Hah. I could see some of these, with some tuning, but just looking at the Mesmer one ensures that it can’t be a real leak.
Dat Warrior elite, though.
It’s easily the ‘strongest’ class in PvE, but you still need other things in your group for most of the harder instances, a la Guardians or Mesmers.
In WvW it’s good but hardly stupid. Good mobility, a potential for high tankiness or high burst, a potential for a strong condition damage build, plenty of built-in clenases – all pluses for WvW.
PvP is where it gets stupid again, but pretty much only because of bunker builds with Hammer and Longbow. Passive healing? Check. Lots of cleanses? Check. AoE fire fields that cover points? Check. Lots and lots of blast and projectile finishers? Check. Stuns out the kitten Check.
It’s a frustrating build to play against because of how strong it is at assaulting and defending points. Outside of that, class is pretty much average in PvP.
All of her organizations and the like are still around, they just aren’t the focus of the story or as major a threat as they were. To think that they couldn’t provide her with the location and resources to build just about anything she wants is a little silly.
Do Necros need a buff for PvE? Not really. Do the things they do need more relevance in high-end group PvE, i.e. CC and condition stacking? Absolutely.
They don’t really need to nerf Warrior DPS. It’s fine. What they need to do is look at condition stacking in PvE and make it work separately from WvW and PvP, since it’s obviously severely limiting the pool of workable PvE builds.
Unfortunately, when it comes to being a PvE Mesmer you don’t really have a choice about using Sword in one of your sets, as Blurred Frenzy is literally too good to pass up and the auto-attack is, IIRC, the strongest in terms of straight damage.
If you’re going PvP there’s a lot more flexibility, of course.
As to what you do in PvE? It really depends on the build, but you should be going for power since it’s PvE, and you should probably be looking to have perma-reflect up through use of a Focus, as that’s one of the main reasons to bring a Mesmer into a dungeon.
PvP, of course, is really different and more wide-open. You’ll have to read a bunch of stuff about that, and I am, to be entirely honest, not interested in rewriting all of it here.
Has ten times the flavor interaction between the name and current targeting system compared to the name and GTAoE.
Add that to the fact that there are plenty of utilities that have only niche uses and Feedback’s failure cases are niche and you really shouldn’t have any complaints here…
If you’re really committed to just doing Berserker Phant or Shat, go with Berserker’s over anything else.
If you want to occasionally – or frequently – toy around with other builds, just go with the Celestial. It’s more useful in many builds than it appears.
Mesmers are solid in WvW. Great large and small group utility, Portal/Veil/TW, decent to good single-target damage, and very strong escapes and focus drops.
We do lack in the AoE department, have some difficulty getting access to enough Swiftness/MS for roaming, and are terrible at catching runners outside of some specific utilities/setups, but everything has its issues.
Not great when it comes to sPvP so I won’t comment on it, but Mesmer is excellent in smaller group situations in WvW. No small roaming group will be unhappy with a Mesmer tagging along.
Healing from Restorative Illusions is quite good. Not as good as (have to add something here to dodge the filter…) Shattered Conditions in all cases, but it tends to do its job quite well. Some maths…
Mind Wrack’s Maximum Health per Second (MHPS) is usually about (680 + 192 * 3 + 1300 * .2) / (15 * .8) = 1516 / 12 = 126 HPS.
Cry of Frustration’s MHPS is at 1516 / 24 = 63 HPS.
Assuming the more likely scenario of shattering at two each time, you’re still looking at around 150 HPS in addition to the possibility of more with extra Illusions and even more when adding in your other Shatters.
Not as good as Regeneration, but you have more control over when you gain the health and gain it in much larger chunks, so it often evens out.
As to utilities, if I’m solo roaming I now take pretty much only Mantra of Recovery, Signet of Domination, Phantasmal Defender, Mantra of Pain, and Mass Invisibility. Defender and Signet are both too good to pass up, and I usually end up with MoP as my last slot because it lets you keep Illusions out longer and still heal up.
If I’m in a group I usually drop Signet of Domination and Phantasmal Defender in favor of Blink, Feedback, Portal, Null Field, or Veil – in about that order for how likely I am to slot them in. Blink is often non-negotiable, as it both allows you to keep up with the group and drop some focus when combined with Phase Retreat/The Prestige/Mass Invisibility.
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And a quick update, for anyone who is interested…
1) Settler’s trinkets are incredibly cheap in the TP now, and work just as well as the normal Apothecary ones.
2) Normal Apothecary trinkets are also much cheaper.
Build itself is still the same and is still working about as well (bounce logic changes are a pain in some ways, but it doesn’t hurt as hard as I thought it would), but hopefully some of you will be more interested in trying it out now that you don’t have to dump a bunch of cash on the trinkets and/or grind for Ascended gear to run it.
You could pretty easily get 20 points in Inspiration for either Warden’s Feedback or Restorative Mantras, both of which are excellent in many PvE situations.
And, of course, you have the ability to switch the trait there back and forth with Staff and Sword/Focus, which makes it all the better.
Outside of that, you already have probably the best group support weapon setup. Utility-wise you should probably be looking at all the good PvE Glamours (Feedback and Null Field in particular), Signet of Inspiration, Mantras if going for Restorative Mantras, and Phantasmal Disenchanter – kind of buggy, but it does a real good job when it can.
I’d urge you to stay away from Illusion of Life unless you’re comfortable with the group you are playing with. It will often end up doing absolutely nothing if the other members of your party are unfamiliar with the skill.
Mesmer may have the ‘best’ 1v1 setup in the game – I’m honestly not sure on this point, as BM Ranger and a handful of others are also excellent at 1v1 – but that build isn’t ALSO a build that does well in group situations.
If it was you’d totally be right, but as it stands none of your arguments are making much sense.
Also, you really don’t do anything to prevent yourself from getting destroyed in that video. Just having a bunch of Toughness doesn’t mean you’re going to survive when you pretty much just sit there and take hits the whole time…
But the problem here is that everyone just wants an easier solution, while totally disregarding the negatives from the perspective of an opponent. The Mesmer already has an easy time escaping opponents with all it’s tricks, or hitting opponents safely from a distance with illusions. Having permanently improved run speed without any draw back, on top, would just be too much of a good thing.
Since, you know, a Thief with permanent MS increase isn’t already doing exactly what you’re describing here…
Mesmer really does need more roaming ability for WvW, most likely in the form of more reliable access to Swiftness. If you don’t understand why, try running around in WvW without either a traited Focus or sub-par Runes taken only for gaining Swiftness.
Several?
You can stack pretty much infinite regeneration with Phantasmal Healing and a little boon duration, so just start from there and you can go plenty of other places with it.
Monk and Sanctuary are bound on acquire because they’re dungeon rewards.
Magi gear is also acquirable as an exotic from dungeon rewards and, I’m sure, a handful of other things. Might also be some available a la exotic Rabid gear, in which case the prices will be incredibly high.
If it were to be moved, you’d probably be putting it in over Shattered Strength in Illusions, moving Shattered Strength to the same spot in Dueling, shuffling the traits around in Illusions a bit, and switching Sharper Images to have an automatic bleed -no critical required – but with an internal CD for each Illusion.
…not that I think any of that should or would happen, but it seems a fairly reasonable change. Won’t absolutely decimate Phantasm builds, won’t touch the typical Shatter build, and should slightly buff certain Mantra and Condition builds, all of which are good things, at least IMO.
Two points…
1) Two is very misleading in terms of wording. Bounce logic itself is pretty bad for us, but Illusionary Elasticity has nothing to do with it and is a separate problem – be it a tooltip problem or an actual bug, I don’t know.
2) Base bleeding on Staff clones is currently 5 seconds, rather than 7. Fixing this would do more to help builds based on Condition Damage than pretty much anything besides making Illusionary Elasticity work with Staff clones.
EDIT:
Also, since we’re talking about things that don’t belong here…
3) is largely opinion. Sure, some of those traits might be on the weaker side, but they have their place. A little buff might be in order, but they fit into the idea of the Mesmer and have use in specific situations, which is true of a lot of traits for every profession. They certainly aren’t ‘breaking the game.’
7) isn’t something that needs to be ‘fixed,’ as it was obviously intentional. Could it be that they should revert it? Sure. Should it be on a list of things that break the game for us? No, it shouldn’t.
8) is not a bug or oversight, as every Signet that produced stats that scale up or down in level got buffed, but every other sort of Signet was untouched. Obviously intentional.
9) is true, but not everything in the game should be balanced around high-end PvP. Mantras are fine for supporting in PvE or WvW, and any buffs in the charging time would probably make them too good there. Some of the activation effects could use a little looking at, but again, this is far from ‘breaking the game’ for us.
In short, if you actually want the Devs to look at this you need to be listing things that absolutely need to be fixed and remove the things that are your personal opinion or just need a little looking at, a la Signets or Mantras.
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Actually no, because you can give them both the virtual and actual fury allowing them to have +40% critical chance.
Of course, the fact that you getting +20% applies to 4 units instead of 1 is an alarmingly larger stat boost than +20% to a single player, assuming you have 3 clones out, you should theoretically be able to get fury on 2-3 units, so if one of them is you, you now have 1-2 clones with 40% crit chance and 2-3 units with 20% crit chance.
Let’s put it this way…
Fury is fine on Illusions, but better on yourself. If you have three Illusions out, it’s four times better.
Previously, all bounces went to the player in a solo situation, if at all possible. With a bit of boon duration you have a nice, reliable 100% Fury that applies to yourself and three Illusions.
Now, all bounces go towards the closest target. Could be you, could be your Illusions. If it hits one of your Illusions, your effect is at 25% of what it was. If it hits you, it’s the same.
Taking only that into account it’s obviously a nerf, as you simply won’t be able to constantly stay the closest bounce target in anything approaching a fair fight. Even if it’s only occasionally after you use Phase Retreat, you’re still missing some Fury you otherwise could have had.
You point out that you could, theoretically, get Fury up on yourself and several Illusions at once to turn the change into an increase in power.
Could you? Sure.
Will you? Almost never.
Why? Because in order to get it to work, you need a specific setup – one where you can manipulate the position of both yourself and your clones in relation to your main target, and can do so reliably enough to get Fury on multiple targets at once.
In PvE you might be able to easily manage yourself and one Illusion having Fury up all the time, but in any WvW or sPvP/tPvP setting you simply aren’t going to have that sort of control over how the fight plays out. You’ll even have trouble getting it to work in plenty of harder instances, as you already have to work pretty hard to not put Phantasms right into AoE so they can do any damage at all.
Hmm, might want to retest that. <evil grin> Well they don’t from IE if that’s what you meant, but they sure do from regular attacks now.
Unless it’s happening strictly against targets that aren’t the practice dummies in LA or the golems in HotM, you’re mistaken.
EDIT: Also, giving Fury to the Clones is actually worse than getting it yourself. Stats auto-filter down to Illusions, so giving yourself Might/Fury also gives the Clones ‘virtual’ Might/Fury.
So, yeah, it’s a straight nerf there.
Bounces are now thoroughly screwed up…
Went to the dummies to test Elasticity before checking that it was poorly worded. Definitely doesn’t work. However, the bounce targeting on Staff is now 100% screwy. With Elasticity I sometimes get it to bounce to two clones or dummies after the first dummy, irregardless of what’s closest.
Perhaps even worse, sometimes the clones will hit nearby dummies with a bounce, sometimes they will hit themselves, and sometimes they will hit you.
This is going to make it very, very difficult to do anything consistent with Staff.
undocumented change: illusionary elasticity can now bounce on clones and phantasms. pretty happy about this one.
Mesgasm!
Seriously, though, I made my current WvW build specifically to abuse Elasticity when it got fixed and continued running it because it worked well even when it was broken. Now I get to enjoy running around doing decent damage in addition to being unkillable!
Straight Cleric’s everything with Runes of Altruism is a solid starting point build-wise, and I personally only slightly deviate from it as a result of the Ascended gear I have. Sigils of Battle are great for the extra Might stacks with Signet of Inspiration, but aren’t strictly necessary, and you can certainly get by without shelling out for the superior ones.
Trait-wise, you’ll need at least 0/0/0/15/5, and usually I go up to 0/0/20/25/5 in every variation From there it’s more what you want to be doing than anything else. I personally don’t find anything in Dueling outside of the first minor to be particularly useful, as you can give your Phantasms Fury with your Runes and DE, while very strong, isn’t particularly great with the build. If I’m on my own I’m usually 10/10/20/25/5 for as much Phantasm damage as I can get, but exactly what I take when I’m in a group varies a lot.
Hopefully that helps out a bit. Build’s still more or less the same as earlier, it just so happens that boon duration filtering down makes everything a little better.
Could that just be them giving each other regeneration?
Also, this thread just gave me the best argument ever for getting my mesmer over this horrible Lv40 hump. It sucks down here and this build sounds fun as hell
Can confirm they gain Regeneration from one another. Forgot to mention that when explaining how your boons can impact your Illusions, so that should clear up all the questions in the post above my last one.
And, yeah, this is a very good build that is also a lot of fun. You don’t necessarily pump out damage – although yours certainly doesn’t suck if you know ho to use Focus well – but you can give permanent Fury and fairly high Might stacks to large groups as well as feeding them pretty much every boon every once in a while.
When it comes to grouped PvE content, this is the build I use, and I use a variant for WvW roaming that also works very well, albeit in a more selfish manner.
Staff actually gets considerably better the closer you are to the enemy.
WoC bounces faster, you can get yourself and your opponent in Chaos Storm, and Phase Shift means you can get away quickly at a moment’s notice when/if you need to.
Also important to consider is that you don’t get the bounce from WoC if you are more than 600 units away because of how the bouncing works.
So, yeah, get up on top of a GS Mesmer and do your best to stay close, as you get better and he gets worse.
I can confirm that all Illusions are affected by boon duration.
Or, at the very least, that Staff clones’ Might/Fury, Retaliation from iMage, and Regeneration from Phantasmal Healing are all effected. Not sure what else could be.
iMage still isn’t super useful, but the Retaliation certainly isn’t terrible now, and its targeting for bounces makes it better for giving out Retaliation than stacking Confusion.
The Prestige IS super good for giving you a way to charge Mantras in non-PvE situations, so Torch could be a reasonable alternative for Focus, but I personally wouldn’t take it unless you were running a Condition Damage version of this build a la this one that I’m still taking through the paces: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Build-Doctor-Mesmer/first#post2039022.
EDIT: Also, Phantasms do not share boons with you. Might/Fury, however, will filter down because of statistic changes that are updated automatically. Or, at least, that’s how it worked last time I did actual checking, i.e. Phantasmal Fury combined with your own Fury will give iDuelist/iWarden +40% critical chance.
(edited by Fuschia.6573)
As an important point: your Phantasms will add considerably more than three seconds of Regeneration now that boon duration is passed to them. I have very few problems keeping regeneration up at all times – I can even stack upwards of 30 seconds in long fights by keeping three Phantasms up – with 35% boon duration, and you run significantly more with food.
Just as a point, since people keep mentioning that not many builds go for the defensive/healing options in Inspirations, here are two that do…
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Build-Doctor-Mesmer/first#post2039022
Also, for those who are interested, I’m going to crunch some numbers later today and see exactly how much HPS you can pump out with a combination of Mantra of Recovery, Mantra of Pain, Restorative Mantras, permanent regeneration, and Restorative Illusions.
I’ve technically gotten the number before – it’s surprisingly large, or, at least, it was to me when I got it – but I can’t seem to find the file anywhere now.
Forget the exact number, but you can easily heal for around 5,000 during the duration of an ordinary three second stealth.
Some highlights of Mesmer self-healing…
1) Perma-regeneration (AoE) with some boon duration, even if your Phantasms occaisonaly die. 35% is more than enough to get it to work, although I’m sure more would work even better.
2) Constant AoE heals via charging Mantra of Pain with Restorative Mantras.
3) Arguably the best healing skill in the game when traited. Heals for more than any other while removing two conditions if you have Mender’s Purity and Restorative Mantras. Obvious downside of needing the charging, but it’s still very good.
4) Heal on shatter. IMO the second strongest of all our Grandmaster traits, Restorative Illusions can add a huge amount of additional healing, and is almost entirely on demand since you can activate it while stunned and the healing is immediate.
I actually think rotating through a bunch of different goals as the daily to average out how many matches people have to play – more for people who are very good, less for people who are very bad – is a good idea.
(I’m speaking as someone who actually spent a whole day farming Crab Toss for Karka Shells and Mystic Toilet fodder. I love the game, and am very good at it.)
On the other hand, ANet would then have to write a bunch of code to track more stuff between games, which may or may not be prohibitive.
with awesome pve skills such as feedback/null field there’s no point of even considering of running a mantra build.
And with Mender’s Purity/Restorative Mantras we also get arguably the game’s best healing spell, in addition to a mountain of AoE healing if we also bring MoP.
Mantras are useful, but you can’t run a PvE build with just Mantras. There are also plenty of times when you’ll want to slot them out for something more useful to the situation, just like with almost any other utility/weapon/trait.
Sword/Focus is your best bet for chasing people down, particularly if, as Crossplay points out, you’re good at moving around with Phase Retreat.
Outside of that, we have pretty limited chasing potential. Our mobility is mostly on long cooldowns, and any that isn’t – Illusionary Leap, for instance – tends to have short range. On top of that, we don’t have a ton of lockdown or the ability to burst with little to no setup.
As someone that tested Illusionary Elasticity extensively, this is not true. Let me break down how it works.
Illusionary Elasticity is a fine trait. I would know, I hardly ever have a build for roaming in WvW that doesn’t take it.
That being said, it’s not great for PvE because of the positioning requirements – you have to be within 400 range (not 600, Embolism is quite right on this point) the whole time for the bounce to get in – and it doesn’t actually add all that much damage when compared to, say, extra phantasm damage, particularly in a build that isn’t taking advantage of the conditions with damage/duration bonuses.
In more difficult PvE content he’s much better off with a smidgeon of extra survivability than the ability to deal a bit more damage when very close to his target.
‘Mantra’ builds are viable in that there are builds that use and, sometimes, spam one or two different Mantras – nearly always MoR and MoP.
Mantra traits outside of Restorative Mantras and Protected Mantras are all pretty weak for the points to get to them, though, and trying to make a build entirely out of Mantras is just not a good idea.
I, personally, run a build with a mix of berserker, knight, cavalier and valkyrie gear for PvE. Damage is split between phants and shatters, but I also usually grab Protected and Restorative Mantras and run MoR and MoP. Works pretty well, overall.
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When/if they fix the bug/tooltip for Elasticity to allow/clarify interaction between staff clones and Elasticity you’d be better off (not) taking it.
As it stands, though, you’re better off with the survivability than Elasticity. If you switched to some condition damage gear things might change, but as it stands you’re not getting tons out of that extra bounce.
This was a mid-month path to enable a story content zone. I guess the bugfixes which were in are the few which are already past testing and internal QA.
This.
Can’t expect every update in a month where everything is focused on fixing bugs to come at the same time, and I personally am very happy that they decided to release the new content when they could and wait on pushing out the bug fixes when they are ready.
If there isn’t anything else this month I’d feel free to complain, but as it stands I’m not seeing any problems with what has happened so far.
And an update…
Superior Sigil of Earth is gone. Testing showed full Apothecary was better than taking Rampager trinkets and trying to support it.
Going with runes to grab duration, rather than 6 runes of Lyssa for the cleanse on MI. Has been working out much better, although I sometimes miss the (6) bonus.
Also updated suggested utilities.
Outside of that, everything has seemed spot on. Tried going with Dueling/Rampager’s before dropping it entirely, but it did not do the job. 0/0/20/20/30 worked, but did not have the lengthy staying power you get with 30 points in Inspiration.
(I had also been working on a ‘budget’ build that used less Apothecary gear, took Cleric instead, and relied more on retaliation than condition damage, but assuming prices continue to drop because of living story stuff, this should no longer be necessary. Hopefully more people will be able to try this out now that the it doesn’t take ~250 gold to get the trinkets for everything…)
You can also do an incredibly gimmicky clone death build that can get to the bleed cap with Debilitating Dissipation, Deceptive Evasion, and Mirror Images/Decoy.
Still, pretty much every build that stacks that many bleeds is generally pretty bad. Illusionary Elasticity would help that, and condition builds really do need the help right now.
Mass Invisibility is solid for roaming in small groups, and Time Warp is great for taking gates faster.
Outside of that, they’re not all that great.
It’s better as is. You can do a lot of interesting things with it, particularly in WvW, a la dumping a ‘blind’ Feedback onto a gate from behind it and reflecting ALL the projectiles.
There are a couple of very skill-intensive support/tank hybrid builds out there that make use of 1-2 Mantras and prefer to keep clones and phantasms around. Not tons of damage, but a proper one can give out every boon but Stability to your whole party without terribly much difficulty on a low-ish CD.
As to suicide clones, the build is actually a lot better recently because condition duration now applies to the conditions you’re putting out. How much better I don’t know, but it’s certainly given a major boost to a lot of support and condition damage builds that are lying around.
Simply fixing Illusionary Elasticity should be enough now that the condition duration bug has been properly fixed.
Either way, I’d be much happier if they fixed all of the various bugs before approaching any more buffs/nerfs outside of the serious ones, as they are claiming to be doing this month. That would include fixing this, fixing Staff clones base bleeding duration being only 5 seconds, fixing the bounce logic for iMage, and fixing the number of hits that iBerzerker consistently gets in.
There are some other minor ones, but those are all fairly major and fixing all of them would be a good start towards being able to properly balance around a working skillset.
I’m pretty sure everyone agrees this should be fixed.
Hopefully they will have more incentive now that Confusion is ‘in line’ for WvW. Before I could see a solid argument against focusing on fixing it being that we can do plenty with just Confusion for condition-based builds, but now that argument is more or less moot.
I do like the duration bonuses, and if I do end up going without Sigil of Earth the precision from Lyssa does seem like a huge waste.
Restorative Illusions is better, I think, than you give it credit for. 1000 healing power puts you at healing 880 with a single Illusion, and you only need one to get above 1000 healing with a single shatter.
If you factor in charging Mantra of Pain during The Prestige, you can go in, become invisible, cast iMage, charge Mantra, shatter iMage after its first cast and have healed for ~3700 during your three seconds of invisibility. Including the regeneration from iMage and/or other sources and you’re looking at very nearly 5000 healing while invisible. It’s a little silly.
(To be fair, you will be visible for .5 seconds after the charging is complete, but I’ve never had a real problem with this.)
Agreed on iDefender. If I’m running solo and expect to have to deal with multiple other roamers, I’m usually running iDefender, Signet of Domination, and Mantra of Pain.
Like with confusion, iDefender creates a lose-lose situation for your opponent. You cast it when you’re at half health, and they can either hit you and do nothing for a while because iDefender takes half of the already very reduced damage, or they can take out iDefender, in which case you most likely have enough time to charge up MoP again and can/will shatter iDefender right before it dies for more healing.
If they try to kill you, they essentially can’t because of iDefender. If they try to kill iDefender, you heal an immense amount while they do. And in either case, they’re taking damage from Retaliation – not much because of our low power – and from all the conditions that should be applied more or less constantly.
The only reason I don’t always take both of them is that other utility slots start becoming better and better as you have more people with you. Portal, Veil, and Null Field all come to mind immediately.
From what I can tell there are only a handful of differences between my setup and yours…
1) Sigil of Battle over Sigil of Earth. Probably the right call, as not having to invest into more precision gives you more ability to take what you want.
2) You go for a bunch of (2) duration bonuses, while I’m running all six runes of Lyssa. Are you finding that works out well? I personally love the added cleanse on Mass Invisbility, as it basically gives you the time to summon a phantasm and channel an entire Mantra to put yourself more or less back to full.
A shame that the precision would be going to waste without Sigil of Earth, so that alone might change my mind, but I’ll have to see how it plays out.
3) 30 points in Illusions over 30 points in Inspiration. I personally wouldn’t ever run this build without the full 30 in Inspiration, as the continuous shattering is easily half of the build’s healing.
Illusionary Persona also doesn’t seem exceptional here – you do get the free one second on Distortion and some extra confusion, but you don’t particularly care about getting the fourth illusion hit on things like Mind Wrack.
Have you tried 30 points in Inspiration?
4) Some utility differences. For instance, I would never run without Mantra of Pain and have zero interest in Signet of Illusions since I shatter so much.
Have you tried running MoP for the chain healing when necessary?
But, yeah, outside of that we’re basically spot on the same build. Completely agree with you on how it plays, as well, although there are problems outside of phantasm Mesmers, a la BM Ranger or a good S/D or D/P Thief.
A better question: do you prefer shattering consistently or making phantasms and having them stick around?
If the first, you’re probably going to want to aim for 0/20/20/0/30 and focus on being awesome with Staff and shattering all day every day.
If the second, you’re probably looking at 0/20/20/25/5 or something of that sort. iDuelist will hit like a truck and cause a ton of bleeds while iWarlock will spike for good damage after Chaos Storm or somesuch.
Either way, your first 5 trait points should go into Illusions and stay there.
As for utilities, it really depends a lot on what sort of gear you’re looking at running. Blink, Decoy, and Feedback are what I usually look at as the ‘default’ PvE utility setup, with whatever for the Elite – probably Time Warp, but the others have their places – and either Ether Feast or Mantra of Recovery for the healing skill – MoR if traited for excellent Mantras or Mender’s Purity, Ether Feast otherwise.
@drongas: This is one of the only other trait distributions I’ve actually tested. Biggest problem with it is that you lose out on a lot of healing and confusion in long fights because you’re missing extra shatters, extra confusion, and a bunch of extra confusion duration.
Oh, and Illusionary Elasticity, which means you’d have to go deeper into precision to make Sigil of Earth useful to begin with.
So, yeah, it doesn’t really work out all that well.
@Pyroatheist: One of several reasons that I suggest going for Rampager’s trinkets with Apothecary jewels in them.
To be fair, it is still 9 gold for each jewel at that point, but it’s a hell of a lot better than paying 50 for each trinket.
If you want basically the same setup you can switch the jewels around, as well. You’ll end up with either slightly less healing or slightly less condition damage, but the build still runs the same way. You can even manage more precision, but at that point you’re really starting to give up a bit too much of the rest of the build to support the bleeding from Sigil of Earth, which is probably not a good idea. (To be fair, haven’t tested that, so I can’t say for certain. Rather difficult to test every possible workable stat distribution, though.)
I’m personally running a mix of Ascended trinkets that give roughly the same distribution with more stats and some random unnecessary bonuses, but none of them significantly impact how the build feels.
(edited by Fuschia.6573)
@drongas: No worries on the English, mate. If I can understand you it’s more than good enough.
Anyways.
Sigil of Earth is better than it first appears. You have base 28% critical chance, and have essentially 100% Fury in a dueling situation to put it at 48%. If you auto-attack with Staff once every two seconds and factor in nothing else, you still have a fairly high chance of having it proc on CD with Staff.
Probably not quite as good on Scepter, though, which is a good point. Should consider something different there.
Rampager trinkets are essentially only for reaching the necessary precision to proc Sigil of Earth on CD as you rotate through everything. If I could cut them I would, but they’re the only set that gives precision as the major bonus.
So, any discussion about removing Sigil of Earth needs to include the possible positive side-effect of being able to switch Rampager to something else. This is one of the biggest areas where change might work its way into the build, but it requires more testing than anything else.
Dueling is actually pretty amazing here in some respects. Sharper Images means more Bleeding but requires a heavier investment into precision. Deceptive Evasion means more shatters which means both more heals and more confusion, and more illusions in general means more conditions.
I’ll agree that Focus would probably require traiting to receive the nod over Torch. Unfortunately, taking out any of the other traits in Inspiration robs the build of one of its key elements. Pistol I would only consider if respeccing into at least 15 Dueling and more precision, as its only really good if you can get 4-5 bleeds with iDuelist.
I really just wish iMage was anything other than a one-shot Confusion and shatter fodder.
I’ll agree with you almost entirely on the Elite skills. I would probably dump MI if I were running anything other than Lyssa runes, but as is I’m probably going to keep it as the default.
EDIT: Completely forgot to mention the Sigil of Battle. This is actually the thing I’m least sold on in the entire build outside of the Sigil of Earth on Scepter. It’s great because the build really enjoys the extra damage, but you’re not constantly swapping to take the most advantage of it. Might be better to switch to something with higher immediate impact on swap, a la Sigil of Hydromancy.
(edited by Fuschia.6573)
And saved for possible future additions and whatnot.