Guild Wars 2

Running a confusion/shatter build.
Out of the top of my head it’s 10/20/0/10/30.
Important traits are vigor on shatter, illusionary persona, confusion on shatter, 33% more confusion, mind wrack dmg and clone on dodge.
24% more condition duration from runes, 40% from food, I could probably drop the runes for more cnd damage without significantly reducing my confusion duration.
Power = vitality < condition damage gear, mind wrack is a nice supplement to the build even though it lacks crit and crit dmg.
Weapons: staff with scepter/sword (for survivability), haven’t settled on the sword as a definite offhand, torch would be nice if they make it work, focus is decent, pistol is bad if you don’t trait into critical images and crit %.
For some fights it’s good, for others it’s not impressive. You can stack 11-13 stacks of confusion for 10 sec and some bleeds/burns.

Edit: iMage is bad, the #4 is also bad although you could use chaos torm + its blast finisher. I’ll try and make it work since I haven’t use the #4 on the sword as often.

Chokepoint on the cost of rares to throw in the forge for precursores changed from elder wood/mithril (before bots got banned) to T5 mats afterwards. T5 mats went up, mithril/wood weren’t the chokepoint and went down.
Most of the bots are gone, although I’m sure that not all of them have been banned yet.

This needs a bit of clarification whether it’s intended or a bug.
After finishing FotM on a difficulty of 2 (and presumably higher) you get a chest with tokens. For my group the amount in it varied between 20 and 40 with increments of 5 tokens. This resulted in the group getting between 50 and 80 tokens after lvl 1 and lvl 2 done. If it’s RNG it should be on average equal for people in the long run but not short term.

Post if you had the same!

So many mistakes in this thread…

Let me start:
A) It’s impossible for mesmers to spec for 100% retaliation without giving up something, that something can be dmg or thoughness for example. 100% retal needs boon duration increase and illusionary persona helps.
B) If you die to retaliation I suggest taking boon removal, or trying out something else than a shortbow autoattack ranger (a retaliation mesmer can just stand still while you kill yourself, it is, truly hilarious).
C) Retaliation isn’t achieved by fields or blocking, sorry, L2P. Also, try running away since as far as I know retaliation builds have a though time killing people not attacking them.

If the staff is an exotic it should have the same droprate as exotics from boss chests, which is really low. Basically it needs to be farmed which people like Gempulse and I are already doing, although casually.
I’m sure it will be farmed more if there is a confirmation by someone getting it because of people wanting to pay for the skin.
It might also have a bugged droprate, Dev’s make mistakes and if it should drop from a chest doesn’t mean it will. Time will tell, I do wonder how much people would be willing to pay for it, if the droprate is as bad as precursor drops from temple chests (not sure if they’re confirmed but I’ve heard about them) then it could get to the price of precursors since you would need to split the money between your group members.

First of all don’t use the torch. Confusion builds which I’m aware of use either power or crit to back up their damage with shatters (power) and/or bleeds (sharper images).
I think that confusion is supposed to be continuously applied in stacks of under 5 instead of burst damage of 15-18 stacks. That’s also the difference between pve and pvp.

Chain 1 min+ of chaos armor while standing in arrow cart damage zones = a good few mins worth of regen/prot/swiftness. Spread those buffs around in a group of mesmers and you can get 24h+ of swiftness,prot,regeneration, in wvwvw.
Yes it needs to be fixed but it’s difficult to make and boons are easy to remove no matter the duration, but, you get a group of invincible scouts.

That eye near Melandru, do you mean the Risen King? I don’t remember it dropping a chest but it has been a long time since I’ve killed it.

And a reply with me killing the Eye whilst abusing LOS.
Can you add multiple pictures/attachments to the same reply?

PS. I did not get the staff, it’s not a 100% droprate. I’m only sure that this is it because it’s the only boss with a chest that is remote enough to not have been killed hundreds or thousands of times in the entire GW2 world, and its in Orr.

PPS. This is a different Eye than the one south of the temple of Dwayna. There are 2 more bosses spawning in the catacombs, Veteran Noble and Veterean Wraith, both are pretty hardcore to solo and I failed to do so, noble spams death blossom and wraith has regeneration plus there’s a killer veteran ghostly ranger running around. Neither Noble nor Wraith spawned any visible chests after killing them with help.

Location is south of the Temple of Balthazar btw.
It’s an underground burial/tomb.

For the sake of research I did the event chain, solo.
It consists of 1 champion blue Ooze (got help from randoms here)
1 champion Abomination (solo)
1 champion purple Eye of Zhaitan (solo)

It gives you a Glorious Chest not sure if temples give Glorious chests as well.
All of this has led me to believe with 99% certainty that this is the chest we’re looking for. Attachements contain images with proof, also, Eye of Zhaitan is a custom Eye and very difficult without abusing LOS like I did.

For the people trying to get the staff – you need a guild, abomination and Eye can be done solo but Ooze cannot, groups will also speed up the process (took me 2 hours).
Mechanics for the Eye:

- It does an aoe spreading green mist which ticks for 2k
- It spawns regular risen, notably wizards with blinds and purifiers with pulls.
- It has the Laser Eye of doom like the other Eye’s.
- There are dead risen corpse landmines (like in Arah explorer) on the ground.
- At 40% the Eye heals itself to full hp if it can hit anything (probably on a fixed cd so you need a minimum amount of dps)
- At 25% the Eye gets a berserk buff increasing damage.
- When I killed it the Eye didn’t do any attacks on me (LOS abuse), it might have more mechanics.

Also, can Linsey confirm it drops from that chest? I’m up for grinding something but discovery + grinding is a bit meh.

I am quite certain that its dropped in Zho’qafa Catacombs – Straits of Devestation.
It would be the only tomb-like “Final Rest athmosphere” location in Orr which hasn’t been farmed to oblivion. It’s hidden and probably nobody does that extremely awesome event chain in there.

Well, basically its a deceptively easy looking “solo event” which in reality lets you fight a champion ranged Ooze and a champion Abomination, I once solo’d the Abomination which resulted in a next event which was correctly labeled as a group event spawning an Eye of Zhaitan. Well, see if you can organise something and complete the chain, if theres a chest you will know that it might drop the staff.

Wish I could farm it and sell it for more than precursors
Of course, all of this is hypothetical, kill it and see and then sell me the staff for my mesmer if you happen to get it ^^

edit for Dev’s if one stumbles upon this post – there are bots running around in the aforementioned Catacombs, I want to see ban hammers patrolling.

So I found myself wanting to complete the Boss Achievement and the fire elemental had the last charge for the key needed for the achievement, problem was nobody was online.

Anyway, I killed the elemental on my own (thief full dps, no vitality, no toughness) getting hit by 1 thing ment downed, failing to kill an ember while downed ment having the boss HP reset (since I was alone), took a lot of tries in 2 hours and I got him without running outside.

Best strategy seemed to stay still outside of ember aggro range (if all embers are up no additional embers spawn) and dodge flares/aoe circles. It is a bit overtuned for groups of less than 6 or so people, and don’t try it alone. Oh and the steam ogre is a wuss compared to the Elemental.

Lvl 80 thief alt full MF… shortbow.. Orr… DE’s and orichalcum running…the farming man.. the farming!
No really, I like mesmer for the fun stuff like dungeons/pvp/wvwvw, I have that thief which will forever sport MF gear, 3th alt? Probably guardian or engineer, both seem good support like my mesmer so I’ll probably enjoy them too.

But yeah it’s up to you, some people say try it out in spvp so you see how it plays at lvl 80, but that doesn’t always show classes as they are at 80 in either dungeons or wvw.

@Twstdsoul (can’t quote apparently) they’ve mentioned it somewhere, they’re probably treating it as a cosmetic bug so don’t expect anything anytime soon.

I run a full power/vit/condition dmg build with a focus on confusion and shattering.
Right now I’m using a staff with scepter/sword as the second set.
It’s hard to pair a staff up but scepter seems the best (if you’re using confusion, if not then go for sword/pistol or sword/focus)

Alright thanks a lot, going sword/pistol and freeing up points for illusionary persona.
Inspiration does seem good with 4s of vigor (don’t know range on “nearby”), that’s 16 sec of vigor every shatter. Tested mage, it’s as bad as you said, pistol/sword offhands have roughly the same dps so it’s close there.

All in all, our condition dmg builds are so confusing (no pun intended).

Have any mesmers played around with a sword/torch or just torch in dungeons, the Domination skill removing conditions on torch skill use (which are all aoe, at least I think the retaliation is aoe and blind is aoe for sure) seems useful.

Build I’m trying to get to work is:
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNAsfWlwzqq3QzgGaNJypCJHKFXX2RSRr9alUwbXIA

Basically I want Dueling X, Inspiration III, Domination I and Illusions VII. Then there are 10 points left for either Illusions or Dominations.
Gear is full carrion/rampager, need to find a good spot for dps vs vitality and how much condition/precision I need to take.

It seems good in theory, when in melee your mob is blinded or you have distortion from sword #2 or you’re in stealth. Damage I have to test.
Also, what does Domination III do? Condition dmg increase, shatter dmg increase?
Idea’s?

Edit: Domination III affecting clones and not phantasms (I know it affects both of them but does it do anything for clones only?)

One thing you can try to do in Queensdale and other areas is to fail the events. They should return to the previous stage or beginning stage and it might fix it. This fixed it for one of our events, let NPC’s die and and the chain should reset.

You assume all the people complaining are market manipulators but they’re not, people wanting to craft them have made the recipe costing over 10g in vendor mats only, which was the first thing available in order to start working on the Halloween weapons.

I don’t know if Anet intended to put them in the chests or they did it because of all the QQ of people wanting more than a book on their back but the weapons lost all value for me when they made it from a rare crafting item into a trader’s commodity.
Crafting it is useless since it might reach crafting cost before next year’s Halloween, until then price will be set by supply/demand and traders.

Honestly this is the just gambling atm, will Anet nerf the chest, will they account bind the weapons, will they hand out a free skin at the end Party, change the recipe? who knows. At least I made my recipe money back by flipping Halloween weapons.

And no, average QQ Tom who didn’t want to craft it with 100 lodestones will still not get them.

If you don’t have passive buffs or they’re skill dependant (skills were disabled for me) use candy corn. 10% speed buff for 10 sec and you can stack it as long as you don’t throw up (seems random chance starting from 20 seconds and later). It’s Halloween, use candy!

Yep had exactly the same, at around 6-7 stacks of 250 the error would pop up preventing you from selling for some time, it’s probably 6-7 items which you sell quickly and the TP is trying to process your sell orders.

Good point 2 posts up, 3 orbs coupled with a toughness/healing power specced mesmer + 100% uptime on protection and regeneration will do wonders for a tank. It is possible to get prot/regen/swiftness up for a good period of time (several minutes) if you chain 30-35 seconds of chaos armor and have +duration on boons traits/runes, all of this while getting hit. Now with the orbs the mesmer should be able to tank 5-6 undergeared people, that’s not 10 yet but I assume you were not all doing damage all the time (people died, ressed others, took retaliation dmg , melee couldn’t keep up because of swiftness + stealth/invuln. I’d say it’s possible to tank 10 ppl for 10 mins if you play well and the others don’t coordinate.

TL:DR you met the overgeared scouting/zergtank mesmer build – next time take some boon removals.

This is all assuming there are no bugged mechanics involved, I don’t know why his health didn’t drop because it should, at least a little bit. Could be from abilities used by the people up top.

One more thing, if they had portals up it could’ve been different mesmers with similar names taking turns.

As far as I can tell it tries to remove up to 3 conditions and steal up to 3 boons. Whenever you have more than 3 it will remove 3 based on a ranking system with the conditions which should be constant, I have no clue what the order in which they’re removed is.
It doesn’t seem to be based on amount of stacks or the duration, it will remove that 1 second of cripple and leave the 15 stacks of bleed, if you’re unlucky.

I don’t know if it’s our best condition removal ability, mantra is a hassle long term and null field doesn’t last long, anyway, against a true condition spam build none of our abilities will work, so I choose Arcane Thievery for the boons it steals and the extra damage of putting the conditions on your enemy.

Arcane Thievery can be dodges and probably blocked, also if you’re not facing your target it will go off and do nothing.

We have good regeneration mixed in with some protection, also, permanent retaliation can be specced for and is good but they’ll probably nerf it when nerfing the guardian.
But yeah most of our utlitities are not that good or have specific niches which you cannot rely on for spvp, in wvwvw and dungeons they’re good.

Yep, mondays patch caused this.

Ah well, all we can do is bump up posts and hope they get merged/someone notices it, not sure if they’ll hotfix it or wait for the weekly patch.

It’s not too bad in random pvp but if this is happening in tournaments and premades then it sucks, a lot.

We shall swim to heaven…

I’m pretty sure there was such a thread of the under-world around somewhere but couldn’t find it. So yeah, teleporting in the (almost) neverending ocean is fun!

Also, since I’m a total noob at this I didn’t hide my interface and I had teleported away before I thought about it, sorry!

Thanks for solvng that then, so it’s actually bad for phantasms, too bad since phantasms seemed to have a timer only on their actions. I will edit the main post to not misinform anyone.

Ps. Staff clones would benefit the most from TW in that case, this is if you’re solo and not with a group which would benefit more.

Good idea!
As it only requires a tip it should be cheaper than the TP unless people are willingly losing money, again.
Good way to circumvent the 15% fee as well, only problem is the inbox limiting of 10 messages.

@Sarelm
Yes it’s probably for the best to hit both and cross your fingers.
Bosses which allow for 2-3 wardens are rare anyway.
@Mufasa
I know that TW isn’t unlimited (when used on a zerg in wvwvw it won’t buff everyone)
And when used on an entire group in a dungeon only players will get it and not pets/clones, can turrets get it? :p

Mufasa.5671:

I tend to group up with my guildies, so i have a slanted view on dungeons. What i do is i get our ranged to come to my illusions and hit them all at once. I dont see why this would be a big issue with random players, Just a little talking.

TW affects a maximum of 5 ‘targets’ (or so it seems, correct me if I’m wrong) so what I want to know is whether it’s better to boost people or phantasms.
Maybe I’m running with undergeared players so their dps seems lower than my wardens.

Also, TW has a priority list of targets to affect, it will buff players first then NPC’s like clones/pets etc.

Hi all,

First of all for those who may not know it Time Warp does affect Phantasms (and possibly illusions like staff clones but I’ve never tested it). EDIT: Dps increase for phantasms from TW disproved.

Now I was running a dungeon the other day and I chose to cast TW on my three iWardens, me and another melee instead of the ranged dps in my group, I got moaned at and asked them if they do 8k dmg and bleeds with their #1 attacks.

This did bring me to think about it, who would benefit more from it?
Getting reliable dps numbers from other classes is hard to do so I make this post, was I right or was my ranged dps right?

Some information:

My iWarden does +- 5-8k damage depending on crits.
I have Phantasmal Haste, Fury and Critical Images and run the phantasm dps spec.
All wardens were able to survive for the entire duration while staying within damage range of the (stationary) boss.
TW doubles cast/animation speeds, this together with cd timers should lead to classes being forced to dps primarily with their #1 skill, weapon switching could boost their dps even more by having different cd’s used.

I think that the base dps an iWarden puts out is higher than other classes with their #1 attack abilities, am I wrong/right?
Exceptions: abilities which alter your skillbar like Lich Form (again I have no idea about its dps but necros I’ve come across insist on having TW + Lich Form)

Discuss!