As a scrapper, you also have good cleave to clear clones. Remember clones die to 1-2 autoattack. Also, if you want easy 1v1 victory vs mesmer, you can opt for mender’s amulet. You will out sustain a mesmer.
I think condition mesmer is in by no means OP. Against meta specs, mesmer loses 1v1 to druid and scrapper and gets completely shut down by dragontrappers.
I agree on the dragontrappers but from my experience the scrapper will have to s.gyro to leverage some time for his cooldowns. You are usually good for the first couple of shatter waves with blocks/evades and clear on Scrapper. But eventually the mesmer will wear you down as his condi application cd’s cycle a lot faster than your defensive cd’s and condi removal cd’s.
The condi pressure uptime from mirror images, signet of illusion continuum split on top of the chronophantasma/illusionary reversion/persistence of memory is just a lot better than what you can leverage on scrapper for defense i find.
You’ve got shock shield on a 20 second timer, i run elixir C with alchemical tinctures for extra clear and e.gun for the super elixir clear. Turret clears 2 on drop and if you pick up rather than blasting the water you are on a 15 second cycle.
Does the jump trick at the end of chrono’s shield 4’s channel still work to spawn the shield clone even if the player dodged? Or did they patch that?
Shield 4 jump trick has been patched. Now if you jump after shield 4 block, no phantasm will spawn.
As a relatively new player I cannot judge yet if condi mes is op or not; but since the topic is somewhat about countering it I have to ask – how do one sees/evades their shatter? Phantasms/clones approach on different time and shatter upon contact, I just cannot manage to dodge that stuff properly as a scrapper sadly :C Best thing I can do is blocking with hammer4 but its cd way bigger than the next mesmer burst. I’m reading that scrapper should counter mesmer but still cannot manage to do that. So if you wise guys can share any tips I’d really appreciate that =) cheers.
Currently the best way to play against condition mesmer is not to dodge the clone shatters.
Your No.1 goal should be to evade the shield 4 phantasm spawn. Once that is evaded, you will limit both mesmer’s offensive and defensive capability at the same time. Mesmer’s clone train generation relies a lot on chronophantasm and persistence of memory. They will have less iavenger to shatter and longer shield 4 block cool down.
As a scrapper, you also have good cleave to clear clones. Remember clones die to 1-2 autoattack. Also, if you want easy 1v1 victory vs mesmer, you can opt for mender’s amulet. You will out sustain a mesmer.
I think condition mesmer is in by no means OP. Against meta specs, mesmer loses 1v1 to druid and scrapper and gets completely shut down by dragontrappers.
Right now in wvw Dragonhunter / Guardian >>>>>>>>>> warrior. Indeed, wariors outside of some roaming nike builds are almost as useless as vanila rangers.
In PvE it doesnt really matter unless raid meta, you can pretty much do well on any class on almost all content except upper fractals and raids and even then its more dependant on the rest of the team comp rather then a single player, neither of which I do so I can’t comment.
In PvP I think guardian is in a better spot then warrior, though there is a smaller gap then in wvw.
Also, fun wise, while warrior with its funky novelty builds back in the days such as killshot, rifle, mace/mace/hammer etc. was more fun then guard, currently DH is way more fun then warrior in just about every aspect. Though different peoples opinions will vary.
This is not very accurate.
In WvW, warrior has its place in zergs by playing a power burst damage build. It also brings the important utility rezzing banner. Guardian is the obviously more important backbone of any WvW group. But saying warrior is useless is false. I also find warrior more enjoyable to play. As for roaming, warrior is clearly the better choice.
In PvP, both can be played to be effective. Guardian is easier to play but warrior can do just as well.
In PvE raid, warrior is a must-have because of EA/PS. Guardian is just another dps role who has to compete against ele, rev, thief. Warrior wins hands down in this category.
I was a player who enjoyed Ragnarok Online quite a bit back in the days.
But I don’t think the special dungeon locked behind WOE winner is a good design. It promoted the whole scene being dominated by 3-4 big guilds.
I also love this QoL improvement a lot.
If you don’t like it, that is fine as you can just turn off. But it certainly benefit a lot of us.
I am also learning to play DP thief recently and here are my two cents.
You teleported (dagger3 steal) onto DH too much. You risk taking trap damage this way. You want to dodge to get rid of the traps first.
Then it is the heal trap that gets DH back to full HP several times. You want to aim to interrupt his heal trap and come in for the finishing blow. Otherwise, you don’t want to trigger heal trap like that. It is probably good time to go shortbow.
So going with a full zerk set and runes of leadership would be perfectly fine, even for high level fractals and open world?
Your goal is to reach 100% boon duration with sigil of concentration and food. You probably need to mix in a few commander gear.
Ranger GS autoattack definitely has not higher dps than LB autoattack at 1000+ range. Some other numbers seem a bit off too. The wiki isn’t always 100% accurate. Of course it doesn’t really matter, because this list is meaningless anyways. It says absolutely nothing about how good or bad a weapon or class is in PvP (and even in PvE those numbers are not really relevant). So i don’t understand why people try to make conclusions based on this list.
Auto attack is pretty important. Many professions spam auto attack a lot in PvP. Engi uses hammer auto. Rev uses sword auto. Thief uses dagger auto. Ele uses dagger auto.
Some weapons are bad because the auto is bad. I can tell you mesmer GS is bad in current pvp because its auto is bad. The weapon has good 2-5 skills but terrible auto prevents it from being a meta weapon.
Ranger staff is a strong weapon and its strong auto party helps that. As a utility weapon, it still gives decent damage pressure by auto
GS is “prevented” from being a meta weapon because most mesmers aren’t skilled enough to play power shatter, and because condi chrono has a much lower skill floor. That’s about it, not because of the auto being bad.
That is bullkitten.
Are you saying all mesmers in ESL tournament are not skilled enough to play power shatter? No.
People play condition shatter simply because it is stronger, no matter what skill level you are at, it is simply the stronger variant. Also the build takes skill to play well, try dueling other good condition mesmers if you think the build takes no skill.
And GS auto damage is weak compared to pretty much all ranged weapon in the game. This is a fact and objective. Whether you believe weak damage is equal to bad is your own personal business.
(edited by Exciton.8942)
DD has one of the highest dps and it is very easy to play. But it is not a must-have.
Druid is obviously more important to a group and you will always need one and sometimes two.
Why can’t you play them both since you have both power and condition damage gear? Play druid when your team needs one. Play DD when your team already have enough druids.
Good raider really shouldn’t be limited to playing only one class, especially considering DD is so easy to play.
Ranger GS autoattack definitely has not higher dps than LB autoattack at 1000+ range. Some other numbers seem a bit off too. The wiki isn’t always 100% accurate. Of course it doesn’t really matter, because this list is meaningless anyways. It says absolutely nothing about how good or bad a weapon or class is in PvP (and even in PvE those numbers are not really relevant). So i don’t understand why people try to make conclusions based on this list.
Auto attack is pretty important. Many professions spam auto attack a lot in PvP. Engi uses hammer auto. Rev uses sword auto. Thief uses dagger auto. Ele uses dagger auto.
Some weapons are bad because the auto is bad. I can tell you mesmer GS is bad in current pvp because its auto is bad. The weapon has good 2-5 skills but terrible auto prevents it from being a meta weapon.
Ranger staff is a strong weapon and its strong auto party helps that. As a utility weapon, it still gives decent damage pressure by auto
Mesmer Greatsword- 1.4 sec – 573 = 409 , (Range: 1200)
Did you count mesmer GS 3 ticks here?
I know mesmer GS auto is weak but not this weak.
Rabid, carrion, viper, wanderer, trailblazer, dire are all valid choices.
You can do a mix up of those to find your balance between offense and defense.
As someone already pointed out, guild hall arena is a perfect place for this.
Play D/P thief, problem solved.
You can jump over the knockback wave. For me, that is the key to avoid damage.
If you try to dodge the knockback wave, you will have a good chance of putting yourself at a bad position after the dodger roll.
MM in unranked is a joke.
They could just not use MM at all and create random games. The end result won’t be any different.
It seems your build lacks focus.
It just looks to me you are trying to do too much in one build. You are going for illusionary inspiration and inspiration signet for support. At same time you want to do good damage with phantasms. The domination traitline seems really out of place as few traits benefit rest of your build.
You need to focus on either support or damage not both of them.
The encounter pace is very well tuned. The boss has just the right amount of mechanics and attack frequency to keep you on your toes while not being too difficult for pug group. And the fight length feels perfect as well, unlike the tedious Mai Trin fight.
Ranked = infinite queue time
unranked = ridiculously low game quality, have to play with newbies all the time.
I would probably go with
air water arcana and dagger/dagger.
Tempest shout healing build is superior.
Your server doesn’t kick rangers out of the squad? Lucky you.
I don’t understand why druid is treated this poorly.
True that tempest is overall the stronger healer. But druid can do somewhat decent as well. Druid also has better mobility than tempest which means being easier to keep up and survive.
I don’t understand how all of you could still regard current Moa still a strong skill with 180 sec CD. It requires setup to get a decent chance to land. It has easy counter-measure by dodging, blocking, blinding, teleporting through you…
The only thing that makes it worthwhile is continuum shift that reduces its CD to 70ish seconds. Without chronomancer line, no one will ever take this skill outside of intentionally trolling.
The skill needs its CD drastically decreased to 90-120 sec to remain even remotely competitive.
Chronomancer line brought in traits that enhanced our ability to reproduce illusions through chronophantasm and illusionary reversion.
However, I feel we don’t have any interaction with illusions other than summoning and shattering.(sword 3 clone being the only exception as you can swap).
I would like to propose a few traits that can be potentially used in new elite specs.
1. Whenever you dodge, your illusions will gain 0.75s evasion.
I think mesmer needs some ways to keep the illusions alive. Some controllable evasion would help that.
2. Whenever you gain a boon, all your illusions gain the same boon as well.
Currently illusions don’t gain as much benefit from boons. I think this greatly limits mesmer’s dps potential since a large part of our dps comes from phantasms. This will allow us to stack boons on the mesmer and illusions at the same time.
3. When illusions are summoned, they gain stealth for 1 sec.
It feels like a fun trait and fits the theme with the leaked Mirage elite spec. Temporarily stealthed illusions can cause some extra confusion to the foes.
I am pretty sure they can easily track each active WvW players’s average playing time over a period of time.
They simply multiply that number of hours to each player and sum up the total to estimate server activity.
There isn’t too much diversity, granted. But even with one build each class, there is plenty for your to learn and get better at.
I just go afk from time to time if I get a feeling like 3 team mates are supposed to carry 2 beginners and this doesn’t work out. I think developers who have implemented the current matchmaking algorithms hurt the game pretty badly. It discourages new players and veterans. In the end the pvp scene looses both. Introducing a solo queue or improvments in class balancing wont do much as long as anet has no clue how to create fair matchups.
I know MM is not great.
But you can still do a lot even with bad teammates. You still improve by playing despite terrible teammates. Actually you improve more with bad teammates. Every one has his carry limit, trying your best even in difficult situations help you raise that limit.
If the weaker side just give up every time, we may as well not have competition at all. Why not just determine the winner by MMR at the start of the game by your logic?
There is no reason to go afk.
I don’t see a problem with this skill but I see what you want.
You want something that is like Warrior GS3.
I also like capricorn.
But I think skyhammer is in a better position in terms of balance. So I think it is a good pick among all the maps.
It is not only viable but also the best offensive carry if you play well.
The downside is it does have a much higher skill floor compared to most other classes.
Warrior roamer has been like this long before the expansion. They put on their nike and you will never be able to keep up.
-Rev can
-thief can
-Druid can
-DH can
-Mesmer can
-Ele can
-Engi canNecor can’t
You just have to build for it.. so does the warrior! because not every warrior build is shield/gs you know
Learn to read.
Warrior roamer has been like this long before the expansion. They put on their nike and you will never be able to keep up.
After expansion, more classes can do this now. Thief with dash can disappear in a blink of eye. My own roaming ranger equip GS/Staff and can run super fast as well.
I think it is a pretty competitive trait.
Its CD is in line with other blind GM trait from other classes(druid’s healing one and ele’s burning one).
Confusion on blind is also a nice offensive power buff. It has good synergy with Blinding Dissipation.
4v5 appears way too often.
There seems to be some problem for players to load in the game…
MM for unranked is terribad.
MM for ranked is slightly better but it is also more toxic. I mean, come on, it is offseason and there is not a ladder to climb.
As a meta condition chronomancer(difficulty in bracket) playing against meta builds for other class.
Warrior(Medium): Varies a lot depending on player skill but in general very manageable. Just need to dodge/block their big bursty skill while kiting and doing damage. GS warrior can be trickier because their ability to cleave out clones with this weapon.
Guardian(Extremely Hard): Almost impossible fight against a decent dragonhunter. Even against bad ones, it takes a lot of effort and accuracy to take down, and also very risky. They have too many symbols and traps to cleave out the clones. In between those skills, they still have a good block uptime. The on-demand unblockable CCs are great counters to our shield block.
Revenant(Easy): We pretty much hard counters power revenant in a 1v1. It is more about how to take down them fast enough. But they still post a great threat when you are already pressured. But that is why revenant is so good in PvP(relentless chasing of pressured enemy).
Thief(Easy/Hard): Depends on the build. DP is pretty easy to beat. But good DP thieves shouldn’t 1v1 you anyway. Staff thief is very hard to fight on point. They have good sustain and too many on-point cleave to clear clones. You need to shatter clones fast and accurate(hit between their infinite dodges). Luckily staff thief is not that great at chasing so it is possible to reset against them.
Ranger(Hard): They have too much sustain to beat in a 1v1. With moa, it is not hard to stalemate a fight for long enough though. But to take one down requires a lot of things going my way. They also have great mobility to keep up with you so it is a pretty annoying opponent to fight against.
Engineer(Medium/Hard): Paladin scrapper can be beaten with moa but it takes some effort since they have a lot of survivability through stealth gyro and elixirS. It is pretty hard to interrupt their heal because of constant stability. Menders scrapper is kinda impossible. They can outsustain your damage through healing. Kinda similar to the druid fight.
Necromancer(Easy): A matchup heavily in our favor but there is definitely room for screwing up due to their ability to transfer conditions. If they play minion build, it will probably require you to land the moa to win. Sometimes it gets tricky because it gets really bad if you get +1 in a 1v1 fight against necro. Their constant chill application makes your important CDs take just that much longer to recover from.
Elementalist(Easy): It is more about how long it takes to take them down. They have not enough damage to force us off point. Healer tempest is a support spec that really shouldn’t go into 1v1 for most of time.
(edited by Exciton.8942)
1up1down will not guarantee you better matchups. It only guarantees variance from week to week. It is not a very meaningful change to be honest. As long as there is no relative balance between servers. Varied matchups usually mean bad matchups.
1up/1down is meaningless. They are already manually adjusting glicko for better matchups.
Players will move about, and if we merge all servers together, it means they can stack servers again. Until they find a way to stop that, I prefer Linking to Merging.
The thing is that there is an ideal population on a server, at least in my opinion. Too low means bad server results and risk to get bored because you meet no-one. Too high means long queues during prime time.
Before linking there were just too many servers compared to the total population in WvW. There was no way for all servers to reach that ideal population, so people stacked on the top servers to reach that ideal.
If you now merge servers, all get closer to the ideal population, so you have much less incentive to move server.
Nope. Did you see that ppl still complain about lack of population on their servers of ‘full’ status with current 4 tiers?
It will never be balanced with a static system. Even if you reduce it to one tier, kittens will still flock into the winning server despite the long queues.
Roamed a bit tonight.
Druid still feels the best duelist out there even after the nerf.
I didn’t take trooper rune but took signet of renewal for the extra condition clear. 15 sec Avatar is fine since you need some time to do damage anyway.
I think the best future for WvW is always a true megaserver system. But I understand it is hard to implement with this 24/7 matches.
Server linking is a middle ground between megaserver everything and merging servers, which I actually quite like. It gives Anet some control of balancing population.
Permanent merging servers will likely create big imbalance as time goes on. We have witnessed time and time again, if you let the population shift control into players’ hand completely. The players will always make sure things going into more imbalanced state.
This is just like the hot-join pvp. 90% of games just end up in hugely imbalanced state with losing players either quit or join the winning side. This is what WvW is like on a large scale.
He probably means if the score is something like 100 for his team and 250-300 for enemy team.
I’ve been part of teams that have pulled it back from a 50-300 score. And that’s with out any voice coms.
Yea, a lot of times, a big deficit really doesn’t mean a huge skill difference between the two teams. It could be a few bad rotation/plays that snowball into a loss of the whole map. It is possible to turn the momentum if a couple of you find the right play at the right time to carry the game.
Based on the first day result, the linking seems to be working as intended.
2v1 him and profit.
There is no need to behave like white knight in WvW roaming.
Most of us play meta builds.
They are all strong builds with relatively low skill floor.
But it still doesn’t change the fact that better players will always come out on top. Many of those builds can still have high skill ceiling at the same time.
The most fun dps in my opinion is power revenant.
Reaper is also strong in terms of doing damage but lacks self survivability and needs support.
Dragonhunter is relatively easy to play but gets shut down by projectile hate and good rotation.
Mesmer has portal and moa which are very impactful skills with high skill ceiling. But it lacks a bit teamfight potential.
Warrior has good damage and sustain but just feels a bit dry IMHO.
1v1 a condition chrono?
DH destroys them if you know how to play. Can survive easily as long as you spam traps, symbols and blocks since they cleave out clones in less than half a second.
Mender druid and scrapper can both play a sustain game against chrono. You will slowly wear them down.
Staff thief can also beat chrono in a 1v1 if they have a cap to worry about. You can cleave out clones very quickly by your constant dodging AOE attack.
Yeah, trooper rune for a shout build maybe also very appealing now due to CA cool down nerf.
Durability is probably the best unless you are building some super bursty spec.
It cannot be too perfect.
If legendary armor become the end-all armor, then fashion war loses one of its main drive to keep people playing.