Guild Wars 2

Pre 23rd July, Shatter was defined by Illusionary Persona. If you didn’t take Illusionary Persona you weren’t playing Shatter. You were playing MTD or CI or some other variant. MTD was sometimes called MTD shatter to distinguish it from condi clone death builds but these no longer exist.

Technically, Shatter as a distinct build no longer exists. Shatter is no longer defined by the presence or absence of 1 grandmaster trait. It is now a true profession mechanic that you can use (or not use) in any build. It is no longer conditional on the presence and position of an AI. Shattering illusions is now a question of necessity, no matter what build you run.

When it comes to shatter builds, it seems as though you simply MUST have Deceptive Evasion.

This was perhaps true in the old trait system, particularly for non (IP) shatter builds because you had no reliable access to your profession mechanic. With IP it didn’t matter if you had no clones out because you always count as a clone for the purpose of enabling shatter. If you needed invulnerability, you smashed F4 and no matter what, you will get a guaranteed 1 second of invuln. Doesn’t matter if all your illusions are cleaved out, what weapon set you are in or if you are stunned or knocked down.

Without IP, you needed a clone or phantasm to be alive when you hit F4, otherwise it would go on a 4 second cooldown with no effect. Opportunistic cleave could really screw you out of shatters when you need them the most.

Without DE, your clone production was bound by weapon skill cooldowns and being able to weapon swap in combat to a set with illusion summoning skills off cooldown. Having IP baseline automatically makes DE less mandatory but by not taking DE you lose a source of clone production that is independent of weapon and utility cooldowns. You still pay a heavy price for dropping it but there are other options now like Harmonious Mantras which are, certainly playable.

Playing a HM build requires you to be very deliberate with your clone production – when you create clones and where you create them. Not having to dodge for clones also changes the way you play and takes getting used to. You can now use dodges exclusively for damage avoidance.

Rising Dusk.2408:

The idea is probably to unlock Unranked at like rank 5 and ranked at rank 20 or something. It should gradually ease you into the “higher skill” environments instead of having brand new players join ranked, wait 5 minutes in the queue, and then get obliterated repeatedly by dragons. This happens to a lot of people in games I play in, both on my team and against me. I genuinely feel bad for the ~50AP players who get into these games and then have that as their defining PvP experience in GW2.

Honestly, I pity brand new players being forced to play hotjoin before they can do unranked or ranked. Theres nothing quite like busting your pvp cherry by getting 5v4 daily farmed on double ele day.

Elorna.5329:

Besetment.9187:

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

I know I am late to this post, but I feel PU needs to be nerfed so hard that no one ever uses it again.

Ahhh the 25/90 treatment. Because it worked so well the first time around.

It killed a skill that needed killing, in a very nonsubtle way. Anyways, PU doesn’t deserve that treatment, stealth in general needs it.

It didn’t need killing. Thats the point. The effective removal of smiter’s boon from GW1 pvp didn’t stop smiteway groups in team arenas. They just dropped a smite monk for a WoH healer until cumulative balance patches made the whole concept unviable.

Since every player and their mother was no longer packing Smite Hex and Smite Condition in team arena, guess what: the flavour of the month went back to hex/condition pressure (later with eles instead of rangers). That eventually turned into MBway which dominated TA and RA – eles spamming distortion, liquid flame and immolate for free because mind blast + aura of restoration meant you always had more energy than you could ever realistically spend.

So people started asking for immolate, mind blast and distortion to get the s-boon treatment except that never happened because TA got replaced by codex arena instead, about a year after boon gate.

When you nerf a skill to uselessness, all you do is reduce complexity. That doesn’t mean PU’s functionality cannot change but the whole idea of deliberately making PU or stealth completely useless is such a stupid idea, you should feel terrible for even thinking it. If you remember s-boon you were there. You have seen this before and it didn’t work.

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

I know I am late to this post, but I feel PU needs to be nerfed so hard that no one ever uses it again.

Ahhh the 25/90 treatment. Because it worked so well the first time around.

Rose tinted glasses huh? People forget the random arena (RA) sync queuing or the fact that RA teams with a monk were alot more likely to go through to team arenas (TA) than any non monk team.

People are also forgetting why TA got completely removed and why getting promoted to TA was a bad thing. They were dominated by smiteway groups to the extent that smiter’s boon got nerfed so hard it coined the term “s-booning” (meaning to nerf something so hard the intent is to effectively stop anyone ever using it).

After smiteway there were 3x perma distortion mindblast/rodgort ele + 1x monk/warrior stance teams that you could never, ever beat in a random group.

There were very good reasons why TA was removed from the game and replaced with the sealed deck codex arena. It isn’t much different to getting farmed by 5 man premades in GW2 ranked queue, except due to the complex skill system in GW1, it was alot worse.

Queuing in GW1 was generally horrible because there were far too many game modes that split the number of concurrent pvp players too many times so you had to wait an eternity to get a gvg. Top 50 gvg teams had to wait over an hour to get a match during off peak times. And half the time it was against a team that wasn’t even ranked. No leaderboard decay ensured that within 2 years, the top 1000 gvg leaderboard was clogged with 90% dead or defunct guilds and smurfs.

Tombs/HA cheated in the sense that if there weren’t enough teams you just skipped straight to scarred earth/courtyard. But Tombs/HA was and will always be a rank farm.

I loved GW1 but queuing and matchmaking in that game was seriously dysfunctional. Its just unbelievable to me how anyone who actually played it within the last 8 years could hold it up as a pillar of design.

Sword/Sword and Sword/Focus (sometimes Sword/Pistol). Metabattle has an outline of the build but the concept is very different to shatter.

Aomine.5012:

Besetment.9187:

Mesmers dont have permanent reflection. What on earth are you smoking…

Dodge grants reflect with no ICD. Manipulation grants reflect with no ICD.
They don’t need to sacrifice weapon choice or even utilities to do these things anymore. (Manipulation is one of the most popular choices for Mesmers anyway)
And then they have that permanent stealth to cover the endurance and CD issue.

Have you fight a good PU Mesmer in WvW before?

Successful evasion grants 1.5 sec of reflection. It also requires you to take evasive mirror which means you can’t have blind on shatter.

Master of manipulation grants 2 sec of reflection on blink (24 sec cooldown) and mass invis (72 sec cooldown).

Mesmers dont have permanent reflection. What on earth are you smoking…

Heres a template for power gs/staff:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQJARWlknhy0YjawINwtGLpGk5N+xLIHwBCQZFSe3A-TpBFABCcBAEvMgc7P02hAYhjAAAPAAA

In open world pve it works decently enough but for dungeons you really want to be running a phantasm/reflect build which is a totally different animal and based solely around maximum damage over time through phantasms and sword auto chain. You wont be using staff in this type of build because staff is mainly a kiting weapon. In dungeons you will nearly always be in close proximity of your teammates (usually melee range) so all team members can maximize support.

Rune choice is optional. Popular choices are Vampirism (mist form proc), Strength (more damage and better might stack retention), Pack (damage and swiftness proc) or Traveler (kiting and moving point to point out of combat). Scholar can be used in dungeons when in organised groups with reliable team support since you are more likely to maintain the damage buff above 90% hp.

This build is primarly designed for pvp and wvw roaming though and works more or less like the standard double ranged shatter build pre trait changes. 3rd utility is open.

Chaos/Domination/Dueling has no condi cleanse so thats why mantra cleanse is present by default although you want to use portal in premade groups. In wvw roaming you must have condi cleanse because of all the cheese condi roamers. In solo queue you won’t get as much team support/utility out of portal and it functions more like a personal “get out of jail free” card or a way to +1 cover 2x capture points at the same time.

You can swap mantra cleanse for mantra interrupt, swap prismatic understanding for chaotic interruption, imagined burden for power block and empowered illusions for confounding suggestions. Now you are basically a lockdown/interrupt build.

You can swap domination for inspiration, primarily for condi cleanse and splitting damage with iDefender or boon sharing. Chaos/Dueling/Inspiration is probably the most defensive way to run this type of build.

Playstyle is the same as the old double ranged shatter. You can do good, safe ranged damage on single targets with limited cleave using GS and phantasms. You have strong ranged area denial with chaos storm (which becomes very strong if traited for interrupt). Burst requires you to be in close range of your target. Positioning and timing are important and the different variants of the build give you different ways of getting into a position to set up burst.

You need to learn how to forward phase retreat and there are many kiting tricks you can do with this. PvP maps have many spots where you can use phase retreat to teleport to different elevations.

Inspiration is a line you will sometimes have to go into to deal with condi pressure because mantra cleanse will cost either a stunbreak (most likely decoy) or portal. Running double stunbreaks allows you to use blink more often for mobility and terrain skips rather than having to save it as your only stunbreak. In open world pve its not so important to run stunbreaks so you can almost run anything you want. In dungeons you will almost always be running feedback and probably mantras for damage and interrupt (defiance removal).

Melee train basically destroys everything in courtyard. Without a set of objectives that force players to split apart, game mechanics strongly encourage you to ball up within 600 range and share heals/cleanses and boons (the most important of which is stability). Then you just cleave your wave through the other team.

The design of the map doesn’t help. Its like a central pit (that most players avoid) and an elevated, narrow outer ring that you can melee train around. I think the only reason WvW guilds don’t farm this map in 5 man GWEN premades is because its in a conquest map rotation and is rarely chosen.

Nobody is saying its absolutely necessary. PU is a trait that gives you different options on engage, disengage and moving from point to point. That is all. If you do fine without it, thats great. You obviously found something that works for you, in the matches you have played. That does not make PU bad for conquest.

I don’t have a set in stone mesmer build anymore because the new mesmer traits are quite elegant in terms of the number of options you have available.

I do run a single stunbreak interrupt build with CI. I also run a stealth/phantasm burst variant with no interrupts and blink/decoy/portal. I also run an inspiration build so I don’t have to run mantra cleanse without giving up portal or a stunbreak and I’m expecting condi pressure. I run illusions for torch trait when using sword/torch and and I run chaos for staff traits. Depending on the map and composition of the other team, I will sometimes play one over the other.

All of these are shatter builds and at their core, none of them are fundamentally different to the old standard shatter. You just have different options available to you at different times.

You can run almost any tree and not lose a tonne of damage. You aren’t losing a tonne of stats by not taking certain trees anymore. You can run inspiration and your damage in practical terms isn’t a whole lot different, it just allows you to play in different ways and your damage is conditional on different things.

The absolute biggest determinant in how much damage you do is timing and positioning. The main difference now is that picking different trees give you different options to get into and out of a shatter combo.

jportell.2197:

Fay.2357:

jportell.2197:

As long as the objective of the game is stand in a circle to win. PU will never be better or more desirable over a CI or standard shatter build.

This is ignorant. Just because you need to stand in a circle to win doesn’t mean that it’s you personally that needs to be doing the standing. Not only do you have to stand in a circle to win, you have to be standing in the circle with no enemies to win. PU shatter facilitates the no enemies part.

Still lacks the overall damage of a CI, or a MoF mesmer. PU is a very selfish build otherwise.

But we can agree to disagree I guess. I will never see PU as more desirable for even a bunker mesmer who could bring the stab on shatter trait over PU. +

PU isn’t a build. Its a trait. Do not confuse the trait with the old stealth attrition build which was made for 1v1 skirmishing. That build is dead because clone death is dead.

F2 cooldown is probably a relic of the days when confusion builds were a thing. Even so it is still a very important shatter skill, not just for boon ripping like it was pre 23rd June. Now it is a way to apply blind from blinding dissipation without having to blow mind wrack, diversion or distortion. I use it for reaction blind stomps now when I would have had to do an interrupt or invuln stomp. That in itself is huge.

jportell.2197:

Because as a PU mesmer your entire build revolves around stealth. Can’t cap a point in stealth.

Not to mention you are gimping your phantasm’s damage by not taking phantasmal fury.

Any build that takes PU for conquest is bad.

What on earth are you talking about? PU is great for stealth team burst in the same way shadow refuge was and continues to be. Its even better than refuge in solo queue because you don’t even need to get your teammate’s attention and wait for them to stand still.

If you are fighting on point and you must disengage using stealth, then you were probably going to die anyway. Everyone knows stealth is a great defense mechanism for skirmishing, but its an option of last resort when you are fighting on point and you are the only one contesting it.

PU is great for engaging and disengaging. Some of the boons that pulse in stealth from PU are really good so you can engage with aegis and protection. Stealth stomps are great when they pulse aegis. Stealth disengaging is safer. PU has great synergy with Master of Manipulation since it not only reduces the cooldown of Mass Invis to 72 seconds, it also gives you projectile reflection so rezzing through downed cleave is safer. The increased duration helps you get the boons you need.

Long stealth allows you to move between points in a straight line and completely avoid skirmishes you don’t want to get into. If you are a roamer, a significant amount of time during each match will be spent moving between points to +1 the right fights.

Saying PU is bad for conquest is really silly and of all people, you should know better.

Evasive Mirror requires a successful dodge to grant reflection and Shatter has always had reliable single target ranged damage, but nice meltdown anyway.

That is not an argument for shatter being bottom of the food chain. It is an argument that S/D and D/P have historically been preferred over shatter as roamers in tournament play.

Mesmers have never been bottom of the food chain. Nowhere near it.

Its called stockholme syndrome. You get imprisoned by panic strike, bountiful theft sleight of handed oh my god get me out of this living hell for 3 years and you begin to form an emotional attachment to your captor.

Mr. teef come back. All those times you beat me I know its only because you cared…

Am I going crazy or is Mirror Blade missing might stacks? I can never generate more than 6 might on bounce even when it generates 9 vulnerability on target.

Thieves are definitely…less of a problem now because you have reliable tools to deal with them: (1) blind on shatter (2) protection on chaos armour (3) you can match thief stealth duration with PU (4) weakness + immobilize on interrupt.

Blind on shatter was really huge because its instant aoe and usable when stunned or locked in attacking/stomping animations, with zero clones out. I don’t even think you can evade it.

Shatter always was strong pre trait revamp but I guess the nadir of the shatter mesmer’s fortune in tournament play was when S/D was prevalent (which it hasn’t been for a while now). I can see that being a rough time to play shatter, knowing that any point in the game, an S/D thief tunnelling into you can completely lock you out of the game.

The roles have almost been reversed now. You can CI, CS, IP blind shatter, with prot and you have so many instants that shut down S/D and so many opportunities to rip vigor that its a bit silly really.

Even getting ganked by D/P, those instants are all useful for massively reducing or completely negating incoming burst, before you even need to reaction smash diversion/distortion.

Dealing with and creating opportunity costs is a part of playing mesmer and it has been since GW1.

Never availing of the option to shatter has serious consequences too. When your phantasms are getting cleaved out, you no longer have the option of converting them into beneficial instants.

When someone dodges your mind wrack, this does not mean your illusions are wasted. It depends entirely on what you traded for that dodge and in some situations it will be a good trade. In many ways, you will be trading damage for defensive cooldowns and vice versa. Good players will try not to get hit but you can still come out ahead if you make the right trades.

Not shattering at all places too much importance on phantasm damage/utility. Its great when you can free cast from elevation with warlock out and a tonne of conditions on your target. By all means, try to get as much mileage out of your phantasms in situations where you are allowed to do so.

However, phantasms are easy targets. They are highly visible and visually distinct from you. They have low hp and are easily cleaved out. Their spawn location and positioning is not precise and beyond your control.

Phantasm based builds are inherently disadvantaged in conquest where you will often find yourself contesting a capture point 1v1, 2v1 and 1v2. Fighting in a small area is where cleave wrecks your illusions and you don’t have the luxury of passive offense. You have to try and get something from your illusion summoning skills before they die (and they will often die quickly).

The more heavily traited you are into phantasm, the more reliant you become on unreliable AIs. When players know you are running phantasm, they can and will target them, knowing you are weak without them.

Elementalist: My piano always sounds wrong without elemental attunement
Guardian: Its tough work being meta at everything…
Engineer: Whenever I make a wish, it always seems to come true
Warrior: A dummies guide to success at 1v1s
Mesmer: The dictionary definition of baseline
Thief: How to be best and worst at absolutely everything
Ranger: 1 button miraculously expanded into a whole class
Necromancer: Please…kill. me.

Making Illusionary Persona baseline and reordering trait lines so they actually make sense is all that I really wanted anyway. Everything else was a pleasant surprise to me.

Illusionary Persona and Deceptive Evasion have always felt essential – if you do not have both of these traits, your own profession mechanics don’t even work reliably. Although there are some builds that do without 1 or the other (like MoTD precluding IP), you pay a very high price to stray from the beaten path.

You have a few days to make a shatter variant and play the old way. Try going a few solo queues without Illusionary Persona or Deceptive Evasion.

21st century rebels…

This game isn’t anti-solo queue. I only solo queue unranked these days and the trick is to not care about your played/lost ratio and just play. Don’t waste your time and energy on things you can’t control. Sometimes this game will create bizaare matches like in the attached screenshot. Sometimes it will put 2x 2 man premades on one team and no premades on the other.

When you queue as a premade, you automatically reduce the risk of getting bizaare team comps and unreliable teammates because every player you are in party/voice communication with will preclude some random uplevel.

However, if you are constantly queuing in premades and beating on a bunch of solo queuers, it will make you a really stupid player. So in the end it sort of works out.

Yeah it would be great if the number of concurrent players in queue in all timezones was so vast, the matchmaking system can split solo and team queues without queue times being insane. That would be ideal but it is not something I can directly control, so it is not something worth getting frustrated about.

Make lemonade.

The mists in GW1 was a much more interesting place. To be honest, I miss the rift and the courtyard/hall of heroes – the golden fortress at the centre of the rift. When I first arrived at the hall of heroes I was in awe. When I first arrived in the Heart of the Mists I was like “so which way is the hall of heroes?”

I know its only the lobby, but you spend so much time there. I need a new jumping puzzle spot…

mistsim.2748:

for #1 – we wouldn’t have to do a separate queue if the matchmaker had more rules to it, such as distributing profs evenly. for example, you shouldn’t be allowed to roll with 4 other rangers while the other team has none, or one.

Heres a blogpost by an Awesomenauts developer called Joost:

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.nl/2014/11/why-good-matchmaking-requires-enormous.html

It does a pretty good job of explaining in simple terms why you can’t keep partitioning a queue unless theres an unbelievable number of players in it 24/7. I understand that alot of matchmaking criteria are relaxed so that queue times do not routinely exceed certain thresholds. I don’t get long queues anyway, so its not a problem that effects me as much as it affects top players who are dangerously close to spending more time queuing than actually playing matches.

I actually tryharded GW1 gvg around 2006-2008 and I spent vastly more time queuing than playing matches. Off peak queues times for top 50 gvgs were routinely 1 hour+. At peak times they were routinely 30 mins+. The longest I ever queued for a gvg without getting a match was over 2 hours.

When you waste that much of your life queuing, you will take anything. As bad as it gets with mixed solo/team queues in GW2 pvp, I’ll usually take that over waiting. I understand that for more stringent matchmaking criterea and acceptable queue times, you need a tonne of players that GW2 doesn’t really have right now. Very few games do for a long period of time.

I dunno. I only have 320 games played and solo queuing is predictably random. I’m fine with it. I get games where I have to carry hard and games where I get carried hard. Most of my games are pretty close in score terms (500-400). I’ve started to shadowplay all of my losses because its a good way of identifying and correcting my own mistakes. The only thing I don’t understand is the 4v5 starts.

I get it when people disconnect or ragequit. I just don’t understand when games start 4v5 and stay 4v5 for the entire match. These are all games with less than 3 minute queues

Most things in yolo queue I can tolerate because random goes with the territory. But every couple of days I get a match that starts 4v5 like in the attached screenshots.

I can’t for the life of me understand why this happens. Why cant the match be postponed until a 5th player joins? If there is no 5th, why can’t everyone just re-queue in Heart of the Mists?

Siva Mira.3546:

I understand your problem but I don’t see the wrong doing of your team mate since it was already one side game.

Well he isn’t really a teammate to be honest. He is more like a big pile of garbage blocking the alley and preventing access for an actual teammate. You know. One that actually walks out the gate at the start of the game and does…something.

Saiyan.1704:

Archers needs to ignore players until all the Guards are down.

Why would that even matter? Players can, should and already do kill the guards before archers even reach the outer gate. When you are on inner gate the priority is once again to kill the guards asap. Its worth doing this even if your whole team dies in the process because players respawn and make new doorbreakers but guards never come back.

Doorbreakers are a little overpowered, because a single one can solo a gate in seconds. Guards can one shot them but they are so easily killed by players. When a gate has no guards, you might think 1 doorbreaker will force a player to move to defensive lane and treb or manually kill the doorbreaker. You might think this is the dynamic where you create outnumbered fights on opposite sides of the map and force enemy players to move out of position, but this doesn’t happen and heres why:

1 attacker + doorbreaker vs 1 defender + guard is problematic because the priority for the attacker is always to kill the guard. He can die in the process and it does not matter because you can always spawn more doorbreakers but you can’t spawn more guards. This is a huge problem that results in suicide offensive.

1 attacker + doorbreaker vs 1 defender (no guards) almost always works in favour of the attacker because the defender has to kill the doorbreaker, even if it means losing the 1v1. Its better to kill the doorbreaker and thus kill an offensive than kill the player and allow the doorbreaker to knock down a gate.

What ends up happening is a variant of the following:

1 player spawns a doorbreaker and moves to defensive lane. The other 4 zerg the guards in offensive lane and any defender or treb operator. You can still start another 4 doorbreaker offensives without ever having to run supply. If the other team overcommits to defence it still works in your favour. Even if your players die they respawn and can start more doorbreaker offensives and pin the other team in their own base.

There is no real counter to this so what the other team does is exactly the same thing in their offensive lane and it becomes a hero lord gank race. The likely winner is the team that can get both gates down first and not be terrible at fighting on the lord.

You dont need to spawn tonnes of doorbreakers. 1 doorbreaker can get through a gate in seconds. If your guards are dead theres very little you can do to stop it. What seems to happen now is bombing the guards, spawn 1 doorbreaker and go offensive before the other team can. Stopping this is very hard because 1v1 against a guy with a doorbreaker you have to choose. Target the doorbreaker and get owned or target the player and let the gate go down.

(Left handed):

WSAD – Movement
Tab – Push to Talk
Caps Lock – Weapon Swap
Space – Jump
Q – Dodge
E – Target Nearest
Shift – Look Behind
Alt – About Face
Mouse 5 – About Face
Mouse 4 – Stow Weapon
Mouse 3 – Utility 1
\ – Heal Skill
Z – Utility 2
X – Utility 3
1 to 5 – Weapon Skills
Alt + Q – Weapon Skill 2
Ctrl + Q – Weapon Skill 3
Alt + E – Weapon Skill 4
Ctrl + E – Weapon Skill 5
F – Elite Skill
Ctrl + F – Elite Skill
Ctrl + 1 – Profession 1
Ctrl + Mouse 4 – Profession 2
Ctrl + Mouse 5 – Profession 3
Ctrl + R – Profession 4
G – Profession 4
R – Autorun
Ctrl + T – Call Target
T – Select Called Target
Y – Target Next

Redundant keybinds are class specific. For instance, when I want to forward phase retreat on Mesmer I can just left click to detarget → alt + q → right click → alt.

This is the same for forwards Withdraw, Burning Retreat etc except with \ and alt + e instead.

You can do a Mesmer GS burst as follows: 2 → hold down ctrl → q → mouse 3 → mouse 4 → release ctrl.

C&D → Steal on Thief goes like: hold down ctrl → e → mouse 3 → release ctrl.

Unfortunately I had to come up with keybinds that represented a happy compromise for 8 different classes. I wish keybinds were stored per character like they are in Tera. I also wish you could use left and right click as ctrl/alt binds (also like Tera).

Jump dodging is somewhat awkward at times (q + space). Space + v works well for right handers since you can thumb both keys. To get something similar as a left hander I need to do it with alt + z, but then I have to shift all my utilities over and it will take some time to get used to.

Certain things like canceling Supply Crate are annoying because my esc key is miles away and you can’t stow cancel crate when you are in a kit. Ditto for conjures.

Profession 4 has a redundant keybind because Distortion and Earth Attunement have uses as panic buttons (protting/invulning against burst), so I have it on a separate key, where I don’t need to do 2 actions (alt bind) to get an instant effect. Over time I just automatically use it both ways in different situations.

Go with whatever is comfortable as long as its not skill clicking. If you click skills you can’t turn the camera and activate skills at the same time. I try to keep reaction skills to one button, adjacent to WSAD where possible. Sometimes I have redundant alt/ctrl binds if they have multiple uses. I try to keep camera control and canceling on the mouse so I can activate skills with right hand and stow cancel with left hand.

For a while I didn’t bind S (back peddle) so I could get used to left click, about face, right click. I couldn’t live without backpeddle but running into free camera is a good habit to get into. You can keep the camera fixed on your target, no matter what direction you are traveling in, even if you are running away from your target. You can also attack/dodge stuff behind you.

Talyn.3295:

I was just about to say this. I remember the first time I did this in Guild Wars 1. I was like, “OMG, what is this foul sorcery, that was supposed to take hours!”

My very first Underworld full clear took just under 8 hours in a full 8 man group.

1x W/Me – IW stance tank
2x E/Me – Arcane Echo Meteor (one with Obs Flesh)
1x Mo/W – Word of Healing
1x Mo/Me – RC Prot (+ Protective Bond/Life Attunement)
2x R/Me – Echo Trappers (one with EoE)
1x N/x – SS

Back then there was no Dhuum so clearing all the shrine quests was…anti climactic. This was before 55hp monk which was around September 2005? Later I did use a Obs Flesh terra in place of the Warrior which was just straight up better for dealing with the split play on Four Horsemen.

About 5-6 years later my last Underworld full clear took less than 1 hour in a split team of 2x 2 players and 4x solo Shadowform E/As in a variant of what is now known as Terraway. I mainly played the Obs Flesh Terra or E/Mo ether renewal prot/infuse.

Terra groups were quite demanding of players and most would not take risks with people they didn’t know or had not played with before. If you spent a few months away from the game, you probably wouldn’t be able to get into a Terra pug.

GW1 was far, far more elitist than anything you will ever see in GW2. Speedrunning practically defined the PvE meta after Shadowform. At that time, team comp was shifting away from clearing content sequentially in an 8 man group to soloing/duoing content concurrently. In DoA, they were doing that 3 man thing with the famine ranger. I never got into DoA so I don’t remember how it worked.

In Underworld, damage immunity/avoidance was always better than mitigation. Damage reflection was king (Sliver Armour). Within a year of release, nobody wanted to do 6+ hour runs to fail on Four Horsemen or Servants of Grenth.

HoM content is still temporarily disabled and it has been like this for ages now. So theres no need to rush.

That is the nature of pugs for you and it comes with the territory. You play with 4 people you barely communicate with and will probably never see again after the run is over. Any mistakes that are made probably wont be corrected unless the individuals see it themselves.

Even so, fractal 50s in “zerk exp” pugs are typically faster and easier than fractal 19 daily pugs. Those can be so random…

You can’t make healing viable without making it necessary. If it isn’t necessary, players will learn to beat stuff faster without it.

It doesn’t matter if there is not an archetype or dedicated healer class. Even if you increase the way healing power scales to the point where you have a functional 1% to 100% healer build, the reality is that there is nothing in PvE that cannot be cleared without anyone needing to play the role of a healer. So all you are doing is breaking the hell out of Shoutbow Warrior in PvP in order to create an archetype in PvE that is totally surplus to requirement.

If you want to play the game another way, the first thing to do is make an LFG that says precisely what you do want. If you see “zerker meta exp” in the LFG tool you know exactly what is expected of you. So if you want something else like asura guardian roleplay only? fake trinity nostalgia group (bring healing power)? You will find it, you just need to say thats what you want.

Beyond that you must rely on Anet to design trash that isn’t completely shut down and provide no incentive to skip (because they actually drop stuff you want). They need to design bosses that cannot be completely shut down by block/evade/reflect. You need to have bosses that reposition alot, have secondary aggro and make an effort to avoid damage. You need bosses to have a mix of damage sources, not just telegraphed burst which is easy to avoid and even if you screw up, aegis has got your back. You need to be running up against a mixture of unblockable attacks, rapid fire hits, big hits and pressure degen.

You need to fight things that can degen you hard through dodge/block/evade requiring efficient use and timing of healing skills. You need to get hit by an unblockable attack and then suddenly prot/damage reduction has a real purpose. You need to fight all of that at the same time so players must intelligently use a diverse set of skills/roles n the right situation at the right time to get through it.

If you want healing, prot, slows/snares to have a use in PvE then Anet has to make them necessary otherwise people will learn to beat a dungeon faster without them. 2-3 years is a long time to play what is fundamentally the same content with the same challenges. Many people figured it out a long time ago and the only reason they are still running fractals is because they still don’t have the dagger skin. Do you blame them for wanting to do it the fastest, safest, most painless way possible?

No. Shatter is a burst build, not a damage over time build. You are supposed to choose the moment you burst wisely. When you need to ramp up clone production for a shatter, you need to do it quickly and in the right places so your target does not have the time or the positioning on you to react. A big cleave at a bad time can screw you sure, but thats part of the dance.

Shatter burst is among the highest in the game and is very resistant to things like block strings, aegis, blinds etc because shatter burst is comprised of lots of damage sources that hit around the same time as opposed to a big single hit. You are supposed to use it when you can create or react to a situations where your opponent is flat footed.

If you screw it up because your clone spacing is rubbish, your timing is off, your opening and positioning is wrong and you waste your burst on someone that actually has cooldowns and knows when to use them, then you need practice. Sometimes you can get most of it right but you find yourself in a fight against the wrong guy(s), in the wrong place, at the wrong time and shatter’s weaknesses are exposed. It happens.

But thats the great thing about shatter right now. Its nowhere near the top of the food chain but it forces you to play properly. More than any other zerk, it teaches you all the things you need to be good at any game – intelligent movement and positioning, proper zoning and kiting, creating pressure through opportunity costs, focusing intently on what your opponent is doing and reacting to it rather than pressing 2, random dodging and putting the ball in your opponent’s park.

Just to clear up any possible confusion.

DE and phantasm is only a problem with 3 phantasms out. When DE overwrites an illusion it prioritizes clones. i.e.

Spawn iBerzerker and iWarlock and Phase Retreat for a clone. When you dodge with DE it will overwrite the clone.

Spawn iBerzerker, iWarlock and iDefender in this order. When you dodge with DE it will overwrite iBerzerker with a clone.

The problems with phantasm are:

1) It is currently the de facto standard PvE Mesmer dps build. In principle this shouldn’t change because phantasm is about doubling down. Its your personal dps and your phantasm’s dps and reflect damage all rolled together.
2) Maintaining 3 phantasms is difficult. They die easily to cleave/aoe and the 3rd phantasm can be overwritten with any clone producing ability.
3) PvE meta build can’t reliably maintain 3 phantasms even without DE but 2 phantasm dps is less than Guardian dps. Increasing phantasm damage is not an easy solution because it is an indirect buff to all other Mesmer builds that use phantasms incidentally.
4) Mesmer is currently a PvE Guardian substitute, providing less team support and less dps.
5) The problem with innate DE and PvE phantasm is that in the long run, it imposes a 2 phantasm hard cap meaning that phantasm dps will be inferior to guardian in perpetuity. Its about the potential of phantasm builds and ways to kill that potential post specialization.
6) PvP phantasm is virtually extinct but the ability to overwrite an out of position phantasm with an in position clone is essential. The clone can be shattered, used to body block etc. An out of position phantasm is useless. 3 phantasm in pvp is even more difficult to maintain (not that anyone even tries this anymore). Raising these issues is about seeing where the build can go and how it could be changed without breaking something else. I just feel like innate DE makes the concept of maximising dps with phantasms unworkable in the long run or at the very least doomed to be inferior Guardians.

Super happy with innate IP.

The biggest single reason to take staff is phase retreat and using it to teleport to higher/lower elevations on a really cheap cooldown. It gives you very strong kiting/line of sight options in places like Keep on Niflhel or Waterfall on Foefire.

Chaos Storm is strong area denial if you need to push a point hard, force a decap, interrupt stomps, downed cleave etc.

The defense you get with staff is mainly to do with movement and gaining positional advantage from phase retreat or zoning with chaos storm. Use phase retreat on known spots to reach areas that you dont have straight line pathing to. This can completely shut down melee classes with no teleports since they can’t really do anything about it. They can walk half way around the world to reach the ledge you are standing on and all you need to do is drop down and phase retreat/blink back up if they follow you.

Classes that can match you for teleports (like Thief) will be able to follow you most places, most of the time. If a Thief or something similar is sticking to you with shadowsteps and you don’t have line of sight, you can’t get good positioning and you have to eat the damage, then sword becomes invaluable because you can evade through burst with Blurred Frenzy. You never really want to get into a situation where it comes to this but having a sword will buy you more time.

iLeap/Swap gives you juking/feinting options with GS to mix up your burst so it isn’t as predictable. It gives you more opportunities to bait cooldowns and dodge rolls, which can help you land more damage from positions you couldn’t otherwise get away with. The immobilize is also good for rooting targets in preparation for a team spike.

Torch gives you another stealth opener for more mixups. Focus gives you a nice ground target interrupt that you can use to deny angles on people trying to open on you. It also gives you swiftness when moving between points.

One isn’t always better than the other and it shouldn’t be a popularity contest. They are just different tools for different jobs. There will be times and places on the map against certain classes where you can completely neutralize them with staff kiting. There are times and places on the map against certain classes where you can’t get a positional advantage with phase retreat/blink and you can’t range effectively, and then you will wish you had sword.

It becomes a question of understanding the mechanical strengths and weaknesses of each weapon and trying to go where you can make the most impact with the weapon sets you have. If you have staff you have so many points of entry to clocktower and multiple angles on both trebs. So you can make a real difference here as long as, I dunno you don’t get outnumbered vs a thief + power necro. Then its going to suck for you.

Huh, really? You must be able to overwrite illusions. If you could not do this, what would happen if the fight moves and all your phantasms are totally out of position? Overwriting a phantasm thats out of position with one thats in position is the ideal scenario. If thats not possible due to cooldowns, then popping a clone in position is better than keeping a phantasm thats nowhere and doing nothing. At least you can instant shatter the clone.

Bunda.2691:

However, maybe they could code it so DE doesn’t activate if 3 phantasms are up. Would solve all issues.

That might work…

DE can never be innate because it would make all phantasm builds unworkable in principle.

The existing problem with DE is that it is vitally important to achieve the clone production necessary to fuel all clone death and shatter variants but is a master major trait (requiring a 20 point investment in dueling by default).

Contrast this with Inspired Virtue or Justice is Blind which are game changing Guardian traits but both are adept minors (requiring only a 5 point investment in virtues and radiance respectively). From what I could gather from the specializations update, point investment wont be a thing anymore so thats half the problem gone anyway?

IP can be innate and arguably should have been from the beginning.

You are thinking about this backwards. You don’t buff shatter so more people use it in PvE, thereby breaking shatter mechanics forever in PvP. You design PvE content so shatter mechanics actually have a useful purpose.

Damage over time is king in PvE. This is because champs/bosses usually have a tonne of health, tend to just stand in your AoE for days and don’t actively avoid or mitigate any damage dealt to them.

Burst is actually good in PvP because players usually try to avoid taking damage, so you need to burst them down at opportune moments when they don’t have the dodges or the right cooldowns to avoid it.

Currently all PvE can be utterly trivialized by a combination of aoe blinds, blocks, reflects and dodging/evading telegraphed attacks. This means that once your group learns the tells, all of you will take almost no damage even though you are all running builds with zero defensive stats, traits, runes or sigils. You can have your cake and eat it, so why would you suicide half your DPS by shattering your phantasms? There is no requirement to do so.

If you want shatters to be used in PvE, there has to be PvE content that requires you to sacrifice rate of damage for invulnerability. Which requires you to interrupt boss attacks with your dazes. Which has monsters that use active defensive abilities and dont just stand in your AoEs until they die.

The solution is not to buff Mind Wrack until it does so much damage it actually out DPSes a phantasm build specifically designed for maximum damage over time and reflects at the expense of everything else.

Illusionary Persona allows you do up to 4 illusion shatters instead of 3 and (more importantly) a 1 illusion shatter even if you don’t have any illusions at all.

The easiest way to demonstrate this is to go to Heart of the Mists and find an unused training golem. Try the following without Illusionary Persona:

Stand near the golem, target it and enter combat. Without any clones or phantasms out, use all of your shatters. They will all go on 4 second cooldowns with no effect.

Now trait Illusionary Persona and repeat the steps above. You will deal damage from Mind Wrack, apply confusion on Cry of Frustration, apply a 1 second daze on Diversion and you will be invulnerable for 1 second thanks to Distortion. All of this without having to pop a single clone. This is because for the purpose of shatter, Illusionary Persona counts you as a persistent illusion.

Without Illusionary Persona you need at least 1 live clone to gain the effect of a shatter. What if you wanted to use 2 shatters back to back? You can’t because you need to pop at least one clone between shatters.

The implications of this are profound in terms of how you can play Mesmer.

If you are doing PvP and one of your teammates is getting stomped, as long as you can get inside 360 range, you can interrupt the stomp with your Diversion, even with no clones/phantasms out.

Lets reverse the roles. You get a Necro into downed state, you have 3 clones out and you are ready to stomp. What happens? The Necro’s teammates throw a tonne of downed cleave on you, instantly killing your clones a micro second before you hit Distortion. It goes on a 4 second cooldown, you dont get any invulnerability, you eat a tonne of damage and you get feared off the Necro.

With Illusionary Persona your Diversion and Distortion are a force to be reckoned with. You can interrupt anything at any time in a 360 radius around your character by using Diversion, provided it does not have immunity to daze. You can see a D/P Thief leaping through black powder and interrupt heartseeker on reaction with your daze, denying them stealth and wasting a tonne of initiative.

If you are getting ganked/focus fired, you can block the damage burst on reaction using your Distortion. You don’t need a clone out. You don’t need to worry about your clones getting cleaved down. Its a guaranteed invuln, any where, any time.

Go back to the training dummy and enter combat. Pop 3 clones and use your Mind Wrack. Check your combat log and you will notice that Mind Wrack hits 4 times instead of 3.

If taking Shattered Concentration this means you can rip a maximum of 4 boons per shatter instead of 3 and you can rip 1 boon having already shattered all your illusions with Mind Wrack.

Any Mesmer build that utilizes shatter mechanics pays a heavy price for dropping Illusionary Persona. More than that, it requires a whole different approach to playing.

Kharr.5746:

Why remove rewards when they can just be equalized so you get the same thing win or lose? No one will “practice” if they are wasting their time in there. People could easily be “practicing” in ranked arena, wrecking the queue for everyone else.

For some reason, there are lots of people in MMOs who have no inclination to do anything unless they get a material reward for it. Its like playing the game and getting better isn’t an adequate reward in itself.

Hotjoin has seriously perverse incentives. It provides a means for players to farm rank and reward track progress with no real consequence.

The main consequence of unranked/ranked play as a relatively inexperienced player is putting yourself out there and inviting criticism. The difficult part is having to face the idea that you aren’t very good and then figuring out how to get better. At times, when you get roflstomped by really good players, its straight up depressing just thinking about the gap between you and them and how to get from here to there.

Hotjoin is a safe way to get rewards by farming people who legitimately want to close that gap. It doesn’t matter if progress is slower than losing unranked/ranked matches. The point it is that you don’t need to put yourself out there. You don’t need to worry about win/loss ratios, you don’t need to perform well or even try.

If you do it right, you also never really lose because you wait in observer, join the winning team and if the opportunity presents itself, you choose volunteer. Never underestimate the lengths people will go to avoid dealing with adversity.

8v8s in GW1 was mostly waiting for stuff to happen.

If you didn’t have all 8 first team gvg players ready to go, you could easily spend an hour+ on team prep, just trying to find guests/subs who can play the builds you link them. You could easily wait an hour+ in queue for a top 50 gvg back in 2006/2007. The longest I’ve sat in gvg queue before canceling was nearly 2 hours.

The highest [aB] ever got on the gvg ladder was 25 and the queue times were routinely insane. I don’t even want to think how much worse it was for top 10 guilds who must have spent an eternity in queue. This is one reason why smurfing was so prevalent, because when your guild reaches a certain point on the ladder, you are guaranteed to spend 50x longer waiting for a match than playing matches.

Classes in GW2 are designed to be relatively self sufficient compared to GW1 where you and your teammates were utterly dependent on each other to accomplish anything. Is that a good or a bad thing though? It depends how long you have waited trying to replace your pro infuse and pb interrupt.

Forget about comparing skill caps. The hardest part of 8v8s in GW1 was getting 8 people online at the same time with the bare minimum of knowledge and ability to play your team comp. Retaining those players during failure and attrition is hard.

I had some good times in GW1 and I still remember some of the great teams and players but why anyone would want to go back to that is beyond me.

As broken as GW2’s matchmaking is, you really have to play a game where you can wait 2 hours and not actually get a match. Even a poor quality, one sided roflstomp or a gimmick vs gimmick is better than waiting for a balanced match that never comes around.

Does this take into account air/fire procs? Because GS1 is an intercontinental ballistic air/fire proc delivery system.