Guild Wars 2

Based on the ranks and guilds tags (yes, I said it: guild tags), there are a lot of bads in this video. Not exclusively! And I’m not complaining or trying to belittle your skill. Just best to keep that in mind.

I am, however, straight-up embarrassed for the Gold Invader thief who goes off on your clones while you’re obvious stomping their friend. How does a thief not expect a stealth-stomp there?

I think main takeaway here is that PU can definitely carry you (that duration is huuuuge given how mesmer bursts are timed), but it does, in fact, have some limitation: all you’ve really got is burst, stealth, and a teleport. It plays a lot like a thief.

Try fighting those two thieves on a power mesmer.

It’s doable but it’s not a button-mash by any stretch of the imagination.

Nieguen.6235:

We needed a buff, but we did not need to be OP as a “Hey ya I am new to pvp let’s push buttons, I kill everybody”.

Sometimes I PvP on my engie. It’s kind of a joke, really. I’m a total scrub at engie, and I play stuff like Juggernaut builds. I really do just push buttons and hope for the best.

I can kill bad mesmers pretty reliably.

Now, I “main” mesmer, I know all their tricks, &c., &c., but really what it boils down to is that bad mesmers can’t burst for crap and 90% of their survival skills are utterly irrelevant because they don’t use them right at all. And, no, it’s not the permastab: I’ve fought plenty of necros, thieves, and warriors with half a brain who could rip right through it. It’s that bad mesmers can’t capitalize on an opening, even one they made easily with CI, to save their lives. It’s like fighting a really, really bad thief.

There’s some stuff I really want to see balanced down a bit (CI, BD, PU) but all these declarations that you can literally faceroll your way through anything on a mesmer now are pretty dang comical.

And the whole “Mesmer used to take skill!” song and dance is just sad. Sad.

Pepsi.8907:

It’ll probably proc more often on evade than block… We have access to two bloc out of all of our weapon set and even then, only one is actually used as a block because of the torment it gives

You’re forgetting about all that sweet, sweet Aegis, though.

Nieguen.6235:

I think you understood my point. It was meaning “starting from”. And sorry but it was not rubbish at all pre-patch. You just needed to know what you were doing. Because one error and you were dead.
Whereas mesmer now: high reward without any skill.

A build where you need your opponent’s mistakes to really pile up to take advantage of them, whereas one of your own gets you killed, is kinda bad. It can be fun and exciting and nerve-wracking in all the best ways. But it’s also straight-up kinda bad.

More or less. DE is still really, really good for shattering.

But, like, in PvP, any phant build can also shatter. (In PvE, you have the problem of really inflated boss hp making sustained DPS more important than burst, so shattering is less desirable.)

Look at your whole toolkit.

Direct damage from attacks
Direct damage from Mind Wrack
Direct damage from interrupts via Power Block
Direct damage from phantasms
Condition damage from attacks
Condition damage from clones
Condition damage from phantasms (mostly Pistol and Torch)
Survival through stealth
CC
Sustain through condition clearing and healing
Damage mitigation through blinds, reflects, or evade frames

You can combine several of these in one build. The biggest obstacle is that direct damage and condition damage require different gear.

Shattering as much as you can requires DE. But now you’re freer to shatter some because you’ve got the amazing Illusionary Persona trait “baked in” to your shatters. So you can, e.g, start out a fight with lockdown and phantasm damage and then finish up with a Mirror Blade greatsword shatter.

Honestly, illusions are pretty trivial to grasp without even picking up mesmer:
1. They just stand there and auto-attack.
2. They usually don’t have all the buffs/status effects the caster does.
3. Their hp melts if you hit them.
4. You don’t lose target on the real mesmer unless they go into stealth, anyway.
5. If you see them all run towards you, dodge when they are close.
6. Nowadays there are no clone-death effects so don’t worry too much about blowing them up by accident; just don’t waste bursts on them thinking they are the player.

DrDivine.5378:

it’s about on the same skill level as other classes now.

Err, good?

I mean, every class should be a class worth playing, accessible to anyone who likes the general style and flow of it.

The way to show off your skill level is to win, not to play trashy stuff.

I’d like to see Blind shaved throughout the game.

Not taking it away. But reduce the duration.

A lot of Blinds are about 3 seconds now. I think changing those to 1.5-2 seconds would be better.

That still allows the use of Blind to stop attacks, kind of as a more spammable Interrupt Lite, but it doesn’t just hang there and hang there and hang there. You have to capitalize on it quicker.

I think the main impact will be to reduce the power of Blind during CC bursts. Often it’s pretty horrible when players get stunned/immobilized and blinded and the CC wears off but they’re still blind for a good 1.5 seconds. Reducing the duration might reduce some of the cheese-factor while still giving thieves, mediguards, and mesmers room to do cool stuff with skillful play.

Also make the blind-on-shatter evadable, of course.

phokus.8934:

I pretty much stopped playing my Mesmer since the update hit because there’s not a lot of challenge with it at the moment. Power/CI builds pretty much play themselves and bad players are now being shown in the light as being good. This is why people are hating on this class because before, you had to really push to be good at Mesmer and bad players were easily killed.

Now there are Mesmers who were bad and running the right build are killing people at a higher rate than before.

Short of WvW zerg frontlines, every build in this game is basically either “high burst + CC” or “immortal condi kitten.” Those are the only builds worth running.

It’s pretty comical to complain about scrubs being carried by a build when, like, literally that’s the entire game except for the lowest of the low trash tiers where people don’t even know how to set up a tolerable build. That’s what good builds just do.

I’m down for a CS nerf (reduce Power Lock daze duration to 1/2 sec, perhaps?). But some of y’all are crying like the sky is falling and mesmers are crushing everyone under their fabulously-attired feet when “cc → ded” is like half the meta.

Nieguen.6235:

basically: you are a thief attacking from 1200 range, with invuln/reflect.

Attacking at 1200 range greatly reduces your burst potential. Greatsword is ranged pressure but its real 100-to-0 burst capability is almost all melee (Mirror Blade into a shatter).

You can Blink in for the burst but then you’re sacrificing your best escape/positioning tool. It’s very much an “all-in” kind of move. Shatter Mesmers could always do it (there are some great videos!), the only thing that really changed now is Confounding Suggestions making the burst easier to stick, and trait changes allowing builds other than 4/4/0/0/6 to be playable without having rubbish damage output.

Aphrael.2478:

Ok, I guess I get that. Would have been nice if my reward had been similar to what I had been using though.

You can still change your equipment easily out of combat. Don’t feel bound to one weapon just because you don’t get a ~ button. Learning to play D/D alongside Sc/F and Staff will only help you in the long run.

JoshuaRAWR.4653:

Laraley.7695:

Imo, they’re just trying to fix the most game breaking bugs atm. You know when they fixed the guardian symbol trait and Grenadier, which was quite important. It was good that they disabled the traits before fixing them, however they can’t delete mesmers from the game temporarily and there’s no other quick solution.

Lets face it, ANet works slow and we’ll have to wait for the actual balance to take place.

That’s fair enough, but then why didn’t they do the same for Blinding dissipation?

Those other trait bugs were turned into straight-up exploits, including not just one-hit kills and massive PvE/WvW super-damage zerging opportunities.

Bugged Blinding Dissipation is pretty OP, but it’s something that shuts down counterplay, not an obvious big-boom “WTF just happened?” kind of bug in its own right. That’s why it hasn’t gotten the same extraordinary treatment, despite its pretty significant power in PvP.

Choppy.4183:

@ASP
You need to run with a better class of people for all the reasons you mention.

Permastealth — especially on a mesmer, who has access to Portals — is a perverse incentive that needs to be removed.

You can hate rat wells all day and still run ‘em because that’s what you recognize to be effective. PU is like that, right now. I wouldn’t blame anyone for employing for it or asking for it, especially on a night when you’re perpetually Outnumbered and trying to do the best with what you’ve got. It’s made for some terrible gameplay, though.

The hardest part of replicating this distribution is just Precision + Vitality.

So, consider this…
1. Do you actually need the exact stats, including really high Precision mixed with only moderate Ferocity? Or is the benefit just Zerk + some Vitality? (If you used the old-style Berserker amulet with some Vit thrown in, would your build work just as well?)
2. What if you just used food or a Perception sigil (WvW stacks kills fast) for the Precision?

I actually do think Harmonious Mantras is a legit PvP/WvW damage buff, buuuut you have to pick it over DE, which is another huge damage buff since it makes it easier to do a big shatter or double-shatter. Having the top end of dueling include multiple competing damage buffs is not a bad idea.

I hate the current PU in WvW.

I’ll tell you why I hate it.

Because people ask you to run it.

Mesmer’s at kind of a high point for interesting options you can exercise in play. But, noooo, they want you to:
1. Take the two most boring trait lines, just for PU and the torch recharge.
2. Flip your utilities into nothing but stealth right when it looks like there’s going to be a tough fight.
3. Spend half your time hiding in keeps doing a rotation instead of fighting.

I want mesmer “perma-stealth” to go away because maybe then folks will stop looking at sneaky-capping with portals as easy mode and insisting it’s the best use of a mesmer. (It should be a fun, risky thing you can do sometimes. Not a go-to strategy for every time you bust through into something you can’t capture or can’t hold.)

There are far, far better things than obscene stealth duration that can be done with PU.

robertul.3679:

Inspiration: healing mantra removes 4 condis(6 after the bug gets fixed on last cast), aoe team heal too, heal on shatter, more heal etc.

Condition play in this game is absolute garbage and you absolutely need specs that can remove them almost-kinda-as-fast as they are spammed on you, however.

No kneejerks. Good.

I can deal with the mantra thing for a few more weeks.

SourGoat.1792:

Been trying to transfer to TC for a few days now and the fullness of it is astounding and makes me want to cry and give up all hope(even with an autoclicker on).

Try it now try it now try it now right now hurry plz try it now.

::fingers crossed::

PU condi builds have become an imitation of the PU condi thief: massive stealth-camping trolls with one trick up their sleeves. I think this is, self-evidently, the wrong direction for the trait.

I think PU was pretty great in its original form before they nerfed it by adding do-nothing conditions (like Swiftness and that single Might stack) to the mix. Back then, it was part of an overall package that allowed glassy mesmers some of the durability of necros and eles thanks to high Protection uptime and a bit of Regen and Aegis.

Nowadays, I think it could do more than that, but just straight-up increases stealth duration forever wasn’t the right move. I’d have much preferred to see a reinvention of the trait to interact with illusions or teammates in some way (while still being a stealth trait that gives some buffs, ideally).

There are no armor types with two “high” stats in PvE/WvW. Instead, combine components.

Unfortunately, in your case, the simplest combos would be:
Power/precision/ferocity (Zerk) + Precision/power/vitality(?)
or
Power/precision/vitality(?) + Precision/power/ferocity (Assassin)

Those ??? are unavailable gear combos. On top of that, the availability of certain stats like Assassin and Valkyrie in ascended trinkets is limited.

I recommend you go into gw2skills.net and mess around with the stats to see how close you can bring it, perhaps using Soldier’s or Sentinel’s gear to shore up your Vitality, or relying on food/tools to make up a gap somewhere.

So far, the conditional ones only seem to encourage all-in gimmick builds, and are rife for nerfing if the gimmick is ever found to be too easy to achieve or too strong. At which point the trait in its entirety is close to straight-up useless. I think this is at odds with the overall goal of the new trait design, which is to avoid do-nothing feel-bad traits.

Menadena.7482:

If you think unlocking the (dragon that gets filtered) WP wait until you have the ‘fun’ of unlocking the less-dangerous WPs in Orr. Unless you happen to be running with a group prepare to be running all the way from zombies until you cry SAFE then do it all over again for the next time. I had to do that yesterday with a new level 80 mesmer and fortunately there was a party relatively nearby when I died before I could unlock the one WP on the far side of cursed shore that would not get me killed.

With the exception of Orr usually the first thing I do with a character when they get to the level for a map is run around getting as many WPs as possible. Then take my time getting the rest of the map and if there is a daily there I have a good chance of having the WP that is called.

Swiftness.
Leaps/teleports.
Condition clearing.
Stability and stun breaks.
Stealth.

Lots of options for getting around. You only really need them in Orr where the monsters are designed to discourage straight-up running past them.

Assic.2746:

It’s more like bunch of illusions is chasing you. You have two options:
1. Leave the illusions and get that dmg, condies and sometimes CC.
2. Kill the illusions… get dmg, condies, and CC. They will be back in “2 dodges” or 10-12s.

Do you want it or not, you will kill them accidently with your auto attack or one AoE skill…

Anet literally removed every single clone-death effect from the game two weeks ago.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

And right now, in WvW at least, this is pretty much all the mesmer is. A joke that let players with a few dozens of hours on their mesmer possibly easily triumph over players with thousands of hours on their main or that can troll entire groups forever (yeah so can thieves but how does that help it make it less annoying? I hate those thieves too).

In WvW, I can tell exactly who is an experienced mesmer (or a very experienced thief playing mesmer) and who is just trying it now. The latter absolutely get pasted by organized teams even without any way to apply Revealed(*), and die very quick in 1v1 unless they’re playing tanky PU condition builds (in which case you have to hit them a lot to kill them).

• - The game definitely does need more ways to apply Revealed, though.

I played like one match yesterday and I was a (juggernaut) engie and the opposing team had a condi-spam engie. So that means engies represent OH WAIT THIS IS NOT HOW STATISTICS WORK percent of the overall population.

I think the strongest burst shatter roaming specs right now are Dom/Duel/Chaos PU and Dom/Duel/Insp Mantras.

Illusions can work as well but in WvW I think “I need to burst more often” is less common than “I need to run away from five people” or “I need to remove 10 kitten conditions in order to not die.”

I vote we rename it to Maybe If You Put On a Zerk Amulet and Heartseeker Right into Someone’s Face You Should Expect to Get Schooled Wars 2.

Various reasons folks might rage:

• Snowball factor due to how the respawns work.
• Once a team gets any kind of lead, they can win by just turtling.
• For whatever reason, a lot of matches just end up as back-and-forths along one of the side passages.
• Even more sensitive to team comp than conquest maps since it’s a straight fight, but it’s only in the de-facto solo queue.
• Can’t actually complete half the dailies at all on this map.

I don’t hate it but I’ve literally never had a Courtyard game that was as fun as a random WvW 5-on-5 around a camp or whatever, so I really can’t say it’s a good map, either.

Kentaine.4692:

Asking for variety should not be so opposed.

Male-oriented armor needs to be at least 30% egregious codpieces. This is important.

For variety.

I dueled an actually good thief today (one of my guildmates). My conclusion is that whoever says mesmers squish thieves effortlessly is probably a pretty rubbish thief. Post-patch I roll over thieves all the time, but they’re doing stuff like Heartseekering into my face and hoping I don’t shatter; that kind of sloppy spammy play deserves to get punished hard anyway. Fighting a thief who understand control, positioning, and initiative management is still pretty tricky.

Of course, there’s room to adjust here and there (e.g. Blinding Dissipation really shouldn’t hit through block-evade). But, like, as a baseline? I’d say it’s a pretty even fight, and kinda fun if you can stand all the stealth nonsense on both sides of it

Chaos.3579:

currently you can grab restoration illusions and mental defence which is a questionable amount of passive sustain. in addition restorative illusions is kind of the most useful trait in the trait line so your not gonna grab the focus trait or the protected phantasms. which begs the question of why it was merged to be super effective with shattered conditions and then moved down a tier?

Pretty sure restorative illusions only removes 1 condition per shatter now, not 1 per clone per shatter.

From the sound of it, the things you miss out with the expansion is:

• New profession (Revenant)
• New specializations (trait lines) for each existing profession
• New PvE area

This is pretty similar to old GW1 (where each expansion gave you new classes, new skills for your old classes, and new PvE stuff — though HoT sounds like it’s going to mostly be a few zones).

If you’ve been away for a while, it’s worth dipping your feet in again right now because the June 2015 patch changes a ton of stuff related to character builds. You may find some of your old favorites play in ways that are interesting again (or you may be disappointed; but the point is you should come and see).

Fighting a mesmer has become a lot more like fighting an ele: you need to keep track of their abilities, bait their defenses, and time your bursts to take advantage of their cooldowns. I was dueling a Rampage warrior a bunch today and basically one of two things happened when he popped Rampage:
1. I was dead.
2. I kited him near-effortlessly for 20 seconds and then afterward he’d usually explode.
What made the difference? Whether he’d already forced me to pop Blink by using a regular ol’ hammer cc chain.

Alternatively, there are quite a few mesmer builds that are soft to conditions (anyone in Inspiration is very, very resilient to conditions, however). Just put a bunch of Burning/Torment/Confusion on them and gg.

gw2skills.net works now, fyi. No reason to use the temporary calculators.

Lux.6490:

Can’t seem to find a build that suits any of my old playstyles

Tell us what you want to do and maybe someone can help you. There’s plenty of stuff to work with unless you were absolutely married to condi clone death or retal.

Lux.6490:

Now it seems, more than ever, than it is all about burst damage and textbook builds.

I’ve been playing progressively more “niche” builds since I started mez last summer and I feel like mostly the game’s actually keeping up with weird preferences fairly well. Traits keep getting better and various mechanics, generally, are easier to use. I’m finding it easier to do acceptable damage without going quite all-in on either shatter or phantasm stuff.

RubberDougie.2750:

DE? IP?
Abbreviations e.e

Deceptive Evasion (clone on dodge)
Illusionary Persona (you count as an illusion when shattering)

A lot of the armor in the game actually has lines that are pretty “idealized” — trimmer waistlines and more pronounced chests (sometimes the dreaded “boobplate”) than are practical or maybe even possible in reality. Attached picture is an example: it’s obviously an attempt to depict full armor that still conveys a “feminine” figure. This is similar to the design of most of GW1’s warrior armor.

On top of that, there’s a lot of heavy armor with cutouts, bare thighs, &c., too. As well as a few “gladiator” style pieces.

What do you want, exactly? Armor that isn’t even armor by the thinnest margins? No thanks. :/

RevanCorana.8942:

Broken or OP I don’t care it needs to be fixed either way
Or it’s gona turn into Mesmer Wars 2

More so than the game’s been Guard Wars 2 in the past?

Most mesmers I’ve run into recently are total pushovers. This is mesmer-on-mesmer (sorry, only have time to actually be truly competent with one character, really) but, like, there’s a huge, easily evident skill gap. My friends playing stuff like ranger, guard, ele, engie, and necro still dunk no them regularly.

Mesmers are great fun in WvW/PvP. Slippery, dynamic, rewarding both deliberative decision-making and being quick on your feet.

In (efficiency-minded) PvE, you spend a lot of time auto-attacking and chaining skills. It’s not bad but I feel like if dungeons/Fractals are your focus, you can get a similar experience with a bit more variety playing guardian instead. I’m not sure I can recommend it over warrior, especially since it’s probably going to be way easier to find pick-up parties as a warrior.

I think warriors are dull as dishwater in WvW. Useful, but dull. Mesmer all the way there. Ditto in SPvP.

VenerateWarlock.2816:

It’s not only that build, though. The same thing happened for Mantras.

Uh, whaaaaat? Mantras and mantra traits are more potent than ever.

(Glamour builds have been dead since, like, 2013, sadly.)

Hard Ritard.8753:

I forgot to mention the large gap between the amount of Black Lion chests and keys. I have found many people with 250 chests and not enough keys to even slow that rate down. If they were more balanced, or whatever, that’d be awesome.

Black Lion Chests exist in abundance to encourage you to buy Black Lion Keys off the gem store.

So… no, they’re probably not gonna do that, no.

I would love a toggle or setting.

Because I literally want to just yell THIS ROSE HAS THORNS constantly.

Pretty sure Confounding Suggestions does, in fact, proc the daze stacks. Both it and Dazzling pop their effect on daze at the same time.

Yes. I love being able to shatter meaningfully without DE.

Though Evasive Mirror is helping me to develop all-new greedy dodge habits. :P

Correct: Illusionary Persona is rolled in now.

and

AND!

Illusionary Elasticity is rolled in!

It’s pretty sweet.

Storm.1653:

dodging for another clone does not help that much?? really?? not nearly as big of damage gap?? really?? i don’t give a kitten if they buffed the heck out of some trait to make you feel better about it in the short term. nerf will happen and you will be in the same position , with a kitten choice in that line PERIOD! sugar coat it all you want (anet employee of the month??) is bunk , end of story

This is really stupid.

Your argument is literally “Sometime in the indeterminate future, the devs will overnerf mesmers all over in this specific way I made up, and then I will be right and you will be wrong.”

Try it. Go and try it and see how it works now. Try these things. Takes five minutes of messing around with golems or the NPC dorks in the lobby or whatever:
1. (With DE) Point-blank Mirror Blade, dodge, shatter immediately.
1.b. As above, but throw in a Mind Stab as well. Note how long it takes to do the “full” combo — effective bursting is about compressing time, not just big damage.
2. (With HM instead) Single-clone shatter off a point-blank Mirror Blade, followed by Mind Stab (spam it some so it activates quickly).
2.b. As above, but with Mantra Strength stacks.

~

Also, you’re complaining about having to make an actual choice with serious trade-offs involved for a change…

… While, at the same time, crying about how the new setup is dumb and easy and designed for people who hate making interesting choices.

Make up your mind?

Dom/Duel/Insp with Greatsword and interrupts is amazing. Pure zerk or close to it, of course.