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(part 2 of 2)
- Is there anything that would make you stop playing Mesmer? If you’ve stopped what would draw you back?
Speaking honestly:
- If they mess up interrupts somehow or nerf our damage output further, I’m probably dropping the game.
- If another class comes along with lots of cool utility powers and similar insta-cast slippery funtimes potential, I might switch. (Thief is too one-note. Elementalist is way too APM-y for me. Other classes feel slow and ponderous.)
- What has damaged your faith in the devs? Is there any faith remaining? What would have to happen to earn back your trust? Again, please no general statements like “a lot of nerfs.”
Things that were super-sad:
- The confusion/glamours nerf that took out a lot of big-group mesmer gameplay.
- The way they fixed Power Block. Like, not even thinking about how it plays in a thief-vs-mesmer situation.
- Ditto that one time Distortion flat-out stopped granting Invuln for like 24 hours.
On the other hand: - They reverted Distortion QUICKLY instead of (for example) waving their hands and going, “Uh, works as intended, somehow!” Clearly Anet isn’t, like, trying to ruin mesmers. They just make mistakes sometimes. And it’s a hard class to really figure out, mechanically.
Best way to build more trust/happiness: - A Chronomancer that both (a) WORKS and (b) isn’t supposed to just supercede Vanilla Mesmers. I like a lot of the mechanics we have — their flow, their style, the overall feel of playing the class — so I get the most joy out of seeing stuff that signals that devs get it and want to patch over the rough spots and fill in the gaps instead of bulldozing the whole thing to start over.
- What is your one (reasonable) Mesmer wish?
I’m gonna be incredibly selfish here.
Make iMage not suck.
Or buff non-IP Mind Wrack damage (so your 3-clone shatter is the same as an IP Mind Wrack when the player doesn’t throw their own body into the burst).
- What do you feel the Mesmer is currently lacking ATM?
I think mesmer is the most trait-dependent class in the game. We get some AMAZING traits, but then a lot of our base abilities and mechanics are just really weak without traits: lots of mediocre (or straight-up poor) damage, some unpleasantly long cooldowns, tricks that flat-out have little value unless you trait for them. This makes the class really sad to level (which I’m sure puts off some players), and also makes build-making an exercise in not only finding cool synergies and strengths but also running around trying to figure out how to minimize glaring colossal weaknesses.
We’re also really lacking a way to contribute consistently in fights where a lot of area-effect damage is flying around. This is an entirely unique problem. Not every class has absolutely AMAZING AoE potential, but we also tend to suffer a DPS loss on our single-target damage — this is annoying and weird and busted and stupid. Like, playing Season 2 stuff, I also noticed that the newly-designed encounters were pretty fun, but absolute trash for mesmers. Your phantasms are pretty consistently rendered useless by the mechanics of the boss fights. Which is really annoying when the bosses are hp-sponges you need to burn down.
- What game mode (PvP, WvW, PvE Open World/Dungeons) do you feel Mesmer currently excels in the most? Least?
For me, Mesmers are only really interesting to play in PvP/WvW. Mostly, that’s fine. But you’re kinda constrained in WvW because your weapon sets give you fairly little big-group impact, so you’re forced to rely on utilities to really help the team.
In PvE, you’re either doing reflects or more-or-less dithering around. Our dithering-around game is good enough to get through most content. It’s just not particularly interesting. Meh, PvE.
- Without reworking anything, what minor adjustments would you make to any of our weapons/utilities/traits to make them more viable?
Torch 5 is such a “Huuhh?” skill. It just seems to do a whole heck of a lot of nothing. Ditto Focus 5 in PvP (because people actually move, unlike PvE mobs). Spitballing some fixes:
- Speed up iMage projectiles and make them hit harder, or replace the concept with more of an AoE retal generator.
- iWarden that follows targets a bit while spinning. Maybe not fast enough that it’ll keep pasting you if you outright run-run-run away, but fast enough that you can’t just take a few steps and then keep pew-pewing, at least. (Or widen its impact area to make it more of a real AoE, whatever.)
Also:
- Fix how Power Block interacts with channels and thief 2-5 skills.
- Take a look at how some of our skills work with LOS. I’d love the ability to spawn phantasms a little more flexibly.
I have some ideas for how to improve garbage stuff like Disruptor’s Sustainment, but I figure that’s down-in-the-weeds redesign that’s better for another thread. (Also incredibly armchair/unfounded so who even cares about my opinion? )
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We need more build diversity. Lockdown builds are nearly there and could be good with some tweaking (and maybe changes to the overall meta) but I don’t think we need a massive focus on it or a specialization devoted to it.
Agreed. The way that lockdown stuff is kinda “spread around” right now is actually pretty good(*), because it gives you opportunities to mix control into different builds. Trying to put all the lockdown stuff into its own little bucket away from everything else would be a surefire formula for do-nothing builds (that will eventually get nerfed into the ground, most likely).
(* – Or would be, if Power Block wasn’t messed up.)
Well, the precision is helping you get Sharper Images bleed stacks from your clones.
Try it in the silly little SPvP practice area and you can judge for yourself whether it’s worth the tradeoff.
I just wanted to know if it was something on my end.
Nope, you’re definitely right. You only hear the dialogue sometimes. Can’t quite figure out whether there’s a pattern to it (out of combat? first time on a map?).
Here’s mine
OMG, so sly! Wonderful!
Balthazar runes now don’t ignore blind, evade, and block. Not sure if they changed anything else.
Did they always have an ICD?
You can also save a ton of money by using sub-80 food and oils (well, crystals, in your case).
Basically 1/20th of the cost for 90% of the effect.
One caveat here: for condition builds, there are duration breakpoints so sometimes losing a little bit of condition duration means you lose a whole “tick” of condition damage. It’s not that hard to figure it out if you play around with your gear in gw2skills, though.
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If you’re looking for a cheap-to-make condi build? The pinned OsiCat build thread is quite dated now, but the PU condition build is basically this build with good burning output and MASSIVE condition removal. The Balthazar runes you need to run it never go above 3s at the auction house.
Take a look.
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This is an old outfit of mine.
I am a pretty flower.
- Disruptor’s needs either changed or replaced. Considering that Mesmers scale abysmally with Healing Power stat, the trait is useless in its present incarnation.
If you want to preserve the general concept: make it grant Protection and Regeneration on interrupts instead. Maybe even with something like a 2-second 1-stack Stability to boot. Basically fodder for a tanky-spec Mesmer (still probably not viable for most things, but folks can at least have some fun with the trait).
The stability changes wont really effect any builds that already take boon removals..
Possible exception there is that it sounds like a lot of the big punchy transformation-like elites are getting long-duration stability replaced with pulsing stability gain. Which is pretty annoying because, well, it’s weakening one of our best counters to them (boon rips).
Mender’s purity
Increase its potential and use by changing it to remove conditions based on number of active illusions (1-3), when using a healing skill.
This is would be a straight-up nerf. The more you make Mesmers rely on having illusions up to power all their abilities, the more you’re pigeonholing them into a class that gets totally kittened by random AoE.
Shattered Conditions and Restorative Illusions
Good trait, but no way we would take them in a shatter build, it’s just in a bad trait line. Move or replace for sure.
Uh, wouldn’t this be making a “bad” trait line worse? I agree that these needs to be moved around because it seems like a build that really wants one would want both.
Really I think the way to improve Inspiration is to improve Healing Power scaling on some of our skills.
Bountiful Disillusionment
IDK what anet are thinking putting this in chaos. Absolutely useless. Reconfigure it to act like engineers Bountiful turrets if you know what I mean, another trait in the “compounding” category would be nice.
Chaos is a boon-centric line. As it is, this trait plays really well with the minors immediately preceding it — not to mention CI directly above it. Where would you move it, exactly, and why?
Mantra Heal too slow and only good with 3 casts traited
I looooove Mantra of Recovery but I think the only reason to use it is Mender’s Purity.
For zerg stuff, Zerk is fine, too:
If you’re a Veilbot, you don’t need to stay on the tag for very long, and Blink covers for a lot of positioning mistakes. Zerk won’t really hurt you, though you may not need it if your role is mostly to lay down Veil and Null Field.
If you’re picking or driver-sniping, Zerk (or Zerk/Assassin’s) is necessary to do your job.
I agree with your general intuition: mesmers need pretty good Power/Ferocity/Precision (or Condition Damage, depending on the build) to really do much.
My recommendation is to get mostly Zerk gear, then water it down with a few Soldier/Knight/Cavalier pieces as needed. In my experience, the best way to do this is by swapping out trinkets, rather than armor, because:
- More stats per piece than swapping shoulders/gloves/&c.
- Don’t have to buy another rune for your swap items.
- Ascended trinkets are relatively easy to get with laurels and guild commendations. (If you do WvW, remember you can use the WvW vendor to save on laurels a bit, too!)
- It’s really easy to move ascended trinkets between your various characters.
(If you’re a dedicated PvE optimizer, using your Assassin gear in place of the Zerk gear for WvW is probably fine, too, at least for the time being.)
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I think that a human female warrior would totally win because she can “Outrun a Centaur!!”
The Tamini aren’t exactly breaking any land speed records, though. Their run is more of a jolly bouncy canter.
Full mantra’s strip Mesmers of their ability to survive and weigh a player down with the burden of their mechanics.
“Full mantras” is a strawman, though. The only builds that want all mantras are EM PvE builds that almost never activate any utility.
The thing is, any build that actually makes regular use of mantras doesn’t want all mantras. The recast will kill you. I’d say a mantra builds wants about… two mantras, ideally.
Mender’s Purity mantra heal is the most spammable condition removal. It opens up a utility slot for something other than condition removal, without forcing you to drop Blink or Decoy from your bar. That’s not a bad starting point.
there are plenty of tricks of the trade by the different professions HOWEVER the Mesmer is the only class that can force the target off of them and make false targets in there place. To me this is artificial difficulty rather being difficult to kill because of skill.
The “artificial difficulty” is stealth, which is terrible because of how bad the targeting UI is. Clones are super easy to identify. Just look at the buff bar or look at their movement or look at how they stand there limpy doing nothing between attacks. Even total scrubs whose only interaction with PvP is repeatedly quitting hotjoin games when they are about to lose should be able to reliably identify the “real” mesmer. Plus, you don’t even lose target on the mez player unless they go into stealth.
I think the original post refers to the fact that an ‘unskilled’ player in any other profession can be rolled in pvp in 20 seconds…unless they are a Mesmer. Being a Mesmer guarantees the user extra time before a death regardless if they have skill or not.
A halfway competent playing using a burst spec can roll over a bad mesmer just as quickly as they can kill a bad necro or ele.
Full condi PU is a very bunker-ish spec, so it can hold out longer. But it still dies pretty quickly if you don’t manage your positioning right or time your blocks well (depending on the build).
There is a reason why a Warrior holds the current record speed run in Obsidian Sanctum @ 2:56 minutes.
In contrast, my record speed is more like 1:45:00.
As in hours.
D:
Interrupting a downed state skill procs all your interrupt traits but doesn’t actually stop the skill. This is most notable on the NPC Necromancer where a 3 clone daze shatter will proc 3 interrupts in a row on both the lifesteal and fear skills.
I’m not disagreeing with you in general, but I just want to point out that the training NPCs are weird and don’t always match player mechanics. For example, if you both get down at the same time, they may get up and stomp you. Also killing them doesn’t trigger any kill procs from equipment or traits. Also their evades all say “block.” They’re… messed up.
That tower fight was pretty amusing to watch. Soooo close!
most or all mesmer cloaking is not actual stealth.
One skill. Lasting 3 seconds. 40 second cooldown.
4 seconds when traited. (So OP!)
or increasing mantra charges to 3 and instead of the grandmaster trait that gives extra charge give like 15% cd reduction on mantras.
This could really encourage mantras builds.
it can also solve the cond cleanse problem with menders purity in active.
I run Harmonious Mantras a lot. I think if you made 3 casts the default it would make mantras really, really strong across the board. Maybe a bit excessive, to be honest. 3-cast MoR with Mender’s Purity is a ton of condition removal. 3-cast Mantra of Distraction without a trait investment might make Power Block + Chillruption a thing.
I just randomly saw this linked in another thread. Sure it uses focus instead of pistol, but I’m not sure if having pistol would make it any stronger, but I’m not really sure.
I can’t say I like the build, but on top of that I think the mesmer is playing way too cautiously here. For example, they’re throwing away a ton of damage output by overkiting and not letting Sword #4 and Scepter #2 do their work.
Also, I do think Pistol would help here since it has a much, much easier time tracking moving targets. Warden is pretty much trash outside of PvE.
There’s no reason for the boon refresh to be every second.
Either change to 2s intervals, or grant boons only on entering stealth for say 4s base.
It’s a random boon each time. On an average cast, you’re gaining 4s each (3s base + boon duration improvements), plus another 4s of one of them.
Sometimes you luck out and it looks kinda like this:
1. Regen procs, you start regenerating hp you’ve lost previously. You get Protection from Illusionary Membrane (4s).
2. Protection procs naturally (7s prot).
3. Aegis procs, lasting long enough to cover against the first burst you take once you come out of stealth.
4. Protection procs (so your total duration left is 7s).
Sometimes it doesn’t look like that at all and you have a stack of protection that expires the second you leave stealth.
Overall I think the prot and regen uptime is comparable — a bit superior, but still comparable to — to Elemental Attunement
Absolutely – I want to see PU (the trait) nerfed/reverted, and other skills buffed to give some build variety.
I don’t.
Simply put, I think Anet has no idea how to make light-armored classes survivable in a meaningful way, so a trait that grants Protection is about the best design we’re ever gonna see.
A video where you show your solo abilities is much more welcome.
Solo videos are great for showing off and all, but, really, this is how a roaming player should operate. Note how they’re actually taking camps instead of just trying to start fights with randos near south camp (how many Youtube videos are just fighting by that stupid guard spot near south camp, srsly?) and able to move along between objectives at a reasonable pace.
Since this seems to be JQ/BG/TC (NA top tier), many enemy roamers are coordinated teams. Playing solo just to be stomped by them or run away from them is often a huge waste of time.
You do need better titles for your stuff, though, OP.
So, mesmers and rangers are in the same boat, but I think for somewhat different reasons.
I think both suffer from the fact that the original design assumed pets would be way, way better than they actually are. Offloading your class’ DPS onto a stupid AI thing that runs around means that you’re doing crap DPS almost any time it actually matters.
Now, I think this is easier to improve ranger because it’s easier to just give more DPS to the character itself and leave the pet as a source of occasional utility moves like extra CC. Look at the proposed longbow tweaks, for example. Mesmer’s problem is that our pet stuff is folded right into our weapon skills (your biggest damage move is usually a phantasm, for instance), and those illusions are awfully bug-ridden: iWarden sucking, iLeap failing to track or having the clone die instantly to any attack, iMage launching garbage projectiles that can’t hit anything. So improving mesmers requires not just hammering away at numbers but fixing all kinds of animation, pathing, and AI bugs.
The condi PU build is strong largely because it works around these built-in weaknesses. In a condi build, your clones spread conditions, both when they attack and when they die, and clones are much, much easier to spam than phantasms (most are on a 20-second cooldown; in contrast, you can trait for clone-on-dodge and there are skills that make a clone every 10 seconds or so). So it’s both easier to keep clones up and you can get something out of them when they die. Your damage doesn’t immediately go to kittens just because someone cleaved through a phantasm while trying to hit you.
In PVE, your utility as a mesmer is very situational. You’re occasionally great thanks to reflection. When you can keep your phantasms up (i.e. there’s almost no AOE to speak of), you can get decent damage output against a boss. But a lot of hardcore players say they’d rather just have a guardian since they reflect, too, without having to keep phantasms up for DPS. Plus they’re better at party buffs.
(I will freely admit that mesmers have more ZvZ value than rangers, thanks to a few key skills. But basically the ideal number of mesmers in a zerg is 1-2. :/ )
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In my experience, the most effective thing against both thief and mesmer downed state is either to have two players start stomping at different times (if your victim doesn’t port, your friend gets him; if he does port to stop the first stomp, you have time to Blink to him and finish), or to do a fakeout using stealth (don’t stomp right away after you start; they’ll port and you’ll still have some time on your animation to do the Blink).
(Or, playing thief, I could stomp other thieves pretty reliably by hitting Steal or Infiltrator’s Signet — both player-targeted ports so you don’t have to place the circle — at the very last moment of my stomp animation. There’s no skill like that for mesmers.)
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With eles in WvW or fighting on point, the most important thing is to apply soft CC before they mistform. Then at least they don’t go anywhere and and you can just stomp them later or kill them with cleaves/area-effects while fighting their friends. Especially useful if you’re fighting in front of a tower.
I hated greatsword at levels 10, 30, and 60, but love it at 80 (including in WvW). So go figure. Sometimes traits make all the difference. And sometimes it’s gear. The 4-2-3 burst is a lot better when you have good weapon sigils and decent Power, Precision, Ferocity all boosting the damage.
In WvW, I mainly play a “Hidden Cat” like build with Deceptive Evasion. What I like about it is that you have a lot of ways to survive group bursts. But you do have to play pretty aggressively to bring down some people in 1-on-1.
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If you have karma lying around, you can easily make a gear set for condi PU really cheaply. For example, you can gear a “Napalm Cat” condi PU build almost entirely with Orrian karma vendors (so you don’t have to spend any gold). Just pick up Rabid trinkets from the Cathedral of Zephyrs, get all the Rabid pieces you can from the Temple of Balthazar, and then pick fill in your armor with Rabid gear from any other temple and buy a couple of Baltahzar runes off the TP. Builds using fancier runes like Perplexity are going to cost a bunch of gold, though.
Okay, so, really basic PvE stuff. It kinda varies by level since traits are a big deal, and also your ability to DPS changes significantly as you get access to different kinds of gear.
Personally, for casual PvE, I like:
Greatsword – You can avoid a lot of melee damage by learning to move and time your evades, but if you’re trying to make your way through unfamiliar content or just don’t want to focus a lot, staying at range is excellent. GS lets you do that, with a pretty good burst, tolerable multitarget ability, and a knockback wave to keep the mobs off you. It’s pretty good as long as you have decent damage-oriented stats (like mostly zerk armor). If you’re leveling and your greatsword kills are slow, try Staff instead. Then you can putter around killing things using Phase Retreat to keep out of trouble.
Sword mainhand – One of your better sources of consistent damage; Blurred Frenzy lets you “tank” things a bit, good fast cooldowns when traited.
Focus offhand – The phantasm is a bit buggy, but it’s still fairly reliable in PvE. It’s a good source of multi-target damage. Once you get the Warden’s Feedback trait, both focus skills reflect projectiles; killing enemies with their own ranged attacks is both fun and effective.
Definitely experiment with the other weapons and stuff. And go back every once in a while when you get access to better traits and gear. The weapons I thought were junky at level 10 are some of my favorites at 80.
Phantasm builds are popular in PvE because you can get decent sustained damage output going once they’re up. 15 points in Illusions gives you a 20% cooldown reduction across the board. 10 points in Domination lets you buy +15% phantasm damage. People often take the weapon-specific cooldown reduction skills as well (they stack even if the tooltips make it seem like the don’t), and 25 in Inspiration is worth an extra 15% phantasm damage (easy to pick up if you’ve already spent 20 to get Warden’s Feedback).
I wouldn’t mind getting into a Scepter/Pistol + Sword/Torch style of play, if thats gonna win me at least some of my duels, i’ve tried to keep away from Prismatic Understanding simply to avoid being called “Cheap” but more and more, i’ve seen it’s honestly not THAT hard a skill to counter if people know how to play correctly, so i’m open to idea’s there.
In my experience, people cry about PU if they see you use stealth even without having the PU trait equipped (Decoy is still pretty great in non-PU builds, and Mass Invis tends to be my default elite).
Actually, in my experience, people will cry about PU even if you never pop stealth during the whole fight. Because PU is just the magic code for “This mesmer beat me.”
So don’t sweat the crying, really. Haters gonna hate, scrubs gonna scrub, whiners gonna whine, newbs gonna newb, &c.
Hmm.
Let’s make a deal. I will be totally fine with warriors being able to move in 100B if I get to reflect it — ALL OF IT — like it’s a projectile (with Feedback, with Magnetic Shield, with Mirror, with Missile Deflection, et cetera).
Fair deal?
Well, if nothing else, you’ll get to have some fun reflecting Rapid Fire. :P
I’ve never used mantra of concentration.
Looks like a decent stunbreak, but never felt the urge to use it.
It’s pretty sweet. The stability duration is very short, but when people are trying to gank you you often get a lot of CC sent your way in a short window, and it’s great for dealing with that when other stunbreaks wouldn’t (Blink is also great for that, of course, since it gets you away from their burst).
Also it has a (tiny radius) group effect, so you ckittene it to save your teammates from stuff.
So i have to just leave GS for PVE? and i cant talk about it to make it better in PVP?
And so warriors are the only one that NEEDS to have a different weapon set just to land 1 skill on its OTHER weapon…
It’s “1 skill” that BURNS through hp like crazy if you connect with the whole thing. The price for that is that it’s hard to connect with the whole thing. That’s just good design.
You’re a warrior. You have two weapon sets for a reason. You can swap weapons every five seconds. It’s not hard.
Or use a utility skill to CC them.
Or hit them with 100B when an ally puts CC on them.
Or use quickness (like Frenzy or Last Chance).
Or 100B on downs so you kill the people trying to res them.
Learn your class. :/
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Necroing this thread because the balance patch talk made the think of this…
You know what I’d like to see on Mind Stab? Putting a short-duration Revealed on your target.
The designers are clearly okay with more of this, since Sic ‘Em went up to 6s Revealed. I’m thinking more like 2s here, mostly useful for knocking a target out of stealth when they don’t expect it.
This is more me thinking about what would be good than what would be good, per se. I think it’d be hella fun, though. Players (thieves and mesmers, in particular) get really complacent about stealth as the ultimate tool for controlling the flow of a fight, so it’d be nice to rock their boats a bit.
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As a warrior, you’re not “stuck” with Greatsword. There are so many good weapons to choose from!
If you’re parking GS in PvE, it’s because the damage is great and mobility doesn’t matter when you’re stack-tanking a boss.
For PvP, try some of your copious stuns and immobilizes to make that hundred-blades connect. Or try a weapon set with more built-in control.
I agree: thieves aren’t especially unpredictable. I think they are pretty hard to read at times, but overall every thief build pretty much has a singular gameplan.
My particular complaint is that, for a mesmer:
- Even if you know exactly where a hidden thief is gonna show up, you have fairly little you can do to punish them. Because you have few area attacks with low damage and long cooldowns, a rather low-damaging melee weapon, and your bursts skills pretty much all require targets.
- Even if you’re personally good at working around an evasion-oriented thief’s evade frames, your phantasms won’t be. (It’s the same trap as the ranger, really: by offloading the class’ damage output onto pets, you’re basically giving anyone who can master basic PvE monster fighting a huge leg up against them. In a way, turret engies have it better because they can count on their turrets not to move around.) And cleaves wipe out clones so fast.
Is there a text-based summary of it somewhere?
I know – why don’t they simply delete everything in the class and just give us two buttons – one for portal and one for veil. Not like it will make much difference in large scale wvw.
Portal, Veil, and a third skill, based on Holiday Blues – Veil, Portal bomb, kill yourself (FOR MASSIVE AOE DEGEN) because your job is done
Mesmers are the reason why you have people on defense in keeps and towers
Err, what? The other team being able to ram their way in in a minute if you don’t have people already in place to man your ACs/mortars/cannons/trebs it he reason is the reason you have people on defense.
and why they’re constantly sweeping, a single mesmer port can cause a tower/keep to flip in a minute.
Sweeping is pretty quick and only requires a very small part of your force. I’m pretty sure if you counted up all the time people spend chasing dolyak-sniping thieves fruitlessly it would be more than an order of magnitude greater than the time people spend sweeping for mesmers. Not to mention all the time people spend chasing thieves who literally do nothing.
A Mesmer can be considered the single most important class in WvW for this reason.
Even though Veil and Portal are great skills, a group with zero mesmers isn’t terribly disadvantaged compared to a group with some. Now try fighting ZvZ with no eles.
And the ideal mesmer count for a group of any size is basically… 1-2.
This is the Power PU build I’ve been playing
(Gear is what I have, not necessarily what’s ideal. I use cheap food most times because that way I don’t feel bad when I spend half an hour scouting or sneaky-capping an unguarded tower or doing anything else that isn’t constant fights.)
It’s pretty much the stickied OsiCat build. I really like mantras because a lot of WvW fights are uneven, and Mantras give you copious ways to get out of trouble thanks to stability, stun breaks, and condi clearing. PU makes ‘em easy to recast. I sometimes miss Ether Feast as a heal, but I value being able to get out from under an entire group’s burst more than I value sustained 1v1 performance.
Greatsword damage is, indeed, kinda crap without Sigil of Air. (I really wish they’d tune it up a bit, maybe?) I try to mix up shatter and phantasm style play and then lean more heavily on one or the other once I see an enemy react a certain way. I pretty much only use Sword #3 in point-blank range.
Making LA server-specific would help WvW organizing at least a moderate amount. Right now when you put out the call for people to help there’s like a 50% chance you’ll actually draw more people from the enemy servers instead (blood in the water and all that).
It might also help RP players, though really making the five home cities server-specific might do more in that regard.
Shatter Mesmer requires that your team be half of your build. Your team has to strip thieves for you and your team has to clear conditions for you. While it’s technically possible to make this work, the vast majority of teams make the decision that it’s simply easier to not bother, and bring something else that has condition removal and doesn’t melt to thieves.
My impression (second-hand) is that to make it worth it to the team you really have to get them addicted to Portals as one of the pillars of their team strategy.
So, in general, when you post about class balance, you should say something more than “I fought this guy and I lost.” Talk about why you think the mechanics of class A give it a huge advantage over class B, name some specific builds, &c.
Otherwise all you get is anecdotes and “l2p.” Because there’s nothing to really respond to.
Well, what’s your armor set actually for?
What content do you usually play and what builds do you like to run?
Your edited build needs weapons and runes and stuff.
Oh, and skills.
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