Guild Wars 2

I gave up on getting any official response from Arenanet regarding those topics. Actually, I don’t expect to see anything from Arenanet if the feedback is negative. Well, at most we’ll get a non-response. See the thread about the pavilion not awarding loot. Multiple threads were merged into one, just like the threads regarding the feature patch, and there hasn’t been a real answer yet.

I guess it’s a sign of the times. In the future, I expect weekly updates to the gem store, no answer if the update proves to be not popular and an equally bad Living Story season 2. Which is why I won’t bother to log too often, if at all.

It can provide a lesson. I play a ton of WvW on CD. 75% of the time in attacking blobs/zergs, it’s some hammer war rushing out to be the hero. MOA, then a likely down state/death, or at least the great subtle pleasure of watching them do a 180 and run…fast.

If I’m losing a fight, you bet…MOA. Why do I want to lose?

“What do you guys think about Moa, is it really, really powerful or not? Why?”

It is powerful against players who need to l2p. So in your case, it is the necro who needs to l2p.

The skill can be dodged, blocked or obstructed. On top of that it has a long cool down. So let’s say you cast it and your enemy runs down a slope and goes out of the line of sight (obstructed), no more moa for the CD period. Same goes for dodged or blocked instances.

In moa form, a player can still dodge + they are equipped with a “flee” skill (5) that evades for 3/4 sec. Good players make use of those to run off and come back when the polymorph wears off. Either that, or they would perform a “2,4,3,1…1…1” on you if you are low on health.

This is polymorph moa, not polymorph rock.

When classes get elites that give several bonuses, including 20 seconds of stability, I have no qualms whatsoever with moa morph.

Hello mesmers! I’ve been playing this build for around a while and doing great with it in sPvP, tPvP and WvW. I’m making this guide to hopefully get some more people interested in the build/playstyle as it is a very, very fun one!
I will explain everything you need to know to get started: each trait, sigil, rune and stat choice!
It takes a while to get used to the build and get the grips of it, but once you do, it’s so powerful. Every match that I do, I get better and better, it’s unbelievable! No matter if you will be using this build in WvW or PvP, please do read through the thread as well as all the extra information linked as it really does help loads.
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Traits

Domination – 4

Halting Strike – Usually, if you are in a shatter spec, you take Mental Torment in this trait slot because you do not interrupt people as often. However, in this spec, we have quite a few ways to interrupt people(Chaos Storm, Diversion, Illusionary Wave), making Halting Strike a much, much better choice over Mental Torment.

Shattered Concentration – This is an absolute must in all shatter builds. It delivers such great team support through boon removal but also helps you get your damage up by removing protection. Instead of a 3 clone shatter doing 10k damage, it will do 6,6k if the enemy has protection. Thanks to this trait that protection will be removed and you will do 10k damage. It’s super useful for removing stability from warriors, guardians and engineers if your mind stab is on cooldown, allowing you to push them off points, off the map, interrupt them or simply give yourself some space to breathe.

Dueling – 4

Far Reaching Manipulations – This has to be one of my favorite mesmer traits. It allows you to blink to some places you usually would not be able to blink to, it’s extremely helpful for kiting around, line of sighting, surprise shatters and so on. We also really do not have anything better to take in this slot. This trait is one of the reasons I love this playstyle so much. A thing you can do if you don’t mind having 900 range blink is take Phantasmal Fury for the iZerker. Pick your poison.

Deceptive Evasion – We are in a shatter build. Shatter builds need to have a lot of clone production so the clones can be shattered. This trait gives us exactly that.
If you try to play a shatter build without Deceptive Evasion, you’re gonna have a bad time!

Illusions – 6

Compounding Power – This is slot for which it is hard to choose a trait for. Compounding power versus Precise Wrack is a very tough choice, I keep going from one to the other constantly. I’m settled on Compounding Power now though. Reason This is simply a damage booster, not much needs to be said.

Illusionary Elasticity – Usually, this spot is used for Illusionary Invigoration. However, Illusionary Elasticity is such a major DPS boost it’s hard to choose Invigoration over it. That one additional bounce will, if you use Mirror Blade, do upwards of 3k more damage, give you 3 more stacks of might and give 3 more stacks of vulnerability to your target. If you combine this with iZerker, mind stab and a dodge/shatter, you will burst an engineer/ranger/necro and maybe even a warrior/guardian down.

Illusionary Persona – A must in all shatter builds. It’s just such an amazing trait! This can help you interrupt people right away, instead of having to kind of predict that they will use a skill and hope that they use it just as your clone comes to daze them. It ups your damage a lot! Instead of doing 9k on a 3 clone shatter, you will do 12k damage. If you do not have clones up and you need to use distortion to save your kitten, you count as a clone and you will get that one second of invulnerability which helps a lot.

Other Trait Options

Illusionary Invigoration – I run this instead of iElasticity when the enemy team does a lot of burst damage to simply allow myself to blow distortion a bit earlier and trade a bit of damage for more survivability. It recharges all your shatters when you get hit below 50% HP

+

Masterful Reflection – I often run this instead of Compounding Power in combination with iInvigoration, it gives you reflection when you distort. Really fun to use against warriors (eat your pindown!) and pewpew rangers (10k rapid fire right back at you!)

I now run this setup regularly with sword torch ( 15/5/15)

I really like the new spinning rams, brilliant job. It is so much more enjoyable to watch the rams do continuous 360’s instead of … well you know … ramming the gates.

gennyt.3428:

Wait, people still read WvWvW patch notes?

Why not, it takes less than 20 seconds…

literally every single player in those videos were terrible

bearbows, players never dodging phantasm summons or blinding/interrupting you, people 1v2’ing you and killing phantasms rather than just rushing you (especially double warrior, good god)

Is it just an empty field with a few people capping camps and a tower here and there? What’s it like? Is there any discussion in map chat about the servers?

http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups/map/1585?lang=en

Ofc thieves don’t LOOK op, cause nobody is allowed to play the builds they destroy. They have as much influence on build diversity as the ENTIRE condi spam meta that doesn’t let players make builds that have trouble with conditions.

Teleports are the largest offender because they negate 90% of defensive mechanics instantly and thieves can run so many of them with absurdly low cooldowns. This means that glass builds which rely on skills for survival simply can’t compete

I really dont think thieves are OP, but I do think they are a big part of why condition bunkers have become so popular.

Most classes simply cant go DPS builds because thieves are the kings and gods of such builds, and everyone knows if you are in a berserker gear and a decent thief attacks you, you’re seriously in trouble.

Their presence just makes it very hard to anyone to play anything except bunky specs, and some classes cant bunker well without being a condition spec, so you end up with people condition bunkering.

Now this is very hard to change without nerfing thieves (which they really dont need), simply because any class running a DPS build is going to be extremely vulnerable to BS. Now.. you can use blocks and evades to try escape BS, but essentially thieves can stealth longer and more often than people can block and evade and theres a lot of luck and guesswork in countering BS anyway.

The most obvious solution is giving people counters to stealth, just as being able to see them if they come within 200 range, so that people have a chance of playing DPS without getting 1 hit, but thats a serious nerf to thieves and generally is an unsatisfactory solution IMO. I dont know what the answer is, but thieves DO stop other people from playing DPS and force others to bunker.

This game would have been better off if the Thief class had never existed. Stealth in and of itself is inherently broken in most MMOs and giving one class access to a dynamic initiative system while keeping all others on a static cooldown system was a recipe for disaster.

Thief has to rely so much on stealth to get anything done as an old man has to rely on his cane. And personally I find the Thief class very unfun both playing one as well as playing against one as there is little to no counterplay involved.

Cynz.9437:

30/30/30/30/30 build is so OP

I wont call you ignorant, but you sir need to know about the S/D and D/P that plagues sPvP. They have access to all of the afore mentioned stuff without having to fall in your uncivilized and near sighted fail of a joke.

I think we can all agreed that currently thieves are stealing (no pun intended) all the attention when it comes to damage dealer/roamer/squishy.

Their OP superb damage coupled with spammable blinds, teleports, dodges, stealth, backstabs is driving to extinction the few eles and mesmers that remain (today we lost 2 top mesmer players due to this, on top of the countless nameless elementalists which plead for fixes long time ago after getting the boot up their …..feet)

Backstabs, without any kind of interaction on the taker other than bending over and taking it regardless of skillfully blocking it, blinding or evading the attack.

Blinds, which reapply on literally every second and then there is the fact that every ranged skill on thieves (except autoattack) applies a blind through this field.

Teleports that cure conditions and break stuns, rendering any form of CC, soft or hard, useless. On top of not only having one, or 2, or 3, or 4 , or 5……. just as many as initiative permit, on top of 2 freebies on low CD.

You cant give one class all the best tools for survival regardless of stats, give it the best single target damage and then allow it to take anybody else’s role and call it a day.

Suggestions; blind fields, same treatment the earth storm ele got; once every 4 seconds.
Teleports, increase initiative cost, give it 1/2 or 3/4 seconds precast, 1/2 activation.
Damage and boon stealing; needs an ICD and the damage needs some shaving down, specially spamable skills, something not along the lines of 8%, but rather 15-25%.
Backstab needs to be an opener, apply 10-15 vulnerability stacks to help vs bunkers but have normal or only slightly augmented damage to not be so upfronted.
Thoughts?

(screenshot taken April 15 post patch)

Every competitive game is just a really complicated form of rock-paper-scissors. Say you’re consistently losing to paper, so you spec into scissors, only to find that now you lose to rock.

There’s no build that can win every fight. If you don’t want to die, you have to know when to run.

In a game with this much diversity of mechanics, there will always be builds that take less skill than others, and people will always find and exploit them. But yes, some builds will succeed where others fail, and unless you have a direct counter with you, you have to choose between death and running away.

The lack of communication is beyond embarrassing.

If they’re so frickin’ busy with all sorts of stuff, the least that can be done is someone saying, just SAYING (doesn’t even have to be true) that they are looking into the concerns and working on things, or that they have ideas to improve the next season, or that they have a stand on the 2v1 thing so everyone on both sides can shut up. A couple lines will do.

Nope, nothing, not a peep. Nobody gives a kitten about WvW.

Let’s face it – Feature Patch brought in a LOT of new/quitted players… for a day or two.

Meantime I SEE population falling man. Coz wardrobe and Balthazar backpack is 3 days worth of content at best. And even then it’s not anywhere near worth losing your home server to all the hordes of alien players and gold spammers, or doing silly content [for traits] which you’d otherwise skip wholeheartedly.

I see entire communities quitting for the sucky state of WvW (and PLEASE let us never call that bridge-intense karmatrain twink-lvling map WvW). Meantime there was not a post on any WvW concerns. As a matter of fact there wasn’t any posts on anything interesting after April 15th, just monotonous news on ticket resolutions and PMs about my posts being deleted. As if everyone just quit already for the summer and left the game floating.

Gonna wait ’til June 3rd and then move on I guess, shame really.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Hey guys. I was hoping to open up a discussion on Mesmers and condition damage, specifically why choose condition over power?

I have a couple of condition build ideas in mind but I’m so acclimated to using power builds that I have a hard time justifying trying them out, so I was hoping some of the condition Mesmers out there could share their experiences and give some reasons as to why they prefer running condition builds over power builds. The Prismatic Understanding (PU) trait doesn’t count for much here, as it works for both power and condition builds; though I do realize that when gearing for conditions you do stack significantly more toughness with Rabid armor.

Still.. If a condition build simply does less damage than a power build -considering cleanses, teamfights and all- for more survivability then what situations does it outshine power?

I’ve been using Napalm Cat for a while now and the beauty with cond dmg for me is that people tend to be looking for big dmg numbers as you do, so they seem to think I’m not doing any dmg at first. When all the conditions are up and they wasted their cleasning and burst they see whats going on and they try to run but then its too late.

For me cond dmg feels like a web that sticks on them from all angles and they tangle up and cant get away. i

WvW is already so extreme infested by tons of cheap hackers, it becomes day per day harder to realize, what is still “normal” there, and what not …

Today I found also again some hackers for sure, playing Eles using some kind of Speed Hack as when I fought agaisnt them, they had no Quickness, but where somehow able to spam like half a dozen skills of different elements within like 1 seconds… among them that real long lasting earth skill, that takes some seconds to charge, before the big burst damage comes that hits with a heavy 8 stacks of bleedign also too

and hhose else i fought today agaisnt manage to perform that skill in 1 second, instant burst basically while performign at the same time that fire rush skillwhich got buffed the last tiem and works now for them also like an evade PLUS naturally performing at the same tiem before of that a RTL and that other air skill that launches

When I see these kind of massive overpowered skill spams, agaisnt that is the thief laughable, cause we have a LIMITED ressource… but these ttoal op eles can rince and repeat cycle through their elements and keep on spamming their skills like crazy while having at all times super high damage, self regen and if well played at nearly no damage, beforeyou lie already dead on the ground full with bleedings, burning, chill, blinds, cripples and what not all…

god hate these fricking op bunkers like nothing else xD

I’m sorry to have to admit it, but all of you FSP guys are right, as a server we have mass ordered the Collin’s German Phrasebook, and upon its arrival wasted no time in contacting the King of Abbadon’s Mouth, jumping on their TS and coordinating attacks together. I have one question for you though, may I have one of those tin foil hats you guys seem to have an abundance of? Surely you can nae need so many…

lol reason why it’s so hard for them I guess is because Far Shiver Peaks just hack all the time Nice to see your tactics haven’t changed with ele’s wall hacking. GG.