Guild Wars 2

This is where skill evolutions could really shine and bring out variety in gameplay.

For example, taking mind stab – you could have a choice to upgrade it for a wider radius effect (multiple blades), or more focused damage and blast finisher. Only one of these evolutions could be active at any time – similar to major trait swapping.

Same goes for every other skill in the game – too bad given the current rate of progress, we’d be unlikely to see such a system for at least 5 years, if ever.

Alternatively, activate “promote skill target” in the option menu – you’ll stay locked, and you can use the"lock target" key as a “drop/deselect target” instead.

It’s a bit strange, but I like the root – gives it a satisfying effect, and I’m not sure if it would feel the same if you could cast it on the move.

Blast finisher of course is a worthy idea that has been tossed around a lot – would like to see this done.

Boon removal could be increased to 2, and I agree probably target cap lowered to 3, perhaps with slight radius increase. Yeah 15s cool down could work as well.

Trouble with poultry soup and melandru is they’ll just run away even more easily. Don’t get me wrong – I love that combo, but kind of needs a focus for speed and reflect, or have to be pigeonholed into rune choice. They might not kill you, but I can’t imagine you’d be killing them much either – I can’t test it so this is just guessing on my part.

But yes I understand the frustration. In order of annoyance, those particular p/d condition thieves are #1, with stunlock tank warrior #2 and PU condition mesmer #3.

Well I’ve now taken on a new policy – block, every time, especially personal attacks.

Previously I’d just ignore it, but I don’t even want to see such nonsense in the chat box anymore. At least then I can play without reading other people’s whining/trash talk.

Yeah it is silly.

Especially in hotjoin – nobody has the right to hate on other players/their team in that game mode – I usually tell them to kitten off to solo/teamq if they care so much about winning.

Hotjoin has one objective – to have fun – that can be through good fights, weird builds, and sometimes winning the stupid points race. I’m not going to sit on a point and fight to prevent decap if I don’t want to. It’s small scale wvw when I can’t be bothered to run around looking for enemies.

I’m not entirely sure how weapon selection works now that they merged it with pve gear – I think you have to buy a corresponding pve item, which will then be available in the pvp build interface and normalised to pvp stats?

Reading your post, a 0/20/30/0/20 condition build could work well with your favourite weapon being the staff – traiting for that and elasticity. I haven’t played a condition build since glamour/confusion so can’t give any more information on that subject.

Nothing wrong with using stealth – as long as you remember you can’t cap or contest a point, and be smart with using stealth skills.

Joe.4178:

Glad you enjoyed, its just personal preference. My game-play is offensive/aggressive so pistol is my natural calling.

Makes sense. Magic bullet is great, it’s just the duelist I don’t get on with.

Maybe when MH pistol ever gets released, I’d rock dual pistols and trait for them too (or pistol/focus if that ever gets fixed).

Always love watching your psychedelic charr!

Fantastic play. I will say that the single weapon I have never felt the urge to pick up for any length of time is the pistol – for some reason I just never liked using it. Now I’m tempted to give it another go.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

WEXXES.2378:

I need to know how to fight this mesmer that:

1) Has High burst damage
2) Has High condi spam, mainly confusion, bleed, burn
3) Has protection/aegis on and generally reduces any non-condi damage by half
4) Constant Stealth
5) Constant Healing (while in stealth)
6) Million of clones no matter how many AoE spam there is
7) Uses GS
8) Constant Condi Removal

I’m guessing its a PU or w/e that thing is.

This pretty much defines a PU-Power build from the eyes of a new player. It’s not all that exaggerated at all… and when he clarified about being seruious, he got hit with even more sarcasm.

Fair point about the subsequent posts confirming the OP was serious. I was looking at the initial post taken on its own.

However, the initial post is very much exaggerated:

“millions of clones” – capped at 3 as we all know, no matter how many keep dying. Most builds are going to have 3 up, most of the time.

“Constant condi removal” – a high damage PU power build will likely not have mender’s purity, nor will be using many mantras. They may have idisenchanter, but saying condition removal is constant is a flat out lie. Yes they can avoid a lot of damage – but can still be wrecked by heavy condition classes.

“Constant stealth” – yes there are a few stealths, and yes retargeting after stealth among illusions is annoying. But constant? No, not like thieves are capable of.

Finally if it’s a power PU build, the conditions are largely a red herring – so the confusion, bleed and burn will amount to minor additional damage compared to direct damage bursts from player and/or phantasms.

Actually from the OP, it isn’t obvious whether a new player or a troll.

The statements made in the OP can be quite easily interpreted either way – given we get threads similar to this fairly often, and usually by players who exaggerate and simply want to sound off about mechanics they don’t yet understand, or just want to hate on the class for no reason, it is not a surprise that the first replies are going to be cutting.

I demand this be fixed. Everything else can wait.
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:p

Yeah, great games – especially the the final match on khylo. Well played both teams.

I was wondering what was going on – thought the progress meter was bugged in some way when it stopped increasing earlier today.

I’d go with GS.

As much as I love the staff, it just can’t output the same raw damage that the GS is capable of.

iWarlock is easily dodged compared to izerker, and the auto attack is useless without elasticity. That’s it – #2, #4 and #5 are primarily support/survivability tools.

However, if your second set is say sword/pistol, then you could get away with the staff as the defensive/pressuring tool.

I was about to say welcome back, but your mesmer is on holiday… :p

You paint walls in your house pink – moving house and painting every wall a different shade of pink. Darker in the bedrooms, lighter in the living rooms. Current bedroom is also pink.

Can’t do magenta – even I’d get sick of that after a while…

Xelic.8674:

Mesmer is the profession that destroys noobs.
Noobs get confused by the illusions and can’t target figure a way to target the mesmer.

Probably just one of the reasons people “hate” mesmers, but something I’ve been noticing since PvE players invaded sPvP.

Everyone has to spend time either cycling through next target or selecting target with the mouse – it’s not that it is difficult, it’s that it is tedious. Especially if fighting a PU mesmer with multiple stealths.

Noobs might take longer or fail altogether, but even good players will have to keep on top of the targeting “minigame” – they just do it faster. Still think it’s a silly system, but anything different would likely require a new game altogether.

Targeting.

That’s the only thing I find annoying – especially with stealths and illusions. Spotting the mesmer is easy – only takes a second. Cycling through targets to reselect them is tedious. I believe it’s the very poor archaic targeting system that has held this game back.

Thinking about it, I must be kittening annoying to fight!

In hotjoin?

Kitten **it up. ;D

Don’t worry too much about winning or losing – people drop in and out so teams can be very imbalanced. Once in a while you might have a very good and coordinated match, but it’s luck of the draw.
Burst stuff down, get all the buffs, support your team, learn all the blink locations, cap points, try to fight on points, kill as many as you can.

Seriously, just have fun – if your team is severely weaker (ie one less player and other team is all much higher skilled) then don’t fret – either savour the challenge if you feel you can take them all on, or jump into a new match. It should be fun after all.

To the OP – if you’re going to drop IP for the sake of 3 mantra charges, you may as well take more than one mantra. I can’t see you gaining much out of it in any case.

Better to sink some into inspiration for either mender’s purity or restorative mantras as well in that case.

Depends what conditions:
- damaging ones like bleed, burn, poison, torment, I’d go stronger.
- cc/debuffs like vuln, weakness, immobilise, cripple, chill… I’d go longer.

Resisting temptation to burst into song. :p

Number of characters: 1 (I deleted the rest)

Number of level 80: 1

Number with 100% map completion: 1

This would be a nice little feature – something small that we can position where we like on the hud.

Xyonon.3987:

SO WAT IT’S kittenING AWESOME MAN! ò.Ó

• … you kill your ex GF with a huge mirror, shouting at her dead corpse “SHATTER BURST kitten”!

What, you mean like smashing a mirror on their head?

I guess Osicat’s mind is hard at work calculating all the possibilities! ;D

When your finger twitches to hit some evasive skill (ie distortion) when you try to avoid something.

When you randomly think about iLeap immobilise and shattering on people you walk past on the street. Or any other skill for that matter.

Whenever you hear the word shatter in any context you automatically see and feel illusions shattering in your mind.

When you raise a sword or staff, or any similar object to the heavens, shouting “By the power of Greyskull!”, you anticipate the izerker to manifest itself and spin through whatever you have targeted.

Updated builds in sig.

Do you like butterflies?

Do you like magic?

Do you ever dream about cloning yourself?

If the answer to all of those is yes, then come and play!

Don’t play mesmer purely for its combat effectiveness – you are better off staying with thief. Especially if thinking of playing power shatter. Play mesmer because you want to be stylish.

I could see a possible boon share/condition shatter build through 0/0/6/0/6 with both bountiful disillusionment and maim the disillusioned, although it could be awful.

I still don’t think bountiful disillusionment is worth it over other choices at chaos 6.

Power block was good…

The other two are mostly useless in general. Ok distortion on kill could be made use of in certain situations, but there are better trait choices in duelling.
Inspiration trait… well there’s nothing to talk about.

So overall – one decent trait (MtD), one maybe ok trait (BI) now.

From what I’ve seen, I agree this is stupid.

Even though I don’t plan on that kind of playstyle, I can see how horrible this is for build variety and unique counterplay.

Now every new GM trait is beyond useless (ok, maybe main the disillusioned is worth it, if you’re into that sort of thing…), and I will not bother with any of them. Seeing as they were one of the major patch features, it has boiled down to a whole lot of nothingness.

Add to that unsuccessful bug fixes and negligable skill changes for the most part, and I can’t see anything that this patch has brought to the table for mesmer specifically. So much for a “big patch” in terms of class specific changes…

The best parts are the wardrobe and some of the new pvp features.

What numbers you go for is going to depend on the game mode you focus on – pvp/wvw or pve, as well as your build’s strategy and tactics.

As said, ferocity is what crit damage is now derived from. Precision has nothing to do with it, and crit chance remains untouched.

Why precision could be seen as “less important” again largely depends on build and game mode.

In pve where you are repeatedly chipping away at absurdly large health pools, getting the most in resultant damage output is needed. Because the damage of crits is overall lower now than it was before , having a high base power is more important than it was before. And similarly, precision is slightly less important than it was, simply because when you crit it won’t be as hard as it used to be unless you have a high base power anyway.

In pvp/wvw, it depends on build – if you need damage in high burst spikes, then the amount of precision you need will likely remain the same as it was, although when you crit it will not deal as much damage as it used to – this is why again having a high base power (boosted by might maybe) is favourable.

Personally I find the crit damage/ferocity conversion (nerf) has forced me to pick up GS full time for shatter, because the GS attacks can supplement lower shatter damage, whereas with the staff you’ve got sod all – even with ielasticity…

Xyonon.3987:

Curunen.8729:

I’m torn between generosity, fire or battle…

Depends on your condi cleanse but I’d say:
battle > generosity > doom > water > karka slaying > no sigil at all > fire.
:o

Is fire really that bad? I never thought it crit anyway, so it just seems to have had an effective reduction in cooldown and lower damage?

Runes: Traveler or hoelbrak/melandru, depending on situation.

Sigils: Energy on everything. Second I’m torn between generosity, fire or battle…

For the record, so I’m not misunderstood – I never said the patch was all good, simply that whatever happened is not worth quitting over.

Yes many of the changes are lackluster, bugfixes have not actually happened, and new traits are mostly useless.

But I do like the global changes to the wardrobe and stuff. Ferocity will just take some getting used to – and maybe they can buff individual skills in the future to compensate for this.

At first I thought this must be a troll thread.

But I could be mistaken and it could be geniune – in which case I apologise to the OP.

I don’t play guardian – so I can’t comment from personal experience, but I do know from fighting good guardians that they can stand up against most mesmers.
So it is an L2P issue for the most part – not taking into account cheese builds. Learn the mechanics of the mesmer and see that they can all be countered.

RIP is a bit extreme.

I have finally had a chance to play and certainly noticed the reduction in burst damage. However it’s still possible to play, although a bit harder – just tweaking stats at the moment.

Unfortunalely I am feeling pushed to use the GS.

Ok, still sticking with 2/6/0/0/6, sword/torch + staff, GS, or whatever else I feel like at the time.

Going to swap some soldier’s out for berserker pieces. Still sticking with traveler runes.

Sigils are the difficult one – definitely energy on everything (I was worried it would be nerfed, but now that they have independant cooldowns there’s every reason to use them). But I’m completely torn on the second sigil.

I have fire at the moment, but the damage reduction makes me wonder if air would be more suitable for bursting single targets, or even use a completely different sigil.

Well I just tried that (prestige-chaos storm-phase retreat-chaos armour) and it was not 13s – more like 6 (taking into account skill activation time), so I don’t think it does stack.

Gonna drop down toughness for more offensive stats, put energy sigils on everything, maybe change fire to air.

That’s about it I think.

eldenbri.1059:

Yup – I was being lazy asking while I was at work yesterday. I tried it out last night, and it seems like it actually does stack. I let the blast finisher happen, and then I did phase retreat and I counted until the shield dropped. It seemed like about 8 seconds.

I’ll try to record it with FRAPS tonight and get an accurate count.

Oh, heh shows how much I pay attention to things!

I guess I’ve just never tried to proc it twice in a row out of habit – that and I haven’t been able to get in game to test for a few days either.

Try the following – prestige, swap, chaos storm, phase retreat, chaos armour – all in a row, and see if it stacks up. I’ll have a go myself once I’ve finished downloading the patch.

Hmm, I believe it wears off after 5s of whatever the last thing you created it with. So no, the duration doesn’t stack.

I’ve always tried to let the last one come to an end before proccing it again – to make it last longer.

Anyway, you can test it out easily enough with torch and staff.

As said, the blast is timed, no matter whether you break stealth early or not. After 3s it will blast, or after 4s if you have PU (someone correct me if I’m wrong haven’t tested with PU in a while).

Easy to self combo aoe chaos armour or whatever else you want.

Blimey – nothing worth quitting over. I just started playing again after a break and have no intention of quitting mesmer. Only reason I’d leave is if a better game came along (which it hasn’t).

Have a look at all if the profession forums – exactly the same complaints in each, as it always happens after a patch.

I’ll adapt and continue to enjoy playing, as I’m sure many others here will too. Doesn’t take a genius to work out new build/equipment choices…

On one hand I’m a bit disappointed with the shallow changes, which seem to be mostly minor bug fixes. Not even going to bother talking about GM traits – out of which only two seem to be worth it.

On the other hand, at least nothing else major seems to have broken or been nerfed into the ground, so, well you could say nothing much has changed. I’m talking mesmer specific – of course ferocity and other global changes are significant, but also apply to every class.

I don’t play any condition builds and I’m still looking forward to it.

Going to be a lot of fun with staff clones in any build.

Flytrap.8075:

EotM is a PvE karma train map where you happen to have the ability to kill other players.

Sure, the map looks nice, but the gameplay is very lackluster.

This is a fair point – perhaps in the future the rewards could be scaled down or something?

But I wouldn’t say the gameplay is lackluster – enough action going on besides the train and can always find a good fight.

And I will say – taking camps in normal wvw is just as much pve as any of the eotm points.

Fun terrain (well mostly – ileap on some of those steep slopes is annoying), immediate action, no queues, mixed servers so can potentially run into wider variety of players.

You get the big blobs in normal maps anyway, so not like there’s much difference in that respect.

I only have one problem – when exiting eotm I sometimes have a framerate drop down to single digits, which only resolves itself by restarting the whole game.

When you try to pan your camera behind you while walking along the street, without turning your head.