Guild Wars 2

LeoWolfish.8917:

So no duel swords for WvW then? I never got around to using the bug or WvW in general yet so I don’t know what it entailed anyway. I am still going to try and work around this I think.

Ok, here’s the deal. You used to be able to use ‘swap’ even after the clone died. It would move you to the clone’s last position and do the cleaving immobilize. This is the only thing that lets it be used in many situations.

In pve, the clone often gets instakilled by aoes, and this used to let you sorta plan a safe route to leap to and/or get through a nasty area. Now you can’t.

In pvp, the clone will often be cleaved down. You used to be able to use this to your advantage, sending the clone through a place you wanted to go to put a tether to go back to. Now you can’t.

In large group WvW, the clone dies almost instantly. The only reason this skill worked at all was this now removed functionality.

To expand on wvw and mainhand sword. Blurred frenzy will kill you on retaliation. The autoattack is not particularly high damage. Now the third skill is completely useless. I honestly can’t see a reason to use mainhand sword in wvw now. In fact, I only see reasons to actively avoid it.

In other news, I can highly recommend dragon nest as a game with incredible combat, high quality story and writing, very reasonable class balance, and highly skill dependent pvp.

Every new patch just makes me want to come back less and less. It’s just become comical at this point.

Savoy.6824:

So does this build still run with Centaur Runes or have Strength runes replaced them?

I used to run with divinity runes in PvP (centaur in wvw because that’s just what I had). If you’re going to use it in wvw for roaming, I recommend centaur just because you move fast. In pvp though, divinity are no longer good at all. I’ve tried quite a few rune sets including strength, but I have no clear preference. Just try a few different ones out and see how it works for you.

Equation Set 1
The prestige
Skill coefficient: 1
Average weapon damage: 1000
Power 1: 1100
Power 2: 1500
Target armor: 2000
Damage 1: 1000*1.0*1100/2000= 550
Damage 2: 1000*1.0*1500/2000= 750
Difference: +200

Confusing Images
Skill coefficient: 2.5
Average weapon damage: 1000
Power 1: 1100
Power 2: 1500
Target armor: 2000
Damage 1: 1000*2.5*1100/2000= 1375
Damage 2: 1000*2.5*1500/2000= 1875
Difference: +500

Equation Set 2
Burn Damage: .25*(1200-1400)328= ~650
Burn time: 5 seconds
Total Burn Damage: 3250
Skill Damage: 3250550= 3800
% Increase: 200/3800*100= 5.26%

Equation Set 3
Illusion attack rate: ~1 attack every 1.5 seconds, or 2/3 aps
Assume 3 illusions.
Total illusion attack rate: 2 aps

Sharper Images bleed duration
Base: 5s
Carrion build: 5s
Normal build: 6s

Critical Hit Rate
Carrion Build Crit Chance: 14%
Crits Per Second: .14* 2aps= .28
Crits per duration of bleed: .28*5s= 1.4
Average Bleeds Maintained: 1

Rabid build crit rate: 45%
Crits per second: .45*2aps= .9
Crits per duration of bleed: .9*6=5.4
Average bleeds maintained: 5

Damage per bleed in both builds: ~1350*.05+42.5= 110

Bleed dps in rabid: 110*5=550
Bleed dps in carrion: 110*1= 110
Difference for carrion=-440 dps

trooper.2650:

Bleed pressure is mitigated by the increase of power

That’s nice to say, but it’s simply wrong. Refer to my earlier calculations.

trooper.2650:

armor by larger health pool

Unfortunately, that’s just not how it works. Armor and health are different aspects of defense. Stacking pure health isn’t effective. Thieves and such will kill you nearly as fast as a total glass cannon. You need actual damage mitigation, particularly in a condition-based build that works on an attrition fight.

trooper.2650:

dodges by sigils

As I said before, the sigils are not a replacement for vigor. You need vigor and sigils, particularly in a build that has no armor. If you get hit at all, it will hurt.

trooper.2650:

condition duration the one I care the most) by runes

The burn duration from the runes is close to useless. It only affects the rune proc and the prestige, but the vast majority of your burning (staff) ends up being nearly unaffected because 1.5s burn only ticks once. In return, you’re losing 20% duration on all bleeds, control conditions, and torment.

trooper.2650:

So, what does? A duel?

A video can show it being effective, but won’t necessarily. Seeing as this is a build for PvP, I’d like to see it being used in tPvP, preferably top 1000 ranked level, and see how it functions.

trooper.2650:

As already said many times CC is not the solution to all. But I have heard so many complainings about “fighting a conditions Mesmer? Just walk away…” You cannot do this anymore. CC helps you keeping the pace of the enemy (unless talking about nike warriors) and the burning and increased damage will do the rest.

Well, I was talking from a WvW roaming standpoint. If you’re not WvW roaming, why does it matter if people run away? Nike warriors and other running builds don’t exist in PvP because they can’t do anything in a capture game type.

I’ll reference calculations that I’ll put in a second post.

trooper.2650:

I took AA from staff for an example. I could be taking #3 from scepter, which is one of the strongest hitting skill. There you can see it is notable. Based on what you say you do not consider anything besides berserker (or anything that max power) or rabid. A sort of narrow PoW? Because lets face it… in pvp you get these values: 922, 643, 434 (celestial) and 328 (rampager). So, it is quite a good chunk of power there.

Your 2 hardest hitting skills are the prestige and confusing images. The prestige will do about 200 more damage from 400 power against a standard armor target. Confusing images will do 500 more damage. Ref EQ 1. Pretty much every other skill will be negligible ( discounting the iWarlock because it’s so unreliable in PvP). So from those 2 skills, you get total damage increase of 700 over about 20 seconds, which is pretty bad.

trooper.2650:

Wrong. You are doing more damage. I have figures showing it.

Yes, you’re technically doing more power damage on your skills. Again though, the increase in power damage is negligible, and doesn’t have a real effect on someone.

Look at one of the two damage skills; the prestige. Your carrion gear means you’ll hit for 200 more. The burn, however, lasts ~5 seconds at 650 per tick, doing 3250 damage. The damage increase from carrion is only a 5.3% increase, absolutely negligible (Ref EQ 2).

trooper.2650:

To me these are “made up” numbers

Well, lets un-make them up. Reference equation set 3. As you can see, a carrion build will average to 1 bleed from sharper images, where a rabid build will average 5. Applying damage per bleed gets you a total dps loss of 440 dps for carrion.

Note that this is 440 damage per second. Recall that your increased power is getting you ~1000 (counting all skills) damage every 20 seconds or so, which is only a gain of 20 dps.

trooper.2650:

If I favor power over conditions it’s ok (a 4/4/6/0/0 for instance). It’s not ok the other way round. I am proving this wrong.

It’s not a matter of what you’re favoring, it’s a matter of how you do it. Firstly, I think most hybrid builds are bad, because they simply don’t add up the separate parts to be better than a pure build. That being said, the most successful hybrid builds utilize high crit. This is because both power and condition damage for Mesmer scales with crit. Power without crit is nothing. This is most evident when one looks at my immortal build. I had 2400 power…but no crit, and my power damage barely tickled anyone. You simply can’t do good power damage without crit.

Because of no crit, your build does no power damage and is useless as a hybrid. It’s the same the other way around though, mainly power and no condition makes it do no condition damage and is useless as a hybrid…but at least control conditions like weakness and cripple still work.

Deli.1302:

Wanze.8410:

You can actually fully auto heal yourself by using a Tome of Knowledge, which grants you 1 level of experience (and a nice knockback).

Didn’t they patch this ages ago?

Yes, they did.

maxinion.8396:

Anyone ever seen 15 wardens bug out simultaneously?

Yup, happened last night in a 5-mesmer Arah P2. Awesome. Truly a beautiful, magical moment.

Hah, I hope you recorded it.

So uh, could we stop bumping this please? I don’t think this guy is trolling on purpose, but it’s certainly filling the same role. This post has less than 0 value and shouldn’t need to be on the front page of these forums.

Uhm. DeathReign pretty much covered it, I’ll just chuckle quietly.

trooper.2650:

Compounding celerity doesn’t solve all our problems, I know it but I still think it is underrated. Clones dying quickly? How hard is it to produce 2-3 more clones? A dodge and a phantasm? Really, I have been able to keep up with fleeing foes only thanks to this trait. Anyway, clones don’t die when chasing…. And if escaping ppl will go after you and not the clones.

I actually didn’t touch on this choice before, but I may as well. CC is actually a pretty decent trait. The 30% boost is almost as good as swiftness, and so for mobility in a fight it’s really nice. The part where it starts failing is when things go wrong. If you get jumped on by several people, your illusions start dying faster than you can put them out, and you need to gtfo real fast. Suddenly CC is useless to you, and that’s its main fault.

trooper.2650:

I agree with the low vigor generation but that is easily fixed by double energy sigil.

That’s not enough. I run with double energy sigils in every build I use (for PvP anyway), and I still value vigor massively.

trooper.2650:

But I have a question. Do you agree with the above calculation? It says that although the low crit rate, your weapons with carrion end up doing more damage. You do more damage. Not a little bit but an average 45% more than standard to be precise.

Your calculations and numbers are correct, but you’ve drawn an invalid conclusion. Yes, you’ll do % more damage. However, you’re misleading yourself by looking at it as a %.

Example: One hit does 10 damage. You change your gear and the next hit does 15 damage. You’ve got a 50% increase. Unfortunately, the actual value of the increase was only +5, which is completely meaningless compared to the hp in this game.

Example: One hit does 10,000 damage. You change your gear and the next hit does 11,500 damage. You’ve got a 15% increase. However, the actual value of this increase is 1,500 damage, which is significant when compared with the hp in this game.

By taking carrion gear, you’re increasing your power by about 400ish compared to a rabid build. At the very most, you’re gaining 400 damage on your skills (that’s for the prestige). On something like winds of chaos, you’re only gaining 120. On the scepter auto, 200.

While you’re technically gaining damage, the amount you gain is absolutely negligible, completely useless.

trooper.2650:

After all you rely on fire to do the job. A full condi build can reach 1700 condi damage. Here you start on 1400ish and depending on sigils you can get close to it. But power is higher, much higher than rabid.

In my normal condie build, I sit at around 2k condition damage. Your build sacrifices a lot of condition damage with that carrion gear, among other things.

trooper.2650:

Armor or HP. Well, if I could I’d go for armor but it’s a trade for being able to do more damage. More HP isn’t bad and helps with conditions anyway.

As I mentioned, you’re not actually doing more damage, so it’s a bad trade.

trooper.2650:

Bleeds and condi power. With carrion you are not losing much condi damage. Only 10% of 645. Neglectable considering the power you gain. As already said bleeds are not lost completely, there will be only less. However if I wanted bleeds I would go with pistol.

You’re losing a significant amount of bleeding. As I said, a normal rabid build maintains around 5-8 stacks of bleeding from sharper images. You’ll have 1-2 at most. Factoring in your loss of condition damage and running the numbers, you’re losing about 900 damage per second. That’s quite significant.

trooper.2650:

Talking about hybrids. Whatever build with 60% power/40% condi of 50/50 or 40/60 is hybrid. And I don’t see why only power centric builds with a tiny splash of condi can be considered viable while if you go condi you have to go full condi or else you cannot add some power because otherwise it’s useless…

Not really sure what you’re getting at here.

trooper.2650:

The build is not a mess either because it’s exactly what I used to run except for trinket rabid and Master of Misdirection instead of compounding power.

Just because it’s similar to what you’ve run in the past doesn’t mean it’s not a mess.

trooper.2650:

Over all is a variation of Osi napalm build and I wouldn’t call it a mess. It does wonders.

It’s hard to call it a variation of the napalm build when you don’t have the burn duration that makes that build truly work, allowing your staff bleeds to last 2 seconds. What exactly does it do wonders against?

trooper.2650:

I’ve only recently been thinking that crit does little to it (condi don’t crit anyway) and more power would probably more useful hence carrion. It retains everything a PU condi build has (except few bleeds) but it adds more power. Does that hurt it? Don’t think so.

Again, you seem to be missing the point. It retains everything a PU condie build has…except bleed pressure, defense through armor, dodges through vigor, condition duration from the domination line, and aoe cripple. As I’ve said a few times already, the power does nothing.

trooper.2650:

Honestly, I think this build really needs a vid to show its viability/capabilities to convince those sceptical out there. I hope to be able to make one, one day.

By all means, make a video, but a video doesn’t change the fact that carrion gear isn’t good, and showing you beating people also doesn’t mean that the build is effective.

There are other problems with carrion.

It offers vitality instead of toughness. This means you’ll be squishier. Mesmers already have good base hp, and adding more without toughness won’t help all that much. In a full carrion build, you’ll end up around 23k hp…and glass cannon armor. Conditions will still melt you without adequate removal, but now thieves, warriors, shatter mesmers, phantasm mesmers, and other strong power builds will also melt you. On top of all that, you have lower condition damage from chaotic transference and tuning crystals.

Carrion doesn’t give crit chance. You covered the sharper images a little bit, but lets look at it again. I don’t think you really appreciate how much bleed pressure it provides. Your clones and phantasms are all attacking at a quite good rate, regardless of how fast they’re replaced and/or killed. These alone can build up 5-8 stacks of bleeding with a good crit chance…one that is obtained with rabid gear. In carrion, your crit chance will be too low for the sharper images to even be noticed, and this removes a significant amount of pressure.

Additionally, a lower crit chance means less chances to proc critical infusion. This is ever more important since the nerf to it. With carrion gear, you’ll often have large periods of time with no vigor, where with rabid you can usually get a proc almost immediately after the icd ends.

Just a bit of math. You have a 14% crit rate. On average, you need to get 11 hits to have an 80% chance of critting. With rabid, you’ll have around a 45% crit rate, giving you 3 hits to have an 84% chance of critting. This is a massive difference.

Lastly, you’re talking about how much damage the power from carrion adds. It’s…not that much. You’ve got 1500 power. This is nothing. You have next to no crit chance, so almost none of those will be crits. This means that your power damage will be hitting minuscule amounts. The issue is that you’re taking this power just for a tiny boost, not for an actual hybrid build.

In an actual hybrid, you focus on effective critting power damage alongside condition pressure. With carrion, you’re focusing on condition pressure with a tiny bit of power that adds next to no damage…but sacrifices condition damage, survivability, and indirect survivability (vigor access). It’s simply objectively worse in every way.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Pyro’s BG I think. JQ is still very active (if you consider biggest puggy blobs active) and manage a lot of PvDoor. BG remains tier 1, and pull numbers when they want to. TC is also solid but like the other two tier 1’s, post season 2 numbers, participation, and the entire future of wvw seems in flux.

The point is all three #1 servers still have ample activity with guilds who, once you’re on the server and actively participating with, will take you on board.

I’m FA.

I haven’t been playing recently because I’m tired of bashing my head against the proverbial brick wall of this game’s balance. Once mesmers get some attention, I’ll come back.

Honestly, this is a pretty bad build no matter where you look at it.

Firstly, divinity runes are pretty bad now. They just don’t give a whole lot of stats, so not worth it.

Blinding befuddlement is a bad trait. It used to be good, then they slapped with an icd, and now it’s bad. In this build, you don’t actually have a ton of access to blind, making it an even worse choice.

You’ve got confusing combatants, but this is very much a shatter build. That’s not going to do a whole lot.

Signet of the ether is never a good choice in a build intended for non-PvE, and it’s particularly bad in this build, since you’re not using the active for any reason.

Signet of midnight is really just all around bad. I believe you took it as a source of blind in this build, but since blinding befuddlement is also bad, that just makes signet of midnight even worse. It’s really something that nobody should ever put on their bar except in the most oddly specific of situations.

Lastly, this is a hybrid build, but it doesn’t hybrid very well. You have access to only 2 real conditions: torment and confusion. Mesmers, contrary to popular belief, aren’t actually good at applying confusion. Your stacks have low duration, and you can’t stack it effectively. Your other condition is torment, but that’s also incredibly low duration and stacks. Maim is just a non-viable trait unfortunately, despite it being fun. On the power side, you have…not much. 1470 power is hardly enough to tickle most people, particularly when you remember that you only have 25% crit damage.

Overall, this is a build that will deal less damage than either a full power build or a full condition build, and is almost as squishy as a full power build. It’s not good.

Zelulose.8695:

GS/Staff Is the spec for a tpvp build I recently posted too.

LumpOfCole.4701:

I find GS/Staff to be the most fun weapons on the Mesmer when paired with a shatter build.

You don’t play GS/Staff in PvE, and you don’t play shatter in PvE, which is what the vast majority of this conversation has been about.

Each stack ticks down separately. If you leave twice, wait 24 hours, then leave a third time, you’ll only be banned until the total number of stacks on you is less than 3.

If you are DCing so often that you get 3 stacks of dishonorable within 72 hours, then the privilege of playing tournament games has been temporarily revoked. Fix your internet, then try again. If you can’t fix it, you don’t deserve to play tournament games.

I never run with speed-run groups. Literally never. I only use the group-finder tool and find pug groups.

The vast vast majority of pug groups melee bosses, and are quite decent at it. I’ve never ever had a fractal group complain about me meleeing tentacles on maw, and if I’m fighting mobs that are dead by the time I get to them after dropping a zerker/mirror blade, then I don’t need to drop a zerker/mirror blade.

maha.7902:

Ah ok, if boss cam is fixed, then melee is fine. The boss cam was just…so bad.

Bugged boss cam, almost zero AR guardian. Did a 38.

There is absolutely no excuse for ranging when I can take a low AR character, play on bad latency and survive with two melee sets.

I didn’t say it wasn’t possible, just that it was so bad.

I don’t enjoy wrestling with the camera angle in order to actually fight effectively. It just wasn’t worth my time and effort.

StickerHappy.8052:

Fay.2357:

StickerHappy.8052:

Whatever happened to you pyro? Havent seen you in a long time?

Got tired of playing a game where the only class I play is broken and neglected. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing dragon nest.

What server are you on?

And ign ill add you

Playing on DN EU and DN NA. EU contact would be Pyrospuncher, NA would be Pyrostwirler

maha.7902:

In the ‘save the prisoners’ bit, it provides a ranged cripple and quite good distance knockback, and that’s very helpful. I’ll swap it off for the boss though.

or you can

temporal curtain
magic bullet
signet of domination

You could, but iWave is better than magic bullet, and you can put on signet of domination regardless.

maha.7902:

On the final boss, I use it because of 2 bugs: wardens and boss cam. If the boss cam bug was fixed (I haven’t done that fractal in ages), then it should be fine to melee. However, with that bug the boss ends up out of your actual FoV, making it simply too difficult to distinguish skill animations. That area is also one of the areas in the game where the warden bug rate approaches >75%, making the standard Mesmer melee defense against it very spotty.

boss cam is fixed. I did grawl 38 with like a 10AR guard and did pretty much fine as well, so there’s no excuse not to melee when you can dodge the love arrows (you don’t reflect those anyway) and dodge/frenzy some of the other skills.

Ah ok, if boss cam is fixed, then melee is fine. The boss cam was just…so bad.

StickerHappy.8052:

Whatever happened to you pyro? Havent seen you in a long time?

Got tired of playing a game where the only class I play is broken and neglected. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing dragon nest.

Dawdler.8521:

Azo.5860:

- great play from doiid.. appriciate.. but it is the just other side of glass.. if it would be fights as versus not blob and as similar competitive/challenged vs another organized group.. ?
i am critizng mesmer, and yes it is 10x more fabulous cuz which is most rarely happens.. depends of skillfulness of player, but not fair challenge compare to other classes.. (skipped ranger and eng dunno much them)

Not exactly sure what you mean, but shatter Mesmers have always been great no matter the type of foe you face. Large raids, small raids, solo combat, it can do everything when played well. Most of all, its just plain fun. If you dont want to be glkittenter, just beef up on toughness by using knights.

What? No. The meta is GWEN for a reason. I like to amend it to GWEN-m, because raids grudgingly drag along a mesmer because they want veil.

In large group fights, mesmer isn’t all that great. Sure, you can do okish, as shown by the video, but lets be honest. A necro, ele, or warrior would be doing 10x the damage with 1/2 the effort.

In small groups (<10) mesmer is actually quite good. You can actually do damage and have access to most of your good utility that is illusion based. Unfortunately, if your group decides to go zergbusting, you become useless again.

In solo fights, shatter mesmer is okish. It’s decent, not great. You can do fine with it, but it simply doesn’t hold a torch to the normal solo mesmer specs of phantasm and condition damage.

I’m not entirely sure where you got this idea that mesmers, let alone shatter mesmers, are great at everything. At best, shatter mesmer is okish at everything, while mesmers as a whole range from great to total crap.

Glad to hear you enjoyed my videos. It is a shame that the build is no longer possible.

A tanky healing build is completely useless in dungeons. All dungeon builds just be designed around damage output first, and all other utility worked in alongside that. For good dungeon builds, look at maxinion’s dungeon guide linked in the stickied guide thread.

Seras.5702:

Ithilwen.1529:

I use clones traited to damage on death. When the zerg kills them, they suffer.

Being able to deal aoe damage shouldn’t be trait dependent. Just my opinion.

While non-trait dependent aoe would be nice, I have no problem with the concept.

Mesmer is a highly trait dependent class that utilizes traits to drastically change how it functions, performs, and plays. Having access to traits that form an aoe powerhouse spec seems right in line with class design.

maha.7902:

off the top of my head:

ZERO

maybe we need to initiate stage two of greatsword purification.

The only fractal I’ll use it on is volcanic.

In the ‘save the prisoners’ bit, it provides a ranged cripple and quite good distance knockback, and that’s very helpful. I’ll swap it off for the boss though.

On the final boss, I use it because of 2 bugs: wardens and boss cam. If the boss cam bug was fixed (I haven’t done that fractal in ages), then it should be fine to melee. However, with that bug the boss ends up out of your actual FoV, making it simply too difficult to distinguish skill animations. That area is also one of the areas in the game where the warden bug rate approaches >75%, making the standard Mesmer melee defense against it very spotty.

maha.7902:

Seras.5702:

GS is still a great weapon, just not optimal for dungeons/fractals unless range is absolutely needed.

examples needed

The next paragraph had some examples. GS is good for open world pve, it’s a very strong weapon for shatter builds, it’s a good weapon for pvp phantasm builds, and it’s (relatively) good for long range damage in large group wvw.

Just don’t take it into dungeons/fractals. The only time I remember using gs in a fractal was when I had to solo the molten duo.

I find that unless you’re on spirit watch, bunker/support builds are worse than most alternatives. While they perform well in theory, they necessarily rely on your team not being idiots, and that’s not an assumption you can make.

Good solo queue builds are ones that can be used to work games into an unbalanced position for your team. Bunker/support builds are used to make your team win an even fight, and you can rely on having even fights or a team that can win them.

Syprus Soulslayer.1640:

Just got a naga Mouse trying to get use to all the new buttons :/ I use it sometimes but old habits die hard. Id like to think my reaction times are still pretty solid given this fact I know they can get better.

You don’t even need to use a fancy mouse. Intelligent choices for keybinding work just as well. Either way you do it though, the important thing is to avoid ever needing to use your mouse to activate a skill.

Your reaction times are pretty solid, but you simply can’t do things that other people can. For example, cast a phantasm and hit your cleanse mantra at the same time to remove a blind, or activating instant skills while performing other actions.

Ok, actually watched the video this time.

Your playing is not bad at all. Surprisingly good actually, considering that you’re 100% clicking skills.

You really really need to not do that. You’ll be absolutely blown away by how much more efficient and effective your playing is if you use keybinds for all skill activations. 1-5 work fine for your weapon skills, but 6-0 are hard to reach, so rebind them to keys that are easy for you to hit with your left hand around wasd. I also don’t like shatters on f1-4, because it’s hard to reach, so I rebind them to ctrl+1-4

Ok, not gonna lie. That was an impressive number of duplicate posts.

BlackStarVegas.3258:

Alright. Ranger runes?
I am currently utilizing traveler, mostly for it’s solid passive speed boost.
What are your thoughts on traveler compared to other runes?
(Also, I’ve sent you a pm.)

~ Love, Lexxy

Traveler runes are bad at everything except for providing a 25% passive speed boost that doesn’t require tapping the heal mantra to keep up. That’s about it.

blitzkrieg.2451:

Solo que solo que solo que

Means nothing man, it’s 5 random players put together. I’m talking against teams, actual teams. PU is completely useless above solo que level , where pvping actually matters. You act like I didn’t lay out basic and logical reasons why the style of PU goes against the very nature of conquest mode.

It’s becoming very obvious that you aren’t reading a word I write, so w/e.

blitzkrieg.2451:

You have yet to play against top tier teams , ask Supcutie if PU works in top tier play. He would be the mesmer you’d want to ask. Don’t even have to worry about taking my word for it, just ask top tier pvp mesmers and they’ll reiterate the same things I’ve said.

Supcutie is a good friend of mine, and we’ve discussed the topic of Mesmer in pvp quite extensively. His opinion, shared by most everyone else on NA as well as most in EU is that Mesmer itself does not work in top tier play.

I only play Mesmer. It’s the only class I actually enjoy. Therefor, I have 2 options:

1. Use what works best the majority of the time. This is PU conditions.
2. Not play. I’ve been exercising this one for the most part recently.

So I actually ran a somewhat lockdown-confusion build. I used scepter/pistol+ staff, 20/25/25 with daze mantra, disenchanter, and something. Note that I ran this with the original no icd perplexity runes.

It was meh. Lets compare it to engineer. Engineers have pretty solid access to interrupts, like Mesmer, so they could use the 6-bonus about the same. Here’s where the difference is. Engineers have several low cooldown skills/skill sets that are very good at applying long duration, moderate to high stacks of confusion…on top of other condition pressure of course. Mesmer has almost nothing, odd as it is. Confusing images is ok, but the clone-death trait and all shatters have such low durations that it’s just impossible to build up stacks well.

Now, you can’t even maintain confusion through effective interrupts due to how the runes have been nerfed. You’ll put on 5 stacks here or there, and that’s pretty much it. Mesmers are bad at confusion. That’s…pretty much it.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Just raise number of Winds of Chaos bounces to two and let it prioritize hitting multiple targets instead of bouncing back to the same guy twice. Fairly easy fix.

Care to explain what this will do other than making condition mesmers stronger in small-scale fights?

blitzkrieg.2451:

dat

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Ok, so I actually read this, and it’s just a massive rant about PU conditions that completely ignores everything I’ve said about how you actually play it in a game. You’re just repeating the same tired talking points over and over in different ways. ‘But stealth, you can’t capture in stealth, and it’s slow, and it doesn’t bunker bust like shatter does. It’s total garbage and will never work’

Guess what. You’re wrong. You can use the stealth effectively when you have the option to and avoid it when you don’t. It’s not slow, it’s an incredibly strong on-point fighter contrary to the misinformation you’re spewing, and it absolutely does work at a high level in both solo and team queue.

If I bother PvPing, I use PU condie. I stay top 100-200 solo queue, so it obviously works there, and I stay top 200 team queue without even ever putting together a team, just solo queuing it in team queue. While it has never been used effectively in a large tournament before…it’s never been used at all in a tournament before, and as Chaos says, all it takes is 1 team using it and suddenly all you people writing books about how PU condie sucks will feel awfully foolish.

vincecontix.1264:

Lux.7169:

yeah… not expecting much from china based on my games there…

lol what! really!!

We’ve had 2 years to figure this out. They’ve had a couple of months. It shouldn’t be all that surprising.

blitzkrieg.2451:

When I say top tier, I mean it’s not viable against players who are ACTUALLY good at the game and know PU doesn’t work.

Knowing how it works doesn’t mean you can effectively counter it.

blitzkrieg.2451:

They’ll outrotate you hardcore

And for this to happen, you must meet 2 requirements.

1. The enemy team must be organized and preferably on voiop
2. The enemy team must be skilled enough to pull off fast and efficient rotations.

These requirements definitionally exclude solo queue, so PU condies is effective at any level in solo queue.

These requirements also narrow down the number of teams that can effectively do this to about 5-8 in the entire game. 99% of people do not care about fighting these teams, and will not ever face these teams. In all other situations, PU condies is extremely effective.

Jeremlloyd.6837:

maha.7902:

it should be moved to trash can, where mesmers belong with necros

<3

We’ll see mesmers in action during the tournament trust me

Meh, I wish. Mesmers are arguably in a worse spot in tPvP than they are in PvE.

knackyknave.7469:

In PvP PU has a hard time taking and holding points due to stealth.

No it doesn’t. Refer to any of my recent posts and/or main guide for a more complete explanation.

blitzkrieg.2451:

Darnis.4056:

The first idea is just straight up Over the top.
You’re not asking for a buff here, you’re basically asking for an end to a lot of counterplay.
While this may be a good idea for wvwvw since no balance takes place there,
it’s a completely awful idea for skill based PVP.

Completely agreed, i dont think people realize how much counterplay this dissolves.

I’d love to see just the tiniest bit of logic and/or facts to back up your claims…

skcamow.3527:

Counter blade will work on any opponent hit in the projectile path. GS#5 is unlimited, Focus pull is unlimited, and Imbued Diversion and Chaos Storm are limited to 5 opponents.

No no no no no.

Nothing is unlimited unless it’s a line aoe. Counterblade is 5 targets, so is illusionary wave and into the void.

Chaos storm is 5 targets per pulse, but pulses multiple times. Imbued diversion is 5 targets per clone.

Darnis.4056:

Fay you have like 300 games total from both ques..

So?

Darnis.4056:

And even then they seem to be so long ago that they’re not recorded on any leaderboard.

Or you could look at the handy dates included with those to see when it was.

Darnis.4056:

Which is cool I guess, but it also means your rank isn’t really legitimate it’s just the rank you were able to achieve with the first 12 games.

I mean, if you want to think that, go for it. Those records show that I maintain my rank throughout more than the initial bump. If the leaderboards had actually reset properly when they reset, you’d also see my win % being closer to 80%, not 60%.

In any event, I don’t have to defend myself to you. You’re wrong, and I’m right, and the devs will listen to neither of us, nor anyone else here, so it doesn’t matter.

Darnis.4056:

Phantasm mesmers aren’t meant to be the AoE hate machines that Ele’s are, devs have said this,

This is obvious. The problem is not that phantasm mesmers can’t provide aoe, the problem is that no mesmer build that exists can effectively provide aoe pressure in a group situation in any way, shape, or form.

Darnis.4056:

They’re looking to Slightly increase damage and provide maybe some small changes, Not remove counterplay and overbuff mesmers.

Firstly, none of these suggestions would remove counterplay or overbuff mesmers. Secondly, last I checked you weren’t a dev. How do you suppose to know what they aim to do?

Darnis.4056:

Fay.2357
Rank Highest rank Account name Character Wins Loses Win% Server
No data found

Rank Highest rank Account name Character Wins Loses Win% Server
68 32 Darnis.4056 Pink Puma 958 771 55.41%

and Teammate who’s banned for 3 days (thats why rank is 9000 Highest rank still works)

Rank Highest rank Account name Character Wins Loses Win% Server
9000 19 cirocinmycup.6954 Puma Has Micro 319 206 60.76%

Re?

Solo

Wins 134
Loses 89
Win percent 60.09%
Highest rank 52
Time highest rank 2014-04-25 12:00:01
In top 1000 since 2014-01-30 13:48:57
Current rank 9000
Characters Pyros Everywhere,

Team, only queuing solo, never with a team

Wins 55
Loses 36
Win percent 60.44%
Highest rank 191
Time highest rank 2014-05-13 06:00:01
In top 1000 since 2014-05-11 09:00:01
Current rank 9000
Characters Pyros Everywhere,

I haven’t played pvp for 3 or so months, and haven’t played gw2 at all for the past several weeks, because Dragon Nest is more fun to me right now. The only class I play is mesmer, every single game.

Darnis.4056:

I kill the phantasm or CC it before an attack sometimes when I don’t have a choice; ie. no dodge and I’m too far from the mesmer to CC him.

I don’t believe you. Show me some recorded gameplay of you actually doing that and I’ll believe you.

Darnis.4056:

In high skill gameplay this is not uncommon.
Balancing the game for the lowest skill gameplay where this is impossible is silly.

Not to toot my own horn, but my gameplay is high skill. I have more experience than almost any player in this entire game, and I don’t see anyone killing phantasms before they get an attack off, with the exception of the iWarden…but that one is a little ‘special’.

Darnis.4056:

I realize this is a PVE oriented subforum, but still come on guys, I main mesmer this is blatently OP.

Hehe. Are you actually serious right now?

Darnis.4056:

Buffing Mantra of Pain to do instant undodgeable AoE damage is also ridiculous especially with the damage potential and the 3-5 second cooldown.

Is it really ridiculous? Something that you’d be forced to spam nonstop to get any good damage out of it on a class that almost completely lacks any form of good long range non-illusion aoe? Compare it to something like lava font…spammable, aoe, 1200 range, high damage. I think you’re very wrong.

BlackDevil.9268:

I’m fine with anything that makes mesmer more viable in raids as long as it doesnt make mesmer become another ‘’spam aoes to win’’ prof like guardians and warriors, but sadly areanent can’t be kitten d with ’’WvW’’ because ‘’its supposed to be unbalanced’’. Pathetic to fully ignore the biggest part of your game and put the full focus on a game mode that has been going on for 2 years now, which is really boring and only promotes AI play.

My thoughts on aoe:

Make mantra of pain aoe on target.
Boost mind stab in some way: radius, damage, utility, etc

Now you’ve got some quality long range power aoe, particularly with mantra of pain supplementing shatter combos such as mirror blade —> iZerker —> instant shatter on target.

Make daze mantra aoe on target.
Make disruptor’s sustainment into a strong aoe healing pulse on interrupt centered on you, no icd.

Now you’ve got the option for strong long range aoe support that supplements the other options we already have available.

Make Master of Misdirection cause confusion to do 50% more damage as well as last 33% longer
Combine Persisting Enchantments and Glamour Mastery into one trait

Now glamour builds are viable again.

Darnis.4056:

The first idea is just straight up Over the top.
You’re not asking for a buff here, you’re basically asking for an end to a lot of counterplay.
While this may be a good idea for wvwvw since no balance takes place there,
it’s a completely awful idea for skill based PVP.

What are you talking about? Nobody kills a phantasm before its first attack. That’s the only thing that making it spawn invuln changes. You can still blind or LoS the cast of the phantasm, you can still dodge the attack of the phantasm, you just can’t kill it within the first few seconds of its life…which isn’t done anyway.

Krispera.5087:

Would love iZerker to be cast like Whirlwind Attack, but only the phantasm moves, but I guess people would hate it, because you don’t need line of sight to cast phantasms…

You absolutely need LoS to cast phantasms. You didn’t used to, and it was a wonderful time, but that was within the first 6 months of the game iirc.

adelaide.6213:

Actually, now that you mention it, you can indeed still get 80 exotics from bags that dropped from “80 monsters.”

That’s interesting. If that’s true, then it’s absolutely better to do it on a lower char. Not like I haven’t thrown away thousands upon thousands of bloodstone dust…