Guild Wars 2

This was suppose to be a non-judgmental discussion of what people actually use. I assume Colesy has a reason for wanted to know. Can we stay on topic? Make a new thread to argue efficiency / optimal whatever.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

200 power is not worth 9% damage. It is at best worth 6% or so. 25 in Illusions is way more useful than 20 in Zeal or whatever that first trait line was called. By dropping the 20 in Zeal and the last 5 in Inspirations, you lose:

1) 15% illusion damage
2) Approximately 6% damage from power
3) One Inspiration trait and one Zeal trait, both of questionable value

Your phantasms will deal less per hit as a result since they are losing about 20% damage, but your own DPS increase will offset that. Moreover, since in practice you will get more phantasms up faster, and they will attack at a faster rate, your phantasms’ overall DPS will increase, especially if they are getting killed by boss AOEs.

Honestly, wrong or correct aside, sometimes I get the impression that Guanglai Kangyi has no level 80 mesmer or any experience in playing him.
All that auto attack talk from the mists and stuff is nice, but it feels too artificial.
So, do you have a level 80 mesmer? (Pics or it didn’t happen…) ^^

TooBz.3065:

No. This is completely wrong. Whether or not something else is optimal, I’m use to my WvW build. I’m in WvW 70+% of the time. My build affects how I play at a fundamental muscle memory level.

On a side point. I think you may have better success if you rephrase your point. For example, if you tell me to do something I instinctively say no. On the other hand, if you had said.

People were saying that are lazy and ont care about others. i actually can buy your memory thing, but that is not what they have said.
As you can notice im not english so sorry if what i wrote sounded rude
ah and come on. we both know that make people wait 39 secs to retrait to an optimal build (optimal meaning that party will get the best of you) will save them time.

U r right tho. this is getting offtopic. sorry colesy

I bring all weapons to the dungeon and change my traits, weapons, armor and utilities constantly, according to what the situation needs.

Weapons:
- berserker sword, focus and greatsword with sigils of perception,
- berserker sword, focus, greatsword and pistol with sigils of the night,
- berserker sword, greatsword and staff with sigils of fire,
- berserker greatsword with sigil of nullification,
- berserker focus and pistol with sigil of accuracy,
- rampager scepter with sigil of malice,
- soldiers torch with sigil of energy.

1. I always take a dungeon potion for every dungeon/fractal and take power/precision food.
2. I bring two sets of armor: one berserker with scholar runes and one berserker with centaur runes for running through trash. Also it gives me the opportunity to switch if my armor is broken and repairing is inconvenient.
3. I often start with a sword, focus and greatsword with sigil of perception. This gets me to 25 stacks pretty fast.
4. After 25 stacks I switch to sword with sigil of the night for night dungeons/instances (or fire for day dungeons), focus with sigil of accuracy and greatsword with sigil of the night (or fire).
5. For stacking to pull mobs, I use sword/focus and staff (start of with chaos storm/chaos armor and then switch to sword/focus, shatter). Feedback when there are a lot of projectiles involved; and I mostly try to get down a focus 4 in the middle as an extra reflect or as a light field for combo’s.
6. For other mobs, I try to focus pull them to a wall or corner when that is useful and nail them down with sword 3.
7. For bosses it depends on the boss; some I melee (with sword/focus and scepter/pistol), some I alternate melee with ranged (with sword/focus and greatsword), some I only take ranged with scepter/pistol and staff or greatsword (the ones that move a lot around or do tons of damage). Especially when I have 25 stacks of 10 precision built up, I try not to go down and lose them. In a party with a lot of condition professions, I might choose staff instead of greatsword against a boss.
8. For running through trash, I slot a torch, blink/ veil, decoy, mirror images (+ f4 and illusionary persona gives 4 seconds of distortion). I give party speed with my focus 4 or runes of centaur. Sometimes mass invisibility if that is helpful and there is no thief.
9. For killing graveling burrows, I use focus, sword (blurred frenzy), greatsword and mindwrack.
10. I run a 20/0/0/20/30 full berserker phantasm/shatter build on armor, weapons and trinkets (except for one or two soldier trinkets). I start with phantasms, shatter when my phantasms are almost off cool down (which is pretty fast with illusionists celerity) and replace them with new phantasms.
11. I switch my traits and utility skills according to what the situation needs. For instance party composition: if the party does not seem to stack much vulnerability, I switch to rending shatter. If the party stacks a lot of might, I slot signet of inspiration. If party members prove to be a bit squishy, or with bosses that do lots of damage, I slot phantasmal defender and signet of illusions. For bosses with a lot of boons, I choose shattered concentration and arcane thievery and try to melee them with sword when I can (I have found phantasmal disenchanter and null field not working too well in those cases).
12. I provide reflects when needed with traited focus and glamour mastery + feedback. When reflects are not needed I will take mender’s purity.

… continued…
I used to run a 20/20/0/30/0 build, but I find the new 20/0/0/20/30 build more useful and adaptable. It gives more survivability in case of running through trash mobs, through illusionary persona. And it’s a lot of fun to play, it can do tons of damage. An encounter with mobs or a boss usually ends with my mindwrack.

Come to think of it, the perception trait line does not have such good traits in comparison with the illusion trait line. Bleeding from illusions probably is not necessary in a berserker build; and a boss usually has reached its bleed cap from other party members. The clone on dodge you can replace by mirror images so you can use it situational instead of override phantasms. Critical infusion seldom has a use and if it does, you can probably better get vigourous revelation and also give vigor to your allies. Phantasmal haste is probably better than phantasms having fury.

I also have tried a mantra build (20/30/0/20/0), which can do a lot of damage with four charged mantra’s, but has not a great deal of survivability and is not fun to play.

And I tried sword/sword and sword/pistol, because of the recent stigma that has been put on greatsword mesmers, but I found that my survivability with that build was pretty low. In Orr, I can roam easily by myself with sword/focus and greatsword, but I kept dying with sword/sword and sword/pistol. The same was true for dungeons and in between and during dying I did not do a lot of damage, just a lot of frantic dodging…

90% of the time sw/sw + sw/p.

Several bosses, I’ll swap to focus for either the pull on an event + warden, or if reflects are needed / speed running past arah trash.

Use GS on Ashym sub 50% and yeah that’s about it.

Since people are posting their wvw/tpvp choices, might as well chime in on that. sw/torch sw/pistol. Staff is no longer ideal in the current meta with people not standing in bad / warlocks damage nulled the majority of the time. GS as usual has one decent phantasm that is by far the easiest cast a mesmer has to see and dodge outside of casting a mantra.

Roaming? the sw/p sw/t option can provide more confusion faster than most any setup. Infinitely more escape options, and superior damage on zerg stealth bombing than channeling GS.

Reasons for all weapon choices are for maximizing my support and cc while still maintaining the highest dps weapons.

TooBz.3065:

This was suppose to be a non-judgmental discussion of what people actually use. I assume Colesy has a reason for wanted to know. Can we stay on topic? Make a new thread to argue efficiency / optimal whatever.

But the judgement thread mysteriously disappeared =/. It’s left a vacuum of internet awesomeness that some ppl need to fill. It also deleted my numbers and tests =(

On topic. I basically run sword/sword/focus the vast majority of the time. I actually have 5 swords that I would use depending on the situation but bolt/zap has made me lazy. I also have 1-2 of each other weapon that I will use for specific occasions. (I am tempted to make a human mesmers just to use bonetti’s rapier) Pistol and focus are sorta interchangeable.

Scepter for example with Sc/Sw/Sw for pug mossman groups where somehow the glass mesmer always gets aggro. It’s really not as bad kitten many ppl make it out to be.

20/20/0/0/30 or 0/20/0/25/25 depending on what I feel like.

I have a question that is on topic sorta.

Idk if its my guild or not but I get hammered at if I do not bring a focus with the reflection trait. I love switching my traits and weapons all the time on my mesmer because I get bored but I stopped playing my mesmer in dungeon play because I was locked into the build.

Some dungeons I can see needing it maybe, but I’m talking about ALL dungeons. Is this really necessary lol?

Alyssa.7254:

I have a question that is on topic sorta.

Idk if its my guild or not but I get hammered at if I do not bring a focus with the reflection trait. I love switching my traits and weapons all the time on my mesmer because I get bored but I stopped playing my mesmer in dungeon play because I was locked into the build.

Some dungeons I can see needing it maybe, but I’m talking about ALL dungeons. Is this really necessary lol?

Well, if you don’t go at least 25 points into inspiration, you don’t have a very good phantasm build, and since the focus trait is only 20 points in, that’s pretty much always going to be an option to take.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

200 power is not worth 9% damage. It is at best worth 6% or so.

Or so? Dude you can just calculate it. I run a maximal power set and without traits i got 2150 Power. If you use rubies you probably gonna go even less. 200 power is worth 9.3% in my case. If I’ve charged bloodlust it would be just 8.5%.

If I have 25 stacks bloodlust, I just need another 28 stacks of might – then 200 power would be worth 6% damage … but … 28 stacks of might … ya know.

Xyonon.3987:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

200 power is not worth 9% damage. It is at best worth 6% or so.

Or so? Dude you can just calculate it. I run a maximal power set and without traits i got 2150 Power. If you use rubies you probably gonna go even less. 200 power is worth 9.3% in my case. If I’ve charged bloodlust it would be just 8.5%.

If I have 25 stacks bloodlust, I just need another 28 stacks of might – then 200 power would be worth 6% damage … but … 28 stacks of might … ya know.

Might, Banner of Strength, Empower Allies, plus full zerk gives you over 3k power. Adding 200 to that is a marginal increase of approximately 6%.

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

TooBz.3065:

This was suppose to be a non-judgmental discussion of what people actually use. I assume Colesy has a reason for wanted to know. Can we stay on topic? Make a new thread to argue efficiency / optimal whatever.

But the judgement thread mysteriously disappeared =/. It’s left a vacuum of internet awesomeness that some ppl need to fill. It also deleted my numbers and tests =(

On topic. I basically run sword/sword/focus the vast majority of the time. I actually have 5 swords that I would use depending on the situation but bolt/zap has made me lazy. I also have 1-2 of each other weapon that I will use for specific occasions. (I am tempted to make a human mesmers just to use bonetti’s rapier) Pistol and focus are sorta interchangeable.

Scepter for example with Sc/Sw/Sw for pug mossman groups where somehow the glass mesmer always gets aggro. It’s really not as bad kitten many ppl make it out to be.

20/20/0/0/30 or 0/20/0/25/25 depending on what I feel like.

The whiners reported it. Not that it really matters since the point was made, GS is bad but people still insist on running it regardless.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

The whiners reported it. Not that it really matters since the point was made, GS is bad but people still insist on running it regardless.

actually there were at least 20 points in favor of GS.
VS just “you are bad if you use it…” and dps untraited against a immobile target….that are not much of a point but any reason in favor of GS was dismissed by “you are bad……” whoever posted it.

But the point is:

Some people is so obsessed with performance and then enters a dungeon with a single weaponset?
Choosing weapons/skills Is like retraiting for WWW.
Switch them costantly and try them.

For sure if you don t run only cof1 and coe with your fixed speedgroup i would take a GS. (and even in coe/cof i switch to GS in some situations).

And i think that mods, deleted topic on their own….unfortunately because i was writing a nice post….that was deleted in the process.

Reading the above post, I forgot to mention something important:
I do carry a Focus, a Pistol and an OH Sword. I used to also carry a Greatsword but noticed that in dungeons I never really used it much, so nowadays I carry an extra stack of maintenance oils instead.

And I swap weapons and traits within my 20/20/30/0/0 as much as possible.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Xyonon.3987:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

200 power is not worth 9% damage. It is at best worth 6% or so.

Or so? Dude you can just calculate it. I run a maximal power set and without traits i got 2150 Power. If you use rubies you probably gonna go even less. 200 power is worth 9.3% in my case. If I’ve charged bloodlust it would be just 8.5%.

If I have 25 stacks bloodlust, I just need another 28 stacks of might – then 200 power would be worth 6% damage … but … 28 stacks of might … ya know.

Might, Banner of Strength, Empower Allies, plus full zerk gives you over 3k power. Adding 200 to that is a marginal increase of approximately 6%.

Might is calculated, Banner does give 170 (?) power wich is equal to additional 5 stacks of might. GASP You repeated exactly what I wrote! WOW
btw. full zerk does definitly not give you over 3k power :P

I have a question that is on topic sorta.

Idk if its my guild or not but I get hammered at if I do not bring a focus with the reflection trait. I love switching my traits and weapons all the time on my mesmer because I get bored but I stopped playing my mesmer in dungeon play because I was locked into the build.

Some dungeons I can see needing it maybe, but I’m talking about ALL dungeons. Is this really necessary lol?

It’s not necessary for all dungeons, no. For the dungeons it is necessary, it’s not necessary for all of the encounters either.

btw. full zerk does definitly not give you over 3k power :P

I’m pretty sure he said “might, banner of strength, empower allies, plus full zerk gives you over 3k power”.

—

I’m pretty disappointed Guang’s thread got deleted too, it actually had some useful posts in there plus DeathPanel’s comedy gold towards the end.

Xyonon.3987:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Might, Banner of Strength, Empower Allies, plus full zerk gives you over 3k power. Adding 200 to that is a marginal increase of approximately 6%.

btw. full zerk does definitly not give you over 3k power :P

Without traits in domination magic and no power food this gives around 3300 power. It is ~6%.

haviz.1340:

Xyonon.3987:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Might, Banner of Strength, Empower Allies, plus full zerk gives you over 3k power. Adding 200 to that is a marginal increase of approximately 6%.

btw. full zerk does definitly not give you over 3k power :P

Without traits in domination magic and no power food this gives around 3300 power. It is ~6%.

Oh god, I read wrong :O Tought he wanna tell me just the zerk equp will grant 3k by itself xD – With everything you’ll get those 6% y. But seriously, when do you have all these buffs up at the same time? Even in dungeons it happens rarely.

Xyonon.3987:

But seriously, when do you have all these buffs up at the same time? Even in dungeons it happens rarely.

If you’re using new lfg tool I have to concur.

Pretty much just get in to a group that doesn’t suck and you’ll easily have those buffs. If you’re a warrior you can provide them all single-handedly.

We are seriously talking about that 0%-9% damage depending on Illusions is better than 6%-10% depending on buffs? I can even go for crit-bufffood or precision stacks instead of bloodlust for even greater results (wich I am probably gonna do after this discussion thx). This may be another reason for assassin set?

And yes, sad but true about the groups… I have noone anymore to play with ingame, since my guild “died to scarlet”. I just have one other member and all the others are randoms. It would be nice to have parties with great communication again I’m envious of you(

I use every weapon except Scepter and Torch in a 20/20/10/20/0 build. This gives me access to almost all of the reduced cooldown traits for weapons/utilities, so I can amend my build on the fly situationally. Keeps things fresh and interesting.

colesy.8490:

For the record, this isn’t me just creating a platform to judge everyone

in the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar…“it’s a trap!”

Helios.3598:

colesy.8490:

For the record, this isn’t me just creating a platform to judge everyone

in the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar…“it’s a trap!”

Obviously considering colesy is known for trolling Mesmer forums and hating on certain weapon types with no substance behind his arguments. This whole thread is a giant flame bait.

DeathPanel.8362:

Helios.3598:

colesy.8490:

For the record, this isn’t me just creating a platform to judge everyone

in the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar…“it’s a trap!”

Obviously considering colesy is known for trolling Mesmer forums and hating on certain weapon types with no substance behind his arguments. This whole thread is a giant flame bait.

Though you have to give credit where credit is due. I actually think he didn’t troll at all in this thread.

Pyroatheist.9031:

DeathPanel.8362:

Helios.3598:

colesy.8490:

For the record, this isn’t me just creating a platform to judge everyone

in the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar…“it’s a trap!”

Obviously considering colesy is known for trolling Mesmer forums and hating on certain weapon types with no substance behind his arguments. This whole thread is a giant flame bait.

Though you have to give credit where credit is due. I actually think he didn’t troll at all in this thread.

Give him time. I estimate it’ll happen a few posts after anyone mentions how much they hate the GS or love it.

DeathPanel.8362:

Helios.3598:

colesy.8490:

For the record, this isn’t me just creating a platform to judge everyone

in the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar…“it’s a trap!”

Obviously considering colesy is known for trolling Mesmer forums and hating on certain weapon types with no substance behind his arguments. This whole thread is a giant flame bait.

I’d say any hate for GS is plenty substantiated. Whether it’d be appropriate in this particular thread when he’s already said he’s not trying to judge anyone is a totally separate issue.

I don’t troll.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

DeathPanel.8362:

Helios.3598:

colesy.8490:

For the record, this isn’t me just creating a platform to judge everyone

in the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar…“it’s a trap!”

Obviously considering colesy is known for trolling Mesmer forums and hating on certain weapon types with no substance behind his arguments. This whole thread is a giant flame bait.

I’d say any hate for GS is plenty substantiated. Whether it’d be appropriate in this particular thread when he’s already said he’s not trying to judge anyone is a totally separate issue.

Sorry but that’s not convincing coming from you, the guy who’s on a crusade against the GS.

I recall you created a whole flamebait thread hating on the GS before that died/was closed by mods.

The GS has it’s own role as a secondary weapon, and regardless of how you hate on it the facts won’t change.

“You’re a troll” said from the guy adding “Learn to play” to his posts while talking with the top dungeon experts and theorycrafters on this forum isn’t really meaningful tbh.

Sword/Focus is always equipped when in dungeons. Secondary may change to Staff or GS depending on the situation though. But mostly GS for DPS.

Dungeons is basically DPS. So..

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Sword/Focus is always equipped when in dungeons. Secondary may change to Staff or GS depending on the situation though. But mostly GS for DPS.

Dungeons is basically DPS. So..

Uh Oh… you shouldn’t have said that. GS haters incoming.

DeathPanel, if you’re just going to bait people and add nothing constructive, could you just leave my thread?