Guild Wars 2

My guild has “scribing guild ballistas” unlocked, and I have a level 211 scribe. Ballistas claim they are a level 200 scribe material, but they don’t show as usable at the scribe crafting station.

Am I missing something, or are these things bugged now?

I’m getting really frustrated losing matches at Foefire to exploiters. Is there any chance of getting it removed from rotation until the exploit can be patched?

I have a suspicion about this.

You know that the JP drains your health, right? And when your health reaches 0, there’s a “gust of wind” effect that takes you back to the start. Is it possible this is what you’re seeing?

US, bronze league, first place:

-1 named exotic
-5 level 80 rares
-3 masterwork weapons
-10 tomes of knowledge
-10 scrolls of knowledge
-1 taste of WxP
-1 mini dolyak
-1 bronze finisher thing
-1 Essence of luck
-100 Dragonite Ore
-100 Empyreal Fragments

I’m noticing that this is a lot better than everyone else got. Maybe it matters that I played in every match?

I got 5 rares and an exotic, along with a bunch of blues and greens, and the mini etc. This doesn’t strike me as all that bad.

My server is HoD and I played in every match up during the season. Is it possible that maybe the rewards scale more on server placement and participation than people think?

Eh, I think the complaints about hacks are to a fair degree caused because there are a lot of hackers lately.

I’ve seen speed hackers at least three or four times since the season started, and not at all for months before that. They’re really obvious too, engineers that teleport every 1/4 second and such.

I just got an Orichalcum Ore from using a PvP Salvage Kit on a PvP Lava Axe. Is that supposed to happen? I’ve never gotten PVE crafting materials this way before.

If you do this with Feedback, you also need to do it with Guardian wards. Line of Warding can be almost invisible sometimes.

There was at least one matchup last night in GoM’s bay where about 15 of us HoD’s were against zergs of 30-40 from both GoM and SF simultaneously. Then we pulled them into each other and wiped the lot inside inner, including their golems. We had one arrow cart, and no other siege.

It was amazing, and I still don’t know how we did it.

I’ve seen this happen 3 times, now, and my impression is that it started with yesterday’s maintenance. When an enemy kills the NPC to get a capture ring to appear at an objective, reviving the NPC doesn’t make the ring go away.

In each case, we just killed them all and repaired stuff, but this seems problematic with camps., as you could theoretically capture one just by kiting the NPC’s away.

Is it just me, or are we trying to trade SM now? Captured it 3 times tonight, and only once did we encounter a defense.

Not that I’m complaining.

Wow, AR, Dh, have you guys been recruiting the last couple days. Don’t think I’ve seen you both have 50 mans going simultaneously before now.

And immediately after, 3 of us got DR Hills Lord down to 40% before 5 of you came and wiped us. It’s been a fun night.

The Mesmer #3 staff skill “Phantasmal Warlock” goes on cooldown and does nothing if used against an invulnerable foe. I ran into this when up against a WvW camp supervisor who still had the “Righteous Indignation” buff up.

Note that I don’t mean that the skill does no damage, it doesn’t do anything at all. It’s almost like they expanded the “illusions fail on blind” to include invulnerable enemies.

I haven’t gone through other Mesmer skills, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were others that are now broken. Has anyone spotted anything else like this?

The Mesmer #3 staff skill “Phantasmal Warlock” goes on cooldown and does nothing if used against an invulnerable foe. I ran into this when up against a WvW camp supervisor who still had the “Righteous Indignation” buff up.

I’m noticing that somewhat frequently the turrets go into a mode where their skills go on cooldown when used, but do nothing. I’ve heard a lot of other people report this too. Any chance we’ll get a fix before the week ends?

Halting Strike isn’t anywhere near as good as it looks on paper. It does less damage than it says it does, and it doesn’t seem to count “interrupts” the way other skills do.

I had this same idea, and I tried tooling around with more or less the exact build you describe here. The problem is that all of your cooldowns are huge, and you will more or less never kill anything in a single spike. All you really achieve is making your opponent angry enough that they’ll hunt you down when you respawn :P

If halting strike wasn’t bugged rather badly, I agree, this would be awesome.

My math is based on the wiki page for power . Base power is 916, and base damage is the damage you do at base power. In general, the damage of a skill is multiplied by (power / 916), except for skills that take weapon damage into account.

You’re right that my math is wrong though. The numbers had worked out nicely enough that I’d thought it wasn’t taking weapon damage into account, but using a steady weapon does give lower damage than I get with a normal one. I’ll see if I can work this out more precisely.

That said, even with full berserker gear, I can’t make halting strike do more than 800 or so damage to any of the training NPC’s.

Does anyone know what toughness they each have?

Something that confuses me is how many things this guy says that are flatly incorrect.

He goes on about the buff to halting strike, but halting strike was barely buffed at all. The patch notes about it lied. It does double the damage it used to, which means at 2300 power it does about 700, and it doesn’t appear to count interrupting autoattacks as interrupts the way he says either. You get the impression he’s read about the game, but not actually played it…

Image attached for evidence.

Note that is less damage than every auto-attack except staff.

The 6/25/2013 update notes claimed Halting Strike damage was increased by 500% from it’s original 150, but its current base damage is only 300. as it is, the trait is effectively useless, as a single auto-attack with almost any weapon does more damage.

So, since the wiki claims that Halting Strike should have a base damage of 750, I thought I would try it out to see how viable it is.

But it turns out that it only does 300 base damage, which makes it pretty useless. For confirmation, it does 772 damage with 2354 power, 772 * 916(base power)/2354 = 300.

It doesn’t appear to care about toughness of target or weapon characteristics / sigil.

Something I’m noticing in PvP:
1. I’m holding a point, necro runs up and fears me
2. I stun break, and then I’m feared again
3. I stun break and then I’m feared again
4. I die before I leave fear.

What skills is the necro using that he can fear me 3 times in 5 seconds like this? What would be an effective counter play here?

So, the offhand weapon bug was fixed, but my understanding is that certain UI options will still label players without labeling clones, making it trivial to tell which is which in PvP.

What I’m wondering is, if this is fixed, are there any other issues that make it trivial to tell which Mesmer is real? Assume that the Mesmer player perfectly imitates the attack and movement patterns of a clone, so issues like “clones don’t dodge” shouldn’t count.

The game has been out nearly a year, and this bug has been plaguing mesmers since day 1.

As it is, mesmers who want to PvP with one-handed weapons end up going out of their way to find the smallest weapons possible, just to make it harder to spot them among the clones. We shouldn’t have to give up on having nice looking equipment just because they can’t be bothered to fix our most basic class mechanic.

Does anyone think this will ever be fixed?

Don’t expect a response on this one. Anet has already addressed this thread many-many times. “The use of clones is only meant to provide a temporary distraction.” “The clone is intended to provide the foundation for the mesmer shatter abilities, not to leave a opponent entirely unsure which one is the player.” If you back read through the mesmer forums you’ll find they have answered all of your questions in this thread, apart from the red arrow in down state.

I actually went to the trouble of reading through the entire Mesmer board. This is not true. They said they wouldn’t give clones dodges, which is fine. The offhand bug though is ludicrous and needs to be fixed.

Mesmer downed and thief downed and ele downed are the only downed states that can stop stability/stealth stomp.

Mesmer downed 2 does not block a stealth stomp – it requires a target.

This sounds good, but I would add one thing: mesmer clones must have the same icon as the mesmer. We don’t need any extra tells on which one is real.

I’ve seen a lot of complaints about the meta lately, and the complete lack of mesmers in high level PvP makes it evident that they could us a bit of a boost.

That said, I don’t think the solution is to give them a better condition cleanse, or to make their burst even stronger. I think the solution is to fix the problems that make mesmers fail in the niche they’re supposed to fill: being confusing and hard to pin down. Up until now, high level mesmer players have been playing around the failings in their main mechanics. Once you get past low-level play, mesmer illusions don’t fool anyone.

I think there are two changes, that combined, could make mesmers viable again:

1. Fix all of the bugs that make clones too obvious:

1. Give clones offhand weapons. This bug has been making mesmers look like fools since beta. I imagine there’s a serious hurdle to making this work in the engine, but it needs to happen.
2. Fix the clone auto-attack rate so that it matches the player auto-attack rate. They don’t do damage anyway, and the tiny boost this would give to sharper images / staff condition builds won’t matter much.

2. Give mesmers a way to escape the giant red arrow of doom:

1. If a mesmer has been called as a target, make the Decoy skill move the target to the decoy clone. As it is, mesmers almost always get a target called on them, which makes all of their illusions useless. Given that being able to confuse opponents is meant to be their primary defense, they need a way to counter the target arrow.
2. Make Ether Blast give 1/4 second of stealth. This is admittedly a bit of a stretch, but mesmer scepter is probably the least played weapon in PvP due to how ridiculously underpowered it is. The tiny bit of stealth would break target, and create a chance for the clone created by the third attack in the chain to actually be confusing.

This will sound crazy, but I liked the old Risen Priest of Melandru better.

I’ll readily admit it needed some tuning, but the old event with the animal transforms and having to kill the acolytes was actually fun. It’s turned into an event where a zerg takes him down in 2 minutes by spamming ‘1’, which isn’t fun at all.

Is there any chance we could bring back the old behavior, but maybe tone down the scaling for the acolytes? As it is, this event is by far the easiest temple.

You can get condition duration up to 247% for confusion and 214% for everything else.

Base = 100%
2 Giver’s Weapons = +20%
Rare Veggie Pizza = +40%
30 Domination = +30%
2 Lyssa Runes + 2 Runes of the Mad King + 2 Runes of the Nightmare = +24%
Master of misdirection = +33% for confusion

This lets you do things like hit someone with confusing images before it’s worn off (if you trait for scepter cooldown reduction). It’s not really a viable build though.

The tooltip shows the total damage, not the damage per illusion.

It’s always been that way, and I’m pretty sure it’s intentional. The idea is that more illusions give diminishing returns.

Honestly, I really hope they leave arrowcarts the way they are.

The meta in WvW has improved vastly. It was getting really old watching stacks of 100 people walk through gates like they weren’t there without even using siege.

I do relatively well in tPvP (2 to 1 win/loss, and I only solo queue) playing staff + sword/focus. I play a hybrid build though. Sword + focus + shatters for killing, staff for holding points and surviving between bursts.

Stealth actually helps a great deal in sPvP if used correctly. If you rush far point and throw a decoy at the people rushing your near, you can often delay them enough to cap, for instance.

It would be enough if the scepter attacks just did what the tooltip says – cause confusion on third attack in the chain. This has been bugged since beta.

(there’s a thread somewhere with some math on it showing that confusion still scales better with condition damage builds than other conditions as long as you can get up more than 4 stacks, so maybe don’t throw out that condition build just yet, or is it that power-shatter still does more damage? because maybe that needs nerfing too, after all, you aren’t warriors or thieves, what business do you have doing damage?!)

I analyzed it elsewhere, but the math and logic used in that thread are both inaccurate. A stack of confusion now is roughly half as dangerous as a stack of bleeding.

This admittedly hits guardians and engineers too, just to a much smaller degree.

The Mesmer skill “Ether clone” (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ether_Clone) claims in its description that it causes confusion, but it doesn’t, and never has.

Is this a mistake in the skill description, or is this skill supposed to cause confusion? As it is, the 294 damage per second on a slow projectile makes Mesmer scepter the worst weapon in the game by a long margin.

The patch notes mentioned reducing retaliation to sPvP levels. They were referring to this: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Is-retaliation-damage-reduced-by-1-3-in-sPvP

So, not only did confusion damage get reduced by 50%, but retaliation (another significant source of Mesmer damage) was reduced by 33%. This looks like an attempt to drive players away from mesmers and towards rangers and warriors.

I’ve been trying the trait that also causes f2 to grant retaliation but it in no way makes up for the damage lost.

Don’t bother. They nerfed retaliation by 33% too.

I’m starting to suspect the goal is not to move mesmers away from condition builds but to move players away fro mesmers. They want more people to play warriors.

Note that confusion is now roughly 3/5 as powerful as bleed. See the updated math in the “truth about confusion” thread.

Honestly, the flaw in the logic here is that anyone is going to use a skill once per second. When you consider that channeled skills only tick once, regardless of duration, and also that a lot of classes naturally do everything at a slow pace than that, it’s more honest to put the rate at 1 skill use per 1.5 seconds.

Also, while it’s possible for a necromancer to maintain 9 stacks of bleed by auto-attacking (along with poison), confusion can’t be applied without burning cooldowns, and I don’t believe it’s possible for one character to stack confusion past 16 under any conditions. The highest number of stacks than can be maintained over time reasonably is 4.

Let’s apply the math to that:
9 stacks of bleed with 1,000 condition damage = 832.5 damage per second

4 stacks of confusion with 1,000 condition damage and 1 skill per second = 560 per second

4 stacks of confusion with 1,000 condition damage and a more realistic 1 skill per 1.5 seconds = 373 damage per second

Note that pre-nerf confusion was better, post nerf it’s about 3/5 as good as bleeding.

Never seen this before this organized but what Aneu suggested would destroy that tactic. It would no be efficient for any group over 30 to run together because there are too many things to do at once. This would destroy your zergball problem.

How would it destroy this? They can always split into two balls of 50, and it currently only takes them about 45 minutes to “cycle” the map.

How? Please give a more directed piece of feedback than generalising as much as possible.

Possibly this is a tier difference, but lately I’ve seen the following meta, particularly from servers like SF:

1. There are 100 people in a zerg ball. Guilds ask players to form “ranks” of specific classes with specific builds, so the zerg ball has a designated make-up, roughly as follows:
1. 10 guardians
2. 10 Mesmers
3. 20 Staff elementalists
4. 20 Well necros
5. 40 or so “others” who tag along but aren’t part of the main group.

This group runs around each BL (they have one of these on each BL) clockwise. When they reach a tower with a gate that’s not upgraded, they bring it down without siege in about 40 seconds, and take the tower in about 3 minutes.

If they meet opposition, the following happens:
1. The mesmers all drop portals, then all stand together and drop another portal and everyone goes through so the ball is stacked on a single location (prevents catching some of the group in an AoE).
2. Guardians rotate reflection bubbles and Hallowed Ground (it doesn’t buff people who already have 3xstability, so with buff duration spec you can give the whole zerg permanent stability.
3. Mesmers all drop temporal curtain and then into the void, either on wall top to pull people forward, or in the field to bunch enemies. Elementalists drop a wave of AoE on the top of the wall in a siege, or on the bunched the zerg in a field battle, starting with 20 meteor showers. Power necros do the same with wells. Everyone else spams a ranged attack.
4. In a siege, the majority of enemy siege and players are dead. In a field battle, any group that’s not running a similar strategy is dead.

By all accounts, this is dreadfully boring to do after a while, but it works. Up until now this strategy has been counterable by glamor mesmers (now dead), or 8 or more arrow carts hitting the same spot (maybe only 5 now with the buff).

The changes you’re suggesting would make this strategy more effective. People already do this while complaining that it’s not fun. Nerfing WXP would do nothing. Reducing siege damage and making gates weaker would make this strategy completely unstoppable.

They didn’t. They will now. Give it a couple weeks.

As of this patch, mesmer usefulness in WvW is down to just portals. Since it’s not possible to build a Mesmer that doesn’t get some damage from confusion, this is approximately a 25% cut in damage for all specs.

If we see say a 75% drop is players running mesmers in WvW, do we think that will be enough to get them some sort of buff?

My poor mesmer! Respec incoming then. Am I being really ignorant, or should not every ability be the same in wvw as in spvp, not just certain abilities for certain classes?

Honestly, this s about a 25% damage nerf to every Mesmer spec, even power-based ones. Expect mesmers to no longer be useful in zerg fights whatsoever, except for portal bombing.

In contrast to that everywhere else my guild[TTA], was having a 5 man run around EB capping all the rest, and we decimated a 10 man HoD zerg. That was while the OTHER commander was rushing your keep.

Meh, we were outmanned 2 to 1, roughly, and during the 4 hours or so this was going on, we took two of your towers and you never took anything of ours that you kept for more than 10 minutes. Our lead went up by about 200 points over that time. I’d call it a loss on your part.