Guild Wars 2

I’ve started using sceptre/torch since a nice +crit% stacking sceptre dropped and noticed something about the iMage- not only does it give retaliation when it strikes, but that retaliation is a bouncing projectile which hits at least 3 allies. Not sure if it also heals, as its’ bounced projectile uses the same animation as regeneration (i tend to pop iMage then prestige which bits the mob as its on the way to the iMage). None of this is in the tooltip iirc (referring to bounces- can someone verify if bouncing elasticity works for iMage’s projectile?).

Edit: i did have the torch skill remove conditions trait (more-or-less to give me more of an excuse to use it :p).

No mesmer illusion has an offhand weapon displayed. Not sure if it’s a bug or not but it’s always been that way :/

This thread is hilarious! I intend to take my lil pink ball of wonder into w3 sometime soon just to see how many people i can troll as mesmers can obviously assume godmode and do huge indiscriminate dmg whilst being untouchable.

However, shatterer also has pre-events. Maybe if u did one of the pre-events it would un-bug shatterer?

Wow, i didn’t know dragon chests (or events in general) had DR- that’s borderline crazy when u consider DR was introduced to reduce botting (i have never seen a bot doing an event). The DR needs to be removed completely from meta-event chests and i’d argue from event chains also. DE’s are a major part of pve content- why on earth would you want to discourage/penalise the playerbase for doing them? It’s not like the chests are handing out 4 rares and an exo every time…

Henrik, OP didn’t say anything abt w3…seems mostly abt dungeons/pve.

For dynamic events, mesmers are one of the worst classes for tagging due to our lack of high-dmg aoe and move speed; my necro and guard can both tag much easier than my mesmer cos by the time izerker gets to swing, his target is dead and so he ‘poofs’ away= no dmg. Believe me i have tried selecting mobs at the back of waves but still very few hits. The other main options are sword #3 then 2 if there are any mobs left once ur in range of sword 3 or chaos storm/staff#2 then shatter. I don’t run a shatter build atm but if u need to tag in a DE, get up close to the wave, dodge (traited) mirror images and wrack.

I haven’t pvp’d yet but having to jump several times just to cast a skill is frankly ridiculous. The problem will not go away either due to the LoS nerf. I wonder if the devs have tried this themselves.

I’ve said it before, 2x staff#1 is actually more dmg than axe#2 (i don’t have axe training) and am a hybrid pwr/cond build. We all know that staff dmg is low but this humiliates axe completely- 2 staff autoattacks are better than the axe ‘burst’? -.- please…

The only thing i can think of is that we are encouraged to loot chests and ignore sparkly mobs, or at least we have the option to not pick up porous bones etc. However, sparkly mobs can still have mats on them so really there is no point ignoring any lootable corpse. A puzzling decision indeed, or perhaps not thoroughly tested?

People are ungrateful for buying a different product to what was marketted to them? I don’t think so (i’m referring to the loot nerf of Nov 15th). There are way too many nerfs and not enough buffs to most pve content, but the devs are all pvp’ers anyway so why should they care? They even added a daily that most of the people on EU servers could not do- should i be grateful for that too?

The problem with Avatar.1923 is that guard and warr are OP for most open world pve. Avatar, i would like to see you try that same stunt with a mesmer, ele or necro (not full exo yet) and tell me how well u got on. Just because your class tanks and spanks doesn’t mean everyone else does.

It used to take me up to 30 mins to do a daily on any non-Orr map (kill variety and nodes making me wander) but it’s a bit longer now they have changed things up. I have 2 characters logged at dragons and a roamer, so it’s awkward to do the crafting one but i’m still levelling chef and armoursmith so it’s relevant to that character.

Probably ranger. For DE tagging you really want a combination of movement speed and AoE’s; idk abt ranger but guard staff #3 gives semi-perm speed buff and they have a few leaps to get to the mobs quickly. I think only guardians’ sword main hand lacks any aoe skills but it does have a leap.

I was doing some events in straits of devastation earlier and loot was noticeable because it wasn’t carpeting the ground ^^

Hi folks.

I was wandering around Straits earlier today, doing the usual farming, nodes and events. As a mesmer my DE tagging isn’t great so i notice when i get loot. From at least 2 wooden chests i got bags. I thought chests had only items of uncommon or higher rarity, so can sumone tell me why i got bags (common) from chests? Having had a little look around the forums i didn’t see another similar post and was wondering how widespread this bug? was.

Patch notes :
In PvE, if a player is awarded loot by killing a creature and the loot is of uncommon rarity or higher, a chest will appear that contains the loot that would previously have been on the corpse. If the rarity of the loot on the creature is lower than uncommon, the loot will remain on the creature’s corpse.

The reason for the spike in prices for t6 mats is the loot nerf patch of Nov 15th. Anet have just recently partially remedied this with bag drops but the supply decreased a lot at a time when more players were introduced to the game. I also believe that we need a new method of gaining ecto’s apart from salvage- no rares means no ectos. I’m a casual player who mostly does dailies, some map completion and dragons and atm a legendary is just a pipedream. At least the Feb monthly ‘encourages’ me to do dungeons :p

I also missed out on the extra laurel as i wasn’t even aware that the daily had reset (UK, i think i already had it done for that day). The idea of squeezing in an achievement that half of the available servers will miss out on (timezones) is pretty inconsiderate (didn’t they learn from lost shores?). To be honest, i don’t think they should have added another ‘daily’ without a server-wide announcement which would at least have given us the choice to try to do it or forsake the laurel.

The reward for the ‘3-hourly’ does not concern me at all; it’s the thinking behind its’ release/implementation (consciously not caring about the EU server players) which is poor form at best. I thought the US had generally high levels of customer awareness, i guess i was wrong.

@ Delo; i’m with you on that one, my sarcasm was intended for the imminent aoe nerf and that a few people seem to think they can just run around in a zerg and be invincible :p I do believe that players who chance across a mesmer for the first time in w3 will be backfooted by the way the class works, especially if they have warrior/guardian as their only character.

I stopped using axe when 4 staff auto-attacks did more damage than axe #2 in a dragon fight, even with 25 vuln stacks and BiP. I get the same event reward (in terms of silver) spamming staff1 as i do using Bip, axe 1 and 2. Axe damage is simply far too low and the lack of cleave (ironic) has steered me away from axe. I did Tixx’s smash the town achievement on my mes cos it has sword 1 and 2 for aoe and prestige for when i got bored. Axe on necro is simply sub-par for its’ purpose (power build) compared to any other necro weapon.

If mind wrack was a blast finisher…

If ppl are dumb enough to take a full 100 blades or stand in a red aoe circle then clones actually being an accurate representation of the player will blow their minds! I do it the other way around- act like a clone :p

The answer is simple- we need another way to get ecto’s apart from salvage. Quite why ANet is so keen to have less ppl playing their game (by repeatedly nerfing loot) is anyone’s guess.

AoE is a false problem caused by players not using their brains- that includes you too devs. If you (devs) do not approve of the zerging going on in w3 then you need to increase player-based AOE damage as that is our most efficient tool for punishing a herd mentality. Also on the w3 front, players use their own aoe skills in keeps etc because they are not restricted by the protection of supply- if in-game aoe was made more accessible then players would use that preferentially to their own aoe damage skills. You (devs) have already nerfed AoE with the 5-target cap and if you make the damage less, increase cooltimes, reduce radii etc then you will be flying in the face of the majority of the games’ design (and your own desires too, apparently).

I am also against the idea of targets taking differing amounts of damage from the same AoE skill. If i am caught in a grenade blast, the only way i will take less damage is if there is something solid (like a brick wall) between me and the source of the blast. If you throw a grenade into a bunch of people they will all take similar damage unless they use someone else as a meat shield. In this example though, the grenade is considered a pbaoe, as true aoe simply covers an area and would be more akin to radiation, or a pool of acid, or a gas cloud- it doesn’t matter if you stand in the centre or the edge, you will still get radiation sickness/start dissolving/be gassed. If i fall into a punji pit, it doesn’t matter if i land in the middle or the edge- i will still be impaled. These are true AoE and the way to avoid aoe damage is to not be in the area affected- is that too hard for ppl to understand? The game even gives us a nice red circle and (usually) the time to get out of it- should there be an audio countdown as long as you’re in the aoe too? Seems like a L2p issue more than anything else…

Seems you guys are all focussing on pvp- boon removal in pve is pretty much redundant. If the devs do anything extra to boon removal they would have to reduce some other facet of the skill such as its’ aoe, range or damage, all of which are a bit ‘meh’ in pve. So if the devs gave u 3 boons removed but no AoE, that would be a harsh nerf to its’ use in pve (as not many mobs buff themselves in the 1st second of a fight and it doesn’t strip defiant stacks). I would be happy with a mini-arcane thievery, though that would mean more careful timing of its’ use. Or how about it casting a mini chaos storm (2 sec) on the target mob using its’ current radius?

While i can see where you’re coming from, i don’t think i would enjoy that playstyle so much. Necro’s downed skills are poor and i anticipate being downed much more if i had to use my hp to power skills.

@ necropsy- we have a nice trait which extends the duration of all sceptre conditions by 33%

Nixon: lol, u cut out the very part in my post which you try to use against me…gg.

Whilst i think that our fields are good i wouldn’t say they are amazing (randomness would like to shake your hand) and feedback’s main effect (imo) is to reflect projectiles so it’s cast on the target, not yourself.

Dhampyr that solution is only viable in pvp and would nerf #3 into oblivion in pve. There is little point in having a combo finisher unless u have utilities with fields/ fields on a weapon swap which, i admit, most people would have :p If it was a blast finisher though there would be no benefit to the mesmer as GS is a ranged weapon :/

@ Raven: i agree with your 2nd part but if you take a look at the first page of necro forums maybe there are only 4 posts relating to a form of pvp (in the title). I said it before; pvp’ers have their own forums and whilst it’s perfectly fine for ppl to post in the class-specific forum it should be understood that there is no pve forum so this is where a lot of the pve’rs come for tips and info. It’s also bad form to hijack a thread, slag people off and not really contribute much.

If Mind Stab gave an AoE cripple or blind/stun (1sec) that would be sweet. As for being OP for interrupt builds- we have very few useable interrupts unless you spec yourself completely around them; pistol#5 and gs#5 are about it, maybe OH sword#4 and focus but you’ll notice they are all on the secondary weapons so the most you’ll have available is two, both with longish cooldowns. Of course you can introduce shatters but again, #3 and #4 are on long cooldowns.

To OP: if the group of mobs is close to you (in melee range), use staff- drop chaos storm and summon the phantasm on 1 mob, switch targets and use phase retreat to summon a clone on a second mob. Switch targets again and just spam #1 on the third mob (you might need to consider chaos armour here) whilst waiting for phase retreat to come off cooldown. During all of this you are moving around, staying close to your clones for winds of chaos buffs and dodging where necessary. You will probably need to spawn a clone on the mob the phantasm was on and from there you can just dance around the mobs letting the clone conditions and bleeds from the sharper images trait do their work (the trait isn’t necessary but it speeds things up).

If the mobs are far away, use GS2 then #4 then #3 quickly on one mob- the berserker will probably hit the rest of the group in it’s initial swing. Spam #1 throughout (switch targets if u like) but be ready to hit #2 as soon as it’s off cd (preferably on a new target) and have #5 ready if they come for your char. This works well for smallish groups of 3 or 4 mobs if you can keep the clones on different mobs and re-summon izerker if the first gets squashed. I have found that, more often than not, if you start with izerker then the clone, the phantasm gets squished in a second leaving you with a clone (at best) and the mob coming for you while your GS1 does less and less dmg.

For GS, use as offensive a weapon as you can (power, precision, crit dmg etc) and with staff you will appreciate some toughness/vitality to help you survive whilst you dance

Hope this helps!

Staff is pretty much our only source of AoE damage and marks are good even untraited. The only thing i would add to the staff is more direct damage on all of the skills, cos when those marks are on cd, it’s #1 spam which is, frankly, lacklustre.

i would change the vulnerability on axe#1 to a 2sec chill or a 1 sec immobilise.

I actually love the sounds, pretty much on all the weaps except maybe axe. I didn’t even notice that all the staff anim’s are the same though so if they changed the animation per skill it wouldn’t make much difference to me^^

Nightpath/Kidel you’re both kind-of right. Minions are not the class mechanic (that is DS) though they make up a major part of the class and are part of general necromancer lore. Personally i am using flesh golem, shadow fiend and bone fiend and having a lot of fun; if they just goof around i find activating their skill gets them working. I don’t pvp/wvw so i can’t comment on those aspects but for general pve they are fine (oh, and flesh wurm is nice to have around on dragon fights).

I think the single thing which bugs me most abt the class is its generally low weapon damage; some may think having minions/wells alleviates this, but why should our utilities pick up the slack from our weapons?

I don’t pvp (yet) and i have found that the axe has a perfect slot when killing dragons apart from Jormag). Staff has range but little dmg, sceptre has higher atk values than axe but its cond’s are overwritten in the zerg and dagger has nice dmg but no range. Use a bloodlust/perception sigil to get 25 stacks of power/precision and swap to an axe/dagger set with lightning strikes/fire blast on crits. Axe is handy for single-target roaming damage if you have a means to cripple the target but even after the +10% damage boost it is still lacklustre compared to pretty much everything else we have.

The problem with the karka and reef drakes is that some classes can spec/ swap skills to deal with them whilst others can’t; necros have no reflect skills that i know of so they have to pop into DS, hope it lasts long enough to survive the attack and still have to deal with the mob at full HP when they drop DS. Maybe a ground-targetted well of darkness would last long enough…but we might as well forget reef drakes with their 3K dot, pull and knockdown, unless you want to wait 1 min between each mob^^ (well of power lasts 5 secs and is prob the ‘best’ thing we have against reef drakes).

I don’t know, i hung around after the event to see what the mobs were like but died a little too readily for my liking (more so against drakes). The idea of having to re-spec ur char just to be able to survive a map seems harsh.

If there are many skills with a 2s knockback/knockdown/launch (which is worse than those 2 put together) on multiple weapon skills, shouldn’t we have something similar with fear?

@Kardia- if you can be knocked back twice from weapon skills and again from a utility, how is us having a 6s fear (the equivalent loss of char control time) bad, even if it took us 3 button-presses to do it, and not this half-arsed 2s fear from 4 button-presses? Why should it take us twice as much effort for a third of the result?

I would love it if focus #1 (reapers touch) gave a 1s or even 2s fear as it is supposed to be our kiting offhand.

Switch to using staff as main instead of sceptre/dagger. U can trait for LF on marks trigger (20 points in Soul Reaping) and the staff has +LF on its auto attack; it also has a spammable regen to keep ur HP ticking over. The Spectral skills are great for gaining LF, but it seems to me that you’re relying a lot on your first spite minor trait which is fine for pve, but not (as you know) for pvp.

It amuses me that Sleepy only does 1/2 damage in his full MF set when no-one else is saying that. Maybe Sleepy needs to get a MF set which optimises his offensive stats.

Also, the dev’s have stated that they have added a loot-boost to players on rewards from chests based on their % MF and we have leet pro’s like Sleepy and Jasher who want to nerf those rewards for the whole team just to satisfy themselves. Nevermind that some classes have to work twice as hard as rolfstomp warriors to come close in terms of damage. Time to get of your high-horses, gents.

Quick question- does the trait which removes conditions on shatter synergise with Illusionary Persona (causes the shatter effect on yourself) so that you can f1-f4 to remove conditions even without a summoned illusion…?

Regarding the death of the wurm; its combo field and blast finisher are usually completely wasted because there is nothing around the wurm to get hit by it.

Of course the wurm does more damage than bone minions- they are just to explode in a combo field (i can’t believe anyone uses bone minions for their normal damage). You might also note that i did specifically say that it’s good against champ mobs and vets, but once that fight is over you’re stuck with the wurm and have to kill it to move on.

If you find that the wurm isn’t getting aggro much, that’s because you have cast it far enough away from the mob to prevent it getting aggro, and the fact that it’s damage is not burst unless you trait for it and kill it.

I like the wurm as it is; a situational utility.

You might be better off throwing out a clone then phantasm in quick succession (easy with staff/GS) and keeping distance as mobs aggro based on the proximity of a damage-dealer. This is why, more so with staff and sword main hand, mobs will go after you rather than the phantasm- you have dealt more damage and are the same distance or closer than your phantasm.

Having re-read your OP Rala, perhaps i was being a bit picky. On the other hand i’m sure you can see how i arrived at my conclusion from this sentence: “It is perfectly fine to pull with this, but the radius of the pull is quite large atm allowing you to pull people far beyond LOS” which implies that we should need LoS to pull people.

In my opinion though, i can’t respect something if it’s easy to do on every class (bar necro- 1 40 sec knockdown on an elite skill, no launches, a couple of 1-sec fears, 1.5 s traited…)- i can appreciate the fun side of it tho :p

The other thing is that mesmers are ‘encouraged’ to use certain builds because they are simply better/faster/more efficient/less hassle than others (mantras for example) and as a result, some skills/traits are over-emphasised due to lack of choice. This has the effect of making the class appear gimmicky when in fact it lacks build variety.

Hmm, interesting interwebz failure- this is the web page link:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_historical_traits#Necromancer_traits_2

and i merely scrolled down to the necro section and pasted that instead of the whole shebang, but i guess ctrl+v got confused somewhere. Our current traits are also there though…

@OP was it really that hard to 2-hit a phantasm and find the mesmer? Or just 2-hit the phantasm whenever it spawns, as the mesmer obviously has no intention of capturing anything and is just kittening on by…?

edit: i can’t say troII (capital ‘i’)?….

I had a look here http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_necromancer_traits and there are some pretty sweet traits that got dumped…

I have two issues with the first post-

a) Ralathar wants us to need LoS to be able to pull a target

b) He respects a tactic which is ‘laughably easy to accomplish’.

If he played a mesmer, he might have some understanding of just how much the LoS patch has affected our class.

GS is a ranged weapon- having iZerker spawn next to you then start spinning would be a complete waste of damage as it has to reach the target first. This would be ok if we didn’t have LoS to the target, cos at least we would have something to use instead of the ‘You fail’ with an ‘obstructed’.

+1 king.
The only thing i would suggest is using the GS auto-attack first just to make sure you have actual line of sight to the mob, otherwise you find out the bad way and you lose the clone from gs2. It’s frustrating to fire mirror blade only to get ‘Obstructed’ -.-

Not everyone pvp’s, and in pve the wurm in it’s current form is awkward to use at best, unless you plan of using the tp during/after the fight. Even then, it’s only really useful for vets/champs etc and they tend to kill it before u use it’s tp ability. This seems like a good case for pvp/pve separation of how the skill works (btw, WvWvW is not pve).

Sausage: the point i think the OP is trying to raise is that other professions actually use their weapons to deal damage but we use ours to generate LF. Name me one single necro weapon skill which out-damages well of suffering. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that we have to use our utilities as a major source of damage, especially AOE damage, instead of our weapons? Other classes get to use their utilities as, you know, utilities…