Guild Wars 2

I play 0/6/6/2/0 with Mender’s Purity and Harmonious Mantras. Because I’m addicted to Mantra of Concentration and having 3 charges of it per cast makes it actually worthwhile.

Dawdler.8521:

As ironic as it sounds, all offensive power builds basicly rely on confusion to win. That and quick manouvering.

Err, do you mean bleeding from Sharper Images?

Is it condi PU bunkers? The thing with condi PU is that if you have good cleansing and you can stand on the point, you can steal it from them, and sometimes even cap it, while you’re still dueling. They have good sustained output, but far less ability to do a real proactive condi-burst than a necro does; instead they’re relying on you screwing yourself on their blocks and clone death.

moonreft.2138:

Thief dead in 8 secs. Non-pu build only stealth is elite. Yes it was luck and some skill. I think I hit a total of 5 buttons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HzmEj5k7Kk

lol yes I counted all 5 clicks with a mouse mind you because I was lazy at the time and ready for bed.

So,
1. That video is hilarious.
2. That thief suuuuucks.
3. What does your build do outside of blocking and some confusion stacks? Like, imagine you get into a 5-on-5 at a camp: how do you contribute to the team?

Don’t be afraid to tag up. In most circumstances, any tag on map is better than no tag. You may not necessarily get followers if it’s a slow time — I once spent four hours as part of a zerg of 4 whole people, helping a commander defend home BL during slump time, heh.

Generally speaking, you should get on VoIP (for Tarnished Coast, it’s Mumble). If you haven’t been using your server’s VoIP at all, getting on it is a great way to learn from other commanders and to build relationships with WvW regulars. It’s not a big deal if you’re just taking objectives on the map, but it’s critical if you’re really going to be “driving” as opposed to just being a rally point and hoping your side can overwhelm/outplay theirs. Participating in the server’s online community (for Tarnished Coast, it’s forthetoast.com) is another good way to establish a bit of cred.

And join a WvW guild, of course. Many are full of friendly people who will coach you a bit and follow you around while you learn without complaining. A lot of them don’t require 100% rep or anything.

One thing you might want to try is playing “aide-de-camp” to a commander. Basically attach yourself to a mentor and take some of the minutiae and strategic stuff off their hands. Handle siege placement when they call it, watch the map timers in another window, relay their voice commands into map chat, manage scouting reports, &c. It’ll give you a chance to get used to the logistics without having to sweat the ZvZ side of it at the same time. (Or do the opposite and get a friend to play “aide-de-camp” while you tag up get used to decision-making and driving.)

Eldrad Ulthran.9360:

there is no such thing as a weak class in gw2.

Err, ranger?

How well does it hold up against other bunker builds, like defense-built guardians or engineers turreting up a waypoint?

Cynz.9437:

trust me, you are not losing fights because of thief steal

Well, as I said in the first post, you’re mostly losing them because you can’t even activate most of your skills at all without a target.

(Or you can be King of Hotjoin with Condi PU.)

PU condi mesmer (like Blackwater or Napalm Cat) is a good build overall, but it has some limitations:

• Takes a while to kill anyone who doesn’t trigger blocks or cleave the clones. (You can condi burst but it’s not as big as a necro’s, in my experience.)
• Can’t really chase, unless the enemy is pretty slow and you’ve got a lot of practice with staff ports.
• Isn’t really any better at soloing camps than any other decent roaming build.
• Is middling at best in team fights.
• Has slow low-damage projectiles and a single 30-second area effect field in ZvZ (vastly inferior to ele).
• Sucks at killing siege and area denial in sieges.

Imagine a bunker guardian standing out near south camp sentry challenging people to fights, and winning most of them: is that the best “roaming” build? That’s kinda Condi PU in a nutshell.

People say mesmer is a class with serious problems (I wouldn’t say “bad” per se) because:

• The core class mechanic is summoning illusions, but like half of them are bugged (Warden, Illusionary Leap), designed to fail (Illusionary Leap again), or do nothing of substance (Mage).
• A lot of damage comes from phantasms, which just die instantly in large-group fights.
• The class has very little area-effect damage, on the whole. This greatly diminishes its value in ZvZ. (You’ve still got Veil, so you’ll never be useless.)
• Track record of big nerfs. Like the big confusion nerf (followed by introducing Perplexity runes, which actually make other classes better at confusion anyway). Or the change to glamours that basically made the mesmer’s biggest ZvZ function utterly dead.

Iavra.8510:

WvW’ers need to do dungeons (or sPvP) and map completion for their legendaries, so that’s only fair.

Heck, you’ve gotta run PvE stuff just to pay for Lemongrass. >.>

You start with low armor and medium health, which points to Toughness as the stat you need more.

Also, mesmers don’t really overheal. So having a lot of Vitality gives you a buffer against condition damage, sure, but it’s kind of a once-per-fight thing. In my experience, you still need condition clearing to survive.

Also, you can, indeed, get a lot of Vitality from guard stacks.

(I run 5/6 Knight and a Soldier chestpiece. ~2.2k armor (~2.5k if traiting Chaos), ~17.5k hp when the rest of your gear is zerk. Not the most durable in the world but you can survive a lot of bursts that kill full glass.)

Cynz.9437:

Are people seriously asking for consume plasma nerf? /facepalm

Just in case, you know you can interrupt thief while he is casting it, right?

It’s a self-buff that doesn’t break stealth. You use it when you’re moving for position anyway, not when you’re visible/Revealed.

Michaeas Magister.1589:

Thieves are basically designed to 100-0 anyone in just a few seconds (often times less) and they are designed to do it well.

My main concern isn’t so much the burst, it’s that there’s scarcely any reward for answering it correctly.

Like, the other classes can generally punish a thief for screwing up. Not just the tanky builds who can take the hits but also glassy builds who can counter-burst if they don’t let the thief catch them with their pants down. Mesmer? I dunno, kinda sorta, with the right semi-useless bunker build?

Some pretty high-ranked players say that one of the main thing holding mesmers back is that they’re very weak to thieves, and you basically need someone else on your team to peel for you constantly in team PvP.

Ditto, just anecdotally speaking, thieves seem to be a pretty big source of frustration in WvW roaming and small groups. I mean, thieves are a common source of frustration for everyone in roaming and small groups, because stealth is a mechanic that mostly involves dealing with crappy UI (and mesmers get stealth, too, after all)… but, like, way WAY beyond that, everything about the thief seems designed to turn mesmers into a trash class:

• Mesmers rely very heavily on targeting skills. Even some of their area damage abilities, like Illusionary Berserker and Mind Wrack, are target-based. Basically when an enemy goes into stealth, all you’ve got to work with is Mind Stab (tiny area effect, roots you during animation), Illusory Wave (long cooldown; might keep them off you for a sec, never gonna kill them), Chaos Storm (long cooldown), and sword autoattacks (disappointing damage for a melee weapon; prepare to get hit back a lot harder than you hit them, light-armor-wearer trying to melee a thief).
• Dumb illusions standing around make C&D trivial.
• Phantasm attacks are very predictable, and thieves have copious evasion to mitigate them.
• Consume Plasma (complete with undocumented Stability!) is a massive slap in the face on top of everything else. Even boon-stripping is near useless because they’re so stacked. I recognize that several stolen skills are set up to be pretty powerful counters to the class they’re stolen from, but some of the other strong ones (Ice Shard, Head Crack) are at least kinda hard to land. Consume Plasma all but guarantees a halfway decent thief running nearly any build can out-attrition a mesmer even if they screw up their burst repeatedly.

Now, on the bright side:

• Illusions do a decent job reacquiring their targets as soon as they come out of stealth.
• Hey, Phase Retreat is good.
• If you take OH Sword or Scepter you get a couple of blocks.

But, well, this really doesn’t address the fact that most of your abilities regardless of weapon set or trait assignment are going to be trash, because it’s the core mechanics of the class that screw you over.

This is rather sad. I can’t think of a single other dynamic that’s so stacked in favor of one class against another. And it’s not just a 1v1 problem. It’s one of the biggest team-play weaknesses of an already troubled and overnerfed class. Why does it work this way? Is this really an intentional design?

OsiCat’s builds (stickied thread) tend to be pretty well-adjusted for solo stuff. They’re a good starting point, at least.

Agent Noun.7350:

The Mesmer is a fantastically cool profession. My Mesmer was the first character I made in the first minutes of headstart, and he’s still my most-played character. And even though I tend to feel like I’m playing a profession whose abilities are essentially fragile clones of other professions’ skills, I’ll probably keep maining Mesmer. But kitten if I don’t feel sad about all that missed potential.

In short, the Mesmer is an excellent profession for an entirely different game.

I think you’re exactly right.

The class is full of potential but you have to work against most of the game’s mechanics to do your basic job.

Agent Noun.7350:

Anyone remember the Mesmer’s trajectory in GW1? Especially in PvE, Mesmers weren’t particularly desirable, but by the end they were damage-dealing gods.

IIRC, that was almost entirely because of a single special PvE-only skill. (To be fair, a lot of builds were held together by a PvE-only skill.)

Honestly I like the GW2 mesmer more. GW1’s mesmer was a cool ideal, all hexes and interrupts, but when I played the game I much preferred necros and rangers for the same stuff. GW2’s mesmer does some unique things, some really cool things, even some borderline-broken things. It’s a fun class to play. Just… very bug-ridden and kinda inconsistent in its design. I miss both GW1’s hexes and its awesome interrupt gameplay, but not on account of the mesmer, really.

Conncept.7638:

And then of course there is still the giant plothole that they were not ever mentioned in the destiny’s edge series. Which takes place only a few years before the start of the game. And there were two asura as main characters!

Never expect a tie-in novel to a video game to actually accurately reflect the video game. It’s just not how these things work, usually.

The bottom line is this.
They can nerf your Chaos Armor. They can nerf your confusion glamours. They can break your Warden. They can nerf your iLeap. They can give you a new GM trait that is beyond garbage, a total triumph of uselessness even amongst the traits that nobody ever takes. They can crank out new content that completely invalidates half your abilities.

But you’re still the prettiest, and will be forever.

Riku.4821:

GW1 was fun and that had no waypoints, But dying would cause much frustration.

Well, you did have the ability to fast-travel to any town or outpost you’ve been to.

And you had res shrines which would automatically res you at the nearest shrine after you died in the exploration areas. Which is a lot how people use waypoints when they’re just map-completing anyway.

Avoiding PU on principle is silly.

There’s nothing dirty about a light-armor class using Protection (there’s not even anything dirty about a Guardian running Protection, really).
There’s nothing dirty about the most misdirection-oriented class in the game using stealth — the only real form of misdirection available to you (clones will never fool a good player).
There’s nothing dirty about the capstone ability of a trait line that’s all about boons and Toughness actually helping you actually survive a fight.

People whine about every single ability that doesn’t suck. It’s just that mesmers have only a few abilities that don’t suck.

So, seriously, use PU whenever it makes sense to do so. Don’t cripple yourself arbitarily.

EDIT: I wrote “Guard___ using Protection” initially and it changed it to “Guardikittening Protection.” This site is the best!

A mix of Rabid and Dire is used by a number of condition builds. Basically any condi build that puts points into the Dueling line wants Precision to take advantage of the pretty nifty Vigor-on-crit and Bleed-on-clone-crit minor traits.

Rampager’s is in an awkward spot because you miss out on defense altogether by taking it. One of the big selling points of condi builds is that you can take Condition Damage and then take two tanky stats for secondaries (or 1.5 tanky stats, if you’re doing the Rabid/Dire split thing as suggested above); Rampager’s doesn’t let you do that. The moderate amount of Power you gain from the set really isn’t that great, especially without Ferocity to make your crits count.

Mesmer is a fun class to play. You get some really fun tricks in your toolbox. It’s fun to Portal a group into a keep. It’s fun to fake people out with stealth and teleports. It’s fun to watch PvE mobs melt under reflect. I love the flow of the class and the options it presents you. I think the class gives you a lot of room to “play smarter” than your opponent, while rewarding patience more than it rewards twitchiness. (It’s also fun to be all purple butterfiles and laser beams. Have you heard the sound that shatter makes? It’s a really satisfying sound. Even if someone beats you they’ll never look half as cool doing it.)

Mesmer is also a vexing class to play. You have a ton of quirks to learn. And they’re not really good quirks, like when you find out that Spectral Walk is way more crazy powerful than it looks at first glance. They’re quirks like “sometimes you skill just doesn’t work.” It also feels like you really have to scrounge around to find builds that are remotely useful. Because your base damage is pretty low, because Anet really doesn’t want your interrupts to be too strong, because you pretty much can’t expect balance changes other than “we nerfed a thing,” because it seems like the designers pretty much view mesmer as a niche class so it’s not a big deal that your options are limited in ZvZ or you’re thief food in SPvP.

The stuff in the stickied OsiCat thread still works.

Lodius.5392:

1) We used to be able to farm Orr for a while to get drops (but no… let’s slap the community with DR)

Err, without DR, there’d be more gold in the economy and it’s just as likely that legendaries/precursors would become even more expensive.

Lodius.5392:

3) Fine… I’ll do dungeon runs over and over for farming… (Don’t think so… let’s remove that aspect from the game as well… once a day only)

You can still run dungeons. Just can’t loop one easy path the whole day for good rewards.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

ASP,
what if, in the future, all profession have equal access to a large choice of mainhand and offhand weapon skills?

It still doesn’t solve the problem of “why can I juggle my weapons around when I’m using two one-hands but I’m stuck with these specific 5 skills when using a two-handed weapon?”

I don’t consider the burst skills to be a problem. I mean, how’s this different from what a thief can do? (Except, you know, telegraphed. So more like a mesmer’s traited shatters.)

It’s not that it’s overpowered, it’s that your proposal is clunky, applies very unevenly across professions and even across different specs within the same profession, and does weird things to the allocation of skills and cooldowns across builds without any coherent reasoning about why you’d want to incentivize running dual weapons like this behind it.

If you want to run Axe/Mace and Mace/Axe, just Axe/Mace + Mace/Axe, maybe?

I play on a laptop, so I don’t have easy F keys or lots of mouse buttons. Which is fine because reaching for the F keys on almost any keyboard kinda sucks anyway.

WASD+QE to move: I like having both strafe and turn; I think I may have flipped them from the defaults, I forget
F to Use stuff
G to look behind: I find that having a “look behind” button is even more important than having a “turn around” button
B to turn around

12345 for weapon skills
V to heal
ZXC for utilities: I usually favor ground-targetable skills (like Blink and Shadowstep) in the Z slot
0 for my elite: there’s probably a better place for it but honestly it hasn’t mattered yet; I might just make it 6
T, Shift+ZXC for class abilities (shatter)

Space to dodge: very easy to hit with your thumb while moving and managing other abilities; who cares about jumping?
Alt (either side) to jump

Bare minimum target mod keys: turn everything you might want to see on permanently so you never have to hold down Ctrl to see names or whatever
Tab for next target
Shift+Tab for prev target
R to take target
Shift+R to call target

Shift to talk in VoIP

(Ed.: moved Autorun to free up some space)

So these are separable suggestions, right? Like you could just implement the ban list without the vote list, or vice versa?

“Other two guaranteed instead” as in “You have to do one more fractal than normal?”

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

Just curious, how well do you guys feel about vitality vs toughness in PU? With standard PU builds you can usually maintain amazingly long duration of protection (lol) but with 2 utilities in stealth you have one slot left for condition cleansing. Thus require certain amount of hp to tank through conditions.

About the weapon choices, torch is great for continuous stealth but pistol certainly deal better damage/cc. Why not both though?

Well, if you’re running torch, you don’t need to fill up your utilities with stealth. I run torch and I never take both Veil and Decoy. (I run Decoy for small-group stuff and Veil for big-group stuff.)

Also, the best personal condition clear is Mantra of Recovery with Mender’s Purity, which will also free up a utility slot for other stuff. (Null Field is arguably a better skill overall, on account of its group utility and multi-purpose nature.)

Torch 5 is total garbage and I can understand why people want to run Pistol (or Focus, or OH Sword) instead, but I feel like trading The Prestige for Veil is a bad idea. You can do cool stuff with Veil but its cooldown is three times as long, so it’s not a meaningful substitute.

Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t ditch Torch if you think Torch sucks, but I think mesmer utility skill slots are more valuable than weapon skill slots, so I’d rather just cut one of my stealth skills entirely than sacrifice a utility slot just to run a phantasm, especially one that’s semi-traited at best.

I like Knight more than Soldier for mesmers. Because our base health isn’t bad, but our armor is pretty low and we don’t have, like, a ton of healing so a bit of damage mitigation goes a long way. Don’t go too hard into Knight’s gear or you’ll start to see a precipitous DPS drop, though.

Right now, in WvW, I’m running full Zerk weapons and trinkets (well, Cav back piece because I’m cheap) and 5/6 Knight armor with a Soldier chestpiece. I’m pretty happy with it so far.

eye floater.7140:

Vayne.8563:

I’m not even sure most of us can agree that the game gets stale when you’ve hit 80 for a while.

It does.

Not as stale as it is while you’re leveling.

At least at 80 you can actually do things with traits, you know?

About that budget… Do you have alternative currencies like karma, laurels, and WvW tokens? Some armor sets and trinkets are very easy on the virtual wallet if you use these alternative methods to attain them. See equipment acquisition by stats on the wiki

(Only real downside of karma or WvW token armor is that you can’t salvage it. So it’s kind of a bad choice if you want to put super pricey runes in it.)

I imagine the logic is that anyone going that deep into the Healing/Vitality line will want to keep up their DPS somehow.

If you’re speccing into defensive traits it’s likely you’re more interested in sustained pressure than pure burst damage, so giving you that extra DPS in the form of a phantasm buff isn’t unreasonable.

WhiteRose.6934:

Everyone runs PU because they can’t play mesmer without using a build that carries them.

So what you’re saying is that a good build inherently makes the game easier than a bad one? I am shocked and appalled.

You should maybe be more specific?

Blix.8021:

Not really. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to stealth + blink or berserker stance + rush

Doesn’t take a lot of skill for half a dozen people to spam immob on one guy and jump on their corpse either. Tit for tat, you know?

racta.4250:

Fun is the right answer. WvW is a lot about objectives, but its also fun to fight people. Laying an ambush and engaging enemies means nothing when they can just run away. Or you can chase them for 10 minutes until they find a keep or a zerg makes you run away.

I agree that it’s fun to fight people. It’s fun to stomp them, too! If someone runs away when they’re about to die, I don’t get to enjoy stomping them, but, well, whatever, it’s not like I didn’t get to enjoy the fight.

Some classes are really good at escaping, but I really wouldn’t say anybody gets a magic button that’ll consistently save their kitten .

The ability to run away also helps you avoid “unfair” fights, which are all over WvW. Don’t tell me you don’t feel good when you get away from six people all trying to gank you.

Bo Van Swill.7619:

Oh why do all mesmer’s want to go PU

Because it gives you a lot of access to Protection, and Protection is pretty awesome. The Aegis and Regen aren’t half bad, either (though in my experience Regen is mostly great because it’s giving you more Protection). Light-armor classes going for some degree of death-by-attrition rather than just burst all the time benefit greatly from something like that.

Bo Van Swill.7619:

if i do and win i get messages like oh a PU mesmer how original well

Shrug. People cry about all sorts of things. Many don’t understand what PU is beyond just “a mesmer who can use stealth” or “a mesmer that doesn’t die immediately when I try to burst them.” Same as people thinking they’re fighting a condition build just because they end up with some bleeds or burns on them, or people acting like warriors are flat-out immune to CC.

Blix.8021:

At least in pvp you get the satisfaction of “well, I get to keep this point for my team,” in wvw you get nothing.

You get to cap BL bloodlust for your team. You get a camp. You get a tower. You get to kill a dolyak and that delays their garrison waypoint for a few more minutes. Heck, maybe all you get is the ability to stay there and scout the thing you wanted to scout.

The map is covered in objectives, many of which only require a small group to take. If you’re fighting for nothing in the middle of nowhere, well, why are you doing that?

Blix.8021:

It just makes fighting people less fun when you have spend half your time chasing.

Well, in fairness, you don’t have to chase them.

Sometimes it’s important to kill someone because you really need to keep a dolyak path clear for a while, or when the fight you just had was pretty perilous and you’re worried they’ll just keep resetting and attacking you over and over again until they get lucky (HI THIEVES!), but there’s lots of other times when you can just shrug your shoulders and let them go. Maybe do some half-hearted chasing to put some fear into ’em so they run further.

Try talking to the Battle Historian NPC. Easiest place to find him is your home base in an enemy Borderlands (they have one everywhere, but home BL citadel is a big place).

Maskaganda.2043:

as for myself, I’d rather lose fights a thousand times while heavily outmanned but having fun and getting a challenge than going around breaking down undefended keep doors in groups of 30+ with no opposition in sight.

… Do you play on a server where zergs don’t routinely fight the other side’s zergs? (EotM? Off-hours on a tier-3 server?)

Zergs fight zergs. Hammer trains collide head-on or try to split each other in half. People try to time their fields and boon strips to turn the tide. Periphery guys try to snipe overextended backliners. Big fights are fun!

Sometimes ZvZ fights are decided quickly by a single good push and sometimes there’s a pretty delicate back-and-forth; sometimes it’s all tactics and sometimes the number differential is too much and, well, you just do what you can. Just like roaming and havoc fights.

In the situation you’re describing, taking the tag off the map is counterproductive. You want to know the troll is there so you can alert other people to the fact that they shouldn’t follow him.

I imagine that instead of complaining about a 20 vs 40, people will be complaining about how their side is 75% uplevels while the other side is only 50% uplevels.

Honestly, I’ve been in maps where the enemy ktrain blob thing was a lot bigger than ours, and it only mattered maybe once every 30-45 minutes or so. There’s the potential for a morale problem if the commander doesn’t manage the situation, but it really isn’t ruinous to how people normally play the game.

Jim Hunter.6821:

The biggest problem is how often the opening strike is completely negated by passive traits or aegis. You have all these traits dedicated to something that barely works half the time.

Good point. How ’bout “your attack is unblockable?”

You could also have it reset after a few seconds of not attacking. Basically helps ranger keep their overall DPS up while evading, chasing, or using stealth without changing their overall output when they’re just constantly attacking a single target.

The information is already available but very difficult to access (#1 skill changeover, random garbage in that combat-log tab everyone keeps disabled). I see no reason not to make it easier to access. Because fighting against your own UI is stupid, and stealth already inflicts way too much of that on opponents.

So, yes, I agree that this would be a reasonable change.

GW1 had a “last in / first out” system for conditions, hexes, and enchantments. So you could Cripple someone and then cover it with Poison, for instance, forcing them to remove Poison before they got the Crippled. It made both application and removal predictable but gave you some reward for correct execution.

GW2 has too many conditions and boons flying around as incidental riders to a skill to make that work, I think.