Guild Wars 2

Probably not. I usually prefer boon stripping to copying. Arcane Thievery does both and more.

I think it’s fine if people express criticism with the game. However, it shouldn’t be used as an excuse to behave badly. If you act like a jerk here, it’s not because the game is bad, it’s because you’re a jerk. People need should learn how to express themselves properly.

If you truly care about this game, you can accomplish more with a positive attitude that shares your opinions. Being a jerk just turns people away from you. It makes the game less pleasant without accomplishing anything worthwhile.

Some good changes.

I guess I just wish they had focused on the mesmer’s damage issues outside of conditions, which aren’t commonly used for PvE.

Also, I can’t see the value in mimic over arcane thievery. I usually care more about removing/stealing boons than copying them.

Romek.4201:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0As-wCpIszrT9dFB3YjVUVFhfenlDUUpXTVBIdm5qWmc&f=true&noheader=true&gid=12

to spend your skillpointz^^

transmute t1 -> t2 is most profitable

Nice job.

Silk to gossamer is amusing.

The pro-dueling side seems hell-bent on proving that all the concerns about them are true.

They say people won’t get spammed with duel requests, but we already have two active threads, by the same few people, on this topic. They will not let us have peace.

I have been absolutely shocked by how people have treated some of the Anet employees here. No one deserves to be treated like that.

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll try them the next time I go against her.

Hi everyone,

Of the three fractal end bosses, the one I struggle the most with is Mai Trin. Her electric blast attacks (those bolts she shoots out) hit me three times for over 5k+, which is often enough to down me in a battle where I’m already often below full health.

Any tips for a mesmer to perform better in this battle?

There’s no cap in SoloQ or tPvP.

Tech > Magic

The permanent kits aren’t a prestige item. People either want them because they like to frequently customize their characters or because they hope to make a lot of gold selling them.

Waffles, I think they’ve topped out. The only reason to keep them is if you’re worried about inflation. That is, they will increase in price, but no more than the rate of inflation. Then you only have to worry about Anet coming up with more ways to obtain them.

The rumble in the Maguuma jungle!

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Now… let me preface this with saying…. I really want this item. If I could trade both of my legendaries and get this item, I would do so.

As a frequent gem buyer with real money, I tried to calculate how much real money I’d need to spend to get one of these babies off the TP.

Now first I estimated that it would cost 3500g. Considering the prices it is being offered at and the buy orders, I feel this is legitimate, but you can argue that number, that’s fine.

Then I said well… 100$ in the past has gotten me about 600g. So I rounded it up to 700g to make my numbers easier, and I feel that gem to good could get more and more profitable given that buying keys for the gamble might be worth it to some TP barons looking to have a go. So… 500$. Give or take. 500 dollars for this fabulous item.

Then… well. 500 bucks gives you 40k gems. Which translates to 160 hair style kits at full price, not buying in bulk.

Even though I would change my characters hair EVERY DAY if I got this item, and even though I’ve spent more than 5000 dollars over the course of 2 years playing this game, even I cannot justify the price of this item to warrant spending such a sum on it. Despite how much I want it. Despite how much I would trade for it. It’s a sad day indeed when I can’t justify the purchase of an item (and let me just say that I’ve justified some really ridiculous items!)

Please, Anet… this item should be a permanent drop. That way a year from now…. they won’t all be gone and people won’t be asking to trade 10’s of thousands of gold for it. Anet. Pls.

I’m with you on this. This item is THE item that I’ve most wanted in this game. Back when it was selling for about 400g, I tried saving up to get it. By the time I had enough gold, it was long gone and the buy orders were over 2000g. Now I have 900g with no hope of being able to buy one. So I will do a few key runs and hope I get lucky with the drops. Otherwise, I just have to accept that this is an item I will never have.

I hope this drops a lot for people.

DaveGan.8065:

The reason it seems to be largely ignored now is because it addresses a more complex issue while people here seem to think the problem and solution are simple.

The problem and solution may actually be simple. Try to better explain the issue, if you truly believe in it. If you make a strong enough argument for your solution, I’d be happy to support it myself.

DaveGan.8065:

@DaShi: I only presented points of contention on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The main bit that stands out to me about the dilemma is the fact that defecting always yields better results than not defecting, true in this case as well, and that’s what I was referencing. I didn’t directly mention this because the > signs were still there where needed. You are simply being semantic about it now.

Actually, in the prisoner’s dilemma the cooperative strategy is the better strategy under repeating plays.

“Ad hominem”: now you’re throwing words around. Ad hominem attacks focus on things not in the argument itself. I focused solely on the argument, and came to the conclusion it was shallow. Simply calling it so (and backing up the opinion) does not constitute ad hominem.

You did not come to that conclusion through any logical process. You simply “thought” it wasn’t deep enough and dismissed it. Kneejerk still doesn’t apply, and you are hardly an adequate judge of the quality of the solutions proposed. In short, you were insulting and rude.

“False dichotomy”: still relevant because stipulating “with a friend” limits the choices of scenarios presented (situations without a friend, which is in fact more representative of hotjoin). “False analogy” is valid here, but again it’s back to semantics.

It’s not semantics. You completely misunderstood the point Isil was making and choose to complain about the color of his analogy rather than the substance of it.

The main thing separating hotjoin and Solo Queue is that hotjoin still allows you to play on the same team with friends (aka: practice coordinating rotations/damage/spikes). If hotjoin is to be practice for arenas, it needs to support coordination practice as well.

Begging the question and strawman.

Autobalance still leaves much to be desired, and getting 10 people into a match would be pretty trivial if spectating and team selection became disabled.

You need to finish your argument here.

I wasn’t aware that the quality of a suggestion was judged on the volume of dialogue. I thought that volume was simply an indicator that the suggestion needed rework and more thought. I’m not here to circlejerk/bandwagon the good suggestions, but rather spend time to fill the holes and gaps in the suboptimal ones.

You are not filling in the gaps for the suboptimal ones. Your arguments are incomplete and filled with flaws. They don’t contribute any discussion here. You also frequently misunderstand other posters and go on nonsequiturs about how they are wrong.

In addition, you are claiming some solutions to be suboptimal but give no criteria as to why yours is superior. Volume is the better indicator, since certain solutions have been suggested and approved several times in this forum. In fact, your solution isn’t discussed because it has been largely dismissed. It’s based on unproven assumptions as to what the problem is and doesn’t actually offer a clear resolution. This is why you are seeing alternatives.

I think this is the pot calling the kettle black. The first half of your last post consisted of you playing ridiculous semantics under the mindset of proving someone wrong, rather than trying to understand, and the latter half carries the same mindset as before, albeit with fewer semantic arguments.

But I do understand what you are saying. For example, what you are saying here is: “No, I’m not! You are!”

I am correcting your misconceptions. You don’t fully understand the concepts and terms you are using and this is preventing you from properly expressing yourself. Look at this quoted section about here: “The first half of your last post consisted of you playing ridiculous semantics under the mindset of proving someone wrong…” The first half of my last post is just a description of how hotjoin functioned before spectator mode. Is this what you are referring to? Do you really think that is a semantics argument? How am I supposed to interpret it?

You whinge about semantics, but the problem is that you are misusing terms and concepts. What’s worse is that you are trying to use them to bully others. I’m simply trying to correct these misconceptions so at least you aren’t continuing to spread ignorance along with your hostility.

Don’t take what I say personally. Mentions of how I would continue to exploit the match given xyz suggestion is my way of saying that xyz proposal does not effectively counter the problems in the status quo.

I honestly have no opinion on how you play. Not sure why you think this is relevant. You make far too many false assumptions and then argue them rather than what other people are actually saying. I suggest you spend more time listening (or reading in this case).

DaveGan.8065:

I think the biggest problem with restricting hotjoin like this is that you may as well remove it altogether as it’s basically Solo Queue at that point.

Players could then go to Solo Queue, Team Queue, or non-progression custom maps. it would be like RA, TA, and guild hall scrimmage matches from Guild Wars 1. I wouldn’t mind seeing this kind of change myself, but I suspect that would be too hardcore for many.

EDIT: If you restrict spectators joining the match after it’s started, how do you fill in people once some of them start to leave? Some will still leave once their Solo Queue or Team Queue fill, and I suspect a few will still leave unbalanced matches. This would create a potential for 5v4 midmatch, so there needs to be a way to get around this.

Actually, hotjoin functioned just fine before spectator mode. New players entered by either selecting “Play Now” or by selecting the server that they wished to join. “Play Now” would put them in a random match that filled empty spots. Selecting a server would put them in an empty spot on that server, but they wouldn’t know if the spot was on the winning or losing team.

Calling it the same as SoloQ is way off because SoloQ requires at least finding all ten participants to even open a server and does not have autobalance.

Finally, attacking everyone’s alternative suggestions (poorly, I might add, because you either refuse to acknowledge what others are posting or don’t understand what they are posting) does not make your proposal any more palatable. If you truly believe that your solution is the best, I suggest you try beefing it up and see if it can stand on its own merits..

DaveGan.8065:

(warning: wall of text ahead)

@DaShi: I called IsilZha’s proposal kneejerk because I didn’t think it went deep enough. Call me an insensitive prick, but I honestly don’t care about the amount of thought or effort that was used, only the quality of the end result, which was about as shallow as you could get in terms of addressing the problems. Perhaps I should have credited the effort and instead said it looked no different than a kneejerk proposal?

It is called ad hominem.

@ Both: Prisoner’s Dilemma comparision: Cooperation = join early, don’t switch teams. Defection = join later and/or autobalance. The key difference here is that it is difficult to gauge the reward for mutual (total) defection (how much time wasted at start? how much time in match? does the behavior kill the server and force a new one to be found?), so rather than a [I defect/You cooperate] > [We Cooperate] > [We Defect] > [I cooperate/You defect], it is simply [I defect/You cooperate] > [We Cooperate] ?? [We Defect] > [I cooperate/You defect].

We may agree to disagree on what comes to mind when thinking about the prisoner’s dilemma.

The term you are looking for is a two-person non-zero-sum game. The prisoner’s dilemma is an example of such a game, but not all such games are the prisoner’s dilemma. Also, this doesn’t apply to hotjoin, which better fits a multi-person game theory.

Finally, this line of reasoning as presented yields no actionable information. It’s talking just to talk. No one can reasonably base an argument on it.

@Both (false dichotomy): A false dichotomy “involves a situation in which limited alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option”. Chess “with a friend” does exactly this, and is more representative of a dueling arena or Team Queue than hotjoin.

The claim you could actually make here is called false analogy. The claim of false dichotomy doesn’t make sense in this instance. Imagine someone saying, “The grass is always greener” in response to a co-worker leaving. Then another person claims that that statement is a false dichotomy because the grass could be crabgrass or maybe there’s no grass at all. It’s an utter non-sequitur.

The truth is that the points in hotjoin don’t really matter. First, they are capped. Win or lose, you can only get so many points in hotjoin. Second, most players are unaware of the disparity of points between winning and losing. You can’t blame them. Most of them are casuals anyway. Plus, all the autobalancing means you are likely to get points for winning (plus volunteering) no matter if your team wins or not. So it’s not easy to tell how many points you are getting for winning and losing.

The biggest reason for team stacking, as has been stated by many people who do it, is that it is no fun to be on a losing team. More specifically, it is no fun to be on a team that is outnumbered. We see the same complaint in SoloQ and WvW. There’s no reason it should be any different in hotjoin.

Before spectator mode, team stacking wasn’t a problem because you couldn’t do it. If someone didn’t like the team they were on, they left the match entirely. Autobalance kicks in and the game goes on just fine without. Back then, matches were more balanced and more fun (I at least thought so).

Now, if you don’t like your team, you just hop into spectator mode. Then switch to the other team after the autobalance. This generally upsets the person who was autobalanced, so he does the same thing. And this can go on for the entire match.

It’s also common to see people let a match go 2v1 for awhile, letting red, for instance, get ahead a bit. Someone inevitably joins blue, so those waiting spam on red making it 3v2. Even if the match gets to 5v5, red already has a significant advantage from its early lead.

I prefer the solution of separating spectator mode from joining matches. You can spectate any match you want, but you can’t join that match while you are spectating in it. To join it, you’d have to leave and then find the server it is on, and join as you normally would. Play Now would immediately send you into the match instead of spectator mode. Also, you would free to enter spectator mode from the match you are currently in, but you wouldn’t be able to rejoin until you leave spectator match and select the server from outside as before.

DaveGan.8065:

I’ve addressed similar proposals by other people, so forgive me for not addressing yours directly. You are making a kneejerk proposal to combat the problem above the soil, rather than destroy the roots. Your proposal does not address the huge incentive players have to stack and spectate/autobalance in the first place.

Remove team swapping and I and many others will simply spectate until there is a clear favorite. After all I only need to play about 3 minutes of the match on the winning side to get equivalent rewards as if I had lost. The potential loss for not joining earlier is less than the potential loss for playing on the losing side.

To address your statement about prisoner’s dilemma, excessive stacking does have a downside: matches taking longer to start up, and the server quickly imploding on itself as nobody will want to join the other team. This forcefully breaks up the stacking and the parties must spend time to find another room. In other words, mutually assured destruction. Far more prominent in the prisoner’s dilemma than your “middle ground” point, by the way, is that 1.) exploiting always comes ahead of not exploiting, and 2.) people will exploit or get exploited.

As far as the false dichotomy, it probably came to mind when you mentioned turning the board around in chess on a friend. Playing vs a stranger, I am playing to win, so I would have absolutely zero problem switching the board at the last legal moment if it was not restricted by the rules, because that opponent would easily turn the board on me in the same circumstance. Playing with a friend, mutual trust ensures we would not do this to each other, and no longer serves as a valid analogy.

The terms and concepts you are using do not mean what you think they do.

Kneejerk=automatic and unthinking. Isil clearly thought through his proposal. I don’t agree with it, but it is not kneejerk, unless you are insulting him, in which case you should be infracted.

Prisoner’s Dilemma: This is a game theory concept about cooperation and betrayal. It is not a catch all term for game theory as you seem to be using it.

False dichotomy: This is a logical fallacy of creating limited options. While it is commonly used in thread discussing this issue (e.g. “Play SoloQ.”) it doesn’t apply to Isil’s chess example, which is about fairness and a reply to the actual false dichotomy fallacy you made (i.e. “It’s just hotjoin”). It certainly has no application as to whether the person is a friend or not, which is actually immaterial to Isil’s argument.

This thread represents what I dislike about rangers. Their forum is so toxic. And now here, they can’t even tolerate another class complaining about its own problems. Please keep it in the ranger forum.

Grenix.1576:

remove reward penalty for loosing side (in hotjoin at least) Just put reward for amount of time played. Problem solved.

This won’t work because how points are rewarded is not obvious. Also, people will still rather be on the winning team, than suffer on a losing team that is getting stomped 4v5.

“hah necro crying now” isn’t the most pleasant of banter.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

DaShi.1368:

OMG! Chocolates!!!

So cute. How did you get that expression?

I got lucky with petrify and the random skill on the box of chocolates. By zooming in at the right angle, you can remove the grey from petrify when the camera starts to clip your character.

I don’t believe that spectator mode is being used as intended. It seems that the points are setup to encourage us to play a certain but there are several problems with this. One is that the points system is very opaque. Another is that playing on a team with one less player is simply not fun. So yes, people will forgo potential points to be on a winning team, because it is a more enjoyable experience.

Even if Spectator mode wasn’t being used for autobalance abuse it still gives an advantage to the people spectating. They can see the builds of the other players and then choose their side and apply counters.

I think a simple solution that keeps spectator mode but stops abuse is to not allow people to join the match that they are spectating in. People can still watch matches and learn from other players, but they won’t be able to turn those battles through just watching and switching sides. In addition, this will return hotjoin to how it was before spectator mode, which was far more enjoyable for casual players.

I think there should be an option to replay the final instance in each part of the LS. I’m surprised that they didn’t include them.

I agree. This lag is much worse than the last time. Hopefully, they can fix it just as quickly, because Dry Top is unplayable for me right now.

I hope Anet adds a way to watch the cutscene again, like they did with the LS1 instances. Something you can click in the machine to view it again.

Fantastic! Great job!

Jurica.1742:

Mesmer
Time Warp: Fixed a bug that prevented the casting animation from playing if the player had a greatsword equipped.

Great, now people are interrupting my Time Warps left and right. The mesmer is now unplayable!

Would it be possible to add a timer to the flood control message, so that you can see exactly how much time is left until you can make the next post?

Good point on dire.

I was recently thinking that even if Anet reverted all the nerfs to the mesmer, they still wouldn’t be very competitive because of the power creep all the other classes got.

Dire for WvW (condition builds), berserkers/assassins for everything else (and even WvW, for non-condition builds). Don’t listen to the zerker haters. They just don’t like that zerker is the most efficient armor, which is a valid complaint. However, there’s no reason to kitten yourself just because other people aren’t happy.

Yup, there is no one build that beats all, despite all the people calling for nerfs requesting that their builds do that.

tekfan.3179:

I tried some flipping over the time, especially since I started to go for my ascended armor set.
So first let me tell you my little story so far.

Note that I’m not one of those gold-hoarders, the largest amount I ever had was something close to 300 when I sold my flame and frost dyes, other than that I just save up as much as I currently need.
So my flipping was still on a kinda small scale.

When the prices for silk skyrocketed with ascended crafting I started to stock up on large amounts of cabalist armor and salvaged the heck out of it.
At first I started to stock up on silk and couldn’t craft as much silk spool as I had silk for, for almost half the price I would’ve paid if I had bought silk scraps directly in the TP.
So I started to sell the silk I didn’t need for a daily spool-craft.
Sometimes I made around 6 to 8 Gold in ten minutes…granted for only one cycle of buying armor, salvaging it, substracting 300 scraps and selling the rest.
This system is still working, though it seems that either enough people found that method or my exploitation has impacted the market enough to raise the price of cabalist armor-pieces from around 3 silver to 3.5 silver.

I started to see patterns though. Some folks seem to have nothing better to do than to raise their buy-orders one copper above higher bidders all the day. I had kinda funny runs of changing an order multiple times in a row, until it was so high that I rather sold my cabalist armor to the player bidding against me.

To be honest, it depresses me. Sitting alone in front of the screen and flipping some key-products from time to time was more effective in order to get an ascended armor than actually playing pve or pvp.
My superficial step into tp-flipping brought more results than the actual game.
It was so easy, I wouldn’t even wonder if there are already flipping-bots at work.

So why do I think that flipping could be the bane of GW2?
Simply this: If you don’t put a lot of work into the game to keep track with the price-wars in the tp, your progression is enormously slow.
Say we got a casual player. Maybe doing his dailies and running some pvp, fractals or dungeons at the weekends. Last time I checked, 300 silk scraps cost approx 7.2 gold at the tp. 7.2 gold are quite some dungeons.
While our casual friend plays an hour to get just the ascended silk-spool, even an unexperienced flipper like me could raise twice the amount of gold in the same time with a budget of less than 10 gold.
Since I stared only at the tp and bought the cheap sell-orders, the price rose higher because people doing the same placed higher buy-orders.
Long story short: Flipping raised the prices and our casual friend is on the losing end.

I don’t even want to imagine what it’s like if you’re a new player, exploring and doing your story. When the game started I really enjoyed crafting. If I lacked some materials I could buy them at the tp easily with what I earned during my playtime.
Nowadays one wool-scrap costs more than 5 silver.
If you want to craft the matching armor for your level 30 char as a new player, you’re pretty much bankrupt.
Alternatively you could farm…I tried that too to know what I’m talking about: I know grindy j-rpg’s with a faster progression.

As lucrative as a little work and time on the tp might be for me, I think Anet should do something against it since it has far too much impact for that little work.
Maybe something like limited buy-orders per day for each account.
But I don’t see that coming anytime soon.

Until then I will end this post with a small song:

They call him Flipper, Flipper, trades rather than playing,
No-one you see, has more gold than he,
And we know Flipper, lives in a world full of trading,
Buying there-over, over the tp!
Everyones bugged by the despot of tp,
Ever so grabby and greedy is he,
Clicks he will do when bargains appear,
And how they vanish when he’s near!
They call him Flipper, Flipper, trades rather than playing,
No-one you see, has more gold than he,
And we know Flipper, lives in a world full of trading,
Buying there-over, over the tp!

You may have run into a bot.

Galen Grey.4709:

Kalavier.1097:

ThiBash.5634:

DaShi.1368:

I hope she does come back. Scarlet isn’t a bad character at all.

I’m still amazed that there are people that actually think she’s a well written character. People like the Power Rangers, and I did so too for a while back when I was little. But let’s not get into that.

My main issue is that, out of nowhere, there’s a character that can literally do everything, and although the story keeps insisting we thwarted her, the voice acting never made me feel like we did anything to her at all. At best it felt like the ‘good guys’ were trying to convince themselves.

The only thing at this point that would make her more ‘mary sue’ is if she took over an elder dragon, or the pale tree, or some variation on that.

She might not be epicly written, but she isn’t as bad as many say.

For example, some like to exaggerate her backstory.

exactly, she wasnt the omnipetant genius people make her out to be. she was more a jack of all trades master of … a few…

proof: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/short-story-what-scarlet-saw/
“Beigarth tried to dissuade her, eager to pass along the full slate of his smithing knowledge " – She didnt know everything there is to know about smithing…

Synergetics took quite a bit longer… she found that one harder then the others.

“I suppose I should thank you for that, though I bet I would have figured it out on my own eventually” omaad was actually ahead of her and in her chosen, prefered field no less.

During Clockwork chaos when Vorpp quickly reverse engineers her shield to let us through in scarlet’s funhouse:

Emissary Vorpp: "Engineering prodigy,“ they said. “Intuitive grasp of phenomenological design and transcendent systems.“ Pfah, I say. Pfah!

Scarlet was a prodigee sure but no where near as perfect as people make her out to be.

Yup, and it’s not even a very good criticism for bad writing, especially for a video game. She was a genius to make her a credible threat. Scarlet’s genius not only explains how she did what she did, but also how she got to where she is. There’s a lot of valid criticisms for Scarlet as a villain, but this is a weak one.

I suspect that many of the people who don’t like Scarlet do like Shiro. They can’t distinguish the difference between story quality and their own preferences, which are 90% of the story complaints.

I hope she does come back. Scarlet isn’t a bad character at all. She was just delivered very poorly, which setup a bunch of amateur analysts to post their favorite TVtropes against her and call that criticism. It was revealing and embarrassing.

Anyway, instead of Scarlet, we’re stuck with the biconics, any of which I could do without other than Taimi. Because she, like Scarlet, is actually interesting and entertaining.

It’s not like this idea is coming from someone who has already made a lot of money on the TP, so a karma tax is irrelevant to them.

I’m pro-TP trading and I don’t think that anything that adds barriers to people wanting to trade on the TP is a good thing. Especially if that barrier affects some groups over others.

Point Blank Shot has made archers more enemies than Scarlet did attacking LA.

The problem is that thieves dominate in the roamer/decapper role of tPvP. No other profession can do this role as well. The mesmer is especially hurt because that’s also its primary role in tPvP. Mesmers can’t bunker because they are frail and rely on stealths. And they are weak in group fights because of AoE and their lack of AoE. So as a 1v1 profession, they are tailored toward the roamer/decapper role, where they are destroyed by thieves. The roamer/decap role is currently like rock, paper, scissors with no rock.

Since teams only need one roamer, they should always take a thief (maybe a ranger who can contribute to middle too and take care of certain bunkers). I’m interested in how the next ToL turns out. I expect to see mesmers rarely played, and those teams that do, will do poorly against teams with thieves.

I disliked the voices for my characters in GW1. They all sounded so smarmy. However, the GW2 voices have been great, and I would love to hear them come back.

comanche.6813:

We could always kill one of our Destiny’s Edge 2.0, unfortunately, it would probably be one of the humans. My character is Sylvari, so that completes the group perfectly.

I don’t think there will be much impact killing any of the DE 2.0 characters now after they just killed off the best one. Still not over it.

That room just made me miss Scarlet more.

Anabol.4965:

Hey, thx for ur answer.
1st of all dont watch only from ur point of view, i can whine only on necros as an engi and that’s all. I wanted to bring u reason why some ppl have problems in the game and rage. I wanted to show how annoying some builds can be for another proffs.
And ye that’s not qq tread, i just want to show what’s wrong in the game. I dont whine i just listed current most played builds.

These aren’t reasons why some people have problems in the game. These are the reasons you have problems in the game. It’s entirely your opinion, and I disagree with it.

Being able to jump right into PvP with a new character was a nice feature of GW1 and GW2 before the April patch. I hope they consider changing it so you can do that again.

This achievement is very difficult because of the current lag problems. I set everything to minimum and still the lag is terrible. Her rotating attack happens all at once. Her big aoe knocks you off before you can see it.

I was able to finally get the achievement with a guardian. I traited 0-6-0-2-6. In Radiance, I ran the sword traits and used Sword/focus. This gives blinds and blocks. In Honor, I took Superior Aria for “Stand Your Ground” and “Retreat.” And in Virtues, I took Master of Consecrations for Hollowed Ground, Indomitable Courage for another stability, and Supreme Justice (which you can change for something else, maybe elite focus to allow Renewed Focus to last a little longer.).

This gave me enough blinds, blocks, and stability to last the fight and was forgiving for mistakes/lag.

Please do something about the lag!

Lag and aspects don’t work.

Yeah, the diving goggles are currently unreachable because of the lag. There should at least be another crystal on the top of the puzzle. The few extra seconds will help against the second lost from lag. It still won’t help with the skills not working 1 out of 3 times because of lag.

I think Arenanet just wants the mesmer to have at least one useless skill on each mesmer weapon.

MH Sword: iLeap
Scepter: Autoattack
Greatsword: Mind stab
Staff: Chaos armor (though probably still too useful so is likely a target for nerf again)
Focus: Phantasmal Warden
Pistol: Currently both skills are useful, so they will probably flip a coin to nerf one. Probably Phantasmal Duelist because its last nerf wasn’t hard enough.
Torch: Phantasmal Mage
Off hand Sword: Illusionary Riposte (though will likely get a nerf).