Aight guys, I’m a long time player and reader of the forums (both since BWE 1), but rarely a poster. Thought I would do some more videos cos it’s fun.
Just as a preface to this I’m going to go ahead and say: Conditions are overpowered.
At least in WvW small scale anyway. Condi builds are king. The strongest few builds in the entire game for roaming are condi (what I always have most trouble with on any class in a 1v1 anyway). Mesmer, Warrior, Thief, Ranger, hell even Ele these days. Necro and Engie do condi a bit more balanced in my opinion, probably because they were originally created with it in mind.
Tankiness and massive dps at the same time while barely sacrificing any utility is powerful. Not only that, but condi application is WAY more than the removal 1 or 2 people have.
Now I think that the food has a lot to do with it. +40% and -40% foods are crazy powerful for their cost and in my opinion WvW would be better if ArenaNet scrapped foods altogether (don’t kill me).
Anyway….. before this turns into a condi rant post (it already has) – I usually run zerk shatter or some kind of burst, just because it’s more fun to play. But frankly I was sick of having good 1vX fights and then being practically 1 shot by a ranger or thief I didn’t even see (you all know what I’m talking about). This happens all the time. So I decided to go tanky for a bit to get some longer (and more outnumbered) fights. But how do you go tanky AND do damage? …..Condi.
Ok, so the bit about Deceptive Evasion. GREAT trait obviously, but we are all being held back creating builds if we require 4 points in Dueling. Take those 2 points out and you can have 2 GM’s in other lines. So as I’m condi I went PU & MtD. Actually works pretty well, even though the best trait hands down to synergise with shatter builds is DE.
With some better clone awareness and OP-ness of condi’s it’s a fun and strong build to play. As zerk shatter and IP I would deffo still take DE just because 1 dodge and f4 is 2 secs of invulnerability with is amazing and life saving.
I know Mesmers are probably overall in one of the worst positions in the entire game, but for roaming I think this (or variations of this) may be the most OP build still even with the PU ‘nerf’.
With the standard 4/4/6 staff/scepter/torch build I personally think is slightly more powerful, but I get bored very quickly playing that though. It’s a much more passive play style and I prefer action packed fights to be honest. So, adding shatter means much more active play style – trying to avoid damage, manage illusions with skills only, and shatter while keeping pressure on the opponents all at the same time is pretty fun. Having both the staff traited and Illusionists Celerity is great for clone production by putting Phase Retreat on a 6 second cooldown, also gives awesome in-fight mobility and in combination with stealth means you can pretty much escape angry zergs (this happens a lot). Anyway, see what you think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-rG-aDb7Gg
Heres the build:
Pretty standard stuff, definitely not optimized for anything really. Could do more damage, but it’s unnecessary. Went for Speed runes cos at the time I had just bought some Traveler for my zerk set and didn’t want spend that much again. Traveler would almost certainly synergise better with the boon and condi duration, but the extra vitality from Speed is nice enough.
Also, as an aside – youtube really butchered my video quality. Was really nice before hand. I guess it’s their re-sampler. It did take about 36 hours to ‘process’ and sat at 360p for that time before upgrading to 1080p60fps. Still, the quality sucks now especially in the high motion areas where it goes blurry. Anyone know any tricks? I’ve definitely seen much higher quality videos.