Guild Wars 2

Kicker.8203:

Fay.2357:

Kicker.8203:

You guys don’t get it. Of course you don’t have to target anyone in order to see which one is the real mesmer practically noone acts like a clone. Why? Because they would spot the real one in 1-2 seconds by randomly targeting them.

A good player spots the Mesmer near-instantly without even having to target them. It’s a nonissue either way.

Did u even read the post? I’m talking about mesmer acting like clones.

If the mesmer is acting so perfectly like a clone that you truly can’t tell the difference between them without tabbing around…then you still don’t need to tab around. A mesmer acting perfectly like a clone is, for all intents and purposes, a clone, and a clone is not even remotely threatening.

Basically, if a mesmer is pretending perfectly to be a clone, they’re useless, so it’s besides the point.

Kicker.8203:

You guys don’t get it. Of course you don’t have to target anyone in order to see which one is the real mesmer practically noone acts like a clone. Why? Because they would spot the real one in 1-2 seconds by randomly targeting them.

A good player spots the Mesmer near-instantly without even having to target them. It’s a nonissue either way.

Honestly not sure why you’re bothering to dignify this thread with responses at this point, chaos. This is the type of one that I just sorta point and laugh at.

SlimChance.6593:

Since they combined several shatter traits into “Master of Fragmentation”, it be a pretty safe bet that it behave like the current “Masterful Reflection” and only applies to the shatter Distortion.

If it did it for all “distortion” combined with “Evasive Mirror” would be too much . And I think Roger Gee even said so in the trait reveal. (He mentioned several things that could potential overlap with each other and would be too op.)

It works for signets too, but not for triumphant distortion.

Haven’t watched it, but are you sure he wasn’t referring to the trait?

On the one hand…they get permaswiftness.

On the other hand…they can’t take the revealing trait with it.

I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Phoenix.7928:

Bwuh. No wonder that didn’t work out.

Didn’t work out? Don’t make me laugh. My build was one of the most popular builds in the game for mesmer until anet deleted it.

Phoenix.7928:

Your only source of retaliation is Confusing Cry. That’s not enough uptime. And heaven forbid you eat a single enemy cleanse. You got no blocks whatsoever, what do you do against hard hitters? No critical infusion for vigor. You can’t dodge EVERYTHING.

If you actually bothered to read the guide…

I had confusing cry and then leap combo finishers on my light field. I had close to 200% uptime on retaliation. It was more or less impossible to strip my retaliation. Hard hitters don’t hit very hard when you have a pDefender, 25k hp, and 3000 armor. Additionally, you can use blurred frenzy for damage mitigation.

Phoenix.7928:

You got no blocks whatsoever. They are the hardest hitters you got and migate a lot of damage if you block the right enemy skills. Especially if traited for retaliation you want to keep those skills on cooldown 24/7.

I don’t think you understand how a retaliation tank works at all. You should watch some of my videos and see how I play. I was able to instakill a lot of people purely through retaliation. Additionally, confusion still hit very hard back then, so that did some serious dps when I burst.

Phoenix.7928:

Your staff is too chaotic to really be of much use,

The staff is the best kiting weapon in the game, and has a leap finisher to provide another stack of retaliation

Phoenix.7928:

scepter allows you to stack confusion on demand, staff doesn’t.

Or, bear with me here, you could use the class mechanic!!111 Shatters apply confusion, and that’s all you need for a burst.

Phoenix.7928:

Staff is defensive, but that’s really all it does for you. If you would’ve at least taken illusionary elasticity to get a second bouce out of your weapon.

Staff has mobility, blinds, confusion, cripple, poison, dazes, and more retaliation from chaos storm. I think it has plenty.

Phoenix.7928:

You got FULL Soldier’s, but for long fights you want some cleric’s, too, that perma regen really adds up and ether feast with some healing power and three clones heals 70% of your health even as a full tank.

There’s no need for it. You have a pDefender soaking damage for you, and anyone that attacks you kills themselves. Additionally, retaliation scales off of power, so the more power you have, the more it hurts. It doesn’t scale well anymore, because they nerfed it into the ground (which is why your build won’t work).

Phoenix.7928:

You also need different food. Convertion into crit chance for vigor procs are really necessary, you’re going to dodge A LOT especially if you drag out fights. The lemon grass, especially in combination with melandru, is awesome though.

I don’t think you understand. I had plenty of dodges and defense, vigor on crit is not necessary. What melandru + lemongrass do is allow me to ignore conditions completely. Immobilize becomes a slight pause, and even longer nasty things like poison drop off very quickly.

Phoenix.7928:

How do you set up burst combos? Staff is useless for that, all you got is sword/focus. The only combination I see is iWarden->root->sword2. That does some damage, but is the only combo available and if you use your sword defensively, you got nothing left.

You’re a retal tank. You kill people by letting them attack you. Your build has 1800 power and 700 condition damage. Your ‘burst combos’ aren’t going to do anything but tickle even the squishiest thief. My burst combo is to stack retal then burst confusion as they engage.

Phoenix.7928:

The post is two years old. Man, you should’ve kept on it. I started out kinda like that, too, but a reta mesmer can do a lot better than that.

I’m not sure what part of ‘Anet deleted my build’ you’re not understanding. They nerfed confusion into the ground, they nerfed retaliation into the ground, and they effectively deleted the one trait that made it all come together. I stopped playing it because it doesn’t exist anymore. It did, it was awesome, and then it was gone. Your build…isn’t going to work against anyone that has a head on their shoulders.

Phoenix.7928:

Another retal mesmer? You’re kittenting me. I’m the only one of my kind.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Guide-The-Immortal-Mesmer-Build/page/11#post3398077

The nightmare torch from twilight arbor looks fantastic.

I hate to rain on your parade here, but retal tank mesmer hasn’t been viable for a very long time. It’s objectively worse than almost any other build you could do. Instead of building for retal, you could build for condition damage in dire or rabid, be just as tanky, and do far more damage.

I’m…a little bit of an expert on the mesmer retal tank. Anet massacred my build a year and a half ago, and despite all of my efforts to make it work…it’s just not good.

Will you be able to kill people on this build? Sure, I guess. You have no real offense though, and anyone that wants to can just walk away, or even just in circles and heal up without you being able to do anything about it. Anyone you kill playing this build simply isn’t a good player.

Yeah, the vigor nerf is going to hurt us certainly. We’ll still work, and we’re admittedly getting a lot of really great buffs. I’m not entirely sure exactly how it’s going to ultimately settle, but I feel that we’ll still be in a much better place, vigor nerf notwithstanding.

Think of it this way. I always run double energy sigils, no questions asked. That’s 1 dodge every 10 seconds. Vigor gives you another 1 every 5 seconds currently, for a total of 3 every 10. Nerfed vigor will give you one every 6.667 seconds, for a total of 2.5 every 10 seconds.

You’re only losing .5 of a dodge every 10 seconds, and that’s with permanent vigor. Less than permanent vigor means less of a difference. I don’t think it’s going to be that big of a deal.

StickerHappy.8052:

@Fay

Even with stealth, most people I face in pvp would either randomly dodge or use a skill that evades or invuln or stealth when they see me stealth. Again not to discredit the OP, but I just find it really surprising.

Hence my comment about heavily cherrypicking. For every perfect burst, there’s 10 that don’t work. Shatter montages are fun, but they’re not representative of normal gameplay.

StickerHappy.8052:

Uhmm you are a really skilled mesmer I can tell. I do have one question though, I hope you don’t get offended. I watched every video you posted and it still surprises me how people don’t move around that much and eat a mirror blade burst to face.

I really struggle to land it in pvp especially against good thieves.

I only watched about 3 minutes, but 90% of them he engaged from stealth or with iSwap for immob for the burst. It’s not something that happens all the time, and is why you really only see incredibly heavily cherrypicked videos like this where he’s able to pop out just at the right moment and unload a burst from stealth.

Pretty sure that bug got fixed a while ago.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Sadrien.3470:

Daniel Handler.4816:

Guys I don’t think you actually want it to stack. Because if you do they have to change it to a pulsing aoe. Which you don’t want. Think if symbol of swiftness were a straight line. There are no exceptions to what stacks and what doesn’t. And that is a good thing.

See my earlier comment please daniel

I explain that because anet already has the capability to individual entity icds for traits and weapon abilities they should just make a icd per player on gaining swiftness from each temporal curatain.

Oh I thought I was also responding to that too. But we can go down this rabbit hole. Not discussing aura or ineptitude because they are activated at range, not by interacting with the aoe. Wall of reflection reflects the bullet back to them and they can dodge, the requirement for these is a player or object has to attempt to move into the radius of the skill.

What do we as players do that aoes don’t do? Move. The aoes that do move are liars and scoundrels as they move along a set path, they do not have free range. So that in mind as we design the ICD for our buffed curtain:

What is the ICD for the curtain? Base duration of swiftness is twelve, duration of curtain is 5. Is the base ICD 1 second? 2? 3? 4? 5?

ICD is 6 seconds to prevent doubling up from one single curtain.

Solori.6025:

Fair, but forgive me if I don’t see 10% as a huge buff compared to the lose of other mechanics that thief will have to suffer through.(mainly the missing dagger traits, and the nerf to feline grace, and practiced tolerance. )

You’re saying this as though thieves aren’t getting other substantial boosts. Baseline traits for steal, f2 QoL, drastic buff to haste, stronger venoms, thieves are getting a lot of nice things.

Solori.6025:

Depends on the build you decide to make.
For example, if you are roaming in a pvp map with an engi or two on the other team SA wont help you, pain response becomes the next best thing.

Sure, and then you have to gasp make a meaningful choice! You shouldn’t be able to take all the best traits in every build, you should have to make sacrifices when choosing to spec towards one thing or another.

Solori.6025:

I doubt that. Especially with the buffs my love child got.

That…wasn’t an opinion up for debate. That was a fact. If all classes are down to 50% on vigor, and thieves trait for 100%, then they’re 2x ahead of all the other classes. Math doesn’t lie.

Solori.6025:

The IP change opened a lot of new windows for me.
HEll the buffs that mesmer got in general are something that has made me excited about the change.
( and I totally deleted that necro)

Mesmers got a bunch of nice buffs certainly…but withdraw is still broken. You can’t just point fingers around going ‘but they got cool things too!’ and expect that to be a good explanation as to why withdraw is broken.

Solori.6025:

You cant interrupt most stealth skills, and unless your and engi or guard, you cant force them out either.
Are we going to nerf those also?

The vast majority of stealth skills have very solid counterplay. BP—> HSS is counterplayable through an interrupt. CnD is counterplayable through an interrupt, block, blind, dodge, etc. Shadow refuge has strong counterplay in the form of knockbacks. There are a couple that don’t, but the majority do, and the ones that don’t are usually panic buttons.

Solori.6025:

What about fresh air strikes?

You mean the build that got nerfed into the ground with the changes?

Solori.6025:

Also, didn’t you just list a bunch of CC that stops Withdraw?!

No, I listed a bunch of ground effects that will interrupt the movement portion of withdraw if the thief is stupid enough to withdraw into it. It won’t stop the heal, it won’t stop the removal of movement impairing conditions, and it won’t stop all of the evasion. That’s hardly a counter.

Solori.6025:

Sorry, but I honestly can’t remember the last time in this forum I saw anyone complain about heal turret (happy?)
OR healing signet since the last time it was nerfed

That’s because people tend to complain about the overall builds (shoutbow, turret engie, celery engie) rather than specific skills that make them overpowered.

Solori.6025:

That may be so for phantasm builds.
I play a shatter build.
There honestly isn’t a a large amount of uptime for my phantasms that I have personally noticed AoE being an issue in pvp

Shatter builds are still countered by heavy aoe pressure, not just phantasm builds. There’s a very good reason mesmers can’t do damage in WvW groups…shatters and phantasms both don’t work under heavy aoe pressure. Trying to land shatters on top of a hotly contested point is much the same.

Solori.6025:

Though, If i remember correctly…Aren’t mesmer’s getting a trait that makes there newly summoned phantasm’s immune to damage?

We already have that trait. It makes them invulnerable for 1 second on summon. Only the iZerker will attack fully in that 1 second. The iWarden will just begin its spin, the iSwordsman will start walking towards its target, the iMage will kitten around as usual, the iWarlock might get an attack off but probably won’t and is easy to avoid anyway, and the iDuelist will get through only a couple bullets of its unload.

Hardly effective.

I’m curious to see what the thief opinion on the new improvisation trait is with respect to the mesmer steal skill consume plasma. As a mesmer, I feel that it’s going to be brutally overpowered and needs to be completely reworked from the ground up, as it’ll be too hard to balance it (it would either be useless due to low duration or too strong, hard to find a good spot).

For those who aren’t aware, consume plasma provides 10s of every boon excepting retal (5s) and stab (3s). Steal when fully traited is on a 19.5s cooldowns, and improvisation allows you to use stolen bundles twice, providing a 100% uptime of almost every boon in the game.

Solori.6025:

You need to read the changes to thief Fay.

Withdraw is going to be 18s

A longer cooldown doesn’t make it less broken due to lack of counterplay. It’s also acquiring a higher base heal and higher heal scaling with that cooldown, so I’d recommend you read the changes.

Solori.6025:

You either give up boon stealing for it to be 15s or you deal with it.

Yes, ‘deal with’ a higher heal on a higher cooldown. Ok.

Solori.6025:

You cant take Vigorous recovery and pain response anymore.

Pain response is hardly a vital trait, particularly with the access to condition removal through stealth that thieves will be acquiring with those changes that you love so much.

Solori.6025:

vigor is getting reduced across the board by 50%, forcing thieves that want any type of evasion into acro to make it 100%.

Which puts them 2x ahead of every single other class in the game. The disparity is simply going to get even worse with these changes.

Solori.6025:

There are a lot of skills through a few proffessions that can’t be interrupted, and are either directly countered through poison or positioned CC.
Gaurdian Shelter
Engineer healing turrent
Ranger troll Ungent
And Warriors healing signet

Shelter can be interrupted by unblockable cc. Healing turret, I hate when people spell that wrong, is broken. Troll unguent has a significant cast time, and that’s a really cool thing called counterplay. Healing signet is broken.

Solori.6025:

We don’t see any threads about these classes come up often, I think it’s because most people have an very big learning curve when it comes to stealth classes.

Are you kidding me? People post about how broken healing signet and healing turret are all the time. Troll unguent is barely taken, which is obviously because it’s so broken according to you, and shelter is balanced due to its very long cooldown and available counterplay through unblockable cc.

Solori.6025:

Also, Lets not forget that more classes that could already do well against thieves are getting some type of skill to reveal thieves while they are stealth.

Does any class so far have a counter skill that can completely shut down a single traitline for them? Other than thief?

I’ll do one better, I can show you something that shuts down an entire class mechanic! Heavy aoe pressure will instakill any mesmer phantasms or clones. This eliminates the unique mesmer class mechanics with no effective possibility of counterplay outside of simply avoiding that aoe pressure.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Me Games Ma.8426:

Yamsandjams.3267:

That won’t be happening… unless they’ve been sipping THAT kind of Kool-Aid over at the ANet office.

All people would do it run back and forth over it to stack up a bunch of swiftness, and then run around with it. This was how it was like in the betas, and that’s why they made it work the way it does now.

Of course, it would be nice if it would remember if you has already crossed it, and thus only give you one stack of swiftness per line, but I don’t think they’re setup to do that properly in their code.

Signet of inspiration got the buff though, so now there is a dedicated movespeed option for mesmers. It’s a brave new world.

This argument against the stacking doesn’t count. There are traits that have ICD per target. Why can’t there be a skill with ICD per target?

Edit: Oh someone already said this :x

All aoes with no target cap follow the same pattern. If they apply a cc, the cc will be reapplied when they enter the radius. If they apply a boon or a condition, it will not be reapplied.

Yeah, but they’ve demonstrated the ability to have a local icd timer on a specific person (with hitting auras, with the new ineptitude, etc). They could implement that for curtain and put a local icd on acquiring swiftness from temporal curtain.

Zoser.7245:

Conditions often need some time to accumulate in large numbers. And they can be cleaned to save time. Usually too long when you die of a combo or two. Or in a blink from an insane skill. How unfair can be depending on what you have in front or behind…

Just a heads up, this thread is discussing PvE capability. Cleanses are sorta irrelevant, as are the rest of what you’ve mentioned when taken in the sense of how you’re discussing them.

You’re still forgetting my first and third points though. In a party situation, it’s unlikely for you to get 2 bounces out of your staff autos, and your non-single target dps in a build like that is absolutely trash.

Fixing coverage problems is not a showy or glamorous release announcement. It doesn’t resonate with new players and doesn’t present well in a large conference like E3. I would have been very surprised if they used E3 to announce any changes to how WvW server populations function.

At this point we really know almost nothing about the expansion other than a couple teased highlights. Server pop adjustments are details that, if changed, would be discussed in a detailed blog post some time in the future.

I’m not. Ascended armor can shove it, I’ll do fine without.

Those numbers look reasonable, but they do mean you screwed up on personal dps. Personal bleeds should be sitting closer to 6 or so in that case, which would make more sense.

A couple things:

First, it looks like you’re assuming that both hits of the staff autos will hit the target. This isn’t valid in a party, they’ll often be soaked up by party members.

Second, I’m not sure how you’re getting 12.5 bleeds per clone but only 3.3 bleeds from you. That seems wrong, you might want to check your math on that again.

Third, this setup is single target only. Good luck doing any damage to a pack of trash.

Jesiah.2457:

And here we have a bunch of lrn2players crying about a heal that doesn’t stealth a thief, merely evades, upset that it has no counterplay.

Let’s completely forget about signet of healing on warriors, cleansing ire and heals on instant cast shouts that can also remove conditions! Those are perfectly acceptable even though they actually have no counter play and are far more spammable unlike this bs that withdraw doesn’t have counterplay which hilariously, some honest counterplay has been listed to it. Sure, it’s not a 100% complete hard counter to it, but this game wasn’t catered to brainless players who …

Wait, wait … nevermind. I see why people are QQ’ing now.

Oh, believe me, I’ve got plenty of harsh criticisms for healing signet and cleansing ire. I’m not quiet about my concerns with those skills in any way.

However, this thread is about withdraw, not about healing signet and cleansing ire. Those are also broken, but that doesn’t make withdraw less broken.

Spurnshadow.3678:

I’m talking about condi builds, not power builds. Please read your posts and mine in context.

Anyway, this has devolved into the merits of condi damgage. Many of y’all are still stuck on the current system and not taking into acount all the changes coming next week as well as the specializations.

Again, I’m just looking for an answer to the question from a dev or a quote from an Anet published source on whether or not there will be a condi cap in WvW.

Of course there won’t be. It’s not broken, and there’s no need to fix it. You’re just going off on wild fantasies about how well of corruption is somehow going to stack 80 bleeds on people.

Laraley.7695:

nearlight.3064:

Laraley.7695:

Salamander.2504:

Laraley.7695:

Salamander.2504:

Laraley.7695:

Salamander.2504:

rchu.8945:

Argilla.8340:

Honestly, it took 2 years to rebalance this game and all youre doing is destroying all the balance you had over this time

Just think logicly for a second, this won’t benefit anyone

I am glad this is happening, the classes I play the most are not part of the meta, so I am glad there is a chance to “reset” and let see how things play out.

The people that are crying because their mains are part of the meta, that’s just too bad.

Really? What do you play? My impression from the changes is that they reinforce the meta (exception: mesmer).

Are you saying that mesmers either weren’t part of the meta at all or are you saying that mesmers won’t be part of the meta? Because neither is true. They definitely weren’t as common as thieves, but they were still played way more than ranger or necro. At least on EU.

My comment was pointing out that most classes currently in the meta got buffed (Ele, Engi, Guard, Thief), and those that aren’t in the meta got nerfed (notably necro); I haven’t read up on the ranger/warrior changes yet. The exception to this is the mesmer, which was not meta and got a buff.

What are you smoking? Mesmers got the most buffs of all.

Yeah man, reread my post o0

Oh yeah, I missed that. But still applies what I said before. At least on EU mesmers were seen quite often.

For the record, the only mesmer in NA thats even close to prominent in pvp these days is Supcutie, and I’m pretty sure he used to be a thief main and/or played many tournies in the past year as a thief.

I don’t really watch the NA tournies that often, but pretty sure it was the other way around with Supcutie. There are several mesmers on EU appearing in tournies, though.

Supcutie is a mesmer main, and has been forced to play thief for a long time because it’s an objectively better choice than mesmer.

Yeah, chrono won’t be ingame next week, but if you want to theorycraft or discuss some of the possibilities of what we’ll be able to do, you can pop on over here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Announcing-the-OMFG-WvW-Division/page/3#post5149699

Spurnshadow.3678:

Zetsumei.4975:

Spurnshadow.3678:

Zetsumei.4975:

Spurnshadow.3678:

Condis are currently not used by guild groups due to the massive amount of cleansing available. However, in Mid-March, they implemented the stability changes. This seriously borked WvW and made dps bombs much more effective as we no longer have to worry about boon stripping. Now, we have a utility slot freed up. All we have to do is spam CCs. This makes cleansing much more difficult. That, in turn, makes immobilization much more effective and stuns, dazes, knockdowns, knockbacks much more prevalent.

The other reason why condi were never the meta was due to the 25 stack limit. If everyone was running condi damage, then there would be a ton of wasted dps.

If we get rid of the 25 stack limit, then this becomes viable again. Condi builds are able to consistently re-apply condi damage. If there are enough people, this can easily go over 25 stacks. Just look at all the condi on crit traits out there.

Another thing to consider about power damage, is one can simply move out of the area of attack. If condis are applied to you, and not cleansed, the damage stays on you.

This concern of mine, and many others, is mostly for the large group fights. However, small havoc groups would also be affected by this. A good, small team usually calls a target and focuses dps on that target. These smaller groups usually have less cleansing available and easily go over the 25 stack limit.

I’m not an idiot. I’ve played on Blackgate since launch and have commanded a long time.

You make a hilarious jump from the stab change to condis being viable. You seem to think that you will be able to CC lock a group to the point where they are unable to use condi cleanses yet say that they will be able to move out of a well bomb which will kill them in a matter of seconds. This just falls back to the point of if you able to lock a group down in CC long enough to stack condis on them they would have died to well bombs anyway.

Condis not being meta was nothing to do with the condi stack limit because you would never reach it. This is because of not only condi cleanses but people using -65% to -98% condi reduction, this means the stacks time out long before they can build intensity, have you even theorycrafted for condi roaming? You also seem to be forgetting about the aoe limit. You still haven’t made a comment about how if you were to somehow, somehow put 25 bleeds, burning, poison etc on a group now they would be dead anyway.

Stab changes make condi viable because of the prevalence of CCs. There are much more stuns and dazes being thrown out there, which means less cleansing. How is this halarious? I think it’s realistic, as we already suffer from it.

+ condi duration food negates -condi reduction food. Most trait lines that spec into condi damage have + condi duration. Of course the stack limit is part of condis not being a viable meta.

A decent sized group, in my example above if most of them are condi specced, should be able to maintain at least 25 stacks of condi damge from auto attacks alone. This is not counting any of their other attacks which can bring that stack well up to 75 or 100.

After the patch, necro wells will be a poor source for condi damge.

Err.. you do realize necro wells are the main source of physical dmg dps for guild groups right? Wells are not used for their Condi damage.. Again if you can CC someone long enough to prevent them from using a condi cleanse before you are done stacking well over 25 bleeds and letting them tick they would have died to standard necro wells anyway.

Do you realize that well of corruption is a huge source of condi damage for a condi necro? I was responding to your post discussing wells and condi damage. After the patch, with the changes to boon to condi conversion, this will be drastically changed.

I’m done with you.

So a well that randomly corrupts boons into conditions is a huge source of condie damage? You’ve got some rethinking to do buster. The majority of boons corrupt into non-damaging conditions, so remind me how well of corruption is a huge source of condition damage?

ASP.8093:

And does Mender’s Purity still trigger off of every use of Power Return?

Presumably?

ASP.8093:

no stealth change to make it work on casting Mantra of Recovery itself?)

Hell if I know

ASP.8093:

Can I get a short-and-sweet explanation on this please:

What exactly about Mender’s Purity stacks with Harmonious Mantras?

Mender’s purity acts as though you literally activated the condie removal mantra every time you activate a healing skill.

The problem is that withdraw is a heal with zero counterplay. Literally the only way to interrupt it would be to put a static field/line of warding/ring of warding/ unsteady ground behind the thief, and hope they’re dumb enough to withdraw into it. Even then, I think the heal applies instantly, so they’d just not roll back the full distance.

It needs a real cast time, not a ’I’m evading, just thought I’d let you know how long I’m evading for’ cast time.

Nokaru.7831:

Fay.2357:

The size of this particular step is relatively unimportant.

That’s your opinion, and you’re entitled to it. My opinion is that the size matters, and people should react in proportion with the change. The change is minor and insignificant.; it’s going to increase Ascended’s overall power by 1-2% over Exotic at the most.

Meanwhile, no one talks about a massive change to the game:

• Base attributes at level 80 now scale to 1000 instead of 926

That’s almost +400 more stats. For everyone. Someone in Exotic gear is going to be much more powerful after the patch than they were before. Meanwhile, Ascended Shoulders are gaining something like +2 to all stats. Which change do you think is actually noticeable and significant?

The important part is the direction of this step, because one step follows another.

Ah, the slippery-slope fallacy. You have to demonstrate this hypotentical thing will exist before concluding it’s a problem

Even if you take the viewpoint that size of a change matters, there’s still a fundamental problem here.

1. By making this change, Anet has demonstrated their intent that ascended gear should be the endgame goal for all players, regardless of what they do (pvp notwithstanding)
2. WvW is either a revenue neutral or negative activity
3. Crafting ascended armor and weapons is highly expensive
4. WvW has precisely zero feasible ways to obtain ascended weapons and armor (no, a .01% chance of a random stat chest drop doesn’t count)

Add all these things together, and you get a problem. Anet wants players to use ascended gear, and this is not a problem by itself. However, when you add in the fact that Anet has completely failed to provide any ways of obtaining ascended gear by playing WvW, you’ve got an issue.

This issue could be easily solved if Anet introduced some method of obtaining ascended weapons/armor by playing WvW. They could give a badges conversion, have craftable components drop at higher rates, or just significantly boost the ascended chest drop rate from chests. There’s a lot of ways they could fix this, but the issue is that they’re incentivising the ascended without providing any reasonable way to obtain it for WvWers.

Spurnshadow.3678:

Ok, lets take a look at a real, practical application with this hypithetical.

Lets say you’re part of a guild group. Usually about 1/2 are backline. Lets say your group is 20. You’re group is commanding and has another 20 pugs following. Usually they are mostly ranged, so lets say another 15 ranged. That’s 25 ranged players. So now, the new thing is condi damage, so your 10 guildies are trying that out. Lets say that 10 out of the 15 pugs are also trying this out. That would be 20 condi based ranged DPS.

One can easily get 2000 condi damage, so lets plug that into the new formulas.
Bleeding 2 + (.3 × 80) + (.075 × 2000) = 176 / tick
Burning 7.5 + (1.55 × 80) + (.155 × 2000) = 442 / tick
Poison 3.5 + (.375 × 80) + (.06 × 2000) = 154 / tick
Torment (while moving as WvW is almost never stationary) 3 + (.45 × 80) + (.11 × 2000) = 259
Confusion 2 + (.3 × 80) + (.04 × 2000) = 106

As we can see above, burning has the highest dps. Also, it will stack intensity rather than duration. This will become the new meta, and with the changes to elementalist, it will be the class to dish out this damage. They will have a ton of ways to apply burning and most of their burning skills have increased duration. If there are a bunch of eles in the above group lets say 10 out of 10, I can easily see 20 stacks of burning being continuously applied to the focus of damage. That would be 9000 / second. This doesn’t take into account the bleeds being applied by necromancers , rangers, mesmers (which also has a lot of burning procs) engis ( I don’t play an engi, but I think they have lots of burning damage), plus the poison.

How much more damage per second would be dished out by the other classes? I don’t want to go through all the changes for each class, but I’m sure it would be very high. I know that rangers and engis can very quickly apply 20 stack of bleeding. Thieves can apply a ton of poison and bleeding with their shortbow and continuously re-apply it.
None of this takes into acount the frontline condition damge. This might be minor as most of them will probably remain power, but there might be builds, such as with the guardian that has lots of built in fire traits, that is viable for burning dps while maintaining toughness.

I think it’s very reasonable to guess that with the 40 man group above, they could maintain 20,000 dps to the focused damage area (and I think that’s being conservative). With well placed static fields and immobilization, that would melt a group.

Again, these changes were desinged for PvE, not WvW. So, my question has not been answered unless a dev responds or someone can quote something from Anet addressing this issue.

And then 5 guardians faceroll across their bar of shouts, and all those condies suddenly disappear.

There are a lot of very distinct counters to condition damage right now, and that’s why it’s not meta.

Nokaru.7831:

It’s like 2 more of each stat on each piece of the armor. Once again, the internet will (over)-react before thinking any change through. If you didn’t care enough to get the armor before, you have no reason to care now. Most of the power of Ascended armor is from the weapons and the trinkets.

The change is unequivocally a step in the wrong direction. The size of this particular step is relatively unimportant. The important part is the direction of this step, because one step follows another.

The cooldown changes are listed twice. One is listed at 25, the other at 15. I’m inclined to think 15 is a typo.

Josh XT.6053:

Is there anything at all you people won’t complain about? I have 9 full ascended sets, at least one of every ascended weapon, typically 2-3 of some. I’ll have to adjust my armor to make way for the new changes too, but if you farmed as hard as I had to in order to get full ascended gear, then you best believe it better be like a 10% increase. If you don’t want to farm for ascended or fight people with it, go play PvP.

Not all of us are college students or unemployed with nothing better to do than spend 14 hours a day farming GW2. Just because you’ve no-lifed for the past 2 years to farm ascended doesn’t mean everyone else should have to.

Vague Memory.2817:

Windwalker.7421:

Vague Memory.2817:

None of those solutions sound satisfactory to me. I think I’ll stick with Travelers. If the swiftness was every 10sec it would be perm swiftness and non-stacking, as it would run out as new swiftness was applied. There would be no overlap, bar outside sources.

If Swiftness was 10s base, then it would be 13s with 30% Swiftness duration granted from Pack or Air runes, plus whatever other sources of Boon duration you can muster.

That means every time SoI cycles it would cast another 13s Swiftness, and quickly add up to 2m or whatever the cap is. The only way to avoid that would be to break it the way they broke our Focus, making it not play nice with other Swiftness which IMO would be worse than the 5s base thing.

Perma Swiftness is stupid, perma-any-Boon is if you ask me, it defeats the purpose of boons. As Pyro said, 50% uptime is fine. It’s not wow, but it’ll do compared to our current choices. I would much rather run Pack or Air runes then Travelers any day of the week, and twice on Sundays.

Perma swiftness is just that, permanent, duration increases don’t make it even more permanent.

It may be fine for you guys but it isn’t for me. Some in the Mes community are very good at expecting little, and happy with getting less in return.

And some of us are very good at demanding ‘We want more more more!! Whatever you give us isn’t good enough!’

We got enormous access to cripple in the new traits. This allows us to have drastically better control over the mobility of fights we’re in. Combined with solid uptime ok swiftness, this makes Mesmer mobility in a fight pretty fantastic.

If you’re not in a fight, you’re not in combat. Quit being lazy, swap on a focus, press 4, and swap it back out. Congratulations! You’ve achieved 100% swiftness uptime by using 3 buttons!

Dawdler.8521:

Fay.2357:

The amount of unloading you’d need to do to stack up enough conditions to kill people is equivalent to the amount of unloading you could do in power builds to kill people.

The difference is that conditions can be instantly cleansed, or completely negated by the use of resistance. Power can’t be.

Incorrect. Power is negated by dodging, popping active defenses on weapons or popping active defenses on skills. Conditions cant be instantly cleanse anywhere near the amount that power damage can be instantly negated. You often only have 1 skill to cleanse a couple conditions, 2 if you are lucky. Question is, how much “resistance” do we have?

The worst thing is probably that condi builds are already powerful in smaller numbers. Condi being meta will be… dull. 5-10 man havoc squads just run condi stacking builds and melt everything they focus on? Many current builds have no real condition cleanse. Weak condi-cleanse classes are going to be crippled by it while strong condi-cleanse classes grow even stronger.

But its not like it matters. All that matters is that it works in PvE. WvW can be broken, we all know it.

Your argument is absurd, bordering on hilariously wrong.

So you’re saying that power damage can be mitigated with blinds, blocks, dodges, and active defenses? Well, listen carefully, because I’m about to blow your mind.

Power damage and condition damage are both applied the exact same way: with ‘hits’ that can be dodged, blocked, or otherwise mitigated by active defense.

Conditions then have a further mitigation potential in the form of removal (and now resistance). Power has further mitigation in the form of toughness and protection.

Both modes of applying damage are roughly equal in a Zerg situation, with power getting the edge due to instant effects where conditions need time to tick.

frifoxy.6014:

Oh I meant portal one after another, not simultaneously.

1. Portal entry, blink 1200, portal exit
2. F5
3. Portal entry, blink 1200, portal exit
5. F5 and use your previously laid portal
6. Mimic
7. Portal entry, blink 1200, portal exit

Unless I’m misundestanding how F5 would work…

You’re misunderstanding both how f5 works and how the portal thing will work.

F5 saves your character state, enabling you to revert back to it. It does not inherently refresh anything.

As per the notes, if you use the skill portal while another of your portals is active, the old one will be destroyed.
You can never have more than 1 active portal.

frifoxy.6014:

F5 resets all your skills.
Mimic resets your utilities.

Tripple portal?

They’ve nipped this one in bud. Using portal with an active portal will destroy the active portal, from patch notes.

apharma.3741:

you know just like how only 3 classes commonly run it at a high competition level. You know unless I missed the celestial thieves, guards, mesmers, rangers and necros.

How many classes run it is entirely irrelevant. The problem is that the builds those classes are able to run are brutally overpowered in terms of their capability to have strong offense, strong defense, and sustain.

Celestial gear is the cause of that power disparity, and it should be nerfed.

Really, the concept of celestial as a whole is flawed and should be removed from the game. Mechanics that give broad capabilities are generally either underpowered or overpowered, due to the way that spread gets balanced. Achieving a happy medium of ‘able to do a bunch of things, but the sum of those isn’t overpowered’ is nigh impossible.

Vague Memory.2817:

None of those solutions sound satisfactory to me. I think I’ll stick with Travelers. If the swiftness was every 10sec it would be perm swiftness and non-stacking, as it would run out as new swiftness was applied. There would be no overlap, bar outside sources.

Jeez, you get a free 50% uptime on swiftness and you’re still not happy? Some people are so needy. Even engineers got their speedy kits nerfed down to 50% uptime now.

50% uptime on swiftness (with zero boom duration) is roughly 10% slower than travelers. Additionally, swapping on a focus will bump your swiftness uptime right to essentially 100%, so that’s quite easy access to permanent swiftness.

On top of all that, we’re getting an awesome 25% movement trait in chrono.

I don’t understand how it’s possible to complain about this. ‘I know you gave us a ton of nice stuff Anet, but I think this stuff, despite being normal to what other classes get, should he better!’

There are lots of game-changers for the mes vs thief matchup. A few off the top of my head:

Mesmer has tons of access to cripple. Mesmer vs thief is a lopsided fight in part because of the mobility advantage that thief enjoys over mesmer, and high access to cripple will even out that advantage.

Additionally, lockdown builds are generally more effective against thieves than pure power shatter. The added form of offense is effective in many ways at shutting down some of the popular thief builds. With the baselining of IP, it allows folks to run power lockdown as a main build instead of being forced into illusions for pure power shatter.

Additionally, running with a staff in chaos gives you access to low cooldown chaos storms, the strongest aoe denial in the game. If a thief engages into that, they’ll have problems. On top of that, the staff trait gives high access to protection, which will further help to mitigate thief burst.

And before someone calls me out for being part of the ‘cabal of the mesmer forum’, this is a summary of a discussion I had with Supcutie last night. The mesmer vs thief matchup is getting some serious equalization factors, and how equal it becomes will simply have to be seen in playing.

Argilla.8340:

Exciton.8942:

Because people find game stagnant and they will leave.
They need something brand new to bring back players even if that means they have to rebuild balance from scratch.
Also, devs may like a chance to overhaul everything so that they can implement some of their more crazy ideas.
It’s more fun in the end for both players and devs.

It’s not fun if the meta took 2 years to estabilish in the ESL scene

All this is doing is destroying esports and make anet looks like bunch of idiots

If you think that GW2 is anywhere close to ‘established’ as a legitimate esport, then you’re just fooling yourself. Nothing about GW2 PvP is a solid and established esport, in any sense of the word. Anet has been throwing buckets of money at it in a futile attempt to make it work, and it hasn’t.

The meta is due for a massive shakeup, and that’s what this patch is going to deliver. It’ll ramp up interest in the game again, get new players back into PvP, and actually help rebuild the PvP community to an extent. The only people moaning about this are the 3 people that like stale metas. They’re loud, but not very common.

mistsim.2748:

what’s all this talk about mesmers needing to work hard in the current meta? rangers have been in a worse spot.

Whatever you say…

And I’ll just fix this bug.

Dondagora.9645:

Based on the new changes in our traits, I’d like to throw out Ineptitude Mesmers as a possibility, or possibly a hybrid of Inept Chronomancers… Ah, that doesn’t sound so cool. Inept Mesmers… naming can do with some work.

But my thoughts are thus: Ineptitude has no hard target cap, it has an ICD per foe, so one mesmer can throw a couple seconds of confusion on to an entire zerg with dodges, blocks[not that we have many], and Blurred Frenzy. Could be potentially strong addition to break zergs without solid stability and cleansing via hard and soft lockdown, mimicking Glamour Bombing in its potential usage. Plus, lots of blind for overall survivability of the squad.

Well, the issue with ineptitude with the function of the raid here is that the idea is to have a very solid lockdown on an enemy group, so in an ideal case ineptitude won’t be getting used as much.

That being said, I’m also thinking running 1 or 2 maim shatter mesmers, potentially with ineptitude or something else, and with the blind on shatter trait and such. It would be a nice injection of some solid tanky skirmishing potential (full dire) into the frontline with the blinds.

Also, something to note:

With the upcoming changes, I’d like to try and put together a 10 man group for some small raids, to test things out and get some experience running as a coordinated party. If you’d like to be part of this group, just toss me a forum PM, and I’ll start figuring out possible raiding times.

I’m looking forward to the GTFO potential of this. Something not going your way? 2400 range instantly, see ya!