Guild Wars 2

Ultimately, you need to be realistically honest both with yourself and with groups if you want a good chance of completing the raids.

You claim to be experienced, but that’s not actually the case. You needed mechanics explained, so you’re not experienced. When a group gets someone that lies about their experience level, they kick and block, so you’ll never have a chance to raid with those people again.

On the other hand, being honest about your experience has no lasting downsides. Groups asking for experienced members will probably decline to take you, and that’s their right to do so. However, many groups will at least give you a chance if you’ve completed other bosses/seem competent. I know that I’m personally ok with explaining mechanics for bosses sometimes in my group. Sometimes I’m too tired to deal with that hassle though, and it’s my right to decide whether or not I want to deal with that.

If you’re so inexperienced that you can’t honestly say that you’ve killed multiple other bosses/are familiar with raid mechanics in general, then you need to do training runs or find a guild willing to train new raiders. That’s simply how it is.

Let me relate this to a PvP analogy. Let’s say you got someone in your group that claims to be an experienced PvPer. When pressed, they admit that their experience mainly consists of a few games of unranked spirit watch. Would you want to keep that player on your team or find someone actually capable? Same thing in raids.

Zelulose.8695:

This post was ment to highlight the fact that mesmer can potentially have 100% defense uptime. The more common nesmer builds have timed defenses with 90% defense uptime and 100% if they are good. I just showed an extreme example to highlighting what needs changing for high skill play. The defese uptime is why pros can easy stomp average players without much effort. I am sorry I made the mesmer community defensive.

Except that your rotation isn’t anything approaching 100% defense uptime. Stealth is far from a perfect defense, aegis is hardly a perfect defense, blocks in general are easily bypassed, you’re vulnerable to various types of cc at multiple points of your rotation, and even disregarding all that, 100% defense uptime the way you did it is useless except for trolling off point.

Dirame.8521:

CptAurellian.9537:

Dirame.8521:

How do you deal with large groups of enemies as a mesmer? Simple! Play condi. Condi hits everything in the area, you apply 2 conditions that the enemy will always take full damage from and you’re not dependent on a phantasm to do damage.

And by the time your condis have killed the enemies, all other classes with a power build have already killed the next two packs.

He asked for a way to deal with mobs like pocket raptors with higher health and armour. I gave an answer that is perfectly viable but you know, eat me alive why don’t you. I’m not the one who has problems in PvE.

“Apply 2 conditions that the enemy will always take full damage on.”

Please don’t tell me you’re referring to torment and confusion here…

Azukas.1426:

Fay.2357:

Azukas.1426:

Fay.2357:

Azukas.1426:

messiah.1908:

staff thief – take scepter over sword. the block and the 5 torment will hurt him
DH – dont fight on point – you cant. he has great condi cleanse so you just cant.
druid – scepter also good here but sword also useful. sometime i love to burst his pet so he switch them and focus on heal them than its more easy time for me. the main objective is to try to decap the point and leave portal so he have to stay for 2 min while my team does 5v4 elsewhere

Can’t dodge the torment application if I remember correctly, and the channel skill will make him blow dodges. This can open up the thief to a nice shatter.

Good advice

Torment is easily dodgeable, just dodge after you see the block pop up. You can even block the torment application itself if you have one available.

I pretty sure you can’t block the torment only the ether bolt that is cast on counter. I thought the torment was applied on block not counter.

I could be wrong but I don’t remember ever having anyone block/dodge it on me.

The way the skill goes is you get hit, the block icon shows up, and then about .25s later a hit-scan attack with 900 range applies the 5 stacks of torment. That hit-scan attack is blockable and dodgeable like any normal attack.

A trick you can do as a mesmer is that you can purposefully proc the block of another mesmer, and then block their counter-attack with your block, applying torment that way and avoiding their counter.

I’ll have to test this but until then a 1/4th of a second counter is pretty tough to dodge.

In a semi-recent patch, the delay between block and counter was drastically shortened. It used to be much longer, closer to .5 seconds.

It’s still very possible to dodge if you’re expecting it. The tell of the counter is obvious and easy to react to. It does, however, still take someone paying attention with good reflexes. It’s definitely a non-trivial thing to pull off now.

Azukas.1426:

Fay.2357:

Azukas.1426:

messiah.1908:

staff thief – take scepter over sword. the block and the 5 torment will hurt him
DH – dont fight on point – you cant. he has great condi cleanse so you just cant.
druid – scepter also good here but sword also useful. sometime i love to burst his pet so he switch them and focus on heal them than its more easy time for me. the main objective is to try to decap the point and leave portal so he have to stay for 2 min while my team does 5v4 elsewhere

Can’t dodge the torment application if I remember correctly, and the channel skill will make him blow dodges. This can open up the thief to a nice shatter.

Good advice

Torment is easily dodgeable, just dodge after you see the block pop up. You can even block the torment application itself if you have one available.

I pretty sure you can’t block the torment only the ether bolt that is cast on counter. I thought the torment was applied on block not counter.

I could be wrong but I don’t remember ever having anyone block/dodge it on me.

The way the skill goes is you get hit, the block icon shows up, and then about .25s later a hit-scan attack with 900 range applies the 5 stacks of torment. That hit-scan attack is blockable and dodgeable like any normal attack.

A trick you can do as a mesmer is that you can purposefully proc the block of another mesmer, and then block their counter-attack with your block, applying torment that way and avoiding their counter.

Azukas.1426:

messiah.1908:

staff thief – take scepter over sword. the block and the 5 torment will hurt him
DH – dont fight on point – you cant. he has great condi cleanse so you just cant.
druid – scepter also good here but sword also useful. sometime i love to burst his pet so he switch them and focus on heal them than its more easy time for me. the main objective is to try to decap the point and leave portal so he have to stay for 2 min while my team does 5v4 elsewhere

Can’t dodge the torment application if I remember correctly, and the channel skill will make him blow dodges. This can open up the thief to a nice shatter.

Good advice

Torment is easily dodgeable, just dodge after you see the block pop up. You can even block the torment application itself if you have one available.

Zelulose.8695:

The build does deal damage it uses the meta trait-line and a torch instead of staff. It is a condition shatter build and you can use any amulet you want. If this doesn’t deal damage than the meta doesn’t deal damage because it uses some of the same weapons and the exact same trait-line.

Just because I didn’t show you the damage doesn’t mean there is none. I’m just showing new players how not to die in 2 seconds. You not helping them. I did not show a build just a rotation. One out of many defense rotations. The same can be done with staff more or less. Just more movement and less stealth.
(I should have mentioned. If you proc the shield/shatter you gain the alacrity needed from that well I used. Just swap the second utility skill for a port.)

The meta build doesn’t spend half of its time hiding in stealth…

Zelulose.8695:

An so what if I am? I got to legend then skill clicking. What does that say about this game?

It says exactly what everyone always says: legendary is a grind and not reflective of skill. This video is just proof of that.

On topic, I really hope you’re trolling with this video, but a sinking feeling tells me this was intended seriously.

CptAurellian.9537:

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

How could you possibly argue that blurred frenzy isn’t weak offensively? It’s one thing to say it should be weak because of shatters or something but seriously? You really think blurred frenzy is a strong offensive skill? It’s not even a learn to dodge thing. People can just walk out of it easily.

Sounds like the hundred blades phenomenon. Big number at the end, so people totally ignore how long it took to get to that number.

Precisely the case here.

OMG 100b hit me for 15k damage, this is absurd!

Yeah, cause you stood still for 3 seconds and watched the warrior chainsaw you…

DeceiverX.8361:

Sword has low sustained damage. Its burst is quite respectable considering BF hits as hard as backstab does – I’m not really sure how you can argue that BF is weak offensively. I ran a S/S power weapon-skill-based damage build not too long ago (just before the power creep of HoT since anything core built power these days is pretty much irrelevant) and was frequently able to get BF to go to around 8-9k in sPvP.

You’re totally misinformed here.

Well…not misinformed exactly. You’re just not comparing things appropriately when discussing blurred frenzy.

Blurred frenzy provides ~5% dps increase over simply autoattacking with sword. This is because it deals its damage spread out over a period of 2.5 seconds. So while you’re technically correct in stating that it deals as much damage as backstab, the reality is entirely different. Most of the time you’d deal just as much damage simply autoattacking instead of using blurred frenzy. That’s a rather marked difference compared to backstab, which provides all of its damage in 1 packet that doesn’t provide the opportunity to dodge away/use other mitigation during the duration.

Therefor, it is quite accurate to say that the sword burst and sustained damage are both garbage. Your argument for the sword “burst” is neglecting to consider the time it takes to deliver damage, focusing simply on that coefficient listed on the wiki, which is demonstrably false.

Open world with core mesmer: Ideally…you don’t do this. Core mesmer blows. If you must, it’ll look something like this build

I didn’t forget the grandmaster trait in dueling, there’s just nothing worth using there.

Open world chronomancer: either this with inspiration or this with dueling. Inspiration has reflects, dueling has more damage.

Highest dps chronomancer build as power? Well, the best recommendation I can give you is to reroll elementalist or thief. If you want power dps, you need to play another class. In fact, if you want condie dps in most realistic situations, you should play another class. From the way you finished your post, it sounds like you’re simply uninformed about how chronomancer works in parties. You don’t use a max dps build, you use a max support build. The build you should use for instanced content is something like this.

You’ll usually use boon duration food or the on-swap sigil to hit high boon duration in combination with a revenant pulsing the 50% facet. If you plan on tanking in raids, you’ll need 1400 toughness, so swap in knights/commander’s gear as appropriate. The purpose of the build is not to provide maximum dps, but to provide permanent quickness and alacrity for most of your raid group/party.

Kusa.6438:

cranos.5913:

Kusa.6438:

cranos.5913:

Kusa.6438:

I think it’s the same reason why people don’t understand that Leadership runes are 1000x better than chronomancer runes. They just check and see what metabattle says.

Chronomancer runes give quickness, leadership runes useless boon duration that should already be capped. 1000x better for sure…

Yeah, which you have to trade dps gear for commander’s gear. I can get 100% boon duration in full zerker gear. You need full commander’s gear to do that with chronomancer runes. Plus if you’re a competent player… You can keep perma quickness on very easily with leadership runes.

Sigil and food alone is 50%+ which is all you need with a rev in the group.

That’s fine… But I tank just fine with leadership runes. I keep quickness and alacrity up just as good, if not better. Just because metabattle says it, doesn’t mean it’s the only way. I’m pretty sure metabattle list leadership as an expensive alternative.

An expensive and less effective alternative… As was already mentioned, chrono should have easy 100% boon duration with zero investment in gear. Leadership are literally worthless.

Silverkey.2078:

Fay.2357:

I’ll just quote myself from another thread on this exact topic that conveniently still happens to be on the front page of this forum.

Fay.2357:

You’re using the wrong aspect of the skill to avoid a stomp, and this is why the Mesmer downed state is more reliable than the thief downed state for avoiding stomps.

If you are stealthed when the stomp finishes, it will fail. Since the #2 skill stealths you, that is what you use to avoid the stomp. A simple teleport, like thief, can be countered with another chasing teleport mid-stomp. The only way to counter the Mesmer stealth is with reveal.

Therefor, the proper way to use the Mesmer downed state is to wait until the stomp has almost completed, then use the skill. You will stealth and the stomp will miss.

Well to be fair, this is very much a PvP advice. In PvE, the randomness of #2 makes it unreliable. So the situations is:

• it can be a way to get out of a bad AOE. But not reliably so.
• It can be a way to trick stupid AI by the clone generation and give you a bit of time.

Overall I would say this is not a skill you should necessarily use. In fractals, your hope is to get rezzed, and the teleport may put you in a worse situation (closer to the enemy or its AOE) and confuse your team more than the enemies. So use #2 only if you think it will help you which I think are mostly the 2 situations highlighted above.

The op is asking about fractal avengers, which are just mobs that spawn to stomp you. My advice is perfectly relevant here.

I’ll just quote myself from another thread on this exact topic that conveniently still happens to be on the front page of this forum.

Fay.2357:

You’re using the wrong aspect of the skill to avoid a stomp, and this is why the Mesmer downed state is more reliable than the thief downed state for avoiding stomps.

If you are stealthed when the stomp finishes, it will fail. Since the #2 skill stealths you, that is what you use to avoid the stomp. A simple teleport, like thief, can be countered with another chasing teleport mid-stomp. The only way to counter the Mesmer stealth is with reveal.

Therefor, the proper way to use the Mesmer downed state is to wait until the stomp has almost completed, then use the skill. You will stealth and the stomp will miss.

Abelisk.4527:

If played right with a sword and shield, Mesmer condi can destroy ANY CLASS. I witnessed this one guy who went by the name of Shadowplane, and he could not be defeated after 30+ DIFFERENT PLAYERS.

I’m too lazy to contribute anything useful right now, so I just want to make it clear that I chuckled at this.

Generally you want Chronomancer runes for any sort of instanced encounters.

Knights works to give you more survivability. However…there’s a big consideration here. You mentioned wanting to run raids eventually. If you’ve got a bunch of toughness, that makes you the tank. Now, chrono is usually asked to tank, so this could be fine. If you’re not personally comfortable with tanking though, you need to have a pure glass setup so that you don’t get the aggro.

Xyonon.3987:

You mean the “painfully slow start” where you have 2 iDuellists right away and the 3rd replacing your warden after it’s 2nd burst? Either you overestimate the setup time or you overestimate other professions ranged dps. Wich one is it?

Even in your picture we can see the dps slowly ramping up over several minutes. It is a very slow start, especially since condie necro/engie lose almost no dps when going for green circles as long as VG stays within range.

Xyonon.3987:

So it’s the 2nd one… They don’t die on Bandit swap btw. Sabetha isn’t dead so they just switch to the next target.

So I haven’t paid enough attention to this, but phantasms usually latch onto another target rapidly, which means they would tend to target any adds currently on the platform, and then die. Does that not happen?

Xyonon.3987:

They don’t die from that leash range… If you have to use Diversion as a Mes, you have a different problem.

They’ll die from leash range if Matthias isn’t on the proper side of the arena when you have to run a poison or something. Yeah, in an extremely coordinated group (a la storm crows) this will never be a problem, but most groups can’t claim to have that much effective control over Matthias. Same for diversion. Can you honestly say that you’ve never been in situations where a strong breaker was sacrificed and you had to pitch in a bit of cc to break?

Xyonon.3987:

Heavily depends on the fight. But in the mentioned ones – drastically? Not as drastically as it does affect most other professions. You should run a dps meter on your war / ele / thief, whatever you want – on Matthias for example.

You’re severely overestimating the dps loss that some classes take. As I mentioned, necros and engies lose very little dps when doing circles. On sabetha, any dps lost from swapping bandits is more than made up for with epidemic bouncing when she returns to the platform. On Matthias, as I mentioned, a perfect group like SC can control the fight to an extent that a condie Mesmer can achieve excellent dps. However, that’s unrealistic for 99% of groups out there, where the reality is that you’ll spend most of the fight replacing phantasms that have popped for one reason or another.

Carighan.6758:

Fay.2357:

And you’re trying to argue that downed state is valuable in PvE because…reasons?

Lets face it, if you get downed in PvE, you’re either bad or in a situation where your downed skills don’t matter because your team should be reviving you. Downed state only matters for PvP, and mesmer downed state 2 is absolute top tier for PvP.

I wish we had numbers for this. I have a slight suspicion that if you were to sum up the amount of times players get downed and up from downed state, PvE might show it’s rather important there.

Yes, it might be your opinion that it only matters for bad players. They should “gitgud”. Thing is, “you’re not capping your player skill yet” is not really an excuse to have skills with crappy mechanics. It’s alright to have skills with complex mechanics if you want some specifically to provide a higher skill ceiling.

Ok, so you’ve gotten downed in open world PvE. Good job! What happens next?

If you’ve almost killed the mob, the Mesmer downed state is extremely strong at finishing that job. Deception will drop aggro for long enough to spawn a hard-hitting rogue for the kill.

If you haven’t almost killed the mob, you just got rekt and deserve the death to hammer home the fact that you should probably be taking a different approach.

I’m not seeing an issue here, even in PvE.

Tiefsee.3647:

Fay.2357:

Carighan.6758:

Uh oh. Queue the PvP brigade, yes all 30 of them, who will tell you that it’s one of the best #2 skills because reasons.

And you’re trying to argue that downed state is valuable in PvE because…reasons?

Lets face it, if you get downed in PvE, you’re either bad or in a situation where your downed skills don’t matter because your team should be reviving you. Downed state only matters for PvP, and mesmer downed state 2 is absolute top tier for PvP.

The only people that think mesmer downed state is bad are the ones that don’t understand how it works, how stomping works, or how PvP in general works.

In that case i must be a bad PvP player and don’t understand that skill – pleas explain me how i get a teleport that sends me out of the stomp range of my clone and not direct under the enemy – i am willing to learn

You’re using the wrong aspect of the skill to avoid a stomp, and this is why the Mesmer downed state is more reliable than the thief downed state for avoiding stomps.

If you are stealthed when the stomp finishes, it will fail. Since the #2 skill stealths you, that is what you use to avoid the stomp. A simple teleport, like thief, can be countered with another chasing teleport mid-stomp. The only way to counter the Mesmer stealth is with reveal.

Therefor, the proper way to use the Mesmer downed state is to wait until the stomp has almost completed, then use the skill. You will stealth and the stomp will miss.

If it’s going to be a ranged power weapon, I sure hope they make it better than the abject failure that is necro axe…

Xyonon.3987:

OriOri.8724:

Xyonon.3987:

Just gonna leave this here …

If mesmers are so great at solo PvE content then why don’t you post a video showing us how "easy"it is for a mesmer to solo the new story instances and still receive the achievements?

Can do, the day I can record again. Reinstalled my computer and on my laptop I have no recording programm.

But what I actually wanted to show here is the dps you can deal as condi Mesmer with realistic buffs. It’s top dps against VG (green fields), Sabetha (ranged) and Matthias in general.

Top dps against VG…except you’ll phase VG before you’ve had enough time to sit there dpsing to make up for the painfully slow start.

Top dps on sabetha…until the bandits switch and you have to do another 30 seconds of ramp up.

Top dps on Matthias…until you get volatile or fountain poison and your phantasms pop due to leash range, or you need to use diversion for breaking.

As I’ve always said, Mesmer is great dps on paper that doesn’t translate into reality. Even in the most ideal fights there are still so many mechanics that drastically reduce your actual dps.

DreamyLove.8947:

sometime u didn’t need cancel finish, mes show up at very close and u finish him…..

Thank you for illustrating my point so cleanly. You see that happen and think ‘oh, this skill must be bad’ when the truth is that the Mesmer using it is bad, and you lack the necessary understanding to see why.

noxx.1706:

Hello,
I’ve recently returned to the game after not having played since the initial release of HoT. I’m brushing off my mesmer who currently has full beserker ascended gear. I’m wondering if there is another gear set I should be running for overall game play? I’m very casual player and don’t want to have multiple gear sets in my bags for any given occasion- just something I can wear that will still be decent for open world / dungeon /fractals /WvW.
Thanks for any advice my fellow mesmers can give

If you always wear full zerk, you’ll be perfectly fine in just about everything. There are some very particular cases in which other stats are nice, but full zerk will get you smoothly through anything.

Ross Biddle.2367:

You have a single option

• Power shatter

You have one way to overcome your dodge problem

• Get better

Yep, that’s roughly the only solution for the question you’ve posed. If people are dodging your burst, do your burst better. That’s about it.

It was stated by Robert Gee that for some reason the range indication for portal would require backend changes to the code base and isn’t something that they could just do with scripting. The implied statement there was that it won’t ever happen…which is dumb, but yeah.

OriOri.8724:

Levetty.1279:

Unless they have changed it recently Phantasms aren’t affected by any might they might end up with but are affected by might on the Mesmer.

This point, this point right here from my first post.

Source.

It’s worked that way since the beginning of the game. Go test it yourself if you want more confirmation. That functionality is due to the way in which stats are inherited from the mesmer by illusions. Read Xyonon’s post for a slightly more specific description of that.

Naw, that was chaos. I remember what you’re talking about I think. Was this story actually a legit prose story?

Carighan.6758:

Uh oh. Queue the PvP brigade, yes all 30 of them, who will tell you that it’s one of the best #2 skills because reasons.

And you’re trying to argue that downed state is valuable in PvE because…reasons?

Lets face it, if you get downed in PvE, you’re either bad or in a situation where your downed skills don’t matter because your team should be reviving you. Downed state only matters for PvP, and mesmer downed state 2 is absolute top tier for PvP.

The only people that think mesmer downed state is bad are the ones that don’t understand how it works, how stomping works, or how PvP in general works.

Silverkey.2078:

Yes, I think to be constructive, we need to know why no berserker. Is it because you want more survivability? Because berserker is expensive? Because you don’t like the “berserker meta”?

Exactly. This forum operates on the GIGO principle. If you come and say ’I’d like something more durable than zerker’ or ’I’d like to really focus on providing party boons’, then we can provide useful advice as to how to achieve that.

Conversely, if you just say ‘hey, the letter B bit me when I was a child, so I’d like to avoid berserker gear’, you’ll get the sort of useless responses you see here.

Why do you not want to use zerker? With that set of weapons, zerker or assassin gear is best. If you just arbitrarily don’t want to use zerker, you may as well just equip random exotics as they drop. There’s no point in explicitly optimizing for a sub-optimal build.

Grandmaster illusion major trait: Contagious Insanity

Phantasms pick a new nearby target when their current target dies.

So berserker runes are a modifier on condition damage. All power damage modifiers are applied multiplicatively to outgoing damage, which means phantasms do not benefit. However, other % modifiers to condition damage (namely sigil of bursting) directly modify the stat itself, which is inherited by our illusions. If berserker runes also work that way, then the illusions will benefit from them.

Trailblazer is utter garbage for condie Mesmer, you should never use that. PvE condie Mesmer relies so heavily on crits proccing sharper images that any non-crit set is worthless.

Basically the options are vipers and sinister for hybrid or rabid for pure condie. Since we’re talking PvE, there’s really no reason to get tanky gear like rabid (or trailblazer’s for that matter). The issue of viper duration not mattering vs small mobs is definitely relevant, but I feel that it’s better to optimize your gear for harder fights (bigger mobs that take longer to kill) since weaker mobs will die fairly quickly regardless of using sinister or viper.

For runes I’d recommend probably berserker runes. They’re generally the best hybrid damage set available. For sigils you can take the sigil of earth for bleed on crit.

Amaimon.7823:

I would almost say VG is the easiest because once you’re used to it, you can beat him easily without deaths. The only reason we still wipe sometimes is because a green field spawns way behind us on charged ground

That’s just experience talking. Yeah, my group doesn’t have the slightest issues with VG anymore…but that’s because we’ve seen him by far the most times, done the mechanics for the longest, spent so much time on that boss we could practically do it blindfolded at this point. VG still has quite challenging and demanding mechanics that cannot be ignored.

Condie mesmer in open world is pretty miserable due to how slowly it kills things. Power mesmer is still sorta miserable, but it’s substantially better.

Condie mesmer in instanced PvE is, on paper, competitive in damage. However, you cannot provide the standard quickness/alacrity buffing while playing condie mesmer, and condie mesmer transfers very poorly from on paper to reality. This is due to the pistol phantasms being purely single target and having long cooldowns, making us useless for clearing multiple mobs and slow to ramp up damage on bosses.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend it. Most groups want a chrono that supports them, not one that struggles to dps a bit.

Mitch.4781:

Razor.9872:

Mitch.4781:

Razor.9872:

Mitch.4781:

I still dislike the Sabatha fight intensely. To me it just isn’t fun and I find the throwing the bombs bit really fiddly and unintuitive.

But it is just an aoe? How is that fiddly and unintuitive?

I’m referring to the mechanic where you have to throw a bomb on the platform to port your teammate up. It just feels contrived. It’s probably my least favourite fight out of all 9 fights.

Right, that is just an AoE.

And I find the action key fiddly and unintuitive. Is that ok with you?

Probably means you have it bound to something hard to hit. Try finding a better binding for it.

For those weaponsets, viper is absolutely the best choice of stats, although sinister would also be functional.

There are very limited defensive options for sigils. Pretty much the only one that provides functional defense is energy, dodge on weapon swap. There are some other gimmicky things like water sigils for tiny heals now and then, but it’s so small that you won’t even notice it happening. I’d recommend a sigil of strength or battle for your second choice.

Runes have some decent defensive options available. I’d recommend either durability or melandru for general defense. That being said, a full vipers build with defensive runes is still pretty squishy. Since you’re only interested in PvE, I’d recommend just going full offense and surviving through the use of the excellent active defense Mesmer has.

Why would this be needed? Do you think our boon application in chrono is underpowered and in need of buffs? This idea is just more garbage power creep.

Regarding the ps warrior toughness issue:

I’ll run less than 1400 toughness on most bosses because a momentary aggro swap usually isn’t a huge problem. Vale guardian and Xera are the two that can easily cause a wipe if aggro jumps, so I’ll throw on extra toughness to break 1400 on those 2.

Zintrothen.1056:

Fay.2357:

draxynnic.3719:

Xyonon.3987:

I still wonder if this is intended or a bug, because to me it’s more like a bug that the shield #4 is the only phantasm that can be dodged. I hope they “fix” this eventually

All of the phantasms can be dodged if the enemy times it right, actually. The thing is that the shield phantasm has a really big tell, so people can more easily judge when to dodge. Other phantasm skills are faster-acting (or at least don’t give forewarning in the form of a purple bubble) so they’re harder to predict.

Incorrect. No phantasm skill other than the shield can be dodged.

Why would they only make one phantasm evadable? That seems silly.

The way you say that implies that they did this on purpose. What most likely happened is that whoever coded up the skill just didn’t know they were supposed to make it unevadeable or didn’t know how.

draxynnic.3719:

Xyonon.3987:

I still wonder if this is intended or a bug, because to me it’s more like a bug that the shield #4 is the only phantasm that can be dodged. I hope they “fix” this eventually

All of the phantasms can be dodged if the enemy times it right, actually. The thing is that the shield phantasm has a really big tell, so people can more easily judge when to dodge. Other phantasm skills are faster-acting (or at least don’t give forewarning in the form of a purple bubble) so they’re harder to predict.

Incorrect. No phantasm skill other than the shield can be dodged.

The problem is that this doesn’t buff mesmer. It buffs Chrono. If you fix the Mesmer dps problem with chrono-specific modifiers, it just recreates the problem for the next elite spec that gets released.

Mesmer dps needs to be fixed for Mesmer, not for a specific elite spec of Mesmer.

Pistol certainly works in solo open world play, it’ll just be a lot slower than other options. Basically the problem is that the duelist is single target, and a phantasm is far more damage investment for most single random mobs than they actually need. Compare that to shield where the wall will cleave through all the mobs you’re fighting, and the phantasm has a (weak) aoe hit.

I’ll dissect the dps claims later. I recognize that I disregarded the potential of alacrity when solo to boost the MoP spam dps above sword auto. I still have doubts about how realistic that number can be, but I want to test it using that method before disputing it on principle.

Edit: I still don’t buy using phantasms as sustained cleave dps in PvE simply due to targets dying ruining that, but my solo numbers are potentially inaccurate.

Xyonon.3987:

apharma.3741:

I’ve still yet to see a credible source backing up your claimsabout mesmer DPS though which doesn’t have the aforementioned disclaimers. Most DPS tests I’ve seen usually say your actually DPS will be a lot lower than the number they show.

Then when everyone points out the flaws you dismiss it as inconsequential saying it doesn’t matter that it’s a single target build.

Here you go – 4m HP golem went up to 22k. To mention, you can get higher if you play core Mesmer and use Chaos for more condi duration, while also swapping out Viper gear for Sinister. I expect the dps to scratch the 25k, but I don’t know for sure. I use my Chrono version only for open world.

However this is just like the condi Ranger a dps focused build and if you would want to be able to do the Quickness rotation, the dps would be around 14k only and you would still only provide close enough Quickness for everyone – or rather, just not enough to be viable.

Ah yes, the ‘I never need to switch targets or do aoe/cleave or begin dpsing rapidly’ benchmark.

Any word on the sorcery you used to get 5.5k solo power cleaving dps or the 7k single target solo power dps?

Xyonon.3987:

Again – 7k dps as power, 5.5k as cleave -> aoe. That’s just dps, not burst at all.
You’ve got MoP, MoD, MW and PB, aswell damage wells like WoC and GW. You can easily burst any trash ball in open world with those things.

7k solo dps as power, 5.5k solo dps cleave? I’ll believe that when you take a video of it, because I’ve never seen that sort of damage.

I just did a test on the 1 mill hp golem. Traiting domination, dueling, illusions boosting phantasms as much as possible, summoning 3 swordsmen and then autoattacking, I hit 5.3k dps. Now, I’m not 100% full zerk and I’m not using scholar runes, so this could theoretically be marginally higher…but not nearly high enough to hit 7k solo dps. That number is nothing but a lie.

5.5k solo dps cleave? So by cleave you’re presumably talking about the sword autoattack, since phantasms aren’t reliable cleave due to their target locking. I managed to hit a little under 2k autoattacking with sword. I’d love to know what sort of sorcery you’re using to hit 5.5k.

So just for kicks, I went and applied 25 might to myself with the console. I found your fabled 7k solo single target dps and 5.5k cleave! It’s possible with 25 might. Now you just need to show me maintaining 25 might solo in realistic situations and I’ll believe you!

Xyonon.3987:

I didn’t say “we win vs other classes in solo”. I said “we win compared to other professions”.

What I meant is that for example a Thief loses more damage in % than a Chrono if you pick both out of the team enviorment. And this applies to basicly all none-supporters with huge damage modifier boons or quickness independent dps like we have. That’s simply a fact.

A Thief deals around 30k dps against the golem with the commonly used raid buffs (qT uses).
If you now solo a 1m golem without any buffs, you’ll deal around 9k damage, with food around 10k. So you lose 67% dmg as a Thief in solo compared to a team enviorment. Most of it due to Quickness wich increases the dps by 50% already.

A solo Chrono with Rev deals around 10-12k dps in Raids. If he lacks a Rev and goes Commander, he’s at around 8k. Let’s just say 11k dps as a Chrono in Raids, ok?
If you now solo the 1m golem with no buffs but food as the thief, oh magic happens! 7k dps as power (5.5 is cleave) and 9.5k as condi (single target). So we lose 15-40% dmg.

That’s what I mean. We aren’t winning directly in terms of dps, but we are winning in “losing less dps in solo”.

So what you mean to say is ‘our dps is still bad, but other classes get brought back down to our level under perfectly ideal conditions’. Gosh, what a wonderful thing! And if you need to dps on 2 targets? Oops, guess you didn’t want to think about that one…

Fay.2357:

We are talking about solo dps. Don’t accuse me of lying with that statement just because I’ve made expiriences with the setup. I’d rather encourage you to give it a shot too, but seriously, not with the “it’s gonna be worse anyway-attitude” :P

Not exactly. I’m talking about solo dps. You’re talking about solo dps while soloing a hero point. There’s a rather substantial difference in scope between those 2.

Xyonon.3987:

Is it not used? You think people who have no problems will complain in the forums? It’s hands-down the best way for soloing hero points as a Chrono. I agree, I wouldn’t use it for trash mobs or cleave / aoe in general either, you’re right with that. But the only thing you have to setup are 2-3 i duellists and that you’ve done within 10s for sure.

Again, a world exists outside of soloing hero points. Story instances, all of the open world that isn’t hero points, various events, there’s so many things where this simply doesn’t hold true. Yeah, mesmer is great for soloing hero points. Have a gold star I guess…

Xyonon.3987:

Well agreed, Necro and Guard have good pulls. The others are rather mediocre to stack mobs to cleave them later though. Especially since Rev and Druid both alsi lack in aoe and have semi cleave autos.

Two professions with good pulls simply are not “most of them” though. It’s not like it’s our only quality.

Ok, lets go over it again.

Heavies: Guard has great pulls, warrior has extremely powerful cleave and solid aoe, revenant has a decent pull, powerful and large aoe on hammer, and powerful cleave on sword.

Medium: Engie farts aoe, ranger has an ok pull with okish cleave, thief doesn’t do aoe too well, but their single target is excellent.

Light: Necro has great pulls and powerful cleave/aoe, elementalist has aoes big enough that pulls don’t matter at all, and mesmer has great pulls and then sits there looking at the pulled mobs hoping an elementalist comes by to kill them for us.

Edit: @Krispera: I believe that the story instance has a debuff applied to the main boss, which means it takes more damage from all sources (including phantasms). Contrast that to the vale guardian-like boss which applies a buff to you, buffing your outgoing damage. That buff doesn’t transfer to the phantasms.

Velimere.7685:

The second part can be evaded; the first part cannot be evaded.

You got that backwards. You can evade them throwing the harpoon at you, but you can’t dodge the yank once you’re tethered.

SloRules.3560:

Levetty.1279:

Terrible in solo content. You will be able to do most of it but at about half the speed of other classes while requiring twice the effort. Often more frustrating then fun.

Every raid group will want at least one Chrono for support and can fill in the tank roll
Terrible in large scale WvW unless you like providing portals and nothing else
Roaming we are decent but other classes are better and will move around the map faster
Good condi build in PvP at the moment but we are always vastly overrated by the PvP community that always demands nerfs no matter what posistion we are in and Anet is more then happy to oblige. Though the last few patches were surprisingly good for us.

It is acctully great for gvgs. That quckness and ressistance arent going to share themaelves. Same thing in pugs.

The boonshare role is extremely strong in an organized group…but it’s total garbage in pugs, not sure why you’d think it’s useful there.