Guild Wars 2

But with spear 2 and 4, you’ve got pretty good mobility without swiftness as it is.

Maybe 4 could give a swiftness buff like temporal curtain. 2 is fine as it is, considering the low cooldown.

Just thought it worth posting, having seen that some players seem to get really worked up during a match, and at the end of a match some players are like a dog with a bone!

To players who are stressed out and call out insults – bookahs, take a chill pill!

And here’s a shout out/plea to all players at the end of a match – pop your clones (F4)! Call off your pets! Stow your weapons!
Those precious seconds before the new map… are for celebrating with your team and the opposition!

Take a bow, have a group dance, cheer, wave, whether you’ve won or lost, played well or played badly!

(s)pvp.

Jump in for half a dozen matches; no waiting around, grinding, and you can get a lot of fun in an hour.

Especially at this time of year, I personally cba to spend ages running around large maps in game doing very little – at least in spvp you’re straight in the action, have a blast.

Thank you for sharing.

Enjoy every moment.

You might survive a full decade and medicine might progress far enough to save you. Never lose hope and enjoy every day like it’s your last.

Yeah absolutely!

Obviously I cannot empathise with your position and anything we all type is easy to say but would be tough for anyone in that situation. But I would really live in the present and experience as much as I could.
Enjoy the love from other people and experiences, and let the fear fall away.
:)

For PU I’d argue Prestige > Mimic, although you’d have to lay aside either staff or GS.

Having said that, mimic works pretty nicely with mirror blade and staff #1 + clones.

1. Camera and targeting – lack of built in mouselook/crosshair toggle.

2. PvP game modes – all basically conquest mode – need some team free for all, or attack/defend team objectives – say blue defends one round and red attacks.

3. Transmutation and lack of “wardrobe” system – this is really clunky.

Really don’t mind – but then it doesn’t bother me if I miss anything anyway.

Mesmer is the most versatile, hands down.
Every point in the OP, and every role can be fulfilled – tank, offence, defence, ranged, melee, healing, cc, group support, roaming (this needs some specific use of skills and gear).

I would say that even if I didn’t play one.

Gone the 20(V, IX)/20(IV, X)/30(III, X, XII)/0/0 Sw/T + staff route now in pvp, PU power build.

Extra blink distance is unnecessary in pvp because maps are small enough, so dropped 30 from duelling, and because vengeful images is absolutely kitten (bad bad, really really bad) now I also dropped the 10 from inspiration and went all the way for cleansing conflagration.

Same point allocation as the “Hidden Fire” build, however not played as condition damage – instead focused on power/prec/crit, with vit/toughness for hard hitting blurred frenzy and decent shatters. Berserker amulet + soldier’s jewel. Sigils of fire + force (toss up between that or superior battle), melandru runes (mainly for the built in anti-FEAR).

Burst damage is nothing special, but insane survivability makes it easy to reset a fight and set up loads of “mini-bursts”.
Can and up in some stalemates – particularly with enemy mesmers.

Utilities are standard decoy and blink, and also the iDisenchanter thread has changed my mind on this guy (thank you guys in that thread!) so I use him together with the iMage – nice in pvp since a lot of fights are not stretched out over long distances and they work nicely on the cap points.

Yeah, no decoy?

Decoy + mass invis should be essential.

Edit: post below – apologies I somehow did not see the link at all and mistook slot skill 1 swapouts for all 3 skills!

Even in spvp other races don’t respect us, often going out of their way to insult us.

But asura always respect each other, even if they’re on the opposite team.

Interesting, I thought there was something off with that.

Kolisch.4691:

My Asura ranger in the new Aetherblade medium skin. I wanted a steampunk look but guess I’ll have to settle with this dye scheme in the meantime and figure that out later…

That is awesome.

Now bouncing is good again, it is a nice skill, especially because it’s not so obvious as feedback.

Haven’t used it in a while mind you, but I always have a soft spot for that skill.

Off when stowed is all I’m asking for.

I love it when actively equipped, but I like to draw and stow weapons a lot, and it is not nice when there is a persistent white glow when you’re just standing around in Lion’s Arch or whatever.

Awesome video, great stuff.

Cooldowns across the board could do with being looked at, not just for mesmer but for other classes too.

You know what, I apologise – this guy isn’t half as bad as I remembered him to be – always remembered him to be dying too fast and requiring awkward positioning.

Started playing with him again and I haven’t felt the urge to ditch him yet! Hopefully it’ll stay like that for a while.

They’ll nerf anything nowdays.

:p

^Boon strip is definitely something great, I agree.

And yeah with condition strip then you could go without mender’s purity, sigils, runes, and so on.

But with essentially 1 spare slot (yes… blink + decoy) on land, I find it hard not to pick a different utility.

Yeah, guardian sounds good for what you want.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Curunen.8729:

I’m going to stick my neck out and say it – I think iMage is better than iDisenchanter (apart from the cooldown of course)!

:p

Yeah, the iMage is pretty similar. They both remove conditions.

…if you trait 20 points and a major trait
…with a 2x longer cooldown
…removing half as many conditions
…not removing boons
…attacking 3x slower
…with less hp

I should have clarified – in a build with sufficient condition removal, I don’t find iDisenchanter to be worth the utility slot.

And in such a situation, at least iMage (untraited) provides some retaliation – pretty decent retaliation although the duration needs a buff, and damage.

But I can appreciate iDisenchanter in a build without many sources of condition removal. I just think there are so many better skills to fill the precious 3 utility slots, that iDisenchater is difficult to justify on many builds.

What if they pulsed retaliation on themselves – say 3s duration in intervals of 5 or 6 seconds?

I don’t know how else they could do it. At the moment, 5s is completely pointless – unless you summon them in an AoE field.

I’m going to stick my neck out and say it – I think iMage is better than iDisenchanter (apart from the cooldown of course)!

:p

We need to be able to buy them IN SEPARATE PIECES!

I can’t justify 800 gems, when the only part of the light armour I’d like to get are the trousers.

Personally the burning and confusion are supplementary – I don’t put any extra condition damage for them.

Works perfectly well to rack up the power/precision, and use the torch for utility with the conditions as a little extra on top.

vinceftw.5086:

Explosion? Do you mean as in shatters?

No, the flashbang-grenade-like explosions for debilitating dissipation, crippling dissipation and confusing combatants.

Just use a good pair of stereo headphones, and personally I like the effect of dolby headphone.

Because of preferring portable equipment, I’m using an asus xonar U3 (it’s not amazing but there’s not much to choose from when it comes to external and portable equipment…) with some sennheiser hd595s.

Oh and this might be better in off topic discussion I would imagine.

I agree that the explosion can be annoying – it doesn’t really fit the “refined” theme of the class.

I do – but as has been said, not going out of my way to stop and look at every player’s armour you run into.

But if standing around I do like to see what other people have created – if I particularly like it I may compliment them on their taste.

BF cooldown is annoying considering it is a MH weapon skill – so we have auto attack, 9 seconds BF and 9 seconds iLeap (traited with sword cooldown).

Not to mention OH weapon have long cooldowns anyway.

Ok the evasion I can understand, but cooldown would be perfectly fine as before.

Haha, love it!

Maybe I’m worrying for no reason – just from this patch it and what has happened to other traits/skills, this looks too good to be true – almost as if they were giving something to placate us for the other changes.

At least as a mesmer compared to thief, stealthing among illusions means we can get away with more infrequent uses of stealth, and chaining it is unnecessary.

I agree that as a 30pt GM trait, it should be powerful, so perhaps it is balanced in the current form.

iMage retaliation is better than nothing – I quite like that aspect.

But it doesn’t change the fact that the cooldown is far too long. and the 3 stacks of confusion not sufficient. 3s of retaliation should really be increased as well to 4 or 5 seconds.

Map completion is a horrible one, I agree there.

Together with the IC change and from posts on here I assume that a number of players will be shifting to 30 in chaos.

Now I have no problem with how anyone likes to play – in my opinion taking into account the number of players in the game, there are no unique builds at all (disregarding minor gear/consumable differences), so for anyone to claim personal ownership/creation of any build is silly.

No, my concern is that I don’t want it to give them an excuse to nerf our stealth, or stealth in general. Ok sure, for those using PU now we have to make do with a 40s decoy cooldown (unless you want to spec x/x/30/x/25), and other stealth skills have high cooldowns anyway, unless you want to also spec 20 domination for the torch cooldown.

I imagine this PU buff will not remain unchanged, so before anything is changed I felt it necessary to have a transparent discussion on the topic to avoid disappointment in a future patch – I just hope the boons remain largely the same; protection, regen and aegis are preferable over all other boons available – perhaps they could find a balance with a boon every 1.5-2 seconds?

I’m inclined to agree with Trahearne here – this won’t end well… I hope I’m (he’s) wrong!

^Both of the above are good points.

It would be nice to see more communication regarding changes (although I can imagine this will open them up to a lot of unnecessary back and forth with antagonistic people).

And likewise we as players need to be flexible with the changes – they haven’t deleted the class.

Alissah.9281:

<snip>

I would say: pick whatver you find the most fun/appealing and stick with it <snip>

This absolutely.

Look at it from a style/thematic viewpoint – what appeals to you the most.

Numbers will change, but the fundamental themes – the visual and aural elements will remain mostly the same.

^Yeah the GS trait swap is very convenient.

I’d love to take dom IX for 24s (effectively 20s) prestige cooldown. Maybe I’ll play around with it, but inspiration 10 is hard to let go of.

Nice build, although I still can’t personally justify 20 points in domination for cleansing conflagration.

Prefer to split those points with 10 in inspiration for a choice of IV, VI, I or II, and then 30 in duelling which means I can take IV, X and I together, or even swap I out for III (retaliatory shield comes in handy now with all the aegis). So 0/30/30/10/0.

Edit: And you also get free exploding clones with duelling 30, so no need to waste a major trait on debilitating dissipation. I agree master of manipulation is a must have.

I think I can see what they’re trying to do. The class is not unplayable, so I’m interested to see how things change in the future.

The problem is we don’t get it all in one go – the process takes time, trial and error.

It’s like having someone cook you a plate of food, and serving it up to you unfinished piece by piece, and you are having to eat it as they continue to prepare it (maybe not an accurate analogy!).

Only thing people will be playing? Oh come on, seriously.

I’m sure there are a lot of very capable players on here who will figure out their own alternatives without IC.
I will certainly be adapting to lower cooldown rather than jumping on the shatter bandwagon.

I agree that shatter has the highest skill requirement, and all the good shatter players will still be doing what they do best. All the flavour of the month players will either attempt to emulate this, a handful might try to adapt their own builds, or they’ll simply change class.

Now?

It was always good. Now it is borderline crazy.

x/20/30/x/x for life.

PU is really the dogs kittens (lol) now. Shame we have 8s longer to wait on Decoy, but I can live with that.

I shifted the 5 points from illusions into duelling for a more offensive/attack focused build, so 0/30/30/10/0, seeing as the only phantasms are iMage and iWarlock, with the former on a horribly long cooldown, so not to keen on phantasmal healing. But I can see the merit of restorative mantras.

Well it’s unavoidable if going into inspiration, and the adept major trait is worth the 10 points – mender’s purity, medic’s feedback, glamour mastery and now compounding celerity (I do love this change).

But I wouldn’t sink 5 points alone into inspiration anymore.
Its either 0 or >10.

I like the scepter, but there are one or two things that bother me which invariably means I end up going for sword.
- casting animation and travel time as well as lack of “impact” of #1
- casting animation and sound effect of #3

Both animations look silly on an asura; they are much too extended (for want of a better word).
Sound effect of #3 could do with some higher frequencies.
Bolts of #1 could do with being “tightened” together with the travel time and sound on impact.

Ah, something good!

Ayrilana.1396:

Sigh. Why must people rely on others to find them a build? There’s many of us who actually try out builds for ourselves and actually know what the class is capable of. I can already see at least two other builds that may be viable other than shatter but haven’t had the chance to test them.

Agreed.
Playing without IC will be more challenging, but it doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to fail in every encounter.

I’ll adapt and test stuff to find my own compromise.
At least PU buff means I can keep 30 in chaos, and compounding celerity should be interesting to play around with.

No, not at all.

I do believe they went overboard with some of these changes, however this is still the most fun class in the game, visually and thematically.

shimmerless.4560:

In the immortal words of Seven Mirror, “I don’t care if they nerf me to the ground, dude. I don’t care if I’m just a clone — I’ll be one kitten clone, hanging around in your face, doing 3 damage, all day”.

Sums it up.

Vengeful Images? **** I didn’t see that!

I will still be playing however – still more fun than other classes.