Guild Wars 2

lol @ giving your team 25 stacks of might. you can tell which people are theorycrafting and don’t actually know how to play a mesmer at all. that would be a pretty awful way to play.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Wait, what? A 25% damage boost is bad for sustained damage, and using a SINGLE utilility to give to your entire party 6-18+ stacks of might is bad play?

Yes and yes. 25% added to bad sustained damage is still bad sustained damage. And wasting a utility just to spread a few stacks of might for a few seconds to your group is also bad play most of the time.

Like I said the benefit of the trait is the basically passive boost it provides just to all around play. It’s not a trait you play differently because you have. It is probably too powerful but not for the reasons people typically quote. Anyone who is actively trying to stack 25 stacks of might with it is doing it wrong.

DiogoSilva.7089:

• Excellent sustained damage: Burst builds are usually poor at sustained damage, and vice-versa. For a reason. Now, Mesmers can get 3-9 stacks of might after bursting, up to 6-18 stacks of might by simply using two shatters, giving them excellent means to deal excellent damage even after their bursts are under a cooldown.
• Excellent party support: With their 6-18 stacks of might – a little more than that with an extra sigil and/ or rune, they can use a signet to spread all that to the party around them, transforming your team into a burst/ damage machine. Add in the quickness elite for a free win.

See posts like this are what I’m talking about. These are both just plain silly. Might isn’t a dramatic dps boost. 18 stacks of might is about a 25% bonus. It does not even begin to make shatter mesmers good at sustained damage. 25% more staff auto attack damage is not good sustained damage.

For the same reason it would be really pretty dumb even if you are going to run signet of inspiration to use it how you describe. Wasting two shatters just to set up a ~20% damage bonus for your group for a few seconds is just bad play most of the itme.

Its obviously badly thought out but what people tend to miss is if you actually stack 25 stacks of might using shattered strength with a shatter spec you don’t really have anything to do WITH those stacks once you get them besides spam auto attacks unless your opponent happens to get you below 50% so you get a reset on your shatter skills.

People see 25 stacks and think “omg ridiculous!” when the powerful part of the skill isn’t the 25 stacks of might someone stacked to show off, it’s the constant 5-10% dps boost you get from the more or less passive stacks you get just from doing your normal routine.

Mesmer is lame before level 40. It isn’t hard, but it’s definitely lame. Mesmer more than maybe any otehr class depends on traits to make the class interesting. Until you have access to the level 20 traits it is pretty boring. Just use GS/staff and you won’t have any problems with normal content but it’s very dull and the lack of good aoe makes it very slow compared to a lot of classes (e.g. warrior) that can just blow through 5+ mobs at once constantly without really thinking about it.

MF is an awful stat. Developers generally as intelligent as GW2’s developers should have been able to see that a long time ago. Why they persist with it is one of GW2’s major mysteries. It rewards people for being carried and encourages them to gear badly.

It is stupid that ectos are used for both exotics and higher tier (ascended/legendary) items. It makes very little sense from a design persepctive because it means demand for top-tier items raises the price of 2nd tier items, when any basic design paradigm should tell you it is more healthy for the opposite to occur. Veterans farming for ascended items shouldn’t be making it harder for new players to gear up to exotic level, but that’s what this design paradigm does.

The problem with chain CC in ORR is that it isn’t difficult, it’s just randomly cheap. 95 times out of 100 they won’t line up their chain CC and bring you from 100% to 0%. But 5 times they will. It’s just totally random. There’s no intelligence or strategy involved. It’s just that sometimes their random attack sequence will combo in just the right way and there’s not much you can really do.

They should probably just fix confusion to do one tick of damage every second against PVE mobs, and nerf it back to its sPVP values. Of course this would make wvwvw mesmers rage, because w3 confusion is so overpowered.

As long as crafting professions give normal XP they will never be broadly profitable. They’re used to powerlevel characters.

Everyone who says they make signficant money crafting are really just saying they make money playing the TP. Which is certainly the way to make money in this game.

Anet tends to quickly fix any bugs that result in prices getting cheaper. They have a vested interest in propping up prices to encourage gold buying.

It’s a bit of a joke this item is only available to new purchasers. It makes essentially zero sense from a long-term business perspective. Which presents the troubling possibility that anet has already decided to write off the long-term prospects for the game and is therefore prioritizing short-term gains over long-term health.

It is a problem in the sense that the design doesn’t make sense. If we want level 1s to be able to mine top tier mats why do we restrict everything but a few specially available picks with a level requirement? Clearly the basic system contemplates level gating. There are just a few items that ignore the gating mechanism. They seem like an oversight.

The only purpose of MF is to insult the intelligence of your players. Unfortunately there seem to be a lot of people who like being insulted.

Particularly in group situations MF is so ridiculously perverse in the way it works that there is no plausible explanation for it except that devs are having a good joke among themselves about how dumb their players are.

Why on earth should someone be actively REWARDED for bringing bad gear to a dungeon and therefore leeching off everyone else?

Phantasm does surprisingly well against shatter. Not because the phantasms are all that great themselves. It’s more the regen + prot that makes you boss in 1v1. With all the avoidance mesmers have that regen + prot can really stretch out your lifespan.

If you are good at reading animations and can reliably dodge their first couple phantasms you will do pretty well though kittenter.

Does ret hit even if the target is blinded and misses the attack? Wiki says it works if you’re blocking, but what about if the target is blind?

So the tl:dr of this thread is that smaller races can get closer using melee assist and therefore hit more of the projectiles, but the difference minor and for some reason the bigger difference is that norns don’t display the full damage they do for some bizarre reason while humans do?

I just rolled a guardian alt for the first time today and haven’t really thought about it, but just looking at the skills on gw2skills it seems like hammer would be competitive with gs in an aoe situation, but also generate similar AH healing (number 3 of chain does 3x protection if I’m reading that right) and give you pretty much constant protection, vastly lowering the damage you take. Is there something I’m missing?

As I pointed out earlier in the thread (and was promptly ignored by the haters), BF is the only mesmer weapon skill in the game that does decent damage without relying on a clone, and it’s also one of the only mesmer weapon skills that has any survivability on it that isn’t dependent on a clone.

It’s not a coincidence most mesmers use sword/x and staff. They are the two weapons that actually provide decent abilities that arn’t illusion centic. Aside from those two weapons basically everything a mesmer does involves illusions.

I do not think it’s a great idea to take the mesmer class and make it even MORE dependent on illusions.

BF could certainly be nerfed but you’d have to go back and systematically make other mesmer skills not dependent on illusions more powerful to compensate. I am not sure you would like the change and it would certainly take too much time and energy for anet given their generally glacial pace when it comes to class balancing.

Excellent post. Gets my vote for forum post of the year.

Mufa.1326:

4. People who claim that they are ‘helpless’ without 2 sec invulnerability on BF. Let me help you with your rotation since you make me sad (far from being good rotation since I never played mesmer in my life and it took me about 2 min to think of this one):
1. You start with duelist when you see the enemy. Duelist is now putting pressure on melee to close in.
time 0s: Just before he closes in use BF, that is what you open with. Takes 0.5s to cast and then you ahve 2sec of invul.
time 2.5s: hit him with magic bullet. Takes 0.5s to cast and then you have him stunned for 2 sec. Then proceed to DSP with autoattack.

Didn’t read past there because by time 0-2.5 you have revealed you don’t have a clue how to play a mesmer and have just made a fool out of yourself.

It does seem like you should get a short CC immunity in PVE every time you get CCed. 2-3 seconds would be plenty. There is nothing interesting or challenging about getting chain CCed from 100% to 0% by a few mobs because their attacks happened to line up that way.

Running mirror images and dodging into the enemy before shattering is definitely an easy but bad strat for bads. I agree with that. That’s an awful strategy. Even if you are going to run mirror images – which most good mesmers don’t these days – you would never want to use it that way.

BF is the only significant damage a Mesmer has on ANY weapon for the Mesmer’s actual attacks. It is also the only thing which makes a melee mesmer vaguely viable. It is an extremely powerful ability but it is that way because it is basically the only thing a Mesmer has that isn’t tied to illusions.

I am not sure it makes much sense to really move the Mesmer even more towards relying on illusions for 100% of everything. If you remove or tone down BF significantly Mesmer has zero damage without illusions and zero survivability without illusions except for chaos armor and chaos storm from staff. Not a recipe for a balanced or versatile class.

Honestly staff/gs is the easiest way to level up to 40 when you get traits that make a more melee-focused build more useful.

If in GS to start:

Start with iZerker, use GS 3, auto attack, GS2 so it bounces because the mob is close to you by now…mob is in melee range by now and has two clones on it. Switch to staff, cast phase retreat, shatter your 2-3 clones depending if the mob killed one. A normal mob should be dead by now if you are fighting mobs 1-2 levels below you which is what you always should be doing. If for some reason it isn’t dead just start kiting with staff, use warlock to finish the mob off.

If in staff to start:

Start with an auto attack, then phase retreat, then warlock, then another auto attack or two. Switch to GS, use GS 3, GS2, shatter your 2-3 clones, then izerker. Mob should be dead by now. If not kite for a few seconds, switch to staff then start the kite.

Sword/x and staff is a pretty unbeatable combo on mesmer at the moment. Even if you down the mesmer you have a good chance of not winning the fight.

Engi is perfectly viable. I mean this in the nicest way possible but if you are having trouble on an engi in sPVP it’s you not the class.

And you are exaggerating horribly. Hammer (which is presumably what you’re talking about – mace dps is even lower) doesn’t kill people in two blows and warriors don’t kill anyone in anywhere near 2 seconds without quickness.

Quickness has a massive cooldown and a short duration. If you use all your escapes before they use quickness you can expect to probably die.

I wish they would remove quickness but if they did honestly you would just get pwned faster with the way you play because the classes would be buffed otherwise and if you refuse to learn to use active defenses to avoid burst effectively you are going to die either way.

If you are fighting a quickness class and you let them quickness burst you you will lose most of your health in 2-3 seconds. That is just the way the game is set up right now. There is no solution. No class can tank a quickness burst and not die very fast.

The counter to quickness burst is active defense. Wait for them to pop quickness then use use a block or a dodge or a teleport or something like that to get out of the way.

Unfortuantely shatter build really is the one build to rule them all at the moment. Don’t get me wrong, you can do ok with a phantasm build or a condition build too…but if you are looking at things objective shatter build is definitely the most powerful right now.

To anyone leveling with this spec….it really don’t work well until level 40. For PVE the dodge on clone effect is actually more important the IP for the spec imo, although it definitely feels more powerful after level 60 too.

Until 40 you’d probably have better luck with GS/staff.

This game isn’t about passive defense. If you try to spec in such a way that you can sit there and take damage passively you are never going to do well because the game isn’t set up that way.

Uh it’s probably the most powerful downed skill in the game in group play. It is the only 100% guaranteed way to avoid a stomp attempt in the game. Even mesmer and thief downed abilities arn’t 100% guaranteed.

BF is extremely powerful but it’s also more or less necessary to make the mesmer class viable in pvp. I would actually like to see BF nerfed but only if other weapons and skills are made more viable to compensate. Right now sword feels 100% mandatory in PVP because BF is so powerful and so necessary to how the mesmer class works.

^^ More like phantasms are bugged and underpowered.

zone.1073:

Remove Quickness = 5 bunker teams a-go-go.

Remove Quickness = Extravagantly buff up Warriors to compensate = more QQing = Nothing solved.

Has anyone ever died to a Warrior without Quickness before? It’s impossible. It’s like fighting an opponent without arms and legs. They can’t get anything done without Quickness.

Which is an extremely stupid way to balance classes.

The problem with quickness is what you identified – either classes have to be balanced TO quickness, in which case they suck the other 95% of the time, or they have to be balanced WITHOUT quickness, in which case they are OP during that 5% window.

The solution is to remove quickness and rebalance accordingly, not keep a broken mechanic that results in bad gameplay.

How is a melee killing you in 2-3 seconds including evades if you run FT? You have a low re-use knockback and a low re-use instant cast aoe blind usable while stunned.

Not to mention you ought to be running rifle and then you also have a low cooldown root, ANOTHER low cooldown knockback, and a jump.

Another obvious option would be to have talents in the phatasm trees also add passive effects to the F1-F4 skills along the lines of what you mentioned.

Farming karka is the one and only place mesmer have a big competitive advantage over other classes. So that’s one obviously place to start. Farm your way to the rich orich node and back.

Air runes are vastly more expensive, which is a good enough reason for me to use centaur.

Twinklefairy.6739:

Xavi.6591:

The problem with Mesmers though is our swiftness buff from Focus doesn’t stack with other profession’s swiftness buffs, which I think is a bug.

Not a bug, it was changed quite a while ago to stop people running through the line multiple times and stacking 1m+ swiftness by themselves in a couple of seconds.

Yeah, it was a super lazy change though that is really annoying to deal with. A more elegant fix would have been to only let you get one charge of swiftness from each temporal curtain without imapcting its ability to stack with other sources.

Remember too it depends on the particular bleed. Bleeds only tick once a second. If you don’t get a full extra second duration is useless. So basically it’s impossible to say how valuable duration is without knowing precisely how much you have already and what the base durations on your bleeds are.

Mobility (i.e. incombat-mobility) being different by class is fine. Out of combat mobility (i.e. swiftess) being different by class is more questionable. I don’t really see the balance benefit of giving some classes easy perma-swiftness and some classes no easy perma-swiftness. Why do that?

Zid.4196:

With BiS Rabid gear, a staff clone will massively outperform iMage. The clone attacks every 0.75 sec. By the time iMage attacks once, even with Phantasmal Haste, the clone inflicts 2s of burning and 25s of bleed, for a base condition damage of 1,7k. The iMage will do 390 base multiplied by the number of skill activations in those three seconds, and possibly a single bleed.

Next, my favorite argument: “But…but…if the THEIF activates skills many times in 3 seconds, iMage will outperform, yes??!?”

No, absolutely not. The last thing you want to do when fighting this appparently suicidal thief is bothering with 3/4s casting time and the iMage attack delay/travel time/whatever. The thing you do is insta-spawn 3 clones without any risk of failing, and Cry of Confusion. That’s it.

The clone doesn’t attack every .75 seconds. That’s the attack speed on winds of chaos, but there’s a delay between each attack (IIRC of 1 second).

Once I put a portal half a foot in front of a 100 foot cliff and then went back to the zerg and dropped my second portal and told everyone to go through.

^ Hah, someone even lazier than me. I at least hit 2 on cooldown too! :P

Yeah iWarlock is obviously junk in a condition damage build.

A normal staff clone might well be better than an iMage though, especially if you don’t have the 20% faster attack speed trait.

iMage does 3 stacks of confusion every 6 seconds. Staff clone does one winds of chaos every 1.75 seconds IIRC. Someone better at math than me would have to do the math.

Sometimes when I am really lazy in pve I just sit in staff 2 and auto attack and running in circles watching the pretty bouncing orbs.

Josh.6213:

depending on your build scepter is not always bad

No, it’s pretty much always bad. I mean maybe you can come up with some build specially tailored for scepter where it is the best weapon choice but it’s hard to think what that build might be. And even harder to imagine that it might be a viable build.

I mean maybe it fits into glamour confusion for added lols but that’s not a real build anyhow it’s just a way to troll dummies in w3.

Scepter is just bad. Pretty well known. Presumably the devs know too and it’s just not on their priority list to fix given we have several viable weapons.