Guild Wars 2

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I don’t believe you need any rating as Artificer to refine Essences of Luck.

Indeed, you can refine them from lvl 0 i think.
You even get experience from it in the beginning

Mending purity only works on the use of real healing skills, not on healing effects.
In case of Mantra of recovery, it only works when using power return, not when channeling the mantra.

Well thats a bummer.
Few days ago i dragged myself trough fractals to get a vial so i could make a celestial backpiece, hope it gets fixed eventually.

Hehe, this topic brings me 15 months back in time

Pure condition build with dire doesn’t really work for a mesmer since confusion was nerfed.
The only things that put out conditions in a reasonable way are scepter, torch and sharper images.
So you need rabid armor and 15 in duelling atleast.
Condition works best in hybrid builds though where you can also put out a decent amount of direct damage.

It’s all fun and games on the Deso side now, until in 2 weeks they start facing gold league servers again and their pve players go back to the dungeons they came from 6 weeks ago

Dingle.2743:

It’s not colour-blind friendly. I honestly can’t tell the difference between masterwork, rare or exotic, and I think fine/ascended/legendary could be a potential issue as well.

Needs some extra detail to make those sets more visually distinct. Like, say, alternating black marks along the top/bottom for fine/masterwork, and along the left/right for rare/ascended.

What about a small letter in a corner that indicates rarity?
Like ‘L’ for legendary, ‘E’ Exotic, ‘’R’ Rare etc.

Wouldn’t be a patch if it didn’t include a bugged phantasm :p
Just hope it gets fixed soon.
The warden is our best source of damage for attacking structures.

It’s weird that they changed it though.
After one year we’ve all been used to the stationary warden by now, and the warden is one of the better phantasms we have, both in damage and especially utility.
Would have preferred they took a look at the mechanics of our not so fortunate phantasms like the Mage, Disenchanter and Defender who have nice ideas behind it but have some big flaws.

I have noticed my warden doesnt attack structures anymore as it’s supposed to.
Was at Lyssa earlier and tried attacking the trebs there.
After the warden got cast it just ran after the mobs instead of spinning next to the treb.

I tried it against the seperatist trebs southeast of Diessa, there the warden just spawns at the treb and does nothing at all.

DarkX.4315:

The reason why desolation is pulling ahead now is FSP is way too weak, they provide free ppt. With AG and AM, they could cap their stuffs back and not let desolation keep free pts for several hours.

True, it would be a much closer match if it has AG or AM instead of us, next week it will be that way.
But the main reason why Deso pulls ahead is because Gandara also doesnt have as much coverage as Deso. It’s not because we can’t cap things back that you had 100-150ppt for a many hours this morning and afternoon

The ppt’s from all servers have been fluctuating now for 7 hours between around 170 and 270, nothing special about the ppt’s you post there.
It’s not like deso will tick below 200 for long, after 5am you’ll be turning all borders into paper.

Vabbi.
They have been the most consistent of all

If you want to get sigils to add extra damage, go for sigil of leeching.
On crit sigils are unreliable unless you got like 60% crit chance cause mesmers dont exactly spam attacks that often.
Leeching gives you a guaranteed 1000 ish damage + 1000 hp heal at every weapon swap. Not sure if it can be blocked or not.

But when it comes to sigils in general, sigils of energy are really awesome as Pyro mentioned, since it works on top of the vigor you might have, giving you a lot of dodges.

Us preferring to fight Deso instead of Gandara is actually a win-win-win for everyone.
Deso would get some resistance and would have something to log on for.
Gandara might win and have equal points with Deso next week.
They fight eachother next week and will decide who’s the best.
And FSP has something else to do this week other than waiting till next week.

Taldren.7523:

Ironvos.9014:

Hybrids are actually quite nice, you just gotta find the right balance to make every stat, skill and trait be useful.
I run this condi/damage build atm
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNAW7flwzipXUTkGb9IipHBHyBcnUAdSXJF62FC-jEDB4MCyk0w0HBKBqIaslRFRjVvATdKpqUwqXA6YQWdA+ELrWKgnmDA-w

I tried that very build for a few weeks and found it not to be practical. The loss of faster torch hurts a lot and the faster refresh of scepter doesn’t do much for us. Plus the two condition removals every 24 seconds beats the single condition removal every 20 seconds. I would even make the argument that +20% condition duration is better than +200 condition damage.

I don’t take the scepter trait for the lower cooldowns but for the 200 cond damage.
With so much cond removal going on in wvw i find that cond damage is more useful than extra duration since it gives it’s damage faster before it gets cleansed.
The 200 extra cond damage has good synergy with the torch skills.
When i switch the torch for focus however i take the focus trait instead of scepter.
The torch trait really isn’t as good as it seems, and going 20 in domination seems like a waste since its minor traits are really useless.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Bunda.2691:

How much might might a mesmer ignite in a quite tight daylight fight?

A Mesmer might ignite not much might in a fight, but he borrows his opponents might

I think the answer was 42

I don’t mind there being ascended gear, the stat boost is minimal.
It seems to me they wanted to try and have the best of both worlds.
Pleasing the grinders with something to aim for with a small benefit, and meanwhile try to keep people that don’t want to grind competitive.
And imo they did exactly this.

You don’t NEED to run this gear threadmill at all if you don’t feel like it.
If you feel like you really really need that small statboost that badly ,and want to deny it to anyone who actually wants to put in effort to get it because you can’t, then you are part of the problem unfortunately.
Let grinders have their 5%, what does it matter to you?

And no i’m not one of those grinders, all i have is some ascended trinkets from laurels, and i don’t care that other people have ascended weapons and soon ascended armor.
Exotics are fine and competitive.
One missed dodge has more influence in combat that the small statboost.

Too bad, i was looking forwards to an illusionary fusilier phantasm with killshot when i saw that picture :p

Hybrids are actually quite nice, you just gotta find the right balance to make every stat, skill and trait be useful.
I run this condi/damage build atm
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNAW7flwzipXUTkGb9IipHBHyBcnUAdSXJF62FC-jEDB4MCyk0w0HBKBqIaslRFRjVvATdKpqUwqXA6YQWdA+ELrWKgnmDA-w

It has a lot of flexibility in weapon choices due to the 0/20/30/20/0 layout.
And being able to apply decent condi damage on top of decent direct damage can put a lot of pressure on the enemy.

This is what i am aiming for in the next few weeks
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgUQNAW7flwzipXUTkGb9IipHBHyBcnUAdSXJF62FC-j0BBYMCyk0wUIBK5rIaslhFRjVVjIqWlETKgnmDA-w

Even in this build there are a lot of things that are optional, like the weapons, runes, food, sigils, most of the traits, can all be filled in to what flavour you want.

And about Aoe, i think all mesmers are quite vulnerable to aoe pressure since so much of our offense and defense is in clones and phantasms which die in aoe very fast. It’s not just a problem for the scepter.

As for the OP.
I do seem to like your current build more than the one you want to get in the future.
The planned one seems quite fragile to me, but that may be just my own preference since i like to run sturdy builds that can survive a storm when a zerg passes by

… you keep pressing your ‘blink’ key when playing another class and wonder why nothing happens.

around 30g at the moment

Yes i’ve had to fight Caithe once.

I rezzed loads of people inthere.
Guess it’s just a natural thing to do as a wvw player.
And not running zerker gear sure helps to survive that mess in the tower

florence.1674:

Interestingly….despite all the wins by Tankolation, the leaderboard shows Tankolation still as rank 10, which means still in silver league.

https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en-gb/eu/wvwmain

I don’t want to argue about whether Deso tanked or not, i dont know the answer to that anyway.
But the reason Deso doesn’t suddenly show up at rank 9 is because of the way the glicko system works.
Deso only gets to fight servers that have lower ranks than them, making it difficult to gain any points.
If you look at the two bottom servers from gold, Kodash and AR, they started at around 1708 points when the season started, but now have around 1750, that’s because they only get to fight servers with higher rank than them so its easier to gain points for them, even if they don’t win.

I have been thinking of a way to improve mantras without making them OP in any way.
Lately i have been using a bunch of them, and the biggest issues i have with it is obviously the long channel which is required and can easily be interrupted.
The cooldown on mantras is really no issue at all.
Therefore , what if Mantra Mastery (duelling VII) would drop the channel from 2 3/4 s to 2 seconds, instead of dropping the cooldown 20%
For the Protected mantras trait (duelling VI) what if instead of 400 T you would get a 3s aegis at the start of the channel, one layer of defense against interrupts.
And for empowering mantras (duelling XI) instead of +4% damage for each readied mantra, the channeling would give a benefit relevant to the sequence skill.
For example Mantra of Pain could give you 3 stacks of 5s might at the end of the channel.
Mantra of resolve could give 5s regeneration.
Mantra of concentration could give 5s swiftness
Mantra of distraction could give you 5s fury
Mantra of recovery could give 3s protection
This doesn’t make the trait push people to load the whole bar with mantras so that there is room for variation.

I do realise that this could turn Mantra of recovery into a beast.
aegis, protection, cond removal, on heal rune, heal while channeling, 2s channel and 10s cooldown with 3charges.
But that would require a 30/30/0/20/0 spec to get it all and spend 6 traits and a runeset on it. So choices will have to be made either way.

Why not just make the scepter auto attacks do a small aoe at the target.
This would also make it more viable in zerg fights.
And similar to GS clones the scepter clones would benefit from sharper images if they can hit multiple foes.
But make the clones spawn atleast 300 or 600 range from the target so that they don’t get insta killed everytime.

If aoe autoattack seems to be OP, just make the second autoattack be aoe.
So that it goes:
1) small bolt, as current autoattack
2) aoe 120 radius, same damage.
3) same as current, so higher damage no aoe + clone

The clones should only cast number 2, since the rest is pretty useless for them anyway.

Ins.7139:

Goodluck and have fun everyone, yes we morning cap, yes we night cap, yes we blob and yes we have BL’s Q’d by friendlies that refuse to get on TS or do anything contstructive other than rally our enemy during prime time so save time and don’t complain about it lol

Should be fun

Well that gives us a lot to work with on the forum this week

The sigils are still something i am testing with.
The 2 mainhand sigils anyway.
The offhand sigil i chose +cond damage because it makes my conditions more intensive and the scepter and torch skills are the main sources of condition damage.
+10% extra chill duration half of the time would have very little effect.

For mainhand sigils i have been testing with replacing one or two energy sigils with sigils of hydromancy for more chilling. To make up for some of the endurance loss i would get +40% endurance food.
But then i loose a lot of condition duration.

I found however that weaponswap sigil is not a great source of chilling.
It looks thesame as the one on the grenth runes, but it has a bit smaller radius.
And while it is easy to hit power return for insta chilling next to the enemy, it is much harder to justify swapping a whole weaponset for just a chill effect, its quite clumsy.

I changed the traits a bit on this new attempt

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgUQNAW7fl4zipXUTkGb9IhpHBH5A/kCo7cSKK9rB-jECBIOCyk0w0HBKPqIas1PFRjV3ATtiIq2roIa1CBoYOA-w

Chill duration is now 5+1/4 s
You loose celerity, bouncing +33% conf duration and 250 cond damage
But you gain +20% overall cond duration, cripple, restorative mantras, traited torch.

After a long break from the game, a month ago i decided to give it a go again.
Now that i am somewhat back up to speed with everything and after trying out a lot of different builds, as far as my gold reserve allowed me
This is what i now came up with (unfortunately after my reserves were empty).
It is not the only good build that i found, but somehow this one seems to be somewhat special, i cant quite put my finger on it yet, there’s some nice synergies. This is mainly aimed as a wvw roaming build.
And the build is 10 december proof :p , it actually will get boosted by the new changes as i will explain later on.
Also be warned, i haven’t exactly spent hours on writing this text, it may not look very structured atm, and its the first build thread i make.
I will make it a bit more readable if the build seems to be successful in any way.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgUQNAW7fl4zipXUTkGb9IhpHBH5A/8Bojmx1zOA-jECBIOCyk0w0HBKPqIas1PFRjV3ATtiIq2roIa1CBoYOA-w

Why did i call it ‘The ice monk’?
Well the build is very defensive, you will punish the enemy for attacking you while you almost embrace pacifism. You also heal a lot and only fight with wooden weapons. And the runes define the ‘ice’ part of the name.

The build is defined by 3 main stats, Condition damage, Healing power and Toughness.
Next to that there is also Condition duration which is boosted by food traits and runes.

Why grenth runes and mantra’s?
The equipment is pretty much all Apothecary, and the runes are Grenth.
Yes Grenth, those 2.5s runes noone probably uses.
But they are useful, very much so actually.
First of all they give me extra condition damage, always nice.
But the on heal creates a 360 radius (or 300, tested the range in the mists) aoe 3s chill.
With +20% chill duration from the runes and +36% cond duration from food, that turns it into a 4,5 second aoe chill.
The best part is, combined with mantra of resolve you can proc it with the mantra, or with power return, every 10s.
This creates power return into an awesome cc weapon, combined with high healing power and menders purity (-2 conditions 10 dec)

The mantras themselves can be channeled while you are in stealth if possible.
Together with PU this gives you quite some protecting while channeling.

To make up for the fact that this mesmer has no perma vigor the weapons have 2 energy sigils.

The traits are 0/0/30/15/25
Quite unconventional perhaps, after dec 10th it will turn into a 0/0/30/20/20.
The extra trait in inspiration could become restorative mantra’s, this way the mantras get more functionality, i get more heals, and more supportive options.

As we also all know, a lot of condition builds are outthere in wvw, and the mesmer is bad at removing them.
So with menders purity and mantra of resolve we can atleast remove a bunch of them when we want to.
To give some counterweight to all those other conditions that are still eating your health away every second, this build has near perma regeneration. With 1130 healing power that comes to about 270 hp/s.

To sum it up:
Good condition damage, good defense, good healing, good cc
The biggest problem is, if your opponent doesn’t want to fight or runs away, theres pretty much nothing you can do as you have no notable direct damage.

From the points point of view (or something like that) it wasn’t nearly as exciting as last match, where 2nd was only 10k behind and 3rd 20k.

But i was glad to find a decent amount of roamers that weren’t warriors or bs thieves
And that were pretty skilled aswell, had some great fights.

As the first season is already 2 weeks in, the first results of this new match setup are starting to show.
There are mixed feelings when it comes to scheduling of matches.
While people appreciate the fact that they are not matched up with servers with much higher or lower rank leading to ridiculous blowouts, there is also the issue with how predictable the leagues are due to the way wvw is. Small differences in wvw population can have major influence on the servers ppt.

There is very little to do about this atm because changing this would require a major overhaul of the wvw point system, which is not what i am going to talk about.

But what can be changed is how the seasons work and promote a more ‘sportslike’ league.

-First of all, seasons need to be 8 weeks long.
This way each server can fight each opponent exactly 2 times per season.
-Server should switch colours more, ideal 3 times ‘colour 1’, 3 times ‘colour 2’ and 2 times ‘colour 3’.
-There should be an interseason period for transfers and redestribution of servers according to new ranks.
Ideally this interseason should be 5 weeks.
-To promote transfers to weaker wvw servers and promote competition: The first 3 weeks of interseason all servers from Bronze should get 50% transfer discount, and Silver should get 25% discount.
Also the server who comes last in silver gets -50%, and the server last in gold gets -25%.
-To discourage last minute transfers and to give the servers a chance to get a real new rating, the last 2 weeks of interseason should have an increased cost to transfers, +25% for all servers.
-During the season, all transfer costs are normal.

Now why 5 weeks of interseason?
First of all it seems a reasonable number compared to the season length and gives people time to decide about transfers.
And second of all, it would make that each year has 4 seasons ( it’s called a season for a reason )
The seasons could easily be named like ‘Spring 2014 Gold’.

In my opinion, these few changes could make the leagues more professional looking and make each new season really a new beginning and less predictable.
I’m not saying it solves all problems or that this is perfect, it’s just an improvement as i see it.
Feel free to pick apart anything i wrote and give your opinion and ideas

*I also added an example of how a balanced schedule can look like.

Here be the standings after week 2:
Desolation 10
Aurora Glade 8
Gandara 8
Abbadon’s Mouth 6
Far Shiverpeaks 6
Fort Ranik 6
Gunnars Hold 4
Millers Sound 4
Underworld 2

It is already starting to show the predicted ranking order of servers.

Victim.3016:

GvG players play more WvW than you mate.

If only that was true so GvG’s could be organised outside of primetime.
Instead of having que’s everywhere and looking on twitch to see 40 or more people of your server behind the windmill.

Sure hope Anet releases the GvG area soon so GvG guilds don’t take up room anymore from wvw players.

Avish.7938:

The patch just saved woodhaven.

And it saved gandara half an hour of dps’ing the gate

Not that much trouble with queue’s anymore on FSP.
Only reset was crazy and the few hours when all the guilds log on has que’s.

Seems like it’s pretty clear now that the fights will be between Gandara, Blobaddon, Deso and Ag for the top 4.
FSP, GH, MS and FR for 5-8
and UW most likely 9th

7 weeks is a long time but there seems to be a sizable gap in coverage and manpower between 4th and 5th. Not enough for blowouts, but enough for a comfortable win.

That fight was just fubar really.
Horrible skilllag, and then gandara decided to show up aswell :p

Not a good start from FSP to say the least.
As mentioned before guilds didn’t seem to get into borders very well, commanders kept d/c’ing, seems like many guilds quit early.
That left our diminished nightcrew with a lot to do.
Many of those people had already given their most the last two nights against Fort Ranik’s foreign legion, so we couldn’t muster our usual numbers.

Seems like a lot of people have lost their focus and have been getting used to fighting pugs that we could steamroll easily.
I hope we can get our act together soon so we are back in this game cause we can do a lot better than this.

Anyway its nice to fight Gandara and Ag again, i do find roamers sometimes, although unfortunately most of those are ridiculously tanked up warriors or bs thieves.
And duels get interrupted a lot by random people from all sides.

Just about as much as gandalf has to do with gandara, absolutely nothing, it just happens :p

But pointless drama is inevitable.
3 international servers with active forum posters having a long awaited matchup and que’s everywhere.
The forums shall overload

You’re gonna need it if we are the predator :p
First we kill apollo creed and then Schwarzenegger has to fight us in the ring.

Yea the ‘FR well know for nightcapping’ thing seems a bit misplaced.
We know it’s SE that caused it and transferred without your knowing.

People are just relieved atm of having overcome the initial disappointments of the first half of the week.
For some reason FR had been preforming subpar during the day, while last week we were very challenged against eachother during the day. And with the huge ppt during the night it just felt sour to have to possibly loose that way.

So we had to do something and still saw that there was a chance we could win because of what happened monday night, when the nightcapping got neutralised.
If it wasn’t for that one weakness FR had the monday night i don’t think we would have had much hope of still going for the win.

Anyway it has been an interesting week, where we once again had to fight till the end
Thanks to FR and UW for this matchup

UW was leading earlier aswell, sunday night.

iorlas.6721:

Ya all a bunch of zergers..can’t even come to UW unless you are 3x our numbers…SWAG running with a huge blob,o how the mighty have fallen

Next week you got Blobaddon on your doorstep

Axelheim.5902:

The thread started off with SE talking about how much fun they are having in this matchup being able to get into some zerg fights during primetime and hoping for bigger fights during the nighttime. And then players started trash talking us and all we did was defend ourselves much like anyone else would do. We know we do alot of PvD during the night time but its not our fault you guys dont have the coverage to give us fights. We would much rather have fights but when we run away from a T3 Garrison that is well defended by an outnumbered group it isnt because we dont want the fights it because our time is more valuable to the server by taking other points and getting our PPT up rather than spending an hour trying to take a keep that we will be able to flip later. We are doing our best to help out our server and get a matchup victory. If all we wanted to do was farm your towers we’d go to Frostgorge instead and make more money.

Yes the thread started nice.
But what you see as thrashtalk is merely the few people in the beginning of the thread stating the fact how we lost a lot of points during the night.
You know you pvd a lot, we know it too, no reason for some person to go rage about how we are supposedly crying about it when merely stating a fact.
Now you have SE people that keep pushing the subject while it had already been settled a page earlier.

And yes i did point out how you left a T3 bay with outnumbered defenders, but this was after one of the SE people thought it would be interesting to laugh at how somehow FSP was the only one who ran away from fights.

All you SE people have done in this thread so far is trolling , complaining and provoking.
Give it a rest before you turn your guild into the laughing stock of everyone, you’re not far off already.

Another thing is that WvW is only available for a limited amount of people.
The WvW player only has WvW, if they have to que they got nothing to do.
The PvE achievement hunters however just que up in wvw for the sake of hoping they get in sometime, meanwhile however they can still play their PvE content and probably couldn’t care less if that que pops in 30mins or in 3 hours.

HippoLogic.2519:

Questular.8359:

A question for the FR night crew, obviously you dont get much resistance from FSP and UW seeing you tick 600 in the morning, and let me be clear about this i would love to have a nightcrew like that on FSP, but isn’t it kinda boring for you? I bet you like the fights as much as any other player in this match-up and i seems there is not much fighting going on at night. I hope you find some good fights vs opponents with a good nightcrew

Yes we do love to fight just as much as everyone else and yes for me and I’m sure others it does get boring. I also hope we see a server with a night crew so we can have fights for more then 2 to 3 hours. It is very ironic that the server that hit us up last week about covering 75% of our transfer is the one QQing about being night capped.

We never qq’ed about the nightcapping, we don’t care if you win that way.
My problem was that even at night the FR nightzerg preferred to avoid a decent siege to go pvd elsewhere.
If you know the next 5 hours all you will have to do is pvd, why avoid a nice fight?

And those few people who you refer to who would pay your transfers aren’t the majority of our server.
I for one would never pay a dime for someone to transfer to our server, they either need to want to transfer or they dont.