It’s likely many of these have been listed before, but they are all little things that are helpful for me. Some of them only apply to the weapons / traits in this build ( http://bit.ly/14SIa7E ) but most of them are generally applicable
- You don’t enter into battle until your phantasm engages. So if you lead off with something like duelist or zerker and then swap weapons before they attack, you can cast the other phantasm and be able to swap off that second weapon set immediately if you want.
- On the flip side, if you use sigils of battle (or other on-weapon-swap sigils), you can jump off a ledge or a hill and immediately swap (anything that gets you a little damage). This will put you in battle, so you will trigger the weapon swap cooldown. But the might stacks from on-swap last a long time (especially with 45% boon duration). The sigils of battle are very nice because the might applies to the phantasms unlike things like sigil of perception where the crit chance only applies to you.
- If you cast null field, duelist (with the duelist discipline trait) and scepter 3, you should end up with 13 stacks of confusion on your target in a few seconds. This build doesn’t have much condition damage, but it’s a nice way to stack confusion quickly.
- Duelist with the trait (and mirror blade and magic bullet) can remove conditions shooting through veil.
- The easiest way I find got get might from bountiful interruption in wvw is the healing “tell” from guards when taking camps or sentry points (they raise their arm straight up in the air). Generally, starting with duelist, zerker, and mirror blade plus a couple of auto-attacks (or the #3 skill from either GS or scepter) will typically put a guard at a point where they need a heal. (So you want to be in range and have illusionary wave or magic bullet ready)
- When using stealth and planning on continuing to fight, it seems like running behind the opponent is almost always the best choice.
- You do not need to face opponents to cast phantasms (at least this seems to be true for me in most cases)
- When you have ranged auto-attacks like GS and Scepter, as soon as you see blindness on yourself, immediately trigger your auto-attack to clear the blindness. Casting a phantasm with blindness on you really hurts.
- The phantasms benefit from getting might stacks on you. So when casting mirror blade, it’s helpful to step in to get the bounce to hit you. I find if I cast berserker and then cast mirror blade as I’m moving in, I typically get the bounce to hit me versus the zerker. (Then I typically back up if I’m staying with GS so that the auto-attack stays at higher damage)
Hope there was something helpful for you there!