Guild Wars 2

Blink is way better than Decoy. This thread is basically insane.

Blink is way better than Swiftness for PvP.

Ridiculous.

^

That sounds like a potent build, although the 20 insp with no Focus makes me giggle. What are you picking up for Inspiration traits?

1. Clones: Depends on playstyle. Can go either way.

2. Sword is a hit-and-run weapon in general use. iLeap is clone + dive. Against mobs in PvE, you can then spam a few autos until the mob is going to attack. Then BF for limited invulnerability. After that is over, you get out or use a different tanking/sit/evasion mechanism.

BF is not a prelude to melee hump. BF is the middle/end of humping a target in melee.

3. Staff is not the “best weapon” for Mesmers, but it is strong and well-rounded. It’s also a bit defensive, so it’s like having survivability training wheels. The clone management is also simplified because leaving them alive is reasonably effective (because they use WOC unlike other clones).

Unless you have a specific offensive strategy with Staff, the Staff is a defensive swap weapon. You use another weapon set as primary, then you swap to Staff for a defensive sequence (retreat / storm / armor, throw in some Warlock for more bang), then back to offense with a different setup.

4. Mind Stab does not really do more raw DPS on a single target than your auto. It is good for multiple targets, or for stripping boons. It is now fast enough that it doesn’t suck kitten to use.

5. Nothing wrong with GS // S/S. When you get a hairy story quest where you are fighting 20 mobs, try out Staff as your swap to drop a chaos storm.

6. iWarden requires specific support to use effectively. You will need to buff him with an Aegis, drop a Blind on the mob, or use the iWarden as your second or third attack (using another clone and phantasm first). It requires its own special learning curve to use effectively.

And I have never seen a mesmer doing shatter builds in pvp….because they suck right now. Phantasm seem to be way better.

They don’t suck.

They are good for burst.

Cyclic burst isn’t the method to kill a bunker build*. Shatter build is strong for roaming sPvP or WvW in skirmish.

Also, Shatter build is not exclusive with most other builds.

Less cursory judgements on things you don’t play and have no experience with.

Edit:

Only relevant notions for Shatter changes are to slightly boost the damage of Mind Wrack, maybe (e.g. remove the downscaling of per-illusion damage for x2/x3 Mind Wracks). Slightly increase the duration of the confuse effects (and/or verify that they are being appropriately increased by +% condition duration and the trait).

Couple other tweaks like Halting Strike needs a significant # buff. Should be like 5x the current damage, although that might be sliiightly overtuned.

You can distract even good players with clones if you play well, but it’s not like they’re distracted long. You can expect about half a second to a second, depending on what you’re doing.

Also note this only applies to small-scale combat. In any large scale combat or surprise situation, you’re going to get more than negligible deception.

That would be a horrible change because you would lose the Immobilize, which is over half the reason for the ability.

Also, Blurred Frenzy fail.

Why do players keep making suggestions to make the class weaker so they can get little gimmicks like a 600 range leap?

Yeah, the cooldown on Chaos Storm is simply ineffective for DE tagging. It’s like 3s every 2×. Not gonna work out.

GS’s attacks are pretty fast and long range. Very reliable as long as you can actually target the mobs.

Range classes start fights in WvW and fight them.

Melee finish fights in WvW.

Greatsword stomps Staff for mob tagging.

Best Mesmer setup for mob tagging is basically GS + Illusiory Persona.

If you’re only tagging like 2 mobs per wave, you’re basically doing it wrong. Note that you don’t get 100% chance for loot drops even if you tag the mob.

- Scepter #3 (confusing images): damage numbers (when used, not on tooltip) do not cumulate like other channeled multiple-hit skills (e.g., blurred frenzy, spatial surge), instead the individual damage hit value is shown five times

This is probably because it is a slow multi-hit ability. It seems like “fast” “flurry-like” abilities have it accumulate, but slower ones do not.

I read through the list and didn’t see any mention of this one yet. When you go underwater, and then leave the water, all of your readied mantras are reset.

This is semi-not-broken: if you have the same Mantras selected for your underwater set, then the charged Mantras will stay. The issue seems to be when you have Mantras in you “land” / normal set, then you go underwater with a different set of utilities — you will lose your Mantra charges.

I ran into this yesterday when messing around with Odaman’s horribad “making me use Mantras” build (otherwise known as getting off mykitten and practicing using Mantras); I was prepared to be highly annoyed at having to recharge my Mantras in and out of water, but after I configured my water utilities to match my land utilities, there was no problem.

A good player ducks behind LOS and uses dodge to wait it out.

Great is subjective. TBH I don’t really like your ideas at all. I don’t think they’d really improve anything and they’re mostly based on false premises.

You only die if you get hit! Haha.

Personally I don’t find iDefender to be relevant in most combat. The general issue is that you will almost always have times when you have your 2 other phantasms out, and then use a clone ability which will overwrite a phantasm unnecessarily.

Considering that Mesmers already have pretty strong survivability (and that survivability is centered on evasiveness, not tanking, unless you go a more serious bunker build for tPvP), it just seems superfluous.

Feedback is definitely more potent than Null Field for WvW. For sPvP, both are equally effective.

With no GS, it’s easy to center your build on condition damage with a side of crit% / Sharper Images. It’s a pretty standard build.

This build gives you answers to the most common WvW situations:
– At range, you’re a beast with multiple reflects and GS.
– In close, you’ve got brutal aoe damage tools and solid defense from decoy, diversion/distortion, blurred frenzy and portal.
– Out of combat, you’re mobility king with perma-aoe sprint and portal.

Most common WvW situations:

1. There is a kitten on the wall that is trying to cheese your team. Cheese them harder with iBerserker trolol.

2. There is another kitten inside the keep firing a catapult on the door. Cheese them more with iBerserker lol.

3. Your team is terrible and ignores the arrow cart / treb up on the high wall. Fortunately, you don’t ignore it and you launch the hero of the story, iBerserker, to deal with the enemy. iBerserker never relents. He is a spiritual manifestation of your GAR and will spin2win with epic style until the enemy is dead. If you listen carefully you can even hear him shout “DEMACIAA!” as he attacks.

4. There are a whole bunch of bad guys who are being cute launching spells at your team then running away from your team’s AOE on the walls. Yank them back to the wall (or off it) and watch them splatter from 10 meteors, ice blocks, poison clouds. Owned.

Oh, and the actual combat stuff mentioned … hehehehe.

I would also suggest to you that improvement can happen even where something is functional – just because it is working doesn’t negate the possibility it can be even better.

There’s a difference between improving things and completely revamping them to “improve” them. Lol.

For WvW I like to have 0 Vit, 0 Toughness.

For power gearing, I would basically start with a baseline of full Berserker, and I would switch out slots to Valkyrie (Pow, Vit, crit dmg if I recall correctly) until you find the balance you want.

I wouldn’t use that build concept in general for WvW, but in terms of the actual build for the stated setup:

1. Not sure if intended, but I wouldn’t use that amulet/stat spread or rune setup for the build at all.

2. Blade Training is not a common pick if you’re only using Sword mainhand. It’s fine if you really want to use iLeap and Blurred Frenzy more often (which is fine), but most players choose Deceptive Easion or the 25% health Decoy.

3. Persisting Images won’t have a significant impact on your phantasm survivability in WvW. I would not invest 10 points into Insp for this trait, although Insp investment may be useful for other reasons.

4. Elasticity only for Staff1 when you are in a heavy phantasm / SI build isn’t hugely productive in my opinion. However, this depends on whether you’re using Staff or your S/P primary. If you’re using Staff primary, then it’s ok I suppose, but I would look towards the Staff cooldown trait if that were the case.

Generally, for heavy phantasm+SI, I would move your points in Inspiration to Domination and pick up the GS Trait, and switch to GS+Sword/Pistol.

If you stick with Staff + S/P, I would drop Elasticity, replacing it with Illusionary Persona if you do a lot of melee / diving, or move those points elsewhere (5 more points into Insp for Phantasmal Healing, maybe 5 more for Restorative Mantras, or something else like Glamour cooldown).

The analysis cited is partially incorrect. The cooldowns for the attacks for all the phantasms seems to start at the beginning of the attack, not at the end.

LAZER BEEM!111

Spatial Surge is epic.

And like i said it’s a personal opinion, i think it would be way more amazing to actually swing that sword you are carrying.

I mean, you realize that there are a dozen (well, 3 off the top of my head) other classes that actually swing their greatsword, right? And like every class in every other MMO that uses a 2h sword actually swings their sword. I think it’s cool to be the one class that doesn’t swing the greatsword. We get LAZER BEAM instead.

Channeled abilities do not cancel when you stealth, so they will continue to hit you. Not only that, but the projectiles will visually go towards wherever you’re stealthed. So, don’t stealth when the enemy [typically a rifle Warr or longbow Ranger] is streaming at you.

Use Feedback instead! Huehuehue.

If you’re playing the game and exploring, you’re stopping all the time to jump up rocks, fight mobs, interact with NPCs, and tons of other stuff that involves blink cooling down, or reducing the %age of time you spend doing raw movement.

Like I said, this topic is primarily for 100% map complete cruising. And if you’re trying for 100% complete, you will swap Focus and likely be picking up the cooldown for blink.

^ Another reason why it’s obviously better to Mind Wrack with 3 illusions rather than 1, for people with 25+ points in Illusions.

*Any build that abused the cooldown bug on Torch.

Duh, fine crafting mats along the way. Also, hearts are more or less everywhere before Straits.

For PvE, yes it does if you’re actually leveling efficiently.

For WvW, it’s ok since you’re almost as fast, and Mesmers are overpowered in every aspect of WvW. Don’t need to be faster to boot.

Also, for all the above discussion:

Portal. GG.

Humor is a lost art.

But I think it would work even better if you added an AOE Immobilize and Daze on the enemy team to protect the Guardian on top.

Sub-80 doesn’t matter because you’ll be killing stuff along the way, removing most of the relevance of pure speed.

Pretty sure Mind Wrack (2x) is slightly less damage per Shatter than Mind Wrack (1x).

Lol, so you have the options and you choose not to use them. And yet you can still use Blink to help get around. And you choose not to use that. So sad.

Guardians have access to jump forwards and swiftness providing utilities.

All 3 of these leaps require a target, which would generally put you into combat and be rather counter-productive.

Mesmers are faster underwater? Who cares we aren’t playing Waterworld the MMO, that benefits us on like 10% of the world.
You would think that somebody who hasn’t played the game would be less arrogant.

Oh man, I’m guessing you haven’t been to the Straights yet or Sea of Sorrows? Get to level 80 bro!

Why are you bringing vigor up in a conversation about out of combat activities?

You move faster with dodge rolls. I noticed this at level 2. Personally I used it to get around Lion’s Arch.

How can you possibly think that a 70% chance (if that) of 5 sec swiftness on a 30 second cooldown even an option?

Because when running from 25 players, you use every bit of mobility you can squeeze out.

HOW ABOUT VEIL AND TIME WARP.

kittenMIT THE FULL HEAL WILL GO OFF IF WE HAVE TO AEGIS AND GROUP STABILITY THE SUCKER TO BOOT.

1) Is it always the case that you get more damage per clone if you shatter one at a time? Or is there some reason with crits etc that might make a 3x mind wrack a good investment?

Well you generate clones and phantasms faster than the cooldown on Mind Wrack, so.

2) Do clones get the same crit chance as the base player?

To my knowledge, Mind Wrack is a player effect, not the illusion’s attack. Either way, clones do copy your crit%.

3) With other shatters (F2-4), is it also fair to say that, on the whole, you get better value/clone when shattering one clone at a time? The daze, for example, seems to be 1 sec no matter how many are shattered.

The Daze applies multiple times. If the illusions are spread out you will get more than 1s.

4) What strategies do people use to jack up mind wrack damage to the max?

The 20% Mind Wrack damage trait and Illusory Persona. I don’t find the 10% chance to crit to be worth it. I’d rather get the 3% damage per illusion trait instead.

Phantasms always die or expire, so Shattering them is almost always a gain.

3. Rangers at least get a signet for 10% run speed and can gain swiftness for weapon swapping (if they choose to spend 5 points in Skirmishing). That’s a lot more than we have in Signets or traits (nothing at all).

The Swiftness on weapon swap only works in combat.

Lols.

4. Warriors at least get Banner of Defense 3, “Inspire”, which grants 10s of Swiftness every 15s, so they can apply swiftness 2-3 times for every 2 minutes (Banner cooldown), even more often if they spend 10 points in Tactics (trait V “Inspiring Banners”) . They can also spend 10 points in Discipline to gain the passive 10% “Warrior’s Sprint” when wielding melee weapons. That’s a lot more than we have in Signets or traits (nothing at all).

You can trait for 20% cooldown on Blink, you can trait for 20% cooldown on Chaos Storm (which has a pretty high chance to grant swiftness). You can trait for longer distance on Blink, although that seems like “trying too hard” for the purpose of running around the map.

You can trait for perma vigor, so you can dodge roll all thekittentime.

You could pick up 6 Centaur Runes and use Mirror for almost perma Swiftness, no weapon swap required. You could use MOR for actual perma Swiftness. Mesmer is basically the only class that can get perma Swiftness without using any weapon, utility, or elite slots for it.

You can actually use Focus and curtain. You know, like Guardians do, like Warriors do with Warhorn, like Rangers do with Warhorn.

Ironically your list for Warriors includes a ton of traiting and utility slots for … banners? Lol. Oh man. Too bad you can’t trait Blink.

5. Guardians at least get “Retreat” as a slot skill, which offers 20s of swiftness once per minute. With 5 points in Honor, they get even more out of it (trait II “Superior Aria”)
That’s a lot more than we have in Signets or traits (nothing at all).

Oh yeah! I forgot about that 33% uptime Swiftness. Good call. That’s kind of like perma vigor. Or Blink twice per minute!

For raw condition damage you want some sort of primary delivery mechanism. E.g. Staff as your primary weapon, and/or Sharper Images support.

If you run GS//Sword/Sword, condition damage should not be a focus of your gearing. If you end up with a lot of condition damage for whatever reason, Staff and/or Sharper Images is a good consideration (although SI needs crit% too).

Yeah it’s a learning curve just like everything. Learning to counter that isn’t as steep because of its lol cast time.

But now imagine that Guardian having Quickness from Time Warp while using that elite :P. GG!

If you’re running 15/15 Chaos Insp for the point sitting tank-ish build, you are not doing a ton of personal damage. Also, it doesn’t take “4 hits” to pop the phantasm unless:

- You are running Signet of Illusions, and
- I’m using autoattacks (LOL) to pop them

Your assumptions are weird. Also, every 1v1 is different. Personally I’d have Warden’s Feedback, so I can basically ignore any projectile phantasms and let them kill themselves. Some classes could passively drive-by-AOE the phantasms like they’re nothing, or Blind/Block them (mostly applicable to Warlock or Swordsman).

A Ranger could penetrate multiple phantasms in a line while attacking you with any of their attacks.

An opponent Infinite Clone Works build could also simply block the projectiles from the clone spam. Personally I find the most dangerous attack from other Mesmers is Mirror Blade.

Shrug.

Every mesmer and their mother uses this skill, it’s a fact.

In WvW, at least half run Time Warp since it’s way more effective for your team.

Other class elites like Thieves Guild (for 1v1), or Tome of fullhealyourwholegroup (for group fighting) are no less significant.

Yeah, condition damage in general is subpar without traiting. If you want a taste, I recommend just hopping into sPvP so you have the full point allocation. Doing condition damage or confusion stuff while leveling just won’t be effective. I mean it’s doable if you really try, but not worth the effort.

Lol, yeah when I [seriously] try to learn a new build or weapon, I force myself to stick with it for at least 8 game hours. Mesmer’s too timing-intensive for anything less.

Gibon.1705:

3 phantasms never happen? defending point alone i always end up with 3 phantasms.

So what you’re saying is that all the people trying to take a point from you are too dumb to realize that they can glance in the phantasm’s general direction and make it go poof, all while looking for the shrubbery you’re hidden behind.

Ah yeah, any projectile traversing the bubble (inside to outside or outside to in) is affected.

I don’t think inside-to-inside is affected, but I’m not sure. I do love the enemy pets thrown against doors or running across during standoffs though. #1 anchor for Feedback.

I only respond in kind to the remarks of others.

People want to complain unreasonably, then they are bad.

Clearly there is something amiss because there’s a lot more of us saying that there’s something wrong with one profession missing a movement passive that the others get in some shape or form (be it signet or trait..).

Lol, no. There’s a lot of players who are jealous of the Thief run speed Signet.

I find it hilarious that people are crying about a Ranger’s 10% Signet, when Blink essentially matches it.

Then you have people crying about classes that can weapon swap for Swiftness …

While refusing to swap Focus. Now that makes me laugh out loud.

And at the end of the day, Guardians are still slower. I’m not versed well enough in Necro capabilities, but from what I’ve seen in WvW they are even slower than Guardians.

So Mesmer is basically tied for third fastest class along with Warriors and Rangers (and where does the Engi land?). Mesmers are faster than Guardians and Necros …

And we have people crying?

Of course we do, because they’re watching all the Thieves and Eles. Nothing but pure, unadulterated, whiny class envy for running around the map right there.

And it’s even more funny because the only thing this really affects is cruising for 100% map completion.

And the pure irony that Mesmers are actually faster underwater … roflmfao.

I’m tired of incessant and unwarranted whining about Mesmers.

Also the misinformation to boot.

I think what he’s saying is that you could demonstrate your spec more effectively if you had a capable Warrior attacking you.

Moa is an effect, so condition removal does nothing.

In a 1v1, Moa is /shrug. If you have a good chasedown game it can auto-win any 1v1 (since the opponent will be running and dodging until it expires). If you don’t, it’s meh.

Against Necro/Guardians it can break them (it rails transform abilities). Against Thieves it can shut down their escape (ability-based escape chains).

So it’s still pretty good 1v1 even though it’s overrated by players who don’t know how to manage their endurance or use line of sight.

For raw power + malice with low crit / no Sharper Images, Sword/Torch, although it wouldn’t be significantly better than the other options.

Offhand Sword/Focus/Torch isn’t really a power/malice question. More that Focus has strong utility, OH Sword has strong damage and some defense, and Torch has, hum, stealth and burn.

Greatsword is actually great in PvP, and for a variety of reasons is basically the best WvW weapon in the game, tied with imba-Focus.

But opinions are opinions …

Mesmer get Blink and Portal.

Can Rangers get Blink? Just saying, since we’re complaining about things we don’t have.

Where is the Warrior passive runspeed utility ability?

Do Guardians get passive runspeed utility? Do they get a Blink?

Hurr hurr.

“Every class”.

Rofl. I like it.