Guild Wars 2

So just messing around with Prismatic Understanding following the buff. The description, as written, is:

Cloaking skills last 1 second longer and you gain a random boon when you are cloaked (protection, regeneration, or aegis).

Some observations:

- The random buff is applied the moment you go into stealth, and every 3 seconds thereafter. An exactly-3-second stealth like The Prestige, will get the buff twice. Mass Invisibility, at 6 seconds of stealth, will get the buff 3 times with one casting provided the stealth isn’t cancelled.

- The buff-on-stealth currently has no internal cooldown. If you use a second stealth skill while already stealthed, the new stealth effect will overwrite the old one, and they do not stack. Thus, the “every 3-second” buff will not be applied multiple times because you used multiple stealth skills at once, but you will still receive the initial buff-on-stealth for your second stealth, even if you were already stealthed at the time.

- The buff will be one of the following:
1) 4-second Aegis
2) 4-second Protection
3) 4-second Regeneration (triggers Illusionary Membraneif available)

- Works with Desperate Decoy (Dueling-V), as it should.

- Despite it saying “while cloaked”, it works with any stealth effect. It works with both ally-created stealth, be it from ground AoE effects (like Shadow Refuge), regular AoE effects (like Blinding Powder) and ally combos (like smoke/blast). Also works with your combos off of ally smoke fields, i.e. smoke/blast and smoke/leap.

These are excellent observations and ones I immediately went to look at, new builds might come out of merely improving the 30 point traits, they have a ton of work to do on many of them though. Imbued Diversion vs Illusionary Persona for instance. . . needs some work to make Imbued Diversion much better without making it too strong.

So I have been disillusioned with the loss of Illusionary Membrane really wrecking many of the builds I enjoyed running in free tPvP matches (not that we can do those right now anyways) so I decided I would test the new Prismatic Understanding. I played with it a little bit with several of the stealths to get a stronger understanding of how useful the extra protection source could be, and while random it proved to be quite strong, giving protection or aegis was a strong addition to the list and many times even when it gave regeneration it proc’d the protection from Illusionary Membrane.

This gave me a thought, how strong could stealth be in a bunker build. The two ideas seem to oppose each other, and I believe I may have even made that point elsewhere, and yet. . . the survival you gain while being able to just force people to deal with you. There is something to be gained here I feel.

I’m currently messing around with a 0/20/30/10/10 build.

• Picking up Deceptive Evasion, Blade Training, Illusionary Defense, Chaotic Dampening, Prismatic Understanding, Glamour Mastery, and Confusing Cry.
• Running Soldier’s Amulet with Sword/Focus and Staff.
• Utilities are Decoy, Veil, Null Field
• Elite is Mass Invisibility
• Runes of Lyssa
• Sigils of Energy and a your choice

This has yielded a build that can almost always have up the 9% damage reduction, protection whenever I need it with any of the stealth abilities, disruption from Into the Void with Focus, a rooted Phantasm that might be able to be used to deflect projectiles occasionally (almost never happens). Permanent Vigor, Glamours on lower CD for more usages of Veil and Null Field (which also means more Chaos Armors and more Protection).

In sum I’m pretty sure they nerfed the protection from Illusionary Membrane simply because they forsaw a way to get permanent Protection outside of combat with both regeneration and new Prismatic Understanding.

I suggest people try the build and get a feel for the new Prismatic Understanding if you liked a build that can take some damage and have a lot of ways of messing with opponents.

I already play a stealth-heavy build (all four stealth skills + Prismatic Understanding) before this buff, and it’s a very tough build: although not really a “bunker” build because that suggests you could hold a point by yourself, which you couldn’t due to the very mobile playstyle (might just be me, I tend to move all over the place unless I’m trying to pretend to be a Clone) and the fact that you cannot contest a point while stealthed.

Agreed that there’s a lot of survivability to be nabbed with this trait, though damage is a bit of an issue, since there’s no natural synergy with offensive skills, eh? I’m wondering if the real danger here is clever 2-man work with a stealth-oriented D/x thief. Between the 2 ally stealths and an extra burst to key off of smoke clouds, I’m not sure whether it works in practice but on paper it sounds dangerous.

I went with an odd, arguably sub-standard build that gave up Illusionary Persona, but kept Deceptive Evasion. The build is 5/25/30/0/5, with all the on-death clone effects, staff and sword/torch, and a mix of carrion and knights gear. I’m not convinced that it’s especially dangerous, and so it’s probably pretty safe to ignore you in a build like this, unfortunately. I mean… what’s the worst that you could do, right?

It’s too bad, too. I’d be very surprised if Anet ever added stealth skills to mesmers, since that’s really a thief-specific mechanic, but I can imagine a “when emerging from stealth…” trait for mesmers. Maybe a short but big might/damage buff.

I’ll play with it for a while, though, maybe something neat will emerge.

I went the 20-20-30-0-0 route. With boons duration runes (with Beserker set), Signet of Inspiration and Signet of Midnight. Sword/Torch, Sword/Sword.

S/S is fine doing damage and is more viable. S/Torch is weird, iMage is terrible and The Prestige is not offensive enough.

I was using the shattercat before trying this build. I went to do the Arena that I can EASILY SOLO with shatter. I took me so long to do the kill and struggled to stay alive.

It’s good on paper and team play, but lacks of solo and damage.

Okay, so for an update, I shifted traits around a bit for various different things slightly. I tampered with a build devoted more towards retaliation with more points in vitality eschewing DE but it was just standing there taking hits for too long. In the end I chose to run 0/25/30/10/5, picking up confusion on clone death and just rolling around nonstop and swapping weapons popping everything and then stealthing to see where I was at.

The ability to apply damage from confusion while blowing clones up and do basically the same damage as retaliation without having to take the hits is quite good. Everything from the other build stayed the same. Turns out you have enough critical chance to keep vigor almost always up, you hit relatively hard with Blurred Frenzy and other such attacks, you can take a beating then stealth and heal to full. I’m completely sold on this build now, it plays like a bunker quite often but with more escapes. Into the Void being on a 25 sec CD is really really strong right now too, it’s a shorter cooldown gtko ability than a Guardian has, so you can anti bunker with this build. You might not ever be able to win the point, but they won’t either.

The build has so many different options and ways to play. It is primarily all about when to use which cooldown and you will go really far, also the CDR on Staff really lets you keep getting Chaos Armor all the time. Give the build a try guys, see what you think.

IMO a condition build works best with stealth spam, although any build can work well with it: it’s just that conditions are DoTs, and for the Mesmer it also means a very spammable source of Illusion DPS in Staff Clones: this means that you can maintain DPS on the target even while stealthed, plus you can roll out more Clones in stealth without breaking it.

I thought producing clones in stealth broke stealth? Which clones can you still produce while stealthed?

I had thought the same as Xavi, that when you did any skill it broke stealth?

Also, how does Illusionary Membrane work exactly? Does it only occur when the regeneration instance begins or what about if you had Rune of the Doylak? Or for that matter, is Rune of the Doylak constant regeneration like it looks like on the description?

Dodging does not break stealth. With Deceptive Evasion you can conjure Clones this way.

Illusionary Membrane applies Protection when Regeneration is applied, i.e. at the beginning of Regeneration. Runes of the Dolyak provides a negligible HP regen that’s much weaker than the boon, and no it doesn’t count as the boon.

Okay thanks .

Extra notes about casting from stealth:

-The Prestige is different from the other skills in that it’s a channeled stealth that ends with that explosion, so casting/dodging will not only abort the explosion, but will lose you the stealth as well.

- The general rule for stealth is that if you hit an opponent with any effect, you’ll drop out of stealth; If you whiff completely (even if it’s a targeted ability), you’ll stay hidden. So you can expect that Phase Retreat will keep you stealthed, and Phantasmal Warlock will not.

vutak.3186:

- The general rule for stealth is that if you hit an opponent with any effect, you’ll drop out of stealth; If you whiff completely (even if it’s a targeted ability), you’ll stay hidden. So you can expect that Phase Retreat will keep you stealthed, and Phantasmal Warlock will not.

Yes, maybe Phase Retreat will keep you stealthed, but your char starts autoattacking immediately after using Phase Retreat, so I guess that’s how you will break stealth anyway.

Dodge roll on the other hand works great. I use dodge roll almost everytime I stealth, because it’s such a good way to fool your enemy around. Especially combined with the Decoy clone. They kill your decoy clone and it goes poof, then they see another mesmer popping up from stealth and they all think “THAT IS THE REAL ONE!!!” but again … poof

Too bad we can’t dodge roll while using The Prestige.