Guild Wars 2

They forgot to nerf mesmers and are currently busy flipping coins.

You have to admit, mesmers are basically only used because of portal and illusion of life. I would rather see ArenaNet nerf those and work on our weaknesses than making us into toolboxes.

Keep in mind ranger has to actually hit you for the stealth to take place

Hmm, does he? I just started a ranger (lvl 20 thanks to achievement chest scroll) and the current Hunter’s Shot applies it’s swiftness even when i’m not hitting anything (no need to even be in combat).

The patch notes state that it applies stealth, there is no mention of “on hit” (apart from the old, now removed, vulnerability). Also it’s quite possible to just shoot straight into the ground or into the air by moving your camera.

Seriously,who cares about keys or wps.

Seriously, who cares about fractals.

So…

+ no nerfs!
+ minimal better condition cleanse
+ unneeded buff to an already good signet

- still no out-of-combat mobility
- still no reliable swiftness apart from focus
- our traitlines are still a mess
- still a lot of bugged/unclarified traits (iElasticity, …)
- useless buffs/boons on random skills/traits
- weapons that don’t know if they want to be condi or power
- too high cds on a lot of skills
- phantasm specs still op in 1v1

Well, that’s most likely the best patch we will ever get, so i guess we should be happy.

On top of this is the new ranger stealth:

mesmer (usual stealth-build without Veil)
- decoy: 3s stealth every 40s → 9s/120s
- prestige: 3s stealth every 30s → 12s/120s
- Massinvis: 5s stealth every 90s → ~7s/120s
→ 28s stealth every 120s

ranger
- LB #3: 3s stealth every 12s → 30s/120s
→ 30s stealth every 120s

This is without taking traits, BUT:
- we need 45 traitpoints to get -20% cd on 2 of 3 stealth skills (cleansing conflagration + iCelerity).
- we can’t take both cd reduction traits + PU since that would cost 75 traitpoints.
- ranger needs 20 traitpoints to get -20% cd on his stealth skill + SB if he decides to use double bows.
- ranger uses 1 weapon skill whereas we have to also use 1 utility skill and our elite.
- the ranger -cd trait is in an agressive traitline, while ours are defensive/supportive.

This is not saying that we should get more stealth skills but that our cds are too high and we need to invest a lot more to achieve the same as other classes.

Yea, this matchup is pretty boring for us as well.

Stop hiding in your zergs and towers and start fighting, then?

Just had 3 millers (1 of them Mya) building ballistas and arrow carts against me when i was attacking their camp…

Phase Retreat is basically everything that’s left after the nerf to Chaos Armor. The might and fury coming from the autoattack also come in handy.

/edit: Being good at tagging enemies should never be a criteria when choosing your weapons. While it may not be the case, it makes you look like a mere zergling.

Against offhand dagger thieves, you can sometimes predict when they are going to backstab you. It’s harder vs d/p so keep moving, changing your direction a lot to increase the chance for him to frontstab.

Both Temporal Curtain and iLeap can be used to get a bit of damage out of the warden. Use the first half of either skill before summoning him and the second half after/a moment before the cast finishes.

But you shouldn’t see the Warden as a source of damage anyway. He creates some kind of safe area around him that protects from projectiles without blocking LoS for you and damages melees. Try to use that to your advantage.

I will never buy black lion keys and don’t do fractals so…Kiel for me ^^

About every class is suitable for roaming in some way.

Warrior, ranger, thief, ele and engi all got fairly high mobility. Guardian isn’t that fast and needs a target, but can be built to be very hard to kill.

Mesmer and necro are the least mobile classes but can at least use stealth or fear to get some space between their opponents and themselves.

So far i’ve seen good roamers of every class. Play what you are good in, the results will be better than just playing thief because of stealth and speed.

Let’s just agree that by population alone, dzagonur is probably the least blobbing server this week :P

Staff: Adamant Guard (Charr T3)
Sword: Etched (Corrupted “Precursor”)
Focus: Cursed Chains
—- not used that often —-
Greatsword: Etched
2nd Staff: Memory of the Sky
Sword 2-6: Etched (^^)
Pistol: Etched
Scepter: Mystic
2nd Focus: Bloodseeker

Please keep your zerging out of my brackets.

Well, i just met you but sadly got zerged by the other JDGE DYE mesmer and the g_i_mped (<- gets filtered) RK(?) ele

/edit: Hehe, i’m also testing my rabid gear again after a while. Bought some ascended pieces recently.

Osi playing FOTM PU build. How could you forsaken the shatter :O

I already met a D/P thief from JDGE (i hate those ^^). Tried to jump me a few times but we had to depart because of the Millerzerg rolling in.

I usually roam solo unless Nubu or Jathres are online in which case we roam as a group.

You will know when you are fighting me…i’m the only BNF shatter mesmer afaik ^^

/edit: Oh, and cheers to Jex for your win against me. Should have focused the duelists and maybe slot a better skill than Technobabble ^^

and we shall place rams upon your corpse!…

Sorry to say this, but…you are too late, this has already been done :P

Good week for farming i guess. Permanent outmanned and loooots of people to kill ^^

I hereby request duels against every single member of [Bots], if you are still there I have waited much too long for this. Ah, and Zumy ofc

Oh, and i’m so looking forwards meeting Osicat somewhere on the field

Go and have some fun on GBL because gandara don’t like defending stuff.

We wanted to, but sadly we had like 10s delay on every single skill and trigger. Other players across all servers seemed to experience the same.

iLeap i okay apart from not working on ramps and sometimes getting stuck.

Chaos armor not stacking is okay and probably done this way to prevent endless CA on zergs. Stealth and maybe even Retaliation should work the same way (by this i mean >combo< stealth and retal).

Every class/build is capable of soloing camps. As a mesmer, you can actually fight right in the middle of the guards due to your clones distracting them some of the time.

So far i soloed camps with shatter, phantasm, clone-spam and confusion-shatter builds. Haven’t tried glamour, but i don’t really consider it a build anymore anyway.

Just remember to go for the archers early on. Shatters and Chaos Storm will take care of the blinds so you can get your important skills off. As i’m using focus i tend to lay down Temporal Curtain, pre-cast iWarden and pop Into the Void the moment before Warden goes off. This way i ensure that it won’t be blinded and maybe most guards will even be at the same spot (if ItV doesn’t get blinded).

A guildmate of mine got about 43 chars right now (no kidding, 1 for each race-class-combination + some extra). I usually see him playing the same 3/4 chars, so i guess you will have to decide. But see, it could be much worse than to have to decide from 5 chars

EXP doesn’t matter anyway, since they only worthwhile investments so far are the both “guard-traitlines” that give actual stat bonusses and you can do just good without them. Gear isn’t also that much of a problem as long as you don’t go for ascendend trinkets. Exotics are easily bought using badges of honor and karma (Orr temples).

/edit: I would suggest you to play every of your chars at least a bit to get a feeling for the class. Even if you don’t end up playing that class it will help you a lot when fighting against it (that said, you should probably level a mesmer. People are only QQing about them because they don’t actually try to figure out a way to fight them).

Weve spent the past year in the last 3 tiers, and the “small mans” there basically run 10.

Might be different on NA servers but at least over here in EU, we are having plenty of smallscale fights, solo roaming and even duels with players of all servers sitting beside watching (and not even always at mill ^^).

It depends on the server you are playing on/against, for sure. For english speakers, i could only recommend Gunnar’s Hold since i had some of my best fights against those people and everytime our servers got matched against we are having a duel evening on thursday with lots of people coming.

There are still people who don’t care about fractals (and even those who do…will most likely just want to rush through it as fast as possible as with every other dungeon) and won’t be buying BLC keys anyway.

For those people, cheaper waypoints are the only usable thing. Plus, rpg-wise i wouldn’t want a greedy filthy merchant like Evon to get any more power

If you want to do roaming i would suggest to transfer to a low ranked server. There will still be zergs but not all the time and the individual skill level is usually higher so you will get better fights.

At least that’s how i experienced it in EU.

Cheers to the TaG mesmer and guildless guardian i just fought on south camp RoS border. Sadly the TaG warrior who showed up afterwards delayed me just long enough for the RoS zerg to appear ^^ (They didn’t catch me but i couldn’t get the hard earned cap either…)

The melee combo i suggest is sword 3 – 3 – 2 – mirror image – F1.

I wouldn’t suggest doing that against a zerg anymore…the retal damage will severely damage or down you during that one Blurred Frenzy.

I don’t zerg, but your best bet for tagging would be feedback. All those projectiles reflected count as yours. However, retaliation will kill you instantly (and not just down, kill), so it could be hard to get your bags after ^^

remove your go faster stripes and try and run around solo without decent speed boosts

I play mesmer, so your argument about “decent speed boosts” is invalid.

And i do run solo most of the time.

The maps are definitely too small. Much too easy for 1 giant blob to reach everything in time and conquer the whole map.

/edit: I’m still against mounts :P

As if they have ever tested anything on mesmers ^^

Hehe, i mentioned that it wasn’t the best location ^^ Besides, i call everyone disturbing duels an idiot, regardless of server

So why not just move that stealth dont have to increase its duration or anything just move it to a more useful and used weapon.

Which most likely will be:
- Warrior in PvE.
- Thief(Roaming)/Guardian(Zerg) in WvW.
- Engi/Necro in PvP (seeing how Skyhammer hugely favors those two).

And i can tell that the argument for further nerfs will be “but you got portal”.

Thanks to the [Fail] ranger for the duels we had before some RoF idiots decided to blow up the scene.

Wasn’t the best location after all ^^

Then that’s a good thing. There needs to be some diversity in this game, after all.

So why not just move that stealth dont have to increase its duration or anything just move it to a more useful and used weapon.

That would make the torch totally unusable and is not the right path to be taken. I’d much prefer to see iMage getting improved.

Regarding eles, those guys are strange, never trust them!

Necro minions also:
- got way longer cds than clones.
- can only be summoned one at a time by each skill.
- are totally stupid (clones just auto-attack, but at least they are actually DOING something)

I much prefer our illusion system over necro minions. If you want to play something like necro, maybe try that class ^^

The Dodge clones attack who you have targeted at the time which is nice.

Might be you just had been lucky…for me they always tend to attack what’s next to them.

Disarm one person? Lol. Five attack you and your dead instantly

Not an argument. If those 5 are halfway capable, you are dead anyway. Warriors can bock Shield Stance, Endure Pain, Berserker Stance etc. It doesn’t win you the fight but it buys several seconds which is about the same other classes can do AND unlike stealth or invul, you can still cap points while under any of the mentioned effects (if i’m not mistaken).

Also, if you’re not into capping points, you also got superior mobility. Just yesterday a guildmate and me (both mesmers, he condi, i shatter) were fighting a D/D ele and a warrior (sword + something else, don’t remember). It was MUCH easier for us to focus on the ele since the warrior lead us on a merry chase everytime he was halfway low.

Only lowering base HP won’t do much. You (warriors) also got the best armor, mobility, damage and CCs in the game. Something like frequent access protection could instantly make the class OP. And, actually, lately our WvW roaming group consists of mainly Warriors because they are actually extremely strong.

And now, if you would flame me, please

I don’t really see daggers as a mesmer weapon…we are a duelling class, not online by profession mechanic, which hugely favors 1v1 over 1vX or XvX, but also by style. Daggers are more of a “cowardly” weapon, used to stab someone in an unforeseen moment in a weak spot.

I never had any issue with blink…i also can’t really understand all the thieves complaining about their shadowsteps getting stuck. After a while, you know where you can port and where not and where you can use Blink to get away from a zerg chasing you (south west camp, in front of the entrance. Left from the door you can port onto the roof from outside, giving you quite an advantage against opponents that have to walk there. Also works with ele blink, thieves blink and even guardian teleports as there often is a white hawk mob that you can target for JI or Flashing Blade).

In zergs you should be have plenty of swiftness from other people. If not, your zerglings are bad ^^

Portal is actually really, really good. Watch some Osicat videos about it’s use and test it for a while. Maybe you will like it afterwards ^^ It’s cd is quite high, sure, but most of the time i don’t really find any other utility i would prefer over it. Arcane Thievery and Mantra of Resolve are the only real contenders here.

Also you are quite contradictory when you are saying you want more stealth without increasing it. Having stealth on more weapons effectively increases stealth uptime for anyone taking that weapon + what we already have. “You just have the option and don’t need to take both torch + the other weapon” is not an argument.

Well, you complain about getting chased and don’t like Blink and Portal. These two are basically your tools against getting chased. You can’t just expect to get away from everything without doing something about it ^^

Personally, i never use Feedback outside of zergs, and i hate zergs. Smart opponents running in groups will never mindlessly spam their ranged attacks in your feedback so you’re better off taking something that will actually help you. If you absolutely need something against projectiles, i would suggest taking Mirror as your heal.

You should actually try playing a thief. From what i’ve reading until now, the class may be better suited for you.

I get never chased down unless i really want that specific kill or get jumped without noticing. I’m using Staff + Sword/Focus with Decoy and Blink as fixed utility skills (3rd is Portal most of the time and i tend to always have it placed somewhere safe for retreating).

Also considering the huge amount of nerfing RTL received until now i’m actually fine with having Blink (traited for 24s cd).

/edit: When roaming on a borderland in WvW, you should try to reach the water as soon as possible. Spear #2 and #4 make up for very fast movement. Also placing a portal in a place that’s hard to see makes it easy to lose those chasing you (try to place it on shallow water as it’s very hard to notice there).

I would go with GS/Staff or GS/Scepter+Pistol as weapon sets. First set got more defense while the scepter phantasm is able to stack a huge amount of bleeds and confusion when taking the trait (would need Null Field as a utility skill).

Rabid is okay i think. You could try to mix some Rampager gear with this to gain some Power and more Precision (for Sharper Images).

Any change in this direction would most likely include a cd increase for all phantasm skills. I rather keep our current, actually quite short cds instead, thanks.

Better out-of-combat mobility has been suggested multiple times and since both Signet of Midnight and Inspiration aren’t that impressive for their passive, i would like to see one of them changed to +25% movement speed.

/edit: After the nerf to Signet of Illusions and since 1500 condi-dmg is enough most of the time, i would actually be okay with any of our signets changed to +movement speed.

We don’t need more stealth, period. Don’t spam it, use it as a timed target drop. When i stealth, i usually cast a phantasm so it’s unlikely to get interrupted, heal and move right through my opponent to reappear on the other side. Most of the time that’s enough to confuse him/her for some seconds which can end a fight quickly.

The GS auto-attack hits multiple times so Sharper Images could stack a lot of bleeds with GS clones.

Would need some testing of course.

Good to see TaG again. Hope you guys had as much fun as we just had on RoS(?) borderlands ^^

→ BNF mesmer and HON mesmer + everyone who got involved into the fight Sadly, we had to run a bit after your zerg showed up but was much fun regardless

As i already suggested multiple times: Stealth from combos shouldn’t be stackable. Also reduce black powder duration to 3s so the thief needs a new field everytime he does his BP + HS combo. The increased amount of initiative needed makes it harder or even impossible to maintain stealth indefinitely.

Leave it as is it currently. Clones can be spammed and most phantasms got decent cds, too. Just don’t shatter when you don’t want your phantasms to die.