Guild Wars 2

Oh the week is starting GW2 exiting. The design is very well done. Not perfect but it should be considered and done!

Haven’t played my Mesmer in well over 4 months now. What is a good solo build or just doing open world stuff like Silver Wastes and dry top as well as doing the story solo?

Doesn’t matter if condi or zerker

Well. Well . Well. There you just lost 20€ I wanted to spend Anet. Sure it is not much. But think about how many people will do the same. You will lose more money then you gain in the long run.

While you answering questions. Might I ask if there is any plans or even thought for the trait system. As it stands it is either very powerful or totally useless depending on the encounter and mode. Also is there any consideration made about certain anti fun mechanics in the game namely warriors being able to be immun to cc and chain stealth. While they are not an issue balance wise they are just badly designed from a fun and dynamic standpoint. The user has fun. Everyone else not. It is rather one dimensional and it oddly different from all other stuff in the game.

[quote=4397183;MatthewMedina.5419:]

They will . Not instantly as there be enough players who just want to finish the collection and will trade gems for gold. After a while though it will go down and if this keeps up they will just die out. New players won’t bother to get to max and old players have less and less to hold them ( alt leveling and eq is a big thing to keep old players)

@JonPeters

I am sorry but this is wasted effort. While it is great to see you keep working on things the system is just bad.

In theory it is a very good idea to encourage people to actually read the traits and explore the world.
In reality you spend 36 levels, close to half of the way to max. level, with out using a single trait. Getting random unlocks you don’t know where they come from for a system you don’t know about and quite possibly you can’t use.
It totally misses the idea of letting the play grow into the traits and expects them to get random traits and know what traits are and what could be useful ( aka. be a veteran of this game to some degree ) but at the same time not to want traits and be happy with a limited choice or going massively out of there way to see new stuff and get said trait ( aka. being new to the game) . In short it is a clash of design that ends up pleasing a few but leaving the majority in the dust.

The whole fake progression idea you tried to implement with it just kills it even more. Levels for trait points are not something players can look forwards too.
I fact most of the time they are utterly useless. You will find yourself with either to main traits you can’t use because of the lack of trait points or not enough trait points to get a build running that is actually a difference from having no traits and just the points from the trait lines. In short it is no fun, it doesn’t get people to think about there builds and most certainly does not help them know the trait system better.
How so? You get points at, for a new player, random levels. Traits are either scattered far far around the world giving you that weird semi encouragement to explore but not to as you visit the area to get the trait but maybe you want to keep exploring your old area or finish it but if you see fun stuff here it just delays it and you end up feeling like you are missing out . And the text in the pop up window is the same as in the trait screen. People don’t change because you slam them a pop up in the face. Ask Ad block.

A much better thing to do. Is either tie each trait to it’s own event that either makes you use it or shows you how it is used ( by say the enemy or an ally using it). That would be much more like the Gw1 elite skill hunting. But also very resource consuming on content only certain class maybe experience if they don’t decide to buy the trait.

Another option , and my favored one, is you gain traits as you level. You still get the same trait points as right now but each level you also get a trait. Frank level 25 on. One T3 trait before 80 ( as you can use them before 80 ), one of each trait line at 80 and the new ones can be kept as little hunts as the idea is nice if it is not stretched to a massive and endless grind. It gives you a certain sense of progression. It encourages you to play around with what you got and learn how to use the things you have and gives you joy of getting a new level as you get this new and shiny toy. And let’s be frank if a new play didn’t understand the basics of the combat up to level 25. The extra 5 level won’t change a thing. You need to implement reoccurring “practice” for things like dodging and other things. Not make it into small tiny bits because if you don’t get it you don’t get it no matter how simple and small it is.

Keep up the great work it is great to see you keeping your eye on things to improve them.

Sorry for any bad English it is not my first language

If this is also on EU then I would be in.

I agree. It is boggling my mind of they want to move away from the trinity yet implement bosses for the trinity. Let’s face it most bosses in dungeons are just damage sponges maybe a interesting mechanic attached to them. If you look at them most could be played with the trinity just fine with out a change or anything. And that is just wrong. Enemies should move and try to avoid our damage. Some bosses already have dodge move but they tend to use it only offensively as part of an attack and it really doesn’t matter if they dodge stuff with it. Making bosses have small active heals you can interrupt ( making interrupting more and frequent useful ) dodges amd movement around the player and actively avoiding AoE . Would improve a lot already.

aGenda.2358:

All NCSoft needs to do is take some of the design team from Wildstar (the people that design the dungeon and raid encounters — NOT the rest of the game) and sit them on ArenaNet for 6 months to teach them how to design challenging, unique PvE encounters. I am sure they will figure out how to make it work within the existing constructs of the GW2 game and vision.

I want the polish and aesthetics of GW2 but with some well-designed and challenging PvE small-group content.

No no no. issue is not that the guys at anet don’t know how to make them challenging counter.
Let me explain:
Any of the current dungeons would be working amazing and be mega fun with a trinity ( as fun as the trinity is also I am not asking for the trinity ) and also hard. It not complicated to balance stuff around that you know what to expect. Issue how ever is instead of one or 2-3 guys dealing damage you have 5. Instead of 1 person taking care that no one dies to the random AoE ( which is a lot if you ever played the dungeons how they are intended you’d notice they are quite hard hitting and require good movement and use of dodge to be avoided ) all can keep themselves topped of with no problem. Add to that the AoE’kitten through walls and certain skills have a hit limit also on boss ( most basic attack of them only hit 3) as non of the dungeon bosses has a phase kitten of a prevention to just burst them full on down. It is the most safe and effective to just go full dps. That’s to what the game lens due to the everyone takes care of themselves mentality. Add stuff like Protection ( 33% dmg increase no matter what your armor is ) , Might ( up to +875 power and condition so you will hard no matter what you do as long as you do damage ) and vulnerability ( up to +25% damage) and you’ll end up a system that was designed with the idea in mind that people can’t dish out all there damage so if they do it horribly breaks. There is no hard cap as far as I am aware so There is no need to spread out or approach it tactically more power = more damage as long as you keep hitting. As long as that doesn’t get addressed addressing stacking is impossible.

A change I could see coming that wouldn’t be a big nerf with out compromising the mobility it gives is that 4 stops after two ticks into a wall. If you use it for mobility you want it to not get you stuck in a wall. Of course that will be a major nerf to it in terms of PvE but it still is a lot of damage between 3 ,5 and 1 even if 4 is nerfed like that. My only fear is that they don’t get that the mechanics need a change and straight up reduce the numbers. It would make it unusable for every non running into a wall use,

Looks through thread

Jup OP most of the thread missed that it’s GW1 reference Skins and they are supposed to look that way to emulate this.

JonathanSharp.7094:

You guys know how we do it!

“When it’s ready”, indeed.

@ balance and splitting skills: Splitting the entire game into 2 (or 3, if you want to be technical: PvE, WvW, PvP) sets of #‘s creates a LOT of overhead in maintaining 3 sets of numbers. As most skills are fine across game types, it’s more efficient to split off problem skills and leave the majority of skills consistent across game types. It also means that people have a general sense of relative balance across all game types, and don’t have 2-3 sets of numbers to learn.

So basically what you did in Gw1. Very good. Just do what you learned from that game an it’ll be good.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I think some are confusing Living Story with Personal Story. If I’m not mistaken, the OP’s post is about the Personal Story.

Which costs nothing to do, but time. Unless, of course, he means the cost of the game. /shrug

Still totally optional. I am not sure if you can enter Dry Top with out but if you can both are just something you can do. Also his complain about costs is mainly due to the fact he isn’t quite leveled yet. They are not that high anymore.

Yoseue.4251:

Destroying their clones?! This sounds like a bug to me, clones should just be standing around doing 1dmg max.

Shhhhhh…. T.T

We don’t joke about that. They actually used to do the same amount of damage as you on there Autos in the Beta. Yes it was not balanced.

Oh I have really bad news for you OP. Guardians are even more Op. They have PERMANENT REGEN!!!!!11111 OMG how can they. Also they can blast, and pull and push and heal and buff and be invincible and deal tons of damage and cleans all condition and jump you like a billion times. Truly you must agree 6/6/6/6/6 Guardians are way way worse then 6/6/6/6/6 Mesmers.

Mayama.1854:

Bhawb.7408:

GWEN = 4 professions + veilbot = 5. Unless the definition of trinity has been changed that’s not 3 professions.

As said necro is only a addition that functions if the rest babysits him and mesmer is just a 2 spell bot.

No it is the WvW meta and it all has it’s reason.

Guardians are the tanky front line with low to medium damage grants stability, control, heals and buffs like might.
Generally the soak damage. Grant a lot of boons and provide very very valuable blast finishers and mass speedbuffs. A lot on low CD’s.

Warriors is the second part of the tanky front line.
Can be more damage oriented, can soak a lot of damage. Brings a lot of free stats and a ress to downed players and lords with banners. Depending on the build very versatile to use. Either a lot of Control , a lot of damage or a lot of support. A mix also works.

Ele. Fields and massive AoE. On small scale also conjured weapons. Heals and buffs to a lesser extend.
Do I really need to explain more? AoE damage is king in WvW and (staff) eles are the kings of AoE DPS.

Necro. Fears. Condition pressure, control and Wells .
Wells are stupidly strong in a zerg vs zerg . They do damage. Put conditions on enemie and benefit your allies.
In a siege scenario the Staff symbols are very very powerful. Zoning the enemy either off walls or punishing them if they try to run out of portals or do something else that forces them to step on a symbol. ( say am i the only one that believes that should be on the Mesmer. Punish enemy for doing or stepping into an area.. I mean GW1… Empathy… Nvm…) Also incredibly tanky for a caster which is always good in WvW.

If you like I can also make why the other classes are not picked.

TrOtskY.5927:

looooool 5-8 second stealth, 10 sec reveal????
What is a D/D supposed to do when not in stealth? What is a D/P supposed to do? So a D/D goes into stealth, is fighting a tanky guardian. Does a 3K backstab…then is revealed for 10 SECONDS? lmao

This thread was created by WvW whiners, it’s so obvious.
Next plz.

Dodge, move and play the game. Are you kittened or do you only play thief and are blind? Thief s if any class already have a lot of active defenses . You got a kitten load of blinds and jumps and you still moan how to survive. What the hell. UHHH … QQ I actually had to COMMIT to an action like every other class. QQ I can’t kitten up and be instantly gone again. QQ my mistakes actually stick to me QQ .
Seriously. Stop. You clearly don’t know how this game works.

TheRyftLord.5820:

Also consider that PvP isn’t the most important aspect of this game. Alot of people play primarily for the open world content, and some never even touch PvP or WvW. How fair would this be to the PvE thief players that enjoy using stealth for beating the life outta things in dungeons or the open world content ? They’d suddenly find themselves punished for using the stealth mechanic in the way that Warriors use their adrenaline, or Guardian uses their virtues, as they were intended within the game mechanics.

Awww…. aren’t this cute. Do you even play Warrior and Guardian? They are exactly like my sugested changes. Yes you can get your Adrenaline back fast as a Warrior the skills still have a cooldown. You can’t burst them out 3 times in a row ( you could if they where just Adrenaline gated). Same for the Guardian. Virtues have a long cooldown. She shortest it can get is 21 seconds on the virtue of justice. You can get it back with a kill if traited the other have twice or more of a cooldown and only can be recharged with a elite skill. So unlike stealth using them means you have to make a good move with them ( block an attack hit the blind etc.) .

Both mechanics punish you if you mess them up. Stealth doesn’t you need to be doing actively stuff wrong to go wrong with it. Also like Mayama.1854 stealth is not a Thief core mechanic. They happen to use it the most yes but they also happen to abuse it the worst. Like I said the mechanic is the main issue. It is just a bad mechanic.

As for your PvE argument. It wouldn’t matter. In PvE you use stealth for two reasons. One to drop aggro and two get the the bonus damage proc on your skills. You will not wait out the full duration to trick the enemy mob and be able to instant stealth again. Why would you. I think it is just a lot of Thiefs don’t wanting to see there class touched. That is understandable especially in PvE there damage is more meh then awesome. But that doesn’t change the fact that stealth is a toxic mechanic and needs to be changed.

vpchelko.4261:

I wanna RailGun

So you’re asking for this class?

Carighan.6758:

This gets spewed around a lot, and no one ever says anything about why that’d be.

See, I can do the same thing: Using sPvP as a reference to balance is kind of pointless.

WvW is not based on fighting others one on one even small group fights are not that common ( they should be but they aren’t). On top of that you have siege giving anyone big damage and AoE if he puts it in a decent.
WvW is objective based so what each individual does often gets boiled down to soaking up damage and dealing as much AoE possible as much as possible. So classes like Mesmer with virtually no AoE just are in a very odd spot. Yes there is roaming but even roaming is always that meh thing as you could be rolled over by a Zerg randomly.

And yes it is true the same could be said about sPvP as it is a severely different game mode. Thing simply is Anet really wants to make it work. Don’t ask me what they think with that or what but they want to make esports happen very hard and they don’t want to fully split PvE and PvP.

And here we see another thread issuing why PvP and PvE should be split up ahead ladies and gentleman some more “unbiased”

So after reading though all this you guys agree to disagree which class has it worse but know both have issues.

You know what the right move would be? Get both fixed and finally get anet to stop balancing only once every 6 month cough kill pvp cough

The issue atm really is two things. For one it is the old. PvP and PvE keeping each other chained down. Stuff can’t do ridiculous stuff in PvE because else it would break PvP. Certain stuff in PvP is totally stupid as it supposed to also work in a PvE environment. It is no surprise and has been called out on the release of the game and we see that it exactly is coming like it was expected. They need to pick a certain mode an favor it over the other. At the moment it seems to be PvP.
Now why is the Necro so hit by that. Several reasons. For one conditons are freaking strong in PvP . Good use of conditions ( poison to keep heals down, bleeds for constant pressure etc) and removing boons is really good in that mode. Guess which class does both very well?

The other thing is unlike all other classes the nerco has that very weird corruption system that punishes you a lot for doing stuff other classes can do for free making it simply harder to do anything as useful for a group because all your skills are self centered.

The main Issue with the Thief is stealth. Stealth in general in this game is a horribly designed mechanic and very badly balanced. Issue with any stealth is that there is atm. exactly 1 player skill to counter it that’s “Sic’em” from the ranger and even that one is highly conditional as I believe the pet needs to hit you before the reveal is applied.

Now why is stealth bad. It is very simple. It has high defense and offensive power with no draw back. Unlike other mechanics ( say a leap or a channel) using stealth doesn’t force you to be offensive or defensive. You have no scenario of where using stealth is bad. Especially for the Mesmer( with PU) and Thief you only get benefits. Putting pressure on the enemy to find you forcing him to take action with out taking any yourself ( beyond going to stealth but let’s not pretend like that is high skill cap).

So basically it is never a bad move to use stealth beyond wasting a cooldown but that can happen with literally any skill. This is also the first point why the Thief is such a big offender is being annoying to stealth. The draw back of CD falls short. If you are some what smart you can manage your initiative. Meaning you can use stealth as much as you want and have no cost for failing to use it.

Another point is that there is virtually no counter play. If anyone is gone argue AoE is a soft counter. Please get out of here. AoE dmg on enemies is a from a pressure. Putting an enemy under pressure makes it more likely that and unskilled player makes an mistake. So it literally is a soft counter to every class. Like mention before there is currently 1 skill in the kitten nal of all 8 classes that gives reveal and while they are looking to give the engi one as well ( which could mean all get one) it still is gone be very very annoying to deal with as you might get forced to run with a semi useful skill just to be able to reveal them. It is a nice start but it probably will not solve the problem.

Ultimately the stealth mechanic needs to change. Be it either that using it will give you the reveal debuff regardless of attacking or not. Dmg cancels stealth or more realistically shortens it’s duration. There needs to be something done as it is a very badly made system in the game causing fun only to the user and huge amounts of distress and annoyance to everyone else. To draw an analogy imagine the death shroud of the necro would not require stuff to die but instead would be fulled by using certain skills and combo finishers. An infinite health necro who could spamm a leap through a what ever field to stay topped of in Death shroud would be just that.

There is no way to currently get there. It is more a remain of Gw1 and subject of a future expansion ( most likely Living story ) . If you want a dessert area Dry Top got opened recently it is just that and very well made.

Not really. Sadly Mesmer are still in a very good spot in PvP and unless you are into PvP that means you have to expect nerfs. Our DPS is among the highest THEORETICALLY but that seems to enough for the life team to assume all is good. Yes we where strong. Yes it might get better. But it probably won’t for a long long time unless they split PvE and PvP. Else the simply can’t justify it as we will pub stomp in PvP. You see the issue. Two unrelated modes keep them from expanding the experience in the other. And we are not the only class with the issue.

As the title says I haven’t played in the while and wanted to ask what is new and the game and how the classes lock right now. I remember the Ranger being pertty much useless as his pet was dead 90% of the dungones. How is the Mesmer at the moment? When I left the best thing you could do was a shatter build … that is about it other stuff just didn’t work very well.

Cantha was an awesome place in GW1 and I really would fell sad if it would not make it’s come back in Gw2.
Put aside the fact that some of my favorite armour sets came from there. Put aside that the city of Kainegh and how awesome it could look.
We have a job to finish in Cantha A-net. We all started it almost 250 years back. The Wind of change blew over Cantha. Now it is time for another change. Don’t listen to the small brained people that claim something is racists. They are the biggest racists. The first step to not being racist is to accept everything. Be it a cutrual refence, a traditional dress or a plain joke. Nothing of that is harmfull it is the reatards and idiots of the world that make it hate. That make it bad. Don’t listen to them. Listen to us how know what is funny as a joke and where to draw the line.
So that the we can start the aria of the wind and bring and end to the ministry

Simple question. As it stand the staff is our condtion weapon and it sucks hard compared to other class conditon build options becaus of vulnerability. It does give out more buffs then any other conditon option on any class but the trade of is just way to bad in most cases. Vulnerability can be stacked very very […]very easy and is usless on a conditon dmg build even on a hybrid shatter build it dosn’t last long enough or is consistent enough to make it worth it. So should it be more like Siren’s Call Apply some buffs and only one condtion. I would be fine with losing vulnerability and burn if I would get some consistend dmg out put. What do you think?

Well you get 10 laurels from the monthly and 1 a day. Which means if you start on a new month it takes you almost a month ( 25 days + 10 monthly) to get one 35 laurel item. To be fair it is a thing you do while doing other stuff. But progression feels diffrent.

Nice idea but you overlook an issu. Either you need to make the skills very weak as they can be used by all classes or they will become a must for the most dps. And there is the problem A-net wants everyone to have the same gaming experience and be stand on equal ground that is why most racial skills are pretty weake.

I think this would be a very nice option for the forum. Sometimes I see a thread with like 8 pages and a redpost and finding the red post in that can take some time. A simple option like a button at the top left or something along those lines that allows you to jump to the very first red post in the thread would be very nice.

CM is just really kittened up a s dungone. Stuff hits like a truck, has high Hp or some big amount of CC.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Latinkuro.9420:

Changes I would love to see implemented now that hey plan to redesign Boss Encounter Mechanics:

1 Remove the annoying defiance buff from Bosses it was a lazyman’s way to fix the core of the issue anyway.

2 display name coherence, what I mean is most of the time I have no idea who is writing to me because the name is always different and if I’m in the middle of a fight I can’t stop to hover over their name to see the account name !

Give us options, say, display account name only for all characters of the same account or display chosen nickname for all characters of this account.

Just my 2 cents.’’

1. Defiance is necessary unfortunately, and we figured that out early on. Without defiance, groups just stack knockdown skills and utilities and kill every boss without them being able to get up off the floor. There are some funny videos of this that can be found where players repeatedly throws rocks at Adelbern and knock him over constantly, allowing them to kill him with ease.

2. I’m a bit confused still about what you are implying with this and how it effects boss re-designs. Could you elaborate some more?

Crazy idea make all CC turn into dazes on the bosses and give that a 25% duration reduce . Maybe give each boss on skill to break stuns and render him immun for a few seconds. That would make CC acutally usfull and importent .

Bump . This is happening again. Fix it!

Same. First I could join the over flow when I tried to log on a char that was in a zone with out an over flow the game just puting this error everytime I try to log in.

I don’t get all the QQ. A NERF to AoE does not mean that your 20k crit will turn into a 2k crit it more will be more like from 20k to 15k which probablx still is to much. Area of effect should have the draw back of lower dmg for more targets hit else why would you even think about going Single traget .

Atm yes. I tryed condtion builds, confusion builds , glamour builds and stuff but you are just lacking compared to simple and brain dead shatter burst. I

Conditions. What do you think of the current state of Conditons and Condtions builds. There is an obviouse lack diffrent conditions to macke more then 1 on condtions dmg dealer in a group viable.

Yargesh.4965:

I am leveling up a mesmer now and have never noticed a lack of damage. Constant movement is no more needed on mesmer than anything else I have played.

LaronX.8079:

If you have a Guardian don’t paly a Mesmer. They are kind of the ranged version of guardians. Low dmg on everyhit lots of tricky and need to be in constant movment.

low dmg /= lack of dmg

you just do your dmg in lot of small hits.

If you have a Guardian don’t paly a Mesmer. They are kind of the ranged version of guardians. Low dmg on everyhit lots of tricky and need to be in constant movment.

Pve isn’t that most classes utlity and dmg skills/traits for PvE are horrible bugged atm.

DanH.5879:

just as in RL, when you buy something, don’t expect the vendor to give your money back

Actaully it is the opposite. Most vendors will take it back to have a good reputation. Counting it isn’t used/ open yet.

cesmode.4257:

LaronX.8079:

Burst is better in pretty much any case where you not run into 4+ mobs on your own. So pretty much all of PvE and PvP ( players in PvP won’t let you kit them like Mobs do)
The main issu is that traits and weapon contradict each other.
You want to have stuff like Illusionary Elasticity in Illussions but pretty much nothing else there dumping 20 points into there for that .
You want Deceptive Evasion and Sharper Images in duelling forceing you to take percison on gear to get the most out of Sharper Images ( and have at least a some what reliable source of bleeds)
But as the stuff is you main weapon and you clones will die pretty fast in AoE

Hi,
Again, to completely contradict your thinking…

1. You want elasticity in Illusions, yes. Definate. But the other one you would take is Compounding Illusions. As a condition mesmer, you never want to shatter your clones unless you are certain it will end the fight. So as long as you keep a healthy supply of illusions, which is not hard, you will get 3-6-9% more damage I believe. In dungeons, when the boss/mobs are not focused on your illusions, which is often enough I find, I dont need to phase retreat to create another for quite some time…sometimes upward of a minute.

2. Yes, you want sharper images(but you can go another route, for more of a Glamour build). So if you go for sharper images, you want precision on your gear. Whats wrong with a rampager’s set? Doesn’t that set even have toughness on it?

3. Clones die often enough, yes. But there are many methods to keep up 2-3 at all times. Phased retreat is on a 4 second cooldown(or something with the staff trait), mirror images = 2 at once, if you are able to(which I dont) you can trait into creating an illusion when you dodge. Then you have your phantasm abilities. I never have problems keeping a healthy stock of clones up. Ever. This is the LEAST of my problems. Sometimes I’ll phase retreat just for kicks, even when I dont need another illusion.

Burst is a great single target DPS build, sure. And if you can get multiple mobs packed together, yeah burst shattering/blurred frenzy/iWarden can take down a nice pack of mobs easily. Conditions will do it a smidge slower, but will also continue to kill the mob at a decent pace, whereas all of your burst abilities would be on CD if they did not kill the entire pack of mobs. Also, there are more multi-mob pulls, packs, and whatnot in the game than there arent. Not even considering story quests, just dungeons and DEs, there are a ton of multi-mob pulls.

As a condition mesmer on an AOE pull, the ideal way to deal with it I find is run up to the pack of mobs, pull out iWarden, switch to staff, drop chaos storm right on top of you, the warden, the mobs(doing some DPS and poison DPS), phase retreat/iWarlock/Mirror Images so all of these guys get the protection buff as well(and you get chaos armor). Wind of Chaos away, watch the world burn.

The above situation is pretty standard for me, watching iWarden tear it up for a good 10+ seconds, my illusions throwing WoC around stacking more conditions in addition to myself…if they die, they are near the mobs and apply another random condition.

Its fantastic.

Dude you did not countre dicte me you just filled the stuff that is not negativ. I listed the main issus the build has sure you can go cond. dmg thougness, perc and be fine but if you get hit you have problems as you HP pool will be around 13k that can be to low in some cases.

And yes while some bosses are so nice to let you clones life in a lot of ocassions they die pretty much afterthey spawn due the genral AoE. The trait tha mackes them give the enemy a random condtion is really strong becaus of that.

Also you 3 point is pretty much what I said O.o you need the traits else you gone have a hard time to keep stuff up.

Staff Mesmer is great for Open world PvE but in dungones it really sucks compared to other classes. We can go a bit more glamour but the fact that two glamours are pretty usless in dungones most of the time( veil and portal) leaves null field and feedback which are awesome.

Also Mirror Images is nice and all but I don’t think it has a spot in a build if you run in a dungone you need to provide a bit more then a Chaos strom once in a while. To bring up 2 clones at will helps you but thats about it.

edit: @Gaiawolf: If you want confusion in WvW you go witha a glamour build. The weapone you use is pretty much unimportent then. You can go staff for the extra AoE or what ever.

@Warzog: Pretty much what you said. When I first leveled up my guardian I told my guild mates to not compalin so much and that PvE is pretty easy. When I levled up my Mesmer I got what the meant by I can’t solo that skill point.

@Tarn: That is actaually a great idea. Make it PvE only so the PvP guys don’t cry and it would give everything more dynamic.

@Agadar: Pure dps on a single target without a limited time the Ranger out dps pretty much everyone as he can keep up his dps ( spamming 1 2 and 3 on CD) problem is that in a dungone or any in game encounter you will never reach that dps as a longbow ranger beacus the stuff will be to close to you or you pet will die which provieds about 40% of your dmg.

Don’t get me wrong the game is great and I really like it but somet stuff in the game needs to be changed.
So I gone keep it short:
*Bugs needs to be fixed so you can actually start balancing.
To balanc something that does not work will only cause more balanc issus ones it is fixed.

*We need more condtions.
Atm you can only build around two condtions for dmg. Burning and bleeds. Most don’t have enough access to burn to build only around it. And bleeds cap at 25 stacks for all palyers together.

*Split PvP and PvE.
You tried. But you combate system just dosn’t allow this. Be realistic and stop trying to fix something that isn’t a good idea.

*Adjust RNG and loot tables.
This is an MMO yes but still the loot tables in GW2 can compete with some Asian grinders. Either droping stuff so much that there is an over supply or don’t droping it at all. It is a nice idea to give ceratin skins a uniqe touch like final rest but you kind of over doing it.

*Guesting.
Srsly. Either this or bring the district system back. Stop delaying one of your main features.

That is about it. I am sry if I sound so negativ. But the game is really great and it makes me really sad that some basic stuff gone wrong making the game way worse. A-net can do better so they should get there stuff together. Sometimes you have to give up on something you planned to do for the great good.

At this point of time class are balanced to work in PvP and PvE. That means to work against a max HP pool of 20k and a max HP pool of 200k on some bosses. The dmg and support power scales around that. Which means classes like Mesmer and Thieve with great burst power are very strong in PvP but are crippled in PvE as big mobs won’t die to burst and leave you vulnerab compared to other classes.

Another big thing is that atm a hugh amount of skills and traits are bugged. Making it impossible for A-net to balance soemthing as they don’t know if it is really strong or the counter options don’t work/ other classes options to do the same do not work.

What the game needs is a confident split between PvP and PvE ( or at least something like in GW1).

Burst is better in pretty much any case where you not run into 4+ mobs on your own. So pretty much all of PvE and PvP ( players in PvP won’t let you kit them like Mobs do)
The main issu is that traits and weapon contradict each other.
You want to have stuff like Illusionary Elasticity in Illussions but pretty much nothing else there dumping 20 points into there for that .
You want Deceptive Evasion and Sharper Images in duelling forceing you to take percison on gear to get the most out of Sharper Images ( and have at least a some what reliable source of bleeds)
But as the stuff is you main weapon and you clones will die pretty fast in AoE you also want the traits in chaos and the free rune of undead effect looks also really nice….

Now you have to get percsion thoughness and condtion dmg and probably still do no dmg becaus you can’t tell when you get dmg condtions and when you just gone support your team with vulnerability…. at cost of your dmg thank you A-net. Oh and you Aoe? It is you 1 attack have fun telling how you gone hit. Also you only support skill on the staff is you only AoE dmg skill at the same time crippling you dmg support power what ever you do. Yes I am kind of bitter atm becaus I can’t play the class the way I want. It really sucks to have a class you like and the only build that is good is the shatter build.

On any class that apply conditions at will duration wins over condition dmg once you are near 1k condition dmg. With the Mesmer it is diffrent. For one our clones don’t get stats like condition duration ( or % crit dmg) and we also apply conditons as short ticks on a radnome based scale which means we can’t spec for one condtion either. In the beta confusion builds where pretty good but then they took the scepter and said “nope you only condition dmg weapons is the staff and that is also you support weapone we are to lazy to think of something to fix the OP fact that clones can apply confusion” and so the Mesmer got kittened in BW2.