Guild Wars 2

Anet did a wonderful job making the combat feel fluid; the mobility standard in this game makes playing other games like GW1 or Tera (where you must stand still to cast, no dodge, etc.) frankly unplayable in comparison.

However, I find several things to be lacking in this game. The expensive cost (in gold, inventory space, and time) for switching builds, the “dps only” focus, and the limits on the skill bar are all pretty frustrating, as has been pointed out already. But the thing that deeply annoys me the most are skill cooldowns, and the lack of a shared psuedo-cooldown mechanic. In GW1, that would be the energy bar.

Lifted from a post I had written in the past:

Richard Nixon.6573

I feel like the biggest mistake Anet made was removing the energy bar. Having every skill be balanced by recharge time lends itself to a system where you want to spam as many skills as possible. The only way to have a good effect for an elite under this system is to either make it so niche that it isn’t even worth taking in the vast majority of situations (see Moa Morph for mesmers), or with such a ridiculous cooldown that you have to guess whether you’ll get a better opportunity to use in before it would come off cooldown again.

That applies for weapon skills and utilities skills too. No shared cooldown mechanic (GW1 used energy for this) really limits how good individual skills can be, and really removes a good amount of depth from combat. I feel that until some system that strays from the “no downside” approach that GW2 currently has is implemented, skills will remain relatively bland and, frankly, underwhelming.

Rainshine.5493:

GW2 feels more flexible because I can swap weapons/utilities on the fly and there’s no PvX wiki where people feel like if it’s not one of those builds, it’s garbage. That’s just me, though. Well, that and I love getting to use all attunements at once now.

Speed Clears in GW1 required cookie-cutter builds, “Speed Clears” in GW2 require Berserker power-based builds.

Anyways, I feel like the biggest mistake Anet made was removing the energy bar. Having every skill be balanced by recharge time lends itself to a system where you want to spam as many skills as possible. The only way to have a good effect for an elite under this system is to either make it so niche that it isn’t even worth taking in the vast majority of situations (see Moa Morph for mesmers), or with such a ridiculous cooldown that you have to guess whether you’ll get a better opportunity to use in before it would come off cooldown again.

That applies for weapon skills and utilities skills too. No shared cooldown mechanic (GW1 used energy for this) really limits how good individual skills can be, and really removes a good amount of depth from combat. I feel that until some system that strays from the “no downside” approach that GW2 currently has is implemented, skills will remain relatively bland and, frankly, underwhelming.

Me Games Ma.8426:

Thank you for your replies!
I forgot to mention that I created the build for the wvw-squad in our guild. The leader told me that I have to use a staff, deal as mutch dmg as possible and that at least 2 mesmers have to go with nullfield and veil. The others may use other utilities.

I’d like to ask you (all of the mesmers out there) why noone uses Imbued Diversion. I think it’s quite OP in Zergfights.

It’s not that it isn’t nice… but the dazes are pretty short, and won’t reliably interrupt key skills. If there was some way to insta-cast and insta-shatter with it, I’d more than welcome its use, and your build would be perfect for (ab)using it. But as it stands, you’re likely to only interrupt auto-attacks.

Looking at it another way, the daze is 1 second, right? So if you get kittens, then that’s 5 seconds worth of a person not casting (more or less) on a 30+ second recharge. In comparison, something like Warden’s Feedback allows for reflection that is capped only by positioning; on top of that, it not only prevents damage the damage (same as daze), but it also causes the opponents to take said damage… and on about a 20 second recharge. That is a whole lot better, and the Inspiration has a few traits that are wonderful for group support. It just seems all around better for the same purpose.

Me Games Ma.8426:

I agree with you in that point. I also want to use Signet of Inspiration and wrote it in my post:

I’m still not sure what utilitys i should use. Signet of inspritaion, mirror images, veil, blink, nullfield, feedback,… they’re all good for the build (help pls?)

Mirror Images is a great skill, but imo, is not worthwhile in this type of build. If you need a stun-breaker, Blink or Signet of Midnight are much preferred (Blink for more selfish survivability, Sig of Midnight for group survivability at the cost of your individual survivability). The mirror images clones are going to die way too fast to be near reliable.

I’m of the mindset that Veil is needed for a mesmer to be worthwhile over other classes in a zerg, so that’s a given (your instructions support that too). What’s better than Veil? More Veil. And the glamour trait also gives more Null Fields, which can be used for boon stripping, or condition removal, or even both if used on the melee groups. I feel like these two are going to be staple for a effective zerg mesmer. The last one is just down to preference- do you need survivability? Grab a stun-breaker. Do you need more group support? Use Sig of Inspiration. Do you want a mix of the two, plus more offense? Get Feedback, which also benefits from the glamour trait in my version (it’s still the same situation in your original build though). Pick whichever you feel you need for each individual situation and also depending on the rest of your group setup.

Me Games Ma.8426:

I have a Question: How can you cause more aoe vulnerability than with the combination of “Imbued Diversion” and “Dazzling”?

Also this is why I can’t use your suggestion. Damage is too important to let it out. Even if it’s only the shatterskills damage.

I didn’t mean it causes more than yours could, just that I added another source of it to help compensate (so there’s more of it compared to without that one trait). Sorry I didn’t make that clear.

Thinking about it more though, the 20% mind wrack damage trait is probably stronger than this. Assuming 5 stacks get applied per shatter (1 per person), and an average player’s health is somewhere around 16k, if all those players were downed in the 8 seconds it’s applied for, it would account for about 800 damage. That also assume that each player takes enough damage to be downed, and all of it has to be direct damage… Whereas the mind wrack trait only needs to hit for 4k to match Rending Shatter’s maximum potential. Even though Rending Shatter activates on Diversion and Cry, Mind Wrack has the lowest cooldown.

So if we swap out Rending for 20% MW damage, perhaps the damage output wouldn’t be as low as I thought. You’ll just miss out on a few stacks of vulnerability from Dazzling, and a bit less frequent shattering than your build.

Anyways, since damage is your top priority, Feedback would compliment my version the best. And getting all that reflection could result in more damage output than yours. I suppose it depends on good usage though, and how much value you place in reflection damage compared to traditional dps.

I had some distractions going on while typing that up, so I apologize if anything there doesn’t make sense or is confusing.

Honestly, I’m not convinced that Diversion is really worth the trait points. Yeah, it helps get more interrupts, which would then get you more stacks of might… but if you’re running in a zerg ball, I’d be willing to bet the ball has ways to give itself might already (which makes 25 stacks from Bountiful a little bit overkill).

I feel like those points would be better spent in the Inspiration line. You can grab the -20% glamour recharge (for veil and null field, both of which will make you exceedingly more effective in your supportive role). That allows you to run Feedback if your group wants/needs it and already has enough might generation (which makes Sig of Inspiration redundant). If you don’t like the -20% trait, then you can instead pick up Vigorous Revelation and give your zerg ball some vigor while you debuff the enemies. Everyone loves vigor.

Anyways, after doing a little theorycrafting (so take this all with a grain of salt!), I came up with this build. I swapped the staff for the greatsword. I decided to trade survivability, and a little utility (chaos storm), for ranged auto-attack damage (to help off-set losing mind wrack buffing traits), some misc. utility (#2, #5 for interrupt and boon generation), and most importantly, another consistent no travel time shatter (iBerserker).

You mentioned a few goals you had in mind when making your build, so I tried to compare how my version compares to yours in fulfillment of those goals:

• clear enemies boons (-, possibly equal)
  Left boon-strip on shatter in. Added -20% glamour recharge for null field use. Overall, my version would strip boons a little less than your original, due to reduce shredding recharge rate, and no iCelerity for faster illusion generation. But, has an extra phantasm for on demand, no travel time shatters.

• buff himself and his allies (+ to ++)
  Added Signet of Inspiration. Points into the Inspiration line allows for group vigor on shatter trait (if not taking -20% glamour). Greatsword #5 should about match the loss from Chaos Storm, and -20% recharge on focus is wonderful for more focus pulls.

• support with skills like veil or nullfield (++)
  The -20% glamour trait allows their use more often. In addition, Warden’s Feedback gives reflect on focus use, especially notable with Temporal Curtain, and more curtain and iWarden use.

• deal damage with shatterskills on range (-, possibly —)
  My version has reduced shredding recharge rate and lacks iCelerity, as well as the mind wrack buff traits. However, it has a better auto-attack weapon, a no travel-time phantasm for shattering, and more aoe vulnerability.

The damage output will be lower, but iBerserker allows for another middle of the zerg shatter, and temporal curtain can be used much more flexibly. I feel like that is worth the trade-off of imbued diversion. The biggest issue might be the lack of stun-breaks in my version (while yours has MI and staff #2). This was all some quick theorycrafting, but think my suggestions hold any merit?

When I first started playing around with condition builds, I didn’t think Sharper Images was worthwhile. I played it for a few hundred hours, so you could say I was accustomed to certain “kill rate”- how fast targets would drop from condition spam.

When I started getting bored with it, I switched to precision-based conditions. Using Deceptive Evasion to help get staff clones up faster was cool and all, but the big player is Sharper Images. Immediately, I noticed my kill rate was sped up drastically. Those extra bleeds offer sustained damage that more or less doubles your dps output.

The thing is though, Sharper Images is an on-crit effect. It doesn’t matter if the illusion does 1 damage or 10,000 damage on the crit, there will be exactly one bleed per damage packet that crits. Since power (and crit damage, while we’re at it) doesn’t help your crit rate, it makes no sense to build power in a condition build. Precision, on the other hand, DOES affect your crit rate, which will help proc Sharper Images more.

Long story short- traditionally you only want to build condition damage and vit/tough/healing in a condition build. But if you have the Sharper Images trait, precision translates into more bleeds, which makes up the bulk of your sustained dps.

Playing devil’s advocate here- Why don’t you just organize a group to do it on another, less populated server? Why do others have to change how they want to play the game to accommodate you?

To the guild officers- I’d gladly donate a few gold to help expand the number of members possible. Let me know if that’s needed.

I’d love an invite! I have a commander tag as well, so when I’m on, feel free to use me for whatever :P

Sign me up. I’m not a part of a large guild, so I’m essentially gated out of this content unless I find (a) a large guild to piggy back with or (b) something like this to join.

Best way I can see this working out (without raising the condition cap) is if the boss reaches a full stack of a particular condition, all the conditions of that type are removed, and ~80-85% of the damage that would have been done is instead done instantly.

Conditions are supposed to be DoT in exchange for slightly higher damage/other utility. By making it into burst damage, you reduce it to make it a bad idea to go over 25 stacks unless you can continuously reapply them. Keeps conditions balanced for pvp, makes them fair in pve.

You get a bag every time you kill a champion. So far, each of my bags have contained karma (drips), a random green/rare, t5 mats, a t6 mat, lodestones/cores/slivers/etc., or a skill point. While not awesome, it’s far far far far better than what it used to be. You can also get exotic things, including the new skins, if you’re lucky.

Totally worth the hassle of killing champions now.

My favorite skin in all of GW1 was Dhuum’s Soul Reaper. I would LOVE to be able to use it again. I’d pay 800 gems+ for it in a heartbeat.

The “class color” is to give a visual cue to what class an opponent is facing. Remember that each class doesn’t have a unique armor model, or an icon that indicates a player’s class- a player needs some kind of cue, and the “class color” gives you a sort of identity.

Blue/white belongs to the guardians, sorry!

Even if the mantra heal is slightly less, the fact that you could possibly get some torment on heal sounds wonderful in zerg combat. No ICD + extra mantra casts would be very potent application of torment… that alone could just about double mesmer condition builds dps.

Pyro, if there is no ICD for it yet, I’d say expect one to be slapped on very soon.

Edit: Also, according to game release notes, “Runes of Perplexity now correctly apply confusion to the enemy target instead of the player.”

So is this anet’s way of apologizing for destroying confusion? A rune set that is only minimally better than undead runes?

It’s a shame that glamour builds are dead and buried, this would be really fun to use with them.

Not rerolling. I love mesmer gameplay too much compared to other classed to even think of doing that. I’ll just have to deal with the nerfs and hope that someday anet makes condition builds viable again.

This patch… happened.

Well, at least the nerfs to every single mesmer build means that condition builds and interrupt builds are viable now, right?

…right?

Just as a rule of thumb, Mesmers get their durability through avoiding damage before it hits you. Keep that in mind when you play- what decision is best for you to avoid as much damage as possible? Should you pop your stealth now, or kite for a bit first? Anyways though, some tips:

1. Are you using Ether Feast? With 3 illusions up, it has the highest raw healing outside of traited mantras (which I assume you aren’t running). Mirror has its uses, but you should use Ether Feast for general pve.

2. Decoy (and Mass Invisibility, though it has a much higher recharge) is a great tool for taking some pressure off yourself while you let your heals recharge.

3. You should be popping out as many clones/phantasms as you can. They draw aggro and eat hits for you while you can kite and reposition yourself. Deceptive Evasion is a fantastic trait to take towards this end.

4. Chaos Armor- gives you boons and gives enemies conditions (blind being an important one, as it causes another hit to miss). If you are using a mainhand sword or staff, you should try and have an etheral field (staff #5, null field, feedback, time warp) down so you can use a leap finisher. Using a leap finisher in an etheral field will give you chaos armor, so try to get it whenever possible.

5. Distortion and Blurred Frenzy are important tools- the invulnerability buys time for your heal to recharge, as well as any other defensive skills. Don’t be afraid to use them.

6. Never stop moving. Don’t make it easy for melee mobs to hit you, and give ranged mobs a chance to target your illusions rather than you.

The trick to playing mesmer is to stay mobile (it involves a lot of kiting and bouncing around from teleports) and try and prevent damage by never letting it hit you in the first place.

Torment is basically just a bleed that varies in damage. It will not make a condition mesmer viable unless we get a TON of access to it, which I highly, highly doubt. I’d be much happier if they made confusion actually worthwhile to trait for and base yourself around.

The fact that we could not only do condition builds, but different kinds of them was awesome. I want to be able to do that, but as long as condition is mediocre at it’s absolute best, we will never be able to do that.

Arale.4207:

I feel this nerf is justified, simply because IC is a very powerful minor trait, one of the most powerful & build changing in the game in my opinion. As a 25 point trait, it feels justified there. However, I also agree that a 10% adjustment to all illusion cooldowns would help non illusion based mesmers out. Similarly, if such a change did happen, IC would be brought down to 10% as well. That way, non IC mesmers are slower but not as slow as before, while mesmers who have put the hard points into illusions will still have the same cooldowns as they do currently.

Because it was so powerful, (almost) every build ran it. One could make the argument that because it was so mandatory for so long, that the rest of the class was balanced around it.

If that’s the case, and that Mesmers were balanced with IC in mind, then this is a flat out nerf to every build that doesn’t run 25 in Illusions. Even with your suggestion (which is definitely better than the possible change), it’s still penalizing mesmers who don’t run 0/0/0/0/25, simply because the class was previously balanced around the trait.

I’m just as disgusted by this as everyone else. If it’s real, Anet should be ashamed about this change.

Zeke.6037:

[Agg] has officially transfered off of DB! We would like to thank everyone in DB for our stay there. We have moved to JQ for more constant fights. Good luck to DB in the future, we in Agg wish DB all the best in their future endeavors.

If it’s true, wish you all the best Agg. Had plenty of fun working with you, and was always a pleasure to see you in action. Good luck in JQ, and may your bags be ever plentiful!

Complaining about changes that haven’t even happened yet is kinda silly. We don’t even know if those patch notes are legit or not…

jalmari.3906:

I think anet simply went insane if they’re going to just give thief and mesmer new condition, especially condition like that. With current mechanics you need to MOVE to avoid their attacks (which somewhat instakill you if you don’t) and now you’d just get damage for doing it. Way to go. Clever. Good work etc.

I just hope this also means thief and mesmer get a meganerf at same time. i.e. Mesmer GS loses 20% dmg and vuln from autoattack and thief loses stealth from dagger 5.

The new condition is 75% of a bleed, 150% of a bleed if you’re moving. Which means, you literally only have to worry about it when it comes from a condition build. Power builds will do almost nothing to you, even if you stay in motion for the entire duration.

And for mesmers at least, the only application we get is the block on the scepter- one single skill, which we can’t even control who gets the torment. And we only have the potential to maintain 3 stacks of it- which will vary between 2.25 bleed stacks and 4.5 bleed stacks.

I’ll tell you this right now, it’s worthless on a power build, and using it in a condition build makes your dps plummet (you can normally maintain ~6 bleeds and burning). You won’t even notice or care that this is coming from a mesmer- just like confusion.

Giffonhook is so ridiculously easy…

…with portals. :P

Doing it legitimately is just a super long “did you press all the keys at the right time? and did you get lucky with your aggro? and is your class well-suited to avoiding being hit?” Not worth the time involved at all.

Even if it does scale on condition damage, this won’t make cond mesmers viable. The only application, supposedly, is on the counter for the scepter. Which applies nothing else but confusion. Which sucks. And it only gives 3 stacks of torment. Which can be the equivilent of anywhere from 2.25 bleeds and 4.5 bleeds. The staff can maintain ~6 plus almost perma burning.

If you use the only weapon that can access it, you’ll do far less damage than you currently do. Which is already pretty crappy.

Halting strike, iirc, can’t crit. It just does a base amount of damage that scales with power.

With really high power, you could get it to hit ~400 before. So now it should be around 2400-2700.

Benji.9203:

I just read the new domination trait and died

I thought eles had it good in terms of dps now but if this is real ANET has just opened up the possibilities of a one shot….

A 500% increase only puts the damage at 2k-3k. What are you going to be one-shotting, ambients?

What stats are you using on armor/weapons/trinkets? Berserker?

Don’t know how accurate it is, but this is supposedly the patch notes for the next update: http://pastebin.com/2rrfg9ps

Haven’t read all of the classes changes, but hope everyone gets some shiny things to play with!

My opinion on the changes:

I actually like them. It makes traiting for interruptions actually look somewhat worthwhile. Halting strike is being brought up to ~2k damage, so it actually looks relevant now. Nice to see buffs for different styles of play. A cool part about these buffs is that shatter builds can’t get their hands on them, because they are too high in Chaos and Inspiration, which shatter builds can’t afford to invest in. Glad to see that shatter builds won’t be affected much, so there’s no need for nerfs there.

I’m not thrilled about the condition build buffs though. The torment and +200 cond damage on scepter still seem so… meh. Torment, if it gets the bonus damage, is only going to be 1.5 bleeds. Meaning 3 stacks of that equates to between 1.5 and 4.5 stacks of bleed. Confusion still sucks, and is even worse now that it doesn’t proc as often (I believe they mean dodge rolls or channeled spells like ele’s tornado), and a staff mesmer could maintain ~6 stacks of bleed (that equates to more torment than the scepter can maintain) and almost perma-burning. With that being the only changes, I still don’t see a condition mesmer doing nearly as much damage as pre-confusion nerf… and it was barely even viable then.

Actually, I’d bet money that the temporal nerf is because of the episode of State of the Game where someone asked when it’s being nerfed and said the meta revolved entirely around it.

Regardless though, the nerf makes some sense for pvp, where an aoe interrupt is pretty strong.

If the leaked patch notes are correct, the only form of torment we get is through the scepter…

Illusionary Counter: This skill damage has been reduced to 25% of what it was. It now applies 3 stacks of Torment for 8 seconds.

Think of how a bleed works- every second there is a check on the number of stacks of bleeding. Then it calculates how much damage should be done, then applies it.

My guess is it works the same way, but has the “if target is moving, then increase the damage” during the calculation of the damage.

hardloop von edgehoven.8512:

“… Torment skills for those two professions as well.”

i can´t help but this sentence reads like: all profession but mesmer and thieve will get torment. but heres the good news at the end we decided to give mesmers and thieves the new condition too

a bit strange or not?

No, according to the writeup, necros were originally the only ones to get the condition, but because thief and mesmer condition builds are lacking, anet also decided to give torment to them as well.

TheMightyAltroll.3485:

That’s fine. As long as they adapt and find something else that’s viable I don’t mind. Once again, Mind Wrack and their Evasion skills are simply too strong/useful compared to other classes. As much as you people would like to make me look like a generic QQer, the point still stands.

I have 0 difficulty killing Mesmers, I use a Mesmer myself, I use all classes, I can literally kill some Mesmers using only my Swamp Drake pet.

HOWEVER: Mesmer requires a small nerf, and I’d be fine with buffing their Scepter to match Staff, and allowing condition builds to become viable. Ranger requires a huge nerf.

Get over it, this is not a learn to play issue, this is simply based upon all around balance.

You have zero problems killing a mesmer, saying sometimes it’s laughably easy, and yet you also think they’re so strong that they require a nerf.

…

Pssst… Calvin, if you hit preview before you post, you can add multiple screenshots to a single post.

Not only does it go against how all other phantasms function, but it also goes against design and lore. From my understanding, phantasms are supposed to be the physical manifestation of hexes from GW1- an illusion of the memory of a past enemy. Mesmers are giving physical form to an opponent’s own memories, and use them against them.

No target means you have no memories to conjure and manipulate. As much as I’d love to place a Warden exactly where I want to guarantee damage/whirl finisher/projectile manipulation, it just doesn’t make sense. And if you could guarantee those things, I’d place a lot of money on the phantasm being nerfed.

I think it’s fine as it is.

Azylir.9137:

Not sure of trying to troll…. or just mad?

Either way, you should just do as most of your server does, accept it, roll with it and just stop giving a kitten! Like hell, guuman’s are known as chest thumpers and forum warriors, idgaf. Your server happened to be where a chunk of KN went when they weren’t having much success, in hope to do better. Dragonwagon/Wagonbrand, just lol and move on, unfortunately you guys will always look like that bandwagon server because you got large transfers from KN and started dominating everywhere but against T1 servers.

TL;DR
Just stop giving a kitten what people call you/your server!

Don’t worry, neither trolling nor mad. I actually chuckle whenever I see Wagonbrand (or, like another DBer pointed out, Dwagonbrand). I think it’s kind of cute, really.

saiyr.3071:

Err, what am I missing, here?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Dragonbrand-looking-for-NA-EU-Ocianic
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Dragonbrand-Welcome-new-WvW-guilds

Crap, two threads… I need to be doubly ashamed.

Edit: The second one, from my understanding, is not recruitment. It’s a public announcement on where they decided to go and who else moved to DB recently (I’m sure most people would have liked to see who exactly went over). The “interested in credentials” seems more like a “shameless self-plug” sort of thing.

gidorah.4960:

maybe you should have people on your server stop complaining about all your fairweathers. you recruited well when you where winning and the same people stopped showing up when you stopped winning. its happened like that on every other bandwagon server and it is happening to db. i’m not knocking the transfers just pointing out you arent special and the answer to why you have so many fairweathers is blindigly obvious. the refusal to accept it and still complain isnt going to change that when you recruit heavily to a winning server you arent going to recruit the kind of people who stick around when you lose.

1. We didn’t recruit anyone- we merely welcomed our new DBrethren.
2. I have not noticed any guilds suddenly not showing up.
3. A quick look at the WvW recruitment forum shows a recruitment thread for Mag (which isn’t a bad thing), and no thread for DB.

Btw, if we’re still considered a bandwagon server, we really must suck at it. I mean, we didn’t even move up a tier- what’s up with that?

The mods are getting back at Maguuma for all those weeks of having to clean up their WvW threads :P

But seriously, just play the thing out. Last week DB got matched up with JQ and BG, both of which have superior coverage. On top of that, JQ did nothing but go for DB’s throat the first weekend. Life sucks sometimes, you just have to keep playing and roll with the punches.

Baa.4582:

Celestial amulets have 7%, not 6%, crit dmg bonus.
The loss in burst damage isn’t just from -2% crit dmg though. It also loses -72power and -31prec compared to zerker.

Precision only gives you crit chance, and the ratio is something like 21 prec = 1% chance. So you only lose 1-2% crit chance, which is almost nothing. The -72 power is probably the biggest issue, as I have no idea how that will affect your dps. But on the bright side, you get an extra 1% crit damage from my earlier post to make up for it ;D

Still think Celestial amulet is completely worthwhile for the flexibility it gives. As long as you don’t add in more celestial items (so that your stat losses don’t start adding up), you will hardly notice any difference, if any at all.

I fully support removing Moa Morph for an actually decent elite. And btw, you shouldn’t make things up- I’m on DB, in a T1 match up, and have yet to see Moa Morph used once by either enemies or allies.

The celestial amulet is definitely better. While you lose 3% crit damage, let’s put that into perspective. If you have an 20k health opponent, and you crit on every single attack, then having a berserker amulet essentially lowers the opponent’s life by 3%. For a 20k health opponent, 3% is only 600 damage you don’t have to do to kill them. How much is 600 damage? It’s 1/3 of a full glass-cannon greatsword auto-attack.

Basically, the difference is almost negligible. And in return, you get a bit of toughness and vit, a little extra condition damage to help sharper images compensate for the lost crit damage, and, most importantly, you never have to switch amulets between builds. It’s totally worthwhile to do until you have an ascended amulet + accessories + rings for every single build you want to run- which most people don’t have.

Celestial amulet is by far more cost efficient- if you don’t care about extreme min/maxing, go with celestial.

Lucky Shot.7650:

So it is bad in group fights… but still good on 3vs3? Thought 3vs3 was considered a group fight. If we’re talking about 8vs8 (hate that kitten), then thief is less useful than those two phantasms: they stay ranged to deal damage, thief has to shadowstep in melee to do so and in a 8vs8 you basically implode! And I think phantasms do give regen to nearby allies, not bad in a group fight! But yes, in a 8vs8 we’re useles… may as well being backcapping during a fight like that.

Sorry for the out of topic, I read the whole topic and even if it shifted to Shatter builds I thought initially it was about mesmer in general.

Still, I don’t know if I’m complaining, may it sound weird. I’m struggling between the love for my thief and the love of feeling powerful. Maybe I’m happy as things are now, still don’t know.

I don’t know the exact point where it starts becoming a bad build choice- it could start losing most of its effectiveness even at 2v2s, I’m not sure. I just know that it scales terribly, even worse than thieves do (thieves can still decently well in group fights- at absolute minimum, the shortbow’s spammable blast finisher, regardless of damage, can provide a group with a ton of support). The 1v1 phantasm mesmer has nothing- no combo fields, no finishers (unless you took a torch, but even the finisher on that is bugged), no group boons, no damage, nothing.

I commend you for reading the whole thread before posting though. It started out as a general “mesmer is OP it needs nerfs” thread, but when asked what about the mesmer was OP, he said it was our burst/glkittenter spec. So really, the thread should be renamed and edited, but the OP isn’t here and hasn’t been here for days. In all honesty, this thread shouldn’t have been necro’ed, and at this point should be locked.

I’ve fallen in love with Runes of the Air, personally. Still requires you to use your heal and the focus, but the crit damage it gives is just… well, it’s the bees knees.

Lucky Shot.7650:

I mained thief since I started at launch. I begun doing spvp in December with thief until a couple of weeks ago:

Recently bought a character slot, built a mesmer. Went to heart of the mists right after the introduction (pve lvl=2) and set up a phantasm build. After reading the skills a couple of times, started some spvp matches to try it. With thief I couldn’t kill bunkers like guardian, elementalist, engineer, ranger. I couldn’t with D/D burst nor D/P, I could kill them only with a S/D build specifically designed for it just to be ineffective against every other build type. With my new mesmer I could SLAY said builds, and every other build effortlessly… during my first match as a mesmer. So after a lifetime playing thief I could achieve better results with mesmer on my very first match. Also played Engineer with Static Discharge before starting mesmer: again, I’m not as affective with engi as much as I am with mesmer despite having more experience with engi.

Also, mesmer is the only class being able to win a 1vs1 even if it gets downed first, except maybe warrior.

And concerning “oh but is very bad in group fight situations”: no it’s not bad it’s at least average since iDuelist and iSwordsman tend to stay out of harm. And, by the way, it’s not uncommon to meet 1vs1 situations, like assaulting a point kept under a bunker’s protection.

Also, stunbreakers assigned to mesmer’s best utilities like blink and decoy. On my thief I only had one stunbreaker on a 45 seconds cooldown, on mesmer I have 2 on 30 an 40 secs.

Now I’m levelling my mesmer: in wvw the only class that will survive 1vs1, the most frequent scenario when you roam, will be thief… if they don’t actually try to fight back.

Some people will say phantasm mesmer is balanced… I say having to bring 2 people to kill one non-bunker is the exact opposite of balance. Funniest thing I never realized how strong it is before playing it.

Farming glory every day now… half asleep!

The OP isn’t complaining about phantasm builds, so this isn’t even relevant.

But honestly, what do you expect? You took the “Overpowered Phantasm Build” (I think that’s what Pyro called it?)- of course you would do well with it. It’s ridiculous in 1v1 fights, so stomping pubs in spvp is more than expected.

And just fyi, it is bad in group fights. It’s stupidly good in 1v1, still really good in 2v2, okay in 3v3, and starts scaling poorly as the fights get bigger. More people = more aoes = dead phantasms. It doesn’t matter if the iDuelist is ranged, or that the iSwordsman evades- auto-attacks go astray, and any kind of aoe places on them means they’re gone. No phantasms means you have to rely entirely on retaliation to do damage… but more people means that retaliation is spread out more before you die.

Agree with Pyro. Mantra-focused builds are only pretty good in WvW because of the raw aoe healing they can put out, but you won’t get much of anything else besides.

You might be able to make a bunker-ish build with mantra healing for tpvp… but it won’t be great. It probably won’t even be good- by having to trait so heavily for essential mantra traits, you won’t be able to use your traits to buff phantasm damage, or otherwise. The majority of your damage will come from auto-attacks, and we all know how poor mesmer auto-attacks are damage-wise.

I’ll be following this thread for the next few weeks. I don’t have any guides or builds credited to my name, but after clocking 1,000 hours on mesmer, I think I know a trick or two. I’m happy to help however possible.

Edit: Title names to throw around:

• Shattering the Myths/Shattering Reality
• Mantra of Knowledge
• The Harlequin’s Smile/Handbook

dylan.5409:

Mesmers are indefensible in the state they are in. To those of you that are still trying to , spent a bit of time playing a different class; this may help to improve your sense of fair play.
+1 TheMighty, I am amazed that you had to argue as hard as you did but impressed that you did. Shows that someone at least cares about the state of the game:D

OP downplays the strengths of other classes and exaggerates a mesmer’s strengths while completely ignoring their weaknesses and downsides.

I care about the state of the game- I am completely for giving classes buffs they need to be able to compete. What I don’t care for is the use of biased “arguments” to try and get other classes nerfed to stop them from being able to compete.

Agien.9834:

No it is the same chance of getting the ticket on the 1st try and the 542395723957th try.

You roll a 4000 sided die(lol) and it is the same chance every single roll to roll a 1. It does not get better just because you rolled a bunch of times because you are not eliminating sides of the die.

Chief.5928:

Sorry but this statement is not correct. Any drop may give you a 0.4% chance to give you a weapon ticket but this does NOT mean that if you get X chests that eventually you’ll have a 100% chance to get a ticket.

The chance of each chest remains 0.4% and is independend of the chance on the next chest to hold a ticket, as they are seperate events and don’t influence each other.

So it doesn’t matter how many you open, your chance (statistically at least!) is always 0.4% that any given chest will hold something of value. Naturally if you collect more boxes your odds are improving somewhat due to the sheer quantity of them.

If I have a coin, it is always 50% chance to be heads. Now, if I choose to flip it 1,000 times, in order for me to never get heads, I have to flip tails 1,000 times in a row. The chances of that are 0.5^1000 = 9.33 × 10^-302. That number is so ridiculously low, and that event is so horribly unlikely, that we say it is (nearly) impossible. The estimate on the wiki is approximately the point where your chances of you not getting it is so small, it might as well be zero.

Basically, Gambler’s Fallacy deals with any single roll, the statistics deal with likelihoods of multiple future rolls. Depending on what is considered “almost zero”, there will indeed exist a number of boxes that will essentially guarantee at least 1 ticket.