Guild Wars 2

The viewers on twitch.tv right now don’t have a spectator mode to watch through.

The Mesmer is a duelist, that is where it is strongest.

It doesn’t scale well beyond 2v2; as you pass into 3v3+ it gets weaker and weaker (incidentally the ele gets stronger in larger engagements) and this is all intentional.

All professions will never be balanced in both 1v1 and large team fights, trade offs must be made.

It’s for spectators on the stream at MLG you doofus.

If you think clones are the most dangerous thing a Mesmer brings to the table then you must have 25 stack of IRL confusion. xD

And the very idea that a lack of competence of the part of the player constitutes an imbalance on the part of the game is absolutely ridiculous.

Mesmers excel in 1v1, are great in 2v2, but as you progress into 3v3 and 4v4 and 5v5 it starts getting worse and worse.

Mesmer are niche duelist that typically don’t scale well into larger engagements which I think is fine. It’s not as if they do everything equally well, and builds like backstab thieves give phantasm mesmers a really hard time.

I hope some the people whining about this and that on the forums take the time to read this and take a step back to realize that they haven’t mastered the game, and maybe that thing that keeps killing them is doing so not because it’s overpowered but because they haven’t figured how to deal with it yet.

+1 to you sir

If getting caught without an escape up is the only time you die to pistol whip, isn’t it working as intended?

If there is counter play, but not a HARD counter so it is situationally effective but not god mode impossible to beat. Sounds like it’s perfectly balanced.

Personally I don’t have any problems with pistol whip, and the signet of illusions nerf makes AoEing phantasms down a very viable option if you dodge the first attack; that “low CD” isn’t any lower than guardian greatsword spin or dragons tooth.

Moa Morph is a transform, like Lich Form or Death Shroud.

It turns you into a completely different character which is why certain pets vanish, the reason others don’t is just in the way that different ones are coded. I don’t think the inconstancy is intended it’s just a side effect of the code that they haven’t had time to fix yet.

Best finishing move for thieves is Black Powder from pistol off hand, it lays a small AoE field which blinds every 1 second causing the next attack to miss. Meaning they can’t hit you with there disable or even there auto attacks.

Second best option is to just finish them in stealth, grab that dagger off hand and Cloak and Dagger there downed soon to be corpse and then go to town with your cow finisher. =)

There are a wide variety of stun breakers, some are better for team fights and self peeling then others.

Necro Ghost Walk give you swiftness and the ability to juke with the optional return component, Engi Rocket Boots fires you a great distance behind yourself, Mesmer Decoy gives you instant stealth and yet another clone to throw off your opponents.

You shouldn’t have any trouble escaping focus if you’re running the proper defensive abilities on your bar.

And no DR is not needed or wanted in this game, it’s far to “gamey” as a mechanic that goes on completely behind the scenes and takes away from the focus on what is happening on the screen. And also makes abilities preform less than there tooltip states under certain conditions which is less straight forward for spectators and just makes less sense in general.

When I noticed I could dodge while Moa Morphed, I stopped complaining about it.

P.S.
Moa Morph is hugely telegraphed, very easy to see it coming.

I commend you Liav and +1 for taking the time to make a well built post on what can make this game great with many valid concerns.

But on the subject of quickness I have to disagree with you.

First off I do not have to blow every deffensive CD to escape hundi blades or pistol whip, as a mesmer all I need to do is keep my staff 2 skill (phase retreat) off CD when fighting them and I can kite the quickness duration easily.

Secondly I’m surprised to hear you say that quickness is required on a thief, because what is arguably there best build doesn’t use it at all.

This build is a backstab variant with a 10/30/30/0/0 trait split and soldier amulet, tons of condi removal, tons of hp regen, high effective hp, and no penalty from lack of precision because backstab always crits.

There is always a meta advantage to this build because the fact that you are always in stealth where you cannot be attacked by phantasms means you should always win 1v1 against a phantasm mesmer which is what you will find on the enemy back point or treb 80% of the time. (you also get free cloak and dagger off phantasms for easy stealth)

The power rifle engi is another example of an very powerful build that doesn’t utilize quickness but still offers insane burst, the greatsword / mindwrack mesmer build is yet another example of extreme burst without quickness and elementalist is capable of the same thing (much more difficult to land though).

TLDR
My point here is that quickness builds are not outright better than non quickness builds. If anything quickness builds are weaker because if they miss there 4 second window (damage is avoid for the duration) they fall off.

You can get a lot of output from confusion, the issue with condi builds n Mesmer is that you lack the cover conditions of an engineer and the application is spikey rather than constant; because of this all your precious confusion stacks can disappear with a single wipe.

The highest output comes against auto attack builds because of the constant one skill activations.

Not sure if this was said already but confusion damage is split between PvE and PvP, that is why you see different numbers.

After I realized I could dodge while Moa Morphed I stopped complaining about it.

I like to Moa Morph people I have just downed before I finish them.

Nah that’s considered “cheesing it” it’s not intended, there is a similar bug with mantras that causes them to go on full cooldown if canceled or interrupted right as the charge completes and the skill swaps over.

Halfcentaur.9706:

Gigawatt.5217:

This means that you DO NOT have to wait for them to finish the shatter animation and the purple orbs empty before you summoning more illusions. The orbs are merely a visual thing and do not accurately represent your actual illusion pop cap where shatters are concerned.

Yea. That’s false.

I only play sPvP, maybe it works differently in PvE or WvW?

30 crit strikes, 30 shadow arts with soldier amulet / zerker jewel is the most well rounded thief build I’ve tried.

Lots of condi removal and self healing with massive escape potential, the damage is constant and impressive from repeated backstabs even if you don’t go for the glassy 10k crit stuff; much more reliable.

If you’re into that then I suggest the Sword / Dagger daze spamming build as well, it’s similar but you get in your damage from the sword auto attacks. I run it with Haste and Signet of Agility so it’s kinda of half way between Pistol Whip and Back Stab.

It’s a lower output build but you can run it with zerkers to compensate and with Runes of the Mesmer and traited to blind on stealth, your target will never be able to strike back.

I’d really like to see set spawn timers in 5v5, by watching the clock and timing my finishes I can consistently give my opponents long respawns.

But it feels so meta game, almost like abusing the mechanics yet you can’t afford not to do it when it’s a 15 second difference in timer on every kill.

In order for quickness to make pvp imbalanced one team or one profession or some subset of them would have to have an edge over all others due to quickness and you have presented no compelling evidence that guardians for instance, are a horrible profession because they lack quickness.

My position is that you have presented no such evidence because there is none; and that sPvP imbalance as a direct result of quickness simply does not presently exist.

Beating quickness
Is all about having sufficient defensive abilities to avoid damage for the duration of your opponent’s quickness, the problem more often than not is that someone got caught in a control effect and then bursted with quickness, not just quickness itself.

These control effects can be broken, blinked, cleansed, dodged, etc.
Or you could get a peel from one or more of your team mates, there is no way to hard counter quickness itself. But you can certainly avoid the damage by avoiding the accompanying control effects.

If no such effects are use, then you are free to dodge when you see it coming or throw up a shield block / blurred frenzy / shelter / endure pain / protect me, or any other form of damage prevention.

Aside from Time Warp and Heartseeker, damage avoidance in that tiny window of quickness generally isn’t that big of an issue.

And if I’m dying to it than I know I either misplayed or made a choice to not run the utilities I needed to survive that particular match up. Either way the burden is always on the player.

It would certainly be nice, but presently I don’t think it’s something that is breaking the game right now (at least in sPvP).

I do have some good news for you though! As soon as you hit the shatter your illusions go into a “shattered” state and no longer take up space in your illusion pop cap.

This means that you DO NOT have to wait for them to finish the shatter animation and the purple orbs empty before you summoning more illusions. The orbs are merely a visual thing and do not accurately represent your actual illusion pop cap where shatters are concerned.

You get used to charging it.
I ran mantras for so long I still use Ether Feast at the start of the match some times. xD

I found that when my illusionary leaps were missing it was really a range issue, running bonus move speed per illusion in the inspiration line helps to alleviate some of these issues.

But really you just need to save it until you’re close enough, if anything the problem is range relative the range of other professions gap closers; but most of those don’t have imob built in.

GS is a burst weapon for Mind Wrack based builds, usually traited for extra bounce in the last line and following the standard [summon phantasm > swap to GS > domi signet > 2 > 4 > 3 > F1] combo with high precision, critical damage, and power.

If you throw in Power Spike from Mantra of Pain few professions can survive that combo in sPvP unless they have protection up.

I like quickness because without it some of the most bursty skills in the game become far less of an issue. Quickness causes those weapon skills to have longer cooldowns on there maximum effectiveness than the cooldown on there standard use.

This helps to add depth to the skill pool by putting in a strong “3-2-1 SPIKE!” skill without saying hundred blades needs a 60second CD. Which would be silly for a weapon skill.

It also allows for a lot of play in it’s use, you can burst with a variety of weapons in different ways whether you want to use Haste with Pistol Whip or Haste your Auto Attacks with Sword + Dagger.

I’ll sight the exception for Heartseeker, but that skill is just blatantly broken.

I think were just going to have to wait and see if AoE is a hard enough counter these “familiar” based builds. Lots of teams are already going back to things like GS guardian or glass staff ele in order to get these down quickly.

I know that my glass shatter build wrecks phantasm Mesmers for instance and Thieves with thieves guild if I catch them in a CC.

The overwhelming number of “pets” is a valid concern to be sure.
But many builds like spirit ranger or turret engineer just aren’t very strong in competitive play at the moment.

Buffing AoE is one straight forward way of combating this issue if it really turns out to hamper competitive play in the long run, but it’s a fine line with professions like ranger and mesmer that are reliant on there familiars as a primary damage source.

My biggest concern with such a change is that AoE abilities like GS guardian spins or ele scepter would continue to deal great single target damage while incidentally becoming a hard counter to any pet reliant profession.

The “hybrid” nature of these abilities is already a little bit of an issue, at least for mesmers in my opinion (not game breaking) in that they do the jobs of AoE and single target well at the same time.