Guild Wars 2

nekretaal.6485:

Mesmers were 100-0 killing players by hitting 2, F1, 3. Less than 2sec cast, less than 10s recharge. (they also had stealth and instant stuns to set the kill up)

No thanks, that was broken.

Getting rid of stunlock spam via Confounding Suggestions (which nobody really asked for in the first place, btw) would have fixed that pretty well.

Also, even before the Mantra Shatter nerf, several tankier builds had come back into the metagame as people figured out how to build them again.

It goes back to why people took Halting Strike (the damage part of PB) over Mental Torment (+20% Mind Wrack damage) pre-patch: it’s a way to diversify your damage a bit.

Power Block makes Diversion a damaging ability. It also makes both of double-ranged shatter’s #5 skills do big damage.

Hitting an interrupt can be tricky, but quite often the best time to shatter is in response to an enemy’s attempted burst. At which point they’re rapidly spamming skills trying to hit you as hard and fast as possible. I’ve had a ton of luck with Power Block in that situation.

Oooh, a necro thread.

Using “metagame” (often “the metagame”) to refer to the strategic landscape of a competitive game is pretty standard. This is established usage across a range of different game communities.

For example, from MTG: http://www.channelfireball.com/tag/metagame/ — these are all articles about what to expect when you go to a tournament and how to tune your own stuff to tackle it well.

(It’s “meta” because it’s driven by communities, analysis, and information cascades.)

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

mesmer:
Reduced glamour recharge rate
Phantasmal Strength: Phantasmal damage boost
Manipulation range.
Illusionary Persona: Shattering illusions creates the shatter effect on you as well.
Illusionary Elasticity: Bouncing attacks have one additional bounce.
Protected Mantras: Gain extra armor when you cast a mantra

Counting traits like this is pretty useless. The whole point of the specialization patch was that a lot of the old traits were trash, or were only “must-haves” because they fixed needless punitive/sucky baseline abilities.

The only instance of Illusionary Elasticity that truly matters — Mirror Blade — got nerfed right back out.

The shatter mechanic was borderline unusable without Illusionary Persona: slow running clones, clones insta-dying in melee, delays on Distortion. Making this a GM trait was a mistake from day one, and it really showed in the structure of competitive-viable builds pre-patch.

900 range for most skills is pretty much nonsense and removing a lot of these across the board for all classes was the right move. I wouldn’t even include this in the count.

Protected Mantras was never a trait worth taking, so… shrug?

stof.9341:

Yeah I think ANet should label your server “Empty”. I’m sure it’ll attract lots of WvW players that way.

The population labels should be:
Full
High
Medium
A Wicked Cool Tumbleweed Ghost Town Where You Can Have Cowboy Shoot-Outs

azizul.8469:

this is done in preparation for HoT. new players will come , and they will be directed to the lower tier servers.

You know that was already the case, right?

Most of NA T1/T2 was “Full” unless you specifically waited around for it to open up. Which random newbies wouldn’t do, of course? (Why would you, unless you had the specific goal of playing on that server with people you already know?)

It’s sort of a “kitten ed if you do, kitten ed if you don’t” situation, if you think about it.

They need to try to balance population somehow (within ‘tiers,’ at least) to get good matchups.

But they’ve gotta be hoping that some new people pick up GW2 when the expansion drops. And part of that is word-of-mouth from the current players base. Who’d probably like to play with their friends.

The old system allowed players who knew what they wanted to “sneak into” a Full server, given a bit of waiting (and probably an auto-clicker). This was a way of spreading populations around but created a loophole where entire guilds of dedicated WvW players could transfer as well.

The new system, AFAIK, plugs that hole, but at the cost of basically making Full servers bricked off to anyone new. At this point if I tell a friend about my WvW time and they want to join me, what’s their best option? My best guess is that they’d have to buy an existing account already on my server — which is against the TOS or at least strongly frowned upon, and means Anet’s not getting any money from them. But I can’t in good conscience just say, “Oh, yeah, go play on Eredon Terrace or whatever,” because that’s not the experience or the community that keeps me playing.

Now, what can you do? There’s pretty much no magic that will allow new players in but prevent existing transfers (also it seems like that would be unfairly punitive towards veterans looking to transfer, but that’s a different topic). Pretty sure every option is going to be an unsatisfying half-measure.

Currently, I’m not too jazzed about being shut up in a bubble like this, though. Making an end run around Full server status used to require a significant investment of both time and money. I suspect a lot of the folks transferring around would’ve just quit WvW if they couldn’t.

Behellagh.1468:

Unless you are into WvW servers are meaningless. The game will dump players from all servers (in a region, NA or EU) onto a single map, or multiple instances of that map.

It does seem to bias the placement in favor of putting people from the same home server together, especially in town.

You can get around that using parties to “taxi” people. Just takes a bit more work.

So not being on TC or Piken isn’t going to screw you out of RP opportunities entirely, it just might make a certain kind of spontaneous play slightly more annoying.

These folks should be able to tell you more: http://www.guildwars2roleplayers.com/

I’d also be unsurprised if the whole reason it went background-charge in the first place was some side-effect of the way new Mender’s Purity works, tbh. (Note how they reverted it and now we have the Mender’s Purity + Mantra of Resolve bug.)

The circle of bugs ^H^H^H^H life, man.

Necrotize.2974:

I’m sorry but how is Mimic broken?

Was broken. I was answering a question about what used to suck (some of which was changed, some wasn’t). Mimic used to absorb a projectile and then allow you to cast it back, but in practice the use for this was that there were a lot of projectiles it didn’t absorb and so you could use it to soak them for a few seconds.

Now it’s a pretty good skill and the various new Mirror-based traits cover its old niche acceptably without relying on weird buggy interactions to work.

Chorazin.4107:

What was wrong with the mesmer pre patch?

• A damage model entirely based around shatter for bursting and phantasms for sustained DPS meant you had very subpar damage unless you specced into one or two very specific builds.
• The most successful roaming build was essentially condi-troll garbage.
• Clunky Mantrkitten
• tering was very unreliable and underpowered unless you take IP.
• Several useless and busted skills (old Mimic is a great example; the only reason to take it was to bug it out and use it as a projectile shield).
• Zerk builds were thief food to an embarrassing degree.
• Practically unable to take a DPS rune because you really want Traveler’s. Speed is life or death in havoc and roaming.
• Glamour Confusion builds got nerfed into oblivion, killing a lot of the class’ original zerg-fight potential.

The specialization patch actually addressed a number of these, directly or indirectly. My concern is that we’ll backslide for all the wrong reasons.

Pandaman.4758:

Not endorsing the wiping of names, but it is pretty hard if you want an authentic Celtic name. I recently made a female sylvari and tried every name from http://www.druidcircle.org/library/index.php?title=Celtic_Female_Names_Glossary to no avail, so I had to settle for something vaguely authentic-sounding but doesn’t actually follow proper naming conventions.

That being said, whether or not other people “get” lore names is unimportant, it’s entirely how you feel about your own character’s name.

I’ll repeat what I said above: use a byname or epithet. It’s what people did throughout history to distinguish individuals with the same name.

Easiest way to get your “RP-friendly” sylvari name without compromising.

Xyonon.3987:

The mantra cd just feels so obviously wrong that I really expect them to change it again. I can’t beleve it should stay like this.

Honestly, I feel like they reverted it because they couldn’t figure out how to fix that second/third cast of Mender’s Purity otherwise. >.>

Shenakitten5792:

19 character limit, 27 characters = 27^19 = 1570042899082081611640534563 = 1 × 10 ^ 27 possible names.

This math is useless, since a random string of characters is not, substantively, a “name.”

(This is not an endorsement of the OP.)

Conditions are DoTs. That is what they are.

The big update has made it easier to stack tons and tons of them and frontload the damage quite significantly. But they’re still DoTs. You can’t really change that. At that point you’re effectively asking for a second stat that’s just like P/P/F all in one but also ignores toughness.

What game modes are you playing, mostly?

Are there any particular problems you’ve had?

Halan.7931:

Miku.6297:

Out of morbid curiosity what names are you guys trying to get?

Sylvari don’t have surnames.. Getting a lore correct name (something Gaelic or Celtic) is really hard for them.

For Norn, Charr or Human it’s much easier.

Pick a byname. As their population grows and they’re interacting more with the other species, it just makes sense.

Problem solved.

Firelysm.4967:

- 90% of the time WvW game mode doesnt work (6 second skill delay OR 150+ ping) which makes the game mode unplayable.

This has not been my experience. I’ve seen excessive skill lag maybe half a dozen times over the course of five months since I’ve been back.

Playing tier 1, NA timezone (the late end of it, but I’m also on when the maps are queued and blobs are everywhere quite often).

Toxicity.5392:

I’ve been tracking 50 people who I want to buy names from, and none of them log in. The (very) few who actually logged in once or twice would not take any amount of gold to release the names.

You’ve stalked FIFTY people???

I’m just imagining…
Wolverine
Wolverine Is The Best
Wolverine Is My Fav
X Wolverine X
Wolverine Logan
Wolveryne
Wooolverine
Wolverines Friend
Girl Wolverine

Deerbot.3152:

Nerfed how? And when I hover over Staff1, it still says 2 bounces.

Mirror Blade got a bounce taken away. So basically now it’s back to the old untraited version, and also untraitable.

I’m pretty sure old Staff 1 was 1 bounce, 2 with IE. So now it’s 2.

messiah.1908:

mesmer – again the problem is pu . yes its being used now in pvp but not for its full duration rather it aegis and other boons it gives .so even if anet nerf the duration (which imo needed) ppl will still use it

It was pretty solidly inferior to Mantra Shatter in SPvP before the patch made Mantra of Recovery (not even MoD: Mantra of Recovery) clunky to use.

Also anyone taking PU just for the boons really needs to try Chaotic Interruption instead.

We’re getting a whole new map with new NPCs, new siege, new objectives, and a radical alteration to the existing upgrade system.

I’m not saying you have to like the changes coming down the pike (my opinions are decidedly mixed), but it’s silly to say WvW isn’t getting significant attention paid to it in HoT.

Things that are also OP:
Waypointing when you see an enemy.
Standing in the Citadel.
Standing in Lion’s Arch.
Not logging into the game.

Pine.6298:

I am sure this is a bug, but it is kinda cool that you get the Mantra Strength Buff when using Signet of the Ether and you are traited that Signets remove conditions. I guess the condi cleanse casts Mantra of Resolve? Only Signet of the Ether does this, none of the other signets.

I don’t think it’s a bug. For the simple reason that they wrote “COUNTS FOR HARMONIOUS MANTRAS” all over Mender’s Purity in their preview material.

Padra.1678:

Take a glass LB Ranger and a glkittenter Mesmer

Shatter builds are srs bsns for SPvP, roaming, and small havoc fights. They’re equipped with tools to get in aggressively, burst, and get out (and you do need to get in to do your real work, usually). Similar to thieves with more ranged power but less stealth.

A glass LB ranger, for the most part, is fire support. You don’t engage targets the same way. You also don’t need to. You can deliver considerable, consistent DPS just pew-pewing at very long range.

Siphaed.9235:

I’m pretty sure the intent of camps was never, NEVER for the purposes of being solo-able. That is why they added in the Sentry guys between points, which are entirely solo-able. The camps are intended to be taken by small groups of a handful of players or large groups. But again, they’re not really intended for solo players. That has more to do with Ascended gear creep (yes, it did creep a bit in comparison between 2012 and present) and creative play adjustment by players. But that is to change with the new WvW, which is a great thing.

Pretty sure people were soloing camps as soon as they learned how to stack and cleave.

The new camps seem plenty solo-able to me. They take longer because there are more melee guards and those guards have better defenses.

dank.3680:

I did not have a problem with the bads either, that is fighting against them, obviously. What I have an issue with is when a swarm of people start playing only because of an overpowered too easy to use wombo combo 1 hit wonder pony with unending forgiveness. Then cry and quit when it gets a slight nerf.

Okay, but screw those people. Ruining a class you (hopefully) actually like and understand to spite them is even worse than caving to the tears of people who’ve spent three years playing this game without learning anything about mesmers but are really mad when they get beat by one.

dank.3680:

No other classes don’t get 100% protection uptime along with invulns and just how long can we now maintain stealth without revealing once? So yeah, they don’t do near as well.

None of this is at all related to what was nerfed. People do this all the time and it’s, like, one of the most annoying things in the game. A PU condi troll mez isn’t a mantra shatter mez isn’t a CI lockdown mez. So pointing to any of these builds to justify nerfing an entirely different one is dead stupid.

dank.3680:

1- I want it to be more challenging when I play my Mesmer which is my main class since forever. Right now I’t silly what I can get away with in WvW(I am wvw player I don’t care if you think it counts). Playing either power or condi, especially condi is ridiculous, even still post patch.

You could pursue more dangerous situations. WvW isn’t about 1v1 or even about killing abject baddies outnumbered.

You could play a less “safe” build.

Every single person complaining about not being “challenged” enough: is Portal on your skill bar? If it’s not, frankly, I don’t care about your opinion. Because you could sacrifice just a bit of your personal survivability for amazing — AMAZING! — team utility but you’re not doing it.

dank.3680:

2- I don’t want my favorite class popular because of some stupid gimmick with braindead levels of play.

The correct solution to that was to start by nerfing the spammable snare. That was the “gimmick.” These things that are not a “gimmick:”
1. Shattering. (That’s our entire class mechanic.)
2. Burst. (That’s the basis of half the game.)
3. Mantras that are actually pleasant to use. (Could they have used a reduction in power to make up for the de-facto cooldown reduction of the new mechanic? I think so.)

dank.3680:

So yeah I’m glad the FOTM mesmers are crying and I’m not seeing them as much. I still want some touches to be made so that when I win a fight its not because “oh you are a pu mesmer”…

Then don’t play PU.

Oh, they’ll say that even if you’re not playing PU? That’s because they are scrubs of the highest order. Bad players have been complaining about being beaten by “OP” builds that you’re not even running since time immemorial. THIS HAPPENS WITH EVERY CLASS. If you want it not to happen with mesmers, you basically have to wish for nerfs so colossal that there are no builds remotely competitive with other classes.

I’m not here to play misery poker about how I am the best because I play a garbage class but still gets kills sometimes. I’m here for sharp-edged glass butterflies and the interrupts and the jukes and the sheer beauty and joy of it all.

The specialization patch had a lot of rough edges (because it involved rewriting nearly all the traits), but it completely revitalized the class. But in order for mesmer to stay that way, it needs balance patches that actually hit the broken stuff, not everything else first and then the broken stuff only after everyone is reduced to a slowly-shrinking gimmick build that’s still held up by its never-nerfed core gimmick. (Anet tends to do this, unfortunately.)

dank.3680:

Personally my opinion is the cooldown reductions caused by the chaos armor trait and torch trait, are very unbalanced.

That whole thing was bad design to begin with. It’s impossible to get the numbers to a truly good spot.

Think of condition cleansing like Toughness.

Having a lot of Toughness will help you take a few hits. But you’re still dead meat if you don’t avoid a lot of the damage in the first place.

Yes, it’s bullkitten that conditions can be stacked like 10 times faster than they an be cleansed. That’s how the game works, though.

Dibaryon.7469:

-Supply depots inside keeps. It was hard to find them! All of the keeps are huge and maze like, I had a hard time finding them. It would be a lot better if we could see them marked on the map (with a small icon).

I’ll second this.

My experience was that I could solo camps and shrines when I tried, by pulling and massing the NPCs strategically.

Also won a 2v2 in a hostile camp with guards swarming around us. Probably wouldn’t have if I were playing a class that couldn’t stealth, since being able to aggro-drop both guards and players was pretty critical.

For me, the main difference with the new guards seemed to be to discourage solo/duo break-ins into keeps. I really didn’t feel confident killing them all, half-building a ram, and then running for more supplies. That may change as I get used to the guard mechanics, though.

I didn’t really get to test out all the bits and bobs in detail, but I have one major observation to make.

Finding a path to your destination on this map can be super confusing. Especially around Air keep, in my experience.

I think tweaking the mini-map might help. Sharper contrast lines to emphasize hard borders like the big cliffs, and some strategic brush strokes / coloration / maybe even literal map marks to spotlight the most important paths.

Learning the map will always be valuable, but I think it’s important for an inexperienced player to be able to quickly figure out how to get where they’re going. In order for the map to be “welcoming” it needs to be easy for those players to:
1. Get on tag easily.
2. Respond defensively.
I understand that the more convoluted terrain helps spread players out and such, but it’s important that they not be lost where they are. I imagine there’s few feelings worse in WvW than losing an objective because you took a wrong turn to get to it.

dank.3680:

All the bads who swarmed the mesmer class due to the updates making them OP and successful without any skill…

I did not have much trouble with most of the bads. They did better than they would before but honestly I think those bads could’ve done just as well playing warriors, mediguards, cele eles, pre-patch S/D evade-spam thieves.

That’s because, fundamentally, every good build in this game is designed to “carry” you some. That’s what makes a good build. People rage about overkill bursts, high mobility, great CC, or lots of sustain and “oh kitten” buttons, and general error tolerance but that’s the foundation of any great build.

Does that mean nothing in the world can be overpowered? No. Far from.

But this “No skills!” thing is a joke. Picking up builds that will work for you is also a skill. Learning a new build quickly, even if you’re not amazing with it, is a skill. We saw folks who spent years getting carried by their profession crying about how an actually-good mesmer build could do that as well.

(My main complaint — that Confounding Suggestions incentivized learning a key-press combo over learning good situational awareness, thereby making mesmers play more like the early days of stupid one-hit-wonder thief builds — was addressed pretty poorly. Alas.)

Happicakes.2054:

As far as fixing mantras goes, why not just allow a partially charged mantra to recharge/reset to max charges when out of combat for a certain period of time (5-10 seconds maybe? If this is too “OP” on its own, why not make the ability a part of the Harmonious Mantras GM in Dueling)? That way there is no “spam” while in combat and waiting on recharge outside of combat is no longer so tedious.

This is basically how it works in WvW/PvE when you switch the skills out and replace them.

Making an explicit mechanic like this would be both a QoL improvement (not having to fiddle with your skill bar) and fix the issue in SPvP.

tobascodagama.2961:

I’d rather they nuke CS now and leave us in an an unnecessarily-weakened state than nuke CS later and leave us in a totally kittened state.

That’s how they tend to balance stuff, though, when they’re not working carefully: nerf all the peripheral stuff in the best builds until they’re weakened enough to be “fair,” which leaves the whole profession with a single one-trick-pony build and a lot of chaff. Look at thieves.

I would literally pay $500 to see them revert the last patch and just cut MoD to 1/4 sec (which would make interrupt builds plenty powerful but no longer able to do “stunlock” cheese without going the full Dom/Chaos CI interrupt) or delete CS from the game.

Embolism.8106:

The main problem was the first strike kitten nal Mesmers had going into every fight, as long as you can’t start with no CD on your Mantras it should be fine.

Even then, I think it wouldn’t be a big deal if CS+MoD wasn’t so great at setting up bursts. There are literally half a dozen different ways to nerf that combo without totally soaking everything else.

Double-dipping the defensive mantras (i.e. all the other ones) isn’t nearly as exploitative.

Double-dipping MoD is only potent because you can make it a 1.25-second stun, which makes it really easy to burst. But even then you seldom needed to double-dip since the first 2-3 tended to be enough to secure a kill.

I’m a broken record, I know.

You gotta go right for the RAM FINISHER.
(Not my video but I endorse this.)

I could see implementing something like this:

• Go back to recharge-in-the-background.
• Whenever you use a charge, if the background recharge is less than {half total cooldown}, reset it to {half total cooldown}.

So there’s always a “gap” but if you spread out your charges you don’t have to wait as long for the final CD.

Zietlogik.6208:

ASP.8093:

Maybe this’ll sound stupid but.

I think the llamas should come with a hat.

Season 2 llamas come standard with the hat!

No, I mean, like, for you to wear. You have a llama and a llama-related hat.

Since you can actually wear the hat in SPvP, whereas you can’t even whip out the llama.

Maybe this’ll sound stupid but.

I think the llamas should come with a hat.

Burst meta was fun while it lasted. T_T

And actually there were quite a few builds who could successfully “tank,” IME. I ran into guardians and eles with tons of sustain and active mitigation. And necros and rangers that were tanky as hell, for that matter.

Sandrox.9524:

not when you stunned/mesmer is in stealth/4 sec cd skill

The problem there is the too-ready access to 1.25 sec stuns (this could have been addressed in a number of ways; it’s not a problem if the stuns are just dazes, or if the duration is shorter, or if the cooldown is increased) .

You can already see some elements of “slow and tanky” with people rediscovering cele eles that can juggle Earth/Water when they want to just turtle up with Stone Heart.

Gabriell.4856:

What do you mean by auto attack? The stealth attack (which is an AA) or the regular AA outside of stealth?

Regular AAs.

It’s true that nerfing the CS+MoD stun combo directly would literally have been the path of least resistance.

I think they’re supposed to be in-your-face and hard-to-deal-with. That’s not quite an “I Win” button. I don’t want to call it the best design ever, though.

I think the idea with the transformation skills is that if you don’t get stability you’re just gonna be hard-cc’ed to death without actually being useful. Since you don’t have access to your utilities (maybe they should just let you use your utilities, though? shrug).

Gabriell.4856:

It was totally “reasonable” for a weapon skill that is unblockable, apply condition, apply boon, hit super hard, create clone, range, cannot be reflected or stopped by swirling wind be as strong as an attack that is restricted by position and required either a combo, heal, or utility to pull off.

(Emphasis added)

Mirror Blade was a very good skill. No argument there. It still is a pretty good skill.

Here’s the thing you need to understand about Mirror Blade, though. Mirror Blade lets you:
a. Hit super hard.
b. Fire it from long range.
PICK ONE. You don’t really get to do both.

Also, there’s no mesmer weapon that compares to the DPS of thief auto-attacks. It’s all loaded into the burst.

PowerBottom.5796:

That’s why I realy liked Powerblock after specialization and the fact we saw so many Mantra’s of Distraction. I was very disappointed to see that it was mostly used as a rather easy out-of stealth insta-stun to spike sth. down.

So that’s caused almost entirely by Confounding Suggestions + MoD. That’s what needed to be looked at. It was largely ignored in favor of just breaking mantras and shaving damage.

Tongku.5326:

I also feel great about those stackers that are now trapped on YB. They so get what they deserve LOL just LOL and now they come here and try to spew bull kitten arguments about “playing with friends….” etc.

Err, not really. Several reasons:

• Like half the people who jumped to YB have alt accounts elsewhere. They’re not really trapped anywhere.
• Based on YB’s week-to-week performance, they actually stand a reasonable chance of breaking into T1 soon, so the transfers are “trapped” exactly where they want to be.
• AFAIK, their intent was never to jump up YB and then abandon it. It was to elevate YB at the expense of (mostly) BG.

NeXeD.3042:

I’m confused…. so they buffed the kitten out of mantras….. making them better than what they should have been due to being able to recast the mantra as soon as you burn the last charge…. so anet fixed the bug, what the problem is?

I’m sure people will still use some mantras,

The problem is that they’ve shown us how mantras could actually be convenient and fun. Then instead of a power-level nerf to compensate for the changed mechanics and new synergy we’re getting a power-level nerf that’s also a huge usability/convenience nerf.

Meanwhile the actual gimmicks that cause all the tears persist, which means you can probably expect another round or two of random nerfs until half the specialization-patch goodies are thrown in the trash before they actually address the thing that makes all the QQ happen in the first place.