Guild Wars 2

Thief stealth is fine. It’s combo stealth (regardless of class, engis can do this too, not just to the extent thieves can due to having cds) what causes perma-stealth.

Duh, the first hours felt like dzagonur had their entire server in RoF borderlands…

Hey, we only occupied the RoS spawntower, built 8 arrow carts, 2 ballistas, 1 treb and had a lot of fun fighting off dozens of players (must be >100 after all) and 3 spawn events with 10 people (BNF zerging, i’m quite sure Jathres will do a video of this…/edit: Better not…i played my engi at reset and…i suck at it) ^^

Most of us logged off after we all got thrown out of WvW because of this fantastic new build which…doesn’t really do anything.

But nice fights against the [Elda] charr thief north of south camp (yeah, i know, i got the name wrong, but i can’t remember the correct capitalization…)

It will most likely get more expensive after the story is over. And the resource node in your home instance is a complete joke. Assuming you get 5 quartz/day, you would need 5 days to make 1 charged crystal. 5 of those are needed to make 1 part of armor.

So after all it takes 5*5*6 = 150 days or about 5 full months(!) to make yourself 1 set of celestial armor.

I don’t agree with Daecello most of the time but this is just stupid.

I usually do the new events etc for 1-2 days every two weeks and continue doing WvW afterwards. I would much prefer to see less but better and PERMANENT content and not something that is there for some weeks and then disappears without having any meaning to the world.

Sorry @ the 2 DeX on RoS border i fought until now. Need to go to work :/ But i don’t really think you would have ever been able to kill me anyway.

or when i use Shatters

Actually, those traits don’t trigger on shatter, only when your clone gets killed/replaced.

Wait, we are in the same matchup right now (Dzagonur player here)? After reading your posts on the mesmer forums i would kinda like to fight you now ^^

Is it possible to LoS in the middle of an open area?

You could always try to put your illusions between you and your opponent. It won’t work when they have some kind of piercing but it’s also one of the rare moments when iWarden starts to shine ^^

Also, i always play like my opponent knows exactly who is the real me and rather try to corner him/her between me and my clones so it’ easier for me to land full shatters and harder for my opponent to see every possible attack.

I play shatter, so i try to put a good amount of pressure to drive my opponent in defense. I assume you play a condi spec, judging from the scepter, or some kind of Seven Mirrors phantasm build. Both are actually quite tanky and are able to grind opponents down. The scepter also synergizes very well with “on clone death” traits. Try to get your clones in the way of your opponents attack as much as possible. Debilitating Dissipation is a great trait since it can proc Weakness which helps a lot in terms of defense.

Top thread on this forum, sticky even:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Guide-WvWvW-Pve-Shatter-Cat-Updated-7-7/page/23#post2275686

I also run a version of Shatter Cat heavy and i have never been disappointed up to this point. I’m using knight gear + cavalier trinkets and end up at 2k power and 1.9k toughness so i’m quite tanky while still doing good damage (Granted, i have the base 15k hp but i played guardian for 1500+ hours so i’m used to low hp pools ^^).

Blurred Frenzy shouldnt be a “defensive” ability to begin with, its used to ATTACK

It’s both and that’s the beauty of it. Maybe that’s part of why you aren’t able to fight against thieves. I tend to use it more for defense than offense when fighting them.

I would take a 15second cool down with it having a Stealth option. Maybe its just me, in PvP without stealth you will be targeted and have no way to remove the target from you.

Yet all the other classes who don’t get any stealth manage to survive. We have some of the best in-combat mobility out of all the classes. Your proposed change would take that away from us. If you want to get more stealth, roll thief, simple as that.

Have you tried kiting a perma stealth Thief?

I’m not playing PvP but i solo roam a lot in WvW (thieves do way more damage here than in PvP and are considered better than in PvP) and i’m able to do quite good against them in 1v1 duels. Between Blurred Frenzy, Phase Retreat, blocks on Scepter and OH sword, F4, Chaos Storm, occasional stealth, Blink and Portal for gaining distance and Chaos Armor (not that much anymore) there are a lot of options to buy you time until your heal is up again.

I also don’t really see why Feedback would be required. It’s mainly a skill for zerging and i only use it when i happen to be in a ZvZ situation. Null Field is a better Ethereal field for solo/smallscale imo and you can always use LoS to block projectiles.

/edit: Personally i always end up using Blink (traited cd) and decoy (also traited) with the last slot being either Portal, Arcane Thievery, the cleansing mantra or Null Field. I like being mobile and being able to deal with conditions when needed.

Change Confusing Images, now it gives stacks of either Cripple or Torment.

I would rather like to see it apply 1s of cripple per pulse in addition to the confusion it already applies. Torment on both condition applying skills would make cleansing too easy imo.

Also our “+33% confusion duration” trait is already weak enough. Don’t limit it further by removing more confusion from us but rather add some ^^

If you don’t want to get killed by other players, don’t play WvW.

This. It’s what we are telling those QQ’ers day and night for months and finally we have it official.

Even PvE enemies tend to attack me, even after Phase Retreat

PvE enemies tend to have quite obvious attack animations so just use Phase Retreat a moment before the attack hits and you avoid it.

and of course with these stealth options, cool downs would be extended.

We just had 2 of our defensive abilities, Blurred Frenzy and Chaos Armor, nerfed. Phase Retreat is basically everything the staff has left to make it worthwhile, please don’t increase it’s cd.

I suggest you use Phase Retreat, Blink, Temporal Curtain, Portal and Swap for kiting until your stealth skills are off cd. Works for me.

[Psy] and [Imp] from Gunnar’s Hold are one of the main reasons why this server is our (my guild and a good part of Dzagonur) favorite opponent out of all the servers.

I would like to see scepter clones being actually useful. They shouldn’t do the whole scepter chain since the results might be…strange and possibly quite OP but add something to the first and maybe even 2nd auto-attack like a 2s confusion (shouldn’t be too powerful) or a bit of torment. Make scepter the punishing weapon it’s seemingly intended to be with torment and confusion already on it.

Also change Signet of Inspiration’s passive to +25% movement speed.

There a more changes i’d like to see but those 2 are among those i like to see the most.

Maybe add a 2-3second stealth after using Phase Retreat

That would be extremely OP…Phase Retreat, when double traited, got about 5-6s cd, so this 1 skill alone would grant 50% stealth uptime without even taking PU.

Mirror Blade is also spammable in a similar manner.

We are no thieves. We can’t spam stealth like them and we aren’t supposed to. Actually i think, that thief stealth is fine, it’s stealth combos that need to be toned down (just make stealth from combos non-stackable like chaos armor).

Our stealth skills are on quite high cds. We got clones to confuse enemies so we are supposed to use our stealth as a timed target drop once the opponent manages to find and hardpress us.

Because the current system already heavily favors the attacker while it should be the other way around.

I don’t really care if this is intended or not, but it should most certainly not be possible.

I will trade Fire shied for chaos armor.
I will trade Frost aura for chaos armor.
I will trade Shocking aura for chaos armor.
I will trade Magnetic aura for chaos armor.

Except for magnetic aura and maybe fire shield i would take any of those over what staff #4 has become.

/edit: Screw it, i would even take magnetic aura seeing that ranged rangers are one of our best counters.

I know illusions need to be target focussed so it will only cast of you have a target

Just make it like Deceptive Evasion: Can only be used while in combat and targets the nearest available enemy.

That will most likely mess with my opening though :/

I will trade all, every single one of my aura’s for chaos armor.

ArenaNet, you heard him/her. Please swap ele frost aura with mesmer chaos armor.

If portal, veil and timewarp are what gets us nerf after nerf i’m all for outright removing them and reward us accordingly. Give them to thieves or warriors instead, they are getting anything anyway.

I would change
Temporal Curtain > players attacked by ranged weapons while behind the wall will have the attacks transformed into boons. detonating the wall gives you 5 sec of swiftness.

So, basically, you want to nerf our only reliable way to gain swiftness? That’s more or less the sole reason why i’m using focus and i won’t be that amused to see it changed in this way.

But the move is now more like an Elementalist’s Aura.

Well, sadly it’s not. Just compare it to all those auras:
- Fire Shield: The might this one procs lasts more than 3times the duration our boons do and is always useful unlike swiftness or protection that barely heals anything.
- Frost Aura: Chill is way better than everything chaos armor can do + it’s a guaranteed 10% damage reduction while it’s up. Also it got 2s longer duration than chaos armor.
- Magnetic Aura: Niche use but at least you know exactly what it does and it’s useful.
- Shocking Aura: We all know that this one is propably the best one. Since last patch it also affects Blurred Frenzy.

So, no…Chaos Armor is way worse than any of those auras.

That’s great for Glamour Support Mesmers.

Sounds very overwhelming…are we supposed to only play support and portal-kittenes now? (/edit: That “kitten” is actually a female dog)

Well, the 1s ICD may be deserved because that’s how the other auras work (even if Chaos Armor isn’t considered an aura). However, taking Fire Shield for example, everyone sees that the might it procs got 10(!) seconds base duration. That’s more than 3 times what we are able to get out of chaos armor and a useful boon on top of it unlike swiftness and regeneration in most builds.

Stuns also kinda immobilize since you can’t move. Changing it to an immobilize would actually make it even stronger since you now need a stunbreak for the daze and a cleanse for the immobilize opposed to “just a stunbreak” for the stun.

@Rufy: Well, seems like that’s your fault. Rangers are actually very capable of fighting mesmers.

Just tested it against some NPCs in the mists. Tooltip still says 5s protection but it’s actually about 2-3s (reset traits so no Illusionary Membrane that could interfere).

Not really. It got a 15s ICD, it already pretty much triggered every time it was off cd pre-nerf.

If anything, it got nerfed by now only having a 33% change to trigger in chaos armor (but another 33% for chaos armor to apply protection on it’s own so nothing really changed here).

If any of those 3 goes however, I’m gonna start maining my engineer full time.

Already got my engi to 80 and nearly fully equipped. Still have to getting used to using utility skills for weapon-swapping but already forgot how swiftness feels after all the time playing mesmer o.O And there are cleanses O.O

But in a year from now…what will the classes look like.

Warriors doing 8k autoattacks, complaining on the forums about being weak.

Mesmers reduced to 1 clone, all phantasms removed, but now having double the number of useless interrupt traits.

Ranger pets now change their color based on the angle the sun is shining on them.

I would vote for the necro. I actually try to avoid necros whenever possible since mesmers just lack the cleanses required to win this.

Honestly? I think they will remove Sharper Images or change it to only have a chance to apply bleeding.

Well, yeah, i was also thinking about boon duration stacking but, at least for me, i makes sense compared to engi HGH and ele insane firefield + blast finishers.

But, as already stated, i’m not that sure about the trait changes. I also thought about changing Chaos Storm since, face it, nobody really fears that skill apart from the occasional daze. I thought about limiting the skill to daze, chill (2s) and cripple (3s) but couldn’t come up with a good overall concept.

At least warriors don’t have to fear every patch knowing that their class will be nerfed even further.

/signed,
Mesmer

They took it, and nurfed it to the GROUNDDDD, they nurfed the rest of the cake too.

Sorry, this is mesmer territory. I suggest you go back to the cool kids.

/edit: And be happy that it’s only the sigil. If this had been a mesmer change it would reduce the damage of terror by 50% and double the cd of all fear skills in adition to nerfing the sigil.

Hi,

as most of you must have noticed by now, we have received yet another heavy nerf to our class. But i’m not (only) writing this because of the nerf but to suggest some changes to help reduce the unreliability of our skills and traits and bring them in line with those of other classes.

This will most likely be my longest post up to this point on these forums but i will try to get to the details of every change i’d like to see.

- Skills:

Winds of Chaos:
- remove Vulnerability.
- reduce Bleeding to 5s duration.

As it stands right now, the staff is basically our only real condition weapon as the scepter still doesn’t fit very well in either power of condi. But seeing that Vulnerability is very much useless on a condition weapon i would suggest to remove it. To offset the increased amounts of condition ticks i also propose to reduce the bleed duration to 5s.
Apart from buffing the condition side of the staff, this change also is a nerf to shatter specs, since most of them (me included) run a staff and can actually make use of the Vulnerability.

Chaos Armor:
- remove Swiftness
- set Protection duration to 3s.
- increase Regeneration to 8s duration.
- remove Crippled
- increase Confusion duration to 5s.
- increase Blind duration to 5s.

While we mesmers are in need of actual movement speed (more to this later), our in-combat mobility is already quite good so in an attempt to increase reliability i propose to remove both swiftness and cripple from chaos armor.
Now that chaos armor got an ICD of 1s i like to compare it with Fire Shield -> 10s might. Seeing that chaos armors boons last not even 1/3rd of this seems a bit odd so i suggest to increase base durations of regeneration. The patch isn’t live yet so i don’t know about the actual protection duration, but 3 seconds seems like a good amount. I also increased the duration of the inflicted conditions as it’s no longer possible to stack them on fast hitting enemies. It doesn’t really make a difference for the blind but our confusion is already in need of a buff.

Signet of Inspiration:
- change passive to +25% movement speed.

Well, as we all now, the passive of this utility skill is very much useless right now as it’s the absolute embodiment of unreliability. Players are basically only taking this skill for it’s passive so i suggest to actually give this signet something the mesmer is heavily lacking: Movement speed without relying heavily on the focus or subpar runes.

- Traits:

Confounding Suggestions:
- now converts all dazes into stuns.

Until now i have never seen any mesmer taking this trait. It’s extremely weak for being grandmaster and even weakens some of our skills (reducing Magic Bullet’s 2s daze to a 1s stun). As we are supposed to have an interrupt subtheme, this trait would actually make some of our skills worthwhile and one could even consider taking Mantra of Distraction (not that you can’t take this trait and activate Mantras 3 times before recharging since both are grandmaster traits in the same trait line).

Bountiful Interruption:
- remove all random boons.
- now grants 5 stacks of might for 20s on interrupt.

The sheer amount of randomness in this skill makes it basically unusable for any build. Since a real interrupt happens maybe 2 or 3 times in a real fight, i suggest to increase the base duration of the gained might to make it actually usable. In combination with the change to Confounding Suggestions, interrupt builds might finally be useful.

Chaotic Interruption:
- remove all random boons.
- add chance for 5 stacks of Bleeding (5s).
- add chance for 5 stacks of Torment (5s).

When you are already immobilizing your opponent, chilling or crippling doesn’t really makes any sense. So i decided to add some damage to this trait in the form of either bleeding or torment. Both conditions are more or less the same so i suggest the same base duration. As a grandmaster trait, this also could do with some good damage.

Well, that’s it. I’m actually not quite sure about the traits but it’s quite obvious that ArenaNet wants to make interrupt builds usable so they need the buff.

And now…flame me to death my pink butterfly comrades ^^

Engis are going to be Jedis Sith o.O

He had to find a shortcut since his friends are way faster than he is.

I also thought of celestial being medium at first. Well, i will pick it either way if i’m forced to since hellfire is just plain ugly to me, but i will most likely never use it and just store it somewhere (as if my 8-tab bank isn’t already full enough…).

10.000 range

Well no, you are right. But also consider that shadow trap (even as is currently) makes it near to impossible to ever catch a thief in a keep. Combined with players able to abuse the inactive counter (not getting kicked after lying dead for 15mins) makes a once opened keep keep (or at least the outer wall) impossible to fully close again.

As already stated, the real culprit is abusing the inactive-timer. Once killed, you should be kicked after a short amount of time (5 mins?) unless you wp first regardless of what you are doing (aside from getting ressed ofc).

Go in to Stealth for 3 seconds and summon a Thief to aid you.

The spawned Thief would always be the melee one with Scorpion Wire, prioritising the target closest to you.

Well, no. PvE for sure is different but thieves are already able to survive 2 stomps in PvP/WvW and this change would bring the possibility to even survive 3 of them if the npc happens to scorpion wire at the right time.

(And for those comparing thieves #3 to mesmers: The rogue is basically useless, never ready in time and does nothing to help you survive. Also our #2 tends to teleport us right into the opponents/mobs…)

GUYS! Guys! I got it. Turn Moa Morph into a Signet. Signet of the Moa? Passive effect: 25% movement speed / Active effect: turns people into a Moa for however long. My work is done here. I will be browsing some other threads if you need me.

I would take it. And never even once use it ofc.

I understood your post very well, that’s why i wrote that all classes that are actually affected in their “jumping-puzzling” by removing their skills (not mesmers, since portal doesn’t help for doing the actual jumps) will complain.

If nothing else, there are always the inquest to attack Rata Sum or plotting some evil plan to conquer the world. Or some villains that escape from Rata Sums prison and cause havoc.

If this is such a pressing problem then maybe when you enter a jumping puzzle all skills should go away…

Nah, then all those professions who got leaps to make JPs easier (guess, how many leaps mesmer got? Right, 0) would complain.

Into the Void got nerfed hard. You have 1 second to step away a bit when you see a line appear on the wall you are standing on. If you can’t do that, i fear that’s a L2P issue.

A trait that specifically affects chaos storm (if i understand that right) feels kinda weird…

But, hey, we currently have a whole load of useless interrupt traits that could be removed to give us something actually useful.

I’m only using Mass Invis since i need the stealth to be able to escape in some situations ((nearly) no swiftness says hi). Time Warp is very useful but could maybe be buffed to 12 seconds like every other source of quickness that got increased in duration after the nerf.

I’m not thinking of Moa as useless as it is very much possible to win a fight. I do, however, think that this skill is quite dumb. It doesn’t feel that special to use it and, in the right situation, it kinda takes the whole competition out of a fight.

I would like to see the following changes:
- Either increase TW to 12s OR make it a glamour skill (so it’s affected by glamour traits) since glamour builds took big hits with the confusion nerf.
- Maybe increase MI stealth by 1s…or not, that skill is actually quite okay.
- Replace moa with…anything.