Guild Wars 2

eldenbri.1059:

If mesmer doesn’t work out for you, you can try condi trapper ranger with trapper runes.

That will get you some target drops and is a natural condition build

Oh yeah, it’s pretty good. I forgot that I had tried that one. I might have to give it some more attention.

D/D Elementalist is actually pretty great, but it just doesn’t feel like Pooka without some vanishes. Also, I’m just plain biased toward Mesmer, because it just seems like Pooka should be a Mesmer.

I think I might be happy if I could make a build designed to just whittle my targets down with Sword, with a lot of vanish, teleport, and regen. In the original game where Pooka comes from, he’s basically about annoying targets to death.

Silverkey.2078:

I do think you are asking too much. It seems the only drawback of Pooka as you mention is an “average DPS”.

Anyway, trying to be somewhat constructive, since you seem to mostly want health regen, I feel what you ask is not too far from what I’ve been working on those past days

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Chrono-bunker/first

The DPS is on the low side, but still decent. Definitely not bursty. The health regen is huge. The mobility is ok (and no stealth), but it is designed to hold points, so mobility is not so useful. With blink and sword 2 you have some gap closer, with blink and phase retreat you have gap openers. It is melee.

In the link, I use it with chronomancer because I feel that this will be useful, but I currently run the build with chaos-insp-illusion and it clearly not the best build ever, but it is ok and does its job.

Despite the impression I might have given, the existing Pooka isn’t great at everything. It’s more like fairly decent at most stuff, plus really good at maneuvering and recovering, plus good enough at sustained DPS that he’ll wear you down if he lives long enough.

As I’ve said, the closest I’ve gotten to that feel in GW2 is with a condi Mesmer, but it fails to reproduce the feel of Pooka in two ways: first, most condi Mesmer builds don’t have the constant, rapid-fire melee attacks that I enjoy so much with Pooka; second, most condi Mesmers builds haven’t been good at chasing.

I won’t be surprised if there’s not a solution to the problem. There’s no reason to think GW2 can reproduce every possible playstyle from every game. I just miss Pooka and wish I could have him. :-) And I thought I’d ask you guys for idea before giving up.

Anyway, thanks for the ideas. I’ll fool with them and see what happens.

Is there any interest in helping me try to create a build to spec?

For context, I’ve been trying since launch to recreate the feel of my favorite MMO character build ever. It’s from a different game, so it’s not possible to reproduce it directly. What I’m trying for is the same general feel and style of play.

I’ve tried reproducing it with Mesmer, Elementalist, and Thief, and each class can do part of the job. I haven’t succeeded in really reproducing the full feel of it, though.

Before I describe what I’m after, let me just acknowledge that yeah, it simply might not be possible. But before I decide that’s true I thought I’d appeal to the Mesmer Forum build crafters, who often do better than I do at devising and optimizing builds.

Why Mesmer? Because of the professions I’ve tried, Mesmer seems to come closest.

The name of the original character is “Pooka,” so I call this build-that-may-not-exist a “Pooka build.”

It should be extremely mobile in combat, and have enough vanishes or other target drops that it can use them tactically. It doesn’t need long-duration stealth.

It should be fairly sturdy—able to last through a modest amount of direct focused damage. It doesn’t have to be a tank.

It should have very good health regeneration.

It should work pretty well as an attrition fighter, wearing opponents down. It doesn’t need to have very high burst damage. What it does need is the ability to recover repeatedly and fairly quickly, using mobility and target drops to interfere with the enemy’s DPS, and the ability to keep up pressure and wear down an opponent.

So far it sounds like a stealth Condition build, and I have had good success with those, but they lack something in the way the play feels, especially while in combat. Pooka is mainly a melee fighter with a high rate of fire. He uses mobility and stealth to gain position to unload lots of melee-range attacks, and uses mobility and target drops to mitigate the enemy’s DPS while his high regen works for him.

Basically, I feel like I can get parts of this gameplay with a Mesmer (or one of the other classes I mentioned), but not the whole package. Am I right? Is it not doable? Or can you think of a build that will have it all?

For reference, the objectives are:

- high mobility in combat
- good availability of target drops
- respectable DPS in melee range
- high rate of fire, especially in melee range
- high health regen
- moderate toughness
- respectable (not necessarily stellar) DPS
- good gap closers and openers
- good options for in-combat recovery or resets

Ideas gratefully received.

Dondagora.9645:

FA is just too full~ QQ

Maybe that’s a reason to move the project to SoS ;-)

Yes, of course that’s a self-serving suggestion, and of course I won’t be miffed if the team elects to stay where it is or move to a server other than SoS.

On the plus side for SoS: its NA coverage is currently weak, which means it’s always in last place in Tier 2, which creates an opportunity to change its fortunes. Of course, that’s also another way of saying that a team that moves to SoS risks losing a lot of the time.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

Sucks that I transferred to SoS with my guild now…that makes me a traitor to OMFG? Haha xD

I won’t do anything to interfere with you guys (even if I am I’m but a lone roamer with few guys haha), though YB has be dominating us after they got several big guilds. Love to see more zerg actions before people started to give up and T2 WvW ended in total collapse.

Though you guys may need to shift chaos armor strategy with the nerf, any alternative plans for mesmer zerg Pyro?

I’m on SoS, too. Been there a good long time. It used to win all the time, but nowadays it needs the help.

A year and a half ago or so, my main guild ran a WvW team of eight Mesmers that looked identical.

I figure there’s very little chance of pulling that off with a larger team of people who are already invested in their Mesmers, but what can it hurt to mention it, right?

I looked for a screenshot, but it looks like I don’t have one. We had eight female Charr Mesmers, all with the same face, stripes, and colors (black tiger stripes on white); all wearing the same (looking) gear, all dyed Orchid.

32 identical purple-clad cats is confusing. Imagine what 80 of them would look like.

StickerHappy.8052:

Icy is great, but please stop using PU in duels! Go back to shatter!

I’d like to see Icy’s build. I run a PU condition build myself sometimes, and I’d like to see what he’s running to see if it offers opportunities for improvement.

A friend and I ran 1 PU condition build and 1 Boonshare and found them to work pretty well together in roaming.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Not saying icy isn’t amazing especially when he gets his pu setups out, but the strategy your team took made me sad. Need more Sun Tzu in your diet.

Strategy? I can’t speak for the others, but you give me too much credit.

I played pretty badly. I can play better, but I need to practice with a build to do that, and I need a motivation to practice before I’ll do it.

Winning 1v1s isn’t much of a motivation for me. I don’t care that much whether I win or lose a 1v1 for its own sake; it’s not what motivates me.

What motivates me is helping a team of friends have fun and perform well. What I’m looking for is a role in a team and a build that supports that role. Given those things, I have something to optimize and a larger goal that serves as motivation to optimize it.

No disrespect to others who are more motivated by 1v1 wins. It’s just not what holds my interest. Helping my friends succeed and have a good time is what motivates me.

messiah.1908:

hope you test them both (probably the power more) and comment

I was running the power version in the OMFG event today and got squashed (I was Limnix), but I think that was my fault, not the fault of the build. I like the build a lot, and what I especially like about it is its ability to provide a lot of support to teammates without the need to play in a very special way to achieve that support.

Ross Biddle.2367:

I’m a hardcore newb, scrub, terribad Mesmer as dubbed by the truly hardcore metabattle fanatics as seen in any thread/discussion I posted a gameplay vid in pre-patch. So if I can catch and dodge an incoming burst from a Mesmer, anyone can.

Well, that’s overstating things a little.

The average age of players in my guild is 55. We’ve been playing various games together for almost forty years, so it’s not like we’re new to gaming. On the other hand, we don’t all have really quick reaction times (or good vision or hearing or…) anymore, either.

Yes, average reaction time is somewhere around 0.3 second. Yes, it can be a lot faster than that in some people, especially if they are athletes. A couple of us used to do full-contact fighting as hobbies, and our reaction times were pretty quick when we were doing that. But time takes its toll. Some of us can still keep up with pretty quick players; others not so much.

That doesn’t mean GW2 has to make allowances, of course. Not every game has to be for every player. On the other hand, if a game’s designers want to make a place for older, slower players, there are ways to do that without penalizing younger, faster players. That’s one of the things you can use class design for.

Fast twitch speed isn’t identical with skill. There’s more than one kind of skill. If GW2 doesn’t want to make a place for slower players in its class design, that’s fine. As I said, not every game has to be for every player. If the designers want to do that, on the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with it, either.

But saying “anyone can” catch and dodge an incoming burst is overstating things a little. Just wait. You’ll get older and slower, too. :-)

Fay.2357:

mikelevins.4639:

Text commands were always issued in uppercase to make them more recognizable, and keyboard macros were used to make them very fast to issue. I don;t know whether OMFG will want to do that, given the prominence of voice chat in GW2,

So there’s a couple problems with typed commands in GW2.

The biggest problem is lack of macros. I could…finagle something….but I’d rather not. The other main issue is that there’s no effective way to talk just to your group with chat. Squad chat sorta works, but has a cap on the number of players in it. You can also do some pretty creative things with multiple teamspeak windows, allowing you to listen to multiple channels while only talking to one, or vice versa. It allows for nice segregation of command structure.

Generally, people balk at voip if they’re forced to talk. In this case, voip will only be necessary to listen, not talk. In my experience, I haven’t seen anyone have an objection with that implementation.

mikelevins.4639:

In addition, there would usually be a short list of commonly-used maneuvers. Examples would be things like:

Yeah, the specific commands/maneuvers are going to depend a decent amount on what the group comp actually ends up being.

Additionally, it’s looking like we may end up with a bit more than 20 people. Obviously this number will come down to some extent based on time availabilities, but the possibility exists that we’ll have significantly more than 20 people who would like to join for this. Depending on how many more want to join, I’ll try to implement a couple things.

If we only have ~10 extras, then they can be organized into an auxiliary roaming group that sticks nearby the main raid, but can pursue independent objectives as fights happen.

If we actually end up with enough for another full raid…I need to find another driver, and so I’ll bug Kylia more to get back here and drive it.

If typed commands don’t work, they don’t work. For what it’s worth, Shadowclan played on Jade Quarry for a while and did well, as usual, and used their usual rules. But that just means it can be done, not that it should be done. The practices of the team should be what works for the team. I more or less assumed voip would be the standard.

I agree with you that for most people listening to voice chat will not be a problem. Most of my comrades would prefer it. Just as a point of reference I’m an exception: listening to voice chat distracts me and makes my play worse—but I’m the exception, and I certainly expect to have to adapt to what works for the group as a whole.

Either two raids or a raid plus a roaming group sound like a good problem to have.

I thought I would just add a couple of notes on commands and maneuvers that have worked well.

In each of these cases, we’ve used a formal vocabulary of roughly eight commands, give or take a few. The exact set depends on the game, because different games offer different sets of things you can do. For example, WoW teams had FLY and LAND commands, but other games didn’t.

Text commands were always issued in uppercase to make them more recognizable, and keyboard macros were used to make them very fast to issue. I don;t know whether OMFG will want to do that, given the prominence of voice chat in GW2, but I will say two things about it: first, both Shadowclan and our other PVP teams have done fine without voice chat using the command system. In fact, Shadowclan commanders are forbidden by guild rules from requiring voice chat in any PVP action. Second, clear commands that are fast to type can actually work faster and better than voice commands in a trained group.

A typical command set would include things like:

- a command to form up on the commander
- a command to form up on a specified person, position, or target
- a command to scatter and hide
- a command to hold ground and take no action
- a command to perform an orderly retreat
- a command to charge and engage the enemy

In addition, there would usually be a short list of commonly-used maneuvers. Examples would be things like:

- activate stealth and charge
- hide in the landscape and send out bait
- split the group into hammer and anvil and engage with the anvil while the hammer flanks
- use landscape as cover to take up an ambush position
- scatter and regroup on a designated rally point

Probably the hardest single maneuver to train is the command to hold ground and take no action. It’s essential for certain applications, like ambushes and pincer maneuvers, but it’s next to impossible with an untrained group.

We used to practice by sending teams into the middle of big groups of PVE mobs and having them do nothing until ordered to respond. When you can send a group into mobs like this and they will die before breaking discipline, you know they are trained.

name: Limnix
playstyle: WvW
server: Sea of Sorrows
role: scholar
time: any

Fay.2357:

mikelevins.4639:

For what it’s worth, I’ve spent a good bit of time in some team-focused PVP guilds in other games. It’s perfectly possible to train a group of players to coordinate their moves in a group effort.

For example, I played with Shadowclan in a couple of different games. If you don’t know who they are, see the Wikipedia page:

-snip-

Thanks for your thoughts on this. I very much agree with that sort of combat mentality; creating more complex possibilities from a basic set of simple maneuvers that can be executed smoothly. Once we actually get organized and start working on actual combat, I’d absolutely appreciate any feedback and input that you and any other folks have on ways to do this, or refinements on what we’re already doing.

Glad to offer any help I can. I’m on Sea of Sorrows at the moment, but would love to join the Mesmer team when it’s time to do that, and will happily transfer if needed. One of my comrades is interested as well.

For what it’s worth, I’ve spent a good bit of time in some team-focused PVP guilds in other games. It’s perfectly possible to train a group of players to coordinate their moves in a group effort.

For example, I played with Shadowclan in a couple of different games. If you don’t know who they are, see the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowclan

They’re very good at organized open-world PVP, and have shown a solid ability to compete in many games, even while maintaining a policy that no Shadowclan team is allowed to require voice chat for any players. The secret of their success—besides just having a lot of experience—is regular boot camps where they drill groups in tactics.

I saw the same approach used in a few other guild projects in several other games, and it worked well in those cases, too. The basic idea is to get your team together on a fairly regular basis and put them through a series of maneuvers. Come up with a standard set of commands that are short and recognizable, and practice having people respond to the commands. Have a few different field commanders practice running the team through the drills, and set up a chain of command. That way, if you lose your main commander, there’s a backup commander ready to go immediately.

You can keep the drills interesting by rotating through different ones and making a sort of minigame out of some of them. For example, in some games we had games like splitting the group into two and having one group try to get as close to the other as possible without being seen (using landscape cover and so forth).

With regular practice, some pretty slick maneuvers become possible. I’ll mention two from Shadowclan days:

In one, our leader ran us into a tower with a closable door, and stood outside the tower alone. We had seen an enemy group approaching, so we knew there was a good chance they would see him. Sure enough, they saw him and made a beeline for him. He told us to stay where we were until he gave the word. He was playing a very tough tank build, but still there were a handful of enemy players attacking him, so suspense was fairly high. When he got to about 30% health he ordered us to attack and we popped out of the tower and obliterated them I think they were dead before they even realized we were attacking, because they were so focused on killing him.

In another case, our leader had a group of us hide behind a couple of big trees with a lot of ground cover around them. A path led between them to a dead end. Then he sent a squishy healer character out to get the attention of an enemy group and run back to where we were. The squishy guy ran right past us into the dead end. The following enemy went right after us, never seeing us at all until, again, they were all dead.

A little regular practice makes many things possible.

fluxit.8247:

For anyone who is inspired to join the mesmer cause but not confident in their ability to run around in a zerg as a mesmer, an amazing player “Caos Danzante” took the time to make a series of training videos. He goes through the basics, positioning, skill usage and enemy movement awareness mainly from the perspective of a mesmer but not always.

Even if you consider yourself able to hold your own and support your team members it’s still nice to refresh your memory of the basics every now and again.

How To Play WvW as a Group

• Lesson 1 – What the hell is going on?
• Lesson 2 – Why do people die? Positioning
• Lesson 3 – Like gods walking among mere mortals
• Lesson 4 – Hit ’em where it hurts

Bear in mind that this is pre-stability changes.

This sounds like big fun. I was involved in one all-Mesmer WvW project already (the one that ran eight identical-looking female Charr Mesmers in purple gear) and it was a ton of fun. This sounds like even more fun.

My availability is a little odd: my bedtime shifts about an hour later each day, right around the clock. I’m available during all my waking hours except when a scheduled appointment or activity conflicts.

I hope ArenaNet knocks the new expansion out of the park. I hope it’s great.

I have some concerns.

I’m a member of a gaming guild that played GW2 enthusiastically for months. We don’t play it anymore. There are several reasons, but the most important and easiest to explain is the new trait system.

The news that this system is to be replaced has the guild looking at GW2 again. We might return, once we see what the expansion brings to the table, but our members are cautious.

What makes us cautious is that the new trait system was introduced without any opportunity for players to see it and comment on it before it became the only way to play the game. After it was released and received overwhelmingly negative feedback for months and months, we saw no sign that the complaints were even being heard, until today’s news that the system was to be replace by…something else.

What’s going to replace it? We don’t know. Will it be better or worse? We don’t know. Will players have any opportunity to comment on proposed changes before they are introduced? We don’t know, but past experience suggests that we won’t. What happens if the new system isn’t an improvement? We don’t know, but past experience suggests that we will wait months and months without knowing whether anyone knows or cares about our dissatisfaction.

For the most part I think ArenaNet is great at game development. I think most of GW2’s systems and features are much better than the competition’s.

One thing that I think is not better than the competition is the policy of keeping secret the details of new game systems until it’s too late to change them. Surely it’s better to expose important new systems for customer feedback before they become a fait accompli? Surely it’s better to gather the feedback before committing to some new system, rather than discovering problems only after it’s too late to do anything about them?

Because ArenaNet does not take this approach to the introduction of new systems, my guild is taking a wait-and-see approach. Maybe the new systems alluded to in the expansion announcement will be great. Maybe they won’t. I guess we’ll have to wait until release and see.

Those videos are almost enough to get me to start playing the game again. What a fun outing!

PookieDaWombat.6209:

The thing it, I think it already HAS done perm damage. Unfortunately I think it will end up slowly driving away players as opposed to a mass exodus, so they might not even realize the slow bleed of population. :/

You might be right. You’re speculating, of course, because we don’t have hard numbers, and even if we did it might be pretty hard to know for sure. But what you say sounds right. It pretty well describes what has happened in my own guild.

Leaving the game has been gradual, and I can’t be sure that everyone has completely left. Up until a couple of weeks ago I was still occasionally logging in to try out an idea for a build or whatever. I still check the forums periodically, looking for any signs of an encouraging change of direction. No luck so far.

The guild’s gradual loss of interest has a lot of causes, but the most prominent is the traits debacle. We used to like to tinker around with builds a lot, even at lower levels. The changes to the trait system made that close to impossible, and that was the beginning of our slow slide out of the game.

I don’t remember exactly when I logged in last. Maybe it was as recent as last week some time, or maybe a little longer. Maybe some of the others in my guild are still logging in.

What I do know is that our group events have moved on to another game, and folks have pretty much stopped talking about GW2. The game came in with a bang in my group, but it looks like it’s going out with a whimper.

But I’ll keep checking the forums for signs of a change until…I dunno. Until I don’t remember to check anymore, I guess.

RP means treating your character as an actual character in a story, rather than just a game token. It means figuring out who the character is, and then playing the role of that character when you play the game, rather than just driving the token around and exercising the game mechanics.

It’s possible to RP solo; if you do, then it’s a kind of street theater, in which you play the part of a fictional character, performing in front of whoever happens to be around. It’s easier and more common, though, to RP cooperatively with a group of other people, each of whom is also playing a character. RP in a group of others who also RP is easier for several reasons—because you’re more likely to encounter people experienced in RP from whom you can learn, because the people you’re with are more likely to understand and encourage RP, because others who RP are more likely to help construct stories in which you can participate, and so on.

As someone else said, a big part of RP is inventing your own story, and then playing it out. Again, others who RP can help a lot with that. You need to learn the give-and-take that improvised storytelling requires—you don’t get to control all aspects of a story that is being created on the fly by a whole group of people—but once you get the hang of it, it can be a ton of fun, and can provide a kind of entertainment that nothing else does. It’s like a combination of storytelling, extemporaneous acting, and improvisational jazz.

If you’re lucky, you might find a friendly, open RP guild. I’m afraid I don’t know of one in GW2. I ran into one early on in another game. It was a guild that had been influenced by Shadowclan, one of the oldest and most influential open RP guilds in gaming. That later led me to spend a bunch of time with Shadowclan itself, where you can learn a lot about high-quality RP.

But if you can’t find a group like that, you can always try creating one. I’ve done that before, too. It has the disadvantage that you have to do a bunch of recruiting and explaining, but it has the advantage that you gain a lot of influence over the style and content of the RP.

Try it and have some fun.

I’m all for making the game as accessible as possible to new players. I don’t think the revised trait system accomplishes that goal. If anything, I think it most likely has the opposite effect, and I think it’s inconsistent with ArenaNet’s Design Manifesto for Guild Wars 2.

For one thing, it doesn’t introduce the trait system more slowly; it introduces it more quickly—but with a later start. Under the old system we acquired fourteen traits in seventy levels. Under the new one, we acquire fourteen traits in fifty-one levels. That’s not more slowly, to my eye; it’s quite the opposite.

Moreover, since we begin to acquire traits later in our progression, there is less opportunity during leveling to experiment with them and get to know them. If the goal is to make them easier to learn, it seems counterproductive to restrict access to them. How likely is it that players can learn something more easily by having less access to it?

Finally, trait unlocking as it’s currently implemented has the effect of penalizing players for avoiding gameplay that they don’t enjoy. I’m not talking about unlocks that are placed at inappropriate levels or on inconvenient timers or on buggy encounters. Those are all problems, to be sure, but they’ve been adequately covered elsewhere.

What I’m talking about is taking a core element of gameplay—the class traits in classes that were obviously designed around the trait system—and gating them behind specific game content, chosen by ArenaNet’s developers.

In the Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto (https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-design-manifesto/), Mike O’ Brien wrote that, “It all gets back to our basic design philosophy. Our games aren’t about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward. Our games are designed to be fun from moment to moment.”

I submit that gating a core element of gameplay behind game content that isn’t chosen by the player is at odds with this stated philosophy. What if you don’t like jumping puzzles, or can’t complete them? What if you don’t want to play WvW or don’t enjoy dungeons? Well, then you must pay the penalty. You have a choice of how to pay it: you can play through content you don’t enjoy; you can pay up to get around it; or you can just play your character with pieces missing.

That doesn’t sound to me like a game that is designed to be fun from moment to moment.

@JonPeters:

You mentioned that the thread seemed dauntingly long. If it seems too long to read in its entirety, maybe that very length is a message in itself. The topic is over four months old. It continues to attract new traffic. The overwhelming majority of the traffic from start to finish has expressed strong dislike of the new trait system. Many commenters have requested a return to the previous system.

I’d say it’s fairly clear that the new trait system is not popular.

My own guild is unanimously of the same opinion: the old trait system is an improvement in pretty much every way over the new one. The new one functions chiefly as an incentive to avoid creating new characters. If our members could have their way, Guild Wars 2 would restore the previous trait system and just forget this little episode had ever happened.

I’d like to avoid any hyperbole, but I have to say that this change has our members shaking their heads. It seems misguided to the point that it’s difficult to account for.

Put me and my guild down as another batch of players who dislike the new trait system. We were away from the game for a few months after playing heavily from before launch through March of this year. When we decided it was time to start up another project, we were excited right up until we read through how the trait system works now.

I’ll resist the temptation to repeat the reactions of our players. Suffice to say that the new system isn’t popular with the team, and the question of whether to continue playing GW2 at all is currently under discussion. Enough hostility has been expressed that I’m not super optimistic that we’ll be continuing.

Take the data point for what it’s worth.

Koala.2805:

How do you handle thieves? If any kind of thief jumps on me he r*pes me completely.

What other people said, but also, if you’re having trouble, try stacking more Toughness until you reach a point where you don’t die so quickly. It like training wheels, because you have to give up some burst damage to increase your Toughness, but it gives you a little more time to see what to do.

The extra Toughness also may not win the fights for you, because of the damage loss, but that’s not really what it’s for; it’s just to make it take the Thief slightly longer to win, so you can more easily see what he’s doing and how to counter it.

When you start to get the idea, shift back toward damage until you reach a balance where you can usually kill them before they can kill you.

KrazyFlyinChicken.5936:

Is it just me, or is everyone you know and respect using this word/prefix wrong.

[…“meta”…]

For some reason, it’s being used in a context that has nothing to do with meta. Am I the only person noticing this? I feel like im taking crazy pills.

You’re not crazy; you just knew what the prefix meant before it acquired a new meaning, and you’re having trouble being comfortable with the newly-acquired meaning.

It happens all the time. It happens as often from ignorance or misinterpretation of an older word’s meaning as for any other reason.

We can reasonably guess that it went something like this:

1. Someone somewhere is playing some game and talking about how to win at it. He or she talks about analyzing the options for play that depend on elements outside the actual game—for example, choosing the class that is most likely to be effective for the result you want to get; or designing a strategy to gear the class for maximum effectiveness; or even figuring out how to influence the game publisher to modify mechanics to make the player’s strategy more effective. Any of these approaches is gaming the game, so you’re metagaming.

2. Once someone uses the word that way, others pick it up and run with it. Soon, by virtue of fuzzy meanings and associations, it’s just another way to say “effective approaches to playing the game.”

3. From there it’s a very short and obvious step to it being used the way it’s currently used. The “current meta” can be seen as a short and convenient way to say “the approach to setting up your character for play that is most likely to provide you with a good range of effective tactics given the current game mechanics.” And “current meta” is a much more convenient way to say that.

Sure, the connection to the prefix’s older meaning is tenuous at best, but so what? That’s never meant much in the evolution of words’ meanings. Etymology is a fun pastime for the linguistically inclined, but if it teaches you anything, it teaches you that words’ meanings are going to drift, and where they drift to isn’t necessarily anyplace particularly expected or logical.

Just for fun, read some of Shakespeare’s comedies and pay attentions to the meanings of the words he uses for puns. A lot of them are still in common use today—with wildly different meanings.

skeppi.4856:

@mikelevins I run a full apothecary setup on my 2nd mesmer which I really enjoy playing because its just such a troll build 1vX. Only issue I have with it is like most condi mesmer builds is can’t catchup to runners so if the condi doesn’t finish them they stalemate by running away. So many invis that I rarely shatter my clones unless i’ve getting burst down and I tend to position myself on/near clones so they get killed and apply more conditions. I tried to find op to give credit but it’s buried on forum. All the traits are setup just right for reducing CD on all weapon skills not just summoning. When clones die they apply 2 condi’s(cripple+random) & sigil geo+doom are meant to add more condi to the stack so it helps to overwhelm builds with good condi removal. Torch skills remove condi’s(not enough condi removal and you can find yourself having problems vs a condi engi). The runes can be swapped out for scavenger if you want more healing, i kept undead for the 5% touchgness -> condi which stacks well with chaotic transference which is same and having 2k toughness.
Anyway here is the build http://ow.ly/pxIyO

I’ve tried out oscicat’s condi build with full rabids and didn’t much care for it compared to this build. For my playstyle preference I found his build squishy(i hear bw build is same) in comparison. I know perplex is OP but I play that on my engi and it feels more controlled and you have more interrupt options(even felt more comfortable with them on ranger than mesmer). 1v1 build was alright 1vX I found myself wanting my other build a lot lol.

@ Trooper Curious to see what your build looks like. From traits I imagine its a staff w/ sword/scepter + pistol is it something like http://tinyurl.com/l3o8sbp

:)

Interesting, skeppi; I was just testing a build almost identical to the one you linked, but Dire gear in the Armor slots, and slightly different sigils. It’s too soon for me to have an informed opinion, but it seems pretty fun so far.

trooper.2650:

Tbh I come from a 20/20/30 without knowing it was called Blackwater. I am not saying it was my build but I arrived there through experimenting. I had a small variation in gear, didn’t take retaliation from trait and used sword/pistol instead of staff for more control and more kills. However I got bored after a while. PU was getting mandatory for any build and wanted to move from there.

Anyway, I have not discarded the idea of stacking confusion but I have lately switched to 0/30/20/0/20. Stacking confusion via combo field is much more fun and rewarding. It’s great and together with perplexity a bit OP sometimes (20~25 stacks ftw). I can put a lot of pressure and deal very good damage. It’s not an aoe build though. Let me know if you want all the details about it.

Please do post the details; I’d be interested in taking it for a spin.

Here’s the version of Ghost Light I was running most recently:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgUQNAW7fl4zKqXQTmGb9IhpHBH5A/UBoj6x1rO3B-j0BBIOCysCCyZSFRjtsuIasadER1KIYeFFRrWKgJlGB-w

As you can see, I backed off on the Healing Power a little; the way that Healing Power scales makes heavy investments in it questionable, and this version seems to be stronger, if anything.

I’ve come to appreciate Ghost Light as a tool in a toolbox. By itself it’s not as strong as Blackwater or Condition Cat, but it’s very hard to kill and can chase off or bog down several opponents on an objective. Combine it with one or two Blackwaters or similar builds and it amplifies their strengths by shutting down enemy players with lots and lots of Confusion. If the opponents don’t use their skills, the Blackwaters kill them. If they do, the Ghost Light kills them.

I run it solo sometimes because, even though the savvy players will get away, it’s still fun to round up a supply camp and start whittling it down, AND kill the enemy players that come to defend it. :-)

If they’re really savvy, that won’t work and I may get killed. But at this point I’ve won enough 1v2 and 1v3 WHILE killing a supply camp that I realize it’s a feature of the build. I think I win those only because the opponents are overconfident going in and so they don’t pay attention to what’s happening. The hectic nature of a supply-camp clear helps mask what I’m doing. But it works often enough to be fun to try, even if I know that a certain percentage of the time I’ll run into players that are too smart to fall for it.

@Rhonin: I would expect a full Dire set to work very well. I don’t think I;ve tried it with this build, but I’ve used it with several other condition builds and it works great in any build where you don’t need a lot of Precision.

@skeppi: I like the sound of your setup and I might try it.

About the Apothecary gear: I arrived at Ghost Light after experimenting with varations on Blackwater (actually variations on some of our guild’s builds that happen to be nearly exactly like Blackwater and Osicat’s Condition Cat, though they evolved independently), and I was coming from a Rabid setup. Without Sharper Images, Rabid gear is not all that attractive, but Dire or Apothecary is.

I chose to go with Apothecary to exploit the Regeneration stacked by Prismatic Understanding to its full potential—to make my Mesmer just keep regenerating health all the time really annoyingly, and that seems to work.

(I used to play a character in Champions Online called Pooka who had regeneration, high toughness, stealth, and teleport. That’s a really annoying combination to fight! THe way I played him was to crowd control a group of people from stealth, teleport into the middle and do a bunch of point-blank AOE damage, then vanish once I started to take damage to let the regen heal me back up. You think clone-spamming builds are trollish? Try playing a character like that!)

I would expect a full Carrion or Dire setup to work well, too; they would just feel different.

@trooper: Have you tried Blackwater? It has Sharper Images, and the bleeds that it stacks speed up killing quite a bit. If you haven’t tried it, I suggest that you should; it plays almost exactly like this build, and you might like the time-to-kill better.

trooper.2650:

Today went well. Few 1v2 won vs guardians, hunters and wars mainly. Only when vs 3+ I had troubles (but it was hard to kill me. Eventually I downed someone but couldn’t stomp them). The only thing is that often ppl when loosing were making a run and confusion wasn’t helping: if someone is turning his back to you is like killing a doliak if you know what I mean. The only skill triggering confusion would be his healing which is often not enough to get him killed by even a big confusion stack.

Apart from that I am pretty much satisfied and like the build a lot. My accessories are all ascendent quality: a mix of rampager, knight, cavalier and rabid. This means I still have a lot of crit and crit chance to get rid of but stepping down to exotic quality accessories just because I not not have the funds to get all ascendent apothecary for example, it seems a waste. So for now my set up is far from being “ideal”.

What is your rotation when starting a fight? Do you start with staff? What are your tricks?
As far as dodging you are right. In fact I will not equip the energy sigil. But don’t you miss sigils on your weapons?

Yeah, if the build has a weakness now it’s that there is no way to reliably trigger high DPS when you want it. It depends so much on Confusion that you just have to play a waiting game. I think your strategy has to be about what you can do to provoke the opponent to use his skills.

I’d like to find a way to stack some additional reliable DPS without breaking the character of the build. I’ve been tinkering with getting Sharper Images back in, and I can do it, but so far all the ways I’ve tried cost me too much in the areas of condition defense. If anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears.

I usually start fights with Phase Retreat to distract them and get the Winds of Chaos started. If I have the chance, I’ll often pop the Prestige right at the start to get the PU buffs going; the Prestige is on a short enough cooldown that I’m comfortable burning it at the start, and it helps get the confusion started right away—and I mean the actual real-world confusion as well as the in-game effect :-).

Once the fight is started, the next stage sort of depends on how savvy the opponents are. Inexperienced players go down really really fast, and there’s hardly any need for strategy at all.

More sophisticated players require playing a very patient shell game. With the various vanishes and with Phase Retreat on a 6-second cooldown, it’s a matter of keeping a cool head and knowing what all your cooldowns are all the time so you can cycle through doing spawn-shoot-vanish-CC-shoot-spawn-shoot-vanish… and so on.

I’m always very interested in what obstacles are around me. I want to disappear a lot, and if I can do it without using a cooldown, so much the better., so I like to fight where I can run behind things while opponents are distracted.

Oh, and absolutely the best pace in the world to be with this build is standing right behind your opponents, with a Chaos Storm right on top of them and you, and three clones in front of them to keep them occupied. I try to make that happen any way I can.

A small minority of skilled players figure all this out, and realize that the way to beat you is to keep high AOE or cleaving DPS on you and your clones all the time. Even so, that’s a somewhat risky strategy, because of your high toughness and quick recoveries, and because of all the conditions the clones will stack if you’re using Chaos V.

I still haven’t seen the latest version of the build take a clear loss. I’m not claiming its unbeatable, or that I am; I haven’t been playing it that long. Of course someone else with a strong build and better skill is going to beat me at some point. I’m just saying it’s holding up extremely well so far.

Honestly I don’t miss the sigils. I tinker together and test a lot of builds for our guild. use sigils when they seem like the best thing, and I don’t use them when they don’t. I sometimes run builds with orbs instead of runes, as well. It all depends what I’m trying to do.

trooper.2650:

It’s good to share ideas
Have you thought of using veggy pizza? Your conditions will not last very long, aside from confusion of course. Also, why not trying a sigil of energy? Not having critical infusion means not dodging very often.

As for me I think I will give perplexity runes one more go. Furthermore I will consider accessories with healing power too. Let’s see how it turns out…

I’ve used both veggie pizza and sigil of energy in other builds; definitely worth a try; thanks for the suggestion.

About dodging—since I don’t have Deceptive Evasion, I almost never find myself unable to dodge when I need to. At first I missed the ability to always create a clone whenever I wanted, but I’ve adjusted. It was really a small adjustment. I’m never short of clones, unless I forget and shatter before my next spawns are ready. That hasn’t been happening much lately.

As for the runes, if they were only for the condition damage, they’d still be okay. The chance to stack confusion on hit makes them better for this kind of build; the guaranteed stacks on interrupt make them really good, especially when used with Imbued Diversion (or any reliable source of interrupts).

By the way, this is a great build for flipping supply camps. I can usually sort of just run into the camp and engage everything, and come out on top. Admittedly, that’s a risky tactic—enemy players could show up at any time. It’s pretty fun, though. I’ve been doing it successfully even before the Righteous Indignation buff has worn off; I just have to be careful to kite and dodge so the supervisor’s buffed cone AOEs don’t hit me. Based on experience, if I attack when RI is below 90 seconds, I can wipe out the guards and yaks and around the time I’m done with that I can kill the supervisor.

mikelevins.4639:

trooper.2650:

I like the ideal of it but as I wrote earlier… don’t you feel a little underpowered? Yes, good conditions, good healing and good stealths…. but when facing good opponents I was like “gosh.. I will never be able to kill this one with this setup” Really, I had the feeling I couldn’t kill people without the power I have now. But hey, maybe it was me…

I assume you’re reporting on a phenomenon that I’ve run into as well: against other very tough builds, the fights can get extremely long. I can see where that would be a very bad thing in sPVP. It’s bad in the new WvW borderlands, too, when you’re trying to control ruins, because the longer the fight goes on, the greater the likelihood that enemy roamers will show up (of course, the enemy bunker runs the same risk).

I did look at your Power version and it looks really good to me. Is it working well for you? I’d be very reluctant to give up Prismatic Understanding and Imbued Diversion at this point, but I have to agree that Cleansing Conflagration is so good for a build like this that it almost looks like a must-have. For myself, I’m finding that greenlentil’s idea of using Mantra of Recovery together with Mender’s Purity really is doing the trick. It may even change my mind about mantras.

On that note, I’ve just been trying another small change: dropping Null Field and running Signet of Domination instead. It adds a ton of Condition Damage to a build that already has high Condition Damage, and it gives you another nearly-instant interrupt—awfully handy for stacking up that Confusion with the Runes of Perplexity. It boosts killing power quite a bit at the cost of reduced condition defense.

It may be a bad idea. I may really need the Null Field. The nice thing is that it’s so easy to switch between them. If it looks like I’m going to need more Condition Defense, out comes the Null Field. My Condition Damage has been strong enough to win a bunch of different kinds of fights tonight (it’s been a good night for this build). If I feel like living a little more dangerously, I swap in the Signet, and now my conditions are even more withering and I have the stun—both to cancel dangerous enemy skills, and to add a bunch more stacks of Confusion.

I’m starting to really like this build, and I have this forum to thank for that.

trooper.2650:

I like the ideal of it but as I wrote earlier… don’t you feel a little underpowered? Yes, good conditions, good healing and good stealths…. but when facing good opponents I was like “gosh.. I will never be able to kill this one with this setup” Really, I had the feeling I couldn’t kill people without the power I have now. But hey, maybe it was me…

I assume you’re reporting on a phenomenon that I’ve run into as well: against other very tough builds, the fights can get extremely long. I can see where that would be a very bad thing in sPVP. It’s bad in the new WvW borderlands, too, when you’re trying to control ruins, because the longer the fight goes on, the greater the likelihood that enemy roamers will show up (of course, the enemy bunker runs the same risk).

I did look at your Power version and it looks really good to me. Is it working well for you? I’d be very reluctant to give up Prismatic Understanding and Imbued Diversion at this point, but I have to agree that Cleansing Conflagration is so good for a build like this that it almost looks like a must-have. For myself, I’m finding that greenlentil’s idea of using Mantra of Recovery together with Mender’s Purity really is doing the trick. It may even change my mind about mantras.

On that note, I’ve just been trying another small change: dropping Null Field and running Signet of Domination instead. It adds a ton of Condition Damage to a build that already has high Condition Damage, and it gives you another nearly-instant interrupt—awfully handy for stacking up that Confusion with the Runes of Perplexity. It boosts killing power quite a bit at the cost of reduced condition defense.

It may be a bad idea. I may really need the Null Field. The nice thing is that it’s so easy to switch between them. If it looks like I’m going to need more Condition Defense, out comes the Null Field. My Condition Damage has been strong enough to win a bunch of different kinds of fights tonight (it’s been a good night for this build). If I feel like living a little more dangerously, I swap in the Signet, and now my conditions are even more withering and I have the stun—both to cancel dangerous enemy skills, and to add a bunch more stacks of Confusion.

I’m starting to really like this build.

mikelevins.4639:

Another fight I’m interested in, and haven’t had yet, is a stealth-heavy Thief with a lot of condition-clearing. I’ve had pretty long fights with guys like that using Blackwater and Condition Cat, and I’m curious to see whether this build makes any noticeable difference in such fights.

Well, I got my wish, and it turned out pretty okay. I happened across a dead ally and started to revive, only to take a backstab from the Thief that had killed him. After about 15 seconds of fighting, the Thief fled and then died a few seconds later from something—Confusion stacks, I’m guessing. I was at about 70% health with no heals used yet.

I guess that’s a partial answer, but I’ll know more after I’ve encountered more players.

trooper.2650:

I was working on this build early this morning before I started reading your post:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNArfWlwzipXUzgGb9IhpHBH5AHlir7dSKU9rB-TsAgyCpI0SplTLjWStsaNEZJyUAA

They seem to be similar in some ways… I started fidling with it form a spvp pow

By the way, trooper, please keep us updated on how it’s working for you in sPVP. I haven’t played sPVP since beta, and I’m definitely curious about your experiences. I can see where time-to-kill would be an increased concern in that setting.

Saraneth.6021:

Wondering if i should scrap precision all together and just got for vit/tough/cond for everything. Have about 20% chance to crit which doesn’t seem like much. Would make me tankier and free up sigil spots for other things.

Dunno.

My current opinion is that you’re right about this. It works better to totally ditch Precision; it’s not really doing much for you anyway, and it’s resources you could instead spend on Vitality, Toughness, Condition Damage—or, as you can see in mt latest version f the build, Healing Power.

It turns out that Apothecary gear is a really good fit for this build. The combination of Healing Power, Toughness, and Prismatic Understanding makes it extremely tough, and every vanish has a high likelihood of healing you up.

So yeah, your idea was definitely the right one.

Another fight I’m interested in, and haven’t had yet, is a stealth-heavy Thief with a lot of condition-clearing. I’ve had pretty long fights with guys like that using Blackwater and Condition Cat, and I’m curious to see whether this build makes any noticeable difference in such fights.

@trooper: Killing power is a valid concern, but what I’ve been finding is that with Condition Damage over 1500 and a high rate of confusion-stacking, people kill themselves. It seems like in practice the main use of conditions other than Confusion is to motivate people to use their skills because their life is leaking out. I had a very long fight with a Blackwater Mesmer who eventually lost because, although he was savvy enough to try to avoid using his skills while he had Confusion stacked, he couldn’t seem to resist it forever, and when he finally did use a few skills with a bunch of stacks of Confusion, he died really quickly.

That fight was instructive because, although it went on for a long long time, he was never able to seriously threaten my health, presumably because of the combination of relatively high Healing Power from the Apothecary gear and the effects of Prismatic Understanding.

I’m guessing the next useful thing to do with it is to play around with trading off some of the Healing Power for additional Condition Damage.

@Dietzen: this is the version I’m using now:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgUQNAW7fl4zKqHVTmGb9IhpHEH5A/UBoj6x1rO3B-j0BBIOCysCCy5RFRjtsuIasadER1KIYeFFRrWKgJlGB-w

@trooper: all good points, and it’s interesting to see the direction you’ve taken the build.

If you look at my latest version, I’ve gone a different way. Like you, I dropped all the Precision (it wasn’t really doing much for us, anyway) and switched in Apothecary Gear. That makes it easy to have high Healing Power with strong Condition Damage.

The upshot is that any time your opponent yields to the temptation to use his skills, he gets slammed hard by the stacks of Confusion. Meanwhile, with all the Healing Power from the Apothecary gear, each time you vanish you’re highly likely to heal right back up—and you’ve got three vanishes.

I don’t blame you for wanting the traited torch—it’s great. But greenlentil’s suggestion to swap in the mantra heal was a solid one. It gives you two condition clears every ten seconds, and combined with the full condition wipe every 40 seconds from Null Field enabled me to come out on top pretty easily against several strong condition players.

I was dubious about the value of this build for a while, but these latest developments have me optimistic about it again. Thanks for breathing new life into it, you guys. It’s been a fun experiment so far.

I managed to defeat another Mesmer who was pretty definitely running Blackwater, and he was not bad, so I think that means this version of the build is strong enough to be worth a look.

No, I’m not silly enough to claim it’s actually stronger than Blackwater; Blackwater is a very strong build and one of my favorites. I just happened to be able to defeat this one particular player who was using it.

But I think it’s strong enough now to be considered a realistic option for fans of the clone-spamming style. It does depend fairly heavily on Runes of Perplexity, though, which is a weakness.

…oh, and I just remembered someone’s point that Imbued Diversion is probably preferable to Dazzling Glamours.

So, yeah; this one:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgUQNAW7fl4zKqHVTmGb9IhpHEH5A/UBoj6x1rO3B-j0BBIOCysCCy5RFRjtsuIasadER1KIYeFFRrWKgJlGB-w

Well, I’ve tweaked the build several times in response to suggestions here. I just ran it for a bit in WvW and it seemed pretty strong.

The incident that prompted me to post this update was a 1v3 (plus a sentry) that I won fairly quickly. Obviously, not too much can be concluded from a single fight—the other players may have been very weak. For what it’s worth, though, they weren’t uplevels, and they were a condition Necromancer and two Mesmers running some version of a condition-based clone-spamming build.

Here’s the version of the build that beat them:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgUQNAW7fl4zKqHVTmGb9IhpHEH5A/UBoj6x1te1B-j0BBIOCysCCy5RFRjtsuIasadER1KIYeFFRrWKgJlGB-w

It incorporates suggestions from several people here, and the results of a little more of my own tinkering.

The Apothecary gear combined with Prismatic Understanding makes it really bad news for the opponent whenever you spend any time at all in stealth, and despite my rocky relationship with mantras, the Mantra of Recovery works a treat for clearing conditions (thanks, greenlentil!). Combining that with Null Field (which is also AOE DPS in this build) seems to emasculate enemy conditions pretty effectively.

@greenlentil:

I don’t know how to incorporate offhand sword, to be honest. The staff is a major element of the build, and so is the torch. For what it’s worth, Scepter 2, when triggered instead of waiting for the block, blinds enemies in a line, and in this build that means it stacks Confusion on them.

The suggestion to substitute Mantra of Healing is definitely solid. The only thing wrong with it is that I don’t actually like mantras much, because of the awkwardness of the charge/activate cycle; but that’s purely a matter of personal preference. There’s no denying that the mantra is strictly better in this build, and I should set my preferences aside in this case in service of an objective improvement.

I’ve adjusted the build accordingly, and I’m interested in any other improvements that folks can suggest.

Please post updates on your progress with this project. I’m keenly interested.

I haven’t played sPVP or tPVP since Beta, so I’m not going to volunteer for the team, but I’m very interested in how well it performs, and in the builds and tactics that you find to be effective. I’d like to learn from your experience, to the extent you want to share.

My guild’s current main project is perhaps sort of relevant: we’re running an all-Mesmer team in WvW on Sea of Sorrows. If you’re on SoS or one of its opponents, we’re the group of 5 to 7 white female Charr Mesmers dressed all in purple, and with names that start with “E” and end with “dy”. We’ve been concentrating mainly on supply and tower control.

@Zen: I agree. I ran it with Imbued Diversion and in combination with Runes of Perplexity it resulted in scary-fast Confusion-stacking.

@trooper: I found the key to making the Runes effective is to have a couple of easy-to use interrupts. As Zen suggested, Imbued Diversion is a good choice: pop a single clone and shatter it, and you get stacks of Confusion on a few enemies. SInce it’s a wide-area AOE, you don’t need to have a lot of clones up to get a good effect from shattering, so that setup favors a more parsimonious tactic where you spawn and shatter one at a time.

At this stage I have to say that in my judgment Blackwater is stronger overall, but this build shines in certain situations. It’s great in small-group fights except when you face an extremely heavy condition build, or a very skilled opponent who is unusually adept at neutralizing Confusion. It’s great in open-field zerg fights, because it’s so easy to spread stacks of Confusion all over the place, and in the hectic circumstances of large-scale WvW, you usually end up with several targets who go down quickly.

In the original form it’s very easy to make a slight change to the trait and utility skills to turn it into a decent AOE build, repeatedly stacking Confusion on whole groups.

So, in summary: fun build, strong in certain circumstances; not as strong overall as something like Blackwater—at least in its current form.

It’s enough fun that I remain interested in tinkering with it, so all additional suggestions are welcome.

If you’re trying it out, I’d suggest trying this version:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgUQNAW7flwzKqHVTmGb9IhpHBH5A/UBoj6x1te1B-jUCBINCyUEwUJBKHCKTiIjtsuIasaIYqUER1+AFRrWIgHrBA-w

It provides better condition defense than the original version.

After more testing, I’ve had generally good results, but occasionally you meet a strong player who is savvy enough about Confusion, and mobile enough, to give you some trouble. Furthermore, I’ve now run into a few extremely heavy condition builds that are trouble—Zen was right, at least if you encounter a build that really stacks conditions extremely heavily in a player who is good at picking you out from among your clones.

It is possible to counter those players by fooling them and evading their targeting, but it takes a lot of nerve and a little luck. You have to be willing to act like a clone in order to fool them, even though it sometimes means you might get hit by something you could dodge.

Extremely heavy condition-stacking does seem to be its weak point, and I continue to be interested in modifications to counteract it without losing the essential character of the build.

I tried moving the ten points from Domination to Inspiration, and the result does seem a little more robust. Now I’m wondering whether, in relying on both interrupts and blinds, I’m spreading the build a little too thin. Perhaps if I focused on one or the other as a source of confusion, it would leave more room to strengthen the condition defense and perhaps better incorporate other tactics.

I might think about moving the 10 points from Domination to Inspiration to get Mender’s Purity. I might also consider changing Chaotic Dampening to Cleansing Inscriptions.

Also, Sigils of Generosity are better than Purity, but they’re awfully pricey. But moving the points to Inspiration would make it more attractive to swap in some Rabid items for higher Precision, improving the performance of the Sigils.