Guild Wars 2

Hmm,

Not sure why anyone cares about Badges while using a support build.

WvW badge gear = no condition damage = support build sucks dick.

If HB is currently balanced, then improving its flexibility (note: turning has no speed adjustment in this game, so a proposed snare would still make HB hugely more flexible if you could turn it at all) requires that its potency be reduced.

Which brings us again back to “I don’t want to see it lose damage so bad players can use it more often”. Moving at chilled + turning would require a ~20-25% damage reduction, IMO. Unacceptable.

I didn’t realize that Hoboed had actually said anything relevant in his post. Could you explain Iruwen?

Ryuujin.8236:

The problem is that sceptre’s clones are still useless for anything by shatter fodder. And if you’re running shatter then you’re probably better off using evasive deception

This, in terms of raw clone generation.

Scepter simply does not fill the purported niche of clone spam except at level 1-6.

1. Deceptive Evasion kitten
2. Autoattack sucks in general; typical Mesmer play involves using as many non-AA abilities as possible.
3. Have to wait until the third AA to get a clone.
4. The ‘normal’ clone generation ability (2) of Scepter has a much longer cooldown than GS/Staff. As a result, Scepter is competitive with but not better than Staff/GS for clone warz.

As a result, Scepter is pretty “meh” if you look at it as a “clone spam” weapon. The block/blind/counter attack damage, and confusion beam have merit in their own ways. So those end up making a decision on Scepter in general.

Sidenote: A safety net for difficult jumps is something no other class has.

The issue is that a jump obeys collisions objects like a wall because the player flies through the air. Teleports obey terrain pathing. It would be awkward for teleports to ignore terrain pathing but obey collision objects, since teleports don’t have the player fly through the air — they instantly move.

If they don’t obey collision or pathing, then teleports would be overpowered since you could teleport through keep walls.

I would love to NOT see the damage on HB get nerfed so bad players can land it more often.

Tbh, they probably click their abilities with the mouse.

I mean honestly, just using GS#2 on my Guardian gives me a pretty high chance of looting almost everyone I hit. Why can’t it be the same for mesmers?

What type of gear are you running?

Vizier’s Tower in Straits of Devastation is mandatory for map completion.

Is that really a jump puzzle? It’s been awhile but I don’t recall any special chests and stuff that usually go with jump puzzles.

I thought it was just a longer-than-average vista path.

The 30/30 stats is a ~38% increase in DPS to PvE Berserker gear. The traits are a 50% increase in DPS. Edit: with bonus effects, since traits are not generally as one-dimensional as damage++;.

The gear itself, as noted prior, has about twice the stats of the trait line investments.

So, the stats-from-traits matter, but they are tertiary.

All illusions .

S/D, Shortbow, and S/P have the most coherent and effective group WvW capabilities.

Smoke field, poison field → weakness, other fields → blast, range Immobilize, burst → evade-tank (soak enemy cooldowns) → escape -- these are all major factors in winning WvW fights and making people dead in mid to large fights.

D/D simply does not have a large/mid-scale toolset. It is much more oriented towards 1v1 or small scale.

The difference in frequency is mostly regarded as a bug.

A full investment into trait HP: 3k. A full investment into gear HP: around 9k.

Not negligible, but it is purely filler. It’s not something to build around or aim for — it’s something to weigh when you are fine-tuning the build.

TC: I understand why you’re posting, but this is the bottom line:

You want HB to be weaker but easier to use.

I like HB strong. I don’t have a problem with its usability constraints.

You need to improve your gameplay or switch to another weapon set that does not have restrictions on its primary DPS approach (e.g. use Axe mainhand). This is why there are weapon options in this game. Different weapon sets are different. You basically want Axe mechanics on your GS. It’s a non-starter.

Personally, I think GS is just fine with its stop-and-go playstyle. It’s both mobile and immobile. Deal with it. Learn it.

Stop trying to make the game fit your fancies, and adapt/expand your playstyle to fit the weapon.

Gear provides far more base stats than trait lines. Only notable trait line stats are crit damage, condition duration, and boon duration. Rest is fluff, although tangentially applicable.

Edit: Class-specific bonus (e.g. Shatter cooldown for Mes) is also relevant, but only for the selfsame trait line usually, so there is little to no consideration in those cases.

Yeah sPvP is different with the focus on standing in the circle. I wonder how high you teleport up the z-axis though. You could really abuse it hilariously if you have a teammate doing the circle, or tag-teamed it.

Chiming in on the Mantra discussion:

Don’t get Mantras or bother trying to use them until you feel you are generally proficient with the rest of the class. They require a different gameplay style/approach/learning curve that will hinder your learning of the rest of the class.

Edit: Unless you really want to. It will probably seem like playing on “hard” difficulty, though.

It originally stunned 3rd. They changed it prior to release to stun 1st. The tooltip may be retro-outdated, or they just nerfed it, or /shrug.

I recommend taking the 5 seconds to go shoot something and see (sidenote: no offense but given that you were reading the tooltip in-game, you would be able to walk outside of town and validate it directly, or at the least press “H” and go shoot a golem or Svanir in the sPvP lobby).

Then you should reroll a Guardian because Guardians are clearly OP.

I mean, I’ve never died to any in a 1v1 except where I screwed up royally, but they’re still OP because they can get fewer Blinds than Mesmers, right?

What really hurts my brain is why people assume that 10 players will attack the same target.

It really makes me laugh though when players go to great lengths of coordination, strategic and tactical depth to lose a fight. If they applied half that much specificity and effort to winning a fight, they’d be boss.

GS doesn’t compliment MH sword because you can’t get enough range fast enough at will.

Luckily, over half of your weapon swap time can be allocated to DPS vectors that ignore range benefits or penalties.

You also have a knockback if it really matters.

You also assume you will be exactly in melee range when you swap to GS, rather than predicting this and moving away ahead of time.

Also in a GS/Sword setup you’re missing all the defensive abilities from Staff.

Staff is a tank weapon for a Mesmer. Surprisingly, not using the tank weapon reduces your defensive abilities. This is shocking news.

And in GS/Staff setup you won’t survive in melee (and kiting isn’t always an option).

If kiting is a poor option, then it makes sense to use a weapon that does not rely on kiting, like Staff (CA/CS) and Sword.

Interesting tactical observation. Use the right tool for the job. Fantastic.

No matter how you put it, GS is just meh. I admit I exaggerated a bit when I called it useless earlier, scepter is certainly much worse.

I wish I knew what it felt like to underperform with GS.

But I don’t.

So I can’t sympathize with you, unfortunately.

I tend to have running far away as a specific strategy to maintain for WvW.

I consider the direction change an improvement, since when I use it I actually want to run consistently away from the target. Previously it only moved you away when you were directly attacking them, which is less effective for the GTFO sequence.

The distance change is mixed; I think it’s a minor improvement overall but requires re-learning.

-Toss down Temporal Curtain thing in between me and the mob
-Leap a clone at my foe
-Dodge roll sideways to create a new clone
-Swap, putting me in melee range and giving me Chaos Armor from the Leap finisher

Curtain is a Light field, not Ethereal. Leap will give you Retaliation, not Chaos Armor :O.

For sPvP, you should also consider Adventurer runes for unlimited clone works builds, even though they nerfed it.

And Nightmare. Note that last I heard, SI bleeds weren’t extended by runes. I haven’t checked personally though. Nightmare more applicable for mixed conditions, not just bleeds (e.g. extending Burn, Poison, Chill, Confusion).

Fortunately, the GS has many buttons that work very well at short-mid range that you can use while you gain range. In addition, the cooldown of MB itself is so short you can spend a lot of a weapon swap cycle using things that are not “Spatial Surge”.

(Cleric’s Orichalcum Inscription)

Are there any stats out there that would hint that this market was false beyond guessing at the listing volume?

1. No one logically buys Cleric’s Orichalcum Inscription.

99% of the playerbase uses hard DPS stats, usually Berserker, rarely other things. I imagine there may be a small generic demand for Carrion, Rampager, Cleric’s.

2. The Inscription is an intermediate item. The majority of players buying gear either:

a) Can craft it themselves. Therefore they are buying the Fine material and Ectos, not the Inscription, for cheaper.
b) Are looking for someone to craft it. This would support a demand for the Inscription except … they still need someone to craft it anyways, so the player may as well BUY the Fine material and Ecto, then have their crafter friend make the Inscripton and then the final item. For cheaper.

3. The only case where someone would purchase Cleric’s off the TP is because they are batkitten incoherent or they are looking for an underpriced item due to a surplus of supply because someone randomly made a Cleric’s Inscription by mistake and it’s burning a hole in their inventory because they can’t sell it.

Sidenote: the player listing for 6s or w/e it was is probably hooking the price target higher to sucker someone into making the Inscription. … … …

In terms of making $ on the TP, here are a few observations:

1. It’s very easy to add up the “cost to make”. Divide by 0.85 to look for your break-even price point (TP taxes).

2. If the sell and purchase order prices have a large spread, something odd is happening with that item’s market. A spread like the Cleric’s Inscription cited above automatically screams “extremely low supply, probably because of extremely low demand”. It may be a low-supply situation and prices are going whacky. There is risk and there is reward for these situations. For stable income, expect a low (5-15% profit) for selling an item. Remember, in some cases quantity > profit per transaction. In some cases, profit per transaction > quantity. Get a feel for it.

3. Never sell to purchase orders if you are intending to make any sort of profit crafting. The only items that are vaguely worth using purchase orders are basic materials that have very high volumes (e.g. Iron Ore). The delta between purchase orders and normal sales is very small, even in large quantities.

There are some rare times where you want very fast transactions. In those cases, you can consider purchase orders. But, these are rare. The key is that you need to think about “do I really want fast transactions that badly? is that worth 5/10/15% of my revenue — probably 20/50/80% of my profit per item?”

PvE for Mesmers is fine, short of Orr DE farming.

Hmmm … maybe I wasn’t clear: Glamour stacking is definitely not for generic skirmishing, but the point spread I cited can adapt to multiple options pretty fluidly, although the Pistol (bugged) trait + Ethereal is going to be more effective for skirmish for sure.

And do you honestly think that tier 2-8 dont have 60-80 people fighting at the same time? really? As if tier 1 has a higher pop cap per map or something lol

I honestly think that servers that are in tiers 2-8 are in tiers 2-8 because their concept of “most players on the map in the same keep” is 60-80, whereas I, in a full-on T1 matchup, was referring to significantly greater than 100 players in the same keep area.

I bet you think 30 players is a “zerg”, too.

A) It’s halloween. GW2 hasn’t had an event like this yet so people want to see what it’s all about.

If you’re serious at all about WvW, then “an event like this” takes all of about 5 minutes to soak in.

D) Hackers/exploits.. Sea of Sorrows HATE when this happens, and yes even to the point where they will simply not play. Why? Because pretty much every single match we have had our orbs hacked.

Every server hates when this happens. This has happened to all servers.

Players that are serious at all about WvW suck it up, accept that cheaters will cheat, and then play even harder. When JQ had 3 orbs simultaneously hacked by ET/HOD within 10 minutes (most likely ET by reports at the time), what happened? JQ went Hulk-bestial-rage mode and picked up 80 PPT against ET within two hours.

It’s the way it is.

They should affect bleeds, but not positive either way.

As far as stat spread, I prefer Carrion. Power scaling for almost all weapons is pretty solid and quite superior to precision in a direct comparison.

You have to stretch to very specific synergies for precision to be worth it (although the crit → Init → Blossom pew pew is a reasonable example of one such).

Blurred Frenzy does higher DPS. While you have your target Immobilized, most players will use that time to BF, and them spam 1 (or do other things) after BF ends.

In some situations, it may be optimal to use 1 spam during the Immobilize, then use BF afterwards (e.g., if your target cannot attack you because they are facing away from you while Immobilized, but after they are free they will attack you — in this case, you may want to maximize the defensive component of Blurred Frenzy).

Well right, it’s not the most drastically effective 1v1 build (sidenote: the third build is an adaptation of an actual 1v1 shatter/confusion build I made for sPvP, so it is relatively close to being very strong for 1v1, although still poor chasedown for WvW because staff is bad for chasedown, period).

The trick is that the same point spread supports multiple builds for multiple roles.

In terms of Glamours in particular, they do not provide gigantic Confusion damage to a single target (unless you troll a melee with Portals). The trick is that they provide ridiculous quantities of confusion to a large number of players — absurdly good for siege/zerg. The extra PvE damage over sPvP applies as well. I mean, I’ve seen 4k Confusion hits from Feedback from rofl newbs spamming their abilities (edit: back when I had trash for gear). And that’s just the combo field aspect of it. Imagine a bonus 2 stacks for that and Null Field, on top of Ethereal combos … on a wide field of players. That’s where the effectiveness comes into play — say you get 3-4k of damage (modest) across … 30 players. That’s 90-120k spread damage. Sure, they will heal a decent spread of that, but that is healing that they cannot use for other damage. And, if they are unable to heal, that’s 20-30% of most players’ health pool. It’s very rough suppression when you consider that the base abilities (Feedback, Null Field) are also providing potent effects like stripping Regen (lol), or simply more troll (Feedback).

And on top of all of the above, the first build includes the point spread for Warden’s Feedback, giving you glamour stack and 3 ways to reflect projectiles in one build. It’s about the most obscene zone control and AOE suppression build in the entire game.

The second build is a “huge utility power build” spec that basically crutches on Feedback+Warden’s Feedback for large scale utility, while maintaining very strong siege busting and solid damage overall with a power-backed GS.

I guess I just like killing regularly and effectively a wee bit too much.

Which is why I’m currently running GS Berserker + 30/30 Mantra, kekeke, and have been so lazy to get a second gear set.

Yes, do not use swap too early. The clone actually takes a moment (or two, or 5) to do its thing. Get into the habit of actually tracking where the clone is moving. When it does its leap, it’s pretty obvious once you’re looking for it. Then when the clone is at your target, use swap.

1. Get familiar with the range.

2. Use it slightly within max range to be safe and to buffer for lag.

3. Get in the habit of tracing the clone’s movement with your peripheral vision.

4. When the clone dives for your target, press it again to swap+Immobilize.

5. Follow with Blurred Frenzy usually.

6. If the clone is not properly diving for your target (you will be able to tell instantly after using it for awhile), then use an alternate plan.

Personally, with my current setup I tend to combo iLeap as part of a longer and much more interesting combo when I can. Specifically:

- iWarden
- Curtain, pause, Void into the iWarden
- iLeap
- Swap
- Blurred Frenzy + iWarden hurhurhur at the same time
- Mantra of Pain for bonus onus
- Shatter just because it hurts before the Immobilize runs out (they will attempt to dodge immediately)

Assuming everything goes perfectly (which doesn’t happen often unfortunately), that’s a 25k damage combo if everything crits (which also doesn’t happen often).

The man is very serious.

Oh I love confusion builds. I just don’t run them in WvW currently because I don’t do much PvE farming, and the entry fee for that build is somewhere around “a kittenon Of Gossamer and 70 Ectos” (I already have the Ancient bones because I bought a stack of 50 back when they were around 55 copper per). Oh, and iBerserker > siege.

The interesting part is that confusion does more damage than in sPvP. Kind of like how PvE Berserker gear has absurd crit damage compared to sPvP.

It’s particularly on my mind atm because JQ may start actually organizing “real” dynamic portal and scouting efforts, and this would be the type of build suited for it (although juggling utilities would be odd, since you’d have Decoy/Blink while running around instead of raw Glamours … or maybe you’d ditch Decoy for Glamourwin, dunno).

Edit:

Specifically, you can run all 3 of the following builds with the same point allocation, so you can swap out when you switch up what you’re doing:

Full-on Glamour condition damage large group traits (Carrion):

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQBYk4kCm3cUPuu1rOJFlG1A

Skirmish IP power shatter (GS/x, Berserker):

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQBYk4kikvcUPwe2/OJFtO1A

Skirmish hybrid power/cdmg shatter (staff//scepter/torch, Carrion):

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQBYk4kikLdUPuOA+OJFtG1A

Edit: To clarify, the 1st and 3rd builds both use a lot of raw condition damage (e.g. not Sharper Images) and it seems easy enough to swap a few traits and utilities (or weapons) when you switch from keep / siege / zerging to and from scouting / roaming.

Also, the first and third builds use Torch effectively, which should probably excite just about anyone. You can even get the Torch trait if you want to..

It’s good if you find yourself running around the map a whole bunch for roaming or in a blitz group.

Otherwise, I prefer to kitten out damage and down people before they know what hit them.

When I craft a new set of gear for glamour/confusion trolling, it will be a tossup between Centaur and Nightmare runes for me. Nightmare will be pretty tight for its raw potency, but I sense I will be doing a lot of scouting / roaming with that build, and NM is not a necessity.

Or maybe I’ll get NM runes and then make a third set for roaming.

This is new for you guys?

Happens pretty much every time you get a good and heavy 3-way around a major keep (with most of the players in the map on that spot).

Hmmm …

About time I consider working Scepter into a few of my specific builds.

Seems like it would be much less tedious with a smoother attack.

All of this was made possible by figuring out how to keep multi adds Crippled and realizing how important it is to Shatter when my nect complement if Illusions were ready to be cast.

Great job! You are now better than 80% of Mesmer players. Keep up the good work and expand your familiarity with the timing of all weapons (although GS + Staff is easily the easiest weapon combo to PvE with).

Sword is pretty entertaining if you can get the hang of it. Although GS+Staff really maximizes Elasticity.

But I don’t really know why you need perma cripple on your targets ?

Because he’s fighting groups of mobs 5 levels higher than him that will take over half his HP off with 1 hit.

My record for 100->0 normal mob kill is 2.0 seconds on some frostgorge wolves NE of the Claw event.

Basically all my kitten crit and my Air sigil proc’d to boot.

It’s not easy to take fortifications if your team knows how the hell to defend.

We held Garrison against HOD and SBI at the same time (on HOD’s borderlands — e.g. HOD = easy siege placement) for over 7 hours straight through primetime.

Basically had outer walls down for 6 of those 7 hours, and fended off multiple 7+ omega golem rushes.

Had a tower under siege (at the same time) from SBI for nearly 3 hours straight and they couldn’t take it with Trebs, Catapults, rams (lol).

If anything, siege needs to be easier to kill than it is currently.

Woohoo, 8 bleed stacks >.>

Progenitus.3718:

I got about 40% crit chance and around 2000 power. Crit dmg is 50% or so. And yes I meant heightened focus. Sorry for the mix up!

With these stats, 10% all > 100 power > 10% crit damage.

Heightened senses at max adren would swap the latter 2.

10% is 10% (actually not really, depending on likely ANet calculations, but close enough)
100 power is 100/2000 = 5%
10%cdmg = [(.6 + .4*(2+.1)) – (.6+.4*2)]/(.6+.4*2) = 2.9%
10%cdmg + 9% crit = [2000*(.51+.49*(2+.1))-2000*(.6+.4*(2))] / (second value) = (3078 – 2800) / 2800 = 9.9%

Edit: Should have just gone with decimals on the last formula, but whatever.

Edit2: Oh, so your question is the GS 10% damage AND 100 power — well that wins as you can see above.

With your high defense and low offense, mobs probably won’t die in a single HB+WW combo, so Axe will probably be superior for your sustained DPS pew pew pew.

Off-hand … shrug. Sword OH may be best because you get high range damage via the Sword4 ability, and Sword5 is great for PvE damage pew pew.

I don’t mind thieves doing a kittenon of damage. I mind them doing it within 0.25 seconds from 900+ range.

Thieves will continue to get nerfed until that burst vector changes.