Guild Wars 2

Are you looking for actual dps or the total dps contribution when taking into account quickness/alacrity?

Well, Mesmer is used in all game modes, but it’s more or less the farthest you can possibly get from “dishing out the damage”. Mesmer is, for most intents and purposes, a pure support class that buffs their allies. In very few situations does it have anything approaching meaningful or significant damage.

stealth.5482:

OriOri.8724:

Try dungeons! They are in a pretty perfect spot difficulty wise imo right now. For players who are new they can still be deadly, but if you pay attention and learn the fight/your class well enough they are pretty easy to fly through.

Also try fractals, and definitely explore the HoT maps. If for nothing else just do it long enough to unlock lean teahniques mastery (which increases your gliding endurance).

Open up the LFG tool (default ‘Y’) and hop on a world boss train.

Do the LW story (HoT, LWS3, and LWS2 if you have it). It gives you a lot of good experience playing with your class with reasonably difficult mobs, as well as gives out free goodies (and mastery experience, which you could put towards gliding or anything else really).

There is so much to do in this game that sometimes it can be hard to know what to do next. But I say go out and try everything, see what you like. Don’t focus just on map completion, its a great way to burn yourself out on this game (unless you are one of those people that loves it above all else) because it can get tedious at times.

If you do want to continue to do map completion, then I say the best place to start is to go to Orr and do those 3 maps. Not only do you gain a lot of karma there (which can be used to buy lots of skins, as well as exotic temple armor), but the event chains there are among the most difficult in core tyria (though still pretty easy honestly) which is just a great way to learn how to play mesmer better. Plus I think those maps are some of the best in the game aesthetics wise.

Best thing you can do is twofold. Try out a bunch of different types of content, and then set goals for yourself. They could be map completion, getting all exotic/ascended gear, collection achievements (or achievements in general), dungeon completion, world bosses etc…. Just pick something and go for it

I did wonder where everyone got all these cool skins from. Are they the ascended armour or are they skins? I got my weaponsmithing to like 340 today, so I think one more 60 map will be enough to farm the mats required to able to use the mats in the Orr maps. The last time I played there was an app for tracking when the world events were happening, however, it wasnt very accurate.

Skin acquisition is a pretty broad topic. You’d have to be more specific with your description.

So I’m not necessarily against the changes that were mentioned, but calling those QoL is simply lying.

Anyone remember way back when Anet first released the permanent contracts in bl chests? Some guy made a reddit post saying ‘I really don’t like wasting money on all the consumable contracts, so I decided to spend $2000 dollars buying keys to try and get the permanent ones’.

Was good for a chuckle and showed so elegantly why garbage RNG boxes will always be profitable for companies.

Rocketmist.5436:

You need to remember +10% damage is a damage modifier that if you have a lot of other damage modifiers might make it way higher than actually 10%. And +20% condition duration is in no way +20% dps, as condis are removed before max duration a huge % of the time, and resistance exists in the game.

All damage modifiers in this game are multiplicative. 10% damage will always be precisely 10% more damage compared to without that mod, no more and no less.

nagr.1593:

guis can we pls focus on my real issue here, I got maybe a half an answer on a simple ‘Whats up with this..?’ question that ppl unanimously decide to change topic to for some reason. Like it seems y’all are waffling and talking in circles when I’d appreciate a straight answer pls, it’s a simple thing I’m asking too

To recap, u don’t have to read up but what I’m asking for assistance with:

• confirmation abt traits again. Is one significantly better than the other, than I absolutely would have to change to Dom in pugs? My reasoning is that Illusions seems like it would better help my survivability, shatter traits and all
• Rotations to use at all times, and rotations to use in a pinch when ur worried about surviving as tank or not getting downed. Again, not sure that metabattle is that accurate anymore
• I will post my build info later if needed, but right now it’s all comm trinkets, one asc comm backpiece and assassins armor with water runes. I’m at ~1620 toughness with food using this setup

I joined for vg training a few days ago to learn how to tank.. not sure if was my group or not like not getting much heals, but I downed a lot that whole fight too. I’d like to avoid this if possible in future cases. I was kinda getting used to my build as well and I didn’t use any dodges most of the time, perhaps I can fix this

I watched vids of how to do it beforehand too, thot I was prepared but man even for a training run that was hard. that guy hits rly hard, plus those circles tele me out if I mistime a dodge and the boss gets displaced. Any tips on surviving on this boss or even in similar cases?

Goodness, get off your high horse! Literally the second reply linked an extremely detailed guide on how to play Chronomancer in raids. We’re not explicitly answering your questions because that guide answers everything you asked plus a lot of questions you didn’t think to ask.

Tips for surviving on VG: you have blocks and evasion on your weapon skills on top of invuln from class skills and normal dodges. Use them. you won’t take much damage if you just cycle through those cooldowns in a reasonable manner.

Edit: Plus, anyone who frequents the PvE subforum has lost more than enough time reading your threads. I think I speak for multiple people when I say my patience with your threads is…limited.

Yeah, Sandy’s mesmer guide is fantastic, so I recommend going through that. As a quick point of reference though…

Open World: Gs+sw/sh or sw/sh+f or sw/sw+sh, depending on what you’re fighting
Dungeons/fractals: sw/sh+f

Open World: Chrono, domination, inspiration/illusions
Dungeons/fractals: Chrono, domination, inspiration

The way you want to play in dungeons and fractals is by doing buff combos to keep your entire party topped up on quickness and alacrity. I recommend looking here: http://qtfy.enjin.com/mesmer#Rotations, as the rotations you’ll use for raids is pretty much the same as the ones you want to use in fractals/dungeons.

Carighan.6758:

Waaaait… the ICD of the passive proc-trait is affected by the CD-trait for the signet?

Really? Who programs this?!

This was made incredibly clear when they caused this change. I’ll spell it out for you:

Traits that produce an effect by proccing a normally active skill are affected by all traits affecting that normally active skill.

Yeah, there’s a sort of ‘bedoop’ sound that plays when you get volatile poison in sloth or matthias and bombs in trio/sabetha.

Xyonon.3987:

I think since qT added the condi Mes to the list of “viable options”, it’s not too hard to bring it to pugs.

Yesterday I helped out a friend who was on holydays and had nothing done this week. At Matthias we had 2 Chronos and 2 condi Mes.

In our guild we now completly got rid of Necros (pre patch only used at Matthias) since their damage is nothing special anymore and condi cleanse was never really their strength to begin with (90% of the ppl don’t know what plague signet does u.u). So instead of the Necros we just use condi Mes instead, 2-3.

In my experience, 1 necro at Matthias usually results in a dead necro when they pull 30 stacks of poison from everyone…

Ok, so lets clarify the mechanics here.

Distortion share is accomplished with a minor trait in the inspiration line. The trait makes it so that when you, the mesmer, receive distortion, it provides 1 second of distortion to 5 nearby allies. This effect has a 5 second internal cooldown and can be procced by any source of distortion. The sources of distortion you can use include distortion on signet cast, coming either from actually casting a signet or the trait from casting a phantasm → signet. You can also provide distortion from the actual distortion shatter itself. None of your distortion sources are inherently aoe. The only aoe is provided by the trait.

Now as for your general comments on it being a ton of things to watch when you’re the tank…yeah, it is. Ultimately you do have to pay attention to a bunch of stuff and execute the distortion share perfectly every time. It’s not an easy thing to do, and it takes practice and experience to pull it off.

Bertrand.3057:

One question this thread has raised in my head concerns clone death – I am unsure about where their health stands now and if it’s relatively diminished because of overall power creep. That said, I think the ability to kill clones is an important part of counterplay. I also wonder how much the devs actually intended to raise the skill floor on leap with that bug fix.

Clones live easily long enough to swap immediately in any situation that isn’t the middle of a WvW zerg. If you’re in a big zergfight mess the clone will die essentially instantly, but any other situation gives you enough time to swap with no problems.

No, the opposition in this thread is pointing out the mesmer is fine and capable of the things you’re complaining about, you just clearly don’t know how to execute them properly to handle it. You’re complaining about the leap clone dying, but any good mesmer knows how to do leaps reliably without any issues. You’re complaining about how chaos armor doesn’t help on the sword phantasm, but any good mesmer knows that the leap finisher applies to the mesmer too.

This is a L2P issue. That’s simply what it is. If you knew how to properly use mesmer mechanics, you wouldn’t have the problems you’re experiencing.

Edit: Just for fun…

Hot Boy.7138:

I don’t think it is. It is not even worth mentioning because of how unreliable it is. And I never said sword doesn’t have any leap finishers. I said sword doesn’t have any BLAST finishers, which is accurate.

Hmm…

Hot Boy.7138:

Staff has a skill for chaos armor and it is the only weapon with a leap finisher to proc it from ethreal combo fields.

“and it is the only weapon with a leap finisher”

Yep, only weapon with a leap finisher for sure.

thrag.9740:

Fay.2357:

Breaking: If you don’t have good players able to play the classes you need for a particular comp, the group won’t be good. More at 11.

Breaking: Being a sarcastic kitten and kitten posting does nothing to stop pugs from trying to stack eles on vg, when some easier to play necros would actually lead to them getting the kill.

My advocacy for effectiveness over blindly following the meta can have a positive impact, what does your post do?

Stupid is as stupid does. You can post until you’re blue in your face about this topic, but it won’t change the fact that people lacking the intelligence to understand how basic group dynamics function aren’t going to understand the point you’re making.

Hot Boy.7138:

I never have chaos armor. Sword doesn’t have any finishers to blast our fields.
If i could proc chaos armor more easily that would be a huge boon to survivability in melee range.

Sword has a 12 second base cooldown leap finisher.

I keep getting this weird feeling that this whole thread exists because of a lack of knowledge of the class mechanics and how best to use them in a fight.

Breaking: If you don’t have good players able to play the classes you need for a particular comp, the group won’t be good. More at 11.

It’ perfectly fine to have a tank that isn’t the chrono. Druid tank, guardian tank, necro tank, thief tank, honestly you can tank on pretty much any class if you spec it properly. The main thing, however, is that the difference in playstyle between a non-tank chrono and a tank chrono is pretty minor. The tank in GW2 really is primarily in charge of proper movement of the boss, with a side-dish of mitigating damage to themselves a bit. That’s not nearly as big a role as in other games where need to manage aggro and stuff.

So the better role statement for chrono is more accurately ‘support’. Tank or non-tank, we’re support no matter what.

Hot Boy.7138:

I said i was over it because balance overall is out of wack. The damage is far too high, along with boon uptime and condition spam.

Which is why I made this thread asking for drastic increases to the amount of condition spam available for Mesmer sword

That build would be miserable in WvW and even worse in PvE.

For WvW, you have literally zero condition removal. 90% of roamers in WvW could walk up to you, sneeze, go afk for 10 seconds, and stomp you. You also have zero mobility, so if you tried to retaliate after said sneeze, they’d just leave and watch you struggle to keep up. You also have close to zero active condition application. Offhand focus and shield have nothing, and mainhand scepter has a weak auto, a block, and a good skill that isn’t nearly enough to do anything on its own. Your utilities are also weird, randomly taking well of calamity for no apparent reason.

In order to make this even remotely functional in WvW you need mobility, condition removal, and active pressure. You need to take torment on shatter in illusions. You need blink. Lastly, you need condition removal either from traiting inspiration, taking some in your utilities, or both.

In PvE you’re even worse off if anything. You have no way to apply any relevant conditions in PvE (non-torment/confusion), so you’ll take ages just to kill any random singular piece of trash. While you’re actually fairly tanky, you’ll probably end up dying a lot in HoT maps due to your utter inability to actually kill anything. A lot of HoT mobs apply conditions too, so you’d just keel over and die when facing any of those.

In order to make this even remotely functional in PvE you need…actually no. You just need to scrap whatever concept led you here and start over. Start with the concept that you need to kill things in PvE. Consider that the best way to do that is with bleeding/burning/poison, and make your build focus on those appropriately.

…but why? You already have them…

Bad mesmers are bad, more at 11.

20% normal food is really cheap. You can craft the candy corn loaves with 70 toughness and 20% boon duration, or just buy some omnomnomberry stuff with 20% boon duration and magic find iirc for like 6s each.

Bountiful utility food is really expensive though. Those run close to 1g per use, so I personally don’t feel they’re anywhere even remotely near worth it.

WhiteRose.6934:

Hot Boy.7138:

Fay.2357:

What makes you so sure that you’re right and all of us other experienced mesmers are wrong?

Don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re somehow of some higher stature.

hmmmm….

Hot Boy.7138:

Thanks, but i’m very experienced and I’m sure I’m playing at a decent or higher skill level.

lmao

Shadowstep.6049:

They should just remove alacrity from mes. Suddenly more classes are viable.

Genius!

Xyonon.3987:

In my opinion minmaxing as Chrono is more important than ever, now that you got 2 of them in each party.

While there’s obviously nothing wrong with min-maxing on any class, chrono is objectively the least important class in the game to min-max on. Since chrono has the lowest direct damage contribution in any group (not counting damage due to buffs, just pure dps here), min-maxing on a chrono will have a far smaller effect than min-maxing on any other class.

Min-maxing a chrono might squeeze out an additional 1-3k dps in total while min-maxing a rotation on say, an ele, could easily affect damage in the 6-8k range if they’re really having trouble.

Since not a single one of you had the presence of mind to quote op in your responses, this thread is awful funny looking now.

…..wearing it?

I have to agree, as you’re leveling your first character is definitely the time to play around and experiment with things. There’s some general advice I can give though.

Firstly, don’t worry about spending those hero points. You’ll get more than enough for every trait and skill, so you can’t really waste them or ‘brick’ your character by using them. Also don’t worry about mastery points; those see use after you hit level 80.

While you should play with utilities and see what works best, I can recommend a general load out that’s suitable for most content. Signet of inspiration is a handy utility that passively pulses swiftness for you. While the active is powerfully useful in the endgame, during leveling the utility simply serves as a nice and easy way to move faster without thinking about it. In addition to that, I like blink for the stunbreak and movement, and feedback for protection against projectile-based enemies.

Magical Things.8465:

Fay.2357:

Magical Things.8465:

Fay.2357:

Tl;Dr: There is no Mesmer condie bomb build for group play. It simply does not and cannot exist. If someone says otherwise, they’re either in a tier where ‘group play’ means <10 people or they simply don’t realize how bad their build is.

Explanation

Mesmer has fairly limited ways to apply conditions, so this will be pretty quick. First lets look at weapons.

• Staff
  • Slow auto with weak conditions and awkward bounce mechanic
  • Chaos armor (heh)
  • Chaos storm applying mostly non-damaging conditions or cc to a low number of targets in a small area on a long cooldown
• Scepter
  • Slow and completely single target auto that applies weak conditions
  • Block/counter applying a strong stack of torment, but purely single target
  • Beam aoe applying 6 confusion
• Torch
  • PbAoe burning explosion, long cooldown
• Sword
  • Nope
• Greatsword
  • Nope
• Focus
  • Nope
• Pistol
  • Nope
• Shield
  • Nope

Well that’s depressing. We have literally 3 skills capable of applying aoe conditions. 1 doesn’t apply anything worth mentioning (chaos storm), 1 is pbaoe and on a long cooldown (the prestige), and one is an incredibly clunky beam aoe (confusing images). Not much in the way of group play here.

Well, how about utilities? Do we have utilities that apply conditions?

Nope.

Ok, that was pretty quick. How about traits and shatters? Surely we can get good aoe conditions from those!

Sorta. The problem is that shatters are inherently linked to having illusions. You can do a powerful condition bomb by setting up your shatters properly, but that only works if you have illusions to do it with. In WvW group play, the average lifespan of your illusions is about .25 seconds. Any shattering you do is absolutely limited to the personal shatter effect to produce; extremely underwhelming.

So there you have it. Mesmer is literally incapable of producing anything even remotely capable of being called a ‘condie bomb’ for group play in WvW.

Edit: I suppose I should probably mention distrust. Distrust is a trait that applies aoe stacks of confusion on interrupt. What you can do is take that trait and a bunch of cc and randomly throw it into groups. Once in a blue moon you’ll get some interrupts and cause a bit of a ‘condie bomb’. 99% of the time you’ll just see a bunch of blocks and immune floaters.

Thank you so much for the explanation. Might I ask what you would recommend running in group WvW? Especially now that boon share is nerfed. Thank you for your help!

Boonshare with added goodies.

Boonshare still works fine, you just need a different group comp than what was possible before. We do 2 guards, a rev, an ele, and a Mesmer. With that comp we still keep 100% uptime on quickness, regen, vigor, protection, might, fury, etc. It’s not possible to effectively do 100% uptime on resistance, but you can burst it up for 10-12 seconds.

I also take a midnight and heal signets, then trait for distortion. Well-timed distortion shares are invaluable to a frontline, but it’s only 1 second at a time, so you really have to be aware of the fight to do it properly.

How would you gear for that? The updated metabattle is overkill on the boon duration. I’m assuming with a rev in party 67% boon duration is the max you want considering natural res. is 33% boon duration.

So in regards to the distortion and signets….are you taking Domination over Insp?

It’s best for your rev not to be burning energy on upkeep for that facet. They’ll run it for a few seconds at the start and then pop it for the boons. I just gear with full commanders and durability runes for a total of 80% boon duration after food. On weapon swap I overcap at 110% actually, but I like pushing my non-swap duration a bit higher so that I don’t need to prioritize swapping weapons as much.

You need inspiration to share distortion. You need domination to produce distortion to share. Chrono is a no-brainer after that.

Magical Things.8465:

Fay.2357:

Tl;Dr: There is no Mesmer condie bomb build for group play. It simply does not and cannot exist. If someone says otherwise, they’re either in a tier where ‘group play’ means <10 people or they simply don’t realize how bad their build is.

Explanation

Mesmer has fairly limited ways to apply conditions, so this will be pretty quick. First lets look at weapons.

• Staff
  • Slow auto with weak conditions and awkward bounce mechanic
  • Chaos armor (heh)
  • Chaos storm applying mostly non-damaging conditions or cc to a low number of targets in a small area on a long cooldown
• Scepter
  • Slow and completely single target auto that applies weak conditions
  • Block/counter applying a strong stack of torment, but purely single target
  • Beam aoe applying 6 confusion
• Torch
  • PbAoe burning explosion, long cooldown
• Sword
  • Nope
• Greatsword
  • Nope
• Focus
  • Nope
• Pistol
  • Nope
• Shield
  • Nope

Well that’s depressing. We have literally 3 skills capable of applying aoe conditions. 1 doesn’t apply anything worth mentioning (chaos storm), 1 is pbaoe and on a long cooldown (the prestige), and one is an incredibly clunky beam aoe (confusing images). Not much in the way of group play here.

Well, how about utilities? Do we have utilities that apply conditions?

Nope.

Ok, that was pretty quick. How about traits and shatters? Surely we can get good aoe conditions from those!

Sorta. The problem is that shatters are inherently linked to having illusions. You can do a powerful condition bomb by setting up your shatters properly, but that only works if you have illusions to do it with. In WvW group play, the average lifespan of your illusions is about .25 seconds. Any shattering you do is absolutely limited to the personal shatter effect to produce; extremely underwhelming.

So there you have it. Mesmer is literally incapable of producing anything even remotely capable of being called a ‘condie bomb’ for group play in WvW.

Edit: I suppose I should probably mention distrust. Distrust is a trait that applies aoe stacks of confusion on interrupt. What you can do is take that trait and a bunch of cc and randomly throw it into groups. Once in a blue moon you’ll get some interrupts and cause a bit of a ‘condie bomb’. 99% of the time you’ll just see a bunch of blocks and immune floaters.

Thank you so much for the explanation. Might I ask what you would recommend running in group WvW? Especially now that boon share is nerfed. Thank you for your help!

Boonshare with added goodies.

Boonshare still works fine, you just need a different group comp than what was possible before. We do 2 guards, a rev, an ele, and a Mesmer. With that comp we still keep 100% uptime on quickness, regen, vigor, protection, might, fury, etc. It’s not possible to effectively do 100% uptime on resistance, but you can burst it up for 10-12 seconds.

I also take a midnight and heal signets, then trait for distortion. Well-timed distortion shares are invaluable to a frontline, but it’s only 1 second at a time, so you really have to be aware of the fight to do it properly.

jyaim.3702:

well… easily achieved… :
3s slow via shield.
slow via cc, not working.
slow via tw, 12secs every 60 at best.
do you remove chronophantasma ?
or do you rely only on shields fantasms ?

and you must also be pretty confident on your alacrity uptime. which means properly controlling its proximities rngs, and so on, on the boss setup and situation…

any alacrity lowered uptime on yourself will impact quickness uptimes…and if you rely on slow, you really got to ensure the slow, hence ensure our fantasms remain up, at minimum !

optimistic and risky…but if you really get the slow and alacrity confidently, ok.
just do not recommend this to mister everyone ^^’

2 Chronos in the group with 2 shield phantasms each. Tada! Perma-slow on bosses while afk. So hard.

I’m curious as to what that ranger dps would be when they’ve got 2 mesmers farting ethereal fields everywhere instead of being able to reliably land fire/poison finishers.

Probably a standard power shatter burst build like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAsfhEloxa0Y50gQHT3/OZAWwyL18wB-TZQaAAQZAA

That’s the gist of it for a non-chrono version, though chrono versions are easy to do as well. The burst combo is as follows:

1. Stealth with torch 4
2. Get point blank range
3. Stun with mantra of distraction (proccing confounding suggestions trait)
4. Use mirror blade (instantly hits all 3 times due to point blank range)
5. Dodge to create a clone (2 clones in total at this point)
6. Mind wrack and mantra of pain at the same time torch 4 explodes

This is essentially the largest burst combo possible for a mesmer to do. You avoid this by reacting rapidly when you’re hit with that opening stun. You’ll need to either break stun and dodge or hit some mitigation skills. If the mesmer is really excellent at their timing, it can be very difficult to react before the full combo is finished, but it usually is possible to react.

Xyonon.3987:

It was most likely to be the quickness gained by SoI, not only the fury

Probably yeah. It would have a small effect on dps since the duelists do have a noticeable channel time.

Mikkel.8427:

I’ve been playing around with this for ZvZ…

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhUQNArdWnsnB9phlpBuqBEgiFcjyMDitKo+Vv1etMAatXD-e

Well placed reflects and interrupts make tagging easy.

You can use Inspiration in place of Chrono, also.

Rabid/Rampagers/Sinister depending on the flavor you’re looking for.

It’s important to note the difference between tagging and condie bomb. If tagging is all you want, just throw on guardian runes and wade through a Zerg with your shield block up. That’ll tag nearly every person.

However, the op asked for a condie bomb build. A condie bomb is something you can unload on a target or in an area when pressure is called for. This is something very different than tagging. Condie bombs are wells/corruption/epidemic from necros, often helped by venoms from thieves. Condie bombs are not a couple random reflects sprinkled around.

Hot Boy.7138:

It doesn’t matter and YOU don’t matter. I’m petitioning to the devs, not to 6 people who play the game. Devs and the balance team makes the changes.

In that case I wish you luck when a dev comes by next august for their bi-yearly stroll through the profession forums.

Tl;Dr: There is no Mesmer condie bomb build for group play. It simply does not and cannot exist. If someone says otherwise, they’re either in a tier where ‘group play’ means <10 people or they simply don’t realize how bad their build is.

Explanation

Mesmer has fairly limited ways to apply conditions, so this will be pretty quick. First lets look at weapons.

• Staff
  • Slow auto with weak conditions and awkward bounce mechanic
  • Chaos armor (heh)
  • Chaos storm applying mostly non-damaging conditions or cc to a low number of targets in a small area on a long cooldown
• Scepter
  • Slow and completely single target auto that applies weak conditions
  • Block/counter applying a strong stack of torment, but purely single target
  • Beam aoe applying 6 confusion
• Torch
  • PbAoe burning explosion, long cooldown
• Sword
  • Nope
• Greatsword
  • Nope
• Focus
  • Nope
• Pistol
  • Nope
• Shield
  • Nope

Well that’s depressing. We have literally 3 skills capable of applying aoe conditions. 1 doesn’t apply anything worth mentioning (chaos storm), 1 is pbaoe and on a long cooldown (the prestige), and one is an incredibly clunky beam aoe (confusing images). Not much in the way of group play here.

Well, how about utilities? Do we have utilities that apply conditions?

Nope.

Ok, that was pretty quick. How about traits and shatters? Surely we can get good aoe conditions from those!

Sorta. The problem is that shatters are inherently linked to having illusions. You can do a powerful condition bomb by setting up your shatters properly, but that only works if you have illusions to do it with. In WvW group play, the average lifespan of your illusions is about .25 seconds. Any shattering you do is absolutely limited to the personal shatter effect to produce; extremely underwhelming.

So there you have it. Mesmer is literally incapable of producing anything even remotely capable of being called a ‘condie bomb’ for group play in WvW.

Edit: I suppose I should probably mention distrust. Distrust is a trait that applies aoe stacks of confusion on interrupt. What you can do is take that trait and a bunch of cc and randomly throw it into groups. Once in a blue moon you’ll get some interrupts and cause a bit of a ‘condie bomb’. 99% of the time you’ll just see a bunch of blocks and immune floaters.

Hot Boy.7138:

Fay.2357:

Carighan.6758:

Hot Boy.7138:

They should just remove all cripple, chill, and (…)

Can you stop for a minute with the childish reactions and actually react to his input?

No, no, that would involve formulating an actual argument that didn’t contain inherent contradictions.

yeah, okay. I’m sure that gave you and your lackey a good laugh.

6 different people have responded to this thread, all in agreement that your suggestion and complaints make no sense. Not a single person has been in agreement with you. Normally this produces a reaction of thinking that perhaps your original idea just isn’t as great as you thought it was. Other times it means you explained it poorly, and need to provide a better explanation or examples.

What makes you so sure that you’re right and all of us other experienced mesmers are wrong?

Just throw on a focus. Tada! 98% uptime combined with the signet.

Don’t need mimic, but yeah that’s fine. It’s worth noting you don’t actually need 2 mainhand swords, just 1 will do for both sets. Also worth noting there are some fights where you’re really going to want a focus instead of offhand sword, so make sure you’ve got one around.

Lastly, if you run this build, you’re the tank. You’ve got far too much toughness to be anything else. Therefor, make sure you’re up for that.

It probably does, but clones simply attack on a slower cycle. It’s not the aftercast slowing them down, it’s more of a cooldown.

Carighan.6758:

Hot Boy.7138:

They should just remove all cripple, chill, and (…)

Can you stop for a minute with the childish reactions and actually react to his input?

No, no, that would involve formulating an actual argument that didn’t contain inherent contradictions.

Hot Boy.7138:

Fay.2357:

Mainhand sword has a powerful gapcloser and control skill in illusionary leap. Additionally, the radius of a point (excepting foefire mid) is barely larger than the range of the mainhand sword cleave. If you’re unable to autoattack someone when they’re on a point with you, more cripple isn’t going to fix that problem. If you’re complaining about people running away…you just won the point. If you’re fighting off point…you’re playing poorly.

Well thanks, I guess that solves everything.

Your complaint simply doesn’t make sense within the context of PvP. Do you want to deal sustained melee damage? Then you have to be on the point. If you’re on the point, you can hit with sword auto, so you don’t need cripple. If you want to kite around, you have to be off the point. If you’re off the point, you lose and therefor are playing poorly.

You’re complaining about a problem that doesn’t exist unless you’re playing in a way that guarantees your team loses.

Mainhand sword has a powerful gapcloser and control skill in illusionary leap. Additionally, the radius of a point (excepting foefire mid) is barely larger than the range of the mainhand sword cleave. If you’re unable to autoattack someone when they’re on a point with you, more cripple isn’t going to fix that problem. If you’re complaining about people running away…you just won the point. If you’re fighting off point…you’re playing poorly.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

Thanks for the quick answer Pyro! And sorry for not clarify my questions. I thought you can only maintain roughly 80% uptime if only use 2 iAvengers (since they only give 3s alacrity every 7.6s CD), so I was wondering if those 3s alacrity from wells will be sufficient to cover the melee group throughout the fight?

So CS is on a roughly 70 second cooldown. Every CS cycle you will cast 4 heal wells and 5 wells of action, providing a total of 18 seconds of alacrity. This is 25% uptime, which combines with the avengers for a touch over 100%. If you spend any time with 3 avengers up (which happens in normal rotations), that’ll increase.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

I’m a bit sick lately so I don’t really feel like log into game and test this atm. Just curious, can you maintain perma quickness AND alacrity when running this?

Just slap on the build since its probably confusing when I explain it. But I drop time warp since it doesn’t seem necessary with well of action. And I wonder if I should slot improved alacrity since I might be a bit short on alacrity. Realistically I probably will keep 2 iAvengers at a time. Is that enough to assume full alacrity or should I swap WoA to WoR and swap gravity well with time warp?

P.S. signet of midnight is a must btw, I want to help tank some unavoidable damage like green AoE in VG.

If you keep 2 shield phantasms up, you’ll have easy permanent alacrity for melee folk. If you manage your swaps well, that’s permanent quickness too.

Justine.6351:

Mathematicaly what is the point where 100% quickness duration causes overwriting with time warp?

So 100% duration causes each stack to last 2s. It applies 1 stack per second, but a stack falls off only once every 2 seconds. After 10 seconds, 11 stacks will have been applied and 5 will have fallen off, so that 11th stack will have overwritten.

The real issue is that you’re also sharing using SoI, shield 5, and well of action during the time warp duration, which causes you to go into overcap much much earlier.

NikeEU.7690:

maybe idk, think I’d rather go for a d/wh ele.

Dwh ele makes like 28k dps small hit box.

Rev makes 26k dps small hit box.

Rev solves any Might, Fury or Protection issues your team has due to buffing the condi ps and making like 4 might of its own. It let’s your mesmers use scholar runes or run dps food. It buffs each member of the group by about 1.5k dps. 26k + 6k = 32k.

Fury really shouldn’t be an issue. SoI with 100% boon duration will provide 10s of fury on use. Since you’re using SoI roughly once every 10-12 seconds absolute minimum, that should be 100% uptime.

So meditrapper guardian and D/D thief are probably two of the most 1-trick pony burst builds in the game. Naturally, you’ll have huge problems against anything that doesn’t die in the first 5 seconds of the fight. My general advice is that you shouldn’t play 1-trick ponies and be surprised when you get wrecked by a defensive sustain build.

On the thief, your best bet is to just pull a full disengage and try again if your burst doesn’t work. Once the Mesmer knows you’re there, they can destroy their illusions and rotate defensive cooldowns/interrupts to prevent you from regaining stealth with CnD. You have basically zero defense, so there’s no way for you to survive or sustain through that.

On the guard you’re basically in the same boat but without the capability to pull a full disengage. Guard does actually have some interesting mechanics that hurt Mesmer defense, but if you don’t have condie cleanse that won’t matter. Without condie cleanse, you either kill the Mesmer in the first 5 seconds or you lose.

If you have condie cleanse it’s a bit more interesting. F1 spear, deflecting shot traited to knockback, and test of faith traited to daze are all unblockable cc. This means you can hold onto those 3 skills and use them when the Mesmer tries to block for defense. Doing that will let you break through the defense and get solid dps windows.

As for your warrior, just modify your builds to have high uptime on resistance and you’ll be fine. If the other builds you run are any indicator, those warrior builds are also probably pure burst 1-trick ponies, and that’s just not going to cut it.

I guess this whole thing could be summed up as: don’t play 1-trick ponies and expect to kill people aware of you being a 1-trick pony.