Showing Posts For Kupi.7864:
Now that was a really great explanation, Pyro! Thank you!
Therefor, taking carrion gear would be lowering your condition damage because of vit instead of toughness, vastly decreasing your endurance regeneration, vastly decreasing your bleed pressure, making your heals less effective, and reducing your power damage defense, while providing you with a tiny bit of power.
And aren’t there any builds that would make better use of carrion? I got carrion set a year ago because of some well-rated build (I don’t remember anymore, heh), but from your explanation it looks like rabid is better on mesmer pretty much all the time. Or did I miss something?
Yeah, I honestly can’t think of a particularly good use for carrion. Even a hybrid build wouldn’t want it, because you really do need that crit chance for sharper images in hybrids. Someone else might have an idea though.
I’m a no-name theorycrafter, but I’ve toyed around with builds designed around stacking both Confusion on the enemy and Retaliation on myself, using Signet of Inspiration to pass the accumulated Retaliation to nearby allies. Since Retaliation keys off of Power, it’s important to have a strong Power stat as well as Condition Damage.
I make no claims that the strategy is actually more effective than focusing on Sharper Images bleeds, though.
In a PvE environment, particularly in dungeons, there’s a “golden radius” of around 600 in-game distance units where players are most powerful. Because so many ally-supporting moves affect allies nearby, at that range or less, standing outside of that range tends to weaken you significantly because you miss all the boons and other effects that you might otherwise have within that range. The Greatsword gets its maximum damage at the end of its range, from 900 to 1200 units away from the target, and significantly less than that in close combat. So since the most effective (and, indeed, generally only) strategy in world events and dungeons is to pile on top of one another and beat things to death, the greatsword doesn’t really have what’s expected of it.
However, that’s if we’re limiting the scope of the discussion to PvE content only. As others have pointed out, in PvP, the weapon has uses— when attacking defended gates, you want to attack from range; in WvW, zergs tend to trade fusillades of ranged attacks before actually closing distance with one another; the clones are decent for proccing Sharper Images and the cripple is good for 1v1 keep-away games, and so on.
Anyone saying the weapon is not useful under any circumstances is being needlessly antagonistic. But if you want to do the most damage in the shortest amount of time while piled on top of all your friends, which is most of the time in PvE and some of the time in WvW, then the greatsword isn’t as good as the one-handed sword.
Just thinking out loud here: the major weakness of mantras is that they take a long time to cast. However, once you cast them, they stay up until you expend them or die— so why not just stack them up and hold onto them until you absolutely need them? Empowering Mantras gives you 4% more damage for every Mantra you have readied, which, if you stack up as many as possible, results in a flat 16% damage boost, which in my experience affects Mind Wrack in addition to your other direct damage. It’s yet another big damage boost you can throw on top of Precise Wrack and Mental Torment to get that much more shatter damage— while still having at least one each of an instant interrupt, a two-condition cleanse, and a stun-break/stability combo without losing any damage.
But, since I’ve never heard of the Almighty Mantra-Stacking Shatter Build before, and the tools to make it have always been there, I’m guessing there’s at least a few good reasons why it actually isn’t viable for sPvP.
If they swapped the positions of Deceptive Evasion and Imbued Diversion (making Illusions 30 a choice between Illusionary Persona and Deceptive Evasion), it’d be fine. Then your options would be either much more powerful shatters or the ability to generate massive numbers of clones, but not both. As it stands, I see no reason not to take 20 Dueling and 30 Illusions— you just get so much extra shattering ability by having both that it leaves every other option behind.
Mesmers currently have four off-hand weapons and only two main-hand weapons to pair them with. I would much prefer a new main-hand weapon (of any kind!) to another off-hand weapon to put on the pile.
Besides, the trend (the trend, not the rule) is to have the Phantasm mimic the weapon it was created with. We already have a shield-fighting Phantasm in the Phantasmal Defender. So what weapon would the hypothetical Mesmer shield’s Phantasm wield?
If I had to guess, the shatter trick as it stands has something to do with the way you maintain a clone indicator even after you issue the shatter. Meaning: notice that when you make a clone and tell it to shatter, you maintain a pink dot for that clone until it actually explodes. But if you shatter three illusions at once, then create a new clone, you don’t blow up any of the existing ones— they’re tracked as an “existing illusion” without being tracked as one of your limit of three illusions. Thus, if you can somehow issue a shatter, generate more clones, and tell those to shatter before the original set explodes, it’s possible that the server sees you as having five to six illusions— with unsettling implications for the calculation of Mind Wrack damage. Add to that the Might stacks from Shattered Might and you’ve got shatter damage beyond the designed boundaries of the game.
The Illusions trait line, as with all the other trait lines in the fifth slot, is the class line. It mirrors the Primary Attribute from the original Guild Wars, which so defined the class that you were gimping yourself if you ignored it. Monks that didn’t put points in Divine Favor threw away half of their healing, on average, and Warriors who didn’t put anything into Strength did significantly less weapon damage than Warriors who did. The same principle still applies in Guild Wars 2: if you ignore your fifth trait line, you’re going to be a bad example of your class because you haven’t put any resources into improving the core feature of your class. So I see no problems with a Mesmer who puts 0 points in Illusions feeling like dead weight. That’s because they are.
I’d like to throw my wholehearted support behind the idea of a 1-second blur on Illusionary Counter, because blocking one attack only to get splattered by the one behind it if you want to get the counter-attack damage is counter-intuitive.
I would also like to propose one very small change that I believe has been proposed before but would bear repeating: the Scepter’s projectile on the auto-attack should bounce to up to three targets, even if it requires a slight downtuning of the damage to a single target to balance the extra hits. Here’s why: as it stands, the reason why people like the Greatsword’s clones is they attack many times over, allowing them to stack up bleeds against their target when combined with Sharper Images. Giving the Scepter’s auto-attack the ability to bounce to three targets would give the Scepter’s clones the same attribute in the multiple-enemy axis.
If the Scepter bolts bounced to three targets and the Illusionary Counter blurred you during the counter-attack, I think the Scepter would be a worthy option. People will always grumble about it being a kitten-litter weapon for idiots only, but at that point it will be more about cultural inertia than anything.
Good call, this needs a fix! Here is a slightly clearer version, but it just looks like facerolled-keyboard text:
Well, that makes sense for a book of “Wrath”, doesn’t it?
The thing to keep in mind about healing is that the “healer” role has been diffused among all classes. Even the party-oriented healing skills like Healing Breeze (Guardian) and Well of Blood (Necromancer) are predominantly for the benefit of the caster— Well of Blood, for instance, heals allies… for 152 HP per second across 10 seconds. That’s 1520 HP, compared to the 5240 that it provides to the Necromancer on-cast. That’s the trend with basically every ally-focused healing in this game: you put out very small amounts of healing to your allies, because every single character in the game is totally capable of maintaining its own HP through its designated healing skill. The responsibility of keeping a character’s HP high lies with that character’s player. There are no “healers”.
So, as other people have been saying, there are plenty of ways to make an effect support build, but it’s not going to look like the traditional Cleric or Priest— for Mesmers, it mostly involves stacking random Boons on allies, reflecting projectiles, and knocking the Boons off of enemies.
If I had to guess, you’re running into the Champion-associated boon, “Defiant”. Basically, to prevent Champions from being stun-locked by groups chaining together Daze, Stun, launch, or anything else that Interrupts, they have a special boon called “Defiant”. The only way to remove a stack of Defiant is to use an interrupt ( / “crowd-control”) skill on them. When the Champion has no stacks of Defiant, the interrupt will work as normal, but they regain all of their stacks of Defiant. So crowd-control skills will work on Champions, but only one for each time you get through their Defiant stacks.
What I believe happened is you cast Moa Morph on the Champion while it still had a stack of Defiant. The Defiant stack absorbed your Moa Morph, causing it to disappear into the ether, as you saw. You can get around it, though: use Diversion, Illusionary Riposte’s double-tap skill, Into the Void (the second half of Temporal Curtain), Signet of Domination, or any other source of Daze to get rid of all the stacks of Defiant. Once it’s open, THEN you can use Moa Morph on the Champion. Assuming nobody else uses a crowd-control skill before you do, of course…