize prismatic understanding. Travelers + sword clone work fine stopping runners, but there’s nothing close to the dps of iduelist.

Impressed too that you’re able to not take blink. I’m so used to it that if I don’t take it I find myself hitting that skill key by accident and blowing the other utlity.

I have no doubt that Blink would be very helpful. Because my build is meant to fight from range, I often have to run to get the stomp in – and I’m not particularly great at that.

But since I never kept Blink on my bar long enough to get good with it, I don’t miss it. Now, losing Decoy would be really hard to handle…

Duelist is so helpful when dealing with thieves, and you can do fun things like put a null field around it and stack confusion quickly (especially if you use scepter at the same time). The build is designed for direct damage, but there’s no harm in making the opponent sweat about 13 stacks of confusion.

I fought someone with torch and a PU build tonight. Definitely was a lot of stealth to deal with, but I wasn’t very worried about the phantasms.

eldenbri.1059:

I fought someone with torch and a PU build tonight. Definitely was a lot of stealth to deal with, but I wasn’t very worried about the phantasms.

Yeah, the iMage is kind of the weak point, dps coming mostly from iZerker.

Having played condition for a while and now going back to direct damage, I’m reminded how much the current meta does favor condi builds. Everyone runs near-max toughness, and so unless I’m playing full zerker, it’s really hard to do lots of direct damage. Is this going to change, and/or will anet move away from the condition meta?

Anyway, anyone else a having success with PU + direct damage build? Looking for ideas.

Funny, I was considering posting this anyway, but I haven’t played it enough to really be sure about it. So far though, I love it in sPvP and I really dig the stats, and of course the play-style differences to the usual PU/Condie builds. This is a PU Shatter build!

Let’s call it…[drumroll]: The Darkmatter Mesmer build!

(Invisible and highly explosive!)

It’s essentially the same 20/20/30/0/0 build as Osicats PU/Condie (or Blackwater), but swapping some traits and of course gear and weapons, etc. I tried it with staff and the associated trait too, worked nice as well, but I really liked it even more with the GS.

http://tinyurl.com/mbhn4ud

I really love the Crit Chance & Crit Damage, considering that you’re not a pure GC/Shatter build. With PU, a bit of toughness, and lots of stealth, you come out a LOT less squishy then a pure GC/Shatter.

It has condie removal as a bonus from traited Torch, and that’s why I stick to Torch for this rather then a more DPS oriented offhand. (Plus The Prestige is a nice additional AE burst, and a lovely opening move on people…not to mention another getaway card in many cases.)

Ever since I saw Sensotix use the Divinity Runes in one of his videos, I’ve had a hard time giving these up in some of my recent burst builds. It’s so easy to overlook the crit damage on those, and for this build they just fit really well IMO. I can often dish out 4-6k MW shatters, 3+k BFrenzy, plus The Prestige, plus Flame Blast, then disappear into the shadows and leave behind a “friend” to play with while I attack from range.

After playing with Staff a bit, I found that I really needed to be able to CC/catch runners a bit better, and ranged damage too was a bit lacking (too slow) with Staff.

I’ve had great fun with this so far. As compared to a PU/Condie build, the AE direct damage is just nice to have for a change. I’m still quite strong in 1v1 with this, but can also jump into the middle of a group, unleash thousands of AE damage, and then pop back out to safety and attack from range for a bit. Needless to say, that helps a lot with getting higher scores in sPvP.

@windwalker Yeah, after playing condition for a while I’m finding it very fun to jump back into DPS, and to pick up the greatword and sword again.

I have noticed that I need to go as glassy as possible in order to win against multiple opponents and burst them down. Everyone runs with so much toughness these days that you need a pretty high crit damage to play direct damage effectively. Fortunately, all the stealth gives us so much survivability. Now if only there was access to swiftness…

Yes, this is very true. I have found that DPS stealth Mesmers are more dangerous now then ever. If I even mess up one second and they get to stun me, I lose around 50% of my health. Very dangerous build to go up against.

Swiftness is not that great in my opinion just because you aren’t gonna need it alot. Only maybe if you want to have a run away option or you want to kite faster. Your choice Bunda.

Windwalker.7421:

Funny, I was considering posting this anyway, but I haven’t played it enough to really be sure about it. So far though, I love it in sPvP and I really dig the stats, and of course the play-style differences to the usual PU/Condie builds. This is a PU Shatter build!

Let’s call it…[drumroll]: The Darkmatter Mesmer build!

(Invisible and highly explosive!)

It’s essentially the same 20/20/30/0/0 build as Osicats PU/Condie (or Blackwater), but swapping some traits and of course gear and weapons, etc. I tried it with staff and the associated trait too, worked nice as well, but I really liked it even more with the GS.

http://tinyurl.com/mbhn4ud

I really love the Crit Chance & Crit Damage, considering that you’re not a pure GC/Shatter build. With PU, a bit of toughness, and lots of stealth, you come out a LOT less squishy then a pure GC/Shatter.

It has condie removal as a bonus from traited Torch, and that’s why I stick to Torch for this rather then a more DPS oriented offhand. (Plus The Prestige is a nice additional AE burst, and a lovely opening move on people…not to mention another getaway card in many cases.)

Ever since I saw Sensotix use the Divinity Runes in one of his videos, I’ve had a hard time giving these up in some of my recent burst builds. It’s so easy to overlook the crit damage on those, and for this build they just fit really well IMO. I can often dish out 4-6k MW shatters, 3+k BFrenzy, plus The Prestige, plus Flame Blast, then disappear into the shadows and leave behind a “friend” to play with while I attack from range.

After playing with Staff a bit, I found that I really needed to be able to CC/catch runners a bit better, and ranged damage too was a bit lacking (too slow) with Staff.

I’ve had great fun with this so far. As compared to a PU/Condie build, the AE direct damage is just nice to have for a change. I’m still quite strong in 1v1 with this, but can also jump into the middle of a group, unleash thousands of AE damage, and then pop back out to safety and attack from range for a bit. Needless to say, that helps a lot with getting higher scores in sPvP.

I’m trying out mesmer for the first time. I have to admit your build does sound something i may be interested in. Unfortunately, the link you left does not work for me. Could you possibly send a new one or perhaps add me in game ?

Sorry about that, here is the long link:

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNAsfRlwzaqXUTmGb9IipHBnvBckU0avWJF42FC-TsAg0CnIqRVjrGTNyas1MsY9xkAA

I’m still playing this and having a blast.

I agree with you Bunda, especially in sPvP where you don’t have as such gear options, it’s hard to make the old toughness/shatter or toughness/Phantasms build work IMO. (The latter works OK thanks to the perma-Fury trait for Phants, but still isn’t as strong as it used to be.)

I played the PU/Condie build for a long time (considering how long I tend to play a single build) and it is excellent, overall it may even be more effective then this build, but it’s not as much fun either. It’s a very single-target and “whittle them down” kinda build, unless you land Torment on a newb who runs around with it ticking away like mad w/o cleansing it.

This PU/Shatter build is much more bursty “in your face(s)”. It’s definitely a GC build when you get locked down with everything on CD, but as you said, thanks to PU you have a ton more survivability then any other Mesmer GC/Burst build (IMO.)

I haven’t changed anything about the build either. I’m really liking it the way it is. It’s very Mesmery/slippery/annoying to face, and more team friendly then the PU/Condie build as you can lay some AE smack down, especially in ongoing fights over points.

Lastly, for Swiftness, I’ve become a huge proponent of swapping in the Focus when out of combat. I refuse to compromise on other parts of the build only to have swiftness. Before all the nerfs came raining down I always used Centaurs, but now I feel we face some pretty major difficulties making a competitive build, and there is simply no room for trade-offs.

For purely team play the Focus can still be an excellent weapon no doubt, but overall the Warden is flawed due to it’s stationary nature, and really needs traits to be decent, traits that no longer fit into any decent build IMO. Plus the Swiftness it provides really doesn’t last long enough, out of combat at least, considering that you’re putting “Into the Void” on CD just to run a little faster. That’s like running around with The Prestige, Magic Bullet, or Illusionary Riposte frequently down just to run fast for ~12s.)

Once you swap in Torch for a few days it becomes pretty second nature.

shatter heavy build without illusion-points? No, thanks.

I would go 0/20/30/0/20, if i want to stealth shatter, but hey, thats me.

Shatter build with no points in Illusions is fine and viable. However I would suggest swapping out Cleansing Conflagration for Shattered Concentration which removes boons on shatter. This is way more group centric.