Showing Posts For BlackStabbath.9780:
Have fun trying to land your sword burst with no soft cc… I tried many times to use sword as a dps weapon. At least from spvp perspective, people with just dodge roll and mitigate your dps making it very unreliable. DPS wise, hammer and GS are both better at DPSing than sword.
just curious… how do you deal with corrupt boon/sos necro and/or condition spamming engies? Just seems like your cleanses are limited with this build.
With GS you could, at least, drop symbol and whirl cleanse.
Both are viable, hammer has a steeper learning curve imo.
Dmg is about equal or perhaps slightly better with hammer if you’re really good at landing the auto-attack chain combined with Mighty Blow.
Both synergize well with the light fields from symbols.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Light_field
I would say it just comes down to personal preference. I personally use both depending on the situation.
“Guardians” are suppose to stand in one spot and whack anything that comes near them. Hence their name “to guard”. Therefore, don’t expect anet to deviate from this and redesign them into a mobile force like the warrior.
The original design of the class allowed guardians to be very effective at holding points. Because so many people complained and their classes were “buffed” beyond anything the guardians of old could defend against. Now the guardian class as a whole is just an underpowered or watered down warrior with none of their inherent mobility tricks.
Stabbath, have you experimented with using an ‘on-heal’ proc Runeset with your Mantra? Lyssa (cough, cough OP) has a great proc and Centaur is really awesome for group mobility.
Mantra Mastery + Centaur is perma-swiftness for your team (and it’s quite underrated in combat too)
Wow!! Sweet idea. I haven’t tested it but I plan on it.
Here’s one I may try tonight.
Thanks. That’s interesting as it is close to what I was running before I came to this forum and started build-tinkering — mantra of pain with the heal on it. I just got tired of all the 2 3/4s periods where I couldn’t do much.
How do you feel your build compares to the one by Embolism? They’re quite different. I’m currently running a “convertible” Blackwater/Blackdevil 20/20/30/0/0 build.
Embolism’s build is tailored more around Mantras whereas mine just happens to use them for the condition removal. My build isn’t anything ingenious, just a phantasm build with some built-in condition removal. I never meant it to be a Mantra build at all…. I’m always tinkering with different things and experimenting. Sometimes things work great together but sometimes not.
I ran with mantras all the time while leveling. The problem with them in PvP (of any type) is that they take too long to charge, and during that time I can’t do anything else except move. Am I using them incorrectly?
Embolism did a great job of explaining how to use mantras in pvp in another thread.
Please refer to his post for more info.
Edit:
If you run a phantasm build similar to mine. You can recharge while your illusions continue to harass your opponents. Decoy, Blink, Mass Invis, etc.
(edited by BlackStabbath.9780)
nice but….
what about writing some lines on how to play it….
or just a vid would be enough.Play like you would normally play a mesmer, but now you need to micro manage your mantras.
Update: Not sure the tooltip is correct but when activating (channeling) Mantra of Resolve it doesn’t seem to remove a condition. This is with Mender’s Purity traited. It does remove a cond when the readied mantra is fired, however…
Not sure if this is by design or a bug. Maybe someone else could confirm?
Nah it’s made like that. Mender’s Purity works when you heal and it doesn’t work with Restorative Mantras.
I’m kind of having mixed feelings with Restorative Mantras. You have 2 strategy : charge your mantras before the fight or use it in the middle of the fight. Best strategy is to charge MoR before the fight and if you need to charge it again in the middle of the fight, you can take advantage of Restorative Mantras. If you have traited Protected Mantras, it could give you a little protection while charging. Distortion and Stealth can help you (Tip : You can charge mantras while blinking). It is still very risky if you’re fighting someone with interrupts (wars, thief, rangers, mesmers), but it’s a good chunk of heal.
You could also just slot Mantra of Pain and have a ~3k aoe heal every 5 secs?
Update: Not sure the tooltip is correct but when activating (channeling) Mantra of Resolve it doesn’t seem to remove a condition. This is with Mender’s Purity traited. It does remove a cond when the readied mantra is fired, however…
Not sure if this is by design or a bug. Maybe someone else could confirm?
I’ve been running 20/30/0/20/0 for a while now with GS+S/S and find it to be very effective.
You have no talents or utilities which give your Phantasms more HP. Since this is a phantasm-heavy build, you may want to consider such an investment. Without more hp, your phantasms will die with 1 crit, or a couple of hits.
Consider placing only 20 into Inspiration and 10 into either Dueling or Domination. For example, if you put 30 into Dueling instead and pick up Empowering Mantras, you’ll lose 15% Phantasm damage, but gain 5% critical strike chance and 10% critical strike damage, and 8% damage for having 2 Mantras charged. That’s a loss of somewhere south of 5% overall phantasm damage in exchange for ~11% personal damage and bigger spike damage.
If you want to keep Deceptive Evasion, you may want to consider dropping greatsword training in favor of Shattered Concentration. Going into a teamfight, dropping a couple of clones and shattering can strip strong boons like protection, which will give you a huge boost to your phantasm damage.
I’d drop Mantra of Resolve for the Disenchanter. Disenchanter is totally underrated. He drops easily in an AoE fight situation, but aside from that he does substantial condi cleaning and boon stripping.
Thanks for the suggestions. All great points. I believe this build is flexible enough you could certainly swap some traits around without losing the main functions of the build.
However, I’m not sold on making the phantasms have more life traits. 20% of nothing is still nothing. I mean, they may last one more hit but that’s not a given.
I’ve never taken clone on dodge in a phantasm build. Usually I run gs/sw-sw and take the sword cooldown trait. I could see taking Krispera’s advice after the patch and going possibly 30/15/0/25/0 and getting the extra mantra charges along with Phantasmal Strength. But then I’d have to give up that sword cooldown. Still, I may try this after the patch.
In your case just swap Deceptive Evasion for Blade Training.
I still like Deceptive Evasion with Shattered Conditions because it gives me a free cleanse and a reason to actually use Cry of Frustration.
I think it would work well either way really. The trade-off I wasn’t willing to make was losing Phantasmal Strength… It’s close to a must have in my mind since your phantasms are providing the bulk of your dmg output.
[Edit]
Also, when the Dec patch comes. The cond removal of this build may be overkill. In that case, you could replace Mantra of Resolve with Mantra of Distraction and add 2 more dazes to your kitten nal. This will also synergize with the Dazzling trait.
(edited by BlackStabbath.9780)
This is my take on a phantasm build that produces amazing spike damage, provides some group utility and puts an end to those nasty condition spammers. I never was a big fan of mantras until I begin using this build and realized their full potential.
With the Mesmer’s active defense we can focus on offensive stats and still maintain great survivability.
With the upcoming patch in December this build only looks to get better when Mender’s Purity will cleanse 2 conditions!!!
sPvP Version
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNAR8al4zCpXUTmGb9IypHQnzNdkUoapWJF42FC-T0Ag0CnIqRVjrGTNyas1MIYRwGiDBPCA
Take 5 points out of Deadly Arts tree and pick up Pain Response.
You can thank me later.
I say revert it back to the one in beta where it auto homed like ele flame tooth (without aiming) and dazed the target :I it seemed more useful back then. I dont use the current version of the skill anymore :I or just change the aoe thing to something new with bigger aoe
This!!!
Daze effect would actually make this skill useful and would make the Master trait “Confounding Suggestions” also worth taking… 2 birds, 1 Stone.