Guild Wars 2

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.

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.

whetpheet.5921:

Fay.2357:

I have an extremely hard time believing that you can maintain permanent alacrity with that setup while achieving your claimed DPS. Alacrity upkeep on a party requires shield phantasms, but that DPS is going to require high upkeep of wardens. You should be able to maintain quickness just fine, but I’ll believe your alacrity+DPS claim once I see it.

The other thing to note is that your DPS will drop massively on many fights due to the stationary nature of wardens. Have you tried with pistol instead?

Edit: As an aside, how exactly do you think you’re going to manage 20 condie cleanse on a group? You’ll get 3 hits of mender’s purity from expending all your mantra charges. That’s 6 AOE clears. If you count each one separately, that’s 30 across 5 targets (don’t count like this please), so I have no idea how you arrived at 20.

Well, I said, “MAX 20 condis” cleansed on a group (240 radius). In a ‘burst’, with a 2 3/4 mantra cast time, you have the POTENTIAL to cleanse a total of 40 conditions actually…not 20.

That is a perfect storm scenario and I understand, it would rarely happen due to you needing 5 players no more than 240 ticks away from you after a 2 3/4 sec mantra cast, all 5 players actually have the (at least conditions to even cleanse.

But here’s the math and how that would work.

Step 1. Begin cast Mantra of Recovery
Step 2. Within 2 3/4 sec, position yourself so that folks with condi’s to be cleared are in your 240 radius.
Step 3. Proc ’Mender’s Purity’ > Cleanse maximum of 2 condi’s times 5 people = possible 10 condi’s cleared.
Step 4. Keep proccin’ ’Mender’s Purity’ on a 1 sec trait cd by casting ‘Power Return’ (instacast on 1 sec cd) 3 times.

That’s 2 * 5 * (3 + 1) = 40 possible.

“Don’t count like that”
Ok fair enough. I’ll edit the original post and say that 40 clears probably would never happen….but am I missing something? Why wouldn’t this be possible?

I believe mender’s purity only procs on power return, not the charge of the mantra itself. I could be wrong on that, but that’s how I recall it working. That would reduce the total number down to 30 as I said.

I have an extremely hard time believing that you can maintain permanent alacrity with that setup while achieving your claimed DPS. Alacrity upkeep on a party requires shield phantasms, but that DPS is going to require high upkeep of wardens. You should be able to maintain quickness just fine, but I’ll believe your alacrity+DPS claim once I see it.

The other thing to note is that your DPS will drop massively on many fights due to the stationary nature of wardens. Have you tried with pistol instead?

Edit: As an aside, how exactly do you think you’re going to manage 20 condie cleanse on a group? You’ll get 3 hits of mender’s purity from expending all your mantra charges. That’s 6 AOE clears. If you count each one separately, that’s 30 across 5 targets (don’t count like this please), so I have no idea how you arrived at 20.

Sartharina.3542:

Ashen.2907:

If regen outhealed incoming damage it would be completely overpowered to the point of breaking the game.

If you have 16k health, and mobs hit for 1k (as mentioned in the OP), and mobs hit every 2 seconds, and your regen ticked for the less than 400 mentioned in the OP (lets use 300) then:

It would take 32 seconds for 1k per hit (every 2 seconds) to ablate the 16k health pool. In that 32 seconds the 300 per second regen would restore 9600 health, requiring the mob to spend another 20 seconds to ablate, during which time regen would restore an additional 6k health, requiring the mob to spend an additional 12 seconds to ablate, during which time regen would restore 3600 health, requiring the mob to spend an additional 8 seconds to ablate. During which time regen would restore 2400 health, requiring the mob to spend 6 seconds to ablate, during which time regen would restore 1800 health, requiring the mob to spend 4 seconds to ablate, during which time regen would restore 1200 health, requiring the mob to spend 2 seconds to ablate, during which time regen would restore 600 health, requiring the mob to spend 1 second to ablate….

at this point, assuming that the character has not dodged or avoided any attack in any way, has not used their healing skill, has not killed their attacker, etc, the character is down….after 84 seconds of doing absolutely nothing to defend himself.

How many normal mobs survive more than 3-5 seconds? How often does a character do absolutely nothing to reduce incoming damage or defeat attackers?

1. Regen has limited duration.
2. Multiple mobs have heavy burst damage abilities, or come in packs.

1. Anyone built for regen will have it up permanently
2. Have you tried dodging?

GW2 combat is built around the concept that you avoid damage instead of facetanking it and healing through the pressure. If you think you can play GW2 like you do WoW, you’ve got another thing coming.

Uh…What nerf are you talking about?

adelaide.6213:

Fay.2357:

adelaide.6213:

Fay.2357:

Additionally, what part of taking MoR makes you think you’re losing self-sustain instead of group sustain? If continually spammed with the mantra trait, MoR has an absolutely insane healing rate. Personal healing, not just aoe.

You are supposed to consume MoR charges, even if you are full hp, so the aoe heal becomes available sooner. Chaos provides an extra survibility in case you really should have waited to consume MoR charges.

Which variant of Minstrel chrono you perceive to be better depends on your experience of what people typically have difficulty with – big, predictable mechanics (choose Domination,) or messing up a series of smaller ones (choose Chaos.) I also would prefer a player new to mesmer tanking to run with Chaos (in this sense the build carries the player.)

Yeah, that’s really not how it works. The cooldown on the mantra heal is low enough that you’ll never be in a situation where you “needed those charges”. It’s incredibly strong continual healing output, and if you need chaos for personal survival while running full minstrels and the mantra heal, you’re nowhere near good enough to even think about trying to raid without an exceptional druid healer, let alone trying to carry on your own.

Edit: Also, if you’re taking neither illusions nor domination, maintaining 100% quickness uptime becomes substantially harder without perfect rotations. That’s hardly the build you want to give to a new tank…

Would you expect a competent mesmer to be able to carry with a build like this?

(Cleric’s with leadership and some doubloons)

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQJAsen0nB9fiFoBmfCMrhFVj6MJWiprOZn2qlMAGhiD-TVCVABipEk4HAwqnAAoU/ByJOAoEr19HkQ5xM6BIFQmTtA-w

If so, then there’s no need for minstrel’s, because the above build has more healing and damage.

Yeah, you could carry as hard as a mesmer can in that build. You’ll be sitting around 1k hp/s, so the only way for you to die is if you tank big attacks that you shouldn’t be tanking. You also have the ability to do consistent distortion share, so you’ll be able to protect at least 5 people from mechanic failures like vg greens, gorseval smashes/prisons, slothy spore shake/fear, etc.

adelaide.6213:

Fay.2357:

Additionally, what part of taking MoR makes you think you’re losing self-sustain instead of group sustain? If continually spammed with the mantra trait, MoR has an absolutely insane healing rate. Personal healing, not just aoe.

You are supposed to consume MoR charges, even if you are full hp, so the aoe heal becomes available sooner. Chaos provides an extra survibility in case you really should have waited to consume MoR charges.

Which variant of Minstrel chrono you perceive to be better depends on your experience of what people typically have difficulty with – big, predictable mechanics (choose Domination,) or messing up a series of smaller ones (choose Chaos.) I also would prefer a player new to mesmer tanking to run with Chaos (in this sense the build carries the player.)

Yeah, that’s really not how it works. The cooldown on the mantra heal is low enough that you’ll never be in a situation where you “needed those charges”. It’s incredibly strong continual healing output, and if you need chaos for personal survival while running full minstrels and the mantra heal, you’re nowhere near good enough to even think about trying to raid without an exceptional druid healer, let alone trying to carry on your own.

Edit: Also, if you’re taking neither illusions nor domination, maintaining 100% quickness uptime becomes substantially harder without perfect rotations. That’s hardly the build you want to give to a new tank…

adelaide.6213:

Fay.2357:

adelaide.6213:

If you’re carrying by distorting mechanics, and consistently running with a good healer, what’s the point in running Minstrel’s gear then?

Wouldn’t a full knight setup with leadership runes be more ideal in such a scenario?

The point of minstrel gear is to carry without a good healer. Invuln to avoid mechanics doesn’t mean your party can go without healing. Minstrel chrono in theory can also lower the healing load by being completely self sustaining and also healing nearby teammates.

If this is the goal, then Chaos offers an effective choice in context of Teapot’s build with MoR. With his build, you are supposed to immediately consume your MoR charges so it comes off cd sooner to maximize group healing effectiveness. Because you are trading self-sustain for group-sustain, Chaos helps make up for it in extra damage mitigation.

Sure, chaos offers extra personal damage mitigation…but you’re wearing full minstrel’s gear. Remember, we’re assuming that somebody is running this build because they are a competent chrono that wants to try and carry. If you manage to die while wearing full minstrel’s gear, you are not competent and clearly do not possess the potential to carry a team. It’s a nonissue. Therefor anyone running a full minstrel’s build should be good enough to not die while taking domination instead of chaos (this is not a difficult thing to do, mind you).

Additionally, what part of taking MoR makes you think you’re losing self-sustain instead of group sustain? If continually spammed with the mantra trait, MoR has an absolutely insane healing rate. Personal healing, not just aoe.

adelaide.6213:

If you’re carrying by distorting mechanics, and consistently running with a good healer, what’s the point in running Minstrel’s gear then?

Wouldn’t a full knight setup with leadership runes be more ideal in such a scenario?

The point of minstrel gear is to carry without a good healer. Invuln to avoid mechanics doesn’t mean your party can go without healing. Minstrel chrono in theory can also lower the healing load by being completely self sustaining and also healing nearby teammates.

Rising Dusk.2408:

adelaide.6213:

I much prefer Teapot’s version in general, at least for its apparent purpose to carry groups, because it has much more healing. The extra toughness/damage reduction may be helpful for some mechanics/encounters, but if I had to choose one variant to invest in, it would definitely be something more like Teapot’s

This may not be apparent, but by virtue of running a Minstrel’s Chronomancer you’re actually hurting your groups overall sustain (and DPS) by preventing the Druids from building CA as fast. If your goal is to carry, an extremely good magi’s Druid coupled with well-played normal Chronomancers is generally superior outside of extremely high-pressure encounters like Xera or Matthias or encounters where you’re forced to split regularly like Deimos.

[qT]‘s gear has substantial healing as-is, and you can easily substitute food/runes/sigils/traits to reach higher levels without swapping the stats on your gear. Let’s also not forget that by taking domination over chaos you get access to signet distortion shares, which can be far superior in damage mitigation to any level of healing.

Wait, does teapot’s version actually take chaos over domination? That’s so bad. If the point is to carry as a chrono, domination lets a good chrono guarantee survival through various mechanics by sharing distortion. Chaos offers literally nothing.

MarkoNS.3261:

i never said it was free , fyi its eu.

Yeah, but you didn’t say you were charging either. Generally speaking, training offers that are made in this forum are free. If you plan to charge, you should be including that in your post so that you aren’t misleading people.

It’s worth noting that minstrel gear is ridiculously expensive. If you’re worried about the cost of things, you should get a concentration sigil and leadership runes instead. That way you only need to get 14% duration from your gear, allowing you to use mostly a much cheaper set of gear.

So the general concept of celestial stats is that you need to be making full use of 6 of the stats for it to be worthwhile compared to 4-stat gear combinations.

Celestial has 7 total stats: power, precision, ferocity, condition damage, toughness, vitality, and healing power.

Unless you’re running an odd healing build, mesmer never makes use of healing power, so you’re down to 6 right away. However, an odd healing build won’t use the offensive stats, so celestial is bad for that. Obviously what’s left is a balanced hybrid build, since celestial gives power and condition stats in even doses along with some toughness and vitality. You can sorta make use of this in a condition-based shatter build, but a balanced hybrid offense with some defense simply isn’t a good build if you don’t have the sustain to go along with it. This is why the celestial ele builds were so powerful: they both had hybrid offense with solid sustain. Mesmer has the hybrid offense, but we can’t sustain in the same way. This means that we either want to go full offense (viper/sinister/zerker) to finish a fight rapidly or full defense (rabid/dire) to properly bulk up defensively for a more drawn out battle. Celestial is a middle ground that mesmer is not suited to utilizing.

75 precision is 3.57 crit chance. Who cares? It shouldn’t affect your gearing choices in the slightest.

Zintrothen.1056:

MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! On NA and EU.

Can you feedback an entire city? Yeah, didn’t think so.

#QueenJennah2017

Uh, is this even a question? Queen Jennah obviously.

Windwalker.7421:

Yes the Reflect on Mirror is doubled when traited. Untraited you don’t get the Reflect effect until after the heal goes off, but traited it will instantly apply Reflect first so you have it up the entire time you’re casting, and then you refresh the Reflect when you actually cast the heal. (So it’s at least 3.25 seconds long, I can’t say for sure if it’s 4 seconds or if that .75 seconds is wasted due to overlap.)

You’re wrong here actually. Untraited Mirror applies a reflect effect that lasts 2 seconds immediately upon beginning the channel. You can actually cancel the cast (aborting the heal and putting it on kitten interrupt cooldown) to get a higher uptime on the reflect due to this. Traited Mirror will apply the normal instant 2 second reflect followed by an additional 2 second reflect upon finishing the channel.

Natto.5819:

Baronvonhippo.3157:

Natto.5819:

Fay.2357:

Natto.5819:

Baronvonhippo.3157:

Vonmanstein.3645:

BellsSola.4793:

This can’t be fun for Maguuma

Oh, don’t worry. Maguuma had plenty of fun wiping you guys tonight.

A for effort, though – BG has been avoiding fighting us for months.

Says the server that just ran from BG. Must be fun to make up your own version of reality. These guys started losing again had a tantrum and took their ball and went home so they could farm lower servers, just sad.

Maguuma take break because BG hide. Not fun when server won’t play. But when Maguuma take break, BG come back and fight, then say they good.

Maguuma overstacked and gets to be matched with BG. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes and all that. Now that you’ve tanked and bamboozled Anet into lowering your glicko, you’ll just steamroll t2 and t3 for a month and end up matched with BG again. Congrats I guess?

When Maguuma is in tier 1 again, BG will run and hide, and cycle continues.

When Maguuma is in tier 1 again BG will continue to dominate like always causing lesser servers to tank thier rating and make excuses on the forums.

I think you use word dominate wrong. When Maguuma is #1, BG cry and hide. BG was dominated, like in 50 Shade movie.

As much as we all enjoy the wang measuring contest between Mag and BG, we’d appreciate it if that contest didn’t involve Mag tanking and royally screwing with WvW balance in the lower tiers for a month.

Natto.5819:

Baronvonhippo.3157:

Vonmanstein.3645:

BellsSola.4793:

This can’t be fun for Maguuma

Oh, don’t worry. Maguuma had plenty of fun wiping you guys tonight.

A for effort, though – BG has been avoiding fighting us for months.

Says the server that just ran from BG. Must be fun to make up your own version of reality. These guys started losing again had a tantrum and took their ball and went home so they could farm lower servers, just sad.

Maguuma take break because BG hide. Not fun when server won’t play. But when Maguuma take break, BG come back and fight, then say they good.

Maguuma overstacked and gets to be matched with BG. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes and all that. Now that you’ve tanked and bamboozled Anet into lowering your glicko, you’ll just steamroll t2 and t3 for a month and end up matched with BG again. Congrats I guess?

Tomas.6092:

How can this not be fun? No more BG hiding behind siege while having equal numbers, now we have YB for that. Finally able to play in smaller groups, as someone above mentioned it. Can’t think of any bad thing that happen for Mag going to t3

It’ll be fun for a day and a half, then DB will be gone and the only YB around will be in a single T3 keep bristling with arrow carts from every open spot. I’m sure you’ll enjoy walking around the rest of the week in 4 empty WvW maps.

Yeah uh, I’m gonna go ahead and say pics or it didn’t happen on this one.

Azukas.1426:

Fay.2357:

They aren’t new…for WvW at least.

It’s worth noting that sigil of absorption has a specified boon order of removal. This makes it mostly useless in PvP, but quite strong in WvW. The order is resistance, then aegis, then retaliation, then swiftness, then other stuff.

Sigil of ruthless is okish I guess…but the stacks are only applied for 3 seconds. It’s basically only useful as part of a shatter burst combo…except the sigil of draining (is that in PvP yet?) would probably deal more damage anyway.

Reason we need to test cause I wonder if they’ll change the priority order. I will say removing resistance first is insanely strong even in a PvP setting with how prevalent warriors have become. I’m looking into a condi and power version to work with atm.

I will be exceedingly surprised if they change the priority order. Anet likes copy-pasting code (as all software companies do). That being said, a re-test once they hit PvP is absolutely a proper thing to do.

In any case, as others have mentioned berserker builds almost always come with the pulsing stab trait. While they do have some uptime on resistance outside of berserk, the really dangerous points where you want to be controlling them is during the berserk phases, making the resistance priority of questionable value. It could very well see use against the odd rev you come up against, but for the most part you would probably be better off focusing on raw boon strip instead of interrupts.

Moonyeti.3296:

Healix.5819:

Malice.8439:

I don’t like the way Counter-Magic is used. I suppose it’s meant to be keybound, but I keep wanting to hover my mouse over it, expecting some sort of tooltip about what I’m supposed to be doing.

The counter magic tutorial was in the first episode, which explained that it reverses the effects of whatever you are countering. It’s a generic skill, so the tooltip isn’t going to help. In this case, it interrupts his shadowstep combo.

Yeah I quickly learned to rebind it to somewhere handy. In my case I bound it to Q for easy reach. I had to learn there is no thought to using it- if the icon flashes, hit the button ASAP. There is no real cooldown or reason not to use it all the time it is available.

It’s essentially the GW2 version of a Quick Time Event (QTE). I’m not really familiar with anyone that likes QTEs, and I’m not a huge fan of it here…but it doesn’t actually make the instance difficult. I just wish they had you doing more interesting things with the special action key like we see them doing in raids with it.

They aren’t new…for WvW at least.

It’s worth noting that sigil of absorption has a specified boon order of removal. This makes it mostly useless in PvP, but quite strong in WvW. The order is resistance, then aegis, then retaliation, then swiftness, then other stuff.

Sigil of ruthless is okish I guess…but the stacks are only applied for 3 seconds. It’s basically only useful as part of a shatter burst combo…except the sigil of draining (is that in PvP yet?) would probably deal more damage anyway.

rabidsmiles.5926:

Fay.2357:

On VG we don’t get the green circles. Instead, we let the mesmers invuln the green circle hits so that we can maintain 100% melee damage uptime on the boss.

Holy kittens…I dunno why this never struck me. /facepalm My guild is new at raiding and we are relying on the know-how of two members who have gotten kills before but as a necro and an ele, so I have no experienced tanks to tell me how things go. This makes total sense and as to why we take the Domi line in the first place if you don’t bother with greens and can just distort through the damage. Takes a bit of knowledge though, knowing when to distort, gives me something to learn the timing on for sure to make me a better tank.

Yep, it’s a much more challenging strategy to execute as it places a huge burden on the mesmers to do things right. Miss an invuln, risk a wipe. If the mesmers are confident and strong at the timing though, it allows your party to really push heavy damage on VG.

Catastro has the right of it. Signet of midnight is instant and has an 8 second lower traited cooldown, making it far better for distortion sharing. Instant means you don’t have to interrupt what you’re doing to pop it, and the lower cooldown means you can reliably have it up every time you need it. Additionally, the vast majority of your alacrity upkeep comes from the shield phantasms, not the wells. If your group is playing properly and you are keeping your shield phantasms up, you will still be maintaining 100% alacrity.

@nagr: You don’t use the signet on VG, Gorse, and Sloth simply because your groups aren’t skilled enough to use the tactics that I am using. On VG we don’t get the green circles. Instead, we let the mesmers invuln the green circle hits so that we can maintain 100% melee damage uptime on the boss. On Gorseval we don’t move out of the black aoes during the breakbar attack. Instead, we let the mesmers invuln the black aoe hits so that we can maintain 100% melee damage uptime on the boss. Lastly, for Sloth we simply stack tightly on the boss and invuln the melee range hits of spore shake, allowing for 100% melee damage uptime on the boss.

Really you should be dropping well of recall for signet of midnight if you need extra distortion. I take midnight on VG, gorse (for invulning the patterns), and sloth (for spore shake). You shouldn’t need it anywhere else.

Edit: I take ether signet at deimos actually. It provides better ticking heals for when I have to tank the big attack with a block.

I believe you must be hit while under 75%. Simply dropping under 75% won’t proc the effect.

Pavlarian.4389:

On typical build, 2 sigils r required? one for sw/sh and 1 for sw/sw?
PS: new to mesmer world

You use a single mainhand sword. It will equip to both weaponsets automatically.

OriOri.8724:

Might affects them, quickness and fury do not. Nor do aegis/protection that is applied to us. And considering how vital they are to our DPS and how easy they are to kill, there isn’t a reason to not give them aegis and protection that we get ourselves.

Quickness is largely pointless for phantasms. The only phantasm that gets a positive effect is the duelist, all others either are unaffected or negatively affected. Since they’re limited by cooldowns, not skill animations, quickness does very little. For wardens, it lowers uptime on the projectile denial.

Fury is traitable.

Aegis and protection would be pointless. In PvE they don’t need it. In wvw or PvP, they take far too much damage and have far too little life for aegis or protection to make a difference. The problem is conceptual, it can’t be fixed with a band-aid like that.

Yep, join a run that’s expecting an experienced player without experience and you’ll get kicked. If you want to learn, join training runs and watch videos. Don’t complain on the forums about how unfair life is because you got kicked from a group that you weren’t qualified for. Would you also complain if you got fired from a job that requires extensive c++ knowledge but all you can do is a bit of BASIC?

Starmiz.3298:

Fay.2357:

-stuff-

I noticed that you pick Power Block over Mental Anguish. Does the damage from Power Block trigger on break bars? Or did you just pick it because it is useful for dealing with adds?

Just for adds really. I don’t use mind wrack enough on bosses to care about that as a DPS contribution.

Straegen.2938:

The argument that the defense against a one shot skill is to not get hit by it is ridiculous. Nobody can see everything coming especially when the game allows players to clip each other. An Asuran standing in the same spot as a Norn or Charr basically makes any of their animations invisible.

No damage over time skill should be able to effectively one shot players much less an AoE.

OriOri.8724:

B – Of course if you trigger an effect to cleanse by using a skill then you will take the condition damage. If you use a skill that cleanses first this wouldn’t be a problem.

If you are advocating skills should remove condi before activating Confusion, sure but that isn’t how it works now. The list of skills that cleanse before Confusion damage is applied is very limited and most of them need a trait component. Once a significant Epi hits there is zero counter play for most builds.

Any skills that natively remove conditions (that is, remove conditions without needing to be traited for it) will remove confusion without proccing damage. The problem is that when you have 12 conditions on you from an epi, it’s unlikely that the confusion will be one of the ones that gets cleansed first.

ArchonWing.9480:

Phantom.5389:

ArchonWing.9480:

Haematic.4913:

Kekkei Genkai Kage.5930:

Player issue on ele, out of position to get ally buffss and cleanses :^)

Said player had 2,300 ping from the server.

So I’d like to make things clear. The player had 2300 ping average in this screenshot? Because everything can look like an insta-pwn with 1k+ ping.

It’s not like I don’t believe it could happen, but just making sure of the facts. I mean I’ve had 2-3 seconds kills on me because your average auramancer isn’t as equipped to have many instant on-demand cleanses. Also, hats off to them for still playing. I have trouble with if the ping hits 230, much less any higher.

I’m not Sherlock, but those condi seen in this short video were way beyond redemption. He would need a cleanse/resist from an ally in the next second, with or without ping issues. Those 2 tick kills from epidemic are not a rare sight, you can see such behavior in many epidemic videos on youtube.

¯\(?)/¯

Well, that’s not what I was getting at. Yes, ping issues or not, he might have died. And sure I know you can be instantly ded’d by these things. What I was referring to is during times of really bad lag, the game may “fast forward” things when it catches up so that everything happens at once which makes it look like everything happened at once.

Of course, is that all we’re really seeing is a life bar going down without any real context. I don’t know if the ele was focused in a fight or just happened to run into 30 people.

The guy receiving the condies had the ping, the guy who made the gif was fine. The gif is an accurate depiction, no lag catch-up there.

Morfedel.4165:

francescoG.1069:

It was a truly disastrous year for the balance of mesmer.
A year ago, alacrity was weakened.
One year ago came the build chronophantasma shatter, since then it has not been possible to create an alternative build.
I stopped playing months ago, forgive me if you can, but if you played the mesmer 2 years ago you can not settle for a lower class to make portal, alacrity and quickness.
I waited for the build was to carry chronophantasma shatter a year to see if it changed something and this was the reward of my patience: alacrity on reavenant.
I waited too long, we are in 2017 and now there are other mmrpg.
it is time to uninstall

That alacrity on the revenant is using the tablet; not exactly a competitive alternative, I dont think centaur revenant is really going to be a thing, so I think we are good.

While this particular change doesn’t really mean anything, it shows what is likely to be the start of a troubling trend of other classes gaining access to alacrity, potentially even better than us eventually.

Wellllllllllllllllllllllllll have we got the class for you!

Turns out that not only is chronomancer great at support, that’s the only thing it’s good at! Playing in organized groups means that you’re fit into an obligatory support role.

Now, you did mention that you don’t want to tank, and that’s ok. If you want to do fractals, there’s not really a true tank role as aggro mechanics don’t allow for that sort of reliability. In those encounters you’re simply providing support. In most raids, on the other hand, there will be a dedicated tank and it will usually be a chronomancer. However, most groups have 2 chronomancers: one tanking and one simply supporting. While knowing how to tank makes you more flexible when pugging, it’s not required.

The general concept of chronomancer support is that you’re providing as high uptimes on alacrity and quickness to your party as possible. Depending on the encounter, you may also be providing reflects, short duration invulnerability, boon stripping, or cc. You’re providing alacrity through the use of traited wells and shield phantasms, quickness through a well, weapon skill, and signet of inspiration, and the other stuff through various traits and utilities.

Here’s the most standard build: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAs+dncfClfi9fCGoBEgiFVj6MIWipjMAGhdqOZn2qF-TxhFQBObCiRU+NI1fE4DA4M6FW3+DAQJIpACcmF-e

Leadership runes, food/utility, the concentration sigil (in the mainhand weapon), and a platinum doubloon allow you to hit 97% boon duration for quickness buffing. If the boon utility is too expensive for you, you can also swap out a few pieces of gear for commander’s stats to get extra boon duration. Your traits give you distortion on signet usage and allow you to share that distortion to nearby allies. If you want reflects, drop well of recall for feedback. If you want more distortion, drop well of recall for signet of midnight. If you want a substantially more detailed guide on rotations and build variations, go here: http://qtfy.enjin.com/mesmer

Akashi.3245:

Fay.2357:

Akashi.3245:

Such a shame that the ele isnt in a group with a rev or anything (yes this is sarcasm).

Yes, epidemic being obscenely overpowered is totally OK because another obscenely overpowered mechanic like having close to 100% uptime on resistance exists…

if the ele in the revs group was positioned where he should have been he would have had the resistance and all other boons which the rev had is all im saying. if he was where he should have been and had the resistance, he would have had enough time to react. If he didn’t react at all thats on him and the people around him cop the epi. or visa versa if the rev is oblivious to what is going on around him.

If your in an organised group and you run away from your support classes you need to rethink your gameplay because 9/10 you get punished for it.

Congratulations, you missed the point. The fact that there is an abusable mechanic allowing you to completely ignore a major part of this game’s combat is no healthier than the fact that there is an abusable mechanic allowing necros to one-shot people with impunity.

Akashi.3245:

Such a shame that the ele isnt in a group with a rev or anything (yes this is sarcasm).

Yes, epidemic being obscenely overpowered is totally OK because another obscenely overpowered mechanic like having close to 100% uptime on resistance exists…

Astralporing.1957:

It’s inconsistent.

So completely normal. Find me something consistent in this game and I’ll find you something that Anet hasn’t gotten around to working on yet.

Astralporing.1957:

Rising Dusk.2408:

Astralporing.1957:

Not on armor though.

Yeah, there are no skins on the armor, but especially now that all other methods of getting ascended gear require crafting the costs are especially reasonable. 400 shards + 15g is great for a chest piece, IMO.

That’s exactly the point. Raid vendor is now the only reasonable ascended armor vendor.
It may seem to be balanced when looked at individually, but turns out completely unbalanced when compared to other vendors.

It’s balanced because you have to do raids to use it. Harder content → better rewards. That’s just how it is.

Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921:

I admit I haven’t found it anywhere on the notes. That is where I first looked after I noticed the change. Either I’m vastly incapable of playing at the same toon from one week to the next or these aren’t common builds so not many people aren’t noticing the changes.

From playing in Lake Doric and Bitterfrost almost daily with these classes is where I noticed that regen isn’t showing or recouping health noticeably.

I guess it could be a bug? It seems to be glaringly obvious with regen on any of my toons that I’ve taken the time to look at their life while regen was up. This change seems to have only started about a couple weeks ago.

Sounds like you’ve accidentally got either the wrong set of gear or the wrong traits on and you didn’t notice it. Nothing was changed with respect to regen or the engie traits that cause regenerating effects, this is all you.

Edit: A lot of the complaints in your original post are just glaring L2P issues as well. Aegis works perfectly fine on the knight knockbacks, you just have to make sure you don’t get hit by multiple swings. Obviously your projectile blocking shield doesn’t work…they’re not projectiles. Have you tried ccing them? Have you tried dodging those windup attacks? Have you tried even just strafing out of the aoes? There’s so many easy ways to deal with those attacks that you’re complaining about, it seems absurd that you haven’t tried any. Mace/shield isn’t even remotely necessary, that just goes to show how completely outclassed you are by this content.

Levetty.1279:

Exciton.8942:

OriOri.8724:

Xenon.4537:

Exciton.8942:

Quickness buffing is something that is very likely to be given to other professions.
Engineer sounds like a good candidate.

Absolutely. Not that quickness was ever a “mesmer only” thing, it’s just that Anet seems to want quickness to be the only thing chrono is good for.

And that, to me, is the perfect reason to not give this level of quickness support to any other profession ever. At this point its all chrono is in PvE, a quickness and alacrity bot. Its not good at anything else, at least not good enough to where another class isn’t already better. So if another class gets even a portion of the quickness uptime that chrono does, chrono deserves some serious changes to make it better.

I am hoping next elite spec will let mesmer copy all her boons to her clones/phantasms. That might give mesmer a potential DPS option.

How?

It wouldn’t.

Pro tip: use keybinds instead of clicking your portal, you’ll screw it up less often. An added bonus is that you can also use turtle banner 5 easier!

Gibon.1705:

@Fay I agree with you that balance team has no idea what consistency is but I’d think that they have someone like game designer or s1 who keeps an eye on such promises.

I’m happy with the buffs mesmer recieved and they seem really good but I hate AN breaking promises every now and then.

You’re making the classic mistake of assuming that the balance team actually cares about consistency. They really don’t. They just say things because they sound good, not because they actually mean it. I’m certainly not pleased with the change, but I’m not surprised and I’m not going to get worked up over something inevitable.

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

New meta comp: Certain abilities have been buffed to affect 10 people:
Banners (but not empower allies), gotl (but not spotter/spirits) and TW.

Group 1: Power
Berserker: Empower Allies
Ventari Herald: Assassin’s Presence + Alacrity group 1
Druid: Spotter/Frost/glyph
Power DPS #1 (DH for bonus quickness shout)
Power DPS #2

Group 2: Condi
Chrono: Alacrity group 2 + 10 ppl quickness (ToT and TW)
Condi DPS: Ranger (Spirits/spotter)
Cond DPS: Engi: 150 bonus condi damage aura
Cond DPS: Not Engi (Ranger/Necro/Mesmer/Warrior)
Condi DPS: Not Engi (Ranger/Necro/Mesmer/Warrior)

All groups gets banners. All groups get gotl. Both groups get alacrity. Condi team gets condi aura buffs (spotter, sun, pinpoint) while power team gets bonus power/ferocity and frost/empowerment. So what really matters is can Chrono now provide aoe quickness to 10 people with TW and ToT? Or more so, can it provide enough quickness that a DH shout can cover group 1 while obviously group 2 has perma quickness as usual.

Overall it looks like a lot of class diversity.
Edit: There is still the issue of organized groups using double chrono for distortion share.
Edit 2: If distortion share is needed, there is still the idea of having 2 chronos with ToT and TW being enough quickness for all 10 people.

Group 2 might see sustain issues without a druid. If you wanted to do that comp, I think you’d need the druid in their own party. That would really screw with distortion sharing though…

OriOri.8724:

Menaka.5092:

Silverkey.2078:

You forget one important detail on mesmer balance:

• We’ve been looking to improve the support role for the revenant. Alacrity will now be available through the Salvation specialization line, allowing Ventari’s Tablet to project it at a constant rate.

and just like that, 1 year down the line, our CLASS SPECIFIC buff is not class specific anymore

well played ANet

What the actual kitten ANet? If ventari was underperforming on Rev then you needed to rework it, not give away chronos unique effect. This is absolute bullkitten. Why do other classes get to keep their unique effects? Why wasn’t GotL given away? Why wasn’t spotter or Engies new effect, or banners given to more classes? Why is it that only chrono isn’t allowed to have an unique effect? Why?

While I’m not a fan of the trend, I don’t really think this is going to make ventari relevant. They’re just throwing random things at the wall to see if anything sticks. It definitely feels insulting to have alacrity just given to revs like that though.

OriOri.8724:

I’m not contesting the record, I just thought that this was an exploit. Is it not?

Sure it is, but that doesn’t mean speedruns can’t use it until it’s fixed.

RodOfDeath.5247:

MMOs are like ships passing in the night, they’ll be another.

I don’t think you understand this phrase at all…

OriOri.8724:

In your Uncat video at 2:47, you use a portal as soon as Old Tom dies, literally the second he dies, to get to the top floor. I thought the way forward from Old Tom was blocked until he was dead? How can your chrono get up there before he dies?

There’s a blink spot that lets you get up there. You can see that the chrono drops the portal and it opens immediately, so they blinked up earlier. At 1:41 you can see them going up top to drop it and at 1:56 you can see the portal entre icon appear on their bar.

Edit: And at 2:01 you can see them dropping back down outside old tom’s room and coming back in for the fight.