Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t it possible to simply change the balance between his skills damage and stats?
As far as I know, reflect damage is calculated with the skill’s base damage and the power/prec/ferocity (amen) of the player reflecting. If Anet brings down the base damage on all of Lupi’s skills and gives him more power (the stat) to compensate, it would only reduce the damage from reflects?
Reflecting an enemy projectile uses that enemy’s power stat for damage calculation.
Unfortunately, that’s just how skill slots work in this game (for all classes).
It’s not really that the slot goes on cooldown, but rather the two skills (land and underwater) in it share cooldowns. So if you use an underwater skill, the land skill in the same slot goes on cooldown. The reverse happens as well when you use a land skill.
The bug is really how incredibly non-obvious this behaviour is. Most people notice this when they change utilities on land, and find that the utility they just equipped is on cooldown for no obvious reason.
I’ll agree it makes sense, just frustrated as a Mesmer player because we have no real way of having swiftness now without putting ourselves in combat. Or sacrificing offense/defense because of having to use Traveler Runes.
Equip centaur runes and use mantra of recovery for perma swiftness. Not really sacrificing any combat potential since you weren’t planning on getting into combat anyway.
The only problem with trying to solo p2 is the first boss, Belka, she can be really annoying, because she does a combo where she shoots a slow moving projectile that one shots you then she uses a knockback that puts you exatly on the place where the one-shot projectile lands, but after you learn how to deal with that it is doable. I recommend getting lots of harpy feathers for some short duration stealth during the skip parts which helps a lot too.
You can play it safe. When you find yourself far away from Belka, wait for the orb to fire, evade it, then move closer.
Nothing like forgetting to switch weapons back after changing them for a running section…
Sometimes on mesmer I’ll use staff for a skip then forget to put the offhand sword back. Then in a fight, try to swap to offhand sword… those 10 seconds will feel so long.
The silver spiders before Malrona are definitely tough because you often have to deal with more than one at a time. Ele might have enough burst to actually kill one quickly then retreat, but this part takes me forever on mesmer.
A couple points:
The first groups will maintain aggro almost all the way to the waypoint. If you pull them back into the cave and you die, the NPC will hold aggro while you can respawn.
The 5 final spiders spiders have slightly different leash ranges based on their initial position, all somewhere near the entrance of the cave. So you can carefully pull them and have all but one reset. It’s easy to fight the spiders if you can get them alone.
The NPC can help, but be aware that if the NPC is killed and you res her normally, she will immediately run back into the room and aggro spiders. To avoid that, teleport to the entrance waypoint and back and she will respawn without aggro.
About this Turmaine bug, do you still get conditions from his form?
Turmaine does not normally move when he is vulnerable. When he is invulnerable, his dash always moves directly towards his target and does not path around obstacles. So you can get him “stuck” during the invulnerable phase — if you are out of range he won’t hit you at all.
Sometimes pug groups exploit this by luring him up to the top of the treehouse, jumping down, and ranging him. He will never come down from the treehouse so you only need to deal with the area denial during vulnerable phases.
CM is really good for this. Path 2 does not finish until someone interacts with the cage so you have all the time in the world to bring your alt in. Sometimes one player will swap and we 4-man the boss for the other paths.
Don’t start the instance if you want to keep your friends.
Awesome guide, most every question I had was answered. So recharge traits do stack? that’s good to know.
I’m curious, is 60044 ever worthwhile? PH + Reflecting wardens seems like it’d be nice coverage for reflects, but you lose the precision bonuses of the dueling tree. Is it worth it?
If you need traited wardens and PH, 2/4/0/4/4 is likely a better choice. This combination allows you to maintain 100% warden reflect uptime with just two wardens. Since Empowering Mantras does not benefit warden reflects I think the precision, ferocity and phantasmal fury are more valuable (these do benefit the warden).
Remember that untraited wardens still defend against projectiles so you can still achieve 100% defense uptime with 6/4/0/0/4 and two wardens.
Also, you mention that the 64004 build has a negative of longer reuse on wardens, wouldn’t it be the same as the 64040 build you list for reflects as you lose the illusion minor but gain the warden’s feedback? Only 60044 should be better in that regard right?
6/4/0/0/4 has the same warden cooldown as 6/4/0/4/0. TC’s cooldown is longer though.
To be honest, I think the dungeon is pretty much fine up to, and including the Mouth of Zhaitan fight. Maybe the airship part with the giants is a bit long.
But after that the rest of the dungeon is just stupid, and long, and pointless. Mouth of Zhaitan should be the last boss. The rest, a cutscene.
Literally the last four times I have taken mesmer in to low-man Arah p2’s (some on stream as well ….) wardens have bugged out. I love playing mesmer but I’m absolutely sick of the class being so screwy and causing wipes.
Some bugs take so long to get fixed (or acknowledged) that sometimes it feels like the game is in some sort of open beta or something. And instead of fixing things, they also break something else, too. I wish they would revert that change that made the iWarden able to move.
At this point, I’m pretty sure that Anet is not capable of even reverting the change without breaking something else (probably some other aspect of the warden).
It would not be so insulting if they hadn’t promised us since December that they would take care of it in the feature patch.
We were told in a forum post that it would be fixed in the feature patch.
Anet posted a blog about the feature patch which advertised that the warden is finally fixed.
There was a livestream thingy about feature patch which highlighted the warden fix as something to look forward to.
The patch notes of feature patch stated warden was fixed.
And yet the warden was not fixed (instead, it was even more bugged!). After all that, Anet obviously didn’t even bother to spend 5 minutes testing their changes.
That’s how I feel, too. Honestly, until I started PUGing CM p1, I didn’t even know people just skipped that part/let a thief solo it. It always just went so fast with my guild groups. But after some of the PUGs I’ve been with recently, I can understand why people want someone to solo it.
Most pugs don’t skip that, or didn’t anyway. Only recently I’ve been seeing it. The big problem with this logic is then everyone has to get through the net turrets, etc.
You realize that once the basement part is completed, a doorway opens so you can walk directly to the barn from the waypoint, right?
This can happen with any bundle. It is caused by the bundle disappearing while you are picking it up. You should be able to unbug it by dying — I think any loading screen might unbug it too.
Since you are picking up your own banner you can look at your cooldowns before doing so. If the banner is about to expire, don’t pick it up.
This has been reported many times in the past, but Anet has no interest in fixing it.
After she goes invisible, you have 45 seconds or so to pull sparks AND damage Simin before she stealths again. If you fail to damage her more than she healed during this time, she will end up back in the first phase.
So your group was probably just slow, and needs to work on pulling sparks faster.
Is making reflects useless the best way to counter stacking? No, not by far.
Does it work? Yes it does. Deal with it.
Can you please explain how stacking has anything to do with Malrona, and how making her projectiles unreflectable discourages it?
Nobody stacks for Malrona.
Never tried to stack in front of her, reflecting the AoEs, getting poisoned and kill her in notime? Never? Well, you could try to evade her AoEs. Gl with that if you’re running with PuGs.
That didn’t answer the question.
Also, standing in front of an enemy is not the same thing as stacking.
Point is nobody knows so why is anyone trying to say ArenaNet intended X when it isn’t documented. Logically you can only assume why something was done. Even then people have different ideas why something was done. On top of the bias too.
As for TA spider boss. You can fight it without reflect stacked and you do just fine. Just have to dodge tbh.
That still doesn’t discard the fact that one reflect made this boss very easy and to no threat at all.
I agree that the reflect damage against this particular boss was way out of whack. But the solution is not to make all reflects useless. We’ve just moved from one bad extreme to another.
The reflect did literally no damage… It just protected you and your mates from taking any damage, making that encounter way too easy.
What is this I don’t even… did you even fight this boss?
Reflects did an incredibly huge amount of damage to Malrona. A solo mesmer could literally kill this boss with just two feedbacks.
Moreover, Malrona has two attacks, one of which was never reflectable. So it’s also wrong to say that reflects prevented all damage.
Point is nobody knows so why is anyone trying to say ArenaNet intended X when it isn’t documented. Logically you can only assume why something was done. Even then people have different ideas why something was done. On top of the bias too.
As for TA spider boss. You can fight it without reflect stacked and you do just fine. Just have to dodge tbh.
That still doesn’t discard the fact that one reflect made this boss very easy and to no threat at all.
I agree that the reflect damage against this particular boss was way out of whack. But the solution is not to make all reflects useless. We’ve just moved from one bad extreme to another.
The right way to improve Malrona is not to make her projectiles unreflectable. Instead, a much better approach would be to have players to fight Malrona and the adds at the same time.
I have no idea why she just sits there as you murder all the little spiders, doesn’t make any sense to me.
For learning I actually suggest giving up Empowering Mantras and take 2/4/0/5/3 with ether feast, blink, feedback, and mantra of concentration. Blink is super useful in this fight as an “oh crap I screwed up” button, as it can save you from 3 of his attacks in phase 3. Illusionists Celerity reduces the cooldown of a good chunk of your weapon skills which I find helps a lot too. Use omnomberry pies and potions of undead slaying.
Use time warp in phase 1 if the locusts get out of hand, but keep in mind that it reduces the duration of blurred frenzy/illusionary riposte.
Once you’re comfortable with that move 4 points into Domination and swap blink for the daze mantra.
We obviously have to test this because we know Anet lies in patch notes. But assuming it’s true… it only took 19 months to fix this waypoint!
In the meantime we got a new bugged waypoint in path 2, so we can expect a fix for that in about a year, after one of the path 3 waypoints stops working.
Yes this happens fairly often, very frustrating. After about 10-20 minutes all the messages you tried to whisper before get sent out at once, and your chat instantly switches to whisper the last person you tried to message.
This has been reported many times so Anet surely knows about the issue. They just don’t care enough to fix it.
Temporal curtain is not too bad as is. The only real gripe I have with it is when you cross the curtain with a few seconds of swiftness remaining you get nothing. In particular, using TC with signet of inspiration equipped is risky because you may randomly get 3s of swiftness just before you cross the curtain. Also well-meaning players can give you small amounts of swiftness and thus negate the effects of TC.
It would be better if it simply increased your current swiftness up to a maximum of 12s (+boon duration bonuses). Unfortunately given past experience, if Anet made this change it would probably add bugs to some unrelated phantasm.
99% sure that reflects do nothing against the nightmare vine projectiles in TA. Untraited wardens block them but the wardens get 1-shot by the melee attack so are unreliable.
Best is to avoid the projectiles by movement. If your PUG dies just solo it. You can always kill the silver mobs to reduce pressure.
You need to be very careful changing weapons because you have an offhand dagger with sigil of battle and a mainhand dagger with sigil of battle. This is fine when they are on different weapon sets.
What’s happening in your case is that while changing weapons, you are (temporarily) having both of these sigils equipped at the same time: this causes the sigils to break due to stupid bugs. If this happens you must switch to a weapon set with no sigil of battle to unbug it.
All of Lupi’s projectiles are ground-targeted AoE. So in order to reflect the phase 2 barrage with the curtain projectiles have to land on the curtain. If you are standing on the curtain probably some of them will be, but some will hit beside the curtain and damage you. This can also happen if you feedback and stand too close to the edge of the bubble.
So if you’re quick you can probably use the curtain during phase 2 aoe to inflict some damage to Lupi but not to avoid damage to yourself. For phase 3 rapidfire I suspect if you place the curtain by his circle and dodge through him you can avoid damage, but the cast time of curtain is probably too long to use reactively.
Personally I don’t bother with focus reflects for this fight.
Let’s talk about the bugs and how the list is getting bigger instead of smaller, rather than balance/l2p issues.
The only bug with mesmer downed skills I’m aware of is the rogue not attacking (same as the warden), which is on the list.
The problem is that it’s almost impossible to tell which “bugs” are failed attempts at balance and which are legitimate quirks or errors in patching.
“This skill seems bugged because I think it is supposed to do X but Y happens instead” is reasonable discussion. Since Anet is really bad at communicating their intentions and also really bad at writing changes in patch notes, obviously we have to make assumptions for X.
On the other hand, “Two downed mesmers managed to kill me once” is really not relevant.
S/S and S/F IS the supporty weapon set you can bring to a PUG. Except for pistol (which you should also carry), our other weapons are basically crap.
The focus provides a unique pull as well as projectile defenses, and the offhand sword provides the strong phantasm as well as a block and aoe daze. Swap one of those weapons for the pistol when it’s more useful.
