Guild Wars 2

OK, just tested it with Beserker and Swordsman on stopwatch, and definitely does NOT work in my experience. I would like to see if others can confirm that Beserker and Swordsman are indeed not working, or perhaps it’s just me or (more likely) my build.

Too bad that such an important trait for build variation still doesn’t work.

I suggest including a trait or two which essentially buffs the shattering of phantasms.

Why?
- to increase build diversity
- to promote good play for phantasm mesmers

Traits
I’ve thought of two traits to accomplish this:
1. A grandmaster trait in an underused tier (perhaps Chaos?) named: “Haunting Illusions: Your clones will now cause 2 s of cripple when shattered, and your phantasms will cause a 1 s immobilize”
2. An adept trait in an underused tier named: “Phantasmal Escape: Shattering phantasms now breaks stun”

Reasoning
As most mesmers will know, shattering 1 to 3 requires some skill to time right, while shatter 4 is the only instashatter, and with the longest cooldown of all. In this way, phantasm mesmers have to make the decision of waiting 5-7 more seconds for extra damage/pressure or that crucial immobilize/stun break, which in some situations should be the better option, but harder to pull off in the 1-3 shatters. This also brings extra utility for shatter builds, who would have to choose to drop one or two major traits in order to get these, thus improving build diversity.

It’s just an idea but I thought I’d share. I thought of it mostly keeping sPvP in mind but I’m guessing it applies to other aspects of the game as well.

This would be one of the more important “quality of life” improvements for this game. It would be reassuring to get some dev comment on this.

Bump… Can anyone confirm if this trait is still broken or has it been fixed?

Ah, thanks for letting us know.

That is kind of shorter than I hoped it would be though. Still not sure if I want to get my own CA.

Lol, I just asked this a few hours ago: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/How-long-is-grace-period-for-Custom-Arenas

But nobody seems to know. I agree it is absolutely necessary to know this before making the investment. Hopefully somebody can inform us.

To me, and probably many others, who think 1600 gems is a little expensive but still want to buy a CA, it’s absolutely crucial to know how long this grace period is in order to make our purchase. If it’s too short it may cost us another 800 extra gems to buy another starter kit instead of the time tokens.

Thanks.

obverkid.5432:

I was hoping for 1000~1200 gems for the Starter Kit, but seeing as this is a one-time purchase, 1600 is not that bad. Every next month costs 780gems so around ~10$/10euro which is in-line with other server hosting services. I’d like to see the price of the starter kit go down in the future though. I don’t see why we should pay twice the price of an 1mo extension for creating a new arena.

Also, I belive ArenaNet said that the CAs would not be removed instantly after the time runs out, but rather they’d go into an “inactive” state for some time and would be reactivated once you add more time.

I want to know how long this “grace” period is before I buy my starter kit though! Does anybody (including ArenaNet people) know?

Nearly every idea I read here is better than the current system in place. I hope someone at Arenanet reads this and could maybe provide some reasoning.

@Luthan: I think you’re right, sadly. But since these other improvements do not exist yet, “normal” players also need custom arenas to get their fun, or training. In this way, the competitive players who are already competitive and part of a guild/team will only get stronger because of their guild’s CA availability, while semi-competitives and casuals are stuck to horrible matchmaking and therefore further lagging behind. I was hoping to finally use these CAs to teach my newbie IRL friends some PVP, but this is a little too much for them to contribute I’m afraid.

1600 is too much to be honest for something which most games provide for free. I’d be willing to pay but now it’s for only 30 days… That’s too many gems for too little. 500 would be acceptable if it were to stay 30 days. I’d pay 1600 if I could have the arena permanently or at least half a year or something.

So can anyone confirm if this is indeed NOT working?

How long is the grace period?

Thanks for that write-up Pyro. You know the profession very well.

Thanks, yes please let us know.

Oh my goodness. I was fine with everything up til now, but this is ridiculous. I was fine with moving Illusionary Celerity up to GM trait because we could then get Phantasmal Haste, HOWEVER that trait doesn’t work anymore LOL.

Signet of Illusions effect reduced by 50 %, PLUS Vengeful Images is completely unviable because it disappears within a few seconds after casting, LOL.

And on top of that, also blurred frenzy nerf…. really??

I’ve been testing this on golems for around an hour with zerkers and swordsmen, and the trait seems to have 0 effect. However, since the effect should be small I’d still like some feedback if other people noticed the same and then we can voice this and hopefully get a fix ASAP. With Illusionary Celerity moved to GM minor trait it’s absolutely necessary that “Haste” is working in order to get some viable builds for phantamesmer.

I think monitoring forums to see what kind of complaints people have is not an ideal way to measure how a game is doing. I also stopped playing for a few months half a year ago, but for me the experience has actually been improving slowly after I started playing again a few months ago. That being said, a lot of the complaints you raise are true, but I have a feeling we had a much larger number of different types of complaints half a year ago.

I don’t think it’s working. It would be nice if someone could look into this.

IGN: Professor James
Main Profession: Mesmer
Alternate Professions: Engineer, conidering adding Ele, Thief or Ranger next.
Account name: JoopFOX
Practice Availablity: Nearly every day for the next two months 10 am – 10 pm GMT+1
Current PvP rank (Not Leaderboard):`30
Level of Desire: Casual and Tournament Play.
NA or EU: EU (also have NA account if necessary)

Like some others have mentioned, I’d also rather play with nice, respectful, positive people, who may be more mature and composed and also have a life and the like. Those are the people I’ll get along with most, which is probaly a good thing when starting a team.

Hello, does anyone know if Compounding Celerity (movement speed + 5% per active illusions) stack with swiftness? Also, does Persisting Images trait (+20% phantasm health) stack with signet of illusions?

These kind of things are pretty crucial for determining a build, yet I cannot find definite answers to this!

@Allie: That’s a nice calendar! I’ve been looking for something like this for a while actually, because I sometimes lose track of what is going on. This is the first time I see it though. Perhaps I missed something, or would it maybe be a good idea to put the link in a sticky somewhere on the forum too?

Perhaps something has changed during the past one or two weeks, but I asked this a little while ago as well and got this response: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/ETA-on-custom-arena-public-release/first#post2057584

So I would say a few weeks from now, hopefully sooner.

Others can correct me, but afaik it’s:
1. HGH elixir builds with might stacking and duration, and grenades, usually.
2. Yes, beastmaster builds are very hard to kill and they’re still good roamers.
3. Warriors UP, Necros slightly UP, and Guard/Mesm slightly OP. But overall pretty good.
4. Hard. The gap between new teams and established teams is huge. Newer teams seem intimidated to sign up for tournaments because they don’t want to get owned. Also they don’t want to look bad in public. And there’s no automated tournaments yet. These will get better when customs go out of beta and accessible to everyone though. Now even those favor the established teams by giving custom arena starters to people that were already in a good position with QPs and all.

I agree that as of now there’s a huge gap between the established “pro teams” and the newer competitive teams/guilds, and with the current structure in place teams from these two categories aren’t really encouraged to face each other. However, I’d be very interested to see some of these matches and therefore it’d be nice if you wouldn’t feel so discouraged about the cast. I do hope you will keep your heads up and I’ll definitely be supporting you guys next tournament!

Yes I also ended up making more characters just so I could access different builds faster. We really need this.

The arrows (green or red) to reflect your changed rank seem to be reversed. I just went up from 89 to 93 % and it shows a red arrow down 4%. And I think this is not just for me.

@Lunet: Where and when can I see more by FilibusterFox? Enjoyed his casting earlier.

IMO, it was great casting, but poor pacing and organization. But I’m sure Blouch are aware of this and will think of a different format for next time.

Thanks a bunch for responding John! I’ll be looking forward to playing CAs as soon as all the issues are fixed.

Maybe this has been discussed before, but does anyone know the official word on when custom arenas will become available everyone (with gems)?

Sorry if this was asked before and I missed it.

I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but it’s a good time to come back.

Yes, I agree. It’s soooo incredibly frustrating to get put with teammates time and again who will just go to one point with the whole group and leave it as soon as it’s capped…. Sooooooo frustrating. I’d really like to play with people of similar skill please.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Just wanted to jump in and say thanks for trying to be constructive guys. Solo queue (and splitting ratings) is something we have planned. We just need to finish up other features before we can get to that one.

Thanks J. Sharp! I appreciate you sharing this and also how you’re always staying so cool despite the tone of some users.

That was an accident: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Custom-Arena-Starter-Kits-Time-Tokens

But yeah, it does seem they’re getting pretty close to being ready.

I lost with a low-ranked PUG against a 40+ glory ranked premade, and I instantly dropped from 60 to 55 %. And I have played over 150 ranked games. So yeah it fluctuates.

Plus obviously for every team there’s 5 players consistently getting higher ratings than you. So it’s near impossible to get anywhere high on the leaderboards without a team. Does anyone know if there’s some highly ranked players who only solo queue?

Well yeah, that and you’d rank higher if they would ever split solo from team premades. It’s kind of unfair they put both on the same leaderboards.

Yes this must happen.

Rune I do, but not the amulet.

Well if they depend on their AOEs just avoid confronting them when they’re all at the same spot and cap other points, spread out more. You saying that you did not get completely smacked already hints to the fact that they may have some weakness in that composition. But yeah, Eles do need some nerf, which I think they’ll get.

I’d really like to know if they are willing to make separate Leaderboards for teams and solo ques, I really like everything as it is now except for how negatively solo q’ing affects rating. Would be really exciting to have this split, I think both for teams and for solo players.

Yeah, that would a good change. It would be great if people could register a team of 5 people somewhere, and then when you play with that composition, the team will show up in a separate “Team” leaderboards. Then we can have the solo queue leaderboards seperately, which would make both of these actually way more interesting. I know of some great solo q’ers that would definitely be in top 100 if not for all the premades, now they’re like 500-ish.

Mouse-clicking my character to move somewhere, and having to do that more than 10 times a second, seems very unintuitive to me and appears to me more like a useless relic from the fact that some of the first competitively constructed games (DOTA) were in fact mods from games that had a different focus and structure. Therefore, more “open” movement, targetting, and perspective are aspects that I consider more suited to competitive play in the long run.

I think it’s part bad luck. I agree it’s sometimes frustrating, in particular in tPVP, where you’re trying to discuss strategy but end up having a conversation with yourself. Anyway, some of your concerns will be gone as soon as Custom Arenas are implemented, but I agree some people should try and communicate more. Maybe some don’t speak English? That’s when the voice commands such as those in Smite can come in handy, if they get automatically translated to the language of your system.

Puandro.3245:

http://i.imgur.com/nfudppy.jpg

6.5K + 265 bleeding per crit (possible 2,120 if all 8 crit). Not all 8 bullets crit i think 6-7 did, the last one did not as you can see by the SS.

Light golem has 2,200 armor.
Heavy Profession base armor is 2,127
Medium is 1,980
Light is 1,836

Keep thinking shatter spec is the best mesmers have right now, ignore utilities i obviously don’t run that in TPvP.

Been playing Mesmer for almost 3 weeks now and i fear no ele 1v1 if they try to take my home point solo.

Even with Rune of the Eagle, Phantasmal Strength and Empowered Illusions and berserker’s amulet all together I don’t get more than 4 – 4,5k on average. Pls tell me your build

OK. Even with a full Beserker amulet/jewel (200 in both power and precision traitlines) I’m dealing under 3k damage on average. So please don’t talk about phantasms dealing more than 4k, it’s nonsense. If I’m lying, then I challenge you to show me. Shatter is so much more viable than phantasm now it’s ridiculous.
And this is all against light armor only. So medium and heavy will get even less damage.

Puandro.3245:

JoopFOX.9510:

Arheundel.6451:

How people can complain when a mesmer can deal close to 10k dmg with Iduellist ( 8k dmg + bleeding ) from distance, instantly for half the CD of arcane wave?

Lol, show me a screenshot of a mesmer’s Iduellist dealing that kind of damage. He has to be insanely bursty and the target has to have close to 0 armor/toughness.

My dueslist hits for 5K-6K + 2K Bleeding and im wearing half zerk half knights. I added 4 more pieces of zerk gear last night and im still wearing full knight armor and my duelist hits for 6-7K now. 8K-9K with DPS food + zerk armor is very possible.

I main an ele since Beta and i fear no ele on my mesmer which ive been playing for 2 weeks total. They try to kill my phantasms and they die to me, they try to kill me they die to my phantasms. This is even with the bugged berserker damage spin atm.

Eles are strong atm but last patch they did more nerfs to “dps” eles than to tank eles which is sad. They nerfed all our dps abilities back in beta so our only viable option is tank eles.

So what’s your traits? Who are you hitting for 5-6k + 2k bleed? Light armor I presume? Is there any phantasm trait combination I’m not aware of??

Arheundel.6451:

How people can complain when a mesmer can deal close to 10k dmg with Iduellist ( 8k dmg + bleeding ) from distance, instantly for half the CD of arcane wave?

Lol, show me a screenshot of a mesmer’s Iduellist dealing that kind of damage. He has to be insanely bursty and the target has to have close to 0 armor/toughness.

What I have noticed is this: without taking into account premades, it seems that the people on your team will be relatively close to your rating. HOWEVER, the team you will get matched up against will in many cases be a much lower or higher agregate. In other words, even the lowest rated player of the opponent team still seems higher than the highest of your team, and the other way around, in many cases I experienced. In these cases, I thought to myself the match would have been so much better if we had some of their players and they would get some of ours. Of course we don’t know the actual ratings but there is something you can say after you play some people many times over, combined with glory rank and rank on the leaderboards. So I guess what I’m saying is I wish the MMR would put more emphasis on matching against teams than matching with other players within your team.

Thanks a lot for the change, Tyler and all