Guild Wars 2

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/limited-time-offer-save-75-on-guildwars2-through-march8/

Give me a break, 6th through 8th is the promotion!? and its over.. awesome, why is it so hard to run a campaign for a few weeks. Let the word get out (no 48hours is not enough time) and get people to sign up.

My guild on another NCSoft game (Lineage 2) is considering playing Guild Wars 2.

I saw there was a great promotion that just passed in the end of January where you could get a GW2 account for $10.00.

Are there any future promotions like this planned? it would be a great incentive to get a bunch of them playing here.

Seeing as this thread has calmed down, dev’s, so what do you think / whats the plan.

serialkicker.5274:

I wouldn’t mind 180 radius, target reduced to 3 players, 3 stacks of bleeding on target. I don’t care about boon remove tbh. CD stays the same. I don’t know why some of you feel like you have to compensate for changing this skill… it’s pretty meh skill atm, it needs a buff, not a change that wouldn’t make it any more useful then it is now…

More nerf the wishlist nonsense.

Nobody here, not a single player knows the internal balancing formula the devs use to determine if a skill is too powerful. Last time I checked they didn’t include anyone in that conversation or process. Don’t presume you know, which to the point im making is don’t aim low, aim high and let the devs calibrate it back.

The freaking choke hold people are putting on their creativity here is astonishing.

Snap out of it.

Too much rubbish talk..

Have some confidence, in your wishlist act like GS could be a deadly mesmer weapon and be confident about bringing some power back to the class. A sad state of affairs that the mesmer class has been beaten into submission for so long that the players are defaulting to try and nerf a wishlist thread lol.

Mesmers deserve some awesome too, stop hamstringing awesome.

a t s e.9614:

You fill the role of understanding the prismatic.

Absolutely.

Most balanced skill ever. I did prefer Anet’s original name for the skill : Prismatic Tears

There should be :

a) a trait option that allows blocks to continuously parry/riposte attacks for the duration of their channel time.
b) a trait option that allows you to extend the duration of a blocks channel time

People should be punished for continuously attacking a mesmer in a block. Further a mesmer should be able to change the tempo of a fight by going into these defensive stances.

Karl McLain.5604:

Some great ideas here guys! This skill is something we’ve been looking at, as it’s a little underwhelming at times.

Here’s a bunch of potential things we could do (we would do one or maybe two of these, not all:

1. Look at making it usable on the move. Currently, the animation is ONLY able to be used while standing still.
2. Increase the number of boons removed.
3. Increase the radius.
4. Make this a channeled skill that pulses AOE damage and boon removal while you hold the sword in the ground.
5. Multi-stab! You choose multiple ground targets and stab all of them simultaneously (or one-after the other). We don’t have tech for this yet… but it’s a possibility!
6. ???
7. Profit!

Tagging this thread for later.

Hi Karl, could you consider changing the visual into a hybrid of what “Tazza” in Sorrows Embrace Part 1 does. A quick recap is that she does an AoE attack that does a burst attack which appears as a dozen Mind Stab animations in a moderately large (close to but not quite what chaos storm is now) field. For cool factor when the mesmer is using the new awesome power of this reworked skill you should animate his clothes blowing back from wind gusting from the rift his sword is going through

The skill should pulse every 0.75s for four seconds.

Further because the mesmer is committed to channeling and unable to move or take other actions, the damage on this skill should be significantly increased with a twist. First off the base damage should be upped by perhaps 30-40% from where it is right now, however the twist should be each time it pulses and removes a buff it should “explode” the buff off the target doing (2x) additional damage. This should allow the mesmer to punish players who are refusing to run out of the mind stab aoe radius (bunker smash!).

I would further tweak this skill such that if the mesmer is in the radius of his own Mind Stab the reuse time should be halved compared to if he is throwing it at a distance at people. This would allow the skill to be balanced for close range fighting (pve/dungeon tweaking) and still have range capabilities (wvw/pvp).

Finally Mind Stab should trigger blast finishers.

Mirror Blade with Illusion Elasticity is awesome sauce.

The problems with GS is

The #1 skill is not bad in its very narrow use case, just counter intuitive to almost all proper hunting configurations involving stacking (which is the majority).

The #3 skill, it’s just crap. Useless in pve, and nobody in pvp/wvw ever said “WATCH OUT FOR THAT MESMER HE WILL USE GS#3 ON YOU”

Why do people think that asura don’t make the best mesmer? They get a 2s utility skill daze should you want to play a daze heavy build.

New Weapon Types:

Main Hand Pistol – Bleeding/Push-Impact/Piercing Skills
Main Hand Torch – Burning/Weakness/Blindness Skills
Main Hand Focus – Pull/Daze/Reflect Skills
Off Hand Scepter – Healing/Regeneration Skills

Some questions:

If the trait is so obviously bad, why haven’t the devs responded here?
How could a trait so terrible have gotten past the Q/E teams?
What could the use case for this trait be given how bad it is?

Given the above, this trait seems like a “filler” or “make work” item, where the game architect was trying to balance new content “count” across the classes without regard for usability. What does it say when they release content no one will ever use, or at best people will try and then quickly never use again due to it being so bad.

The mechanics of heal power are known, the analysis in this thread is irrefutable.

I really like Mirror Blade when you have the illusionary elasticity trait, however I saw one of the dev’s recently mention that you can use reflection to get even more bounces.

Has anyone tried this? what kinds of reflects are we talking about here ?

Masterful Reflection + Distortion Reflects ?

IE + Mirror Blade already lets you pop 9 stacks of vulnerability, on a target.. MR + Blurred Frenzy might be 6 more stacks (2 more bounces given a 3s distort), Shattering for distortion might be another 6 stacks.

Has anyone tried this .. it sounds pretty awesome and IE is getting some much needed love(fixes) in the feature build .. might be a mainstay if people can capitalize on bounces.

No dev responses stating they play mesmers in a frequent/constant capacity…

Answer obtained!

Krispera.5087:

I wonder if we have a ‘’mesmer gs hate lobby group’’ or something…

Anyway, Mirror Blade does insane damage. If you trait it with bouncing trait and you’re 1v1, the target get 3 mirror blade. They can crit for over 2K each and it’s on a low cooldown. Don’t forget the might stack and invulnerability. Cast mirror blade and swap to your an another weapon when you’re in close combat ?

If someone is far away, cast iZerker -> Mirror Blade -> Shatter. Huge burst.

I very much like Mirror Blade + Illusionary Elasticity, given that you get Compounding Power + IC going this route I do not know why more people don’t use it.

CptAurellian.9537:

Every time I see a mesmer use GS #5 in PvE, I wish there was friendly fire in this game …

Most people are not running a BI/CI build or know when it is appropriate to use it…

BTW GS#5 is perfect as is in both pvp and pve. Pvp benefit is obvious, but pve with the right traits is devastating (multi interrupt + BI/CI is hackery).

GS#3 needs to be redesigned, I understand the idea behind it but it just doesn’t feel natural with the flow of this weapon and the single boon strip with long reuse doesnt have a huge impact in pvp.

Replacement Idea:

GS#3 – Illusory Reciprocation
Type: Channeled Block – 3s, Reuse 15s. Successful Block Discharges a Mirror Blade towards the target.
Elective Riposte Skill: Mind Stab for 314 damage centered on the Mesmer with the radius expanded to that of a chaos storm. Using the elective riposte triggers a blast finisher should the user be in a combo field when they trigger it.

I think this would gel really well given that this skill can scale up in power if the user has traited illusory elasticity (also making this point spread in illusions more attractive for a GS user). Also the only other blast finisher is with the torch in the domination line so having a blast finisher with the GS seems appropriate. Finally we are just creatively reusing skills already available to the mesmer (counter mirror blade / block / revamped mind stab aoe) so there is limited infringement on other classes.

I sincerely hope that the devs read this post and consider reworking the current GS#3 skill.

I PvE with my constant group of 5 people, this build is to support my party in dungeons/fractals etc.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Unfortunately, there’s 2 vital boons missing from that. Might and fury. The only 2 boons that are directly related to damage output. The 2 boons that matter more than all the other boons combined. Mesmer can’t supply them.

Im not sure why you would say that, my build has 6x altruism runes with superior battle double swap for “consistent” might/fury generation. I also prefer mantra healing which has the fastest reuse and multiple proc points to trigger altruism.

On an opportunistic side I also have bountiful interruption / and mirror blade to generate extra stacks of might to pass around.

I have never been in a situation where I couldnt supply several stacks of might and a fury buff when signet of inspiration was up so I am not sure what you are basing that comment on.

Osicat.4139:

Ppl can rum what build they want, but I ask this. IF you solo roaming and rum into a gank party of 2 bs thiefs and a warrior, can you survive and get away? IF you fight a guardian or 2 and a pair of necros jump in to gank you can you survive and get away?

Can your build win more than 50% or ressult in infenite draws vs a skilled thief in Wvwvw duels alternative let you escape and lose a thief who go for you 1 vs 1

IF no is the answer on any of these q its not a effective roaming build.

/Osicat

Sorry the context was not wvw/pvp but pve.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Diego Vargas.3058:

Boonstorm Mesmer is extremely powerful in any kind of dungeon setting.

It’s strong support. Unfortunately, that kind of support is more or less useless in a good dungeon group.

Why would this build be useless? I make overpowered DPS classes even stronger.

Lets be serious here, mesmer isnt meant to be competitive DPS like certain classes. IMO the class has become a curiosity, something that relies on the person being better at guild wars 2 than their opponent. Eg. better hand eye co-ordination, better at situational awareness, better thinking on your feet. None of these traits are something you spec in, and I find is often used to cover up the many significant shortcomings of the class. It is odd that some of the better players gravitate to this class purely because it is so handicapped.

Point in case, most average players vs. an average mesmber can faceroll on their keyboard and win. It typically takes an excellent player to drive a mesmer around to overcome all the class shortcomings.

So anyhow, boonstorm for me is something that mesmer actually does very very well. This is the role ANet has forced me to play to add meaningful content to a dungeon party.

BTW the CDI thread is a bit of a joke .. what i have found is that while rangers have problems they are not so broken compared to mesmer that they deserve priority .. the outcry of ranger > mesmer is purely that way more people play ranger out of whatever intrinsic “coolness” they attach. I find that most of the gw2 playerbase find the notion of mesmer so broken to be abhorrent so they dont even try to use it. I have been in lots of groups and a bunch of guilds and every time its like “wow a mesmer (lol)” …

Boonstorm Mesmer is extremely powerful in any kind of dungeon setting.

Its not that, I want to not invest so deeply into the Chaos Tree. I have played the traditional S+F / Staff boonstormer and its nice, but I am trying to shift slightly towards offense.

I am trying to pull off : 20/5/15/30

Build here:

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcmmzz0MzooVMmooxMmGVfx0oaVmRa08kiU7khs70z707kiU7khs7qGJ70V7ofF70m

One thing to note is given my build any time I get regeneration I get protection, that means prayer to lyssa can provide protection 2 ways (direct or via regen buff).

The thing about decoy is the reuse is pretty slow, 40s is a long time compared to prayer which also has offensive capabilites.

If you ignore the stealth benefits of Prismatic Understanding and are playing a boonstorm spec, given that you are Human do you think Prayer to Lyssa is a valid replacement for Decoy to cycle buffs? I mean this has a 12s reuse, gives a random boon and also throws a random debuff on something.

Trying to break out of PU dependence.

Can we get “Giver” stat Ascended Armor / Trinkets.

As it stands my Exotic Giver gear is way better than my potential Ascended Armor and Trinkets.

This doesn’t seem right give the effort required to craft ascended.

I play a boon-storm support mesmer for my constant party so giver armor/trinkets with altruism runes x6 is pretty key to this build.

Thanks,