Guild Wars 2

I am worried that so far, 4 out of 7 of our ambush skills have a cast time longer than the Mirage Cloak duration. Easy targets for interrupts :/

Well, it has uses in solo plays, as you struggle with might stacks. Although you don’t get the stacks if you cast your iSwordman while running to the mob.
Meh.

Zerker staff is quite good against world boss, who are loaded with conditions, making your iWarlocks hit like trucks. Just summon them and switch to your other weapon set for optimal dps.

I think that giving alacrity to revenant was the best thing that could happen to mesmers.

Alacrity is so good, people have grown so dependant to it, that no matter how good the next elite specialization will be, it can not compete with chronomancer (unless it gives alacrity too). So revenant got alacrity on a core legend ? Fine. It doesn’t affect out hability to spread quickness anyway (mosty tied to core mesmer). By the way, you will notice that even if revenant can spread alacrity, they are nowhere near as good as chronomancers at doing so. And by not giving it to Glint, they do not tie revenant to herald, either.

By doing that, Anet just opened us the door to another elite specialization without completely removing alacrity from a party.

Goodness gracious, no ! Not another boonshare specialization !
Give us some damage already !

Shaman.2034:

(…)
The following skills and traits do not spawn clones while under the effects of Endless Miniature Tonic:

• Mirror Blade (Greatsword 2)
  (…)
• Illusionary Riposte (Sword 4 – after a successful block)
  (…)

Actually, those are great. It allows to use those skills without worrying about overriding a phantasm. Thanks for the tip !

I do believe they have changed some intonations as well. For exemple, the way he says “Ready to meet my latest creation ? No ? TOO BAD !” used to be in a very sarcastic tone. Now, it’s just as if he was half-asleep.

Magic bullet only, but I still enjoy it on my mesmer

Funny enough, since this thread has been started I’ve met three power shatter mesmers in sPvP, despite not having seen one in months.
The three of them got obliterated (Sapphire division -I’m just your regular PvEr doing his dailies). This build is still not meant for beginners

Thaumanova Reactor krewe called, they want their catapult back.

Xyonon.3987:

Aslong as you do trait for domination and chrono and chaos, use zerk / assassin gear only and use at least 1 sword mainhand, everything is fine.

Are you sure about Chaos ? I would have suggested Illusions.

Back to the subject : check the Lazy Kai build for a painless open PvE experience https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Guide-The-Leveling-Open-World-Compendium-1/

A good way to understand the importance of condition duration is to imagine your condition to be an instant damage skill which would remove (damage per second)*duration HP.

If your opponent has an infinite amount of HP (meaning, several order of magnitude more HP than your skill is going to remove), your bleeding stack which will remove 100HP per second during 12 seconds is similar to an instant skill that would deal 1200 damage. Your bleeding stack of 120 HP removed per second during 6 seconds is similar to an instant skill that would deal 720 damage.

You would say, since condition damage and duration are multiplicative while calculating the real damage, increasing one by 10% or the other by the same amount is the same. Which is false, because of the condition factor applied to the condition damage modifier (bleeding: 0.06, burning: 0.155, poison: 0.06, etc., see the wiki) plus the constant damage (bleeding: 22, burning: 131.5, poison: 33.5). A 10% increase in condition damage is lower than a 10% increase in actual damage. A 10% increase in condition duration, however, is a direct 10% increase in actual damage (if it allows another tick).

Back to your exemple : 1 bleeding stack, 6s, 100 damage per second for a total of 600 HP removed
If you up the condition duration by 100% to make it last 12s : 1200 HP remove, as stated above.
To remove the same amount of HP only by increasing the condition damage, you need to increase your condition damage by 128%.

Of course, this calcul is only worth “during” the fight, not taking in account the border cases. A building sacrificing condition duration for condition damage reaches its full damage potential faster, and has less damage loss when the boss dies with several condition stack still active. In other words : long fights, i.e. high level fractals and raids.

Note : as far as I have seen, only a couple of traits actually increase the final damage applied by a condition (such as Hidden Barb or Poison Master for the ranger). All other damage modifier increase the condition damage base stat.

===
Now, another exercise : if we keep our beloved exemple (1 bleeding stack, {6s ; 120dps} versus {12s; 100dps}, with another stack applied each second), how does fight duration influences the damage ?

As expected, and stated by people earlier, each build reaches its damage peak when the first stack ticks for its last time (for the lulz, try and say that aloud), which is respectively 6s and 12s.
When the damage build reaches its peak, the duration build is 320 total damage late, equivalent to slightly more than 3 of its ticks. It starts being more powerful at the 10s mark (4 ticks later).
On a side note, the damage per tick becomes better for the duration build at the 8s mark.

Conclusion : same as above, the longer the fight, the better condition duration is.

Xyonon.3987:

Heya,

I have to disagree with you guys, saying there aren’t any other viable builds. Metabattle is way out of line about that (like always … xD). There are extremly many Mesmer builds you can use in raids, if you know when and how.

• Danger Time Chrono
• Standard Support Chrono
• Danger Time Tank Chrono
• Standard Tank Chrono
• Heal-O-Mancer (Tank aswell)
• Max DpS Power Chrono
• Max DpS Condi Mes
• Support Condi Mes

I can give you at least one reason for using every single one of them. I played them all and I pick everyone of them once in a while. How much I trust in each build? Well look at my inventory:

Greez!
- Madame Le Blanc

Apart from the very obvious standard support, standard tank (which is, I assume, standard support with a bit of toughness) and Heal-o-Mancer (which you have discussed in another thread), could you elaborate on those builds ?

I’m most especially interested in how you make the Danger Time and Condition variations work, keeping in mind we are talking PvE.

Alex Shatter.7956:

(i dont know why, but assassins is preferred over zerker).

Because reflects. I don’t think this is still the case nowadays.

My PvE opinion on some of your questions.

TL;DR: What you have to understand is that HoT didn’t change many things for the core mesmer. If you do not/can not play chronomancer at the time being, your old mesmer build should still work -at least in PvE settings. What has changed is every other profession, so you will feel less powerfull not because you are, but because everyone else got a huge power increase.

Fay.2357:

(…)
You can do that, but it’s massively unreliable. In that case, your buffing priority is determined by proximity. In VG, this means your non-circle squad will get the vast majority of buffs. On the others, it’s more of a total crapshoot, but you can almost guarantee that it won’t be an even spread. You’ll almost definitely be wasting a lot of quickness overcapping on people that happen to be nearby more often. It’s more efficient to just go into a squad and optimize for full buffing of the people that you know will be receiving the buffs.

The result is pretty much the same if you stand in a 5-man subsquad, without the occasional buff on the other team.
I don’t feel that I overcap the team since there is always one reason or another someone didn’t get the tick (they exited the well too early, they dodged Tides of Times, etc.), although it may be a l2p issue.

Moreover, during Gorseval burst phases, the team is less spread out and benefit more from the random distribution (can’t talk about Sabetha since I lack experience there).

Myrias.8732:

100% uptime is completely viable… what changed is the following:

When each player in a raid enters combat, their boon prioritization will be locked in based on the composition of the subgroup they are currently in. That prioritization will not change until the player has left combat, even if their subgroup composition changes while they are in combat.

For Mesmer, this means that our wells and Time Warp strictly prioritize the people in your group. The reasoning for 100% boon duration was because it was possible for a single mesmer to get high up time on the entire raid of 10-people. More boon duration helped this immensely.

Now that we got pseudo shot in the foot, up time on our group of 5 people is all that matters.

In raid environment, shouldn’t you be in your own subsquad, and if possible with a revenant ? 100% boon duration still matters in this case.

Is your guild on NA or EU ?

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

Buff some of our useless utilities, like mirror images. Why is this on a 45 second cooldown, yet decoy (which is stronger) is on a 40 second cooldown?
Why does precog still have a cast time?
Why are the wells cooldowns untouched?
Why are our Chono Traits untouched?
Why is timewarp, despite being severely weakened in most game modes, still on a 180 second cooldown. Despite that Gravity Well, an easily argued stronger elite, is on a 90 second cooldown?
Hey, we just buffed the kitten out of boon corrupt Necro. Can arcane thievery get some mother kittening love?
Can we replace phantasmal defender with something actually useful?
Can we get rid of some of the weird kitten after cast delay on our skills? Seriously, has anyone else noticed that sword 2 has an after cast in which you can’t dodge or do anything initially, unless you cancel the attack slightly early?

Have I made my point yet, are we about done?

Next patch note :
- updated cooldown of decoy from 40 to 45 seconds, to match mirror images
- updated cooldown of Gravity Well from 90 to 180 seconds, to match Time Warp
- fixed a bug where Quickness given by mesmers was a Boon instead of an Effect. Still corruptible.
- inscreased delay between iDefender attacks by 50% to avoid excessive sustain
- added a skill fact on Blurred Frenzy to document the aftercast
- fixed a server crash

Maybe faster to summon the 1st phantasm, but since it will be trickier to proc the block, so will be the summoning of the 2nd phantasm :/

Ananeos.4587:

Novamatrix.2569:

You people obviously dont know how to play your class correctly

Do you know who you are talking to? THE Fay, literally the first person to introduce the Chronobunker meta to Guild Wars. He obviously knows how to play his class correctly.

Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

It would be more accurate to say : the first person to publish a chronobunker build on the forum. I don’t think he was the first one to figure the build out (I did use it as soon as HoT was live).

Nevertheless, it is still fun to read people saying Fay has no idea how to play his class

Shame on me, I didn’t see the survey. Here we go !

How did you find the guide on the forum?

[ ] I found it by myself.
[ ] I found it by a link in a post leading me there.
[ ] I saw it in Kaiyanwan’s signature and followed the link.
[X] I googled for a mesmer leveling guide
[ ] else (please specify)

I use (used) the guide and it:

[X] is exactly what I was looking for
[ ] is helping me a lot
[ ] is sort of helpful
[ ] is not helpful

Should the guide be more visible and easier to find in the first place?

[ ] Yes, new players and new mesmers should have an easier time to find the guide.
[X] A clear maybe.
[ ] It is easy enough to find the guide in the first place.

Clarification on the last question : when I google “mesmer leveling guide”, I find the “old” thread which redirects here. It’s good, it’s great, but it’s not perfect. Maybe add some reddit visibility ? Lots of people go there, but most of the builds I’ve found for a new user are either outdated or refer to Sanderinoa’s (which, however great it is, is better aimed at level 80s).

I would suggest you to check out Lazy Kai’s build for painless leveling and open world PvE : https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Guide-The-Leveling-Open-World-Compendium-1

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3v4eoi/rejoice_the_ranger_spirit_bug_was_fixed

Can anyone please check wether this issue has been fixed for iAvenger as well ?
I would if I could, but I’m stuck at the office.

Fay.2357:

Edit: @FrenchFry:

Shield phantasms (and all non-human entities such as ranger pets, spirits, turrets, etc) are broken. They prioritize buffing other pets over players. Until that’s fixed, you can safely assume that shield phantasms don’t exist for purposes of alacrity sharing.

At first I was in denial, but the test just confirmed that. Man, this bug really hurts.

Sorry for necro -but hasn’t this been ninja nerfed ?
I can’t see the distance to my personal waypoint anymore.

I’d like to go further with your theory.
I think mordy, no matter how powerful he is, is a plant dragon and has severe issues fighting far from his roots. Look, it sends vines here and there but fails to do any severe damage to the pact infrastructures.
Lore wise, the “Mordrem Attack” we had prior to HoT release, was a failed attempt from Mordremoth to take over a part of Tyria. He realized then that his breachers and husks are not all-powerful. He needs an army adapted to the ground he wants to take.

WARNING —SPOILER AHEAD (chapter 15+16)

Proper trial seems to confirm your results.
My previous testing was during a cliffside fractal, I could not remove a very long burning stack (from jumping on a fire), and I cannot reproduce it at the moment.
Case closed, I guess -thanks for your time

Strange. I did the tests last week and none worked. Tested again today, mostly with Signet of the Ether, still no result. The skill description was not even updated with “Condition removed : 1”, as it used to be.
Gonna try again with Ether Feast.

Hi folks,

Is it only me, or is the Inspiration minor “Mender’s Purity” currently not working ?
Tried in PvE with every healing skill, none of them has removed condition. I’d rather have someone confirm this before sending a bug report

Thanks for the update !

Definitely Lazy Kai’s, best open world build you’ll find

The patch has changed the Signet of Illusions description, and specifies it resets Mind Wrack, Cry of Frustration, Diversion and Distortion. I am quite sure it has been done in anticipation of it not resetting Continuum Shift.

Saturn.6591:

(…)
On a sidenote, and slightly more on topic… who in OMFG is in/on EU anyway? I have a feeling that most (or even all) of the activity is NA-based.

Some of us are. Man, does it feel lonely most of the time…

IGN: Taaun We
Role: Scholar
Server: Vizunah Square [EU]
Playstle: mostly PvE, interested in WvW
Time : a couple of hours per evening during work days, and anytime during week end.

Finally managed to log into the forum to send my application