Guild Wars 2

Yes.

The second one person switches classes you’ve essentially thrown out any semblance of balance the match making system was trying to achieve.

Granted, I get why (most) people (probably) do it. The match making system gives us stupid team comps sometimes and players take it upon themselves to try and fix the issue. That being said..I don’t believe that that -is- the reason all players switch, some of them are just trying to create an advantage for their team by switching to a class the other team might have a weakness to. Again, this completely invalidates everything the match making system tried to do.

Voting no against this because you want to hold on to this ability to fix poor match making with your own hands is, I believe, short sighted (I’ll explain in a moment).

Voting no against this because you want to be able to gain advantage over other players..well, that doesn’t make things better.

As to why I think voting no is short sighted, let’s do best case/worst case scenario:

Best case: If classes are locked in place the moment you queue, then ten players of a (hopefully relatively) equal skill level get put into the match. The teams are as close to even as the system can make them, and no player has the ability to try and give their team an edge by switching.

Worst case: Classes are locked in place the moment you queue, and the match starts with horribly bad team compositions or stacked classes. Now it is up to the players to do the best they can with what they have to try and win, but that isn’t the important point. The important point is that this -IS- a situation that the players can’t remedy by themselves, and all of the onus for creating balanced teams is on match making system and the match making system ONLY.

In conclusion: Even if we end up with cases of the worst case scenario, this change is a step in the right direction.

It might take time, it might be painful, but if we put the power in the hand’s of the system, than the system can be improved upon over time as we move forward. If there is a problem they can fix it, if there are imbalances they can tweak it.

Let’s not fight against the devs and defeat their efforts – working with them in this way reduces the guesswork and makes the flaws in the system a LOT more apparent.

Good point on the regen with cele. Admittedly I was not as good with this build when I tried it so I will give it another shot.

Last night I decided to try swapping pistol out for focus, as my lack of movement really does feel like my biggest problem. I have to say I was hesitant because the targeted pistol 5 is so quick and reliable, not to mention pistol 4’s effectiveness at stacking bleeds. That being said though, I found it much easier to curtain pull multiple opponents into immobilized + focus 5 combos than I thought it would be, and being able to also move people with the pull did come in handy.

So far focus is promising, but I’m going to continue to test.

Mail – I really want to thank you for posting this and sharing this build, as well as everyone else who has contributed to testing and discussing this build and its variations.

I’ve been playing gw2 for a long time now, but I’ve only been pvping for the past 6 months or so. Admittedly I’m a bit of an alt-oholic, but in that time mesmer has largely always been my main/favorite class with the exception being in pvp. While I feel I excel when playing cele engi and d/d ele, no mesmer build I’ve ever tried in PVP as felt at all efficient or worthwhile. I’m not saying power shatter or power lockdown don’t work – far from it – but they certainly didn’t work for me, not like this build does.

I haven’t super extensively tested this yet, but I’ve tested a couple variations across 10-15 matches or so, and so far its incredibly successful in both team fights and particularly 1v1.

As it stands, I’m running it pretty similarly – currently using nightmare runes, rabid armor, and I swapped portal for mantra of distraction, MI for moa, and am using CI instead of mender’s purity.

I really really tried to make portal work, and I wanted it to work, but I just don’t feel it adds as much to my
team play as consistently as having MOD does on my bar. When portal works, it works amazingly well, and some friends and I have made some very strong plays with it. That being said though, most of the time it just times out while we
are fighting, I end up not needing it, or we end up in situations like the one time where the medi guard, necro, and I all took the quick port back to mid on Kylo after grabbing the far cap – only to port face first into treb fire and massive aoe.

I also have to say I haven’t tried it much, but I really perfer running with rabid to cele on this build – so far. I don’t feel like the cele healing power is realling making all that much a difference with the signet, and I feel like I bring targets down faster using these weapons (staff/scepter/pistol) with straight high condi dmg than i do with the added
power/crit. Maybe if I were using sword, but I’m not really interested in using sword with this – have used it for so many other builds already.

Between the stun signet, mod, fear runes, pistol 5, chaos storm, and daze shatter (although I hardly use that one) – the interrupts and CI control is unreal. Granted, this is all available to power LD too – but the added sustain of the signets with condi clears and multiple evasions on demand just makes it so much easier to stay in the fight/hold points and focus on disabling targets and taking them down. I also have to say playing condi after playing power for so long is just a nice change, and I REALLY
appreciate not having to depend on landing super blatantly obvious shatters – the fact that the clones/phants are spreading condis and confusing my opponents whether they live or die is great.

Honestly, I feel that I’ve pretty much won every straight forward 1v1 fight I’ve been in, and most of the team fights I’ve been in have gone pretty well too – with the exception of uncoordinated pug involvement. Moa’ing off the guardian or the
necro who just popped lich to stun/immob lock and murderize the eles/rangers/ etc to death has been great. Even theives don’t feel like much of an issue unless they have help or I do something stupid.

Anyways, sorry for the diatribe, but I don’t post often, and I’m enjoying this build in pvp so much that I really wanted to share my experience. I’ll continue to tweak and experiment and post my results.

Seems like a really interesting concept and I’d like to try it..but question:

Considering that the only glamour you’ve got slotted is veil, is it really worth devoting two glam related traits to? I know that you could (and probably do) swap it out periodically for other glam utilities, but in my case I have to have veil on my bar pretty much all the time.

With the lack of condition removal in mind as well, I wonder about giving up CE or Glam mastery for traited torch or mender’s purity.

And what were your thoughts on torch vs focus (traited or not)? I love focus..but typically only when I’m traited for reflection too.

Dear everyone who isn’t Dr:

I transferred to Dr with firkin and shade and it has been a life changing experience.
In the last 20 minutes I got a promotion at work, my girlfriend gave me an old fashioned, and publishers clearing house knocked on my door.

Can not recommend this server highly enough.

(Also they have an awesome community and its been great fun)

Basket of Boxes.1976:

The free transfers have effectively killed ET, I have been here since the server was created and I will likely transfer off by the time the league starts. Apparently we have had one guild transfer over but we have lost 3 or 4 of our main WvW guilds.

I will have a hard to motivating myself to run in EB or a borderland with maybe 2 other people knowing that the other servers karma training around the map are going to get much better rewards for 1/10th the effort. Anet devs should really spend a week or two in the bottom few servers to see what life is like in a ghost town during leagues.

It is unfortunate to see some servers turning into ghost towns but in ETs case this is just not true. As previously stated, dmd would of left regardless of cost. As someone formally in IOM as well, I’m pretty sure they’d say the same thing.

Im not out to flame war, but guilds leaving ET had plenty of reason to do so. A net just saved us money.

As a member of DmD that just transferred to DR from ET, I have to say I couldn’t be happier.

We haven’t been on the server long, but it has been a blast, and the transfers being free really helped make the ordeal a lot less stressful. Almost all of our active members have moved over now, so I very much appreciate that anet helped make that possible.

That being said, we aren’t the first major wvw guild to leave ET, and it was a tough decision to make. At the end of the day though, it wasn’t the right home for our guild, and even if the transfers were not free, I can say with certainty we would have moved.

I believe that the other major guilds that have left (DI, AKD, and Basic off the top of my head) were much the same.

Guilds will move if they feel the need to, and I think that anet making lower tier servers potential targets by being free is ultimately a good thing.