Guild Wars 2

The only possible lasting solution to WvW matchmaking is if Anet institutes incredibly harsh limitations on transferring. If they locked down transfers completely to the higher population half of linked servers, they would manually enforce balance to eventually be reached.

However, this won’t ever happen. People want to play together and want the ability to transfer as a community wherever they want, and the outcry of such a severe transfer lock would be immense. On Anet’s side, they want that sweet transfer money that comes in abundance from WvWers (probably by far their largest revenue stream from WvW).

Soothsayer.9206:

Have you thought of using Rune of Sanctuary instead of Radiance? What about Persisting Images over Medic’s Feedback? Interesting build though; variation on a theme. Always looking for alternatives, keep us posted on the results.

Persisting images probably wouldn’t do much. Phantasm survivability is pretty binary; either the fight is small enough to not kill them or there’s so much cleave they die immediately upon spawning. Medic’s feedback on the other hand gives that fantastic revive speed booster plus a pbaoe feedback, which can be really nice if you’re getting hit with ranged pressure.

Neither is a fantastic trait, but medic’s feedback is going to have a more reliable positive effect most of the time.

skcamow.3527:

messiah.1908:

Soothsayer.9206:

Have you thought of using Rune of Sanctuary instead of Radiance? What about Persisting Images over Medic’s Feedback? Interesting build though; variation on a theme. Always looking for alternatives, keep us posted on the results.

with sanctuary you already have stability and retaliation while with this rune the cd is too long. with radiance it buff your auras which is always nice

I was thinking the same thing at first (why radiance) but after looking at it you really get some great retaliation uptime (probably permanent) which fits well with the knight amulet, plus on top of that every chaos armor lasts almost 7 seconds due to the aura duration buff on #6, which is very nice.

Does it actually work with chaos armor now? In the past (multiple times) I tested radiance runes and they never procced any of their effects nor affected chaos armor durations.

Signet of inspiration is a garbage choice, so you could swap that out for a stunbreak.

Edit: Idk though, I’m not really feeling it. Even in a 1v2 there’s so much cleave that you’re going to have a tough time keeping illusions up, so no defender and no 3% per illusion. Do you really think you could hold down a 1v2 against pressure classes like scrapper/dh?

Furajir.3815:

Fay.2357:

Furajir.3815:

Fay.2357:

It’s just your standard condie build with sc/sh + staff. He’s running insp/ill/chrono, probably a mix of rabid and dire based on the crit rate.

Thanks a lot Flimp!

looks at acc name

That’s a new one.

I asked him, not you, take a seat.

Goodness, such hostility for being literally exactly correct? It’s not like it’s rocket science to figure out a build from a video. It took me about 30 seconds of clicking to random parts in the video to figure out exactly what the build was, and anyone with actual knowledge about the class should be able to do that.

Furajir.3815:

Fay.2357:

It’s just your standard condie build with sc/sh + staff. He’s running insp/ill/chrono, probably a mix of rabid and dire based on the crit rate.

Thanks a lot Flimp!

looks at acc name

That’s a new one.

It’s just your standard condie build with sc/sh + staff. He’s running insp/ill/chrono, probably a mix of rabid and dire based on the crit rate.

DoomKnightMax.6592:

Fay.2357:

Tomiyou.3790:

When I played mesmer, it used to be definiton of skill. Now it is spam.

What you actually mean is, when you played mesmer it was the definition of garbage. Now it’s actually competitive, but since people always complain about mesmer it’s now “OMG SO OP”.

No, I think what he means is, a few years back you had to think a bit when it came to playing against different builds on different classes. Now due to power creep, everything is a quick speed up of button mashing, and killing the other guy before he murders you.

Gameplay in general is a bit too forgiving now and pays off more to those players with less experience. Traits which over accommodate for players (such as the ones that prock at 25% HP and provide immunity), support less thinking and diminish the use of reaction time.

The pay off for players who are able to successfully play berserker builds or “high risk” builds simply isn’t incentivized anymore.

Those are some awfully rosey glasses you’ve got on there.

Has there been power creep? Yes. Has it affected how the meta plays in any way at all? Lol no. Back then people still went for the highest reward:risk builds, and those were still the meta just as they are now. The only difference is that back then mesmer had no high reward:risk builds, and was absolute garbage. You get people reminiscing about the “good old days when mesmer took skill”.

No, mesmer has always taken skill. The difference is that back then being extremely skilled on the mesmer meant you were still garbage compared to a moderately skilled person playing cele ele, and now being extremely skilled on the mesmer means you can actually trash people.

So don’t give me this ‘oh everything is so easy and back then it was so much better’ crap. Back then it was exactly the same. We had the exact same complaints, the exact same moaning, and the exact same nerf calls for mesmer, so don’t you dare think for one instant that if mesmer gets nerfed into the ground ANY of this will change.

Tomiyou.3790:

When I played mesmer, it used to be definiton of skill. Now it is spam.

What you actually mean is, when you played mesmer it was the definition of garbage. Now it’s actually competitive, but since people always complain about mesmer it’s now “OMG SO OP”.

Sunshine.5014:

It’s true that confusion is a strong enough condition on its own already. They just add the passive tick so people can PvE with condi mesmer. It’s a case that PvE balancing triump PvP balancing.

Not that confusion is any better in PvE either though. They made that change to try and make it better, but it’s still garbage with the added bonus of being wonky in PvP.

Since you don’t care for PvP or WvW, I’m assuming you want something for PvE? Are we talking dungeons, raids, fractals, open world, or all/any of the above?

The short answer is…You’re in luck!
In fact, the only commonly viable mesmer PvE builds are support-oriented; designed to drastically boost the abilities of your teammates. Not so lucky on lockdown though, that’s not a thing in PvE at all, not even a little bit.

Ross Biddle.2367:

messiah.1908:

also instead qq about mesmer and shout for nerf i didnt see any top player trying to build anti mesmer condi build

i can see warrior counter to mesmer in the future , also good ranger. and if you say moa 50% of the time you can kite out of it.

also every singly top match i watch every mesmer in group fight did in average (are you rdy?)

3 torment, 5 confusion and some low cover bleed and poison…. that is it!!!

in 1v1 or 2v2 its different story if the enemy didnt pressure the mesmer. in 1v1 it can go up to 15 stacks…..

so kitten funny. not long time ago every condi build i and other posted got banned cause ppl scream useless cause of condi cleanse …. nothing has change but the fact top player mesmer had to play condi build with mesmer…..

i am really open minded but hardly see any post here with good real fact of why this build is consider so strong in pvp (not 1v1) compare pre hot and post hot
(hint: players take less condi cleanse now)

Yup yup yup.

Pretty much to summarize the problem we’ve been seeing: This is grade A scrub mentality at work. People not playing to win.

Simple as that.

Sorta depends on how you characterize “playing” doesn’kitten The PvPers are just playing the game on the forums better than we are, and it’ll probably result in them winning in the long run.

Silverkey.2078:

I just wanted to clearly debunk something I have seen over and over when mentioning a nerf to CS. Many people (including mesmers) suggest a nerf to CS, often by preventing elite skills to be cast. And many mesmers argue this would kill PvE mesmers. So this is simply not true.

First, if one simply prevents elites, then alacrity is untouched and 100% alacrity can be reached “easily”. If this is the case, then

• Tides of Time: 3s quickness every 30s (22.5 with perma alacrity) = 13% quickness uptime
• Well of action: 3s quickness every 25s (18.8 with perma alacrity) = 16% quickness uptime
• Time Warp (untraited): 11s quickness every 180s (135 with perma alacrity) = 8% quickness uptime
• Signet of Inspiration can be assumed to simply double Tides of Time and Well of Action (good approximation since they have the same cooldown and you have already stacked quickness thanks to TW so you don’t loose duration while casting the signet): 26% quickness uptime.

So here we go, even without CS, you get 63% quickness uptime, which will be higher with boon duration and can reach 100%. And with nerfed CS, you can get an additional ToD + WoA + SoI for another 12s quickness every untraited 90s (68s with alacrity) for an extra 18% quickness uptime.

On another note, with similar calculations, I saw that perma alacrity is also possible (with 2 iAvenger, even easier with 3) without any CS, and therefore definitely possible with the “small” nerf suggested.

So no, CS is not needed for PvE viability and also threatens PvP balance and therefore should be nerfed before a-net decides to instead nerf core mesmer even more.

So you’re making some heavily faulty assumptions here, primarily the assumption that you’re casting all the skills immediately off cooldown (you don’t) and that SoI ends up doubling ToT and WoA (it doesn’t).

Due to stacking mechanics, SoI will often only add half of what you’re assuming. ToT is 2 stacks, adding chrono runes means a whole bunch of extra short stacks floating around, and since SoI preserves stacks, you end up overstacking your teammates pretty quickly. Essentially this means that the SoI used twice during the opening CS combo will have slightly less than doubling for the first use and significantly less than doubling for the second use. For the SoI used outside of the CS combo, the quickness will begin wearing off before it is casted, making it significantly less than doubling.

Your other faulty assumption is that all skills are cast on cooldown. This cannot be the case in most fights. Maybe you can maintain this in fractals/dungeons where the fights are by and large snoozefests, but not in raids. A lot of the raids necessitate group mobility and/or defensive reactions to skills. You keep as close to the ideal rotation as possible, but you’ll never actually make it there, sometimes significantly less on some bosses.

So all that being said, lets do some rough math. With permanent alacrity, CS should be on a 60s cd. You’ll use it roughly every 70 seconds though, accounting for time spent inside CS and time waiting for mechanics. We’ll use this as our main time period for calculations. Every 70 seconds:

3 uses of Well of Action: 9s quickness
3 uses of Tides of Time: 9s quickness
3 uses of Signet of Inspiration: ~5s per use, generously for a total of 15s

This totals to 33s of quickness on a 70s cd, or 47.14% uptime.

Time warp is 11s every 135s, for 8.14% uptime.

In total, we end up with 55% base uptime if continuum split does not affect elites. If continuum split does affect elites (current situation) time warp jumps to 11s every 70s, for a 15.71% uptime to reach a total of 63% uptime.

With a revenant providing 50% boon duration, we have the nerfed uptime placed at 82.5% final uptime, and the un-nerfed uptime at 94.5%. Ultimately, is this an extraordinarily massive difference? In most cases, probably not. However, there’s definitely a substantial difference there, and that lower uptime also translates to less room for error on rotations and makes enforced movements for mechanics very unforgiving in terms of falling behind on quickness uptime.

Is it worth eating this nerf to satisfy some PvP complainers that will just latch onto the next strongest part of the build if moa+cs gets nerfed? No.

Xyonon.3987:

Heya,

---

Fay said “if you need more than the 50% provided by a revenant”.
The one to Rule said “you need at least 50% so you can get 100% uptime”.

Those are two completly different things. I agree that you need 50% boon duration, even a bit more to make it smooth. But this does not require you to have a Revenant, not does it require you to have crappy commander gear.

---

If you have 20% boon dura food and 33% from Superior Sigil of Concentration, you’ll be fine. If you want to be on the safe side, simply use 10% boon duration utility.

With 63% boon duration, you’ll have more than enough quickness uptime wich (in theory -> SoI randomness stuff) could grant permaquickness for 10 ppl.

If you are a solo Chrono, you will most likely have a Rev in your sub-party anyway, if you duo Chrono, you just have to provide quickness and alacrity to 5 allies, wich i find more reliable and successful (also increases alacrity uptime to 100%).

---

Here some rota vids I’ve made:

Rotation (Solo with Revenant): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqPVOhi_cw0
Rotation (Duo without Revenant): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZGl-bV2RjA

(read descriptions)

---

Greez!
- Xyo

Yep, this info is accurate. Just wanted to clarify that the post I quoted explicitly stated that he was sitting at 50% and it wasn’t enough to keep quickness up permanently, and he needed a revenant to push it the rest of the way…hence my comment about doing it horribly wrong.

Lettuce.2945:

Power revs are in the same position yet you don’t see them crying about it.

I mean…have you seen the PvP forums lately? It’s basically power revs complaining about condie Mesmer in every other thread.

Anyway, 15 or 20 stacks of confusion without effort? Let’s see.

Confusing images: 6 stacks
Cry of frustration with 3 clones + melee range: 8 stacks
Mind wrack with 3 clones + melee range: 4 stacks

Total: 18 stacks.

In order to get 18 stacks of confusion on you, you need to eat a long and slow channeled skill followed by two full shatters (which would require the Mesmer to burn significant cooldowns to generate the illusions for). You would need to dodge none of this and have zero condition removal.

I’m going to go ahead and call this a l2p issue. If a Mesmer is loading you with 20 stacks of confusion, it’s because you’re playing extremely poorly. Before complaining about other classes, instead take a good look at your own level of play.

Uhm…

So…perplexity runes don’t actually exist in PvP. Just…so you’re aware. Maybe you meant to post this in the WvW subforums?

The one to Rule.2593:

I disagree, without a revenant. I sit on about 50% boon duration, still not enough and that’s with commanders. I’m unsure how you’d get 100% without a revenant. and without commanders that will be even less, probably take you down to like 30%

As a chrono you DO need boon duration since your primary role is providing boons. Literally there is no other reason to take a chrono.

You can block a good 80% of Vale’s attacks if you time things right, and when you shatter you also heal, mesmer tanking is so much more about active defenses than stacking on defensive stats.

If you need more than the 50% provided by a revenant, you’re doing your rotations wrong.

Healing prism is utter garbage that doesn’t synergize with anything. It’s a tiny amount of healing on a long icd. Don’t waste your time even thinking about it.

Any boons or conditions applied by you, your traits, or your illusions are affected by your personal boon or condition duration.

Any utility skills produced by a trigger trait will be affected by all traits that the actual skill is affected by.

Xyonon.3987:

Little hints:

Tank, Shield, Avenger, Danger Time.

Now pick a proper gear stat combination

Definitely not a fan of danger time. I’m sitting at 85%-90% crit in my raid with full buffs, so danger time is way overkill.

Jaffawer.4932:

well… now I’m even more worried about trying the tank role The bigges issue is that I don’t have any stable raid group, and everyone expect you to be exp and best, with X amount of Li.

So I highly recommend finding a steady group to raid with. There’s always groups recruiting, and almost everyone wants a chronotank. Pugging raids can be a really bad experience between toxic people and unskilled players which means failing, then people leave, then you find more, then fail, then people leave…you get the picture.

Insofar as tanking VG goes, staying alive is important, but ultimately not too tricky. The most difficult part of that fight to learn is the proper way to rotate VG around the arena without letting green circles spawn behind you. This means moving it early on some segments to take into account an upcoming breakbar, and essentially playing as flawlessly as possible. As tank on VG, your performance is more important than anyone else on your group (not to scare you), so it’s pretty nice to have a more permanent group that doesn’t ragequit the first time you don’t do the rotation flawlessly.

Jaffawer.4932:

Ye, I’m a bit worried about that low toughness. Seems like I’ll be ‘squashed’ a lot.

Er, yeah, you can pile on more toughness if you need more survivability. I do have the advantage of both having done the fights a lot and I raid with a top notch druid, so dying isn’t really something I have to worry about much. I also use restorative illusions in the first raid wing, so that lets me get extra healing. With persistence of memory, proper shatter cadence will allow you to rotate the shield block and blurred frenzy for almost every attack that VG makes.

Gorseval is actually far easier in terms of incoming damage. He doesn’t hurt all that much, and his attacks come slower and are well telegraphed. VG is definitely the hardest to stay alive on.

Optimal condie gear for a Mesmer is mostly vipers with a bit of sinister. However, condie Mesmer is rarely a build that will actually be a good fit for a party/encounter as it has a lot of mechanical problems that limit its usefulness.

Generally speaking, Mesmer should be running an alacrity-quickness support build with assassin’s or berserker gear.

Yeah, chrono runes combined with SoI is where a large portion of the shared quickness comes from.

I use zerker with 1-2 pieces of knights. Commander gear is overkill since I run with a revenant.

Probably standard condie build, but it would be more accurate to say that you’re killing yourself in 3 seconds. The standard burst loads up a decent amount of low duration confusion. If you just spam skills while you’ve got that confusion on you, you’ll kill yourself very rapidly.

As long as your team is good, you only need 1-2 pieces of toughness gear. I usually use an amulet to get the toughness, and I run zerker for every other piece.

Disclaimer: Playing Mesmer in a group is an often depressing experience. After experiencing the strength and utility of Elementalist and necromancer, Mesmer is really depressing.

Anyway…

So the Zerg hero build I’ve found most effective is the guardian runes block-burn build. I use full dire with sw/sh+gs. Chaos with bd, illusions with ineptitude, chrono with w/e you prefer. The general idea is to just wade through the middle of everything with your block up to proc burns on everyone. It works fairly well, doesn’t lock down utilities so you can take veil or w/e, but doesn’t actually contribute to killing all that much.

For more focused stuff, you’ll have to go glassy. Gs+sw/sh or torch, power gear, that sort of thing. You’ll squish if anything hits you, so you’ll need to stay aware of your positioning and make sure you’re properly picking targets.

It’s not really possible to do an effective aoe bruiser. Your main aoe comes from shatters and wells. Wells are garbage damage, and shatters need clones. While it would be nice to actually have aoe or strong cleave capability, the best we have is the shield wall, and that gets bricked by hitting an invulnerable recently downed person 90% of the time. If you actually want to do good damage…go ele.

Frostball.9108:

Portal has always been here, but we have never had the capabilities of condi mesmer paired with portal. Unless you want to keep having mediocre builds and be carried by these 2 skills they need to change so mesmers can get actual normal viable builds. I dont mind either but id imagine alot of people wouldnt in the end want to be completely locked to these 2 skills.

1v1s can be a big part of pvp. People always qqd about moa, but now theres actual reason to, theres no real big punishment so to say for missing moa when you can use it every 70s or so, and thats being generous.

So you’re forgetting history a bit here. Condie mesmer has always been top tier 1v1. A well played condie mesmer has been able to trash just about anyone else from the PU condie era onwards. Despite that, it’s never been considered viable or strong in PvP for many reasons. So obviously, there’s a difference now that’s making it viable, and most would agree that that difference is double moa plus the added defense of chronomancer.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/World-completion-help/first#post6109709

Azukas.1426:

My facts are true thus are facts.

See, this is where the problem is. What you think are true facts are actually incorrect opinions, and no amount of weak tautology is going to change that.

It’s okish. You don’t have CI, which is usually a pretty important staple of interrupt builds. You’ve also got basically zero defense. You’re relying completely on locking someone down offensively to stay alive.

You’ll have major problems with stability. You’ll also have major problems against other glassy roamers, thieves in particular.

Honestly, there’s a lot of good reasons you don’t see people running interrupt builds anymore. There’s a lot of stability, and a lot of builds/classes are able to just shrug off that sort of pressure.

Frostball.9108:

apharma.3741:

Frostball.9108:

apharma.3741:

Lets be clear here, it’s the elite spec that is “over tuned” (like all other elites), nerfing portal or anything else about base mesmer like you suggested earlier makes base mesmer even more uncompetitive. You even said it yourself, base mesmer isn’t competitive so you can’t justify increasing the cool down by a lot just because we have an elite spec with alacrity.

By the way mesmer DPS is completely terrible, bottom of the barrel terrible, source.

This is why mesmer is in the alacrity/quickness buff role and while I do agree being a best in slot indispensable pick for raids isn’t healthy for the game nor the class there is no other viable option. Mesmer wouldn’t even be considered for it’s utility which can, for the most part, be acquired from much higher DPS classes.

I dont care of base specs, i dont see anet trying to balance the new elite specs with base specs, having a cd nerf on continuum does not mean quickness mesmer would be unused.

Also to add, your source i believe has a quickness mesmers dps, which i believe is far worse from other builds that are not used due to quickness mesmer being very good, not at dps on its own but due to alacrity+quickness.

Yes I’m aware the test was on a quickness/alacrity build in the link. There was also a discussion on the forums asking what people were getting for their DPS and the results were very similar to be honest. The highest I got for DPS was with 2 phantasmal warlock and a swordsman with all conditions on the golem, completely unreasonable but there we go. I believe it becomes better than a swordsman at 6 conditions which means it’s likely not much if at all better in a realistic scenario.

You might not care about base specs but I for one like diversity. Feeling like one of my trait lines is mandatory is taking away a significant amount of diversity whatever the class. I do however acknowledge ANet isn’t exactly trying to bring down the elite specs though.

Cool down increase on CS will always be a nerf to PvE mesmer no matter which way you cut it. The better question in my opinion is should CS be in the game? I mean what will it be next that people complain about, double signet of domination, double null fields? Then what happens when ANet buffs a useless utility and it becomes worth it on it’s own? Double it and you create the next problem.

You could even just make moa incompatible with it, there are ways other than cd nerf. I think continuum is sort of a part of the chronomancer theme but i wouldnt mind too much if it got removed, almost just that skill makes chrono worth taking over other specs.

Making moa selectively incompatible with CS is probably the best solution at this point. Mesmer would still be solid in PvP, and it wouldn’t be nerfed in PvE.

I do recognize the balance issues with the concept of CS, but it’s too late to be changed. It’s a basic part of chrono and changing that would require a total rework of the spec — something that Anet is most definitely not going to be doing. It’ll be bandaid fixes from here on out.

Friendly movement speed modifiers do not stack. Instead, the highest value is chosen. Having both traveler runes and time marches on along with swiftness will give you 33%.

Chill and cripple will then modify from that highest value. Having multiple sources of positive speed will not provide any sort of defense against chill and cripple.

Frostball.9108:

Fay.2357:

Frostball.9108:

I mean this is coming from a mesmer main, been playing it for ages, i should be able to tell whether or not the class im playing is too good in the current meta, others should be, too. Of course there will always be the people that QQ about mesmer but at the moment theres a genuine reason to. Is there a single person that thinks that a class with a moa every 60 ish seconds or so, have a portal play available every 70 seconds and the ability to 1v1 just about any class in the game is balanced? You can even CC and condi burst considerably well (considering the state of the class in other parts of the game) without talking of heal with well and invuln your teammates for guaranteed heal cast. I have to say the class is a bit crazy at the moment.

Problem with nerfing CS is that if you do that in the way that all the PvP folks want, chrono instantly becomes garbage in PvE.

Speaking purely from a utilitarian standpoint, PvP folks are going to have to deal with it until Anet comes up with an amenable solution that doesn’t dumpster chrono in PvE. Lets be honest here, while the PvP folks whine loudly, it actually only affects a grand total of ~12 pros and maybe a hundred or so serious PvPers. In the grand scheme of things, nobody cares. It’s not like the PvP balance problems are actually driving away a measurable amount of people, it’s too small to even remotely matter.

It wont affect the game much but unless i understood wrong, people think mes doesnt need a nerf. A nerf to continuum cd and portal cd would not make mes garbage in pve.

Yeah, it sorta would. Not the portal, the continuum split.

Frostball.9108:

I mean this is coming from a mesmer main, been playing it for ages, i should be able to tell whether or not the class im playing is too good in the current meta, others should be, too. Of course there will always be the people that QQ about mesmer but at the moment theres a genuine reason to. Is there a single person that thinks that a class with a moa every 60 ish seconds or so, have a portal play available every 70 seconds and the ability to 1v1 just about any class in the game is balanced? You can even CC and condi burst considerably well (considering the state of the class in other parts of the game) without talking of heal with well and invuln your teammates for guaranteed heal cast. I have to say the class is a bit crazy at the moment.

Problem with nerfing CS is that if you do that in the way that all the PvP folks want, chrono instantly becomes garbage in PvE.

Speaking purely from a utilitarian standpoint, PvP folks are going to have to deal with it until Anet comes up with an amenable solution that doesn’t dumpster chrono in PvE. Lets be honest here, while the PvP folks whine loudly, it actually only affects a grand total of ~12 pros and maybe a hundred or so serious PvPers. In the grand scheme of things, nobody cares. It’s not like the PvP balance problems are actually driving away a measurable amount of people, it’s too small to even remotely matter.

StickerHappy.8052:

AtomsOrSystems.9420:

StickerHappy.8052:

Hate to burst the bubble but Azukas is mostly on point with his stuff.

I kind of feel like I need to deny this just on principle. For a more nuanced take on what Azukas is really, really not on point, the replies in this thread (and others) do a better job than I could in this post.

StickerHappy.8052:

Mesmers are the best 1v1 class in the game atm. This is coming from me who dueled countless mesmers, mesmer is my hardest matchup even on my ranger. Mesmers are not mainly gotten for Moa and port, its part of it but 1v1 ability is more of the deal breaker here.

Bull. But I do think you’ve hit on an important, maybe the important, point here. Mesmers are good at 1v1. They always have been; they were designed to be. We have an entire traitline called “Dueling,” for chrissake. People don’t like losing 1v1s; so when they do, they rage, they call the class that beat them OP. It’s happened to warriors. It’s happened to thieves. And it’s happened, over and over again, to Mesmers.

However, sPvP (and WvW, for that matter) isn’t based around 1v1 duels. You can sit on home or far the whole match, win every 1v1, and still lose the match because you can’t/don’t contribute jack to the teamfight. Team contribution is wildly more important; Mesmers aren’t bought because they can win 1v1, they’re brought because they can portal their team, and they can unbalance teamfights with Moa.

Saying Mesmer is OP because it can win 1v1s is like the people who said Mesmer was OP because they couldn’t kill it in WvW roaming; it betrays a frightening lack of knowledge of what wins (or loses) the game overall.

1v1s happen alllll the time in a competitive match.

Moa Port? yes these two are factors, but what about the metas that we didnt have mesmers?

Moa and Port existed since the launch of the game.

If you read what I wrote, I said they are also picked for Moa and Portal.

For the record when did say mesmer is OP?

Mesmer has always been stellar at 1v1. Mesmer has always had moa. Mesmer has always had portal.

Mesmer has almost always been garbage-tier in PvP.

You and others make all these arguments while ignoring the facts obvious to everyone else that all these things you’re complaining about clearly didn’t matter all that much ever before. They’re just being brought up as talking points now to try and get on the ‘nerf mesmer omg so op’ train.

I use perplexity, but mainly because I’ve already got gear with them and none of the other runes really call out to me. There’s no obvious choice for condie Mesmer, all of the runes are varying degrees of okish.

Idk what you guys are talking about. Azukas makes perfect sense to me! Clearly condie Mesmer was simultaneously brokenly op and completely unviable! Nothing about this is contradictory at all!

Hiraethlon.3561:

Noah… plz give me back my gold-_-… It was meant for unlocking the guild hall, I never said it was okay for you to leave with it! If you do not, I will ask Anet to look into the records.

So…you’ll want to take this to private messages, not just random accusations on the forums.

Can’t say I’ve noticed this happening before. The only time my phantasms die without me causing it is my pDefender dying due to damage transfer. My normal phantasms never die to stray damage.

Yeah, if you’re looking for tactical play, you’re going to be disappointed in EotM. It’s basically just ring around the rosie karma training. You just want as much aoe and long range tagging as possible.

If you want tactical play, head over to WvW. The build posted by lujate will be solid for roaming, but will be awful in larger groups. Unfortunately, there is no Mesmer build possible that doesn’t feel awful in large groups. We don’t have any good long range aoe, and we don’t have any strong cleaving weapons. Wells help a little bit, but the aoe is relatively small, their range is short, their cooldowns long, and their damage is absolute garbage. The best you’ll be able to do is spamming gs skills and hoping your iZerker survives long enough to get an attack off.

Step.1285:

Krispera.5087:

Levetty.1279:

Step.1285:

If you’re taking Scepter, you’re going to want to build condition. It deals rather abysmal damage if you go for a power build,

As far as Mesmer weapons go Scepter works quite well with power.

Yep. Confusing Images do more or less the same damage as Rapid Fire.

It’s pretty insane. Power Scepter is good.

Huh? I’ll take a look. Last I tried Scepter (a couple of weeks ago) on power, I really wasn’t happy with the damage output.

Rapid fire skill coefficient = 3.75
Confusing images skill coefficient = 3.6

Almost identical damage from them, though rapid fire also applies a bunch of vulnerability of course. The scepter autoattack used at melee range along with confusing images off cooldown does about 80% the damage of sword autoattack at melee range, minus cleave of course.

I highly recommend sw/sh+Gs over offhand sword. There’s not really any good reason to use offhand sword in open world as you’ll rarely be in a situation that makes use of that much single target damage.

Until you have shield, use focus. Consider using focus+inspiration signet or centaur runes until you’ve unlocked the grandmaster minor chrono trait otherwise you’ll be horridly slow.

So if you’re playing well, you put permanent quickness and alacrity on 5 other members of your raid group. Let’s call it 4 though, and assume only 3 of them are Eles.

Quickness = 1.5x action speed
Alacrity = 25% CDR

Eles do a good mix of autoattacking and skill usage, so we can reasonably approximate the overall damage boost as about 1.3x-1.4×.

If each ele is doing 35k dps after all buffs, then without quickness and alacrity they’re doing 25-27k. Worst case scenario this is a boost of 8k dps per ele. Even if you’re only applying this boost to 3 people (in reality 5), you still have an effective dps of at least 24k on top of your personal dps. Since you’ll realistically be boosting 5 people, your effective dps modifier is going to look more like +35k, so you could be doing literally zero personal dps and still be worth it.

Edit: For 5-man content it’s basically the same situation but all the numbers will be a bit lower. Alacrity won’t have as much of an effect while quickness will have a stronger effect, so it ends up much the same. The main issue is that people in 5-man groups tend to be really stupid, so they run away from my combo and stand in a corner autoattacking or something. Barring that, it’ll work fine.

Xyonon.3987:

Mai’s multi lightning fan like attack is unblockable, but you can simply stay behind a clone or phantasm or dodge it. Her port is blockable, her autos are blockable (even tough they are multihit, you can take one to block n slap her. Mossman’s cleave is a 2 hit, but one hit should be survivable. I’d rather block it with shield or dodge it tough and block his autos then, but if that’s it, i’ll gladly stick to my scepter :P

Just goes to show how little I’ve done fractals since the update. I remember back when a mossman cleave from a level 40+ fractal would do 15k with each of those 2 hits.

Silverkey.2078:

Exciton.8942:

Let’s be honest. It is not a good thing to have every long cd elite to be on the same cd as CS.

This! We can discuss it for as long as we want, but CS simply removes the possibility of balancing elite skills by their CD!

And Fay: PvE mesmer would not be dead even if CS is partly nerfed (many suggestions have been given including this one). Maintaining 100% uptime of quickness and alacrity would be more difficult (or maybe impossible) but the uptime would still be enough to justify a chrono presence in a organized group. You said it yourself, chrono is currently the most irreplaceable class in PvE, so a small nerf would not suddenly make us garbage.

More than tripling the cooldown of CS for having the audacity to use time warp with it is anything but a “small nerf”. That triples the cooldown on our main buffing combo. It would make us move from providing permanent quickness to quickness running out on the group with another 2 minutes left on the CS timer.

I said it myself, chrono is currently the most irreplaceable class in PvE. However, it is only that way because of the powerful utility it brings. If this change was implemented, chrono would instantly move from best in slot for any group to "eh…lets bring another elementalist instead’.

Now, I’m open to the possibility of nerfs to CS in some way, but literally every single suggestion I’ve seen so far guts PvE mesmer without a second thought. Quite honestly, I don’t give 2 kittens about how perceived unbalanced it is in PvP, because it’s balanced in PvE, useful in WvW, and the number of people actually affected by the PvP performance of it is hilariously miniscule.

“Oh but the pros say it’s so op”. Yes, I’m sure all 12 of them are heartbroken about it. “Oh but everyone on the PvP subforum says it’s op.” Yeah, they’ve been saying that mesmer is op literally since the launch of the game.

This is just a L2P issue. If people weren’t scrubs and learned the moa animation instead of just throwing their hands up in the air and giving up the instant they see an enemy mesmer, nobody would be complaining about CS. Case in point: nobody complained about CS during the chronobunker time. Has it changed at all? Nope.

GS+sw/focus. You’ll want blink, signet of inspiration, and something else. Using focus and signet of inspiration will get you nearly permanent swiftness for movement. You’ll probably want to trait domination, dueling, inspiration. Dom/dueling gets you damage/crit modifiers, and inspiration gets you some reflect utility.

Fay.2357:

Ah yes, the classic “Lets bend PvE builds over a log and give them a good reaming for the purposes of PvP balance” suggestion.

Xyonon.3987:

Fay.2357:

It’s worth noting that the sword is massively better defensively than scepter, particularly in fractals. There’s a ton of absurd and infuriating unblockable attacks in fractals. There are also some equally absurd undodgeable attacks, but those are far more rare.

What are those “ton’s of absurd unblockable attacks” you’re talking about? Jade Maw beam? o.O I can’t find them even if I try, at least not as many as you put it to be there so please – enlighten me.

Well, the one that was kittening me off last night is half of mai trin’s toolkit can’t be blocked. There’s a ton of aetherblade mob attacks that can’t be blocked as well. There’s also a lot of attacks that do multihits (like mossman’s cleave thingy), and those smash right through the scepter block (shield works for those though).

Alex Shatter.7956:

Portal / Moa

1. Portal: Turn into an f5 skill for core mesmer

So this change alone would instantly delete mesmers from competitive play. Vanilla Mesmer is not even remotely viable because it lacks the offense, defense, and utility that Chronomancer does, but Chronomancer wouldn’t be worth taking if it couldn’t portal.

Alex Shatter.7956:

2. Moa: Active effect: Reduce duration to 3 seconds. Reduce CD to 120 seconds. On interrupt, deals damage and inflicts torment. Instant cast, breaks stun Passive effect: Change from 20% reduction on CC to 20% increased damage against confused enemies

This makes the skill absolute garbage. 120 second cooldown for an interrupt? Please tell me this is a joke. The passive effect also isn’t even remotely good enough to be valuable for a PvE dps boost. Maybe if it were 150%…

Alex Shatter.7956:

Chronomancer
1. Continuum Shift: No longer affects elite skills. Duration per illusion shattered is twice as long. On cast, also affects up to three allies in a 250 radius of the user.

This is one of the only ideas from your post that isn’t garbage. That being said, I’m still not a huge fan. This would make CS extremely difficult to use in a way that was positive instead of just disruptive. It would basically make CS unusable without active voice comms…even in PvE.

Alex Shatter.7956:

2. Well of Precognition: Keep the stability as is. Remove aegis. Causes allies to block 50% of incoming attacks. At the end, gives back stamina per usual.

Why even bother mentioning the stability? It has stability because it’s a stunbreak with a cast time.

Anyway, this would be just weird. Blocks 50% of incoming attacks? Does that mean every other attack or are we getting an RNG roll each time? It makes far more sense just to revert it back to distortion.

Alex Shatter.7956:

Inspiration and Glamours
1. Temporal enchanter: No longer applies resistance and superspeed. Instead, removes a condition from allies and a boon from foes. Applies 4 seconds of retaliation. Still increases duration of glamours

This is just ridiculous. First of all, nobody with a working head on their shoulders thinks the resistance is overpowered. Secondly, retaliation is literally the single most worthless boon in the game you could choose to add to this. “Powerful offensive support”? Don’t make me laugh.

Alex Shatter.7956:

2. New Glamour – Flip: Field with a higher radius than null field, but less than TW. Increases damage done from allies by 15%, and reduces damage taken from allies by 15%. Lasts 6 seconds. 40 second CD.

This is the only other idea in this post that isn’t garbage, but it’s made somewhat irrelevant by the fact that the portal change allowing it to be proposed is garbage.

Alex Shatter.7956:

1. Give Maim the Disillusioned an ICD. Like 2 or 3 seconds.

It’s difficult for me to describe in a sensible fashion how awful of an idea this is. Internal cooldowns are bad design by themselves, but putting them on a trait that’s explicitly supposed to add consistent condition pressure to our shatters because we have literally zero condition pressure without it is…special.

Alex Shatter.7956:

2. Make sceptor 3 hit four times instead of six. Six confusions stacks at once is ridiculous.

How about no. This is an obvious and telegraphed attack that has plenty of options for counterplay.

Alex Shatter.7956:

3. Increase damage on staff 1. Change vulnerability to a stack of confusion.

Staff 1 is condition, not power. Why add more to power creep when you don’t need to?

Alex Shatter.7956:

1. Increase DPS of greatsword AA. Add confusion to GS 2 for synergy with the new moa passive skill.

2. Increase blurred frenzy and sword AA damage.

Shatter Mesmer is a burst build. These changes are attempting to give a burst build high sustained dps as well. Doing this is how you get broken garbage like shiro revenant or S/D thief during the spam 3 to win era.

So in conclusion…

No.