Guild Wars 2

Mmmmm necromancy.

OriOri.8724:

I don’t recall a similar statement about the collections, but I could very well have missed it. Still though, I try to be hopeful.

Oh yes, they said that it was taking so long because they needed to lay out the ground work for the system of collections, but once they had that done they’d be able to produce new legendaries much faster.

Fast forward a year and it’s “mmmmm yeahhhh….so actually all that stuff we said was a total lie. We’re actually just canceling the whole thing.”

OriOri.8724:

Fay.2357:

Fatalyz.7168:

Fay.2357:

abaddon.3290:

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

Feanor.2358:

Like The Ascension isn’t tied to PvP and Ad Infinitum isn’t tied to Fractals of the Mists? Both require you to play a LOT in their respective modes.

The point is, I have an option if I want a back item between two very different game modes. Not so for armour.

so your complaining anet hasnt commited suicide from caffeine working so hard to get 2 sets of Armour out at once and put them in different game modes at the same time? jesus dude give them some time! patience is a virtue.

Yeah, they’re really working at a strict pace here! We can’t expect them to pump out a single set of armor in less than 2 years, can we? That’s just absurd. We all know that normal teams would take at least 4 years to make it! They’re practically working at lightning speed here!

And you can produce armor sets with their engine faster?

They manage to pump out a gem store outfit every 2 weeks. Maybe if they dedicated half of the artists working on those to making legendary armor it wouldn’t have taken 2 years.

Now that they have the engine work done for animated armor, hopefully future sets of leg armor won’t take nearly as long. Though it does still take Anet an absurdly long time to make new armor sets

Yeah, that’s what they said about being done with the system for the legendary weapon collections too. ’Member those? Cause I ’member.

Fatalyz.7168:

Fay.2357:

abaddon.3290:

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

Feanor.2358:

Like The Ascension isn’t tied to PvP and Ad Infinitum isn’t tied to Fractals of the Mists? Both require you to play a LOT in their respective modes.

The point is, I have an option if I want a back item between two very different game modes. Not so for armour.

so your complaining anet hasnt commited suicide from caffeine working so hard to get 2 sets of Armour out at once and put them in different game modes at the same time? jesus dude give them some time! patience is a virtue.

Yeah, they’re really working at a strict pace here! We can’t expect them to pump out a single set of armor in less than 2 years, can we? That’s just absurd. We all know that normal teams would take at least 4 years to make it! They’re practically working at lightning speed here!

And you can produce armor sets with their engine faster?

They manage to pump out a gem store outfit every 2 weeks. Maybe if they dedicated half of the artists working on those to making legendary armor it wouldn’t have taken 2 years.

abaddon.3290:

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

Feanor.2358:

Like The Ascension isn’t tied to PvP and Ad Infinitum isn’t tied to Fractals of the Mists? Both require you to play a LOT in their respective modes.

The point is, I have an option if I want a back item between two very different game modes. Not so for armour.

so your complaining anet hasnt commited suicide from caffeine working so hard to get 2 sets of Armour out at once and put them in different game modes at the same time? jesus dude give them some time! patience is a virtue.

Yeah, they’re really working at a strict pace here! We can’t expect them to pump out a single set of armor in less than 2 years, can we? That’s just absurd. We all know that normal teams would take at least 4 years to make it! They’re practically working at lightning speed here!

I haven’t noticed this ever.

Stand The Wall.6987:

its not like you cant have energy and stamina at the same time. I do.

And now you’ve wasted both sigil slots for extra dodges when you could instead just position better and use better sigils…

The medium looks like what you’d get if you forced a trenchcoat and an armadillo to breed. Not a fan.

The light still has a butt-cape that’s poofy enough to fit 3 asurans underneath it.

Other than that, the light set is pretty decent tbh. The rune solution is a band-aid hack solution, but it’ll work.

Carighan.6758:

Hrm, with Stealth in particular I wish it had more use in PvE.

For Mass Invisiblity, I’d use this version for PvE only:

• Maximum number of targets: 50
• Duration: 15 seconds
• Radius: 900, centered on the Mesmer
• Cast time: 15 seconds, channeled, stealth lasts while targets stay in the radius and the mesmer keeps channeling.

This way it can be viably used to “hide” from enemies.

That wouldn’t really make stealth useful in PvE. Access to stealth is fine, it’s not used much because it’s objectively not very valuable. This sort of thing would just confuse players coming from PvE and expecting the skill to mechanically work in a very different way.

Yeah, that’s more or less accurate. Obviously 5 might is going to be the close to perfect rotation, so it’s more realistic to assume 3-4 on average in a real encounter.

The problem with the sigil is that it’s only excellent if you’re already destroying the other group. When you’re getting a lot of kills, you don’t need a lot of dodges. On the other hand, when you’re not getting kills you usually need a lot of dodges. So the sigil works great when it’s useless and it doesn’t work at all when you really need it.

Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe scaling with power would make it…………………….not a condition.

Evrir.9618:

Is there any condition build that can be any sort of useful without having to be pigeonholed into Boon sharing quickness?.

Yes, but ONLY USEFUL FOR SPECIFIC RAID BOSSES.

Condie mesmer is awful in all fractals other than maybe t4 boss fractals. It’s awful in open world. It’s awful in dungeons. Additionally, condie mesmer is awful on a good number of raid bosses.

The following bosses are reasonably decent and/or great for condie mesmer:

• Vale Guardian: Decent
• Sabetha: Decent
• Matthias: Excellent
• Cairn: Excellent
• Mursaat Overseer: Decent
• Samarog: Decent
• Deimos: Usable-Decent

That’s about it.

Yeah, this isn’t really going to work well in PvP, that’s just a different beast entirely. This class of builds are most powerful when you’re pumping boons to the full 5 additional targets for support. Any less than that and you start becoming that much less effective. In PvP it’s rare to have more than 3 allies on a point together, making this sort of thing simply inefficient.

Now personally, I prefer playing the variant that uses signets to keep a ~6s rotation of invuln sharing alongside the boonshare. I posted a guide on that a while ago and have been meaning to update it but I’m lazy. The variant here will also do the job of boonshare, but I feel that it’s simply missing out on the powerful other utility that mesmer can offer for both offensive and defensive capabilities in a Frontline.

coro.3176:

Yeah. If you watch the end of the video, we tried that. They pulled emergency waypoint and ran us over with a 40-person zerg.

Some people are scared of even remotely fair fights. I’m just saying, it’s boring. If they enjoy it, more power to them, but I don’t think hiding in keeps defending is good for the game.

>complains about the enemy not fighting them
>complains about the enemy fighting them

ok

Yeah, soldiers is totally worthless. Exotic berserker’s is what you should aim for first, and then start converting to ascended. Start with trinkets, they’re very easy to get from the new living story maps. Then get weapons, lastly work on armor.

Yeah, there’s no need for you to rush and make a set of minstrels. That’s honestly the absolute last set you need to be worrying about. Get a zerk set first, then commander’s maybe, then maaaaybe minstrels.

Many of the attacks in the raid deal %-hp damage. With that in mind, you’re better off not stacking vitality at all and focusing on toughness and healing power, as you’ll be able to heal through the %-hp hits easier.

That being said, I think you probably have a pretty poor idea of how raids and tanking actually works in this game, so it would be worth your time to perhaps watch some videos of it being done.

bearshaman.3421:

Did people miss the part about this being designed by a son for his mother who was having problems using active defenses and just wanted to play around without the extra effort of ACTIVE defenses?

Sure, but this build is objectively bad even considering that. This is a case of doing your best to hammer nails using a screwdriver. Mesmer is a class of active defenses, trying to use it as a purely passive sustain build will be bad no matter what. They should be playing tempest instead to accomplish that goal. Indeed, even in this build a significant amount of it is very active sustain and active defense. The OP discussed how the scepter/sword have active blocks. The healing comes in a large part from shatters that have to both be actively used and actively set up by producing illusions.

On top of all that, this isn’t even the best way to get passive defense! Staff is a defensive weapon that requires very active use to be effective. Why not take greatsword with the cripple trait to just passively cripple everything while fighting? Why take offhand sword and illusions when offhand shield and chronomancer would offer far better blocks and passive defense from the slow the phantasm apply?

Lastly, a build needs to do more than survive to be a successful build for open world content. Unless you want to play the entire game as a pacifist without killing anything and instead contribute to events by doing non-combat actions, this build doesn’t have a purpose. Full nomads on mesmer will be truly and completely unable to kill anything in a reasonable amount of time in the base game, let alone HoT where tankier mobs are very common. So many events in HoT require mob cleanup and a reasonable pace or they’ll fail. This build is categorically incapable of completing a significant amount of content in this game, and by that measure it is a failed attempt at a build.

Carighan.6758:

Erm… Fay? I didn’t write about it not affecting the phantasm…

I am on about the new projectile which is shot on casting the skill. I was pretty certain it’d be affected, being an entirely normal projectile created by a weapon skill. As in, every other projectile on any class.

Ah, that’s different then. Do you know whether it functions with quip or if it’s a hope specific bug?

This is entirely consistent. No legendary effect from any legendary weapon has ever appeared on any phantasm. While I wish it did, this isn’t some new and unexpected revelation. You only have yourself to blame for not doing even a cursory check on this mechanic.

mauried.5608:

The real problem with this story is that it requires an ability to mash keyboard buttons really quickly, and / or the ability to move your mouse around really quickly.
If you cant do this, it doesnt matter what in game skills you have, as you wont win.
Not everyone has mega fantastic hand dexterity to keep up with the speed of the fight, especially older gamers like me who dont have full use of my fingers.

As blatantly cruel as it sounds, Anet doesn’t and won’t ever develop this game for people incapable of using normal input techniques such as keyboard bindings. That’s simply the reality, and complaining about it won’t ever change anything. The burden is on you, the person with a disability, to figure out how to interact with the game in a way that works. But I mean…a quadriplegic with literally no functional limbs manages to play the fast ARPG Path of Exile (NoHandsKen: https://www.twitch.tv/nohandsken), so I’m confident you could figure out a way to make it work in GW2 if you cared enough.

OriOri.8724:

Time Warp – No longer pulses quickness to allies, instead doubles attack speed of up to 10 allies while they are inside TW. Pulse slow to all enemies inside TW, 1 sec slow applied every second. Also slows down enemy projectiles by 15%. Radius 380 units (20 units larger radius). Base duration 10 seconds. CD 120 seconds

Projectile speed modification is not a mechanic that currently exists in the game. This change would require new tech, so you can go ahead and rethink this one. It also would be weaker in PvE than it is currently, though stronger in PvP since the effect would be more potent but much more limited in duration.

OriOri.8724:

Signet of Humility – Transform duration restored to 10 seconds. If you successfully transform someone, transfer 1 boon from them to you every 2 seconds until the transformation ends or they are killed. Can again target enemies behind the mesmer. CD 120 seconds.

Sure I guess. I feel like targeting enemies behind the mesmer is unnecessary, but whatever. The boon transfer is technically a buff, but in reality it wouldn’t have much of an effect. A moad target is no longer producing boons, and a shatter burst is generally going to strip whatever they have left, so I think you should rethink that aspect of this change.

OriOri.8724:

Mass Invisibility – 5 seconds of invisibility to up to 10 allies. Causes AoE reveal centered around you when the cast finishes, 300 unit radius. If you reveal at least 1 person, add another second to the base stealth duration granted to allies. 90 sec CD (note that ideally for me, if this change were to go through that PU would also be nerfed to only providing 33% longer stealth uptime instead of 50%. So best case scenario is 8 second stealth if you revealed someone, only .5 seconds more than you can currently get with MI and PU, but harder to achieve. Realistically you would only achieve 6.5-6.75 sec stealth with MI and PU most of the time).

This really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Adding reveal to it is a reasonable thing, but why would you be scaling stealth duration off of revealing someone? The two effects are pretty binary, you’re either going to want long stealth (no attacking) or reveal someone to attack them (breaking stealth to attack). A more sensible implementation would be reducing the cooldown by a percentage for each target revealed.

OriOri.8724:

Gravity Well – This one is fine, just increase radius to 280 units (40 unit increase in radius).

Sure.

OriOri.8724:

To start off with, CS would no longer affect elite skills. Only way to truly balance them between core mesmer and chrono.

Yeah, see, I’m gonna have to agree with Ithilwen on this one. The dev team is not to be trusted with implementing things properly. The proper order of changes here would be elite skill buffs → removal of CS interaction, not the other way around. The current interaction between CS and elites is a large part of what is keeping mesmer relevant in PvP currently, and the devs simply no longer have the benefit of the doubt to implement changes in a reasonable way.

That being said, PvP as a whole in this game is on life support that just had the power cable yanked, so it’s not like any of these are relevant insofar as actual game-time goes. I’d just as soon see a balance pass making elites more relevant for WvW group play/WvW roaming/PvE.

Mister Asdasd.6194:

Hasnt it been long enough that we get at least some info on the next story part? SAB is a big disappointment first time i played it last year was fun,now it is a drag and it doesnt help that i lost all my weapons and tools and level progression.I can barely log in to do dailies i even skip them somedays because i dont even feel loging in for 10 minutes to do them. Lake doric is out for a while now are there any future updates on the matter?

Sab progression is character bound. Use the same character as last year to get your stuff back.

Malice.8439:

Mochizuki.7385:

How exactly does full comm gear lock you into tank role? You don’t really do damage anyway…

I’d say it’s because your toughness goes too high.

That’s correct. The tank role means aggro control, and aggro is determined (where applicable) by toughness. Since nobody except the tank should have any toughness on their gear (excepting the hand kiter at deimos anyway), full commander’s means you will tank, end of story.

savacli.8172:

Exciton.8942:

Or just design more encounters like Matthias so that pugs and casual groups actually run safer options while hardcore groups run dps-centric composition.

I present you the entirety of Wing 4. The normal versions of the fights have very relaxed DPS checks (I use the term loosely) so there’s a lot of variation you can throw in there as far as slower-safer/faster-riskier.

The challenge motes are the only ones where damage seems to make a difference (more so on Overseer due to global arena timers), but even then you can still opt for safer routes.

Nonetheless, we bring druids for the offensive buffs, and we bring ele’s in situations where we want large heals for cover.

Idk about that. You’re right that the dps timers are very relaxed…but so are the healing requirements. Cairn barely deals damage if your group doesn’t screw up shared agony positioning, overseer…actually is a dps golem, samarog really doesn’t deal much damage unless people get hit by knockbacks a lot, and deimos is only painful for the tank and hands kiter.

Exciton.8942:

Dromar.1027:

Fay.2357:

thrag.9740:

You know OP, 3 years ago you complained about this:

Dromar.1027:

Sad because so far its been 16 months and…
No instanced raids
Same bugs/exploits since day one
Same bad mob AI(mossman can still be exploited)
Lack of defined roles for classes(and diversity)
Constant imbalance

Well you got raids, they fixed mossman ai, they added much more defined builds and diversity, they balanced dps roles a lot better.

They did a lot of the stuff you wanted them to do.

/Thread

Nah. That was three years ago and my original post only talks about the redesign of the Swamp fractal and I had no problem with the previous one save a few bugs which could have been fixed without a redesign. Then I just asked should I even bother pugging without HoT skills because at 40+ it seems to become a toxic cesspool where I run the risk of getting booted. Doesn’t matter if I can do it or not and I have done many 40s including the swamp already thanks to some not throwing a fit but the problem still stands. If I can do it without HoT skills then why are some people acting like its a requirement.

Well, the reason they release an expansion is because most players want to play with new things.

It completely beats the point of having an expansion, if you just want to play the old content with old spec. MMORPG relies on having more and more new content to stay alive.

No, no, you don’t get it at all. The mmo should simply perform a holding pattern of zero progress when someone like him stops playing, out of respect. That way they can come back without having missed anything!

thrag.9740:

You know OP, 3 years ago you complained about this:

Dromar.1027:

Sad because so far its been 16 months and…
No instanced raids
Same bugs/exploits since day one
Same bad mob AI(mossman can still be exploited)
Lack of defined roles for classes(and diversity)
Constant imbalance

Well you got raids, they fixed mossman ai, they added much more defined builds and diversity, they balanced dps roles a lot better.

They did a lot of the stuff you wanted them to do.

/Thread

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAR8fl0nhS0YNawMNwtGLnGk5O22MIDwCWeZGaeCA-TpBFwAAeAAVLDI4CA04gAw4IAgc/BA

That’s generally the build. You don’t take chronomancer for this one trick pony. Instead you’ll usually take chaos for PU so that you can get a bit more mileage out of MI and torch. You could alternatively take illusions (for a bit more might sustain and crit) or inspiration (for actual sustain). You’ll also usually use fire + air on the greatsword to maximize the instant burst damage.

Hevoskuuri.3891:

Now that I have more hours with the build under my belt, and I’ve learned the rotations, it’s working wonders for me. I also made a drastic choice and picked Signets of Domination and Midnight over Signet of Illusions and Arcane Thievery (and keeping Blink as my third utility.)

This allows me to keep 100% Confusion duration with less expensive utility foods, gives even more condition output (SoM puts out confusion, cripple and vulnerability + blind with traits, and also works as a stun break), has great cc with the 3 second unblockable stun with SoD, and gives a really nice bonus to my base condi damage. I also like to run with Gravity Well more often than moa, especially when engaging in fights against multiple enemies.

I sometimes miss the F1-F4 recharge with SoI, but I feel the change was worth it. While they are on cooldown, I can still spam out illusions, use Blink to kite around, and sword to block, evade and deal a bit of damage with the autoattack chain. Also, I have my signets to spam conditions and keep my opponent CC’d until shatters recharge.

I can now see why msalakka called this one of the strongest 1v1 builds. The sustain and condi pressure is really strong, and I feel like I lash out more conditions than most opponents can cleanse. Of course DH’s and good thieves still win, but it’s a fun build to play around, having a nice learning curve to it.

It’s worth noting that arcane thievery is utter garbage that really should never be used, so there’s that.

SoD is not an unblockable stun, not sure what gave you that idea.

Gravity well is more generally useful than moa since it’s on a lower cooldown and can affect more people. Moa is a 1off extremely powerful utility that’s great if you’re regularly only fighting 1v1s.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

I actually really interested in seeing this Pyro, any chance anyone recorded it down?

Ask and you shall receive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yGGFBki6-E

Sartharina.3542:

Right, and in situations where Perma Regen would be needed (High-end organized content, or specific builds), it should have the same value that 100% uptime on Quickness, Fury, or Might has – you’re facing a LOT of enemies (Or very challenging ones), so being able to outheal one enemy’s damage output isn’t significant.

You’re drawing ridiculously false equivalencies there. Fury can be kept close to 100% uptime by multiple classes with zero effort. It has an impact appropriately minor on overall combat performance. Might is difficult to keep at 25 stacks 100% of the time and generally requires a dedicated setup to do so. It has an impact appropriately larger on overall combat performance. Quickness is exceedingly difficult to keep up 100% of the time and requires build, gear, runes, weapons, and utilities used in a particular rotation to maintain. It has an appropriately massive effect on combat performance.

Regeneration is maintained with 100% uptime by half the classes in the game without them even trying. It has an appropriately low effect.

Also, what’s that about needing permanent regen in high-end organized content? I manage to complete raids every week without needing permanent regen, so I think you’re encountering a personal issue there.

redcomyn.4651:

I remember that video. Unfortunately, it isn’t doable, not with the portal exit only good for 10 seconds. It has been greatly nerfed since that video was made.

Uhhhhhh no. Let me tell you what actually happened.

So in the first beta, portal worked basically like you see in that video. The mesmer would drop both ends and then anyone who walked over one end would be instantly teleported to the other end. We pretty quickly figured out that if you place 3 portals end-to-end in a triangle configuration, you could trap somebody into an endless loop of porting until the portals ran out of time. Additionally, it turns out that sending 10-15 people into this loop would cause the entire map to freeze for the duration of the portals, sometimes crashing it entirely.

In the second beta, an interaction button was added.

Retro.5810:

Can you use full commander’s armor and then berserker trinkets and still be a support mesmer? whats the reason for 2 commanders and rest berserker? is it max boon duration?

So commander’s gear has toughness in it. If you’re always the tank, this isn’t an issue. However, if you sometimes take the non-tank role having a set of gear with toughness on it will make it difficult to let somebody else tank. Maximum boon duration is 100%, so anything past that is useless. Because of that, you can make a build that reaches 100% without needing a bunch of commander’s gear. 33% on swap, 20% food, 10% utility, 30% runes and we’re at 93% already without any boon duration on gear. You can then add a couple pieces of commander’s or slot platinum doubloons into a couple exotic trinkets to finish it off.

Moonyeti.3296:

Fay.2357:

Mahou.3924:

A small correction after checking my character: I used the runes that were already in the exotics and/or weapon. I don’t like painting a false picture in that regard!
I hope it works as it should: https://gw2efficiency.com/account/character/Marina%20Blatthauch/share. As the Vatlaaw parts indicate, I’ve switched to the budget Condi Druid since HoT but used whatever I already have had (and found afterwards) to use in a power setup with Caladbolg.

Not gonna lie, your gear is astonishingly bad. Why don’t you get easy ascended trinkets from the new living world stuff and buy cheap exotic gear + sigils and runes on the trading post?

?
Are we looking at the same thing? Other than the rings, everything is Exotic or ascended.

Look closer? 4 exotic armors, 2 rare. None of the pieces have anything resembling a coherent rune in them. Half is zerker, half is rabid. One of the weapons is rare with a single garbage sigil, the other is ascended without any sigils. The amulet is ascended, the accessories are exotic, the backpiece is rare, and the rings are masterwork(!).

Mahou.3924:

A small correction after checking my character: I used the runes that were already in the exotics and/or weapon. I don’t like painting a false picture in that regard!
I hope it works as it should: https://gw2efficiency.com/account/character/Marina%20Blatthauch/share. As the Vatlaaw parts indicate, I’ve switched to the budget Condi Druid since HoT but used whatever I already have had (and found afterwards) to use in a power setup with Caladbolg.

Not gonna lie, your gear is astonishingly bad. Why don’t you get easy ascended trinkets from the new living world stuff and buy cheap exotic gear + sigils and runes on the trading post?

Amaimon.7823:

Djinn.9245:

Mara.6782:

Living stories are made for veteran players in mind and are harder than core game. You need to master dodging and your skills and have updated armor and weapons.

This is what I don’t understand – why doesn’t Anet want all players to be able to experience the Stories?

Because if you design your story for the most casual of players in mind, you will lose 90% of your playerbase as they all die of boredom.
As others said before, the idea is that if you play the story in order, the difficulty slowly climbs up, at a pace anyone is able to adjust to it. If you’re still not dodging by the time you’re fighting the maw of mordremoth.. well.. it’s all you, sorry to say. Every game has a difficulty curve, and practice makes perfect. Maybe you should do events in the zones related to the story you find difficult, so you can get used to the maps. And remember, utulity skills are important, you can’t just auto-attack through the game

Plus, it’s not like this content is actually that hard. The person a couple posts prior to this managed to complete it with only one death while keyboard turning, mouse clicking, in a mix of exotic, rare, and green gear, and also having no runes or sigils. If that person can do it while literally playing a setup that by all rights shouldn’t be capable of doing any difficult content, it boggles the mind how bad someone would have to be to die 30+ times on the fight.

Jumping puzzle safety net.

Healix.5819:

and enemies in HoT regularly hit for 5-15k.

Haha what? Nothing in HoT is going around hitting for 15k unless it’s one of those frogs during octovine that you’re not actually supposed to be fighting…

This whole thread just makes me chuckle though. Seriously, people complaining about sustain in open world stuff? I’ve never run a character with a lick of healing power or built for sustain in any way in open world and I’ve never had trouble happily mowing things down, including the new vets in LS maps.

Ok, that’s a lot of questions, let me try to answer them in a sensible order.

Tanking vs non-tank chrono
Aggro in raids is controlled by the toughness stat, where applicable. The person with the highest toughness will be the tank. Generally speaking, a chrono can swap between tank and non-tank gear by switching between different sets of trinkets. If you have a zerker set and a knights/Cavs/commanders or whatever other toughness set you can choose to boost your toughness enough to be the tank. The rest of the gear can be the same, so you don’t need 2 completely unique setups.

Is it hard to be the tank in raids?
Tanking in raids is generally the hardest role in the raid group. You are in charge of positioning the boss to properly execute mechanics in the fight and generally have to be more aware of everything that’s going on to do this. That being said, the difficulty of tanking varies greatly from fight to fight and even with different strategies in the same fight. I can guarantee you, however, that it’ll be more challenging than playing a dps thief no matter what way you do it.

Buffing your party
Both the tank and non-tank must buff their party in the same way. Mesmer is responsible for 2 buffs: alacrity and quickness. Alacrity is pretty simple to do. Group alacrity comes from the last pulse of wells (using the well trait), is baked into the last pulse of well of recall, and from the AOE hit of shield phantasms. To maintain 100% alacrity uptime you must drop your wells on your party as they are available while also keeping at least 2 shield phantasms on the boss.

Quickness is a bit more complicated. Quickness is a boon, meaning it scales from boon duration. This is where weapon swapping and the sigil of concentration come into play. The sigil of concentration provides you with 33% boon duration for 7 seconds after swapping weapons. This means that you want to time your rotations so that you only apply quickness after a weapon swap to make use of that bonus boon duration.

Quickness comes from a couple sources. Shield 5 applies quickness to everyone it hits both on the way out and back in. Well of action applies quickness on its last pulse. Time warp continually pulses quickness (but you don’t need this to have 100% uptime, I don’t personally use it). Lastly, signet of inspiration applies quickness to nearby allies when you activate it if you have quickness on yourself. Signet of inspiration also comes in the form of a trait proc that is activated when you summon a phantasm. This trait proc has hidden cooldown that is the same length as the normal signet. Here’s the rotation that I generally use:

Startup

1. iLeap in non-shield weaponset (should put you in combat)
2. Swap weapons (procs concentration)
3. Shield 5 (applies quickness to yourself and allies)
4. Begin channeling shield 4
5. Enter CS an instant before the shield 4 channel completes (procs trait SoI)
6. Use well of action, normal SoI, and the heal well
7. CS ends
8. Use shield 4 again (procs trait SoI outside of CS)
9. Swap weapons (procs concentration)
10. Use well of action, normal SoI, the heal well, and well of recall if you have it equipped

So that rotation is how you start a fight. It gets you a good CS opener without wasting any time or trait procs at the start of a fight. From this point onwards, you’ll do this next rotation every 20 seconds:

In-fight rotation

1. Swap weapons (procs concentration)
2. Cast a phantasm, use well of action, use signet of inspiration

That’s basically it. You should be using well of recall every time it’s ready to go, and if you are in your shield weaponset after swapping weapons you should use shield 5 there too. The exception to that are certain fights where heavy breaking is required regularly (Matthias and Samarog), which means you should hold shield 5 for the breaks instead of using it in the rotation. The last thing is that every 72 seconds CS will come off of cooldown:

CS Refresh Rotation

1. Enter CS
2. Shield 5, Shield 4, well of action, SoI, healing well, well of recall
3. Exit CS
4. Step 2 again

That’ll give a hefty boost to quickness duration that lets you comfortably maintain 100% uptime on your party. In between CS cooldowns, you should only shatter phantasms if required for breaking. Other than that, you want to maintain at least 2 shield phantasms at all times for alacrity uptime on your group.

OriOri.8724:

Someone was working on soloing VG as a chrono months ago, IDK if he gave up though.

I’m pretty confident that I could do it, I just have trouble justifying the number of hours of continual effort it would require…

zealex.9410:

i dont think they are atrociously telegraphed its more of a mater of paying attention to them to not get teleported

Yeah, try seeing a blandly-colored circle that has no sound effect or other cue while it’s covered by the visual spam of 2 chronomancers doing buff rotations, 2 PS warriors dropping fire fields, and probably a couple eles doing non-stop overloads.

Nope, there’s no way to increase the visibility. They’re poorly designed and absolutely atrociously telegraphed, but you’ll just have to deal with the garbage for the encounter. Once your group gets the hang of it, it’s not really an issue to be teleported now and then unless you’re doing challenge mode.

Turk.5460:

Aeolus.3615:

Still its not a elegant solution to deal with the traps from thieves ;\, and decent players can still do what they were doing, daze+confusion+venon player cant escape while they cant use any skils and cant move, 5 seconds is more than eneught to kill targets arround 25k hp.

What are these decent players fighting against? Large potatoes?

No, you only get to fight a large potato in the mordremoth final story instance.

saerni.2584:

How does that reasoning not apply to other traps then? If traps must be laid and then activate after a delay, then why only apply this to thief traps and not universally?

You misunderstand. One does not question purity of purpose. One merely bows before the undeniable will and force that is purity of purpose.

saerni.2584:

The delay has nothing to do with the fix. The fix, heavy handed as it is, was to add a strike component to reveal the thief. The delay is separate and seems completely unrelated to ghost thief or any other recognizable balance goal.

… Purity of purpose?

Yeah, duckduckboom covered most of it, but I’ll reiterate things just to make a point.

1. Higgs’ build is not your build

To start with, Higgs uses full viper instead of full seraph. You take full seraph to help boost your healing capabilities. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you have been claiming to be able to produce a similar amount of DPS and that’s obviously not true. Your build in an extremely favorable environment failed to even crack 14k DPS. Again, because I want to be clear, this isn’t necessarily an awful thing…But you need to be up front and clear about the fact that your build is pulling maybe 14k at the very top end. I do see that you’ve finally adjusted the op to account for this.

2. Higgs doesn’t claim his build to be a miracle buffing solution

In the video, Higgs is extremely clear about the role that build can play: supplemental buffing and support. The video of an actual raid supports that claim, as duckduckboom mentioned. In order to maintain alacrity on allies, a chrono must keep 2 shield phantasms up at all times in addition to performing the well rotations. You, however, are still claiming that your build can maintain 100% quickness and alacrity uptime. In a real fight, you’re going to find that this build can only barely scrape close to 100% quickness uptime with the help of another chrono’s spillover buffs and that you’ll get nowhere close to 100% alacrity on your party.

3. The primary contention is not the build’s capabilities, but the false claims of them

I want to be really clear on this one. I’m not claiming that this build is garbage for use in raids. It’s certainly going to be limited in application due to how bad condie mesmer is on many fights, but there’s nothing you can do about that aspect of it. My issue here is that you’re claiming the build is capable of much more than it actually is and you’re claiming to do things that you actually don’t do. Multiple times in the thread you claim to use shield phantasms, but when you post a dps video you’re using all duelists. You keep making this claim of 100% alacrity uptime, but that’s obviously not true either.

People just glancing at the op will be mislead into thinking that this build is a viable replacement for a full buffing chrono and it’s not.

Now I’ll write up an appropriate description of this build:

This build is a solid choice for a hybrid support/DPS on bosses where condie mesmer is decent (so excluding trio, escort, KC, deimos, and probably xera). It doesn’t replace a buffing chrono but can be placed in the tank’s party to make full sustain of buffs much easier on the tank. Alternatively it could be placed in a separate subsquad to help share buffs across the whole raid while providing supplemental healing. The capabilities include:

• 70%-80% quickness uptime on 5 people
• 40%-60% alacrity uptime on 5 people
• 8k-13k realistic DPS
• Some healing stuff
• Condie removal or whatever.

whetpheet.5921:

Fay.2357:

whetpheet.5921:

Fay.2357:

So you’re saying you’ll hit 14k-19k DPS using shield phantasms as damage? That seems…unlikely. I’ll take a closer look later when I can test things a bit, but since you’re not scaling power at all and avengers attack rather slowly, I really can’t see you reaching that sort of DPS.

Ok, some rough math here.

Avengers attack every 7.6 seconds. If they permanently have alacrity (they won’t) they’ll attack every 6.08 seconds. We’ll drop that to a flat 6 seconds for an easier calculation and a bit of wiggle room.

3 avengers means an attack every 2 seconds on average. The avenger skill coefficient is .345, so the power damage coefficient per second is .1725. Your power is 1770 on the builder with might, but I’ll just bump that to 2000 to account for various things for an approximation.

The phantasms will have 76% crit chance with fury. With spotter we can just assume they’ll be at 100% crit. This means that you will proc sharper images an average of 1 time every 2 seconds, or .5 times per second. Each bleed will do 900ish damage on the builder, but we’ll bump that to 1000 just for wiggle room. The total condition damage per second you’ll be applying, therefore, is roughly 500.

Ok, I was going to go ahead and do some rough power damage calculations, but I’ll stop right here. You’re getting 500 dps from sharper images. I didn’t drop a decimal point there, that’s not 5000. You’re getting 500. This is in a set of gear that has zero power, so your power damage is going to be nothing spectacular, but you expect us to believe that you can pull up to 18.5k DPS from your wimpy phantasm power hits and personal damage? No way that number is true. If you’re keeping 3 shield phantasm up I’ll be astonished if your total DPS breaks 10k.

Ask and you shall receive. https://youtu.be/LQLsBt9kGd0

Rune of the water there so much more dps to be had.
Full alacrity uptime and quickness.
13k dps with healer rune.

Uh no. There’s so many things wrong with that clip.

1. At no point in the clip did you have more than 1 shield phantasm. This means that your alacrity upkeep for your party is close to nonexistent.
2. Your phantasms all got quickness and alacrity from your buffs and wells. In a real fight this would not occur.
3. You used time warp outside of CS. In a short fight this buffs you more, but in a real fight this just means you sacrificed the ability to use it more frequently.

So no, that clip did nothing but prove my point. Even when using almost solely pistol phantasms you’re barely cracking 13k dps. If you used shield phantasms like is required for alacrity upkeep you’d probably be around 6k at best.

Edit: Just to make it abundantly clear what I’m arguing about…

In your OP, you say this:

whetpheet.5921:

Key points:

100% quickness uptime
100% alacrity uptime
14-19.1k dps realistic buffs

You can do 100% quickness…but you can’t do more than maybe 50% alacrity uptime with a really crisp rotation. Additionally, you’ll be capable of getting 14k dps at the high end, more realistically 10k.

Huh?

Watch it again. There was alacrity up 100% of the time once I dropped my first well.

And I botched the rotation and did time warp out of cs on accident. Still pulled 13.4k dps with the botched rotation and a rune that offers ZERO dps.

I’m not sure why you’re taking things so personal…just trying to have fun here. Maybe move on to another thread buddy.

Alacrity is easy to upkeep on yourself because of the trait that boosts the duration by 50%. The key is that you need to keep it up on your party. You didn’t do that. As I also mentioned, your phantasms are receiving all of that alacrity and quickness in this test…which won’t be present in any form in an actual raid environment. Your dps is artificially boosted by a very substantial amount there. If you want to do a more accurate dps test, put quickness and alacrity on yourself from the console and do your dps rotation without buffing the phantasms at all.

The reason I’m pointing all of this out is that you’ve posted this thread on the forums with a bunch of very specific claims about the performance of it. These claims are demonstrably false. Without calling you out on this, newer or less knowledgeable players may see this thread and get the incorrect impression that this build performs the way you say it does, will potentially waste money putting this build together, and end up with a result that doesn’t match the advertisement. I’m attempting to prevent that.

Obtena.7952:

I don’t get this thread … obviously the purpose of regen wasn’t to maintain your health at the levels it was prior to whatever nerfs. That’s why it was changed. I don’t see how it’s restricting you in any way in PVE. This isn’t a ‘face tank’ game, so the fact that it can’t heal through one basic hit makes lots of sense.

Regen wasn’t even nerfed. This guy is complaining about the engineer specific health regeneration buffs that are linked to having swiftness/superspeed/etc.