Guild Wars 2

redcomyn.4651:

Except confusion is worthless in pve. So no to that!

> Implying that PU isn’t worthless in PvE

While I’d rather have PU than try and bring back the glamour trait, you’re not going to be getting an awful lot of PvE mileage out of either one of them unfortunately.

HappinessFactory.4910:

Remember when we were afraid of bullrush because of hundred blades?

Heh, I remember the frenzy – bulls rush – HB days. While the one trick poniest of all one trick ponies, it was still a pretty scary threat that would be laughed at today.

randomguy.1283:

Fay.2357:

randomguy.1283:

Fay.2357:

randomguy.1283:

Fay.2357:

randomguy.1283:

Fay.2357:

So while it can be useful to be proficient at multiple classes, it’s definitely not necessary.

Chrono, Druid, warrior, tempest, revenant, and DH are all fine/great on every fight. Thief, engineer, and necromancer will vary in effectiveness and some groups will prefer that you not use one of those classes sometimes.

That being said, if you’re just trying to hop into random groups, it’s best to play as many classes as possible because that increases the chances that you can fill the role that someone wants. I only play chrono and despite chrono being present in every raid, not every raid group is looking for a chrono at any given point in time.

However, your best bet is joining a guild or permanent raiding group, finding a role to play, and mastering that role. Do some research on the fights to become familiar with them, and look around for guilds/groups recruiting for new members. Don’t be afraid of letting them know that you’re inexperienced, as most groups don’t mind bringing a newer player up to speed.

ewww revenant no

I’ve beaten gorse with 3 revenants in the raid. Since gorse has by far the tightest dps check of the bosses, clearly revenants are fine at the very least.

Was that before they got bugged? atm they are bugged so that their auto attack (that thing that used to do actual damage) no longer scales of weapon damage.

That was a week or two ago.

And didn’t they fix that already?

They have not, this is anet we’re talking about

Just tested it out, it seems fine.

Having the same stats with a white weapon and with an exotic weapon will yield the same damage on the 1st and 3rd hit of the auto attack, that’s what you need to test.

Went out and tested with a white weapon and an ascended weapon. Swapped around other pieces of gear so that total power was the same with both of them. The ascended weapon did substantially more damage with all parts of the autoattack.

Asrat.2645:

Thats it. Im done talking to you.
I truly tried to reason with you and I believe unlike most people I have been nice and tried to be supportive and I always tried to change your point of view, not to disencourage you from balancing in general.
But you just dont listen. At all. You are so convinced of your own supremacy and your view is so biased…whatever qualifications you may posses, they dont apply to guild wars 2.

This changes would be op on a currently underpowered class. But what they would do to the elementalist…
I wish you all the best and I hope you have fun at what you are doing, but you are not in a position to suggest changes.
I hope when you still play the game in half a year you can laugh about all this. ^^

Honestly, the amount of patient persistence you showed in these threads was astounding, I’m rather impressed.

Sigmoid.7082:

I keep seeing in OPs suggestions for classes " change base damage to this" or " x condition does y damage over z seconds"

Do you know that both of these things are impossible because of how they scale and the formula behind them.

Yeah, this is also good to note. “Base damage” is not a concept that exists in GW2 (except maaaybe on funky things like damage from utilities, cause those act really weird).

randomguy.1283:

Fay.2357:

randomguy.1283:

Fay.2357:

randomguy.1283:

Fay.2357:

So while it can be useful to be proficient at multiple classes, it’s definitely not necessary.

Chrono, Druid, warrior, tempest, revenant, and DH are all fine/great on every fight. Thief, engineer, and necromancer will vary in effectiveness and some groups will prefer that you not use one of those classes sometimes.

That being said, if you’re just trying to hop into random groups, it’s best to play as many classes as possible because that increases the chances that you can fill the role that someone wants. I only play chrono and despite chrono being present in every raid, not every raid group is looking for a chrono at any given point in time.

However, your best bet is joining a guild or permanent raiding group, finding a role to play, and mastering that role. Do some research on the fights to become familiar with them, and look around for guilds/groups recruiting for new members. Don’t be afraid of letting them know that you’re inexperienced, as most groups don’t mind bringing a newer player up to speed.

ewww revenant no

I’ve beaten gorse with 3 revenants in the raid. Since gorse has by far the tightest dps check of the bosses, clearly revenants are fine at the very least.

Was that before they got bugged? atm they are bugged so that their auto attack (that thing that used to do actual damage) no longer scales of weapon damage.

That was a week or two ago.

And didn’t they fix that already?

They have not, this is anet we’re talking about

Just tested it out, it seems fine.

FrownyClown.8402:

How long have you been playing this game?

Forum history extends 3 months or so.

randomguy.1283:

Fay.2357:

randomguy.1283:

Fay.2357:

So while it can be useful to be proficient at multiple classes, it’s definitely not necessary.

Chrono, Druid, warrior, tempest, revenant, and DH are all fine/great on every fight. Thief, engineer, and necromancer will vary in effectiveness and some groups will prefer that you not use one of those classes sometimes.

That being said, if you’re just trying to hop into random groups, it’s best to play as many classes as possible because that increases the chances that you can fill the role that someone wants. I only play chrono and despite chrono being present in every raid, not every raid group is looking for a chrono at any given point in time.

However, your best bet is joining a guild or permanent raiding group, finding a role to play, and mastering that role. Do some research on the fights to become familiar with them, and look around for guilds/groups recruiting for new members. Don’t be afraid of letting them know that you’re inexperienced, as most groups don’t mind bringing a newer player up to speed.

ewww revenant no

I’ve beaten gorse with 3 revenants in the raid. Since gorse has by far the tightest dps check of the bosses, clearly revenants are fine at the very least.

Was that before they got bugged? atm they are bugged so that their auto attack (that thing that used to do actual damage) no longer scales of weapon damage.

That was a week or two ago.

And didn’t they fix that already?

Ooh Ooh another one

Anari.2137:

Stone Flesh: Now Grants Protection (30%) Permanently While in Earth Form.

Seems balanced.

Azukas.1426:

Fay.2357:

Azukas.1426:

Mesmer is meta in all game modes.

They are still taken on raids, open world, and yes WvW.

Thank You

Correct, but disengenuous. Nobody gaf about who shows up in open world, cause it’s open world. However, if people had a choice, they’d probably ask for no mesmers and more eles. WvW takes mesmer for veil. That’s…about it. Portal also, but only when it’s convenient.

Mesmers have been an essential part of all gank groups in WvW and truth be told the 1st guild to ever run a ganked group ran 2 mesmers.

Once again you are wrong.

You mean back in the shatter hey-day? Sure, that was a thing back then. You’re about 2 years late on that one though. For the most part close combat gank groups have been phased out by revenants with every key bound to the 2nd hammer skill.

Om Im.7863:

bloodpyrope.8630:

Anari.2137:

Did you really just ask for metrics proving pushing buttons means more interaction with the game?

No, I asked for a source on the “higher retention rates, and more competitive play.”

Still waiting on that API…

From near the beginning of this thread.

Anapxist.5314:

Just add topic starter to friend in game with accaunt tag, and you will see he have 1300 a.p. Yes pvp only players didn’t have much a.p. in general, but 1300. Really. And if you search for his post’s in forum you will see he start them about month ago. If we add here poor game mechanic understanding and his wrong class rework suggestions we can have a result. He is new player, maybe 2 month in this game End of story

But he said he was a game design expert! You’re clearly insinuating that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and that can’t be right because he told us that he was extremely experienced!

Anari.2137:

Fay.2357:

Anari.2137:

These are basics in balance

You heard it here first folks. Skill spam is the quintessence of perfect balance! No need to question this, this guy is clearly an expert, he said so himself!

20-30 seconds is not spam, its just not waiting for 3 minute cd for an effect in battle to take place.

And thank you for your kind words, they make me blush wink

mm sure, just hurry up and get to mesmer, I want my share of chuckles!

Soothsayer.9206:

Fay.2357:

Soothsayer.9206:

Fay.2357:

There’s no meaningful answer to this question because the question is pointless.

What’s a hard nerf? Duration? Health? Cooldown? Usability of skills? All of the above?

Ultimately, if CS gets nerfed, it gets nerfed. We’ll work with it as best we can. If it gets nerfed bad enough to remove chrono from the meta, then chrono gets removed from the meta and a lot of people probably either switch class or stop playing.

Whatever happens will happen, but unless you happen to have special knowledge about what changes are going to happen, it’s nothing but idle gossip to discuss how you will respond to it.

Here we go with the ad hominem again. I really don’t understand why you have to take that sort of posture. No one saw the Mesmer nerfs that accompanied the last “balance patch” coming, did they? We all feel that Anet over did it and the current meta fell to Mesmer by default, not because it is as solid as other builds, but it is serviceable as a portal and moa bot. Furthermore, getting replies, suggestions and advice from others may help influence others even if the current conversation is speculative at the moment – at least it lays a possible foundation for further discussions after April 19.
Que Sera, Sera then eh? I hope not, really enjoy GW2 and really enjoy Mesmer; I hope I don’t have to give up either any time soon.

You really have no idea what ad hominem means.

In any event, history has shown that attempts to predict the actions of the balance team are generally futile. Sometimes they’ll do what you expect, and sometimes they’ll do things that nobody asked for or wanted. They’re so out of touch with reality and logic that there’s no point in trying to prepare yourself for what’s coming. Just wait for the patch and roll with the punches.

I know what ad hominem is; you already know that. By stating it again in the manner you just did (“You really have no idea what ad hominem means.”) only reinforces that I know what I speak of. Furthermore, why say that it’s “pointless?” Why, because you have nothing more creative to say, so you state things in that manner to disparage my post. Seems like a classic case of ad hominem to me.
Furthermore, its not about predicting the future, but having meaningful conversations about trajectories. Instead of taking the time to post something meaningful, using your knowledge and experience of GW2 and Mesmers to further this conversation that may result in helping others, you attempt to ruin my post and potentially keep others from engaging.

So ad hominem is the action of attacking the person making the argument instead of the argument itself. You have some sort of weird idea that attacking the argument is an ad hominem, but that’s not the case at all. The fallacy of ad hominem is that you’re attempting to discredit the argument by discrediting the person where there’s no actual correlation between the validity of an argument and the person making the argument.

Nowhere have I attacked you, the person. I’ve called the idea of this thread pointless and silly, and I’ve made arguments explaining that. That’s not ad hominem, that’s called logical discussion.

Anari.2137:

These are basics in balance

You heard it here first folks. Skill spam is the quintessence of perfect balance! No need to question this, this guy is clearly an expert, he said so himself!

Zelulose.8695:

Fay.2357:

Zelulose.8695:

Fay.2357:

OP, you’re aware that when someone says ‘power creep’, they’re not actually referring to power-based damage, right?

Power creep is the growing buffs related to damage dealing abilities or options. This includes power builds and condition builds alike in this particular game and also may include increasing levels of crowd control. That is what one can refer to as the definition I intended in the title. Sorry about the confusion.

Nope, that’s completely incorrect. Power creep is a general term used to describe the increasing strength of abilities or mechanics. It has nothing to do with damage at all, only the relative strength of a given skill. This could refer to damage, cc, or sustain potential, it doesn’t matter which.

Yes… this is exactly what I understand crowd control to be. I’m sorry if you had trouble reading my explanation.

/facepalm

Soothsayer.9206:

Fay.2357:

There’s no meaningful answer to this question because the question is pointless.

What’s a hard nerf? Duration? Health? Cooldown? Usability of skills? All of the above?

Ultimately, if CS gets nerfed, it gets nerfed. We’ll work with it as best we can. If it gets nerfed bad enough to remove chrono from the meta, then chrono gets removed from the meta and a lot of people probably either switch class or stop playing.

Whatever happens will happen, but unless you happen to have special knowledge about what changes are going to happen, it’s nothing but idle gossip to discuss how you will respond to it.

Here we go with the ad hominem again. I really don’t understand why you have to take that sort of posture. No one saw the Mesmer nerfs that accompanied the last “balance patch” coming, did they? We all feel that Anet over did it and the current meta fell to Mesmer by default, not because it is as solid as other builds, but it is serviceable as a portal and moa bot. Furthermore, getting replies, suggestions and advice from others may help influence others even if the current conversation is speculative at the moment – at least it lays a possible foundation for further discussions after April 19.
Que Sera, Sera then eh? I hope not, really enjoy GW2 and really enjoy Mesmer; I hope I don’t have to give up either any time soon.

You really have no idea what ad hominem means.

In any event, history has shown that attempts to predict the actions of the balance team are generally futile. Sometimes they’ll do what you expect, and sometimes they’ll do things that nobody asked for or wanted. They’re so out of touch with reality and logic that there’s no point in trying to prepare yourself for what’s coming. Just wait for the patch and roll with the punches.

Zelulose.8695:

Fay.2357:

OP, you’re aware that when someone says ‘power creep’, they’re not actually referring to power-based damage, right?

Power creep is the growing buffs related to damage dealing abilities or options. This includes power builds and condition builds alike in this particular game and also may include increasing levels of crowd control. That is what one can refer to as the definition I intended in the title. Sorry about the confusion.

Nope, that’s completely incorrect. Power creep is a general term used to describe the increasing strength of abilities or mechanics. It has nothing to do with damage at all, only the relative strength of a given skill. This could refer to damage, cc, or sustain potential, it doesn’t matter which.

randomguy.1283:

Fay.2357:

So while it can be useful to be proficient at multiple classes, it’s definitely not necessary.

Chrono, Druid, warrior, tempest, revenant, and DH are all fine/great on every fight. Thief, engineer, and necromancer will vary in effectiveness and some groups will prefer that you not use one of those classes sometimes.

That being said, if you’re just trying to hop into random groups, it’s best to play as many classes as possible because that increases the chances that you can fill the role that someone wants. I only play chrono and despite chrono being present in every raid, not every raid group is looking for a chrono at any given point in time.

However, your best bet is joining a guild or permanent raiding group, finding a role to play, and mastering that role. Do some research on the fights to become familiar with them, and look around for guilds/groups recruiting for new members. Don’t be afraid of letting them know that you’re inexperienced, as most groups don’t mind bringing a newer player up to speed.

ewww revenant no

I’ve beaten gorse with 3 revenants in the raid. Since gorse has by far the tightest dps check of the bosses, clearly revenants are fine at the very least.

There’s no meaningful answer to this question because the question is pointless.

What’s a hard nerf? Duration? Health? Cooldown? Usability of skills? All of the above?

Ultimately, if CS gets nerfed, it gets nerfed. We’ll work with it as best we can. If it gets nerfed bad enough to remove chrono from the meta, then chrono gets removed from the meta and a lot of people probably either switch class or stop playing.

Whatever happens will happen, but unless you happen to have special knowledge about what changes are going to happen, it’s nothing but idle gossip to discuss how you will respond to it.

So the only way to do a targeted “lag” attack at another player is to DDoS them. This is certainly possible to do if you’re careless and share your IP all over the place. It’s also nothing that Anet can possibly control, because the DDoS attack doesn’t utilize Anet servers at all. It functions by overloading your local connection, not by targeting your connection to GW2 specifically. If you’re actually getting DDoSed, that’s between you and your ISP.

There are, as was mentioned, drop hacks. These are extremely unlikely to exist for any length of time due to them being severe vulnerabilities in the game servers, but they also don’t fit the situation at all. A drop hack will affect everyone connected to the server equally, not just one targeted person.

It’s also worth mentioning that DDoS is not a hack. DDoS has nothing to do with the game itself. It simply attacks general connections to the Internet with a brute force method.

OP, you’re aware that when someone says ‘power creep’, they’re not actually referring to power-based damage, right?

I can’t wait for op to get to Mesmer so we can all have a good chuckle about it. If he can’t figure out guardian, imagine how he’s going to do trying to figure out Mesmer…

So while it can be useful to be proficient at multiple classes, it’s definitely not necessary.

Chrono, Druid, warrior, tempest, revenant, and DH are all fine/great on every fight. Thief, engineer, and necromancer will vary in effectiveness and some groups will prefer that you not use one of those classes sometimes.

That being said, if you’re just trying to hop into random groups, it’s best to play as many classes as possible because that increases the chances that you can fill the role that someone wants. I only play chrono and despite chrono being present in every raid, not every raid group is looking for a chrono at any given point in time.

However, your best bet is joining a guild or permanent raiding group, finding a role to play, and mastering that role. Do some research on the fights to become familiar with them, and look around for guilds/groups recruiting for new members. Don’t be afraid of letting them know that you’re inexperienced, as most groups don’t mind bringing a newer player up to speed.

This is a whopper of a thread, that’s for sure.

So first op claims blizzard and WoW to be the epitome of MMO balance. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t WoW spend close to half a decade trying and failing to break into the eSports scene due to awful balance and gameplay issues?

Then OP changes tactics and now claims to be one of 4 competent developers in the industry, and we should take everything they say as the unadulterated truth because of that.
…
…
…
Ok. In other news, I’m definitely an astronaut. You can believe me because I’ve said so on an online games forum.

Azukas.1426:

Mesmer is meta in all game modes.

They are still taken on raids, open world, and yes WvW.

Thank You

Correct, but disengenuous. Nobody gaf about who shows up in open world, cause it’s open world. However, if people had a choice, they’d probably ask for no mesmers and more eles. WvW takes mesmer for veil. That’s…about it. Portal also, but only when it’s convenient.

FJSAMA.2867:

3. Keep on to supporting party/squad cause soloing will be a struggle anyway.

Realisticly phantasms will never benefit from alacrity. Even solo on HotM golems u cant cover all phantasms with your well radius… Random spawns/ attacks range will always end up with one or other out of alacrity range. On pve content its impossible.
Also, quickness has no impact on their dps…. If they kept passive alacrity on them, thats another story… Dream on fellow mesmers.

Technically quickness does have an impact on dps, it’s just a very small one. Since the skill recharge doesn’t begin until the skill is done executing, faster execution from quickness leads to an earlier start for the recharge. This would really only be noticeable on duelists and wardens, and would be objectively a bad thing on wardens, so I’m not too eager to see it happen.

Azukas.1426:

Levetty.1279:

Look we know you can’t tell the difference between pro league using portal and the random troll cleric mesmer that keeps kicking your kitten in hot join but we don’t need an update everytime it happens.

Expressing exuberance for having arguably the strongest class in the game is a natural reaction. This is more so special because we just got nuked with the nerf bat last patch.

Join me in the gaiety!!

Arguably the strongest class implies that one is capable of discussion about it. Since that description obviously doesn’t fit, you should probably stay away from that turn of phrase.

Silverkey.2078:

Don’t phantasms get alacrity from our AOE alacrity (wells or shield) as long as no other target has priority?

I know it does not help at all in group environment, but it does at least boost our solo DPS.

Pick one:

1. Soloing something challenging enough to care about alacrity means you’re unable to stand still long enough to get the benefit from wells onto yourself, let alone phantasms
2. Soloing something easy enough that you don’t care either way

I’m ok with phantasms not getting quickness. Most phantasms use a low duration attack, limiting the impact of quickness. Wardens are negatively impacted.

However, phantasms getting alacrity when we do really should have been baked into the spec. It’s absurd that our signature buff doesn’t actually end up working on 60% of our damage.

Then again, while we’re discussing pipe dreams, phantasmal haste working on shield phants would be pretty cool too, and I’d be pretty ok with mesmers getting a use outside of portal and moa in PvP.

phokus.8934:

Fay.2357:

What he won’t be doing is interfering in the specifics of what each team does. He’s not going to go to the balance team and instruct them to balance better, just like he isn’t going to go to the raid team and tell them that they need to make the sloth arena a bit bigger. Maybe he would put more devs onto the balance team, but do you really think piling more monkeys onto the typewriters is going to result in an improvement?

Improving class balance doesn’t require more people, it requires smarter people.

But that’s the thing, Mike could very well be doing those things. I work in software development for a very large firm and the CEO/Partner would literally dictate every direction of software development. From the colors, to the nomenclature, to even what we would be working in. Time will certainly tell and so far he’s already telling us what he’ll do but there’s a lot to be desired from the so called balance team.

And how did that go for you?

Let me rephrase. If Mo tries to get into the nitty gritty of every team’s operation and meddle with things, anything he tries to do that for will get worse not better. Management should manage, because it’s generally all that they’re good at. When they try to micromanage tasks is when things really go bad.

phokus.8934:

You hit the nail right on the head – we need smarter people directing the balance in this game. Right now, I feel like they have the wrong people making the wrong decisions.

Yep, exactly.

Ok, I’ve performed the test I described in my previous post. The guardian had 70% boon duration, taking feel my wrath to 8.5s total. The shout was popped at the start, giving 3 seconds before maximum stacks were reached. With time warp ticks of 1.5s, 8 stacks of that is 12s. 8.5-3 seconds of stacking is 5.5 seconds for a projected maximum quickness duration of 17.5s.

Observed results aligned with the theory. Quickness rapidly stacked up to 18 seconds, then ticked down without refreshing for about 5 seconds before refreshing to 13 seconds on the last tick of time warp.

So I can confirm that the behavior of quickness is that of a first in, first out stack with 9 slots. When maximum stacks are reached, further stacks will fail to apply until the oldest stack has worn off.

Xyonon.3987:

Step.1285:

However, I’ve managed to sustain permanent quickness with 35% boon duration without Sigil of Concentration. It’s very tight; people need to be in your wells at all times and they might need to even touch your Tides of Time waves too. It is possible though.

I doubt that to be working without a Rev as it is the discussion of this thread.

---

Fay.2357:

Here’s the simple test that I executed.

Boon duration: 50%

With 50% boon duration, each tick of time warp adds 1.5s of quickness.

I dropped 2 time warps within .5s of each other by using split-second timing with CS, and then monitored the resulting quickness duration. Over 10 seconds, 2 time warps will add a total of 22 stacks of quickness. With each stack lasting 1.5 seconds, over 10 seconds 6.666 stacks will wear off, leaving at least 15 stacks remaining. With 15 stacks, each stack lasting 1.5s, the expected quickness duration is 22.5 seconds.

On execution, quickness reached 13 seconds, and pulsed up to 13 seconds multiple times before the time warps ended.

13/1.5 = 8.667, round up to 9 stacks.

A test that I did not execute, but could easily try is having a guardian use the elite shout early on in the time warps. If it favors the long 5s duration shout, then the total duration will be higher. If it pushes out the stack, it will still be 13s.

Exactly! 8.667 is lower than 9. This means it doesn’t override, it gets blocked. It can never be higher than 9. So if you see “13s” turning into “12s” and back to “13s” again all the time, it means it has to wait until one stack has weared off.

I’ve made a visualization in excel that easily explains what I mean.

The first one is a normal solo time warp (blue 1) with 50% boon dura, it won’t go over 5 stacks around 10s.

The 2nd one are two time warps (blue 1 and blue 2), 0.5s after each other. Once 9 stacks are reached, no new stacks will be added (red = blocked stacks) until one stack has weared off.

This means you actively destroy quickness stacks this way.

I also made a short vid showing how it’s struggling to add further stacks at 13s (what you said too).
(exlusive link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL8mL4M1DXc&index=1&list=PL4QnNhTXYiNKquK0GYFNlpLQJbjiyoToN)

Greez!
- Xyo^^

So my test is actually inconclusive as to whether it fails to add stacks when at full stacks or whether it actually pushes out old stacks. Since all time warp stacks are the same duration, it’s impossible to tell the difference.

I’ll test later with a guardian. By adding in a 50% duration quickness shout (7.5 seconds) that is used at the start of the time warps, we will be able to tell a difference. If stacks are being pushed out, the duration will drop back to the 12/13 behavior at the same point as without the shout. If stacks fail to be added, we’ll see a very obvious 3 second period where no new stacks are added (duration is not refreshed), and instead the duration counts down normally.

I’ll update this thread once I’ve executed the test.

I think you don’t understand how the trait works, but I’m fairly sure that I understand what you’re asking. What you’re saying is that you’d like to be able to shatter the phantasms and have them respawn more than once as long as you waited long enough inbetween shatters?

It’s an interesting thought, but ultimately wouldn’t do anything to resolve the issues that prevent Mesmer from being a good PvE damage class. It also would be a drastic change in mechanics between PvE and PvP, and Anet has never made a PvE/PvP split that substantial.

apharma.3741:

To be honest we don’t really know. With Mike at the steering wheel he might be redistributing some man power a little to help the class balance get into a better state like it was just before HoT.

A broken clock is still right twice a day. The marginally better balance before HoT was nothing but a temporary fluke.

apharma.3741:

He’s already said he intends to do something about the content droughts and not long after we got SAB. Sure no new world but it was something to do. I guess if we keep getting little bits of living world/festivals to do until the next season we’ll know it was him driving that and how big of an effect he is having.

Mo taking over has nothing to do with SAB. Any given release pushed to live has been in the works for multiple months already. 2-3 months down the road is when we will start seeing the first actual effects of the leadership change.

apharma.3741:

So yeah while Colin leaving might not have an effect, Mike stepping up might have an effect other than to boot the legendary crafting team to do something more productive.

Effects that are driven by management are different than what you seem to think they are. Mo can/might change things on an overall directional level. He can allocate resources and direct the broad goals of the company.

What he won’t be doing is interfering in the specifics of what each team does. He’s not going to go to the balance team and instruct them to balance better, just like he isn’t going to go to the raid team and tell them that they need to make the sloth arena a bit bigger. Maybe he would put more devs onto the balance team, but do you really think piling more monkeys onto the typewriters is going to result in an improvement?

Improving class balance doesn’t require more people, it requires smarter people.

Vague Memory.2817:

Well now that Colin has left, it will be interesting to see what direction they go in for class balance. At the moment I think this is not so predictable. If they are serious about balancing there will be huge nerfs across the board for several elites to bring them in line with other classes, as opposed to continuing the current ridiculous arms race of increasing damage/survivability, and nerfing according to Proleague wisdom.

If you think Colin leaving will have even the most miniscule effect on class balance, you should think again.

Xyonon.3987:

Heya,

Nope, it does NOT do that.

You simply become immune to quickness if you currently have 9 stacks. You cannot override it. Did you never notice that you wanted to share quickness with SoI and “immune” popped up everywhere? That’s when you want to share more stacks than they can hold. Otherwise skills like Time Warp could REDUCE your quickness wich would be silly …

Same thing for swiftness or stealth, etc.

You can sustain 100% quickness with 30% boon dura already. The trick is it to not spam your wells right after CS again. Always wait until your CS cd is around 65s, then continue with spamming wells on cd.

Never miss the concentration proc. If you don’t own concentration you’ll require around 60% boon duration.

Greez!

Here’s the simple test that I executed.

Boon duration: 50%

With 50% boon duration, each tick of time warp adds 1.5s of quickness.

I dropped 2 time warps within .5s of each other by using split-second timing with CS, and then monitored the resulting quickness duration. Over 10 seconds, 2 time warps will add a total of 22 stacks of quickness. With each stack lasting 1.5 seconds, over 10 seconds 6.666 stacks will wear off, leaving at least 15 stacks remaining. With 15 stacks, each stack lasting 1.5s, the expected quickness duration is 22.5 seconds.

On execution, quickness reached 13 seconds, and pulsed up to 13 seconds multiple times before the time warps ended.

13/1.5 = 8.667, round up to 9 stacks.

A test that I did not execute, but could easily try is having a guardian use the elite shout early on in the time warps. If it favors the long 5s duration shout, then the total duration will be higher. If it pushes out the stack, it will still be 13s.

Step.1285:

Fay.2357:

Quickness stacks 9 times. The stacking behavior is a First in, First out list. Once the list has 9 entries, the oldest entry will be pushed out in favor of a new entry, with no preference given to duration. Signet of inspiration conserves stacks, and simply adds on your current stack list to everyone elses in the same manner as if you had manually applied each stack separately.

I always wondered about this; good on you for testing it. Not sure I understand exactly what’s going on, though.

So if, hypothetically, the rest of my party had 18 seconds of quickness – one stack of 10 seconds as the “oldest” stack and then 8 stacks of 1 second – and I shared a single stack of 2 seconds with Signet of Inspiration, would that pop out the 10 seconds and push in 2 seconds, dropping everyone’s quickness from 18 to 10? If so, then in practice there are times when using Signet of Inspiration must do more harm than good, no?

That is correct, the stack does not care what the duration is. It simply pushes out old stacks in favor of new ones.

Ok, so I typed up a long response, then reached an incorrect conclusion from my math. A couple hours of testing later, I can give some more information, but I’m too lazy at the moment to actually math this out.

Quickness stacks 9 times. The stacking behavior is a First in, First out list. Once the list has 9 entries, the oldest entry will be pushed out in favor of a new entry, with no preference given to duration. Signet of inspiration conserves stacks, and simply adds on your current stack list to everyone elses in the same manner as if you had manually applied each stack separately.

While not all of these suggestions are horrible, I’m pretty comfortable in saying that most are horrible. That being said, no dev is ever going to read this thread, so I’m not too worried.

Chrissy.1679:

Thansk all for answer.

Guy said exactly that:
“If you see SB crossing from their spawn to ours at the start of the game only, go to mid. If you don’t see anybody go home. Unless they have a thief, so go mid.”

Other team had both, a thief and ranger at their party.

In this case, it might mean “somebody”. Hard to say.

Uhm…shortbow probably. Rangers and thieves can use it. I’m guessing they were referring to the thief shortbow because it’s a frequently used weapon with powerful utility, while the ranger version is mostly underwhelming.

DeceiverX.8361:

Condi reaper can take out pretty much everything but daredevil with relative ease. Went for one day playing rabid condis and started winning fights vastly outnumbered because there’s just so much damage on the build. I imagine dire is borderline faceroll. There’s no fun in that, though.

He probably has overall weaker condition cleanse, though typically there’s an ele or two running with him these days which soak conditions.

Condie reaper will kill most anything that’s either unwilling or unable to run away from a build with the mobility of a 1 legged tortoise. It’s a very powerful build, but it’s really slow. Anyone that wants to run away will, and there’s not much you can do to stop them.

An inspiration Mesmer can fight condie reaper if they’re careful though. It’ll take a while, but the Mesmer should win eventually.

dubstax.9102:

denis.9487:

dubstax.9102:

Because there are already perma stealth roaming groups buzzing around World vs. World and you want more stealth? Perhaps this is a troll?

Just stating perma stealth like its a thing is the troll.

It’s not a troll. I’ve seen it in action. So have others. Perma stealth or “near” perma stealth if it makes you feel better. The fact is that stealth is fine overall and I don’t see where there needs to be more avenues for it or ways for longer duration of it.

Have you tried killing the permanently revealed stealth gyro, or just loading up aoe on top of it? I’ve heard that proper application of intelligent thought is a pretty solid counter to “permastealth” in WvW.

Very common and well-known bug that has existed for several years. You’ll hear it referred to as the immobilize bug.

To escape, use an emote; I prefer /no.

• Portal cd and range reduced
• Blurred inscriptions distortion reduced to .5 seconds
• Moa cooldown increased to 240 seconds
• Healing prism icd increases to 14 seconds
• Confusing images range buffed to 1000

Dellingr.5063:

Thank you, is it possible instead of the second sword/ focus to use GS or Staff, because I don’t like having 2 of same weapon with just different OH seems like less versatility to me.

Strictly speaking, having the same mainhand with a different offhand (you can just equip one mainhand btw, it’ll work for both sets) only has 2 new skills on swap, and so has less diversity in options than a 2-hander.

In reality, swapping to gs or staff during a fight just means your dps and utility potential evaporate with no positive change.

Sword mainhand both has the highest dps from the autoattack and potent defense from blurred frenzy. You don’t need anything from the 2-handers. Instead, you may want reflects from focus, dps from offhand sword, or control and utility from shield.

This is just for instanced stuff though. If you’re going open world, I’d recommend sw/sh+gs to cover the long range option as well as the close range stuff. Long range isn’t needed in instances, which is why you take a pure melee set.

Well, I certainly wouldn’t recommend using staff at all in dragon stand and silverwastes. The phantasm is good on the bosses, but some of the things you kill have funky collision that makes the attack miss, and the rest of the weapon is not well suited to fast moving and long range combat. I’d recommend greatsword instead.

For fractals, you absolutely should not be using staff. Sword/shield + /x should be your weapons there.

The stats can be zerker for everything you’ve mentioned and that’s basically optimal. However, you haven’t said whether you want to raid at all. If so, you may not necessarily want zerker for every piece, so that’s a consideration that you might need to make.

Berserker isn’t always wanted for staff, but it would help if you let us know what part of the game you’re looking to use this in.

Dellingr.5063:

1.Which is better power or condition dmg when using the chronomancer trait line?

Chrono is primarily utility, and doesn’t really have a preference towards either.

Dellingr.5063:

2.What build should I be using for PvE content excluding raids ( I know that raids are a bit different from rest of PvE)?
3. What kind of gear (accessories,armor, weapon and such)should I be wearing for the build?

You’ll want to be going full zerker for non-raids. You’ll still use almost an identical trait setup and weapon setup, but where in a raid you may get commanders/some toughness for boon duration and tanking, in non-raids fights don’t last long enough to need the boon duration, and tanking isn’t a thing outside of raids.

Something like this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQRAsd8encfClfi9fCGoBUrhFVjCt6SjsjMAKgirOZn2qF-TRBXABAo8rH1feQJYI6HQd/BA-e

Dellingr.5063:

4.I also like doing PvP and WvW, can you guys suggest me a build + gear combo that would be useful in both WvW and PvE, I will try to tweak my own build for PvP as I understand it is very different from WvW and PvE.

Do not attempt to use the same build and/or gear for WvW and PvE. The only thing you’ll succeed at doing is finding a build that’s awful in both.

Dellingr.5063:

5. What priorities should I take in leveling masteries, as in Central Tyria or Jungle and what order to take the respective lines in in both Mastery types.

Personal preference here, but: Gliding 1 -> Updraft -> Bouncy shrooms -> Exalted Markings -> Nuhoch Wallows -> poison lore → The rest of gliding.

For Tyria: Fractal attunement 1-3 -> no way I’m doing anything else on purpose.

Wolfric.9380:

So think i will try to learn playing mesmer again with the following variant.
when i tired mesmer last time in PvP it felt super squishy. But maybe because i tried viper XD. thanx for the advices. Well i usualy would like to add slow as active support and as another condition but if its so bad …

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAW8encfC1qhFqBeoBMrhFcjCN3OpdoOWr1etMAWtXD-TpRFABMcEAA4CAw2BB48yAKt/QyPAAA

If you want slow, add it with delayed reactions: slow on interrupt. It’s also worth noting that the build you’ve posted there has zero stunbreaks and zero access to stability. You’re basically a walking target for everyone.