A stealth build is basically a survivability build that lacks bunker capability. You get awesome survivability: the +1s to stealth and buffs, which generally last for a while after you exit stealth, can make a huge difference: even when facing three or more opponents at once, but it won’t help you hold a point.
The only role I find for such builds in tPvP is to hold up multiple opponents to give the rest of your team a number advantage. The combination of Clones and stealth allows you to avoid burst pretty well, which is an advantage over bunkers.
Whether Confusion is burst or control pretty much depends on your opponent, i.e. whether they think taking the damage or waiting it out is better. Of course if you time your Confusion burst well you can usually get your opponent to proc it a few times, and usually people will stop spamming autoattacks when you have a few stacks of Confusion on them.
If you know or suspect your opponent has condition removal, try to bait it out with Bleeding stacks first. A well-timed Confusion burst can be the only thing that will bring down an opponent with lots of condition removal.
P.S. For those who don’t know, Confusion deals 2x as much damage in PvE and WvW than it does in PvP. This makes Confusion in WvW ridiculously powerful, downing people in a few seconds if they’re not careful. Especially hilarious against Thieves.
(edited by Embolism.8106)
Another common mistake people make is looking only at the Mesmer’s WoC damage without taking into account Clone WoC (plus Sharper Images) damage and Illusionary Elasticity. All in all the Mesmer’s Staff condition damage output is more than triple that WoC alone would indicate. If you rely primarily on Confusion in anywhere other than WvW it’s no wonder you’d feel weak, because Confusion is burst; not DPS.
Having said that, condition Mesmers definitely don’t do as much damage kittenter Mesmers: playing a condition Mesmer is essentially trading damage for survivability. All in all this is probably more important in PvP than in PvE, although I play condition Mesmer in both.
(edited by Embolism.8106)
If you take Shattered Conditions you don’t need any other condition removal really. IIRC it’s one condition removed per Clone Shattered, you’re basically immune to conditions then if you Shatter often. The problem of course is it’s too deep in Inspiration for Shatter builds to take without sacrificing a more important trait.
I don’t really see how Mender’s Purity can give a “large amount” of condition removal considering it’s one condition per heal and MoRec is rarely worth using. Almost any of the Mesmer’s other condition removal options are better IMO, without making you either waste your heal on condition removal or lose your condition removal when you need to heal.
Ah, but Staff’s attack rate is exponentially lower than Greatsword. 20% crit chance doesn’t compete with potentially 5 hits out of mirror blade on a quick cast, and spatia surge getting about 2 to 2.5x the hitrate since the animation speed buffs. Chaos storm being an on demand extreme self heal generator doesn’t make up for the lack of tools that trigger heals rapidly in the rest of the kit. And GS/Staff doesn’t have the multi hit options of sword or the invun for destroying burst combos.
I tested it today on bosses. It procs “Interrupt” If a CC hits during an attack and either chips CC immunity, or outright CC’s it.
You do not need to stay on the Staff, you only need to generate three Clones with it. Then you can switch to your preferred DPS weapon.
On the other hand, Winds of Chaos is a spammable attack that can hit up to three targets, so it’s not too shabby; plus the Staff has three excellent defensive skills (Phase Retreat, Chaos Armour, Chaos Storm) that fits well with a defensive playstyle (which a lifestealing build would be). Invest in condition damage and you and your Clones can inflict significant DoT on enemies.
Interrupt traits may be passable in PvE due to mobs having long and obvious cast animations, but I definitely would not waste slots on them in any kind of PvP.
Unless this has been ninja-buffed, my tests with interrupt traits shows that they do not proc unless the target is actually interrupted.
Regardless, the best way to get permanent Fury is to use a Staff. Three Staff Clones can easily stack permanent Fury plus a few stacks of Might on you (assuming there are no allied targets to steal them), not to mention Vulnerability and damaging conditions on their target.
The Shield doesn’t really fit the Mesmer IMO, as the Mesmer is more about evasion and trickery rather than taking hits. Having said that, an OH Shield with mirror-themed skills could certainly work.
IMO though the Mesmer needs another MH more than it needs another OH. And no, MH Shield is just… no.
While it is a powerful condition cleanser/boon stripper, my problem with it is that condition cleansing needs to be reliable: when I use a condition cleanser I expect it to work 100% of the time. Phantasmal Disenchanter (and also Arcane Thievery) requires the target to be hit, which means it can fail if you’re Blinded, not facing the target, target is invulnerable, target is stealthed, target is obstructed, target is out of range, so on so forth.
If Phantasmal Disenchanter (and maybe Defender too) targets yourself instead of your enemies and is 100% guaranteed to work at any time, then it would be much more useful IMO. Shattering it would cause it to Shatter on the spot, as Illusions without a target already do.
So you want a Glamour that you can Shatter.
A nonsensical comparison considering that Glamours are persistent field effects while Phantasms are targetable entities that can be destroyed.
Conventional Phantasms are supposed to be “damaging hexes that enemies can destroy”. A Mesmer-bound support Phantasm is basically a “beneficial buff that enemies can destroy”. Which they already are, really; except the buff has to be cast on the enemy; which IMO doesn’t make much sense.
Of course, Disenchanter does have the whole boon stripping thing going for it, but really; people use it first and foremost for the condition cleansing, and for that purpose it has to be reliable. It doesn’t make it considerably more difficult for enemies to deal with it so I don’t see why it’s a problem.
(edited by Embolism.8106)
I was under the impression that Mantra of Recovery procs on-healing effects when it finishes channelling as well as on every cast. I haven’t used MoRec since it’s unjustified nerf however, so that may have changed.
While it is a powerful condition cleanser/boon stripper, my problem with it is that condition cleansing needs to be reliable: when I use a condition cleanser I expect it to work 100% of the time. Phantasmal Disenchanter (and also Arcane Thievery) requires the target to be hit, which means it can fail if you’re Blinded, not facing the target, target is invulnerable, target is stealthed, target is obstructed, target is out of range, so on so forth.
If Phantasmal Disenchanter (and maybe Defender too) targets yourself instead of your enemies and is 100% guaranteed to work at any time, then it would be much more useful IMO. Shattering it would cause it to Shatter on the spot, as Illusions without a target already do.
A common mistake is to think that Mesmer condition builds rely heavily on Confusion. That is not true except in WvW, and even in WvW you still rely heavily on Burning and Bleeding as Confusion can only be applied in bursts.
For sPvP and PvE, your primary damage comes from Burning and Bleeding, inflicted by Winds of Chaos. Confusion can provide some much-needed burst but is highly situational, if you just spam Confusion skills on CD you likely won’t get much benefit from them.
In terms of prefixes, Rabid (CondDmg-Precision-Toughness) is the absolute best, as the Precision it gives fuels some of your most important traits (Sharper Images and Critical Infusion) as well as any on-crit Sigils you use. Carrion (CondDmg-Power-Vitality) is a passable substitute, but provides no benefit over Rabid unless you face a lot of condition damage or prefer a hybrid approach. Rampager’s (Precision-CondDmg-Power) is, IMO, absolutely useless for Mesmers.
Do people really blind clones?
Shatters count as attacks from the Mesmer, not from Illusions. This is evident in the fact that Confusion inflicted by Shatters is affected by +CondDuration. Therefore Blinding Clones wouldn’t affect Shatters.
Whether inflicting Blind on the Mesmer would affect Shatters I don’t know. If I had to guess I’d say it affects the first Illusion but not subsequent ones unless it was reinflicted.
/cough charr /cough
I also doubt quaggan and hylek will be playable, but for another reason, they are one of the lesser races, which you can sympathize with in your storyline. They aren’t ment to be one of the big players.
Compared to Quaggans and Hylek, the Charr are not distorted at all. You need to think about it from the perspective of models and animations, and how every piece of equipment is going to look on them. For starters, neither Quaggans or Hylek have distinct necks, consider how Helmets are going to work with that.
I mentioned the “lesser race” reason in a previous post as well. When considering if an existing race is going to work, consider if the player’s interaction with them would make sense if the player is a member of the same species.
(edited by Embolism.8106)
I highly doubt non-humanoids or highly distorted humanoids (Quaggans, Hylek) will even be considered as playable races.
The only races that will realistically be adopted as player races are those that are humanoid in a manner similar to, well, humans. That definitely rules out Centaurs as well as Hylek, Quaggan and likely Skritt.
The other “requirement” IMO is that the race must not have appeared too frequently in the game world already. Many of the common non-player races interact with players in a way that would not make sense if the player is a member of the same race (an example would be the racial sympathy quests), the most likely player race candidates are therefore races we don’t see/know much of.
As far as I know, that pretty much leaves the Tengu and the Largos. The Kodan might be plausible, although they might be too common (and too similar to Norn bear form) to be implemented. Plus, I don’t really see the Kodan lending themselves to player customisation, given they’re polar bears and polar bears are always, you know, white.
If an enemy uses a reflectable move inside a Feedback bubble, it doesn’t reflect after it hits the inner surface of the bubble: it is reflected immediately, i.e. the projectile hits them without traveling.
The inconsistency you see may be due to timing or something, I cannot say. In my experience however Feedback is basically a solid sphere of reflection.
“If teleported into an obstacle, and not far enough away from a stomping enemy, the stomp will succeed since the skill doesn’t deselect the enemy’s target”
This bug is listed in the GW2 wiki (see here)
And this happened several times to me. Admittedly this is a bug and not a flaw in the skill design itself. But still it does happen, even if u’re still invisible.
The Wiki has plenty of wrong/outdated information. During the Beta Deception did not stealth you, and more often than not you would teleport only a small distance that’s still within the original stomping range. Now it stealths, and stealthing always breaks targeting.
If you look at the history of that article you would see that the bug was logged before GW2 was released, i.e. it was a Beta bug. It no longer applies due to the change to Deception.
As to your experience, most likely it’s because you spammed 1 after using Deception, which breaks your stealth and allows the stomp to hit you.
Indeed. Forget tooltips, at the end of Beta we were promised an overhaul of Mesmer traits. There’s been some minor changes since then but no where close to an overhaul.
That is definitively wrong. There are times, where i got stomped and also stomped others while in downed mode and stealthed. I admit, that is actually a bug, when deception does not move u away far enough, because of u being close to a wall. But it still happens…
Stomping enemies is a different matter. Even if you yourself did not move from the spot being invisible on the moment the stomp lands will break the stomp: see Thief Downed #3.
Plus, he’s right. Played well Deception is a guaranteed stomp breaker, the only other profession whose Skill #2 is guaranteed is Ele’s. The Thieve’s is situationally better, but easier to counter by professions with blink (which primarily happen to be the Ele and Mesmer)..
It most certainly is not a guaranteed stomp breaker. Yes, wise timing can sometimes change the game and save you, but when you are teleported a foot away, it doesn’t matter at all, invis or not (however that works…). While having the ability to choose where to blink to would be especially nice, if the downed #2 skill would at the very least be given a minimum distance greater than 1 (which seems to happen exceptionally often), it would actually make this a proper skill instead of half of one.
While you’re invisible you cannot be stomped even if you’re in range. Time your Deception so the stomp will land during your invisibility (it’s not hard) and resist the urge to spam 1 and break your invis and it’s a guaranteed stomp breaker unless you have no target to use Deception on.
The Blind is only applied once, on the moment the Glamour is cast.
Empowered Illusions is a relic from Beta, back when Clones used to deal significant damage. Now that Clones deal no damage it pretty much just affects Phantasms, which makes it basically the same as Phantasmal Strength.
Conditions inflicted by Illusions no longer showing damage numbers when they die is only a visual bug, the damage is still ticking off the victim.
Crit allows your Illusions to proc Sharper Images, so in a way it does apply to Mesmer condition damage. You can also use Sigil of Earth so you too can proc Bleeding on Crit (albeit at a reduced chance).
Plus, Crit procs Critical Infusion; effectively powering your Deceptive Evasion allowing you to conjure even more Clones (which means you can replace lost Clones very frequently, and therefore can Shatter more often).
Make no mistake, CritChance is very important for Mesmer condition builds. Hence why Rabid (CondDmg-Precision-Toughness) is our best condition damage prefix.
Because a lot of your condition damage comes from Staff Clones, you want to be able to conjure three Staff Clones in an instant and be able to replace them immediately should they get destroyed. Deceptive Evasion is essential for that, especially since you have Critical Infusion and high CritChance fueling your Endurance bar.
Condition Mesmers still need to Shatter if they want to achieve their maximum DPS. You should only Shatter however if you can reconjure 3 Staff Clones immediately, i.e. Phase Retreat off CD and Endurance bar full, to avoid losing Clone DPS. In PvP Confusion is a potentially powerful condition and you should always look for a chance to use CoF.
Deception is fine as it is: it is a guaranteed stomp breaker unless your enemy uses stealth. Comparing it to the Ele, which has the most OP downed kill in Vapour Form, is unfair.
If they made the clone death traits also trigger from shattering, then a shatter/condition hybrid build using rampagers would be insanely good.
Not really: you’d be far better off with a pure Shatter build without CondDmg, as the only damaging conditions you can get from death traits is 33% chance of 3xBleeding from Debilitating Dissipation and a 3s Confusion that cannot be extended by +CondDuration from Confusing Combatants.
Indeed, those last 10 points can be very useful and can greatly affect your playstyle. My personal favourite is Prismatic Understanding, but Illusionary Persona is also very enticing; especially in WvW where Confusion is absurdly overpowered.
Crippling Dissipation is indeed deceptively powerful against melee opponents. Alternatives to Mender’s Purity include Glamour Mastery (if you want to be more about group support) and Medic’s Feedback (very useful trait in WvW). Personally I don’t like Confusing Combatants because it inflicts 3s Confusion that cannot be extended by +CondDuration, which is too short IMO to do much.
Domination gives +CondDuration which isn’t actually that useful because it doesn’t affect Illusions.
There are two traits that are pretty much essential for a condition Mesmer: Deceptive Evasion and Illusionary Elasticity. Chaotic Dampening is almost always taken, though not essential. That leaves you with 10 points to do as you will.
Currently Shatter builds are the most powerful Mesmer builds in terms of sheer damage. The beauty of it is that you don’t necessarily sacrifice survivability even if you go full glass cannon.
Phantasm builds are a thing of the past: Phantasms themselves are still good but are generally supplementary to Shattering.
Condition build rely on Illusions to deal damage more than Shattering, but still need to Shatter quite often to maximise (burst) damage.
Solution:
All Mantras take 4 seconds to charge.
You can only have 1 mantra charging at a time. (No limit on mantras charged )
Charging a mantra does not count as a skill cast (you can cast another spell while charging).
Taking damage cancels the mantra charge and puts it on cd for an additional 4-5 seconds.That would make them even more useless, as they would be impossible to charge in combat without using say stealth (which negates most of the point of allowing skill use through channelling).
Or you could actually be doing some damage while charging your mantras, like, say, using your weapon skills.
Except the Mantra will never get charged, because if you’re not stealthed or Distorted or whatever you’re almost certain to take damage in a 4s interval against any competent opponent; so you may as well not use the Mantras and get a Heal/Utility you can actually reuse.
(edited by Embolism.8106)
Working as intended. Clones don’t actually deal no damage, they just deal extremely little damage which, at lower levels, shows as 0 damage. At higher levels your Clones do start doing non-zero damage, although it is still a negligible amount that is as good as zero anyway.
Note that while Clones don’t deal direct damage, they are capable of dealing condition damage. Some Clones are naturally able to inflict damaging conditions (Staff Clones and Trident Clones), and all Clones can be traited to inflict Bleeding on critical hits through Sharper Images (Dueling 15).
Sword Clones are noteworthy because they inflict Vulnerability and strip boons, so despite having no natural damage they can improve your damage and wreck boon-dependent opponents.
I’d be a Johnny. I do like to win and have a tendency to dump builds after a few losses even if I had great success with it in the past (never permanently of course, I always go back to them eventually), but this serves to broaden my repertoire of builds.
I rarely play with the “best” build, in fact I tend to actively avoid FotM builds. Uniqueness is more important to me than winning.
I don’t care much for big numbers as long as my opponent dies in the end. Unfortunately this means my builds don’t do that well in tPvP due to the burst vs bunker meta.
(edited by Embolism.8106)
Solution:
All Mantras take 4 seconds to charge.
You can only have 1 mantra charging at a time. (No limit on mantras charged )
Charging a mantra does not count as a skill cast (you can cast another spell while charging).
Taking damage cancels the mantra charge and puts it on cd for an additional 4-5 seconds.
That would make them even more useless, as they would be impossible to charge in combat without using say stealth (which negates most of the point of allowing skill use through channelling).
Make Vulnerability increase condition damage too. It will still be a sub-par condition for WoC to inflict but at least it won’t be completely useless, and besides if Might was changed to affect both direct and condition damage why shouldn’t Vulnerability.
The Daze itself wasn’t OP, what was “OP” was the fact that the GS had two interrupts; which made it the go-to choice for interrupt builds.
I don’t know, corrupting boons into conditions is more Necro territory. I’m fine with the Mesmer just having boon stripping: if Mind Stab removed them all at once that would be dandy and would be more fitting the vision of the Mesmer having lots of boon removal, rather than just on the MH Sword.
While it is true that Mesmer condition builds are sub-par offensively to most other professions, I think we need to consider the defensive aspect as well. Mesmer condition builds are tough, and because of Clones you continue to inflict a significant portion of your DPS even when you are playing defensively (e.g. stealth). While I can’t kill anyone particularly fast as a condition Mesmer (Confusion vs Thieves being a notable exception), it is almost always possible to outlast them even in 2 vs 1 situations.
Unfortunately it seems like tPvP is all about either burst or tank: you kill quickly so you can take the point before more enemies show up, or you hold the point until allies show up. Builds like condition Mesmers, which despite having survivability cannot hold points due to their defense being based on evasion instead of tanking, don’t do well.
Personally I’m hoping for a move away from Conquest so we can see something different from the burst vs tank meta we have now.
The MH Sword’s Mind Stab is actually excellent for stripping boons, because Sword Clones also use it. The GS’s Mind Stab however is indeed a joke.
Null Field and Phantasmal Disenchanter also removes boons: the latter removes two boons every hit so it’s actually quite effective as well.
Osicat’s Shatter Cat build is powerful and definitely worth checking out. Even if you don’t want to go with a Shatter build, there’s lots of excellent tips in the guide and videos that are invaluable to any Mesmer.
There is no real “better”, it’s mostly preference.
Stats you need depend entirely on what build you’re going for, as well as whether you want more damage or more defense. Generally you want to maximise your offensive stat (which is either Power or Condition Damage), the rest of your stats depend on what you want (Precision and/or Critical Damage for more damage, Toughness/Vitality for more defense, etc.).
GS + Staff is a decent PvE combination. Generally with this combination your primary damage is from the GS, with the Staff being a defensive weapon. With this in mind you should focus on Power for your damage, whether you want Precision + Critical Damage for even more damage or Toughness/Vitality for survivability is up to you.
If you can’t use a weapon/armour and don’t plan on making an alt that can use it, then by all means sell it.
In general it isn’t a good idea to use two of the same MH/OH/2H weapon, because they share their CDs; i.e. you don’t get two separate uses of Blurred Frenzy by using two MH Swords.
The thing is, the main power of stealth (especially for the Mesmer) is target dropping. A longer/more powerful stealth doesn’t contribute to that, more frequent stealth does. Unless you’re saying that’s the Thief’s domain and the Mesmer shouldn’t have more frequent stealth, but even with 45s CD MI (and hopefully 60s CD Veil) the Mesmer still couldn’t stealth half as frequently as the Thief could.
The “group” effect is basically non-existent against players, and interrupts are not particularly useful in PvE due to the Unshakable mechanic.
I’m thinking a blink away from the enemy might just have ludicrous synergy. Clone > Swap > Blurred + Shatter > iRiposte + blink away.
Well, the Mesmer is already very good at getting away; it’s chasing the enemy that tends to be the problem.
iMage is just bad. 3x Confusion for 3s that cannot be extended by any form of +CondDuration? No thanks. Yeah, it applies Retaliation, but if you’re a condition Mesmer Retaliation does do that much damage; plus as a Mesmer your main defense is evasion, not tanking.
A blink to the enemy would be awesome, actually. Might make OH Sword considerably more enticing compared to Pistol.
+Duration only affects yourself, not your Illusions; and Bleed only procs 33% of the time. I wouldn’t go for it.
Carrion is far better than Rampager’s, definitely get them if you can’t get Rabid. Runes, matter of preference. I like to maximise CondDmg so I go for Undead. Someone who really likes Confusion may find Nightmare better.
10 points in Chaos or Illusions depends on whether you want offense or defense. Prismatic Understanding is a lovely trait if you like to run solo in WvW. As it is though the extra (Confusion) damage you get from Illusionary Persona and Shattered Strength is probably too good to pass up. In PvE definitely go for 10 in Illusions.
Confusing Images is really quite sub-par. It takes ages for your character to flourish their scepter before starting to inflict Confusion, and 8 times out of 10 it will at least be partially dodged/blocked/obstructed. That said, I still use the Sceptre.
Overall though Sword is probably the better choice in WvW. You get a 2s invulnerability, massive boon stripping and a 2s Immobilise. In PvE Sceptre is passable since mobs generally don’t dodge/block/LoS your Confusing Images.