Guild Wars 2

The reason Shatter builds are among the few viable builds in sPvP is AoE. AoE is just too dominant in sPvP. Phantasm and Condition specced mesmers can do a lot of damage, but they are 1 vs 1 focused and don’t contribute as much in bigger fights. Tanky mesmers are problematic since Mesmer survivability relies a lot on phase retreat, blink and stealth, which make it harder to keep a point captured.

This leaves Shatter builds as the dominant sPvP build with their ability to damage multiple targets, confuse multiple targets, and more easily become unhittable when stomping downed enemies thanks to illusionary persona.

The problem with Scepter is that Skill 3 (Confusing Images) is terrible. It’s just way too easy to avoid. The first second of the skill is just a charge, with a very obvious animation. Then you have two seconds during which a rapid fire happens of five hits.

This is the only skill in the game which is both a charge up attack, a channel after, while not being an AoE. When you start doing damage there’s no guarantee your target will not be obscured by then, and even if the target is still hittable they can still dodge most of channel hits due to how long it takes this skill to work.

Add to that the fact that now Scepter is forced to be condition centric, yet can’t hit more than a single target with any of it’s attacks, and has an auto-attack that does direct damage, terrible direct damage at that, with clones that offer no extra benefits (and condition builds rely on staff clones), and the clone spawning auto attack which is pretty terrible, and the weapon is pretty useless.

I think it was actually more viable when the block skill did 100% more direct damage. The Torment change was a nerf since the rest of the Scepter’s skills weren’t changed to fit with it.

Ayrilana.1396:

A trait that deals directly with illusions that shouldn’t be in the illusion section… Hmmm…

You have really missed the point. Build diversity > flavor text fluff.

The problem is that the Illusions tree offers the passive bonuses to +condition damage and -shatter recharge, making the whole tree only beneficial to two builds, one of which (condition build) is very weak. That is a huge stat loss to invest in for non-shatter builds for a trait that until the patch was considered a requirement for every Mesmer build.

Illusionary Celerity being a 25 points trait actually makes sense by itself. BUT! The problem is it’s in the Illusions traits tree, which gives +condition damage and -Shatter Cooldown.

This means only Shatter and Condition builds benefit from speccing so deep into the tree. Condition builds are already weak due to their lack of ability to damage more than a single opponent at a time unless they use Cry of Frustration which is on a 22 seconds cooldown. This leaves Shatter builds as some of the few viable builds, in sPvP at least.

If Phantasms were nerfed -20% in damage across the board, it would have been a better change than the Illusionary Celerity placement – Doing your main source of damage on 16 seconds cooldown is really not viable in team fights.

It’s interesting that the biggest nerf was to Focus’ Illusionary Veil/Into the Void and no one has complained about this one specifically. I guess we saw it coming and it is a reasonable change. However it greatly harms the Focus as a viable weapon with iWarden’s placement and A.I. being so luckluster.

Yeah I’m experimenting with staff/greatsword 0/20/20/0/30 now that iBerserker and bounce are fixed. Need to test it some more before deciding if greatsword works better for me than mainhand sword.

The problem is that all this nerfs are actually good from a balance change perspective, but they leave Mesmers with too few alternatives. The changes one by one make sense, but taken as a whole they greatly limit Mesmer build options. And Mesmers already lost Kylia’s glamour build. I fear this will push us even more into the cookie cutter 20/20/0/0/30.

The good news is that iBerserker is finally fixed, as well as the bouncing priorities now giving low priority to clones. But it’s easy to me to see the half full part of the glass as a shatterer.

The problem is, that all this nerfs are actually good from a balance change perspective, but they leave Mesmers with too few alternatives. The changes one by one make sense, but taken as a whole they greatly limit Mesmer build options. And Mesmers already lost Kylia’s glamour build. I fear this will push us even more into the cookie cutter 20/20/0/0/30.

Just tested bouncing in the mists and the bounces go to me instead of to my clone which is closer to the target. When I move farther away, the bounce hits a second enemy target, preferring it to my closer clone as well.

Can anyone check that I am not hallucinating and this was indeed ninja fixed?

Arzeth.4701:

Thanks for the explanation! I never even considered Cavalier before. The added toughness in Cavalier might be a worthwhile trade off. Do you use Cavalier in a PvE setting regularly?

I use a mix of Cavalier and Berserker for my ascended gear. It’s good to have a certain amount of toughness in GW2 since the more toughness you have, the less effective it is, but if you have none at all you will take a lot of extra damage.

It’s best to get amulet/accessories/rings/backpiece to have Cavalier stats at any rate. That’s because those items have a much larger +crit damage on them than armor pieces, due to ANet messing up jewel stats balance wise and having to stick with it.

So since you are using Cavalier, and it is a +crit damage item, you will need other items that grant +crit chance or the +crit damage would be a waste. Which means having some knight armor and weapons meshes well with the Cavalier jewelry. And you can mix in Soldier. And berserker.

Well, you are talking about Ascended. Unlike in sPvP where Celestial has the same +crit damage as Berserker, in PvE/WvW the “celestial” ascended amulets have only +6 crit damage to berserker/cavalier’s +9.

So when it comes to Ascended it’s always best value to pick either Cavalier or berserker gear.

LiuliRenai.3928:

When you have the time, can you add my Celestial sPvP build under Shatter builds?

Any chance of adding it to the list? Also welcome back.

TheKidHenry.5732:

Been doing sPvP for a while now and I’m sick of only seeing zerker mesmers, so I have assembled a new build I’ve been working on. A lot of the things I’m still testing out (amulet, runes, even one or two trait options) but I’d like to see what the mesmer world thinks about it… Here’s a link to the build

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNArcWlwzKqHTzgGbNJiJF9GydSB0JdoKcdlUwbXIA-TsAA1CpImSNlbKzUypsNN+Y9xsAA

I’m open to suggestions, tips, whatever. Thank you fellow illusionists!

Well you’re trying to combine direct damage and conditions which is not a bad idea at all if you’re focusing on staff. But I think your amulet choices hurt you. You can get more out of such a combination if you simply go Celestial amulet with berserker jewel.

I posted an sPvP build that works with that combo very well for me: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Celestial-Madonna-sPvP-build/first#post2079564

The bounce bug/nerf affects it negatively, but it’s still quite good.

Hmm weird, we’re the only profession without a full team yet.

I love the ability to throw custom playlists into a folder and have them play ambient, battle etc according to the situation. Unfortunately unlike the regular sPvP music, the custom playlists don’t work very well in sPvP. Due to the high frequency of fights starting and very soon ending, the playlist tracks tend to start and stop too frequently. It’s definately not a burning issue but it would be great if sPvP would only play the battle playlist, as it tends to do with regular ingame music.

Buy a few copper deer boxes, you’ll get the set pretty easily.

although I wish it would look the same on female characters as male ones. The later simply has more respect in it. You know?

Hi grandpa.

As long as this bug / ninja nerf exist there’s little point for any attacks to have effects that bounce to allies. Hell even when bouncing between enemies this is a terrible issue. Elementalist AoEs are scripted to favor hitting enemy players over engineer turrets clutter. The new bouncing mechanics do not.

Also if you’re running a hybrid build with good toughness, against many dungeon bosses you can use your illusions to tank some of the hits (A.I. often prefers to attack targets with high armor and your illusions have the same armor amount you do). Since you can spawn more illusions nearly constantly this can really help with tanking some bosses while most of your spec is still directed at doing damage and offering your utilities.

There are many spots in dungeons when a Mesmer with portal saves the groups time – Fractal swamp, CoF wing 1 to get past the boulders, Fractal crazy Asura to help new people get past the electrified stairs, etc.

Iruwen.3164:

Something positive: I never fooled around with it that much before.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNFQI5DQUeQ&hd=1

You have a point. Maybe ANet wanted Mesmers to have a weapon against Malaria.

Sheesh this thread. Some people don’t get that this is an mmoRPG I guess.

Daecollo.9578:

. . .

So what you are saying is that you don’t like counters and you want less counters in the game.

I think you are missing the point of sPvP.

It would be appreciated if we at least get a response if this is indeed a bug or if this is a ninja nerf. This change hurts Mesmer build diversity.

Well I totally missed this thread.

Liuli
LiuliRenai.3928
24

+9% crit damage on my amulet. Means the stats were merged for ease of reading, so not a bug.

This is an even bigger nerf to staff than it is to Greatsword. Staff mesmers rely on the bouncing boons.

Mesmer. With a build with both high defense and offense that can change their style between point defender and point assaulter at will. Shatter ofc. Good for both 1v1s and team fights.

I tested this in a few games after reading. The nerf did happen. It seems not too bad though, mostly due to how staff clones are content to stay in longer range usually. I’m still getting most of the boons.

But it does feel like a slap in the face. Just this week we’ve had some power/condition hybrid builds posted on the Mesmer forums with discussions about this mechanic, and suddenly it’s nerfed. It feels like punishment for trying to diversify builds out of the very popular and powerful 20/20/0/0/30 shatter glass cannons. And on top of that it’s a ninja nerf.

1) Dueling.
2) sPvP helping me build my legendary (no, not more obsidian shards, already maxed on those).
3) Hot Join’s ‘Play Now’ button always bringing me to the same type of game (not sometimes 8v8 sometimes 5v5).

Carighan.6758:

Embolism.8106:

People need to remember that Clones use Winds of Chaos too.

Bringing us right to the next issue, unbalanced clones. I think we’d be better off if Clones didn’t cause damage / debuffs at all (except via Sharper Images), and the weapons were rebalanced with that in mind.

How would this be a good thing? It would give less gameplay options.

It’s also a good part of the Mesmer’s strength in PvP. Some Mesmers rely on phantasms, some shatter clones, some use their clones to apply conditions, some do a mix of sorts. Enemies that face a Mesmer can’t immediately figure out a Mesmer’s focus which gives us some seconds of advantage until our enemy figures out the type of Mesmer we are.

Staff with Illusionary Elasticity is imho the best sPvP weapon due to the close proximity you usually end up at in fights as you try to contest points. Sword+Sword/Pistol/Focus as secondary offers powerful bursts, the choice of offhand varies by build and all those three are quite powerful.

I don’t recommend phantasm builds, the meta is AoE heavy atm and their phantasms tend to die to it often in fights bigger than 1 vs 1. Most people run glass cannon shatter builds (can use one of Osicat’s builds for it with berserker amulet). If you prefare bunkering there’s Pyro’s Immortal build. I posted an sPvP focused hybrid build which I think can help new Mesmer players learn the ropes without being bursted down too quickly due to glass cannoning. Don’t know of a pure condition build to recommend, they always felt lacking in sPvP to me due to their single target focus and lack of burst.

When you have the time, can you add my Celestial sPvP build under Shatter builds?

Since Ascended gear are all in the jewelry spots, get a mix of berserker and cavalier (power/toughness/crit damage). Each of those Ascended items have +5% to +9% crit damage which is a lot more than what your armor offers.

Any build that uses crit damage at all and don’t have those two sets for ascended equipment loses on stats.

I think one of the devs mentioned once that they’ll change immobilize so you’d be able to dodge while immobilized. If they’d really implement it that would help matters.

When it comes to jewelry, having around half of it Cavalier is pretty good. It grants you toughness while still maintaining the higher +crit damage that jewelry slots offer (especially the ascended variants).

djtool.8372:

Well I just want to commend you on tryung to make the celestial amulet work.

I know right?

Skill choices

Ether Feast: Low cooldown and high healing burst (when having clones out) is important in sPvP where you can run into an enemy behind every corner.
Mantra of Resolve: Null Field might be more useful with a coordinated team, but this is a solo queuing focused build. Mantra of Resolve’s low cooldown offers a good defense against conditions, and, more importantly, it helps you instantly remove immobilize and avoid bursts when your Phase Retreat is on cooldown.
Feedback: gives you a second source of Ether Field to proc Chaos Armor as well as helps shut down ranged enemies for a little bit.
Decoy: A stun breaker, a stealth, and a distraction. Important for when you are focus fired.
Moa Morph: To be honest Mass Invisibility is fantastic for ressing allies in sPvP and has a lower cooldown. I was once in a 2vs2, both sides had one player down, so I popped mass invisibility, protected my ally from a stomp, and stealth-stomped the downed enemy to proc a rally. But come on. It’s a skill that turns your foe into a big bird. It’s hilarious. An Elementalist transformed and going “Moaaaaaa” in /say will brighten your day.

Why choose offhand Pistol over Offhand Sword or Focus?
Phantasmal Duelist procs 4 bleeds on avarage during each channel, making it a good source of both direct damage and condition damage. This build isn’t focused enough on pure burst damage for Sword’s Phantasmal Swordsman to be very effective. While Focus’ Temporal Curtain is an amazing ability, it’s Swiftness portion is not needed due to Runes of the Centaur, and Phantasmal Warden never stands where I want him to in sPvP (a personal issue perhaps).

What equipment can be used with this build in PvE/WvW?

I use Soldier’s armor (Sentinel pants), a mix of Cavalier/Berserker jewelry, and Knight weapons. I don’t invest in +condition damage on my PvE/WvW set because of the 25 bleed stacks limit, and the scale of big WvW battles making clone bleeds/burning not as useful to stack. If I want to increase my solo PvE condition damage I replace Feedback with Signet of Domination. Also in dungeons it’s -sometimes- useful to switch Feedback with Signet of Illusions, since the build’s relatively high toughness draws bosses A.I. to target them more often, helping your party tank some of the damage.

Celestial Madonna build

This is an sPvP build meant to take full advantage of the Celestial Amulet (with berserker jewel) to have all around high defense while still maintaining respectable direct damage as well as condition damage. The build’s role versatility focuses on solo queue play, where you are not sure you can depend on your teammates in a fight or if they’ll just run off in a random direction. It’s good for both defending and assaulting points, for 1vs1s and group battles.

Celestial Amulet is terrible on most classes, yet Staff Mesmers can make good use of it due to high uptime on Fury, good condition applications from clones and shatters, and decent direct damage with using the Illusionary Ellasticity trait in close range.

How to play this build in sPvP

When engaging an enemy, cast either Chaos Storm or Feedback, stand inside the AoE and cast Phase Retreat to proc Chaos Armor. If you use this three skills in different time intervals, you should have Chaos Armor up for 15 seconds out of every 28 seconds. If you are targetted and taking damage, cast Cry of Frustruation with at least two clones to proc the long-duration Retaliation from the Confusing Cry trait. If you are in a group fight cast Mind Wrack and Cry of Frustruation as much as you can. If you are fighting one person, leave the clones alive longer so they would cast more conditions on your foe and use your shatters when you see your illusion skills are off cooldowns for quick replacements.

When you are using the staff, try to stay within 400 range of your opponent so Illusionary Elasticity would bounce a second attack on them, yet stay out of melee range. This is a range a ranged class finds themselves within often in sPvP at any rate. This way you pressure your opponent with both direct damage and clone conditions with the occasional shatter, while also stacking might and fury from Winds of Chaos.

If you notice your opponent has exhausted their defensive cooldowns/dodges, switch to Sword/Pistol. This set is useful mostly as a fire and forget, switching to it to blow off all cooldowns fast, using the illusionary leap->switch->blurred frenzy->shatter combo, and quickly switching back to staff.

Distortion shatters are mostly good for finishing a downed player, while Diversion shatters are ok for stopping an enemy from downing a friendly. If you are heading to a capture point and there aren’t nearby enemies, use Ether Feast to proc swiftness from Runes of the Centaur to get there faster – Ether Feast will almost always be off cooldown by the time you need it again.

Equipment Selection

Celestial Amulet: A staff mesmer benefits from each of the stats it increases. Fury from bouncing Winds of Chaos will help you maintain a 50% crit chance and the amulet’s +crit damage stat is as high as berserker’s.
Berserker’s Jewel: When using a Celestial Amulet, the stat that suffers the most for it is Power. This jewel is there to compensate for it.
Runes of the Centaur: This give more +power to compensate for the amulet’s low power stat, grants you swiftness for 14 seconds from Ether Feast every 21 seconds, and gives you +bleed duration to push your Winds of Chaos to 8 seconds per bleed (Winds of Chaose base bleed duration is 7 seconds for your attacks, and 5 seconds for your clones’ attacks. Ignore the tooltip, it’s bugged).
Staff – Sigil of Agony: The +bleed duration now works on clones, pushing the duration of their bleeds to 6 seconds.
Sword – Sigil of Fire: This AoE will almost always proc when you use Blurred Frenzy due to it’s multiple hits, enhancing Blurred Frenzy’s own AoE damage.
Pistol – Sigil of Accuracy: Helps you maintain your crit chance at a workable level, as you won’t have Fury procs as often while not using your Staff.
Trident – Sigil of Earth: Since Trident bleeds last two seconds, an extra bleed proc chance is better than +duration that won’t do anything.
Spear – Sigil of Fire: Same as Sword, this AoE will almost always proc when using Vortex, enhancing it’s AoE damage.

Archemist.4362:

I’ve played games such as League, Dota, HoN and as far as i can tell their communities suck. You’re having a bad day and you’re not playing your A-game? expect to be reported, even playing a non-ranked match. (Its that bad) Expect to be reported for forces you can’t control such as Internet disconnections Lag and PC problems.

I can see the direction that the current Spvp community is going on and its going to become the elitist kittenry that we see on those MOBA games.

This will not happen because of how the game is built. In MOBA games like LoL and DOTA, when you die you actively give your opposition a lot of gold and XP, so dying a few times means you actively made your opposition much stronger, sometimes to the point where they will decimate the rest of your teammates with ease. In GW2 if you die you just give your opponents 5 points. It has maybe 1% of the bad impact dying has in MOBA games. Totalbiscuit talked extensively in some of his videos on the subject.

Your situation is rather unique since it’s not easy in GW2 to actively be detrimental to your team, but having a commander tag is one of those rare things whose consequence is to actively harm your own team.

The enemy can see the commander tag. They always know where one of the players in the team is. If you try to capture a neglected point, they’ll see you coming. So I can completely understand people’s frustruation with players that do not turn off the commander tag while in sPvP, even if I’d prefare they wouldn’t express their frustruation in a hostile manner.

Asking for two wins was too harsh -because- of the lack of solo queue. Until they make two separate queues (which they are planning to), best to keep that daily away from the list.

Ah sorry, I should have definitely mentioned the range is my rough estimate. The 1200 range left over is good info to learn. I guess Illusionary Elasticity works well for me due to my higher toughness+tanky illusions build, I tend to be closer to bosses more often than not though not quite in melee range.

Fuschia.6573:

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.

As someone that tested Illusionary Elasticity extensively, this is not true. Let me break down how it works.

As a staff wielder, when you use your auto-attack, your enemy will be hit once, then the shot will bounce back to you (or an ally, but almost always you) and give you a boon, if you are at a range of 600 or less away from your target. If you are farther the attack will not bounce.

Your illusions will also bounce their attacks once towards you if you are in a range of 600 or less of your target, giving you more fury/might boons.

If you have Illusionary Elasticity traited, your attack will hit your target, bounce back to you if you are at a range of 600 and less, and then bounce back to hit another target – and if no other target is nearer it will hit your initial target again. The trait does not function for your illusions (honestly it would be OP if it would have).

This means that a staff Mesmer fighting a target in a range of 600 or less using this trait double their single target auto-attack direct damage, and do as much auto-attack damage as a greatsword (but also apply conditions and get boons), while also applying 2 conditions on the target per auto-attack.

Press the standard filter, then the Play Now button. You’ll end up in a game that will be full 8 vs 8 in a few seconds. Works much better than before the patch, where pressing play now sent you to near empty games more often than not.

So Hot Join improved.

Luthan.5236:

It’s okay. It’s for people that play mostly sPvP only and not for PvE guys that only want to do the PvP dailies because they are faster. That’s why they probably wanted to make them take more time.

Investment of time is not a good comparison as in PvE dailies you spend that time with braindead easy content to get your daily laurel, while in PvP you have to be active and alert to finish your dailies. And the PvE dailies still reward you better as 4500 karma>>>glory booster.

It was a bad decision to increase the daily PvP grind. The old achievements gave me a reason to log in daily. Now it just doesn’t seem worth the trouble anymore.

Kitcat.1739:

Maybe. But remember, some people are using that time to try to strategize; so it’s not all just people being lazy. In fact – personally, I’d rather have longer than 2 minutes.

If people are taking that time to strategize this change won’t stop them from doing it and they’re more than welcome to. Unfortunately from my experience in uncommunicating pugs I see people not pressing ready very very often, even though they don’t bother to strategize. It only takes one player that doesn’t bother with the button to waste 2 minutes for ten people, and that happens almost every match.

Hot join in itself is not a bad idea. The problem is that it’s meant to allow newer players a place to practice without pressure, a place that’s a little less competitive and with less steamrolling going on. But this is not the case.

Hot join is filled with rank 30-50 experienced players that steamroll new players, and together with the 8vs8 making the maps really crowded, new players die like flies. Ironically hot join currently is harder to survive at than tournaments.

The reason this happens is experienced players are grinding glory, which is much easier to come by in hot join than in tournaments. 8vs8 means you can get more kills with AoE, and there isn’t the 20% dead time between matches which tournaments suffer from.

I think Hot join can still be good by making a few changes:

- Turn 8 vs 8 into 6 vs 6. The 8 is there to allow for less pressure on groups that are missing a player. But honestly 6 vs 6 should be enough for that, games rarely miss more than one or two players, and the maps are too small for 8 vs 8 to work well.

- Give players +50% glory bonus while in tournaments to make sure hot join is not so much better for earning glory than tournaments.

- Solve the 20% dead time between tournament matches issue, mostly caused by people refusing to press ‘I am ready!’ at the start of rounds.

I think with this changes people might actually love hot join for what it is instead of viewing it as a necessary dumb glory grind.

The most irritating part of tournament play is being forced to wait two minute or more before the match starts. Considering that an avarage match lasts 10 minutes, that’s 20% more time you spend just waiting for the game to start.

This problem is mostly caused because in 97.5% of tournament matches, there is at least one person not pressing the ‘I am ready!’ button. It’s extremely rare for all ten people to press ready, which causes a big waste of time between matches.

I think the solution to this is very easy – place the ‘I am ready!’ button ON TOP of the player in the UI, blocking the player’s view of their character until they press ready. I guarantee you that this small change that only irritates the eye until people press ready will cause people to click the button much more frequently.

Same issue. Switched map, got booted, can’t log back in.

EU – Piken Square

Error 42:6:3:2158

If people insult you in a harrassing manner, there’s the report button for that.

The ability to log on an empty server and 1 vs 1 a friend is great fun. Just because you personally think people shouldn’t 1 vs 1 with friends, doesn’t mean people should be blocked from having fun. What is the problem here that requires solving, precisely?

As a tip to people who 1 vs 1, don’t capture any points on the map you’re playing on. Once you capture points, the ‘play now’ button will lead people who press it into the server you’re playing on (which is a nice way to avoid people grinding glory in empty games).

If you don’t capture points though, more often than not you won’t get outsiders interrupting.

iZerker is doing the same amount of damage it did before the patch. However, I’m not 100% sure, but it seems to hit targets less reliably. Testing on golems, they’d sometimes get all 4 hits on them, sometimes they’ll just get 1 hit, and sometimes 0 hits. The bad hits seem to happen when the iZerker first spawns, the damage being more consistent on their following bursts.