Guild Wars 2

Over 300 ranks, never have had an ascended drop.

Account bound Wxp is the one feature I’ve been looking forward to since wxp/ranking system was introduced.

Downed state and rallying should be removed from WvW altogether, imo. If you’re dead, you’re dead.

Players that finish early on their platform should get an option to help other platforms that might be struggling. Technical limitations may deny physical interaction between platforms, but why can’t we do things in the form of moral buffs? Example: Platform A finishes but Platform B next to it has several downed, so those on Platform A do a pray emote/action to buff the stats of the allies on Platform B (a moral boost that functions like a food buff or somesuch) or activate the broken generator to jerryrig it to debuff the regulator next door. Or even rez people in the platform next door once. Something helpful and worthwhile. There are far too many times when it is just one group that fails their platform due to the random grouping.

Stealth already has a counter: Stealth trap. It’s not like we have Anti-Adrenaline traps and Anti-Lifeforce traps.

You mean make them even less useful and damaging? :O I’d have to stop playing my Necro altogether. And what a waste of all that ascended it would be.

scerevisiae.1972:

• dagger: revert ride the lightning CD nerf

I would cry tears of happy if that happened.

^ 30 in Earth. It’s a sacrifice to even get it. Really, it’s only got limited/specific use for trolling certain builds.

Malganis.7468:

Yet another reason to buff Ele’s then. Are there any downsides to being a warrior?

Nope. This is why so many are warriors in WvW now. Mobile RegenTankPower warriors are the new D/D eles of yesteryear, tbh. 3.9k armor, 1.9k power, high crit, always on adrenaline regen, fast weapon swapping. Rush in, damage and CC burst, rush out, heal, reset the fight, then rush back in and mop up as other classes are stuck with long cooldowns on their skills. Run away when it looks bad with only a few few class builds that can catch up to them (less a chance if they use GS, Sword+Shield, and Bulls Rush).

“Only” stack 3 times now. Yeah… no. It needs to stack 0 times. Immobilize stacking is one of the worst changes.

Conditions can be a problem in smaller fights where you/your group/your pug zerg doesn’t really have any cleansing going. Eating a dozen thousand condition damage in a condition spam build in moments is tough for some classes in particular. I am not calling for any nerfs per se, as condition builds are some of the only viable ways and other build options that certain classes have to feel useful.

But, like a few others have pointed out, let us not pretend that direct burst damage and perma-immobilize-until-dead CC isn’t a big if not bigger issue in WvW.

I play WvW to WvW, but I am definitely not going out of my way next season for the achievements/rewards seeing how this went.

Immobilize stacking + zergs = ridiculous. The stacking is what needs to be removed. I personally think whatever immobilize you are hit with first is what you should have to deal with. Example being: if you’re hit with a 2 second immobilize, then someone hits you with a 5 and another hits with a 3, then you’d only deal with the 2 second immobilize. You’re already immobilized by a first come first serve basis, and immune to any other immobilizes tossed at you (aka no stacking and no overwriting to a higher or lower immobilize if someone else does one). Likewise, hit with a 5 first, then deal with the five.

This still allows for chaining immobilizes. And I think chaining immobilizes is more acceptable since it would require timing and coordination rather than just skill smashing.

What Maugetarr and TsukiNoEi said. Perhaps you are not using one of the cheesier builds for warrior out there that can cripple and stunlock and aoe condition and immobilize with their rotations. Not to mention the ease of burst fleeing on par or even better than Eles right now (all the charge/rush movement on certain weapons and utilities and/or invulnerable shield and endure pain chaining = incredible escape from a thief’s reach no matter what swiftness boons and heartseeking gap-chasing spamming they can do).

I think you need to rethink your weapons and/or build and gear, if you are having serious problems. A stealthed thief is not an invulnerable thief from damage, nor are they invulnerable from aoe condition dots and crowd control effects.

Infiltrator’s Arrow on shortbow also has the very annoying issue of rubberbanding back to enemies when hit with immobilize, or simply not going anywhere but blinking and being a couple steps away from your original spot (and sometimes not even going anywhere period, just reappearing in the same spot). I die from this happening with shadowstep and Infiltrator’s Arrow more than I’d like. :\

Any other NA (US) servers have the temple open?

Had this happen to my just now, today. The new patch messed this up for me. I’m fiddling around to try and get things to snap back in place. Sigh.

I’m really confused as to why this alleged 30 zerg couldn’t prevent one stealth thief from getting by. Necro Marks, Thief Traps, Ranger Traps, any of them around the gate would prevent the thief from melee-contesting it. If a thief has to ranged contest, that means she needs to be closer to the guards or to where this 30 man zerg is standing around (they should also be scattered around the gate). I’m going to assume there are a few exaggerations, and thus it makes it more difficult to take the issue seriously.

Thief stealth is far from OP, especially now that culling is gone and stealth revealed has increased. That is not the issue. The real issue is the contesting of the door mechanic and if something needs to be done about that.

I completely agree that loot bags dropping in the middle of battle just makes for a much more complicated and annoying scramble. I want to concentrate on fighting (and I want everyone else concentrating on fighting) and not running around to grab their loot bags.

If I’m fighting large group vs group, running away or being defeated both ends up with loot bags just left there, uncollected. Jumping into the middle of a zerg with all kinds of condition marks, aoes, and swirling melee is not happening.

Instead of loot bags dropping, I think all the loot should go directly into your bags. Only when you run out of bag space should loot bags then drop on the group.

I would certainly enjoy having more pants options instead of trenches and robes and skirts. It gets a bit repetitive in design and in actual costume. Particularly for human/norn/sylvari men. Whereas the women have some very unique and detailed and stylized armor pieces. But ultimately, still too many trenches and robes and skirts floating around. I know the team is creative, it shouldn’t be hard to think of some new and stylish things.

LightningBlaze.4913:

Awful simply an awful idea. There will be a whole lot more pve players with lack of pvp skills coming to wvw if this ever happens.

To be fair, the state of WvW right now is zerg mentality. Wxp encourages zerging. There is no skill involved or required for zerging.

SpitFire.4690:

Heinel.6548:

What is the purpose of this thread? The only CDers are the people currently playing on CD. Period.

The point of this thread is.. I missed the old server where my guild grew onto.. I will never forget where I started WvWing.

You wouldn’t miss it if you had stayed like the rest of us.

I was really looking forward to the supply passive, but… only 5 extra supply? For 300 point investment? That is incredibly extreme.

I truly do think that they should have held back on the Reveal change until data from the culling fix could be gathered. That was the larger issue in WvW, not the reveal time itself. Seeing how that change affected players and the data first would have been best. And if it did need tweaking, then go through with the Reveal change.

I wish it were retroactive. :\

It is open on Crystal Desert (NA) as of twenty minutes ago.

Winter.6091:

Hey Osi, huge fan of all your builds, but I’ve been wanting to see this cond/glamour build you use sometimes.

Thanks!

Me too, me too. I just finished acquiring rabid armor and trinket set. I’m curious to see it in action and how it works, the Osicat way. I’ve been trying the condition 3.4 build for fun and tweaking some things. Though I find that I am so painfully slow on the map, and so slow when stuck in combat at any little bruise, that it’s frustrating. Decoy, Mass Invis, and Torch help, but most in WvW have caught on to the tactic of ‘aoe everything (and use knockdown/pull CCs)’ the moment someone goes into stealth.

Looking forward to some vids and tactics.

Mesmer is wonderful and awesome as it is. Colors, butterflies, and all.

If you want to put up skill/color change options in the gem market for all classes, then I’m okay with that. It’s optional and one would have to pay for it. But I don’t see this as any kind of priority atm.

I would LOVE for us to have mainhand pistol. It fits the duelist vibe and theme. Plus, offhand pistol… well, we don’t really do anything with it. We shoot one bullet every so often that stuns enemies, but that’s it. I’d love to have a pistol mainhand where we’d actually get to shoot it.

DR Is ridiculous, imo. It’s not solving anything for real players and people that work hard to get things they want. But I don’t think this is related to DR… unless it is incredibly broken on a larger scale with calculating events and what a player is doing.

This is the second time in the last two days that I’ve done Shatterer and not gotten a chest reward. I get golds for the events, I stay there the entire event (and even do the pre event on dragons), yet I’m not getting the reward sometimes. That is too strange and rather unfair imho. I put the work in, I made the time, but nothing in return. :\

iBerserker. LOVE. Fast mobility, chasing, AoE (if somewhat random), and cripples. Great for slowing down targets trying to flee, or to cast on the run to keep people from chasing you. Also great for tossing into a horde and see all those numbers pop above everyone’s head. It spawns pretty quick and does the attack somewhat quick, so there is less telegraph prompting involved. As it should be with clones/phantasms, imo.

Second would be iDuelist. Can’t beat those rapid fire rounds for condition damage/damage. Especially if you throw down a field.

Third would be iSwordsman. Leaping attack!

Fourth would be iWarden. The huge con is that it doesn’t move. It stays where you targeted the enemy and where it spawns. So if someone just sidesteps, they’re completely out of harm’s way. The full damage on a target is quite high, though, and very nice in those rare cases it gets a full attack before being popped/evaded. It blocks projectiles when the arms are swirling too, though this lacks some utility since you can’t place it where you want it. You spawn it on a target. So if I wanted to place it at a doorway to block archers shooting through at me, I can’t. I’d spawn it on top of one of the archers… and then they’d just move out of the way and keep firing at me. Thus, I’d need to jog over to the spot it spawned to stand on top of it to get protection… but by then the whirlwind attack is usually done and on its long cooldown or they’ve simply killed it.

And then iWarlock. Heavy damage if you are in a party and spam conditions. But the attacks are so very slow.

The rest aren’t worth mentioning imo.

For a long time I played a phantasm Mesmer build, prior to a lot of the tweaks and changes to the class and the skills used months ago, and utilized it as a strategic long-ranged caster profession. Throwing down phantasms to tank, defend, distract and take a hit, all while using GS #1 from afar (where one gets the best damage on GS #1). I ran with sword/pistol and GS or sword/focus (for the pull, swiftness, and cc mostly) and GS. I didn’t use shatters often, only when it looked like my phantasms were about to die or when I had more clones out than phantasms and my phantasms were ready to be recast anyway etc.

It worked well for a time. I think it’s tougher to be a phantasm ranged build these days, though. At least with the expectations that your phantasms can do consistent damage + survival while lacking precise aoe in many cases. I think you can still try for something like it, though, for PvE and some Dungeons.

The talk of boons makes me think this was a Condition/Confusion Mesmer with Runes of Lyssa on. Using elite skill puts all boons on and healing grants a random boon, and that’s in addition to whatever boons they get with their build. Contrary to what some people may think, no, we do not get a gob of boons that we can consistently and constantly put on ourselves and maintain. Pretty much what Palu’s post above says. That’s the reality of it.

Basically, you ran into a build that is designed specifically to counter you. It was just a luck of the draw.

I’ve said it here and on the gw guru forums that Illusionary Leap is a broken skill that is too finicky and temperamental to work most of the time. Not only are you fighting to be within range of an opponent (and we lack speed of other classes, so it can be a feat sometimes) but you are also fighting against terrain issues, the skill simply not even working issues, clone not leaping to the target fully, clone dying upon spawn for no apparent reason, and/or the immobilize part of the leap not functioning correctly or at all when it should. It all combines to make it a big mess that is highly, highly situational.

Also, unlike other classes, our leap/gap closer skill cannot be used outside of combat and can only be used when a target is visible. Which further limits the use of the skill, imo. At least with other gap closers for classes like Warrior, Thief, Guardian, etc. they can use their leaps out of combat and without a target needed so they can gain increased mobility on the battlefield. All such classes can use those skills to expedite travel over maps, jump across obstacles/jump onto nearby platforms, and especially in leaping away from combat/opponents to get quickly get out of range of attacks and retreat. I really wish Mesmer could use their leap skill like Warrior sword #2. It’d help mobility.

Of course, I also believe that Illusionary Leap should be a 1200 or at least 900 range skill. Not this 600 stuff. If you’re that close to your opponent, then you may as well be in melee range and start #2 and #1’ing your enemy.

Our CD oceanic guilds are in holiday, so that’s one reason as to why we’ve not been too active thus far. But we’ve had some very large-scale battles this past week with you folks and it’s been quite fun.

Confusion isn’t bad as it is. You have to trait and build to get a specific duration and high value damage numbers, which leaves you lacking in other areas. It’s a tradeoff.

Right now I am running a shatter build and I rarely get over 600 damage from confusion, and my confusion doesn’t last long at all. Cripples, bleeds, stuns, fear, immobilize, etc. last longer on average than any confusion that comes from my build atm. Just reassuring folks that are complaining in the thread that even non-condition/confusion Mesmers can still rack up high confusion damage. Nah, can’t do that. Only if you build hybrid or condition can you get high numbers.

Oh, I’m about 500 kills away from the 10k mark.

Oh, it’s a VERY VERY VERY common issue. I run across this problem much more frequently on my Mesmer, however. Still, getting targeted and hit while in stealth happens all too frequently.

An AOE skill hitting a target area? Getting hit by an area effect is fine. That is logical and normal. Stealth doesn’t mean invulnerability to area skills.

A target-specific skill, however, should not hit someone in stealth. Going stealth means losing target and a target-specific skill shouldn’t be able to track and thus damage someone in stealth. Yet, I’ve been hit many times by single target and target-specific skills (even basic ranged #1’s) while stealthed. I also do not think that if someone is doing a multi-hit skill or a channeled/duration skill and you stealth (and presumably are moving) that you should continue to be targeted and hit by that skill. Losing target means you lose target, you don’t know where someone is. If you stealth and just stand there in the same spot the person first fires at, then yes, you should be hit. But if karka rapid spit or arrow rapid shot is coming at you and you stealth after a hit or two, then the rest should miss you as you are no longer a visible target. Just my thoughts on that.

I’ve always been of the thought that if Portal is causing too much trouble, then get rid of it and give us something else in its place. Something with great mobility. Or at least do better with splitting abilities for sPvP/WvW/PvE. Make portal only allow for 5 people (a party) to enter through, and switch it back to 60 second cooldown.

Or give Mesmers a multi-portal illusion ability that lets them bounce between location points to confuse enemies. Acting as a sort of solo-portal ability with a longer use time when it’s active.

Some kind of trait, maybe. Something that doesn’t use up a utility slot since we need a lot of specific utilities to even function. Eles, when traited, can have swiftness up all the time without sacrificing a utility slot, for example.

I don’t think Mesmer is a great mobility class. I think it is a class that needs to be mobile, and has high mobility demands, but I think it is really poor at offering mobility options. Blink, portal, dodging, sure, but we lack leaps and charges and gap closers that do not require a target etc. like other classes have access to that make them even more mobile. I mean, hey, we’re a light-armored class and yet the heavy armored classes of Guardian and Warrior have more mobility/swiftness/gap closers for range out of combat/etc than we do. Only in a fantasy world does heavy armor allow you speed over a supposed mobile class wearing cloth, I guess.

Mesmers definitely need more speed adjustments. All we received was Signet of Inspiration grabbag chance and a slight increase in duration for swiftness on a specific weapon. Not a utility we can reliably use — which is what it should be. I’m not saying that we should be given a signet that gives +25 percent speed like many other classes have now, but definitely something more should be given without us having to rely on luck/chance or a specific weapon that we may not even use for our build/combat.

We’re Mesmers. We can warp friggen time and fold space with Time Warp and Portals and Teleports. But we can’t manage to do it do give us better speed? Out of all the classes thematically, speed boosting/warping of time makes the most sense for us.

Somewhat related to LOS (attacks, phantasm spawning, etc) and the topic is how Mesmer got ‘fixed’ but many other classes still have ways to bypass obstructions and doors/walls with their attacks. Many AE Ele attacks on staff and even D/D churning earth can hit people on different levels/heights as long as it’s in the circle. Thief clusterbomb can hit people through doors when you spam it right in front of you. Ranger pets can climb atop of keep walls/Sanctum platforms to attack players. On and on, yet Mesmer is/was the one focused on for fixing (first), when all these issues are still issues since forever.

The global cooldown is pretty silly rather than fixing the issue itself. :P Very interested in this hybrid build, Osi. Since I don’t feel like my Phantasm build is doing much for me anymore, over the last several updates of Mesmer tweak and damage caps, I think I’ll give this a shot. It’ll be unlearning my tactics and playstyle, but I don’t want my poor Mesmer just getting dusty on my character select screen or becoming a Sanctum portal bot.

Many of us have been asking for that.

12 tries with the princess frame and no joy. :\ Alas…

It is a fair and reasonable tweak to portals. HOWEVER, this is what should have been done first, before the increase in cooldown. Put cooldown back the way it was. In fact, I think it’s fair that 10ish people through a portal is a decent limit. (That is ten people using it, not ten uses by three people.) You just get more Mesmers to teleport more people, if it is needed, in WvW.

The speed buffs/additions make me disappointed. We’re still relying on speed through a specific weapon rather than speed/movement from a utility like the majority of other classes. Signet of Inspiration? The chances to get that particular buff is too random. Swiftness is needed when it’s needed, not random. I still find that any swiftness less than 15-20 seconds is difficult to deal with in PvE maps and WvW, because when you run by mobs or a player and just one attack that hits you puts you into slowdown. 10-12 seconds of swiftness barely gets you away from anything when in combat slowdown. I might reconsider my dissatisfaction of 12 second swiftness if we got rid of combat slowdown. If you haven’t hit anyone in combat and have only been running, you should retain your full speed. If someone hits you, even if you’ve not engaged in combat with anything, you get into slowdown. And it doesn’t make much sense to me.

I’d still like for more diversity in traits and builds to be encouraged for Mesmer. As it is, shatter builds seem to be king. There is nothing wrong with the shatter builds and shatter angle, but I wish we would have some buffs/traits/balancing that makes other builds more tantalizing than they are right now.

Sigh. One thing fixed to what it was before (it wasn’t a buff or anything, just reverted) and another thing broken. :C It seems rather endless for Zerker and phantasms.

In a Phantasm Mesmer build vs. a shatter-type build, I think the phantasms should stay around even if a target dies. If only in PvE to help them with better survivability and damage output. The idea of phantasm builds is (usually) to keep your phantasms out as long as possible, anyway. Shattering them isn’t high on the list. So… I think it is worth investigating. Perhaps a grandmastery trait that makes it possible.

Well, we don’t have ‘reliable AoE’ in the sense that we need a target to cast phantasms and such. Even then, that AoE is very specific/unique. If you’re doing a dynamic event or farming, you (particularly phantasm-build Mesmers) may not be able to do enough for gold medals or tag enough mobs before they’re obliterated by all the other classes whirling blade spinning and firestorming spawn points.

I am not a fan of ground target skills, but when farming events/mobs I often do feel pangs of pain in trying to tag everything and compete with other classes. It’s quite lacking there.

Thank gawd! Seriously, speed is one of the more terribly lacking areas of Mesmer. Being forced to carry a specific weapon with you for the class’ only reliable sprint skill is a really terrible. Not to mention that said skill grants swiftness for only 10 seconds. It may sound like a lot, but when you’re running through Orr or WvW, you will begin to feel that cooldown and slowness a lot. Moreover, another issue with swiftness with Mesmer while running through areas or moving through combat, is that you’ll get the ‘combat slowness’ effect on you. Where you slow down even while in swiftness and that 10 seconds will feel like nothing. You may as well be moving at normal speed for all effective it is.

I really would prefer that we get a utility swiftness skill. Even a new elite since we only really have Mass Invisibility (which not many use) and Time Warp. I rarely see people using Moa these days outside of perhaps sPvP. Relying on any specific weaponsets for swiftness is a poor design idea, imo. Now if swiftness was granted to several weaponsets as a byproduct of other skills, then maybe. Also, I rather not have it trait-related either… like casting a heal gives you swiftness for x amount of seconds. I don’t want to feel forced into making certain builds just for some swiftness either.

I hope for positive things…