Guild Wars 2

If your friend is a thief, go thief as well. Build both for perma-stealth and get the ultimate trolling duo. Seriously, you can troll other roamers so much its not even funny.

Seveleniumus.5973:

Even if they reset personal story completely, there are still problems with all the achievements, mission items, cultural items, cultural skills.

I cant believe how many people keep bringing this up when there are no issues with any of this. A reset of the personal story is pointless.

- Achievements wont change, they are global.

- Personal story wont change, only 80’s with fully completed story allowed (killing of Zhaitan). See my previous suggestion about just altering the first arc to say “you where born Asuran but raised by the Charr” as an example (when you where originally Charr and did the Charr personal story, then did a race change to Asura).

- What mission items can you use at 80 when your personal story is done?

- Race items become account bound/soulbound on use/still racial. If you make a race change, you make that choice.

- Race skills can just be swapped for the new race skills as the simplest solution. Lets slap on the requirement to have all skills unlocked on top of full personal story and 80.

And there you have it. You would be a full new race with no visible difference from any other player of that race. It would look like you designed it from the start. At 80 the personal story is irrelevant. Of course YOU would know its “wrong”, but kitten a roleplayer would never ever race change to begin with.

Even if pugs suffer, group gameplay is ALOT better. You can now organize into 5 man squads getting the most of each individual class rather than having a random moshpit of buffing/stacking/stability/cleansing/healing/whatever.

Its much more fun playing in a guild now and I even see a noticable difference in the field – smaller groups, less zergs. And when facing the odd zerg, smaller guild groups are stronger. Or maybe its just the halloween update, lol. But moral of the story, isnt this what we all wanted?!

Pugs are an acceptable loss. Just join a random group, its not that hard to ask.

Same. MSI afterburner + Movie maker is very easy.

Kelthien.8593:

Having 2-3 mantras locked and loaded pumping out heals, AoE cleanse, and AoE stability along with the normal plethora of boons, reflections, and dazes will be nice!

If would be really nice if having them all locked and loaded wasnt like juggling 20 shells while trying to load a shotgun when someone is smashing your head against a wall and your baby need a diaper change.

Also, you’re hanging upside down.

People have always said that upscaling in WvW is unbalanced but in my experience, they always get cut down like little twigs by 80s. Yeah so you can get 80% crit chance and 120% crit damage… Which barely seem to hurt a level 80 character. Armor scaling seems similar like in PvE, which means lower levels never stand a chance. Fighting an 80 vs 20 in WvW is like fighting a Veteran Risen Giant in Orr vs fighting a Grawl in Ascalon Fields. You are “scaled appropriatly” by the game… Yeah right.

If they implement a queue number, you’d find out that there is no queue, its random zone based groups being tossed into WvW on random.

And that would be… awkward.

IMO mantra buffs are nice, but in practice they only really matter for small 3-5 man groups. So the usage of these new improvements are limited. Solo or duo manipulations/clones will still be far superior – there are still must-have skills, multiple in fact. For larger organized groups, glamour is the only real way to play.

I guess having a MoH, MoP, MoR, MoC build to see if its a good commander/support setup is the only interesting thing I can think of. Because it sure as hell wont be good at anything other than mindlessly repeat buttons and watch a 2.5s channel every 2s.

If you want to solo roam, its really quite simple IMO – Either you aim for a hybrid with >=1800 toughness and >=1200 vitality, the rest is built for condition or power/prec/crit. OR you go full berserker and max out your condition or crit damage.

Weapons doesnt really matter, they all have their pros and cons.

Bunkers* will not perform well when solo roaming – not to mention its gets boring fast without any real oomph.

*1800 toughness as I specified above is not a bunker in WvW

Kelthien.8593:

My commander would rather we survive and do low damage than do high damage for a few seconds and die. When your zerg strategy is “run through the middle and gather on the other side”, skills like feedback and Mantra of Stability are the only way you’ll succeed.

This really depends on the size of your group though. Skilled tactics and damage* is better up to around 15-20 peeps IMO.

(the following is from T1 perspective)

Guilds running 40ish peeps, its no big deal. You can all have low damage because you will still roll over whatever you focus on and be invounerable against anything less than a guild group of equal size or a twice as big angry pug mob.

Guilds running 10 people will have problem with this because they will not be able to properly focus people down. You’ll have superior survivability, but fights can drag out so long that adds will wear you down. These kind of groups are usually countered by more damage oriented group with a harder frontline to take the brunt of the damage. Even if you just get 2-3 of them down in the initial assault… Well you’ve practicly won already if you avoid the counter-attack.

*"damage" being relative. I’m not talking berserker builds since you can still have 2000 power, 2000 precision, 2000 toughness and 1500 vitality with 50% crit damage ^^

Yes, just take every weapon. Aside from being able to change stats on Bifrost, in my backpack I have 3 different greatswords, 2 swords, a pistol, torch, scepter and focus.

Also 70 quaggan tonics and a balloon when things really get rough.

Pikens blobs are so large we actually require 3 open walls just to enter garrison. And open all the doors. And the other walls.

Bifrost ftw. I shoot rainbows and poop butterflies.

The stats the infusions give is so low it doesnt even matter. So get whatever if you cant put agony in it.

Do you need help picking a main or what? O.o

I cant really tell.

Deathcon.5903:

I agree with you Zen I think it would be an awesome build to use in a 5 man roaming squad. The aoe blinds and reflects would just be devastating to most groups.

Unfortunetly in a 5 man havoc squad you need some serious spike damage – something a damage oriented Mesmer excel at. Blinds are reflects are not that effective against small groups – they just run out of the circles and avoid the reflect (unless they are idiots, hey it happen).

So choosing a bunkerish glamour build would essentially take a natural killer and turn him into a fluffy butterfly.

Its a great zerg build though.

400 toughness remain completely pointless and 2.5s stability on a 10s cd would be far too strong. I would rather see something like 1s reduction on channeling time. Maybe slap removing of 1 condition on top of it.

Your build will be seriously starved for speed and missing one of the key elements to Mantras.

1) Remove Compounding Celerity, its useless. Replace the runes with 7 Travelers for perma-speed both above and below water instead. You can use 20% glamour CD instead of CC if you want, or Menders Purity due to the mantra heal (no downtime).

2) Without MoP squeezed in there, a mantra healing build is completely pointless and you might as well go with something else. MoP define a Mantra build IMO. It allow you decent damage when pursuing foes and AoE heals for 2500 (min) every 4 second.

3) While the Protected Mantras trait look like a good boost in theory, it doesnt really do that much. You dont want to be caught in a situation where the enemy pound you while channeling anyway and chances are far more likely they interrupt you than actually do enough damage for 400 toughness to matter. Phantasmal Fury or Blade Training is a given replacement.

All races run at the exact same speed (without buffs/traits). Of course a max size Norn will look like she’s running “slower” than Asura – they need to take 10 steps where the Norn take 1 step.

Its almost like putting a horse next to a human. The horse doesnt have to put much effort into running as fast as a human flailing his legs like a madman and the horse will look far more graceful doing it.

So yes, I consider my trotting female Norn having more grace than any of the… lesser races.

One of the simplest UI changes they could do that I posted a while ago:

30/30/10/0/0 to max out damage and weapon traits I’m guessing, with 20/30/20/0/0 as a possible alternative. If running with glamours (for duelist and combos) then I would personally use 20/30/10/10/0.

Of course its still possible.

Anything is possible when playing against idiots.

The other 90% of the time you get roflstomped by 5 players though.

Cool, a new feature for Warriors in the next rebalancing patch?

Winsom.2389:

I like Phantasmal Defender utility. If the wiki can be believed, it soaks up damage that would otherwise hit me or my party members. Its low damage but it will tank damage for awhile.

Phantasmal defender is very underrated and can be quite powerful. At 80 is has 20K HP and soak up 50% of damage taken (for an entire group of 5). If you are alone, that’s like having 30K HP on a berserker build. I highly recommend it in PvE. I usually have blink/defender/null field and its pretty decent in any combat situation. Veterans die without you taking much, if any, damage. Champions can be soloed. Groups of maybe up to 7-10 is manageable.

Though I must admit, I did die when 30 Risen spawned around me in cursed shore. kitten upscales and still no one else at that particular event O.o

Hexin.5603:

Commander tags are primarily tools for leading militia

Yes, that is exactly everyones complaint.

We want guild commanders in addition to the militia commander. It already works fine as the later – the former does not exist.

Anet could improve the game so much by simple additions and modifications. To recap my old and some new examples:

- Name the squad (shown on overhead map when you hover over the tag). THis is so you can name it “Camp Cappers”, “Pug Raid #1” or whatever. For overall zone organisation.

- Change the icon.

- Change the color (though I must admit this is a bit extravaganca, not really needed).

- “Private” tickbox – shows tag to own guild members, group members and the guild members of any group member. The later part is to allow cross-guild organisation – if the WOW guild has 10 members in the group and the UGH guild has 1 member in the same group, the commander tag would be shown to all WOW and all UGH.

- Group limit upped to 20 man in WvW. For 5+, small HP bars, no boons shown. For <=5 just like its shown now.

- The Commander gain more powerful variants of the Warriors different battle standards as choice of elite skills. The effect is bigger for group members.

… Has Anet really only ever thought “Oh yeah a tag, that’s great, we put it into the game! What should we do more with it? Uhm, lets make it… a blue tag! Yeah, and you can enable or disable it! Awesome! Like, an icon, yet not an icon, a tag! That you can enable! Its so perfect!!!”. No imagination whatsoever?

Current EU matchup between some of the highest ranked servers:

Seafarers Rest, ranked 1 (very high)
Elona Reach, ranked 5 (very high)
Piken Square, ranked 2 (high)

Take a wild guess where the bandwagon rolls? But no worries, we’ve only seen 2-3 hours queue for EB in primetime. What’s another 6 hours?

Anet doesnt know the meaning of the word “balance”.

Arcade.8901:

Dawdler.8521:

Arcade.8901:

Dawdler.8521:

Haha have to applaud the 3 SPRT that tried to kill a lone Mesmer some 10 mins ago north of Bluebriar/ER border… and failed. Group builds are not good at killing stuff. When 4 more Pikens came the poor SPRT never stood a chance. Well I guess trying counts for something :p

Yeah Piken and Elona need more those rabid/zerks with spvp builds maybe those small victories will bring happiness to your communities.

Well at least some like to be different. Like said Mesmer having a soldiers/knight/cavaliers mix on a hybrid build.

Be the different no one cares.

I would hope not. If people started caring then this forum would be filled with love to the brim. Like Care-Bears, except everyone are Quaggans.

Arcade.8901:

Dawdler.8521:

Haha have to applaud the 3 SPRT that tried to kill a lone Mesmer some 10 mins ago north of Bluebriar/ER border… and failed. Group builds are not good at killing stuff. When 4 more Pikens came the poor SPRT never stood a chance. Well I guess trying counts for something :p

Yeah Piken and Elona need more those rabid/zerks with spvp builds maybe those small victories will bring happiness to your communities.

Well at least some like to be different. Like said Mesmer having a soldiers/knight/cavaliers mix on a hybrid build.

Haha have to applaud the 3 SPRT that tried to kill a lone Mesmer some 10 mins ago north of Bluebriar/ER border… and failed. Group builds are not good at killing stuff. When 4 more Pikens came the poor SPRT never stood a chance. Well I guess trying counts for something :p

MiLkZz.4789:

I got PvD between a sweaty pile of man.

I think you need to go see a doctor about that.

… Humans.

Other than that, there are no animals to “hunt”. You do hearts and you level. Simple as that. Not sure where you get the idea that you hunt animals from.

Speed runes are bugged, yes. They provide 5% speed, not 25%. They are supposed to be fixed with the next big patch but we’ll see. They have been broken for a month now.

Well the question is still impossible to answer. The Mesmer would kill the Thief before he can react, the Thief would kill the Mesmer before he can react. Neither can be flawless in a real world situation. Its impossible.

Personally I still fail to see why you would have problem with a power Mesmer. I find them one of the few class builds that can counter thieves, just because you get high damage very fast between stealths (phantasms all attacking on reappearance, iBerserker and GS autoattack, etc). I wish I had recording a battle I had with an SPRT thief the other day, sigh… We engaged each other 4 times I think. He fled every time and came back at full HP of course. Managed to kill him the last time with fairly little effort.

EnderzShadow.2506:

@Dawdler
1- Having people run from me and having a tough time catching them

and 2- Getting destroyed by high power specs. Last night had serious trouble vs a GS Mesmer with phantasm…..because I “couldn’t” get away from him. The amount he put out vs my weak gear—-and condi damage made for a one sided fight.

Which is exactly the reason why I eventually gave up with sword/focus in WvW and swapped it for a greatsword. Melee is good fun but people run away so often its not even funny. I mean we’re not talking the occasional enemy, they will always seem to be running away one way or another. The greatsword give you a chance to kill them, plain and simple. Neither the scepter or sword can do it. In the end I just couldnt take it anymore and adapted my playstyle around loosing reflective focus (pack more direct damage) and temporal curtain (first centaur runes/mantra healing, later traveler runes). The only thing I miss is the evade on sword 2.

Wemil.7052:

Dear Piken square.

I take all your keeps and towers and camps and I farm you every morning.

and there is nothing you can do about it.

Much love from Wemil and his morning crew

tomorrow I slack a bit<3

Dont worry, you can take it easy and slack. I am sure the NPCs will appreciate some calm in their allegiance swapping after hectic evenings working for Piken.

Errrr… Well, shouldnt a flawless thief win? If you manage to make them to screw up, they arent flawless.

I honestly dont understand what you want out of this. Tips on beating a thief? Only the best Mesmers can beat the best Thieves by definition – otherwise neither is the best.

Not bothering to fight and running away is an option, sure. Wont help you get better at beating the best Thieves though. Only standing your ground and fighting will do that.

RedCobra.7693:

not sure why a commander build HAS to be full tank to the max

Hence why I asked for the numbers you wanted to lead. Its true that you dont always have to be tank, but maybe I should have taken into account the server, lol.

I am on Piken Square and I can tell you that a dps Mesmer running frontline of a melee train wouldnt last a second against 30-50 man guilds in high tier. You can instantly tell the difference between random blobs (even if they are 60+) and coordinated guilds.

But for 20 peeps vs 20 random peeps, I would still want at least veil (even when using MI) and null field. Its great having those “requested” skills when being the actual Commander. A single veil at the right moment can change a battle and nullfield is critical both offensivly and defensivly when taking a breather in the push (unless you want waterfields).

Edit: to take an example, we just finished a battle on the hill in north bay. Covering the entire hill. All three servers, lol. Probably 200ish people there. In those cases… Yeah you need to be a tank

That must be one of the wierdest Commander builds I have ever seen. Little toughness and mediocre vitality. MI instead of timewarp? No nullfield or veil? No staff?!?! Ether Feast yet centaur runes?! Berserker weapons? Argh!!!!!!

Lol, I guess whatever works for you works. Decent build for leading maybe 5 men (together with at least one more Mesmer that has the skillset a squad need), poor for leading 20+. I would call it a Commando build before Commander

If I made a commander, I would make it X/X/30/30/X (with 10 points spent in whatever), staff, sword/focus (reflective), mantra healing, 2000 toughness and at least 1600 vitality. Skills would be mantra heal (perma-swiftness for 5 peep if you keep centaur), MoP (2500 AoE healing every 3 sec), veil, nullfield and timewarp.

I really have no idea how to improve your build without knowing what kind of numbers its supposed to lead.

Currently I run a 20/30/20/0/0 greatstaff build for both WvW roaming and zerging. ~40% crit chance, ~60% crit damage, ~3000 armor (mix of soldiers, knights and cavalier). Traveller runes for +25% runspeed. I dont put any traits into phantasms specifically (well, actually I use fury so that’s not quite true), I just focus on raw weapons and illusion traiting. It probably share more things with a shatter build than phantasm. I do find it incredibly fun and it can be intense at times. Its great for getting through to dps backliners.

As Pyro says its easy to spread out, sort of speak. Toss a chaos storm to left, a berserker to the right, plop down feedback in the middle and you have a wide area of damage. You cant focus on everything any more than a condition build. The major difference is that once you do switch focus… You can knock 50% off their HP in a second. Condition melee builds cant [unless the enemy is an idiot].

Rainshine.5493:

Wait … what? Why do you think the the norn would view other races as children? Do you view midgets as children? I sure don’t. Seems like grasping at straws imo.

Grasping at straws? Does anyone even read the basic lore of the game?! You can bet your kitten that a Norn would consider the human desire for wealth childish. Lets not even begin to argue the Asuran obsession for technology and scientific “fame”, all of which is just pointless for a Norn and much like children playing with their toys. Charr I suppose a Norn would consider the most equal, but they do have an unhealthy appreciation of the Asura. Sylvari are children and its a miracle they dont trip over their own feet every second.

Comparing to midgets is grasping at straws.

Greatsword skill 3, blast finisher.

It would finally make the skill usefull and add a highly desired finisher to the Mesmer.

IMO that’s all there really is too it and well within the capabilities of Anet. They could fix us up in 10 minutes. But no, they never will.

You call for reinforcement, lol.

Seriously though, any bunker build is hard to break. Warriors and Guardians are two of the best bunkers. When they seriously go into it, yes it can be like trying to scratch a brick wall to death.

All you can do is time interrupts, dodge alot and slowly wear them down. If you yourself is a bunker, its going to be pretty much impossible to beat them. If you are built for damage, you may be able to punch through their armor.

EnderzShadow.2506:

And just the opposite with the Power builds, they need to focus on that one person, and if they let off to help a team mate , then they have just effectively wasted their build and the time they put into taking out their opponent.

Well you could easily argue that the condition builds have “wasted” their build if the opponent has condition removal. Pretty much the same thing.

But I agree with you on the riposte style of play that condition builds have. I dont like them either, I find them boring – especially for the Mesmer, given how random condition application is.

When I was recording random running in WvW, I got an excellent view of how Mesmer melee can be pretty kitten poor. In the clip below I am greatstaff built while the enemy Mesmer have sword/torch and staff. Its so easy to spot the mistakes made and how the enemy lack overall pressure. The first attempt at blurred frenzy is dodged, the second is evaded by staff 2. I have no idea what armor he have but I have about 3K ^^.

(but granted, it was a rather weak attempt IMO)

When I was recording random running in WvW, I got an excellent view of how Mesmer melee can be pretty kitten poor. In the clip below I am greatstaff built while the enemy Mesmer have sword/torch and staff. Its so easy to spot the mistakes made and how the enemy lack overall pressure. The first attempt at blurred frenzy is dodged, the second is evaded by staff 2. I have no idea what armor he have but I have about 3K ^^.

(but granted, it was a rather weak attempt IMO)

People said L2P before the confusion nerf and Mesmer confusion wherent even half as OP as perplexity runes.

How exactly does Anet want us to L2P if they nerfed that but not perplexity?

Rainbow Sprint.3215:

1. It sounds like they asked the voice actor to do their best male voice, as that’s what girls sound like if they’re trying to imitate a male voice. (atleast any one i’ve ever heard doing it)

Just go watch Babylon 5 then. Because that’s how she sounds.

Also, why wouldnt a Norn be constantly bored with children running around their legs all the time?

God I get bored just with 5 minutes of them IRL, imagine if they all wore clanking heavy armor and thought they where the heros of the world?

EnderzShadow.2506:

Nope, didn’t want to zerg. Small groups—roaming.
lol..wrong class for that?

The Mesmer is an excellent roamer and one of the very few classes that can roflstomp berserker Thieves.

Personally, I prefer all ranged on my Mesmer. Melee isnt bad, quite the contrary its very fun. But I only find it effective for spamming 1 in zergs and using 2 when enemy zergs roll all over you. When roaming, swapping from say the staff to a sword generally result in one of two things: either you get a decent stun-damage combo in over the next second or two or you completely loose all pressure for 9 seconds. Sure a Mesmer could stand toe to toe with a Warrior in melee range, but by class design you need to dodge and move around outside melee range.

Guardians are generally considered the better choice. They can control/buff and heal considerably better than a Warrior.

It doesnt really matter what class you use though. Your commanding style is what will keep people coming back to you. One of the commanders on my server is a Thief that’s as immortal as a Guardian :/

Its never, ever going to happen… But imagine if we could actually fight for a guild.

Remove the idea of fighting for your “server” and introduce real guilds. That’s who you fight for in WvW. Its Guild vs Guild vs Guild instead. Each guild alliance consist of player guilds. You may freely leave your guild alliance and go fight for another without changing your server, though with some limitations of course. The amount of members/player guilds in each guild alliance would of course be open information – that way the players themselves can moderate “population”. Rankings and which guild alliance fight whom would work in the same way as it does now. There may even be WvW rivals on the same server – guilds actually fighting each other in the mists, yet have a ceasefire going on in PvE.

Self moderation, no more transfers, hell Anet could even have guild alliances announcing rewards for joining them instead and interaction within the game (like recruiters for a weaker alliance going around in Lions Arch offering gems).

Ah, it would be like… Guild Wars… You can only dream…