Guild Wars 2

In groups just nuke the rangers, honestly most are terrible players, they will die in seconds, if you are really having trouble slot Arcane Thievery and Feedback then get condi cleanse from your party while you totally lock down any Ranger, AT their Rampage as One, call in the CC and nuke. Realistically all that isn’t necessary, a well timed Engi stealth pull into a group nuke will 100-0 any LB ranger that is a threat. When it gets to the stage where there are more LB rangers than your party members just go “serious business”, 2 Guards, 2 eles ( D/D and D/F) with a War or Necro and bomb them, if they want to Barrage you let em eat retaliation ticks at 350 a pop.

Halting strike kills on thieves via Mantra of Distraction or that moment when your iWarlock crits for 8k on an immobilised target because you’ve got oodles of vulnerability up and the interrupt has just bumped its damage multiplier up by another 28%, small pleasures really. Frankly if it weren’t for CI and lockdown I’d have given up a long time ago, or got much better at playing shatter (or D/D ele…).

Aye they are very different so it may not be that helpful it was actually a right pain to get the Necromancer to use the fear. I’ll nab a guild mate tomorrow and see whats what with interrupting those skills on real players.

Interrupting a downed state skill procs all your interrupt traits but doesn’t actually stop the skill. This is most notable on the NPC Necromancer where a 3 clone daze shatter will proc 3 interrupts in a row on both the lifesteal and fear skills.

Deli.1302:

SFR has at least 4 that I can think of off the top of my head. I can’t even walk across a map without running into Deso roamers. Who cares if the roamers aren’t in a roaming guild. Roamers are roamers no matter the tag.

No raid guild considers fighting 20 random tags and winning as that much of an achievement, they aren’t going to be organised, they aren’t going to synergise well and a fair proportion aren’t going to be on teamspeak. What makes you think a 4 man guild group thinks any differently about fighting 4 random tags than a 20 man group would? People in guilds on TS generally make for far better fights without the need to start attacking groups that outnumber you significantly.

As for SFR roaming groups, well, we’ve played all the days this week and not seen any of em, a shame really but not something that happens against the other servers mentioned above.

Nope, NPCs don’t fight back and players will hide in keeps whether they are t1 or t3. Don’t waste your spare time performing menial and pointless tasks in game, fight people and if they are going to cower inside their keeps “bugging” dolyaks on their odd venture into the fresh air they really aren’t worth the effort you’ll put in to get at them.

Honestly, how could you possibly care?

If you are going to be running solo or in a pair I can’t see the server mattering there are always going to be fights to be had and blobs to run away from in gold league all the way down to bronze. The average quality of players is the same up and down the leagues, most players on a WvW map are competent and the 100s in that bracket are going to drown out the fact that server A in at the bottom of Gold league has 3 awesome roamers to fight where as server C in mid-Silver has 4.

If you are thinking of re-forming a small group to roam with in Gold League I’d be looking for a server that will match up regularly with Gandara, Kodash, Riverside and Augury Rock, Kodash and Gandara especially. Its rather funny that after 2 years of Germans being accused of only blobbing pretty much all the EU roaming guilds outside of Gandara are on German servers.

I’ve had my Warden fail when cast almost point blank on a NPC Scout that was standing stock still and firing at me…..

I applaud your initiative but I don’t think you’ll find any specific avoidable action or situation which causes failure if simply casting it on a stationary NPC is enough to break it. Also not doing this will save you the anger and despair which will inevitably come when you and the community produces an exhaustive list of failure situations plus potential coding causes/solutions which Anet then ignores.

Sergoros.4398:

Maybe they invited one of those “Mesmer op! I was playing warrior and pressing 1-1-1-1-1-1-1 and then came mesmer and he had many clones and I did my best but he have to many clones so I died. Nerf mesmer!!!he is to op!!!” to dev team. It would explain alot…

The thing is no one did anything like this, no one has ever complained about a Memser swapping his ileap 1 second after that clone was destroyed, literally no one.

Tis a good job GS/Staff is the new meta I guess.

A totally pointless change again from Anet, this facet of ileap is not a “bug” its been in the game for 2+ years it is an inherent part of the skill’s functionality and adds significantly to the skill cap of its use. I just don’t understand the rationale behind this change unless this clone swap is causing some major server side problems for them, why not just change the wording to say you can return to the location the clone was last at even after its destroyed and keep an awesome piece of unintended (though after 2+ years I highly doubt that) functionality.

Seriously Anet you looked at ileap and the only bug you found to fix was this?

Human, Sylvari and Asura animations look the best by a long way. Charr is fun but you get paranoid about iLeap failing more often than on the other smaller classes, well at least I do. For more serious gameplay a small Asura makes animations harder to see. Looks wise Human and Sylvari have the best in my book, Asura in T3 looks awesome as well, Charr is pretty limited, I’ve only ever found two looks I like and one needs something from GW1 achievements I believe, Norn, who knows, do Norn Mesmers actually exist?

Best option however is multiple Mesmers with ghost pots.

MarauderShields.6830:

Solo-Roaming is rarely any fun these days. Too many organized havoc groups that only farm single players and run when the numbers start to even out.

This seems to come up in every single post about roaming in WvW and I just can’t believe its true. EU doesn’t really have “havoc groups” but what we do is probably pretty close and fights are usually a procession until you are outnumbered thus killing soloers beyond getting stacks or discouraging ones that are being idiots from continued stupidity is a waste of time. I can’t believe that there is a large enough number of “organised” groups out there that do those things to justify the amount of times this complaint comes up.

Think someone is confusing “friends and/or guildmates” with “easyback up”.

Try to look more difficult to kill than 5 NPCs, stacks are stacks after all, that should keep all those nasty groups away from you.

Every other roamer in the game has adapted to the fact that to get consistently worthwhile fights you need to be in a group. No one is going to play how you want them to play to keep you entertained while they spend the other 99.9% of the time they don’t meet your august self dying to groups that if they were roaming in a 5 man team with their guildmates would be a) killable or b) at least interesting to wipe to.

At least it won’t get wrecked by the first IP engi who looks at it twice, that rare roaming class….

Cliff Notes:

Melandru + Pot of Lemongrass for the Zerg + proper Purging Flames rotations from the Guardians on zerg TS = -65% to -95% Condition Duration most of the time.

Thats before you get to any active cleansing.

sendmark.4731:

Hollywood.3490:

PU is for people who want to play with one hand and click their skills. In other words. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you go PU. If you know what you’re doing, you pick CI.

Laughable

Oh and it takes so much skill to use immobilise?

Takes slightly more skill to actually recognise a skill animation and interrupt it than it does to use The Prestige and come out with 10 seconds of Protection…

Plus its nothing to do with skill its about whats more useful, you getting some Regen and Aegis or you immobilising your target for 3.5 seconds while your DPS class unloads at will. Ever seen what happens when 4 people get Focus pull interrupted with CI into a glass cannon Necro well bomb and DS burst, 4 red triangles is what happens…. or you could stealth a bit longer, I know which my group would prefer…

Osi when it comes to other classes with burn you need to be careful that you aren’t applying too much, running with an IP Engi and a Guardian there were times when some of my burns weren’t applying as we’d stacked too many individual ones already.

Waiting for comments about Staff 1 camping when raid leader calls for damage spike…..

Osicat.4139:

Ps, Kitten the kitten Karma, regret Almost I posted this build, I got ganked by a duo of 2 Napalm cats from Auora glade earlier 2 night. Used al my clenses and bam, 6 new conditions and 18 sec of burn on me S:

All those months of wanting be an op HGH burn duration engi (yes we all think hes cheating too… :p) and you finally come up with (albeit a fair amount of help from Anet) a way to stack stupid amounts of burn on people as a Mesmer and you get ganked with it, such is life.

Was playing about with these runes this morning and its quite entertaining being able to drop 6 secs of burn with very little chance of people dodging though you do start doing silly things like blinking into the enemy group to make sure the proc on mantra charge hits. When/if Anet fix iElasticity these runes and 0/20/30/0/20 would open up a more shatter orientated playstyle with the staff clone bounce and 2 sec burns, can trade the Sigent for cleanse mantra and still have the same condi damage.

As for PU, its no better or worse than GS warrior gimmick or Pistol Whip spammage gimmick or Dire, Perplexity + Dhumfire Necro pre-ptach gimmick, people should just be glad the Mesmer isn’t running Chaotic Interruption and knows what to do with it….

Only thing that keeps me going on interrupt Mesmer is 80-100% condi duration Chaotic Interruption immobilises in WvW, every Focus detonation into a Necro well/DS burst makes me happy but yeah seriously wtf Anet, interrupts being a viable way to stop skill spamage for 5 days, awesome, I can smell the PU cheese its calling me.

Its a new variant, I’ve played nearly 5k hours of GW2 and Wednesday was the first time I’ve ever been feared by a Mesmer for 6 seconds and I really don’t believe Wednesday was the first time we’ve killed a mesmer using TA gear. The case is closed, we know what the cause is and we know why the fear duration was so long, the runes were changed to a 2 sec Fear with 50% proc chance on Tuseday, add in a minimum of 40% condi duration, more like 60% as PU cheese build, and you are looking at 3 secs per clone hit with it stacking per clone as mango said and multiple fears coming from the fact each clone counts as a new event to trigger the 6th set bonus, which was born out by the fact the guildies were getting new fears from this guy while I was still halfway through my own.

Thanks mango, I was pretty certain it was a bug relating to TA armour and Nightmare runes based on the old bugs with it and procing fears when transmutated. It was kinda “hmm this is a bit odd, oh well” along with some “wow how long is that fear..?” but if I’d had a whole shed load of condis on me when a mesmer dropped an 8 second fear on me I’d be slightly more annoyed.

So messing about this morning and we are fairly sure a mesmer was procing 6 secs, maybe more, fears on us so anyone going to own up knowing how if that is the case? The guy we suspect it is seems to be wearing TA gear, so its could be some bug with Nightmare, it doesn’t seem to be Sunless, but the procs are much more often than 90 seconds and much longer than the theoretical max of 4 secs with 100% duration.

Thoughts?

I was under the impression 10/30/0/10/20 or 10/30/0/20/10 were the go to builds for PvE anyway, so in the latter’s case its just a question of what is more important to you fixed Phantasmal Haste or Focus reflects.

Just drop a stealth trap and kite em over it, the results are pretty hilarious, doing this in even fights is a bit off but against the usual full zerker, check reds are already outnumbered 2 to 1 by allies, spam everything thieves its great.

Chaotic Interruption mesmers running daze mantra lockdown D/P thieves pretty hard as well if you spot the combo, 5,2 initiative use with no stealth and a 2-4 sec immobilize followd by focusing hurts em a lot.

“Its good enough for 2, its good enough for 3, if its good enough for [TCHU] its where you need to be”

and most of Deso hates us, so we must be doing something right!

bumpity bump.

2 support guardians with staff will give 25 might, pretty much perma retal (which with 25 might backing it up hurts) and plenty of stability, protection and vigor (form PoV conversion). You’ll need to back this up with some heavy damage, Power Necros are really the best option as the wells and marks synergise so well with successful Guardian pulls, rings and walls, a D/D ele with aura share also helps pump the damage up while providing differing utility to the Guards.

The thing you need to concern yourself with if you are going up against mid-high tier small zergs is that most of the Warriors will be running War Banner, getting people downed isn’t hard killing them off fast is the problem. On top of that there is also the fact that a lot of these zergs (outside of primetime) in the higher tiers will be made of people from half decent raiding guilds at which point you are looking at charging into a mass of retal’d up 3K armour hammer Guards and Warriors with Necros behind em, not much fun.

For a Gandara example, you can do this sort of stuff against AM, Drakkar, Ranik, even Augury to an extent (though zerker PUGs in insane numbers is pretty bad as well) but against a server like Gunnar’s where half the tags in the group you spot are from 25 man raiding guilds it just doesn’t work.

His point may be that PU isn’t god mode for the average mesmer player, as he describes himself. Thus the complaints about PU outside the Mesmer forums are possibly coming from the people he kills in this video and that in reality they are dying because they are terrible players not because they got hit by an OP PU Mesmer.

To the OP if you are using Disenchanter for cleanse its bounces will land on your allies as well so even though the nade Engi wasn’t focusing you (or anything in general) if you had got the Disenchanter up at the start its bounces may have landed on your Warrior (it also strips boons which you will find useful against more competent players). When you did finally cast him it was about 3 seconds before the engi got stomped which is a waste as the phantasm will then die, the cooldown is low but still casting it on one of the NPCs to help deal with the scouts poison/cripple/blinds would have been more help.

Finally stay and fight unless the odds are crazy (10+ vs 2) you’ll become a much better player from killing a few people and then dying/running, you’ll learn to better manage cooldowns, to really perfect a joint burst, how to ensure stomps while outnumbered and when to backout, regroup and re-engage/bail.

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyAUH12IH35pzfor5iOo9QA

I would note the use of two Guardians, the hammer/GS is pretty much full cleric, I don’t know about t’other, at least one with the book, to keep Joe alive.

I find shatter fun but at times the dependance on iLeap and clone pathing alongisde the complete reliance on team mates for condi cleanse in a burst build (Blink, Decoy, Mirror) annoying, though when you see the 4×3K Mind Wracks it does make it all worthwhile.

I didn’t play GW1 either but was under the impression a lot of the lockdown came from the mesmer using skills that caused you to damage yourself if you did anything while under the effect of the mesmer spell or it caused skills to fail and go on cooldown. We did have the first in GW2 it was confusion, but it turned out this was too difficult for most players so it was nerfed, we still do have it to an extent its just that most players are so bad they don’t see it as them being lockdown and just spam until they die or remember to cleanse. The second we don’t really have and I think its a shame, an interrupt is a reactive move on the Mesmer’s part it would be nice to have a proactive skill where we could go into a fight cast x on a target and the next 3 skills they use will fail and go on full CD, maybe with a trait that further punishes them for failed skills to counter the obvious choice of spamming low CD moves.

For a more immediate way to improve lockdown and Mesmer’s generally for larger scale fighting all Mantras could be made AoE. Pain then allows you to take part in damage spikes from range and Daze would give well co-ordinated groups with good boon stripping and the use of Chaotic Interruption a chance to immoblise a lot of people in preparation for well bombs/general damage spikes.

Have been running a 20/20/30 hybrid lockdown build for a long time in small group WvW, its an awful lot of fun. The synergy with staff in a hybrid build is incredible, might stacks from aoe interrupts buffing all aspects of the staff damage, instant condi spam on interrupt to give the Warlock a huge damage boost (I run Perplexity so minimum 40% from the interrupt proc if I’m timing stuff right and another 8%+ from Vulnerability), it also provides a lot of condi cover for the rest of your party (OP Engis procing 15+ secs of 900 damage burn…) and the immoblise to make sure the Warlock’s projectile actually hits along with allowing you direct damage classes free rein. On swap Sword/Pistol for the double interrupt potential and bleeds from the Duelist or Sword/Focus a set that allows some incredible combinations with well timed or lucky interrupts.

Using focus if you can get an interrupt off and cast Warden on the target then follow if up with an iLeap to stack more immoblise (I run the +40% food) you can get most of the Warden’s damage in, more clutch would be casting the Warden and managing a mantra interrupt during it, relying on your opponent using an interruptable skill.

Sreoom.3690:

Blob: A derogatory term used to describe the group that totally face rolled your group into the dirt.

There are a number of times when that definition would apply to the winning smaller group involved in the combat…

Theoretically as long as you have ~3k armour and 20k+ HP you should be fine in the frontline as long as you have a good party set up allowing proper access to stability and protection and you know how to avoid bombs. Why is another question, a mesmer’s job in a raid is to drop Null Field, Time Warp and Veil, all these can be done at range, so you should be looking more to Necromancers for your go to stats. Ok you can’t tag as much as a Wellmancer but isn’t the point to help your guild win fights not to get as much loot as possible…?

To be honest just sell all your silk you’d be better off getting Exotic + Runes of every conceivable mesmer set than blowing 100s of gold on one ascended set, trying all the possible combinations at exotic level will make you a much better player. Generally defensive mesmer armour runs Knights on Helm, Chest and Legs with your prefered crit damage minor on the others, offensive is pure zerker or possibly celestial on the aforementioned.

PVT/Hoelbrak with Bountiful Interruption in the old Immortal build then go to the EotM and troll everyone as they take 400+damage per hit on you and your defender (iLeap Temproal Curtain and Inspiration the retal to all your phantasms).

http://www.twitch.tv/doiidrg/b/493937177 – BlackDevil’s channel, raiding with [RG].

Don’t know of any other Mesmer steamers/vid posters in top tier (as in recognised ability not matchup tier) EU guilds, its dull gameplay in zerg fights tbh, GvG would be more fun to watch but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a GvG from a Mesmer PoV.

In terms of GvG most Mesmer’s seem to run GS and Sw/Focus and then play periphery wars while using Null Field on cooldown but in general good mesmer raid footage is as rare as hens’ teeth, it doesn’t seem to make entertaining copy.

To Kelthien

If you want to get enthused about Mesmer usage in organised groups you’ll have to look at much smaller scale fighting. [EscG] on Augury Rock and ~tM~ (now know why you use the tildas) in the USA use Mesmers extensively in smaller scale fights with emphasis on totally different aspects of our gameplay, boon sharing/utility/mobility and burst damage respectively.

Offair.2563:

Distaste.4801:

This definitely needs corrected immediately in a hotfix.

Exactly, gamebreaking bug and used by a lot of people, not going to accuse the world that just breached our keeps etc as i guess more servers are doing it but you can stop with it already!

A healthy community would agree not to exploit this until it is hotfixed, guess what will happen in WvW over the next 12hrs….. Maybe the US primetime will show a bit of class if its not fixed by then.

Don’t really need to say much more

aspirine.6852:

Do you play on gandara btw? Edit, no I doubt that. The tchu we fought from gandara where blobbers and lame players overall.

Sorry, that is us, so that Necro that owned you almost certainly was a lame blobber who’d got lost from his zerg of 5 people on their way to to mercilessly gank a 20 man group trying to cap a keep.

JoeYl.4609:

The tower we lost were T0 and we took them before the end of the countdown for the score, your tower was T3 and we kept it a long time enough for the score
Its just a question of time and strategy

I’m fairly sure his point was about the dying to PUGs, towers schmowers who cares, even we stoop so low as to cap stuff, dying to the unwashed masses however….

Just a quick thanks to the GUM guys for that little scrap in the north camp, nothing to write home about but our TS was entertaining:

“Find a target”
“Guardian, Guardian, Guardian, Warrior, Warrior…. seriously they’re all Guardians.”
“I think I saw an ele…. no, no its just a Guardian with a silly staff”
“There that ones afk, get him!”

Anyway was a fun week, thanks all, see you soon, shame these forums will be gone the next time we meet.

Okaishi.8320:

Shame I couldn’t fight one of you without 3 additional TCHUUs adding in 10 seconds into the fight though. Maybe I’ll have more luck next time

Our relationship with party wide swiftness is fleeting at best so the delays may make it look like we all added in but rest assured we were just failing to gank you . Trying to run aura share with this lot has probably shaved 10 years off my life, “oh look some iron ore”, “over here some herbs” “come look at this rabbit”. The other 3 were most likely farming a particularly tasty patch of scallions way back when the cry of “TUP at 12 o’clock came in”.

It seems if you have any Wexp ranks invested in the siege you are using it will revert to the normal rocks/bolts e.t.c if you don’t you fire the presents, candycanes e.t.c.

I played about with 0/20/30/0/20 just after the patch in WvW. On getting max stacks, 5/5 guard buffs, using full ascended trinkets/weapons bar the pistol, and a Sigil of Bursting you end up with 2,299 condition damage before any might stacks from Bountiful Interruption. I was running this on my Rabid/Perplexity set, it’d be even higher with Scavenger/Undead, kinda silly. A Chaos Storm on a couple of guys or befriend some staff Guardians and your condi damage will hit 3k+ with the might stacks.

Ins.7139:

Deso currently running 134 people on TS round lions arch in a celebration kitten up. Sorry if there’s not much in WvW lmao

Classy…..

One could say a bunny of Pain Train, or possibly a drove or even a wrack for the younger members.

Maskaganda.2043:

oblivious.8074:

PS. As a member of a smallish roaming guild I would like to say ditto to everything Conchis said.

As a punishment for forgetting to mention Yarr, Conchis will be forced to man an arrow cart 8h/day on a northern tower in gandara borderland for a week, shooting at everyone who passes by but never ever engaging in an actual fight.

I’ll sit there watching Speller’s stream and shout “epi” on TS every time I see a whole load of conditions on the target and he has it on CD.

Promas.8627:

Gandara used to have some great roamers, but now only TCHU and a few individuals live up to that standard. Everyone else is now running ganksquads or revengesquads (coming back with 2x numbers – lol).
Not sure what happened, gandara was stronger in week 1

Theres no point doing what we do tbh, every server runs zergs all times of the day because winning the League is of paramount importance….. As a small scale group you spend most of your time feeling bad about steamrollering small groups of randoms or trying to pester a zerg enough so that a decent number follow you but not the whole lot, that happens once in a blue moon tbh.

In reality what happens is you spend a lot of time taking undefended camps, kill the odd straggler and then get zerged (and inevitably chased across the whole map) when you try and get something approaching an interesting fight by attacking a tower or the north camp (when its upgraded). When not fighting Deso and AM you can pretty much cap a whole BL with 2 golems and 4 people in the mornings and no one will try to stop you. None of the above is what we consider “fun”.

There are few small scale guilds in Silver League to fight, [team] on AG and [EscG] on Ranik are the only two I can think of, the best you can hope for is a fight vs some members of a raiding guild, at least that way they should be on TS and vaguely coordinated.

On Gandara in terms of 3-6 men there is us [TCHU], [BT] and [Yarr} (sorry about forgetting you the first time round) when they are running small ish, and the odd few guys who roam as pairs/trios. [TDA]s main roaming group left for Vabbi as soon as the leagues started for precisely the reasons above.

Edit – Actually the most annoying thing about the match ups at the moment occurs when you see an enemy zerg and you move out of their way to let them pass. Almost inevitably 2 or 3 of them have to come and attack you because they feel safe with 30 mates nearby. Seriously if you want to fight us stay behind when the zerg moves off and do it properly, we are either going to ignore you or kill you, neither of which is worth your time but the latter is pretty embarrassing if your whole zerg sees it happen. If you are zerging stay with your commander and do as he asks, if you aren’t wait til they pass then fight, you can’t have your cake and eat it I’m afraid.

Very nice, always good to see small scale groups in WvW punishing the mindless blobs and their dreaded hard ressing, even better when it involves 2 mesmers. Don’t know if we crossed paths during Silver League if we did not it is (lol filter didn’t like the abbreviation of that….) a shame we always prefer fighting groups our size as opposing to steamrollering the random 5s and having to kite and bait the 25+ers. Love to see the Inspiration sigent as well, it seems amazingly powerful when paired with a nice group of melee, all the might, protection, and retal you can double, yum yum, so many zerker Rangers would 100-0 themselves from 1 Barrage.

Keep it up and hopefully our paths cross sometime before Season 2.

Been running a build that you seem to be aiming at for some laughs the last few days, give Perplexity a proper send off.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNAW8alwzipHVTjGb9IipHBnvJckUYaqWJF42FC-jECBYLCyUEwkIBKHqIasl1FRjVbDT5aIyqYoSBAxwI-w

Its a variant of BlackDevil’s hybrid build, https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Maximised-Hybrid-Phantasm-Build-Roaming/first. The phantasms hit reasonably hard, halting strike will be in the 1.5-3.5k range with crits and might and the immobilize, cripple/blind/chill, 5 stacks of confusion and 8 stacks of vulnerability on interrupt is epiclly trolly. Oh and plenty of might stacking as well so your condi damage will be around 1k. You could easily substitute a scepter for the sword, it would give you access to more confusion and torment, the clones are a bit “meh” and confusing images hits hard when you start specing into power. I wouldn’t use interrupt based builds for PvE, the current state of PvE all you need to think about is stacking as much damage as possible.

Its good fun in a group, the damage is good and the interrupt provides a massive amount of cover conditions for your confusion and whatever your group puts out. There is no better sight than a thief HSing out of a smoke field only for him to stop in mid air as your daze lands and hes rooted there with confusion as your team sets about him.

That grub is crying out for an epidemic.