Guild Wars 2

If you had dueling traited, then the higher bleed ticks you see are coming from the fact that critical strikes from illusions cause bleeding as per the minor trait sharper images. Fury does affect their crit chance, as I noted.

Edit: I see you’re calculating bleeding per tick. Let me take a closer look.

Illusions do not have basic stats, those values are inherited completely from the Mesmer. Therefore, might on illusions has no effect.

On the other hand, illusions do have secondary stats. This means that while the illusion inherits the Mesmer’s precision, they do not inherit the critical chance. The effect of this is that fury on a Mesmer has no effect on their illusions, but fury on the illusions does increase their critical chance.

Lorden.8026:

I’m on EU server, GM said “The only thing about these transfers is I cannot put you into any full or highly populated server.” I am east coast time zone but It doesn’t matter because I’ll play at 3-5am sometimes.

FA = bad for competition because it outnumbers other servers?

For this week yeah, we got an awful roll into t4 again. Next week will be better though.

Wargameur.6950:

beatthedown.2651:

Best one :

• Added 500 toughness on every class to make combat less threatening

Yes this is real. There is a thread with 31+ posts about it. I know the majority is against it, but the fact that there is a discussion on such a topic creeps me out. Have you ever had a midfight against druid-engi-ele-comp while thinking: “This could be a lot more fun with more toughness”.

There is no hope.

It’s not really a discussion, it’s more 15 people telling the OP that the proposition will solve nothing….

These forums have pretty low standards, I think that counts.

Lordrosicky.5813:

fumbii.3582:

Lordrosicky.5813:

Supreme.3164:

Lordrosicky.5813:

Moonsinn.5382:

I’m so sick of these threads. Mesmer is not OP. There isn’t a single OP class now. Some might need some tweaking, but balance is very good right now. Honestly, I eat mesmers like candy. Maybe you just need to learn when to attack (not during BF or shield), and dodge or aoe the clones.

Lol the window to attack the doesnt exist. They can chain invukns or blocks whilst clone spamming for huge dps. Then just blink away for the few seconds they can be attacked. Their condi clear is mad too

But..

1) They can’t sit on top of traps/wells whose CD starts the second they’re used

2) They can’t hold a point

3) You don’t see 2-3 mesmer teams winning consistently every teamfight where one team lacks strong condi clear

4) You don’t need outstanding condi clear ( like your build loaded with condi clear to 70-80% total) to win against condi mesmer

5) They have no god mode, where they have pulsating stability and just advance without fear into the thick of battle

6) Blurred frenzy root them…they don’t walk towards you while blocking the kitten out of everything

7) You don’t see bad mesmers being carried by passive sustain…they die in few secs

8) They can be CCed for a change…not like most other professions that truly fart stability/block for hours to no end

9) New players don’t roll a mesmer for easy win..they die in 2s using them, they need loads of practice.

In a game dominated by cheesy mechanics…you still don’t find videos like this..for mesmer:

-Necromancer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcho3twIK2g

-DragonHunter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWRWW3tb4Rw

-Warrior
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpxIggT6thM

….I rest my case..and I don’t play mesmer or thief, just saying

New players can easily face role on mesmer and be carried by clone and shatter spam.

I lose to gold mesmers, even silver mesmers cause me problems. This is not ok.

You lose against mesmers because you’re playing with necro and did you know that you can dodge moa?

Gold/silver mesmers shouldnt be owning me. Something is seriously wrong

When you play at a bronze skill level, anything is possible!

Keviin Snow.5760:

Olli.9028:

i guess we found a skill clicker that cannot imagine how you can use more than 1 skill per second.
l2 keybind and you can do this magic too.

nope after he rush me i dodge out , roll back into tower , notice 20k health , down to 8k theif skill 2 5 5 2 2 7 9 all at once was hit on me after 2 landed on me i roll back into the tower
and check the combat log , 7 skills was spam onto me with 1 rush

I think we’d believe you more if you had a screenshot of it.

Lordrosicky.5813:

DrDivine.5378:

Mesmer is fine, toughness got nerfed, moa got nerfed, shield got nerfed, healing got balanced, it’s still good to play, but can also be killed which is a good sign to me. I hate it when people don’t know what to do in moa, I used to die a lot too to it, so I read the moa skills. The best one is probably the 5 skill, allowing you to do a fast sprint. You literally sprint away, wait for it to wear off and get back in there.

The problem is that thief has been and still is a one trick pony. The damage and mobility are actually quite good, but it can’t 1v1 all that well which is a huge problem. You’ll rely on a thief to cap far, only for the enemy’s DH or something to be there and the thief just can’t do anything. It’s not the best in big fights either since it’s so squishy and doesn’t offer too much.

Chrono has good mobility, damage but is actually good in team fights. DH is great for 1v1 and teamfights with it’s only real drawback being speed. Similar to revenant, thief isn’t god awful and can be played well, but I don’t see them doing anything that other classes don’t do better.

Nope, it is mega op. Evade spam, invuln spam, condi spam, clone spam, mobility spam, moa spam. It is so OP

Yeah, 1 spam, 2 spam, red spam, blue spam, old spam, new spam, false spam, true spam!

Aenaos.8160:

A class that has one of the highest hitting condi spikes and can spam both confusion and torment and has access to retaliation,is bound to be over performing.
No class or build should have access to both of these conditions to the extent that Mesmer does,and such a high hitting class/build that can also avoid damage through blocks,evades ,and invulnerability,certainly does not need retaliation to top all the op ness off.

Oh yeah, that retaliation is just… So op. It truly is what makes Mesmers totally broken and capable of instakilling any class in the game. It’s practically an exploit, it is. Any Mesmer using such a broken mechanic as retaliation clearly deserves a ban.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

I’m of the opinion that I’d honestly rather no one tag on either side. Tagless blob fights are the most chaotic and the most fun. They also usually last for an incredibly long time because not enough people will die at once to make a full push.

If I wanted to waste my time without accomplishing anything I’d play PvP.

Swamurabi.7890:

The same could be argued for those guilds/servers that feel the need to always fight 50v20.

Would you rather play against players, or doors?

I personally enjoy playing against players. However I also run with a guild that fields 25 players maximum and actually uses tactics and well-thought-out group composition to counter pin sniping. Our commander never gets successfully sniped, and in the rare circumstances that he DCs, we have a couple of backup strategies that keep the group moving.

I know, basic strategy and tactics is a tall order for most WvWers, but at least have the self-awareness not to come complaining on the forums about lacking it…

Swamurabi.7890:

Heibi.4251:

TheHeretic.3529:

It’s a big problem that really won’t be stopped and can’t be, even if ranks were hidden. The driver is in front of the group 90% of the time so they’re easy to identify.

Only real solution is for commanders to be running tankier builds, like nomad or sentinel with durability or melandru runes.

I still don’t see why this is a big problem. It’s called Guild WARS. There is nothing fair in a war. Targeting the commander is a proper tactic and there is nothing wrong or illegal with it. If you can’t stand being targeted don’t tag up. And if you commander is being targeted keep him/her healed and condi clean. Oh, and stay close to him/her so the enemy has a hard time sniping him/her in the first place.

So moral of the story:
If you can’t stand being targeted, don’t tag up.
If you’re going to whine about being targeted, don’t tag up.
If you think your commander is being sniped, stay ON tag.
If you keep getting targeted look into the reason why you are so east to target. Are you a huge norn with a fire sword? A huge Charr with big wings? A high WvW ranked player?

This is what the problem is.

Say you’re on a server that’s outnumbered. Your server has only one tag on the map.
The other server is used to playing the pin snipe meta.
The two sides meet, your outnumbered commander is pin sniped every time then ragequits.
No other commander tags up.
Your server starts losing players to other maps and is now outmanned.
The other server is free to PvD the map for the next three and a half hours of their raid.
The other side PvD’s the map, comes on to the forum and complains that there is nobody to fight.

If you’re outnumbered and your group is bad enough to get pin sniped and have the commander rage quit, you were just a bag farm for the other group anyway. One way or another your team would have ended being pounded into the ground by the other team. Pin sniping has nothing to do with it.

JTGuevara.9018:

I assume commanders are prepared for things like that.

Good ones are. Bad ones make threads like these.

Corrupt.6749:

Anet should nerf Corrupt boon by keeping WvW and PvE/PvP skills different. Commander sniping is ruining this game and making people leave.

Hah. If you’re so bad that you quit the game because other people are actually thinking and using gasp strategy…..then we don’t want you.

OriOri.8724:

jackynikola.1205:

nah doesnt work. Taking marauder makes my hp 21k. So before I eaven start any burst am geting one shoted by Thiefs or Warriors. Eaven if i pull full burst target is barely on 50%hp so… MMMMMMMMM quiting mesmer for good. Ty guys for help

Hold on, you wanted to be able to burst people down in one hit while also being tanky? That’s the opposite of balance, and ideally no class should ever have a build like that

Sure would make the game easy to play though I suppose…

Instead of complaining on the forums about it, have you considered trying to play better instead?

Jayne.9251:

See #3.

You all a making it like thieves are the boogeyman. You can kill them.

Or it could be all thieves in EU play drunk.

If a thief in the wild doesn’t want to be killed, it’s more or less impossible to kill them. The same applies here, except NPCs aren’t smart enough to just leave the thief be, they’ll simply die to it.

Jayne.9251:

Baldrick.8967:

Jayne.9251:

OriOri.8724:

Jayne.9251:

OriOri.8724:

Jayne.9251:

OriOri.8724:

One change I would like to see is to not have WPs be contested until either a wall/gate is down.

Careful for what you wish for. Those swords can mean the difference between defending lords room and getting there JUST as it flips. One gate down and no immediate defenders … Might as well just hand it to them.

Have it affect WPs and attackers might as well not attack. People can insta port in.

I only want to change how the WPs are contested, not how the orange swords spawn. Those should stay the same, but it just doesn’t make sense for one person to knock a WP out of commission by doing almost nothing. And, having the WP still be uncontested until the outer wall is down gives that server more of a chance of getting there to defend. It might be too long, so maybe when walls/gates are at 50% might be better but still.

Also, if at all possible (though I highly doubt it), someone who hits a gate, then runs away mmediately as soon as you come up to fight them, rinse and repeat should never, ever be able to contest anything.

There’s strategy involved in the pizza delivery model.

Contest the centre keep on alpine and force your opponent to have to run all the way from spawn to get to a keep under attack. Any delay can mean victory if timed well.

I’m well aware of that strategy. I think its a bullkitten strategy that Anet should get rid of already. If you want to contest a WP then you should be putting serious pressure on that keep, not killing a guard or two that are roaming outside every couple minutes. That’s lazy and only requires a single person to hamper an entire servers’ ability to respond. That’s too much power put into a single person’s hands, too much. It’s just something that shouldn’t be happening. Go actually attack the keep and make a concentrated effort if you want to take down their WP.

It’s not a bull-kitten strategy.

There are many viable counters to it; the prime one being jumping out of your keep and killing the guy who’s doing it. Over and over. Hiding behind the walls and pew pewing with siege won’t stop them – it just irritates them and makes them more determined.

I can think of five different ways to dissuade it.

Your counter of jumping out doesn’t work. It’s a thief. Unless you want to tie up 5-10 people for hours on the off chance he comes back the likelihood is he will stealth and be out of range. Even if you camp both gates with people- at which point he’s won, as he’s tied up 10 players just to try and prevent him contesting (which is still very hard to do). It’s usually the same thief contesting other towers, capping guards, etc and sometimes 2-3 of them. If you do manage to kill him he’s back within 3 minutes anyway- if there is more than one of you spending time trying to kill him then he’s winning, tying up your players and making his team’s odds better elsewhere.

There is no viable foolproof counter to a lone thief contesting whatever he likes which doesn’t involve tying up many more on your side than his. It’s a broken mechanic that needs fixing.

If you’re playing in t1 or t2 then you probably don’t see the issue as you have bodies available.

Contesting should be done on damage to walls or gates, threshold set at 10k damage (ie one hit or so with a catapult/ram).

Scouting should be done by NPC’s so tactics would be send people around taking down NPCs on towers etc so your main party isn’t revealed if you want to ninja things until you get in – then Lord would reveal you anyway.

Wvw should encourage tactics and fights not karma training. When I’m ninja capping a tower with a couple of people the game should show us if an NPC spots us- after all, it might be my tactic to pull a larger force to us so our main force can attack SM or a keep or main tower elsewhere.

1. Thieves have very little HP.
2. Multiple stealth traps ensures he not only aggros you, but the npcs as well.
3. How do you counter a thief “in the wild”? Use the same strategy to staking them, or hide in the keep and be annoyed.
4. Recognize patterns.
5. Have one person per gate. Kill thief over and over. They’ll move on to an easier target.
6. Use cold snares on thieves; they have few counters to cold.
7. Play a thief, learn their limitations.
8. See #3.

You clearly have never actually fought a thief that has even a tiny amount of competence at this game.

Yeah, what the poster above me said is the way you have to go about this. The problem is that you’re looking at this the entirely wrong way. You’re complaining about how you’re being excluded because of your disability and that it’s not your fault that you can’t use voice comms. Strictly speaking, you’re not wrong…But it doesn’t matter. The reality is that your disability is causing a burden to groups, and you need to compensate for that.

The real life analogy would be like someone showing up in a wheelchair to a soccer match and complaining that nobody will let them join a team. Yeah, it’s unfair, but it’s not the responsibility of those people to compensate for another person’s disability. It is your responsibility to show and prove that you will not be a burden to the team.

Knowing only VG will pretty much guarantee that you never get a team. Typing out the mechanics for each fight would be immensely tiring and unfun. What you need to do is read every guide that you can, watch every video that you can, and learn the fights as well as possible without actually doing them. Then, you can go to a training group and say that although you can’t use voice comms, you’ve already learned the fight and are confident in your ability to perform it properly.

thrag.9740:

Its not so much that the direct damage from the volatile poison kills people. I think that while running away from the boss, people get killed by ads and the green floor.

Obviously we can combat this several ways. First, our eaters need to make sure they clear area to drop poison. Second, if we do a good job of killing ads, then moving outside of projectile protection is not as big a problem. But remember, this is a progressing guild team, and so we are still improving in these areas. I think telling a healer to baby sit poison runners will give us more leniency with these mistakes.

So obviously I can’t comment exactly on how to do this because each group does it a bit differently, but I can share my experiences for my group.

Green floor is never an issue for our volatile droppers. Green floor becomes an issue if your slublings actually start eating too much, because then it starts to catch up with you quicker. What you want the slublings to do is eat as little as possible while still giving you guys enough room to maneuver. Usually we have our slubs eat more or less directly to the next shroom plus maybe 1 or 2 spots towards the center. This way we never worry about the green floor catching up and there’s always space to drop poisons.

Those 1 or 2 spots towards the center are important. We don’t continually pull sloth along with the slubling eating. What we do is pull it to one of those spots towards the center and leave it there until we’re forced to start moving it again. While there, myself and the other mesmer are continually pulling the adds into the boss, and the eles and such are dropping aoes that hit the center of the arena. This means that we’ll almost completely clean up the adds every time we stop to dps, allowing the volatile poisons to be dropped without worrying about getting destroyed by the adds.

thrag.9740:

I definitely agree that getting all of our members to the point where they are aware enough that me calling out pulls and epis is unnecessary is a good move. Our guild will get there eventually, it was only 2 months ago we were struggling to get 4 people to stand at vg green circles, but now we either 1 or 2 shot him, so I am confident we will get there.

I am really starting to learn more about what playing druid entails. Druid is pretty much the only class I don’t have/haven’t played. I think, the second something like a volatile poison spawns on a player, we need to have a druid dedicated to making sure that player stays alive.

Volatile poison doesn’t really do any significant damage to players. I mean, obviously that player dying is bad because it drops the poison, but it should only take a second or two to dash back a couple steps to drop.

Exciton.8942:

Rokkis.8901:

Azukas.1426:

Just out rotate them and use your portal plays. You will beat the bad DH’s if you are really good on mesmer, but general rule of thumb is avoid.

Wait, is there actually some profession you shouldn’t avoid as mesmer?

For meta condition chrono:

You absolutely should take on necro and revenant in a 1v1 as a mesmer. Those two professions are immensely strong in team fights but got completely shut down by a mesmer in 1v1(except for some weird tanky necro build).

You should also learn to 1v1 druid, scrapper and tempest. They are super tanky but with moa, you can take them down 1v1 if you time your burst well.

However, meta condition build kinda sucks in a 2v2. You simply don’t have enough burst to put on enough pressure.

Druid, scrapper, and tempest are usually not worth the time to 1v1. Possible to 1v1? Yes, bu it’ll take ages. You’ll probably get +1d and killed by the time you’re finished with it.

It’s about the same still.

Ok, so the mesmer role in WvW groups changes drastically depending on how you’re comped.

Uncomped Zerg
Unfortunately, you’re totally worthless as a mesmer in a random zerg. It honestly doesn’t matter what you do, you essentially have zero value to the team. You’re bad at dealing damage, you can’t provide meaningful support without coordination, you don’t have any great trap cc like line of warding or static field, it’s really bad. You can just do whatever, you’ll be equally worthless.

Coordinated Group
So here’s where things get interesting. Mesmer has a ton of great utility to provide to a coordinated group, and you can leverage that to do a lot of interesting things. One of the more common things groups will ask for is veil, but this actually is pretty useless and overrated. The real strengths of mesmer support come from boonshare and distortion share. Using signet of inspiration and clever traiting, you can provide massive amounts of boons to your groups. This lets you take more temporary boons like quickness and resistance and turn them into nearly permanent boosts.

The other key thing you do is sharing distortion. The is accomplished with a minor trait in the inspiration line that causes you to provide 1s of aoe distortion upon gaining distortion yourself. You can obtain distortion in various ways, but the most frequent are with traited signets and the distortion shatter. Distortion is extremely powerful, but the 1 second duration means you need to use it at the appropriate time to avoid damage or cc.

So I can provide a substantially different perspective on this, but I’m too tired to type it out on my phone. I’ll add it in later.

GundamSentinel.6470:

Fay.2357:

They cost 5s on the trading post because anyone that does WvW regards them as utter junk. I’m sure you can pony up 13 gold for a stack to get your legendary.

I was about to say. This is an issue now? Really? People making a legendary that usually costs in excess of 2000g and they have a problem buying one comparatively cheap material on the TP? Wow.

Yep, just shows how obscenely entitled these players are. You don’t see us WvWers making constant whine threads in the dungeon section complaining about having to do all sorts of PvE stuff to get a legendary, now do you?

They cost 5s on the trading post because anyone that does WvW regards them as utter junk. I’m sure you can pony up 13 gold for a stack to get your legendary.

Blackjack.5621:

only 3 mesmers and 4 thieves in top 10, seems balanced

Top 10 means nothing because it’s purely the result of a couple unscrupulous players manipulating the matchmaking and rating system.

Evan Lesh.3295:

I have good news and bad news.

This example is an extreme case so it is not screwing over everybody. There were multiple people that failed to ready up, which meant multiple rounds of substitutes were needed.

Bad news. Teams are not rebalanced after finding substitutes and it has been that way for years. There are complicated computer-science reasons why, but it is solvable and I will attempt to fix it. In this case since it happened multiple times, it compounded the inaccuracies.

Ahhh, the curse of the edge conditions.

Yeah, looks like a significant bug having to do with some weird interaction with the negative timer.

hackks.3687:

Simple fix to prevent gaming the point capture contribution: it only counts for the first person to step onto the point – which more likely than not is the person intended to capture it rather than the person who ran back to perhaps cleave a corpse then stay for the cap.

Xter’s ideas are right on the money IMO

Well, good thing the devs don’t take poor ideas from random forum-goers.

hackks.3687:

Now if you think ANet can’t apply some criteria to include individual contribution then I kindly invite you to take your ignorant kitten elsewhere, because these systems already exist. Go play any other competitive game and you’ll find out pretty quick just how ANet’s system is deficient.

Yeah! Just look at League of Legends, the most successful eSport of all time! Their matching system….Oh wait, their matching system actually works exactly the same.

Xter.6271:

Fay.2357:

Xfer, you’re making the faulty assumption that matchmaking is out to get you and is always placing you in the losing team of those matchups. The reality is quite different. You’re right that MMR matching will not produce perfect matches every time. However, you have an equal chance of being on the lucky team as you do of being on the unlucky team. Over time these average out and end up having no long term effect on your rating.

No I’m not. I have had games with great team mates and it was fun at the start till it just turned into a blow out and we literally had 3 point caps and the other team showed no effort into doing something. They’d ether respawn and be fodder, or gave up.

Now the match went from being enjoyable at the start because I had players that wanted to try and win, communicated, rotated, and did their absolute best, but the other team was awful and blowing out the opposing team isn’t really fun when you’re just waiting on 500 and killing the same guys over and over.

I’m just trying to propose something that will help the current matchmaking place people with people of similar skill quickly and hopefully create better matches. I personally don’t care too much about losing, but I get irritated when I lose and drop down farther and get even worse team mates that seem to have just started the game 5 hours ago. Yes, eventually I’ll climb out and hopefully be in a better division. But it’s going to be painful and frustrating doing so knowing it’s probably going to take 30 matches of the same thing over and over.

Well, correct me if I’m reading this wrong, but your whole argument seems totally pointless. You start by using MMR examples as a demonstration as to how unbalanced matches can be formed. This inherently also means that the MMR used for these matches is accurate, but the system is using it wrong. You then go on to talk about how the system ends up evaluating your MMR totally wrong and you introduce some suggestions to evaluate it better.

Pick one, because you can’t have both. Either the MMR is accurate and it’s the matching that is bad or the MMR is bad itself. But as is, your arguments are logically inconsistent with each other. Let me give an example:

You claim that the system has artificially lowered your MMR more than it should have. If that’s true, you’ll end up in a match like your second example… except now team blue has an ace up their sleeve. You’re that guy with the 750 MMR, but your actual rating is closer to 900. In this case, team blue should dominate the match because you are much stronger than the matchmaker thinks you are. This will keep happening until your MMR has risen to the appropriate level.

And so now we see how matchmaking works fine. Even if your MMR somehow gets lowered more than it should, the system is self-correcting. Even though the system doesn’t make perfect matches every time, it still automatically irons out improper MMR ratings until they’re correct. Your arguments are inconsistent with each other AND inconsistent with reality. I recommend finding some new ones.

Xfer, you’re making the faulty assumption that matchmaking is out to get you and is always placing you in the losing team of those matchups. The reality is quite different. You’re right that MMR matching will not produce perfect matches every time. However, you have an equal chance of being on the lucky team as you do of being on the unlucky team. Over time these average out and end up having no long term effect on your rating.

Azukas.1426:

and properly timed bursts once their CD’s are down or happen so fast and hard they can’t react.

Which makes them pretty vulnerable to a +1 by a mesmer. Just don’t try and get the jump on one alone unless you’re extremely confident about taking them out.

Seyiwaji.4082:

Ben Phongluangtham.1065:

Shaogin.2679:

I’ll try investigating this more, but from what I undestand your decayed rating doesn’t determine who you are matched against. So in theory, when you came back you were still playing against gold players. Your decayed rating only affects your leader board position and nothing else.

This is correct. Decay does not affect your matchmaking. With our current decay settings, you can work off your decay in 7 games.

If you will all 7 games (precision)

For the 2nd time, decay is removed at a rate of 100 per game played. You do not have to win. For proof, see the screenshot immediately prior to your post.

Not to rain on your parade here, but I decided to take a look at the GW1 wiki to see the sort of aesthetic for Mesmer that you were talking about. Helpfully, the wiki had a big picture of Mesmers on the main Mesmer page, so it was easy to see.

https://wiki.guildwars.com/images/3/36/Mesmers.jpg

Oh wait…

Rising Dusk.2408:

The only raid RNG I legitimately hate is at KC. The difference between getting bombs and phantasms is night and day, and honestly I think the phantasm phase should be made more threatening so that you actually have to deal with the mechanic instead of skipping it.

While KC RNG is annoying, the one that takes the cake for me was a time that I got sacrificed on Matthias halfway through the duration of my feedback to break the shield. That caused it to swap sides and killed someone due to the projectiles hitting.

Tiefsee.3647:

Ben Phongluangtham.1065:

Shaogin.2679:

I’ll try investigating this more, but from what I undestand your decayed rating doesn’t determine who you are matched against. So in theory, when you came back you were still playing against gold players. Your decayed rating only affects your leader board position and nothing else.

This is correct. Decay does not affect your matchmaking. With our current decay settings, you can work off your decay in 7 games.

Wait, that means;
1) a correct placed player will have a match making with 50/50 win rate
2) decay reduces the division
3) but you gain it back when you win all games, in the previous division you had a 50/50 win rate
D) something here seems odd

You gain back 100 points of decayed rating per game played, not per game won.

Xyonon.3987:

Every dps matters, Chrono is no exception, even though his main purpose is to apply Q&A.

I suppose. Realistically it’s not such a big deal though. As long as your group is comped reasonably and everyone stays alive, not a single encounter should ever end up close to the timer. VG gives you more than enough time, gorseval is incredibly forgiving if you do updrafts, sabetha has loads of time, sloth has more time than any of the wing 1 bosses, KC is easy to burn if you do the orb properly, and xera is very laid back to do as long as your tank knows how to keep her moving properly.

Even Matthias is a very loose timer. My group has been having trouble with people dying, so we had one of our dps eles go full healomancer. We ended up losing 1 chrono to a desynced down state, losing another dps to something else, and still finished before enrage.

Unless you’re actually trying for speedrun times, far more important than squeezing out every last bit of dps is making sure all mechanics are performed properly and that everyone stays alive.

Maniac Magee.2643:

Fay you say landing the shatters will be harder without imob but that i have higher burst. It’s not like that. that’s not the proper use of this most of the time. I send out a shatter or 2 spacing weapon attacks between, keeping substantial stacks (not burst high stacks but enough to really hurt) on the foes, so that even if they clear it’s re-applied. So missing out on the sword really just means I don’t have Blurred Frenzy. That is def a shame, but whatchya gonna do? no build has everything.

That’s certainly one way to use it. Regardless though, landing the block is a quite powerful burst since it’s equivalent to roughly 2 full 4 clone shatters landing due to the duration and stack size. That’s why I always view scepter as a higher risk/reward mainhand for a condie build. It’s got less defense and less utility for landing shatters, but it has unmatched raw burst pressure if you land the skills.

The key is that you have to resist the urge to actually fight the thief. Just go to his point, stay long enough to decap it, and leave. That’s all you need to do. If you stick around to try and kill it you’re just wasting time that could be spent making the main team fight unbalanced in your favor.

I think calling this build ‘basically the meta build’ is going a bit far. The traits are identical, and that does mean that the way this build fights in a very general sense, i.e. you use shatters to apply conditions while sustaining, will be the same. However, other parts of the build make it a bit distinct.

The scepter choice means that you’ll have a much harder time landing shatters without the immobilization of iLeap. However, it also means you have the potentially for a much more powerful spike between confusing images and the block.

The torch choice means that you’ll have far less pressure and point-holding sustain than shield. However, it does give you the opportunity for shatters from stealth, and provides and excellent gtfo tool if the occasion demands it.

Personally I disagree with the MI and mantra choices in this build, but they do have impacts on various matchups. Fighting a necro becomes quite safe with the mantra, while the normal meta build needs to proceed with substantial caution in that matchup. MI lets you do interesting things with instant burst, particularly in conjunction with CS. You lose the mobility of portal, but you can potentially make up for that by instakilling somebody with a powerful alpha burst.

So yeah. Is it a completely different build than the meta? No, not really. But neither is it ‘just another meta clone’.

Feedback given in the double post OP made here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/GW2-Mesmer-WvW-Guide/first#post6457836

Yeah, clownmug has the right of this. The problem isn’t the spamming of shatter skills in and of itself. The problem is the fact that condie builds have an incentive to spam all your shatter skills as much as possible.

So I didn’t actually watch more than about a minute, and I’ll give you feedback based on what I’ve observed.

Firstly, it’s 13 minutes long. This is roughly 6-7 minutes longer than it should be. If your video is longer than 5-6 minutes, you either need to drastically condense your information or break it into two videos. Something that long will simply not be watchable for any useful purpose and would be better served as a text-based guide.

Mousing over the bar, I’m seeing that you spend a full 5 minutes standing in 1 place and talking. This is exactly what I’m referring to when I say that your video is far too long. Think about it a minute: What’s the point of the video format? You can show things! You can show footage of gameplay, you can demonstrate in a visual manner what you’re talking about. If you’re using your video to stand in 1 spot and talk, you should be writing it down instead. That entire portion of the video should be removed and put into a text guide.

Finally after 6 minutes of nothing, you get into the portion of the video that actually justifies having a video at all. Unfortunately, you don’t use this portion well. You should be pointing out your gameplay here, discussing your use of the skills in actual situations, describing this and that occurrence or callout that shows how your build fits into a group. What we actually see is you in what looks like a throw-away random subsquad (mesmer + 2 scrappers, what is that?) mis-using long cooldowns like veil and time warp for no apparent reason. Also a highlight is that one portal bomb that you didn’t even use stealth for and then cut away after 10s of fight (presumably to not show your group wiping?).

I apologize if this is a bit harsh…but nobody will or should be learning from this guide.

expandas.7051:

Give the build a shot Fay. When you factor in Seaweed, Scholars, Force, and Mantra Strength the localized AoE damage is pretty good. I said at the beginning that it wasn’t going to be optimal compared to a backline necro (or ele), but it’s the closest imitation of those traditional roles I can get to.

I spent a lot of time trying to make builds that worked for this role. The variation you propose is one of many things that I’ve tried in the past, and it’s no better than various other options. The problem is that at the very best, they’re nothing more than an awful imitation of what a necro or an ele…or a rev, or a warrior, or a guardian, or an engineer, or even a ranger can do. You’re doing nobody any favors by trying to play backline mesmer. You will not get much loot, it’ll feel bad to play, and you’ll be effectively useless insofar as accomplishing anything as part of the backline is concerned.

expandas.7051:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAreWn0nBlohtfCuqBEgilVjqOZj2r98ISiioMCOuAA-TFCBABA8AAa4IAsxhAIgTAQlq/kn+gzUCi1+jyPSBMwCA-w

Spam Confusing Images and Mantra of Pain for ridiculous damage. Once you have full stacks, camp scepter/shield and only switch to staff if you’re pushed or need poison on downs. Mantra of Pain is really versatile instant cast damage and can synergizes with Restorative Mantras. Drop wells on the enemy midline or when your driver calls for it. Use feedback’s resistance as an instant cast defensive utility against gank and condi pressure. Phase retreat is your friend! Learn how to deselect targets for directional teleports and you’ll be golden.

If by “ridiculous damage” you mean “roughly equivalent to a single meteor from meteor shower, but actually in a tiny aoe with clunky skills that don’t work very well in WvW”.

This build would be fine in some random pug zerg that doesn’t actually care about who is in it, but the effectiveness of this build compared to literally any backline build on any other class in the game is absolute garbage.

Edit: and don’t even get me started on how worthless well of calamity is.

DeceiverX.8361:

Fay.2357:

DeceiverX.8361:

Server stacking is a hard problem to solve on the technical level, despite being doable. ANet’s unwilling to devote the resources needed to do so, so we get ineffective algorithms, instead.

Server stacking is not possible to solve when the community is so intent on destroying any possible solutions that Anet implements. The only way to fix stacking would be to completely stop server transfers of any kind. That would allow Anet to balance the populations appropriately. Obviously they’ll never do that because not only would that make a ton of people scream and cry about it, it would also remove their primary wvw revenue stream.

Data-driven AI and a big devotion to log file processing to create said data would solve it entirely and prevent any community intervention that lasted longer than maybe a few days or a single matchup. But that’s very laborious and extremely difficult to implement at that. It’d require a lot of resources which simply put aren’t going to be devoted to the mode.

What are you talking about? I don’t care how much data you collect and what you do with it, it won’t change anything. The playerbase isn’t trying to create balanced matches. They’re actively trying to create lopsided matches. If your system creates a balanced match, people will transfer to one server until it’s overloaded and wins in a lopsided victory. The only way to prevent that is to completely stop server transfers.

It’s garbage in PvP. Just leave the point and dance around a bit if you encounter one. Its strength is staying permanently stealthed, but that guarantees a loss of a point.

SteepledHat.1345:

Godkitten , how much more do you wanna nerf chrono? When will you people be happy?

Well, we still had regular nerf mesmer threads in the pre-hot+pre-hot-traitrework meta where mesmer was utter and complete garbage, so the answer to that question is ‘never’.