Guild Wars 2

I’m probably the oddball here. I use both wasd and mouse controls. Mouse control is mostly for open-world travel but when I enter battle, I switch without even thinking about it. I find tab-targeting to be useless in this game so I move with wasd while selecting a new target with the mouse. I’ve changed “a” and “d” to strafes. The “q” and “e” activate skill 6 and 7, respectively. Skill 8 and 9 are used by my mouse buttons 3 and 4. I trigger my elite by clicking on the mouse scrollwheel. Manually targeting reticules with the mouse is a lot easier too. if I get knocked back, I can highlight the area near my opponent and cast blink in about a second. Sometimes I can blink before my toon has completely settled from the knockback.

I was going for Sunrise but when I switched builds, I had little to no need for a greatsword. Since then I’ve bought an Asuran Peacemaker Staff, made the Anomaly and just crafted the Ignis Fatuus last night. I could see that the hand positioning was wrong by the preview but I’m highly disappointed that it doesn’t glow. These weapons will do for now until (hopefully) a mesmer-ish 1hand lightsaber is implemented and I finally find a trident that makes me wet myself. Or they finally allow recoloring weapons, at which point I will disturbingly giggle while buying every class-appropriate weapon from the Durmund Priory.

To answer your question, no I’m not going for any legendaries. This is mostly because I want to backhand the kitten out of the kitten that keeps thinking RNG is a great game feature.

Leveling is pretty much going to suck until you get to at least 40 and unlock master traits. In general, I suggest finding someone to level with to alleviate a lot of the frustration.

Toughness isn’t the only factor in aggro. Distance, shields, vitality and perhaps several other stats that we don’t even know about get taken into account. on top of that, some bosses have their own aggro AI. They may have targeted you simply because you are a necromancer.

But I do agree with one point. Aggro should be made clear so we can take advantage of it. Without a deep understanding, we’re just running around spamming abilities. We may counter one or two massive strikes but we’re cooperating less as a team.

There is one upside to this. T3 and T4 mats can be farmed for decent returns.

Dawdler.8521:

Aberrant.6749:

I’ve also noticed that human females in revealing clothing get targeted more vs. conservatively dressed ones.

… still totaly worth it.

Agreed!

More weapon options would be great but there’s already a waiting list. I’m certain mainhand pistol will be first. I’m hoping a whip or shortbow will follow. After that, we can consider daggers.

I do agree on nerfing some aspects of confusion. Dodging while confused shouldn’t cause any damage, regardless of traits. In fact, all players should be completely invulnerable while dodging as that the whole point of it. Healing shouldn’t trigger it either unless the heal triggers an attack.

There’s also an event where an npc calls for you to help. When you talk to them and follow, you’re lead into a bandit trap. I actually prefer such events as they shake things up.

I agree with the above. Grenth is the only one I would prefer to have a handful of players do and that’s only because it requires a level of skill, awareness, cooperation and strategy. Announcing it attracts way too many “zerg minded” players that die from aoes and/or pull mobs towards Jonez. The ones that die stay and beg for rezzing instead of respawning which just makes the add numbers stay high. Things always get out of hand and the few skilled players left standing can’t guard/heal the npc while clearing mobs and dpsing the priest so it eventually fails. I find it’s a lot better to make the call to arms after the priest is dead. That’s when you want zerg noobs to do what they do best: mindlessly kill everything that moves.

Yes, the player base is actually growing. The reason you see fewer people is because the initial level rush is over and now players gravitate towards where they want to be. You don’t have to take my word for it either. Just do a dragon champion event on any server and you’ll see how many people are still playing. And those are just the ones interested in pve.

Though this is farming in every literal sense, there are rare nodes which spawn every 24 hours that will net you some nice profits. Cursed Shore and Malchor’s Leap generally have 5 orichalcum nodes, 5 ancient wood nodes and 5 omnomberry nodes each. Frostgorge Sound and Southsun Cove usually have 3 orichalcum nodes and 3 ancient wood nodes. Their positions vary on every server and they are moved around after every weekly maintenance update. The only exception is one ori node in Southsun that never moves but it’s guarded by a champion karka.

You could hunt these down yourself or you could go to http://orrmaps.com and get their general locations easily. They aren’t always correct but I find them accurate around 80 to 90% of the time.

When I use to do daily node runs it took about 30 minutes to cover all 4 maps. I found that wood and berries were fairly easy to get but there would always be that one ori node that Anet had to put in the most kittenish place possible. On Cursed Shore, one of their favorite spots is near the meta event for the temple of Grenth. You have to get past a lot of enemies that love to stun, daze, cripple and use knockback.

Now that you can guest on other servers, it is possible to do 3 runs daily. I will discourage you from doing so very often as Anet has made it clear they didn’t like players abusing the overflow servers so I’m fairly certain they will frown on exploiting guesting as well. They basically said they’ll frown but turn a blind eye to it unless it gets out of hand.

I will note that Rabid mesmers can be VERY annoying in WvW. Their stupidly high toughness and all the evasive powers the staff and utilities bring make bursting them down a lesson in futility. They will simply dance around you while their clones wittle you down. I have seen some take on 5 to 7 opponents at once and have them all struggling to stay alive. I’ve even gone toe-to-toe with a great one for about 4 minutes. The only reason I was victorious was because we were locked in a stalemate until an ally came to help me. Even then, it took 2 more minutes to kill him and he managed to down one of our catapults in the process.

Actually nerfing top builds can be a very bad idea. It always comes with physiological blows to anyone that is using the build. It is especially brutal towards anyone whom worked hard to gather the components for the “flavor of the month” and just completed it all shortly before the nerf hit.

I can’t give you an exact number or percentage but I can say there are a lot of people that seek the, “strongest build available.” You don’t have t take my word for it. Just watch the profession forums and eventually someone will ask, “hey, what’s the best build for this class?” If the present ‘best build’ is always getting nerfed then, after a few rotations, those that seek it will quit the game and they will take all potential profits with them. What’s worse is their outlook of the game will be negative so any word-of-mouth they spread will discourage newcomers. If taken to the logical conclusion, all builds will eventually be homogenized variants of each other, which will make for very poor gameplay.

Oh the other hand, boosting sub-optimal builds encourages diversity. Eventually one of them will come to the forefront and may even be the new “flavor of the month.” When individual skills are buffed, they may find new meaning in other builds and can even promote new builds to emerge. The only downside I can see is a minor tweak may expose or create an exploit but nerfing a new variable quickly is better for the overall health of the players then nerfing something that was considered constant for a long time. Portal is the perfect example of this. When the game first began, it was a remarkable skill and so many mesmers ran it in their build religiously. Now it’s been nerfed so many times that I’ve only seen it used for portal bombing, jumping puzzles and getting past the flaming boulders in CoF1. It has a time limitation, a ridiculously long cooldown, a passenger limit and a range limit. The last time I saw anyone use it in combat was myself when I was toying with a melee champion. It barely gives a mesmer any personal benefit. It’s their team and allies that really benefit and there are people still crying for it to be nerfed more.

I don’t envy the devs that are trying to find balance in this mess but I do actively encourage them to consider buffing weak builds before nerfing strong ones. We need more optimal diversity, not less.

Mesmers have been nerfed in almost every update. Even the first patch of the year nerfed mesmers while it didn’t touch any other class.

I think it’s more like, “hiding in plain site.” Sure you see them around a lot but you don’t know what they’re up to when you don’t see them.

One thing you have to remember is that Kryta is the last great human city. The dragons, centaurs and charr have pretty much driven all the humans into one spot. I imagine many humans have died over the past 250 years due to all the conflicts. Those that survived would be more likely to seek comfort in any other humans remaining, even if they are of different ethnicity. Interracial coupling is bound to happen and it would only take 2 generations for skintones to homogenize.

If you really want to follow racial heritage, it may be better to go by skull type but even then, you’d have to keep in mind that Africans have all three (caucasoid, mongoloid and kittenid). I’m not even sure how that would translate into the races in GW2.

I should point out that clones can be traited to do damage. Use a staff, get the Sharper Images trait (15 in Illusions) and load yourself up with precision and condition damage. I’m still not sure how but with rampager gear (power/precision/condition damage) this somehow allows me to kill enemies faster with a staff than with sword/focus.

At first I was going to main an elementalist because I wanted to be a ranged, healing/support class but Anet did away with that. Ele was as close as I was ever going to get. Then I saw a mesmer auto-attack with a greatsword and had a nerdgasm.

The reason I stuck with a mesmer is because I like cute things, I have an itch to be more flamboyant and, underneath my sweet exterior, I’m a sadistic kitten! This class lets me be all those things! The only thing that would make it more awesome is if I could use the Dreamer. When that day comes, I’ll have a very hard time deciding if I should give up my staff or sword/focus.

What I find sad about this entire thread is how many of you are placing speed over fun. I’d rather run this with a suboptimal pug that’s easy-going than with OCD speedrunners that obsess over every second.

Actually I have a solution that’s even easier. Change the way Defiant works. The more critical hits and raw damage a boss takes in a short period of time, the more power they gain. Eventually they should get to the point of one-hit KOs.

The balance of this would using conditions and condition damage to lower Defiant to the point where bosses become Vigilant. In this state, they are more susceptible to conditions and condition damage but gain toughness.

This will allow players to decide if they want to try killing a boss before it kills them or go for the more slow and controlled route. Better yet, some may try to keep the boss in balance to maximize all types of damage while keeping the risk relatively low.

Here’s a far less cynical and far more useful reply. Create a thief and level them up to 80. Read the build threads on the thief forums so you can figure out which was used against you. Use it until you are familiar with its mechanics and the timing of the cooldowns. Figure out its weakness or ask people on the thief forums what their general weaknesses are. You’d be quite surprised how many are willing to tell you and how much they are willing to tell simply because they want to fight more experienced opponents.

Once you’ve done all of that, go back to your mesmer and put all that knowledge to good use. If you do, the next time a thief decides to attack you, you can make sure he has a very bad day.

I hope you guys understand that mesmers aren’t bypassing anything. Portals don’t have a targeting reticule. Both the entrance and exit can only be opened on the spot that the mesmer is standing. That means at least one mesmer went through the entire jumping puzzle the hard way.

Now consider this. Mesmers don’t have a passive speed boost signet or any jumping skills from weapons. In fact, the only reliable speed boost they have is Temporal Curtain, which will NOT stack swiftness over any other speed boost! On top of that, there are only a handful of spots where Blink will move mesmers to a spot they can’t normally reach by jumping. This means mesmers generally have a harder time getting though jumping puzzles than every other class. Portals cannot and will NEVER help mesmers progress forward! The best they can do is place them back at a point they were previously and that’s only if the entrance portal was dropped ahead of time AND still active AND still within range! To make matters worse, Portal has even more limitations than that! Don’t even get me started on the transfer limit and ridiculously long cooldown!

In this respect, portals in jumping puzzles will benefit a mesmer’s allies more than it will ever benefit the mesmer that created it. Think about that! The ability all you guys are crying over is more beneficial to YOU than the class that has it! Even with that, Anet, in all their infinite wisdom, still nerfed portal to hell and back! Now jumping puzzles and base bombing are pretty much all it’s good for and you guys want it nerfed MORE?!

I don’t know about you but many of my battles have come down to split second decisions. Having weapon skills available more often gives me more options.

Screw weapons! I want martial arts! The avatar series already shows how it can be done!

You know those annoying crystal cages Subject Alpha and The Shatterer put you in? Guess what gets you out of them instantly.

fishergrip.4082:

Yes you are, mainly because confusion is op.

Confusion can easily be mitigated by not attacking. While it is on you, you can still use powers that don’t do damage. Name one other condition that is just as easily avoided.

In pve, yes if you are planning on fighting lots of silver mobs, vets and champions. In pvp, not so much as only amateurs don’t cleanse conditions often.

As far as I know, phantoms don’t benefit from sigils. They do benefit from some base stats though. I know power, precision, vitality and condition damage for certain. I don’t think they inherit toughness but I’m not sure.

As everyone else stated, early on they are crap. You can get Illusionists Celerity (5 points in Illusions) at level 15 and that lets you crank them out faster. At level 40 you can get Deceptive Evasion (20 in dueling) which pretty much takes care of the problem. At that point you’ll be spamming clones so much that you won’t care if they die.

I can personally guarantee you that they are adequate distractions in pve. Earlier today I was taking on 2 Veteran Flaming Effigies and about 11 common mobs at the same time yet was holding my own. I would have won that fight too but I was just wasting time until my team started a CoF run. Later on I took out a Champion Ascalonian Ghost and at least 25 mobs. I even screwed up and pulled him too far which restarted the fight so I had to widdle him down all over again. The only hits he ever got on me was near the end when I decided to melee.

Mesmers are painful to level but if you stick with it, you will soon become godly.

When the game first started, I had gone through about 70 chests and got crap out of them. Now I have over 200 chests and about 37 keys and could care less about them. I don’t care what Anet puts in them. The chances of getting something good are so low that they are worthless.

You’ll have to explain to me how a mantra build is great as I’ve only seen one mantra casted at the beginning of the video. The rest of the time I see stuff that can easily be emulated just by wearing zerker gear. Given the fact that you were rarely attacked directly and almost always had several people with you, I fail to see how your build influenced the outcome of these fights. The only thing I can properly contribute to you are some well-placed pulls and well-timed combos. The rest were greatsword auto-attacks.

And you might want to use a less offensive song. Seriously. While the beat was decent, the lyrics felt childish.

Wooboost.8527:

I see it getting a nerf, just like portal bombing, the casuals didnt know how to counter so they qq’ed until it got nerfed. Now they don’t understand that confusion doesn’t do anything if you don’t do anything. It’s not hard, bind stow weapon, when you get confusion stacks, press the key and disengage for a moment.

You don’t even have to bind stow weapon. Just press escape while you’re auto-attacking and you’ll stop auto-attacking. Another way to handle it is to switch to a weapon that hits less often.

One thing I’ve noticed is any gear with berzerker stats is highly favored over all others. Rampager stats do pretty well too. Also, components generally sell better than completed products. It helps a lot to check the market first before making an item.

Actually the price has dropped. They use to be 4g each. Now they’re around 3g. If you really want the TP prices to drop then my advice is to stop buying from the TP. Instead, all of you should hook up, find more like-minded individuals and run CoE Explorable until you’re blue in the face. If depreciated returns kick in, do some fractal runs until they reset. This will require a higher skill level of play but you’ll have a better drop rate than farming elementals. You’ll also make more gold. Better yet, you will improve your skills.

Just one word of warning: Subject Alpha will teach you how to dodge the hard way.

The pro is versatility. There’s pretty much a build for everything. The con is the learning curve. Leveling will be hard until you really start to understand how the powers and abilities work, both offensively and defensively. Others will tell you that we don’t have great condition removal but a few days ago someone pointed out that there’s even a build for that.

The greatsword is the mesmer’s sniper rifle. It’s meant to hit hard and fast but at a distance. If something is close enough for you to circle around it then you should be switching weapons.

I believe it’s the multitude of builds that are throwing people off. Shatters mesmers don’t fight the same way as confusion mesmers which don’t fight the same way as mantra mesmers but we all look alike to our opponents. On top of that, a lot of mesmer attacks are meant to confuse our enemies. Spawning clones rapidly, for example, looks like a very strong ability to enemies but we know how pathetically weak they are.

I also believe the “mesmer mentality” plays a hand as well. Because the learning curve is so high and lower levels are painful, those whom stick with it naturally become better players than those whom don’t. We learn to cope with the lack of aoe. We figure out how to get into melee, do some damage, and get out unscathed. We learn to micromanage our endurance precisely so we can dodge to avoid an attack or to spawn a clone. We also cope with our class constantly being tweaked heavy-handedly with every new patch and sometimes even in-between.

We also have a tendency to think outside the box more than others too, simply because of how our powers are designed. Chaos Storm can be used to hinder enemies or buff allies. Time Warp can increase the number of auto-attacks or speed up reviving. Blink can be used to get out of hairy situations as well as a gap closer. And Portal… I’ve used it to bomb a camp, speed up a jumping puzzle, get teammates past dungeon traps and have a melee champion running back and forth aimlessly. The versatility of our powers seems limitless as long as we are constantly thinking, “I wonder what would happen if I did this?”

In essence, it’s not the mesmer class that’s OP; it’s the players. We are willing to work harder for a class that requires a higher skill level and it’s paying off in spades. With that said, we shouldn’t be nerfed. Other classes should be given more versatility so they can have more viable builds.

If you are truly interested in the maximum possible dps, the staff is the wrong choice. It is a defensive/support weapon and there’s nothing wrong with that. The real problem is that eles can’t swap weapons in combat so there are very few options to fall on when Guild Wars 2’s dynamic combat… dynamically changes.

My idea is to give every elemental trait line a Grand Master trait that would allow you to swap weapons in combat while in that element. That way we could finally see eles that focus on one attunement and not be considered kitten

I would argue that it does work in dungeons. You may have you change how you play to make it work. If you notice in the video, I rarely dodge. I purposely take hits to trigger might and chill. In certain situations, I even stand in front of other characters to shield them. I also try to save the frost aura for when I know a big hit is coming. I’ve used it against the Risen Abomination while he charged at me. After hitting me twice in a row, I got up with half my health remaining. Granted my armor is exotic PVT but that’s still amazing for an ele. Hell, there are warriors that can’t even take one hit.

I would be kitten . It’s not so much from the nerfing of one skill but the constant nerfing that’s getting to me. This is suppose to be a class that specializes in confusion and disruption but they are slowly widdling away our ability to do just that. Remember when Moa Morph was something to be feared? Remember when we could spawn phantasms on ramparts? Remember when Phantasms always got an attack off before they were killed? Remember when regeneration was actually worth traiting into? Remember when the tooltips for our skills WERE ACTUALLY CORRECT?!

I’m starting to feel less like a master of misdirection and more like a one-trick pony.

Jinks.2057:

Confusion needs to be neutered.

Sorry but it needs to happen for the health of this game.

You still got a lot of other builds so it’ll be fine

I say it needs to be buffed. People whom attack thoughtlessly and don’t bring condition clear skills should be punished for it. Plus anything that breaks up the zerg fest of WvW is a plus. I would love to see more strategy and less mob mentality.

Swiftwynd.1685:

That would be pretty darn beast mode and i DO have a ton of extra AC tokens lying about

Yeah, you can’t stack the same sigil. You can, however, stack Night with Justice and do 20% more damage on bandits during the night. If you have the inventory space, you could buy or craft a bunch of cheap, exotic daggers, put a different sigil on each and change them according to what’s the most beneficial to the situation.

I do play on the US servers so I’ll add you too. I’m always looking for someone to pve with because my main guild only seems interested in WvW.

paleeshi.1924:

Its not unique for staff, but all weapons have maximized effeciency with attunement swaping. Its not a problem, thats how the class was designed. Although i like your idea with fields and finnishers on swap, maybe it could be added as a talent, but theres a chance for it to turn into a bit op.

But that’s the beauty of it! As long as enemies aren’t close enough to the combo field, they won’t take damage from combos. I have yet to meet anyone whom actively tries to get in one unless they are taking advantage of the 5 target limit. Even if, by some miracle, anet decides to remove that, it would only be a great thing! If zergs could be taken down by one combo crazy staff ele then it would drastically shake up the meta. There would be less mindless zerging and more tactical strikes! WvW would actually be INTERESTING!

Dastion.3106:

LoS doesn’t matter to the Necro because it’s not HIS dark path you’re worried about. Even if you run out of LoS he may be throwing his Dark Path at one of your allies or even empty space. As soon as it hits your feedback field it becomes YOUR Dark Path, and Reflects ignore the normal LoS rules (otherwise throwing a feed back bubble up on a wall would be worthless).

The mechanic works. Use it to your advantage. Here’s a trick I used last night when I noticed a medium sized group was using this trick frequently.

-Drop Portal
-Cast Feedback
-Cast Mass Invis
-Get yanked in
-Drop other end if portal
-Invis Allies funnel in.

That’ll teach’em to go Mesmer fishing. Now, I wonder if the same trick would work with keeps…

I know you’re joking but I love the way you think! This means this exploit could be abused both ways, thus making it “fair”. Sure, a necro could pull in a mesmer but that mesmer could pull 20 friends with them! I honestly want to spread this around to everyone, just to shake up the meta in WvW!

I’m pretty sure that’s not intended either. To be honest, they might as well give us another elite instead of nerfing moa morph anymore. I don’t even know of any mesmers that still use it.

I hate how people keep saying, for pve, condition damage on mesmers is horrible. Yes, confusion is but burning, bleeding and vulnerability are not. In nearly full rampager gear (three trinkets are carrion), I’m able to kill faster with my staff than with sword/focus. I thought it was a fluke at first but I tested it a few times around Orr and the results were the same every time. And no, it’s not my runes because they give me 190 vitality and 50 power.

Personally I think the problem with the staff is being forced to swap attunements to maximize its potential. The way I see it, every attunement should have fields AND finishers! In this way, the cast times for finishers can be lowered substantially and eles will still be combo crazy! It also would promote more builds as staying in one element most of the time wouldn’t be detrimental. Plus enemies would take staff eles a lot more seriously if they could spam finishers in fields. Auto-attacks are projectiles already. They should be finishers. I really see no point in having the downside of projectiles (they can be reflected) without the good side of combos.

Also, imagine arcane wave being turned into a mantra and then having the charges spammed in a fire field. Due to its speed and auto-crit, I can’t imagine any opponent wanting to get near that field. With such a mentality, it could also be used for defensive zoning and it would truly make staff wielders feel powerful.

I’m currently running WoodenPotato’s signet support build. It gives the entire party any aura I grant myself, gives fire aura anytime I use a signet and grants fury, swiftness and protection every time I gain any aura. Basically all I have to do is spam my signets and buffs literally fly everywhere! I was getting bored with it but, from reading this build, I had a Eureka moment!

These two builds synergize so well!

My support build can easily have the signets traited to cause vulnerability and, since they are spammed anyway, vulnerability will be up a lot. While protection can only come close to near permanent, swiftness and fury will easily hit their 1 minute mark so that’s a guaranteed 4-6% extra damage. Fire aura grants might stacks from being hit and applies burning to foes that do the hitting. Any teammate tanking for you will ensure 10% more damage and, on the off-chance that you get hit, the extra damage will offset being below 90% health. Since the update, frost armor is nothing to sneeze at as it gives 10% damage mitigation and chills the enemy that hits it. Imagine 43% damage mitigation FOR THE ENTIRE PARTY at the press of a button! What’s even more beautiful is that support build’s magic is mostly done by utilities, runes and traits. They can pretty much choose whatever weapon, armor stats and trinkets they want.

If that’s not enough, I’m now salivating over theories that could easily make this symbiotic relationship godly. If the support is standing in an ice field and someone activates a blast finisher, will the triggered frost aura be transferred to the rest of the party? If it is, a party of 5 specialized elementalists could easily trivialize anything pve throws at them. Hell, they may be able to take on fortified forts by themselves and do it faster than a full zerg.