Guild Wars 2

I greatly appreciate the feedback you guys have given. It’s hard to settle on a profession when every profession forum is full of “our profession is terrible, buff us and nerf everyone else” threads. This has definitely helped make up my mind.

I know, I’m asking for an unbiased opinion in a biased forum. But I’ve been away from the game for a long time and I’d like to pick it back up again. My last go, I played the kitty out of my mesmer, but I was wanting to do something a bit different, and right now I’m leaning towards either warrior or thief. I’ve had a taste of warrior (up to level 40ish) and I like the much faster playstyle compared to my mesmer.

If you warriors had it to do all over again, would you go warrior over thief again? Any particular highlights or pitfalls you can think of that I should know about? I exclusively PvE and at 80, farming on a mesmer just really isn’t an option, so I’m really just looking for a change. After warrior/thief, I’m possibly looking at elementalist/necromancer/engineer as alternatives, but I’ve never been a big melee player before and I’d really like to give it a go. Any thoughts or feedback you can give would be appreciated.

Piriel.5197:

Sabo.1485:

Are Black Lion Chests dropping as often as they were before for you guys? They aren’t for me. That makes it pretty obvious to me that it’s a bug. Anet wouldn’t nerf chests.

Piriel.5197:

Glad to see the topics were merged but not answered. That leaves out the part with “they’re on holiday, they didn’t see the post, they’ll answer when they do”. Talk about a slap in the face…

Forum moderator =/= developer.

Not opening BLC anymore since it’s a waste of money. Developers don’t answer on forums, they probably don’t even read them. I refuse to think that moderators and community managers are not aware of game changes.

I’m sure they’re aware. I’m also sure they can’t do anything about it, since they’re not programmers. I’m not sure what you’re wanting the person minding the board to do about the situation this weekend while the actual programmers and decision-makers are away. And I think you missed my point about the chests. I don’t feel they’re worth opening either. But other people do, and they buy keys to open those chests. If the chests have stopped dropping as often along with everything else, it’s clearly a bug, because the chests are a revenue stream for Anet and thus wouldn’t be intentionally nerfed.

Are Black Lion Chests dropping as often as they were before for you guys? They aren’t for me. That makes it pretty obvious to me that it’s a bug. Anet wouldn’t nerf chests.

Piriel.5197:

Glad to see the topics were merged but not answered. That leaves out the part with “they’re on holiday, they didn’t see the post, they’ll answer when they do”. Talk about a slap in the face…

Forum moderator =/= developer.

Memnoch.2589:

^ As I said..pretty much rewards that really are worthless and doesn’t increase your power whatsoever. Here’s an example how I see it:

Brian “Hey man! Look at my new mask, what do you think?”
Jason “Not bad, what do does it do? and how long did it take to get it?”
Brian “..Well It took me a few days and it looks awesome!”
Jason “Right..but what type of benefit does it give you? Does it increase the power of your character in any way at all?”
Brian “Well it doesn’t do anything for me at all, it’s just for cosmetic purposes, but it does look good..”
Jason “So let me get this straight, you spent a few days working on getting an item that does absolutely nothing for you at all besides making you look different?”
Brian “Yeah..I guess I did.”

See the problem? Maybe you like working for useless items but I sure don’t.

Then go play one of the other THOUSANDS of MMOs that cater to your kind of play and leave this ONE to us.

Phantax.1369:

Piriel.5197:

5. Signet of capture. People might or might not agree but I loved having to work for my elites that way.

OMG yes… I so wish they would bring this back, geez Id pay to have this back…lol

:)

Seconded. That was the best part of GW1 for me, it was (almost) endless endgame content and I had a blast with it.

Funky.4861:

@ siliconhobbit: it’s in the official guide (which i bought with the game). Whilst it wasn’t the red box i was hoping for, on page 102 it says this-

“HOW TO GET THE BEST EVENT REWARDS

Kill enemies quickly with the most damaging weapons you have. Don’t try to kite or kill single enemies over time unless you can’t win without doing so. Take on multiple opponents at once and storm the area if you’re up to the challenge. This has the added benefit of giving you practice for more challenging PvE content, like dungeons. Learn how much your character can handle, and practice using your skills to their best advantage.

Also, push for higher level events whenever you can. Groups of skilled players slamming through content two or three levels above their characters often rake in the rewards."

Italics mine.

They’re talking about the notion that enemies will die from AoEs from other people before your conditions can get rolling. That’s not the same thing as condition damage not counting. If they have time to deal their damage, they count.

Bump to the top!

Bump because this is a great list.

Tarnished Coast (or as we prefer it, Garnished Toast) is pretty active at all hours.

Don’t forget mesmer, we throw around boons like they’re candy and if specced for mantras we can be pretty decent healers.

To all the Arenanet employees, their friends and families, and to my fellow players, I wish you a happy holiday and hope you all get to spend the day with your loved ones.

It is an area of Guild Wars 1 in the Eye of the North expansion that you can use to “register” certain GW1 achievements. As you register these achievements from GW1, you get points that allow you to unlock various minipets, skin unlocks and titles in GW2.
There is a nifty page set up that shows you what achievements the Hall of Monuments accepts and what you get for them.

http://hom.guildwars2.com/en/#page=welcome

Mandrax.7342:

Mungrul.9358:

Columba.9730:

flood all online buying sites with complaints and bad reviews. if they can’t sell anything over the holidays, someone will get fired and things will change.

Done; one-star review submitted to Amazon.co.uk, and I’ve up-voted a few other one-star reviews too.
Let’s hit them where it hurts.

Metacritic is a good place to vent too. User reviews do mean a lot to developers and currently they have done pretty well in this respect. If their rating starts to drop due to unrest it could have a negative impact on further players buying and joining the game.

I’m not really sure what you hope to accomplish. Attacking Arenanet isn’t going to achieve anything except convince people not to buy GW2, which will lower their income, which will cause them to have to lay people off and ultimately shutter the game. Are you wanting them to FIX the game? Or are you so hostile because of this patch you’re just wanting to destroy it?

Xelonir.5921:

ANet has such a nice system in place at the very start of the game, where things run in an instance, with a “blocking” event that keeps people busy until a certain amount of players has entered the instance and then proceeds.

They should simply use a similar system for these events, and making the instance available for a certain amount of time that allows players all over the world to do it (once per account) at a suitable time.

Oh, in the tutorial areas you mean? Like the human one where you have to fight centaurs at the gates for a little bit?

What a tweeeest!

I know this post is getting long, but I have one last request. PLEASE, for the love of all things good and right in the world, PLEASE cut down on the random number generator stuff. I know you guys were looking for a method of adding more precursors to the game, but throwing them out to some people as event prizes is NOT the way to do it. I have struggled and fought for what little bit of money I’ve been able to make since I started playing after launch. I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried farming (but you decided mesmers shouldn’t have good tagging methods, so whatever). I’ve tried “playing the auction house” but quickly realized how boring and soul-sucking that is. I’ve tried crafting, only to rapidly come to the conclusion that I’ll never make back the money I sank into it (and especially not now, since I’m a jeweler, and you in your divine developer wisdom decided that the new dungeon should reward items better than anything I can make). I have done everything I can think of to make enough money to function, which has gotten me to half exotics and half rares, and a net worth of about 7g in the bank. So it’s rather insulting to know that there were people during the event who were awarded winning lottery tickets, and that for just a few minutes of participating in an event I was unable to attend, they made more money in that few minutes thanks to precursor handouts than I will likely make between now and next summer.

No matter what I do or how hard I work to make it in this game, I feel like the RNG is rewarding someone else. I like the idea of making precursors more accessible for those who want legendaries (I’m not even going to consider such a lofty and impossible dream for myself), but at the very least, make their methods of attainment mean more than just “log in on Sunday for a little while”. That seems very unfair, to the point that I found myself staring at my character select screen tonight, unable to make myself log in. I should NOT be feeling that way. I love this game deeply, but the philosophical flaws I see were just compounded by this new patch and what it has done to the game I love. I thought GW2 was going to get better with time, and I still hold out hope that it will. But it’s going to take some serious developer attention (and more importantly, INTERACTION WITH THE COMMUNITY) for me to feel like we’re there.

“Thank you for completing the survey. Your answers and comments are greatly appreciated. If you have any additional comments please visit the official Guild Wars 2 forums.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum"

That greeted me at the end of my survey. Since you asked so nicely, I’ll be happy to share my further thoughts with you.

My biggest concern is that I REALLY don’t like these one-time events. I feel like a lot of people (specifically our friends in other time zones) get left out every time one of these events goes on. I was able to attend the Halloween event and was happy to see it was just a short cut scene. Knowing that, I didn’t feel bad about skipping this event to take care of real life concerns. Of course, I didn’t know that this event would give people precursor weapons, I just assumed it would be another cut scene I could catch later on Youtube. Had I known that the event was more than that… well, I still wouldn’t have attended. My sister found out she has a brain tumor. Some real life responsibilities are more important.

I’m also not a big fan of this new dungeon, mostly because I haven’t been able to try it yet. I primarily play during the very late-night hours. There aren’t many people on. And there are NO people who want to do the level 1 part of the dungeon. So I haven’t been able to go in yet, and of course as more time passes my chances of getting to do level 1 shrink further, to the point that I’ve basically written off any notion of getting to do that dungeon at all.

Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that there’s stuff in that dungeon I can’t get elsewhere. Now I’m not one of the forum doomsayers, I have no idea whether this new tier of gear is going to dramatically affect the game or not. But, whether it’s a huge increase or almost non-existent, it’s still better than the gear I’m wearing. Much has been said about this new tier of gear, and I’m not going to rehash it here, but if it’s going to stick around then I hope to any god you wish to pray to that this is the LAST time a new tier is added. If I wanted to chase gear, I’d play a bigger and more established game. I thought the GW franchise was supposed to be an escape from that kind of gaming. We’ll see over the long haul what changes this new tier has wrought, but I’m not hopeful.

That wouldn’t be a problem if you guys at Anet were more communicative, but I feel like you’ve been very silent through all this. Surely you’ve realized by now that we players appreciate devs who are communicative and who include us in the decision-making process. Having an open rapport with your players is a sure path to success, and right now I can only speak for myself when I say I feel very shut out. There’s a lot of concern going on around here, and more than a token dev blurb would go a LONG way to soothing worried feelings and angered minds.

If you want a game where the entire point is to get ever increasing stats from gear to do ever increasing difficulties of content, there are literally HUNDREDS of MMOs you can choose from. Let those of us who don’t want that type of gameplay have this one, please.

In my opinion World of Warcraft is one of the worst things that has ever happened to MMOs or to computer gaming in general. Blizzard somehow managed to get extremely lucky and hit paydirt, and every developer on earth noticed and only saw dollar signs. Blizzard put greed into MMO development and pretty much stifled any creativity or thinking outside the box that might have happened over the last several years. I’d rather be playing a game in a moderately successful niche genre that I really enjoy, than playing a game in a massively successful money machine that I can barely get into.

I missed the event. I had better things to do, what with my sister finding out she has a brain tumor that Friday afternoon. She wasn’t really in the right frame of mind to deal with her 4-year-old, so I took him for the weekend. Terribly inconvenient timing that something so real-life should interrupt Anet’s carefully crafted schedule for me, and for that I humbly apologize to Anet. Next time I’ll try to be more considerate and ask my real life commitments to try to remember their place.

Iina.7035:

One of the bigger things for me is the lack of a skill pool, in GW1 we had hundreds of skills to mess around with for each profession, then secondary profs to make it that much more interesting, it let you cater your class to your play style. Frankly it made things interesting just because of stuff you could do with all these different ability’s for example the 55 monk.

Yeah, I didn’t think of that but that’s a good one. It felt like there was more build versatility and a lot of ways to use things to different advantages. I definitely miss building my skill combos.

I’m not a WoW fan and I haven’t tried Fractals yet, but my guild has been raving about how fun it is so I’m sure I’ll give it a whirl soon.

Town clothes primarily come from the gem store. You can wear them even when not in town by going to your hero page (default key H) and then clicking on the top hat and cane icon at the top of the page to toggle on your town clothes. This won’t affect your armor but the first time you get into combat while wearing your town clothes you will immediately shift into your combat armor. If that happens, you’ll have to toggle town clothes back on again after combat.

Before I even start this thread, please note that I am only speaking from personal experience. I do not profess to be “the voice of the community” or any of that nonsense.

Recently I’ve been playing GW1 again, mostly to max out my Hall of Monuments, but I noticed something while I was playing; while there are a lot of things I really feel GW2 improves upon, there are a lot of things I miss a great deal. I want to go over some of these things in the hope that maybe my feedback will resonate and maybe the devs will notice.

I miss skill hunts. I REALLY miss skill hunts. I get that GW2 needs some way for maxed out players to feel they’re still making progress, but I don’t feel that a gated dungeon with improved gear is the answer. GW1 got this aspect right, because if I wanted to really feel fully kitted out I had to go all over all the campaigns with my trusty Signet of Capture and my ever-changing secondary profession to find all the best skills. I miss this aspect of the game, it helped make GW1 feel a lot less shallow at endgame.

I miss named enemy encounters. I know it would be hard to do in GW2 because the world isn’t a personal instance, but I miss bosses and their non-randomized drops. This was a great alternative for gear that I feel is really missing in GW2. Maybe take some of those utterly useless world veterans and champions and give them an occasional chance of spawning as named versions with specific drops that everyone who kills them can get. I dunno, but it feels less than epic when I manage to solo a particularly nasty baddie only to get 17 copper.

I miss my heroes. I know there’s no way it would work in this game, but I really do miss my heroes so terribly. That was a great, unique mechanic and GW2 feels a bit shallower without it.

I miss mission chains. This is one of the big ones where I think GW2 is forgetting its roots. In GW1, I had to work for the same NPC several times to get to the most rewarding parts. In GW2, I feel like the heart NPCs and dynamic events lack a sense of permanency and I don’t feel overly connected to what’s going on. Sure, I kill the worms and grab the armor pieces and tickle the bellies of the rabbits, but I do it because a pop-up on my screen tells me to. Then when it tells me I’m done, I leave the area in search of lizards to kill, pumpkins to squash, and cats to herd. It would be really great if I felt more connected to the world rather than feeling like a wandering mercenary willing to work for whoever has the emptiest heart. I dunno, this is an odd one, but something is a bit off with the heart system.

I miss having actual money-making ability. This is something that has really limited my enjoyment of GW2. I know Anet has an actual economist on staff or something, but it doesn’t seem to be helping. In GW1 I feel like items were actually worth something and money wasn’t super-hard to come by. In GW2, I’ve tried everything from farming Orr events (hard to do on a mesmer) to crafting (a money pit) to playing the auction house (which I fail at because I’m no good with Microsoft Excel). Right now my account has about 2g 80s in total, down from a high of about 8g because I picked up an expensive dye on the trading post that I really wanted. Maybe the problem here is me, but I can’t seem to find a niche in GW2 that will allow me to make enough money to function reasonably well.

I miss skill being rewarded over luck. GW1 had hard modes and elite dungeons and all sorts of ways to make your way in the world through skill. GW2 has the Mystic Forge (which I swear hates me) and events that RNG people into rare drops they can sell for riches. I feel like the more I learned about GW1 and the better I played, the more I succeeded. I feel like in GW2 I’d be better off investing in four-leaf clovers and rabbit’s feet if I really wanted to be a success.

Lastly (there’s more but I don’t want to make this more of a wall o’ text than it is), I miss feeling like a hero. In GW1, I took down Shiro and saved all of Cantha from a terrible plague. In Elona… ok, that evil cow Kormir stole my glory, but I made it happen. In GW2, after a certain point in the story I began to feel like a backup singer for Trahearne and the Trahettes, with guest stars Logan and the Destiny’s Edge Chorus. I’m hoping this will change with further story content, but for now… I just feel really disconnected from the story.

Please feel free to entertain this old hipster with your own list.

Italyguy.4128:

Why can’t you guys wait for clarification before you start whining and moaning? You make the community seem like a bunch of spoiled brats.

Quoting for emphasis, because people are panicking and don’t even know what they’re panicking over yet.

phooka.4295:

That today, they basically indirectly turned “we’re not saying we won’t” into “we will do everything the way everyone else does it”.

I really wish people wouldn’t pull statements out of their backsides like this. You have no evidence that they’re doing anything of the kind.

Has everyone here lost their minds? You’re panicking over something you don’t fully yet understand? Can we PLEASE wait until they actually put this stuff in the game and find out what it means before we stampede? I mean really, remember Halloween, when they said they were having an amazing one-time event that you really must attend, and everyone lost their freaking minds over it because of work, church, timezones, whatever, and then this magical once in a lifetime event turned out to be a 10 second cut scene? Yeah. This is going to be exactly the same thing. A whole lot of panic over nothing.

I was thinking the other night, and although I LOVE this game, I feel like certain areas lack the depth they had in GW1, and so I was trying to think of ways to rectify the problem.

The main issue I have is with the lack of depth in character builds. Part of the fun of GW1, to me, is the ridiculously over-the-top number of skills to unlock. GW2 is lacking in this area, because you basically have everything you’ll ever use unlocked by around level 30. So I was thinking, something that could be fun would be bringing back the skill hunt, but in a way tailored to GW2.

Suppose every ability your weapons give you had a “slot” that you could fill with a skill you’ve unlocked from gameplay. Like, for example, my mesmer’s greatsword (though wonderful) gets boring after a while. Suppose each of my 5 greatsword attacks had a slot that I could put a modifier in. Suppose we got the ability to capture these abilities like we did with GW1 elite skills, and suppose those abilities came from dungeon bosses and non-DE champions. This would give people more incentive to run dungeons and would give players a reason to kill wandering champions.

Let’s say I kill a champion enemy and use my Signet of Capture ability on it and capture a modifier, an “augment” to my abilities. For lore reasons, we’ll break them out. Charr can get Carvings (oh I miss you, charr carvings). Asura can get Formulae. Sylvari can get Seeds. Norn can get Runes. And Humans can get Inscriptions (playing off the inscriptions from GW1, which all players had on their armor, since player characters in GW1 were all humans). So let’s say my human mesmer gets an “Inscription of Flames” (or Seed of Flames, Formula of Flames, etc) from my champion I killed. I can slot that inscription into one of my greatsword abilities to give it a chance to cause burning. So I put it on my 2 ability, and now in addition to throwing a bouncing blade and summoning a clone, I also have a chance to burn the targets the blade hits. But say I want to shake it up, so out of combat I remove my Inscription of Flames and replace it with Inscription of Trickery. I put Inscription of Flames, instead, on my greatsword’s phantasm. Now my phantasm’s attacks can drop burning instead, and my bouncy sword has a chance to remove one of my conditions and give it to my target.

I see this as being a fun way of expanding combat and giving us a way to really “build” our characters, as well as give us back our skill hunt, which was always a blast in GW1. It’s just a random thought I had, but I’m curious what the community thinks. Would you guys enjoy something like this as an extra layer of character building and combat, or do you like combat the way it is?

I have enjoyed what WvWvW I’ve done, but I don’t intend to go back anytime soon because it kills my framerate to the point that, if there are a lot of players around, I can’t do anything.

Thank you for the feedback. And Aesir, thank you for the offer! I’ll definitely look for you.

I’m not worried about whether it would be worth it (for me it would be, I want those skins!) But whether it would be feasible to do, and just how much harder it would be without a big player base to trade with.

Just wondering here, but how hard would it be to fill my Hall of Monuments these days? I only have 7/50 right now, but with the original Guild Wars pretty vacant these days I wonder if it would even be worth my time and how much I could reasonably achieve without lots of trading and a basic lack of miniatures to use for completion. Anyone have any thoughts? Anyone else still working on their HoM? Having any success? All the guides out there are from pre – GW2 and thus not very helpful.

I’m not the best player in the world, let me start by saying that. But honestly, I find Orr fun. It’s challenging to the point that I do die on occasion, but it’s not frustrating. Then again, I tend to just roam the map gathering nodes and doing nearby events, rather than playing the karma train game. And I really do think it must be a problem with the server you’re on, because the people on Tarnished Coast are fantastic. I can’t think of a single instance where I got in over my head that someone didn’t come running to help me out. Maybe you just need a server change.

I’ve yet to complete the puzzle and likely won’t try again, and a lot of times (not all or even most, but many times) it’s been because I couldn’t see my character to be able to tell where I am on a platform, so I either run off the edge or I jump too far away to land the next platform. I do understand the frustration people are feeling toward the two large races, because it has basically made me decide not to continue trying. However, it isn’t the players’ fault and I would never direct my frustration at anyone else. I don’t like the mechanics of the puzzle because it’s so twitchy already, but the real reason I’m not bothering anymore is because I see no reason to frustrate myself constantly between now and the end of the Halloween event over someone else’s character choice. I’m genuinely sorry that players who chose Charr or Norn are getting grief from others; that is unforgivable. It certainly isn’t your fault your character model is creating problems for others. All I can say is to keep in mind that when someone is ranting at you, they’re not really ranting at YOU, they’re ranting at whoever designed the puzzle. Just try to be the bigger person and shrug it off. It isn’t fair that you should be the target of their anger at all. But, that’s the internet for you.

Level 80, full magic find gear, luck rune for an additional 15% at full stacks, plus omnoms. I’m at about 140% magic find. Ran the dungeon about 15 times with all that. Got… green weapons/armor, and a couple of white loot bags that had totems or scales or whatever in them. But honestly I wasn’t expecting much, I have terrible luck when I’m up against a random number generator. Haven’t gotten anything at all from this holiday that was holiday-specific.

I love the event on the whole. I really REALLY wish it wasn’t so RNG-dependent. I’ve done everything there is to do, and while everyone else has been getting exotics from chests in the Labyrinth and from the Mad King, the best I’ve managed were a few green items. I’ve opened Black Lion Chests, I’ve crafted Mad King Chests, and I’ve run the maze and now the king so many times my eyes are bleeding, and I’ve yet to get anything decent even with full magic find, a luck rune and omnom bars. So there have certainly been some frustrations with the event. But on the whole, the holiday was executed amazingly well. And there’s SO much to do. Pumpkin carving was a blast, as was the scavenger hunt.

I have the same problem, I can’t seem to make money. I have tried farming Orr events but lack the AoE on my mesmer to compete with the bots. I maxed weaponsmithing because I’d heard crafting rares for people chasing precursors was profitable… it isn’t, I make back the cost of materials but that’s it. Crafting, my MMO stand by for money, is a huge money pit in GW2. I tried buying and reselling on the TP but I guess I’m doing it wrong because I only made about 2 silver. I have never had this sort of trouble in a game and I don’t know what to do. After about 4 days I finally made enough to buy an exotic weapon. And now I’m broke again. I wish I knew what to do. I’m having a lot less fun than I should be because I can’t afford anything.

Thanks for the feedback. The reason I’m considering changing is because Mesmer just seems sooooo weak in PvE. I don’t mind a slow, thoughtful profession but I do want SOME killing power. I don’t want a flavour of the month profession though so necro seems appealing in that regard. How truly bad are the bugs?

(On my Mesmer, that is) I’ve decided to try a necromancer for more buggy goodness. Joking aside though, what areas do necros excel in? I want something that is survivable and doesn’t take forever to ramp up in damage like my Mesmer does. I exclusively PvE, and I’m not looking to be overpowered, just more functional. I’ve got my eye on necro but I know they play very different from their GW1 counterparts so I’d like some thoughts from you guys on where they’re strong and weak.

Furienify.5738:

@Sabo
20 Domination I, X
20 Dueling IV, X
30 Illusions I, V, XI

Sword/Pistol + Greatsword
Signet of Inspiration/Mirrored Images/X

Fairly standard shatter build, tweak as desired.

Thank you kindly. I haven’t done a shatter build before and I wasn’t sure how to start one. That helps a lot.

I guess I’m going to have to rework my build. I was building entirely around iWarlock and conditions, and after the build went live I died more times than I can count because my one squishy warlock would die before I could get another out. Can anyone link me to a good shatter build?

Couple tips for the OP, from a PvE mesmer:

If he was meleeing you, he was using a 1h sword, which is our only melee weapon. The greatsword is a ranged weapon for mesmers (yeah, I know), that shoots pinkish purple lightning at you (yeah, I know).

Also, mesmers have two different kinds of illusions: clones and phantasms. Clones look exactly like the mesmer, but they only have basic attacks and can’t really do much other than distract you or explode in your face. Phantasms look like a blue glowing version of the mesmer and are the really dangerous ones to watch out for. When you’re fighting a mesmer, if they are dropping clones all over the place (the ones that look exactly like the mesmer) then they’re probably specced for shattering (i.e. popping their clones on you for high damage, confusion, or dazing).

However, if they’re dropping phantasms (the very obvious blue glowing ones) they don’t want to pop them and they’re specced for a completely different playstyle. All mesmers use both clones and phantasms, but every mesmer will favor one over the other. If you’re dealing with a clone mesmer, your best bet is to pop his clones quickly and once you find the real him, lock your target (control+T) so that he can’t sneak away. When you get turned into a Moa, you have two choices. If the mesmer is still very healthy, run away. In Moa form you should be able to run pretty quick, and mesmers don’t have many options for movement speed increases so you should be able to line-of-sight him until Moa wears off. Otherwise, if the mesmer is nearly dead, you can use the Moa attacks to finish him. Moa has a couple of decent attacks and even a heal if I remember correctly, so don’t be afraid to use your skills while in that form if you can safely do so. It has a long 10-second duration but an even longer 3 minute cooldown, so if you can survive through the Moa the mesmer is mostly boned when it comes to being able to control you.

I hope that helps!

It’s probably just me, but I don’t want a game to make me want to play. I want to play because the game is fun. If I need a carrot on a stick to force me to play a game, there’s something very wrong with the game.

I think it can be said. We Sylvari are the master race.

I love this game so very, very much. Thank you, devs. This is the most fun I’ve had in a game (mmorpg or otherwise) in a very long time.

Sylvari Engineer
Norn Elementalist
Human Mesmer
Charr Ranger
Asura Thief

However, I’m not sold on the Ranger class, nor on the Charr race. I can’t get past the fact that the Charr are supposed to be the BAD guys, and death leveling for hours on them in GW1 has left me a bit racist against them. I’m kicking over deleting my Ranger to make room for a Human, Sylvari or Asura Guardian.