Guild Wars 2

Squall Leonhart.2075:

directx 11 would certainly help by reducing CPU overhead that DirectX9’s state management causes.

Only if they refactor the code to be efficient with 11. A straight conversion from 9 to 10 (or 11) leaves the code less efficient.

For most things the GPU is the same and will preform and look the same in 9 or 11. Most of the big differences are not taken advantage of yet by modern games (being able to bind a huge number of textures to the shaders, rendering into volumetric textures, integration with compute shaders, exposing enormous amounts of metadata to shaders via the constant buffers relative to 9).

Red and Green can also build up there, with arguably much more devastating effect than hitting the SM outer wall.

The AOE limit is ridiculous in light of the presence of portal. This basically boils down to a force projection imbalance. In the real world objects occupy space, and you want to diversify your force/positions while maximizing your ability to hit a target with lethal force.

In the game this is turned upside down because the players can all stack in the same physical space, amplifying their ability to project a sphere/circle of lethal force around their position. Because there is an AOE cap, attacking this concentrated force is penalized, making the grouped up force actually much more durable too.

If the players were solid there would be a finite number of enemies that could occupy an area, and aoe damage likely wouldn’t need any kind of limits at all, since stacking up should make your force significantly more vulnerable, not stronger.

The portal spell could use a lot of work. 5-10 player limit, 4+ second cast time (like our mantras) etc, maybe 1 person every second or two seconds throughput etc.

PVE mesmer is pretty terrible until 40-50+

30 point illusion, illusionary persona is pretty much the only good one.

Mass Invis
Run toward enemy
Phantasmal Warden, timed to finish when you enter a reliable leap range
Leap+Swap
Blurred Frenzy

in WVW zerg-like fights the next pretty much involves blinking out.

I run Sword/Focus and Scepter/Pistol, so in a more 1v1 fight there is a dodge or two for some clones then a decoy, if they try to run switch to ranged for phantasm and the pistol stun, then some confusion damage.

I would argue the cooldowns for F2-3-4 are too long, and that shattering phantasms should count for something (more duration on distortion and daze, twice the stacks of confusion etc) over shattering clones.

Finishing moves just need to permanently kill people.

The cast time is a bit high but they do pair well with the stealth skills.

There really should be 3 zones setup in the keep:

keep lord room for capturing the point
the keep itself (if you are in the keep when it flips you get some credit)
outside the keep within some distance (if you are within this zone for some # of minutes it increases your credit).

Building any siege in the outer zone should bump you to silver or gold instantly. Trebuchets might be an oddball but i think people can live with it for the shorter range siege weapons.

6x Centaur Runes + mantra of recovery can get you pretty much anywhere with near full uptime (esp if you open with a focus boost)

So you tried a bunch of glass canon specs against a class that pretty much is designed to kill glass canons and lost?

Can fling people off walls, bridges, and most importantly of all : cliffs.

I built a 10/30/0/0/30 in the mists with pure glass canon gear and on the real low armor golem the best i could manage was around 4×1020 damage with a 212% crit multiplier and a 60% crit rate. Each hit from the shatter crits on independently own so getting all 4 is somewhat rare. I could have probably pumped the damage up a little higher with 4 mantras instead of two.

I do believe people forget our auto attack damage is horrifically low. Low armor scepter is 550-550-775 (before crits) and the sword isn’t much higher (but is a faster attack cycle).

WvW? I keep gravitating to knight armor & jewelry and invader weapons.

Centaur Runes + Healing Mantra.

The centaur runes seem to have a 15 second CD despite it saying 10s, but its possible to keep it up long enough with a focus and 3 uses of the mantra at the right times.

96 badges and 759 kills with a mesmer here, so 12.6% (higher than some of the other horror stories on this thread, but also in the category of ‘i might be able to afford a xmas present before xmas if i work real hard’ )

100 mesmers would probably crash every client on both sides

Your problem is not the class, but of tactics and force projection.

Zerg v Zerg moving first (and almost always alone) is going to get you shot by everyone with a ranged weapon all at the same time. You need to move as a unit with other people, or bring firepower to counter zergs (arrow carts, balista).

Get 2-4 mesmers to chain pull people out of the enemy front line for you, until their force is smaller than yours etc.

You can get a lot more stacks than that with 3 sword clones.

I’ve tried most of the basic armor/jewelry setups (berserker, rampager, carrion, cleric, knight) that make sense. I keep coming back to full knight for the armor and jewelry, and invader weapons. I am currently running what I think is a somewhat odd wvw build:

10/20/10/20/10

Sword/Focus
Scepter/Pistol

Traits are:
Crippling Dissipation
Far Reaching Manipulations
Deceptive Evasion
Illusionary Defense
Mender’s Purity
Restorative Mantras (sometimes Warden’s Feedback)
Compounding Power

Skills are:
Mantra of Recovery
Mantra of Resolve
Blink
Decoy
TimeWarp (or MassInvis of course)

and Centaur Runes in the armor is nearly essential (and will push you to the mantra instead of ether feast)

The orr areas aren’t balanced in the slightest. There are large numbers of fast respawning veterans, and every single risen has extremely annoying abilities (cripple city, extremely fast, insane fast respawns etc).

Their bug database is probably on fire, I would imagine it will be awhile before they get through their backlog and to the point they can do real tuning over fixing things like ‘DE gets stuck’ and flying orb thiefs.

I’ll tolerate the run speed disavantage as long as I can pull people off walls, off bridges, and toward my warband.

The Prestige is fine, its the iMage that is terrible

Disabled masks showing up in character select screen is a much more serious problem.

NEW LAND!

On the plus side you don’t hear it all that often, but when you hear it, YOU HEAR IT, much like an arrow to the knee.

I’m playing a female norn mesmer and its pretty much the only voice complaint I have.

A female charr shout-based warrior gets pretty old pretty quick, even though it is also fairly good voicework except for the shouts. They quickly start getting on your nerves (For Great Justice! etc), and you cast them all the time in nearly every fight.

Every rare I have ever received in the claw of jormag was from a minion trash wave and never from the chest. Feels broken to me.

I noticed it too leveling up, I think there are multiple factors:

Most players are not that high level. The people who care are already 80. A good number of the remaining people are in the WvW maps. And i’m sure a good number of people switch to alts during the off hours as well (especially if their server is getting murdered in the imbalanced overnight WvW battles)

Hippocampus.8470:

It’s likely another complaint that mid-level blues and greens aren’t selling for enough money on the TP, on account of they’re not actually that great and will be out-leveled within a few days by most people who play regularly.

I loved outleveling my crafted gear, by crafting gear, which caused me to craft yet more gear. Life is much better at 80 though.

The first 5 points in duelist gives you quite a lot of vigor if you have a reasonable amount of precision. If you want ludicrous levels of vigor on top there is the 10 pt major trait in Inspiration to grant vigor on shatters.

That said I’ve also never really understood sword/pistol. I prefer sword/sword paired with either staff (big boss fights) or scepter/pistol (soloing). If the iMage was better I would probably be running sword/torch all the time.

I do, currently doing 30 dom 30 illusion 10 chaos and a whole bunch of on’death’ and shatter improvements, and all clone generators utility and traits.

I leveled up to 80 as duelist primarily with sword+everything. I avoid staffs except in the larger PVE events. My ranged go-to weapon was a scepter.

i started out [sword/torch], [scepter/torch]

i in the 30’s i switched to [sword/focus], [scepter/pistol]

in the 50’s to 80 i settled on [sword/sword], [scepter/pistol]

I liked sword torch (prestige is great for how I play, but the iMage is pretty meh).

I just hit 80 and I’m doing a bleeding condition build with 30 duelist, 30 illusion, 10 chaos.

My main utility setup is the big heal, summon 2 clones, stealth and summon a clone, blink, and time warp.

Going from memory the major slots were things like, create a clone on dodge, clones bleed on crit, confusion on clone death, all shatters confuse, random condition on clone death etc. Basically a build that can make a ridiculous amount of clones, and killing them yourself, shattering them, having the enemies kill them, or letting them hit on enemies are all reasonable actions, which you can try to push favoring one over the other. Sometimes the bleed on crits just wont work (some veteran creatures just blow them up too fast). But this kind of build can pump out clones like crazy, and the scepter is frequently the glue to hold you over until the skills are off cooldown, or you need a second block, or you need to dodge twice to pop out two clones and go ranged for a few seconds, pop out a duelist, then go back to sword etc.

The class has a lot of other builds but thats kind of where I settled. Having a block on each weapon loadout is invaluable, as I am one of those weirdos running around with sword off hand

Its cool for asura warriors