Guild Wars 2

Xehanort.7034:

Phoenix.7928:

Here alone are three of ‘em, if you can’t enter, wait. The password is password.

https://i.imgur.com/qIJj1uQ.jpg

while I didn’t find the other two, i can confirm that i found one. Second story, behind the bed.

http://puu.sh/izWvE/ed136a9145.jpg

Go down into the tunnels. Two more.

Here alone are three of ‘em, if you can’t enter, wait. The password is password.

https://i.imgur.com/qIJj1uQ.jpg

Just in case that the karka scratching at the bank is driving you nuts, too. Don’t do the JP. It’s double evil, because hard and unnecessary.

→ https://i.imgur.com/p8DlfZm.jpg

Here’s the first hatchling: https://i.imgur.com/lZpE51C.jpg

Elvirais.5472:

So you use dire armor instead of say rabid for extra vitality? I was thinking of doing that myself for WvW for a while. Is that absolutely necessary or is that more a temporary training wheels thing? I’m new to condi mesmer so I definitely need some wheels right now

What Curunen said, plus:

High health PLUS high armor allows you to survive blobs trampling over you, thieves backstabbing you midfight, burst setups from glass cannons, and so on.

It depends really on where you play and how. T1 WvW is pure cancer. kittentons of guild squads hunting solo roamers all over the kittening map, one big-kitten zerg after another, zerker thieves behind every bush. So it might be a good thing to get a big, fat health buffer.

Oh, hey. You again.

You right with most stuff. Mental Defense I only took because it’s one more illussion to shatter. So yeah, I’m probably going to be starved like hell. I’m playing around with a nerfed MtD shatter right now on live in exotic gear and with DE and Mirror Images, holy kitten can I shatter. Clone generation might be the reason this won’t work and force me to concessions.

Anyway, I chose utility and speed over clone generation because I’m dead without said utility and speed. Torch won’t save me from a guild ganksquad full of zerkers spreading out to find and kill me, especially if I already popped some cooldowns. Catching 15s of swiftness, pulling them and THEN vanishing into stealth with super speed and condition resistance might allow me to give them the slip however.

I probably don’t have to tell you what a pain it is to run from one end of a WvW map to another without swiftness whatsoever. Right now I got my old reta tank mesmer build and spam stealth for swiftness procs on top of my focus swiftness, so I got used to perma swiftness as a mesmer over the last…what, a year or two?

Yeah, that’s what torch is up against.

And please, let’s not talk about Persisting Images. We both know the only reason I took it is because it’s the less worse option in the adept tier. -.-

Well, it’s survivability in a highly volatile environment VS better performance in 1on1’s.

Maybe I drop the whole shatter thing and go…what. Spamming staff1?

Oh I don’t know, they’re all pretty useful and have several synergies. Illusionary Inspiration for example is a killer with Blurred Inscriptions.

Dear Lord, Warden’s Feeback AND Restorative Illussions would solve so many problems.

Mirror on manipulation is useful and I’m planning to use it, but it’s no contender to focus. Focus is too powerful a tool. Placeable reflects of quite high duration, pulls in a thousand different situations, AoE snare, good lord the swiftness alone makes it a must have.

I also need a full utility bar of stealth. I’m no thief, I can’t just spam stealth and teleports all day long. I need several stealth cooldowns to get away from a blob or, worst case, a ganksquad of 5-10 guild people hounding me all over the map.

Doesn’t mean I don’t use other skills, I just hotswap them if need be. The initial setup simply is a full bar of stealth. It’s just too strong a defence (and sometimes offence) to be able to compete with arcane thievery. AT won’t save me if I get jumped by a zerker thief the ten thousandth time while I’m already busy fighting a power ranger and condition engineer. Dropping a veil to GTFO is a life-saver. On of the reasons why I’m considering to use Temporal Enchanter. Dat Super Speed / Resistance OH kitten combo.

Why dulfy doesn’t work for you I don’t know, but here’s another one from intothemists. It’s a quite fragmented calculator, but you should get the gist.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=0R;9;5c5;0Vz0;1X;4WUV;0056257236;4UNm6awl6NX8aNX8aw-keAzqJ-cKYLvcv7wcw7xcx7DZWN74J0;4V05NV05NV05NV05N7YBm-VBm;9;9;6k0;3V6-7-F5OZ0F

Keep in mind that most of the build is early alpha, I’ll have to play it in the field to adjust the whole thing in the right direction.

TL;DR: I need to survive everything a T1 WvW map throws at me and still kill something. Not being able to create enough clones is going to severely cramp my shatters. Also, condition removal.

Build: -> http://dulfy.net/gw2traits#build=AgME1AV0A-g~

I sacrificed a lot for a ton more utility, survivability and escapes. Fought long and hard about that one. In the end, my animosity to corpse runs won over my wish to be able to shatter more.

Prismatic Understanding is, as sad as it may be, a no brainer. I need that thing to escape the million blobs and gank squads, all of them having nothing better to do than to hunt a single player all over the kittening map.

Inspiration is also a must have. Reflect on focus skills is far too strong in the open field to not have it, lack of synergy be kitten ed. I need to reflect kitten and I need to do so almost all the kittening time. Also, swiftness.

And, well, Illussions is where the torment is. So yeah, I have to stick around.

Honestly, I hate the new system. I’d love to be able to spread my points all over the place, instead I HAVE to chose three and ONLY three. There is so much good stuff in Dueling, and dat Blurred Inscriptions has a kittenton of synergy with Illussionary Inspiration.

Maybe I turn away from shatter and try something else entirely.

Edit: Weapons are scepter/focus & staff.

That’s probably all we can expect. Sad thing, really.

Simonoly.4352:

Combining all the stuff I mentioned should provide some decent backstab protection.

True, and I already can protect myself against backstabs. I can pop a stealth or two, block, dodge, and so on. Thing is, in the end I’ already wasting cooldowns and the fight hasn’t even started. All the while Captain McStabby sits on a full pool of cooldowns, a spammable opener and endlessly regenerating initiative.

Fay.2357:

Didn’t work out? Don’t make me laugh. My build was one of the most popular builds in the game for mesmer until anet deleted it.

Heh, that’s probably the reason why I think that it doesn’t work out.
I did not go over every single reply, I probably got the gist that it was teh kitten and that I have no clue about what I’m talking about. So I actually am going to watch a video or two, I’m always interested in unconventional combos.
Anyway, sorry to hear that your build is gone. I’d rather like to avoid the same fate.

Bwuh. No wonder that didn’t work out. Your only source of retaliation is Confusing Cry. That’s not enough uptime. And heaven forbid you eat a single enemy cleanse. You got no blocks whatsoever, what do you do against hard hitters? No critical infusion for vigor. You can’t dodge EVERYTHING.

You got no blocks whatsoever. They are the hardest hitters you got and migate a lot of damage if you block the right enemy skills. Especially if traited for retaliation you want to keep those skills on cooldown 24/7.

Your staff is too chaotic to really be of much use, scepter allows you to stack confusion on demand, staff doesn’t. Staff is defensive, but that’s really all it does for you. If you would’ve at least taken illusionary elasticity to get a second bouce out of your weapon.

You got FULL Soldier’s, but for long fights you want some cleric’s, too, that perma regen really adds up and ether feast with some healing power and three clones heals 70% of your health even as a full tank.

You also need different food. Convertion into crit chance for vigor procs are really necessary, you’re going to dodge A LOT especially if you drag out fights. The lemon grass, especially in combination with melandru, is awesome though.

How do you set up burst combos? Staff is useless for that, all you got is sword/focus. The only combination I see is iWarden→root→sword2. That does some damage, but is the only combo available and if you use your sword defensively, you got nothing left.

It seemed like you tried to create a condition/tank hybrid, but I don’t really see how that should work out. You do as little damage as I do (minus setups, I got more of these than you), got very little retaliation and with the total lack of blocks and dodges there isn’t much counter-play left for you either, except reflects and chaos armor.

The post is two years old. Man, you should’ve kept on it. I started out kinda like that, too, but a reta mesmer can do a lot better than that.

Another retal mesmer? You’re kittenting me. I’m the only one of my kind.

Edit: For me, it’s not about killing the enemy, it’s about winning the fight. Having them run away is as good for me as a stomp, especially if they do it four times in a row and still don’t win. Best case scenario, they get infuriated and get actually stomped by me.
Major factor for me: I’m no thief food but the other way around.

Edit2: If Robert simply kills me, full dire is probably what I’m going to do. Although I enjoy PVT/Cleric’s ten times more. It’s much more skill based than LULZ CONDITIONS ‘N’ STEALTH.

Retaliation Tank Mesmer, to be exact.

Yes, that’s a thing.

TL;DR: WvW Retaliation Tank Mesmer Build And Gear

Detailed version:

Retaliation Tank Mesmer is an attrition based Mesmer with as much utility as a swiss army knife. It’s build around denial and punishment, core mechanics associated with the Mesmer. Plus a pinch of my personal taste: tanky attrition based gameplay instead of twitch burst crits.

Blocks & invuls (sword offhand, scepter mainhand, F4 shatter), punishes careless big hitters
Retaliation (blocks, F2 shatter), punishes careless fast-hitters (guardian whirl & fields, for example)
Confusion (scepter, F2 shatter), punishes careless skill use
Torment (scepter block, auto attack & clones), punishes superfluous movement
Recflects (focus 4&5), punishes careless use of projectiles
Interrupts (offhand sword 4, focus 4 pull, F3 shatter), punishes obviously telegraphed attacks and skills
Spike Damage (F1 shatter, sword 2, coordinated with phantasm attacks), punishes underestimation of my burst capabilities

My tankiness allows me to endure thief openers (the bane of a mesmer’s existence) or even use burst combos AGAINST an enemy, by stacking some confusion on him and dealing damage via retaliation. It’s honestly a horrible build to fight against, you have to watch so. much. stuff. to NOT kill yourself slowly* but surely.
On the other hand, I’m still a cloth armoured class instead of a warrior, so all these zerker burst setups may not one-hit me, but hurt a lot. So there’s counterplay through pure force. Of course, you can intelligently use cleanses, converts or transfers, wait out my boons, attack through the gaps between my blocks and play on my weakness: my low DPS. Anyway, it won’t be a quick fight.

I’ve been playing that build since release (almost three years now), refining and perfecting it, and it’s ten times more fun (yeah, yeah, I know, at least for me) than twitch glass burst or stuff like PU, whose gameplay consists of “stack conditions, hide in stealth, repeat”. And all you need to do to conserve it is to leave retaliation in the trait lines. I need reta on F2 and blocks for a meaningful uptime. The condition changes already weaken my build, but retaliation is essential. I need a reliable source of constant DPS.

WvW Retaliation Tank Mesmer Build And Gear

Please don’t turn my tank mesmer into yet another shatter mesmer.
Have a heart for non-twitch players.

• I could up my DPS and lessen my tankiness if I had more counter-play to thieves. Right now, thieves suffer next to no consequences if they screw up an opener. I anticipate their attack and block it, dodge it, turn myself invulnerable or whatever, and it does nothing to them. There is no cooldown they’ve blown, no initiative lost, they don’t get revealed if their attack connects, only if it does damage. They just can spam 111 until the backstab hits, wich especially in WvW all but one-hits my full zerk mesmer (wich I play whenever I’m too lazy to switch all my gear and build). Worst case, their stealth runs out and they have to restealth – not the biggest problem for a thief. It’s highly unlikely that I get the burst down instantly and I’m dead with the next opener.
  Same goes for perplex pistol condition thieves.
  If there were more reliable counterplay than pure tankiness, I could ease up on armor and health and slot some more condition or crit. Although I would still need to be able to take hits and burst combos to get my retaliation to do its thing.

http://gw2status.de/

Bring them back up again, we need our fix.

Can’t log in and get a range of different errors, all connectivity related.

Ah, I see. Thanks, man.

Yes, I know, most people consider themselves lucky about the mix-up. But I really wanted the choosable stat exotic backpack and would like my cultivated seed very much. Could you send it to me via mail?

Thanks in advance

Long story short, I use pretty much every weapon noone else uses in a build that’s so rare I’m not sure that me and my roamer buddy aren’t the only two people in the world who play the Mesmer in that way. But it works. It’s awesome, and we could need some love.

Staff and Greatsword don’t need more fans, and neither Torch nor Scepter are bad. They’re underrated, but they DO have some problems. Scepter projectile speed is terrible, as is its attack speed, and Torch Phantasm needs to lay off the valium. That holds for its cooldown, too.
Our survivability could use a small boost in form of Sword #2 Distortion. We don’t need 10 seconds of invul like Warriors do, as Mesmers we can utilize Blink, Illusionary Leap, F4, stealth and alot more stuff I don’t wanna reveal here. But as tanks wich don’t kill stuff fast, we sometime have so stay there and simply take it, so we DO need a piece of these 10 seconds of invul. Two would be fine. Because, at the end of the day, we ARE wearing cloth and our health is only medium. Sword is meele, as is Torch, Scepter is only medium ranged. DPS traited, shattering long-range Mesmer are already a major part of design decisions and the player base. Please remember the minorities. Tank Mesmer damage is laughable, our kills come by a thousand pinpricks. Some Confusion here, a healthy dose of Tormet there, an Phantasmal Duelist’s salve on top of it and round it off with a Blurred Frenzy. BAM! 20% health off! Every build would have killed someone with such a combo, not so the tank Mesmer.
Glass builds can’t utilize Retaliation, but tank Mesmers could. DPS builds kill too fast to get much of a difference between Sword #2 Evasion and Evade, however, it is a tank Mesmers bread and butter. Glass builds don’t take the brunt of an enemy zerg, the tank Mesmer does. DPS Mesmer don’t revive downed players under Superior Arrow Cart fire or while the boss whirls in their faces, tank Mesmer do.

Mesmer has a very unique potentiality to be a cloth wearing trickster tank and I’d like…, nah, love with all my heart and soul, to invite you to keep that fraction of your players in mind when making design decisions, because that Archetype has never ever been seen before and I’m pretty sure it’d infringe against the Geneva Convention to let them die out.

Wall of text over.

Thanks for reading. <3

JonPeters.5630:

I think this might give us 3 strong mesmer build archetypes.

1) Shatter
2) Phantasm
3) Mantra

I think right behind those are the interrupt shutdown mesmer and the signet mesmer, so future suggestions towards those are appreciated as well.

Hey Jon,

I’d like to remember you that there is yet another mesmer archtype, one that I’ve been playing since beta weekend one:

The tank Mesmer.

(Yes, I’m serious.)

My gear is full Soldier’s with Cleric’s jewelry. 70% of my time I spend in WvW, the rest is PvE. Never mind that sprinkle of sPvP I do, though my playstyle is quite effective there, too.

If I could decide anything I want, it’d be to revert 1h sword skill #2, Blurred Frenzy, from Evade back to Distortion, keep the bigger cooldown on the sword skills and nerf Mind Wrack by somewhat around 25%. Mostly because DPS Mesmers are simply too strong (a.k.a. OP) in duels. Too much short range mobility, stealth and invulvs for a four-hit glkittenter crit wich’s going to hit like a nuke full of trucks and is on a 10 second cooldown.
Condition Engineers are bordering on that problem, too, as did Thieves.
With the difference that the Thief burst got toned down a bit. The Mesmer nerfs missed that goal. Instead of toning down that one skill that one-shot alot of people, alot of different small-scale nerfs were implemented, not all of them bad, but none of them hitting the actual culprit.

While the conversion to Evade didn’t affect the defense of a dueling glkittenter Mesmer too much, us tank Mesmers had a much bigger problem now at our hands.
As a WvW player, my #2 invuls was a two-second breathing window while pushing into the enemy zerg. Glass Mesmer don’t go there. Tank Mesmers do. Now neither of us has that breathing window, if needed or not. Mesmers don’t have Ignore Pain or whatever that shrinking elixier of Engineers is called, or Mistform or a bajillion health bars or whatever every single class seems to have, all I had was F4 if my clones weren’t insta-gibbed by all the AoE, or, more reliable, Blurred Frenzy, wich rooted me in place.
Now all these bleeding stacks are still ticking, I can’t prevent to hit minimum two guys with Retaliation on them and while I could stop my healthbar from dropping fast at least for two seconds, all I can do now is to make it drop a bit slower.

Every stealth class with high mobility, may it be long or short range, and high burst suffers the same fate: creating alot of frustration in those who get two-shot without being able to fight back. Glkittenter Mesmers as well as berserker Thieves.

Like Backstab, Mind Wrack is such a skill.

All in all I would be happy to see Mesmer tankibility to grow. I love the Mesmer, and I love playing it defensive. My weapons of choice are Scepter / Focus for utility, range and conditions, and Sword / Pistole for damage and control if I’m more dueling and fighting, or Sword / Torch if I need more survivability. I.e. commandeering, trolling zergs, etc.
Focus is absolutely awesome. The 1s cooldown on Into the Void killed my only on-command CC I have, saving a friend in the last second is literally impossible now. Pistol has cast time and I need to click exactly the right guy, F3 daze has a slow-kitten clone waddling over there, there’s nothing I can do if I don’t react at least 1,1s before the stomp. But even so Temporal Curtain is one of the most versatile skills ingame. It’s a snare. It’s a speed buff. It’s a pull. It’s a reflect (and it’s always a reflect for me). I can use it offensivly, defensivly, I can use it to place mobs or players, it may even cure cancer and spawn kittens. As do these forums.
That’s something alot of Mesmer skills have in common. One skill, a dozen applications. Sword #3, Illusionary Leap, is another example. I can root, if my half-kittened, crippled monkey clone is actually able to leap to its frigging target for a change, but instead I can use that short range teleport defensively and send the clone AWAY cluster of enemies that surround me. Or I can keep the clone and let it happily cripple away. Or I can shatter it. I can even place myself strategically near it and let it intercept projectiles.
Phantasmal Warden? Damage! Reflect! Target out of the Warden? I run into it – more reflect! Want damage instead or reflect? Why not both?! Pull the target back into the Warden via Into The Void! Even easier with NPCs instead of players. I just wish it would move more once it’s finished its animation.
Phantasmal Mage debuffs Confusion and buffs Retaliation. As a tank, Retaliation is my best friend. As a Mesmer, my ways of getting Retaliation can be numbered on one hand, and all of them suck dromedary balls. Wanna make Scepter awesome for me? Make it buff Retaliation. Make its clones do the same. 1/2s Retaliation from every Scepter clone, 2 seconds from Scepter #1. Wanna keep that 50% Retaliation uptime? Keep spamming #1. Wanna bask in the awesomenes of what all your other skills offer? Well, gotta let go of Retaliation now, do you. Buff Phantasmal Mage, its attack is awesome, but it attacks like once every ten years, does abysmal damage and has friggin’ 30 seconds cooldown. Even so I love Torch.

Habib Loew.6239:

Players in your party are always reported to you and are never culled. Guilds are not favored in the current system.

I love you and want your children, but first let me ask: how about squads? Are those treated like groups?

Thank god the gear-treadmill comes back. After a thousend years of WoWDAoCEQRIFTWhatever there is absolutely no other way for me to have fun in a game, but grinding points.
Tough luck for everyone else.
Ultima Online doesn’t count. Only old people talk about Ultima Online.

Thanks Anet, for saving me from just playing the game.

Let’s make it short:

Wanted to buy ectoplasm, made a leap of faith ‘cause there is no trade window and sent the money – of course the player went offline. Gold lost, no items recieved. So I was curious and wrote to the support, interested if they’re doing something about such a blatant scam. After all, the deal was documented via screens.

Short answer: No, they don’t.

Long answer: No help at loss of stuff no matter what kind or circumstances (wich seems to include griefing and scamming as well), thanks for your understanding, there’s a ton of useless links on totally unrelated matters have fun and never bother as again, etc, etc.

Screenshots, but beware: It’s krautspeak, it’s highly unlikeley for your to understand more then a bunch of words. Independent of the language of the server where it happened, I felt it’s interesting for everyone on every server, since it’s been an official response to that matter.

[Moderator edit] This post has been edited to remove personally identifying information

I didn’t talk about dying. I talked about how the sudden increase of damage concerns me.

Is it just me or did damage get alot worse over the last few days?
What put me on the hype train through beta was

1.) Dirty open PvP in a RvR environment instead of clinical competitive PvP á la battlegrounds
2.) Slow, tactical fights with alot of health and low damage instead a 5 seconds roflstompfest somewhere between crits and CC-chains

WvW is broken for me, 5h++ queues can’t be named in any other way in my opinion.
And the slow tactical fights start to remember me more and more of lolcrit damage-fests I’m used to from…WoW-Rift-SWTOR-AoC-WHO-etc-etc

I’m specced vitality / toughness, my whole gear is power / health / toughness based. It’s the rare WvW gear.
If I lose 80% of my health in sometimes under 5 seconds, it feels like something’s very, very wrong.

Most of the time it’s fine, people in damage gear take more damage and do less because of my more tank-ier stuff, but sometimes I just feel like some green geared guy in a WoW battleground.
It’s just my opinion, but it feels very, very wrong.

Eight out of ten guys nearly wiping the floor with me are thiefs, the rest were necromancers. No clue if it’s the class or the gear, but I’m concerned. I’m a Mesmer. With a defensive-heavy skill set. I don’t do much damage. I’m tanky and agile. I get out. What do people without a dozen stealth skills, blink and roots and snared and knockbacks?

They die.
Like that Warrior yesterday. Or that more damage oriented Mesmer the day before.

Maybe it’s just a phase. Maybe I smell honor point grind and critfests just because I’m paranoid.

nah. leave it. seeing two zergs fighting over it is awesome.
open pvp isn’t battlegrounds. learn the difference.

greetings from riverside, after we’ve roflstomped you, we get dogpiled 24/7 by vizunah square.
find comfort in that knowledge.