Guild Wars 2

Tomz.9265:

I agree. And class balance is quite unbalanced in every way. Ranger being seriously underpowered. Hope they nerf thief and mesmer and boost ranger (at least, dont have experience form all the classes). While waiting for this, i will make a mesmer for meself and go kill every1

The stupid thing is…..there are so many horrendously bad mesmers its unreal. People complain that they are everywhere in hotjoin but they are awful, like seriously bad. If you have even a basic knowledge of the class you can just take them apart. Unlike the rogue build which can be messy even then and the HB warrior who just prays your stun breaker is on CD, only finding out when he pushes it and a kill pops up on his screen, or not.

Most people who complain about the mesmer often start listing off all the things they think are overpowered and its 90% not real stuff we have. Read back in the thread for great examples of this, massive confusion damage, huge quantites of phantasm damage all combined with 30k hp and a bazillion toughness…what fantasy land are they living in :S

EDIT: Ranger is the one UP class imo.

I wish I could put my finger on it, but unless I trait into tough/vitality my warrior spvp expirence is rather “meh” tbh. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, as they say. But either way it’s not as sexy as I hoped. I use mine as a support control type ATM.

It’s because the GS burst warrior is a skill less build. It’s there for bad’s who don’t have any skill in order to allow them to get kills. If you fight opponents who have skill and are reasonably skilled yourself then the GS just stops getting any more effective. It’s the big reason it needs to be changed.

Demosthene.2195:

Greatsword is a low-skill weapon that is practically useless in PvP versus competent people. In PvE it lacks the control elements to tackle dungeons and be a real asset to a group, but it’s pretty darn good for cleaving easy mobs in dynamic events.

If anything, we got “nerfed” enough when our burst damage buff from discipline became practically obsolete. After that we still got nerfed on a number of our key skills, and at this point we’re probably as “balanced” as a profession can get in this game.

One-hit K.O. burst against full-damage DPS Thieves, Elementalists and other vermin USED TO be our profession-specific mechanic. We don’t have that now, our only hope is stacking vitality/toughness and packing 9-10 CC skills just to keep the damage up with enemies teleporting/leaping/stealthing all over the place. Other builds work but they’re inferior to heavy CC support we provide to our team in tournament sPvP.

If any of you still view Warrior as OP, roll one and play in tournaments. You’ll quickly realise just how obsolete greatsword is, and that the class has highest skill cap despite it’s simplicity on surface. It was like that in original game already when the very best Warrior players happened to be best players in the PvP part of the game overall.

Greatsword is a low-skill weapon that is practically useless in PvP versus competent people.

This is exactly what I’ve been saying for practically the whole page. Hence why I’ve also been saying it needs to be “CHANGED” not “NERFED” so that it becomes a high damage weapon available to warriors but one that actually requires skill to use and gets better when you have more skill.

Crowley.8761:

I’d like this, but simply can’t see it happening. Would prefer it if they could make the scepter a bit more interesting than it is at the moment.

Sceptre should be rebuffed up to being a core condition orientated MH weapon based around, preferably, confusion.

Ofc, because having 1 stronger Phantasm on top of 3 Clones is clearly inferior to having 3 weak Phantasms and 0 Clones. I see your logic, and raise you a banana.

And I say again: If we all end up using 3 Phantasms, the devs will just make it so that only 1 Phantasm can be up a time (something they should do anyhow, and remove their inter-attack delay entirely, and make them have 3x the normal Shatter effect).

Just because a phantasm is stronger for shattering doesn’t make it more useful for a phan……wait a min….

and remove their inter-attack delay entirely

You can’t mean……sorry I see what you mean now, I initially misread this due to the fact that taking it literally would be sokitten it’s unreal. What’s that a continually firing phantasmal duelist….You’d have a hard time defending that against any of the other profs because it would make hundred blades look like a baby hitting you with a blanket. Yeah that’s a stupid idea.

but none do so the longer they are up, something which would clearly indicate that you’re supposed to keep them around.

I see your incorrect statement and raise you

Phantasmal Haste – Phantasms recharge 20% faster.

A trait which is specifically based around the idea that you will get more than one volley out of your phantasm, a core part of the PvE phantasm build just fyi. 20 points into illusion. Then for indirect hints they want them out for a while.

Phantasmal Fury – Your phantasms have fury.

This originally had a duration of 2 hours, that’s right 2 hours. It now has a duration of 10seconds and is instantly refreshed every 10seconds as a counter measure to someone stealing a TWO HOUR FURY BUFF off your phantasm.

Persisting Images – Phantasms have 20% more health.
Signet of Illusions – Passive: Grants more health to your illusions ( Illusion Health Bonus: 50%)

Both of these massively increase the longevity of your phantasms, both heavily hinting that they want you to keep your phantasms (cos a 50% hp bonus on a clone is useless) out for much longer.

Basically there are several key things which a phantasm build is based around that specifically increase the effectiveness of phantasms with the aim being to keep as many of them out for as long as possible.

“Clones will not replace Phantasms.”
Done. Exactly what you want, right there. Trivial change too, count # of Phantasms, if 3, don’t spawn Clone. Much easier than the current one.
Instead they did this:
“Clones will replace a Clone, if possible”.

While at this point I don’t expect you to realize this I’ll go ahead and explain it anyway. There is this core mesmer SPvP talent which creates a clone when you dodge, there’s an almost mandatory mesmer utility that causes you to create a clone and go invisible. Both of these are crippled if you can’t replace that third phantasm, this is why they chose the second one, so that it doesn’t smash apart other core abilities and utilities.

Personally my feeling is they should add the pistol as a more single target ranged weapon. Then switch the greatsword over to our ranged aoe damage weapon, this would make it synergize a lot better with it’s phantasm and most of it’s other skills. Would also allow them to get rid of the god awful No1 skill on it.

Greatsword No1: Throw an illusionary blade which carves all foes in its path for X damage (small width line projectile) CFin : Proj.
– Throw an illusionary blade which cleaves all foes in it’s path (thrown sideways, similar aoe size to the berserker and similar type effect).
– Slam your blade into the ground damaging all foes around the target and removing one boon from them (the No3 skill).

Greatsword No3: Throw your blade into the air causing many to come raining down on your foes (GTAoE, imagine like 20/30 mirror blades pointing straight down above the area and then coming straight down) Deals damage to all targets hit and dazes them for 1/4 of a second.

This would give us a strong aoe weapon, and really fits with the pre-existing theme of the greatsword while also opening up the space for a single target ranged MH power weapon like the pistol.

EDIT:

3 illusion mind wrack

My untraited shatter does naff all damage, hence why it’s never worth losing my phantasms for it (this is as full power/precision)

Generally precision/power with a phantasm build (variation on 10/20/0/25/0 for PvP). You can also run an illusion based condition/precision build using illusions to stack up bleeds, this gives you more flexibility in exactly how you build but loses a lot of the raw strength that the basic phantasm build has.

I just finished a match in sPvP and yes, I did use it. Several times even. Without dying. So if you ask me, the problem doesn’t exist inside the Shatters themselves. The problem only exists in your skills.
If you find yourself going down too often, perhaps you should consider practicing more. Or try out one of the many other professions, whom you might end up loving more than you love the Mesmer =)

So we then go through the three basic questions.

1) Were you running a phantasm build? (if no why the hell not)
2) Did you have at least one phantasm out? (if no why the hell not)
3) You do realize you would have gotten way more damage by just leaving the phantasm out right? (if no…..)

The way I see it:
Staff → AE
GS → Long Range (it has AE capabilities, but unless people are for whatever reason ignoring your PZerkers, it isn’t all that awesome)
Scepter → Medium Range
Sword → Melee Range, it gives you swiping attacks in turn, a feature most melee weapons in GW2 do, and a very nice way to balance Melee against Ranged inherently.

It’s actually, staff—> survivabilty and ranged power/condition damage (more so power)
GS —> power based ranged weapon for use with the staff when you don’t want sword+OH.
sceptre —> For when you really desperately need a second block.
Sword —> Power based defensive and offensive weapon.
The OHs then have less of a purpose and are heavily build dependent.

Sword/OH + staff is far and away the best combo the mesmer has right now, with the GS being usable in PvE and the sceptre being mediocre for specific condition based builds.

just make sure u can resummon again fast.. in case ur target doesnt die..

If you ever shatter and your target doesn’t die it’s a sign you are shattering to often and should wait more. Unless its really freaking close using that shatter will actually cause you to take longer in killing the mob.

F4 does stack.. to a max of 3s of complete evasion

It doesn’t stop dots, it makes you unhittable for the duration not immune to damage. This however is the reliably legitimate reason to shatter your illusions.

I actually met a solid engineer the other day, I think the problem is it has a very small number of powerful builds and is finkey to play.

The ele I know WAS good but I think it got smacked with the nerf bat and suffered for it. I also found it to be the one class which you have to really have a feel for (which I don’t) in order to be good with. Also met a strong necro who was able to put some good upfront burst with strong survivability and good sustained dps. Again I think it suffers from being quite niche.

Never met a good ranger.

Also, Moa needs a nerf. Or specifically, the Moa form needs a buff.

Needs to be 5 second duration on a 90-100 second cd. Not 10second duration on 180second CD. 10seconds wins you a fight for free, 5 seconds gives you a strong edge.

I met a reasonably good rifle warrior, he did kinda die to feedback but not many ppl seem to run it for some reason :S Pumped some decent damage and had a nice amount of survivability.

You should get nerfed so that your crazy dps skill (whatever it is) only does 2k damage like us necros. How would you feel then? I would say justice has been served.

The bad ones would reroll to another prof and the good ones are already not running the HB builds because it is independent of the warriors skill level.

How about I don’t accept your opinion and passive aggressive insults.
It’s not ideal but until warriors have other options or more melee survivability I don’t see why anyone is complaining about it other than people who can’t dodge or blow their stun breakers on other enemies.

Ok then.

wow… just wow already really?

You didnt really expect it to take that long when you have a skill which requires 0 skill and causes even the worst of warriors to be competent if the opponent magically has his stun breaker down for whatever reason like…I dunno it has a cooldown or something stupid.

Basically the issue ppl have with it is that it does in the region of TO MUCH DAMAGE for no effort or skill. An uh well when such a skill exists ppl get annoyed by it. I mean imagine your standing there watching a ranger walk into a wall, he keyboard turns round, walks past you, keyboard turns again then stuns you and hits you for your entire health bar plus some. It’s quite frustrating to know that the guy probably has issues even turning on his computer and loading up the game yet is still able to instigib you because Anet some how let such a bullkitten skill.

It’s even more frustrating to then see said bads stand there and go OLOLOL it’s fine, just dodge yo, we haz nothing else yo so we needs our instigib. Basically this sums up the state of HB warriors and its why ppl get annoyed by it. Fortunately at some point it will be nerfed, whether it gets a wow nerf and the GS ceases to be a weapon the warrior can use we will have to see. On the other hand when it does get nerfed into the toilet said noobs will be able to instantly switch to another prof in order to attempt to find the next 0 skill 120% instigib. Which should in turn mean that the skilled warriors will get other bits of their class proped up if it’s needed in order to properly support them in SPvP, basically HB being nerfed is a win for everyone but the truly awful warriors.

Yeah he does more damage. Especially once the AEs killed him.
Oh sorry, not what you wanted to hear, I know. :P

Congratulations on summing up why the greatsword is a weak weapon.

You’re not supposed to run perma-Phantasm.

So basically what your saying….you think we’re not supposed to run the only truly viable build which also happens to be the one best support and arranged in our trait tree.

Do you look at a train track and see a park or something?

EDIT:

They redesigned Clones vs Phantasms, and deliberately made it so that you can’t have 3 Phantasms up for long without overwriting one.

Actually it used to replace them in order of when you summoned them, so phantasm—>clone—>clone—>clone would end up with 3 clones. They changed it so that it prioritised clones first giving you phantasm—>phantasm—>clone—>clone—>clone is 2phantasms and a clone. I’d say that’s a pretty clear message against what your arguing.

EDIT2:

something they should do anyhow, and remove their inter-attack delay entirely, and make them have 3x the normal Shatter effect

This would cripple us in all aspects of the game rendering us a null class.

HB needs a change so its not a one shot wonder. If the prof needs a buff to other builds in order to bring it up to par then it should have it.

Autobalance is a kitten but one we need, you can be as skilled as you want but when you have to 1v3 everytime you’ll be happy when autobalance happens!

Except the most common reason for an auto-balance is that your team is kicking the crap out of the other team so some of their bads left. Essentially it takes all the hard work you did rams it up yourkittenthen proceeds to kitten you brutally.

Until warriors can dodge around as much as theives, they’ll need burst damage. A lot of other classes can do damage without near as much risk right now. Maybe not within the same window of time but they get it done with little personal risk compared to a warrior.
A greatsword frenzy build will still have to contend with enemies the other 56 seconds of the time, it just punishes bads who don’t take a stun break or can’t be bothered to dodge. If you open with bulls rush and frenzy all the time, you’re bad and people will dodge it more than often, you need to wait for opportunities if you really want to do anything with this build. It’s not as mindless as you like to say it is because you can’t dodge.
And it’s still a 60 second cooldown with a 50% damage penalty, anyone with a stun break can punish this build easy. and I doubt the warrior is just waiting in the back until it’s up again, someone who is scoring high with this build knows how to survive outside of a bull frenzy combo. So much for your assumptions, stick to the mesmer forums, a class that if anything needs a balancing.

2 things: 1)

HB does need a change but you shouldn’t come onto the warrior forums to kitten about it. Instead go to the SPvP. This forum primarily should be for the use of warriors to discuss warrior stuff with other warriors.

I actually did try to not have this argument.

2) The thing I have against it is entirely that it strips the skill out of the fight. At least with thekittenthieves you know they are playing properly where as HB acts as a crutch for bad warriors to score kills they shouldn’t be scoring purely because someone’s stun break is down. Honestly I’m of the opinion that it needs “changing” not “nerfing into the toilet never to return” so that when used properly it forms a strong part of the warriors arsenal rather than now where it’s very much a hit and hope one shot wonder kind of skill.

So how about we call it there, stop the kitten throwing. You accept my opinion and I accept you want your shiney toy and we do what I suggested earlier which is not have a trolling match on a forum which is designed for warriors to discuss warriors with other warriors.

The problem is that as it stands most of the really powerful mesmer builds are crippled when you use a shatter just because it breaks your phantasms. Unless you turn yourself into a one trick shatter pony your better off in 99% of situations just keeping the phantasms up and not using shatter even in that 1% situation your still probably better off airing on the side of caution in case any kitten hits the fan. For SPvP shatters are essentially not on the mesmer skill list and even in PvE they are kitten horrible.

EDIT:

Eh? There’s plenty of uses for them in sPvP and WvW. It’s not like you’ll be fighting zerg vs. zerg constantly. And even if you were, the occasional shatter does good AoE damage and could greatly benefit your team if you place it well enough.
I like how you kitten things up though. Meeeow!

When would you ever use them in SPvP….

From personal playing around the opinon I came to about the greatsword is this.

It’s to schizophrenic, it’s 1 wants you to be at absolute max range to do reasonable damage while its mirror blade want’s you to be within 600. The cast time on the 3 is so long it’s just bad relatively and the berserker itself is one of the weakest phantasms we have, it’s only use is for tagging large numbers of mobs. Which brings us to the fact you want the mirror blade to bounce between yourself and 1 other mob, essentially wasting the aoe damage from the berserker. Then to cap it all off you have the knock back on greatsword which is ok but again feels kinda weird since your trying to maintain this near perfect distance for your mirror blade and autoattack. It’s also almost strictly worse than the teleport backwards from the staff or a chaos storm+chaos armor combo.

It feels like its supposed to be our ranged power weapon but it just ends up being mediocre in pretty much every area.

If we do everything the above suggests we need to shift more damage into shatters though. We cannot keep our phantasms dealing such ridiculous numbers and gain a reliable AoE spike.

Actually you would shift damage AWAY from shatter’s and simply buff the shatter traits. Make the illusion tree actually have shatter talents in it all the way down. A good one would be to have that 4th shatter (from counting yourself) be a much more substantial increase than the previous three as this means your definitely 30 points in illusions.

As an example, change diversion so its daze duration is (.5/1/1.5/3 seconds). My build for example would struggle to get anywhere near that far down the tree without really hurting it or turning it into a 100% glass cannon build. It gives the option to go for a more shatter focused build.

Instant dazes flying at people in PvP with our current power may be a bit much.

Have the clones “shatter” then send the energy back to the mesmer and fire out after say 1 second. So no “cast time” per say but it’s not instant, much the same way mantras work (in terms of the way they cast rather than being instant).

EDIT:

If you ask me, the Shatter skills aren’t meant to be spammed anyway. The mesmer gets its survivability because of its clones – Destroying them in the midst of a fight could turn out really silly, as it might mean you’ll go down real fast.
However when the enemy is near death already, sending your clones to explode makes all the more sense. Since if you don’t use a Mind Wrack or anything else, they’ll be destroyed anyway. And I believe that’s what the tactics are all about, and that’s what’ll set the “Good” players apart from the “Bad” players. The former will know how to stay hidden and alive much better than the latter who will spam his Shatter skills like his life depends on it.

Then the really good players realize that atm you just shouldn’t use the shatter skills outside of solo PvE, if you shatter at any other time either its distortion because your pants are round your ankles and you NEED that 3seconds or you kitten up and pushed the wrong key.

It’s funny how much people complain about greatswords but there’s really nothing else viable if you want to keep up with the other burst classes atm.
Funnier still it’s a channeled melee ability.

2points here. 1) If there are no other viable builds the solution is not to have a 1 faceroll hero spec. It’s to buff up the other builds so there are viable builds. Also do you need a burst build? Serious question there, wouldn’t a sustained damage with good survivability build be fine or do you desperately need to pump 18k into someone with 1key press. 2) Anything which does in the region of 11k damage for an incomplete channel iskitten Even if it’s not OP it needs changing because its so mindless and skill less.

Also I’d like to add to this that the mesmer underwater downed state is broken. After your first clone+teleport (2) it treats you as if you were now on ground for all purposes including death speed, movement etc.

I do love when the top player on your team gets swapped over (and I don’t mean score related top player) and has to suffer the 100-450 which they basically earn. It’s such a massive kitten you.

I’d agree on the downed state. The one thing I would say (having played mesmer, thief and ele) is that the downed state should be buffed up to where the mesmer is not down to where the ele is. As a mesmer you feel like your being downed is a disadvantage combat position, as an ele getting downed is basically being dead. The first one is cool and fun to use while the second you kinda just wish you would die straight away with no pratting about.

My feeling is that top tier downed state should be around where the mesmer is while the bottom end should be around where the guardian is. That and warrior should have theirkitten “get up from dead” cd removed.

I agree. They are easy to use and deal WAY too much damage in a super short amount of time. And worst of all, all they have to do is spam a couple of skills and kills easily come. And on top of that, they have extremely effective escape skills. Combining all these, you got two op professions in PvP. Sure, they can be countered, but the same can be said about EVERY SINGLE CLASS. So yeah, please nerf them.

Just wana point out here that you got something wrong regarding mesmers, relitively we actually do quite low spike damage, individual bursts get to 7k if you are completely totally 100% glass cannon and even that’s only once ever 8 or so seconds. The thing about mesmers is that our main primary build packs survivabilty and defences along with strong sustained dps on a single target. We wreck most glass cannon builds just because they can’t soak the continual damage and we can use our defences to soak their burst. Burst wise we lose out to warriors, several specs of thief, engineers, at least one necro build, there’s a guardian build that heavily out bursts us while being way tankier.

i rolled a mesmer, lvld to two, went to the dummies, looked at each attack, and then went and SPvP’d. The class is inherently stronger than many other classes for very little skill.

The other class you tried was a ranger? Again comparing the damage from our attack’s is bloody pointless because we actually lose to a large amount of the other professions. The difference is that our primary build isn’t a glass cannon, it makes us king.

Having said that moa is OTT, could use a duration and cooldown reduction and our primary attack from downed state is so much better than any other profession it’s unreal. I’d say a few other prof’s could use a buff to their downed state as I feel the mesmers is a better borderline for where they should be. Top end downed state mesmer, bottom end should be where the guardian is.

When I tried ele it seem to me the one class that you really had to “feel” more than any other. If your not completely at home with it you will fail.

In tourney PvP you don’t have enough players to not have a solo player.

I like my 1v1s to not be “oh kitten what happened to mykitten #8221;…..the problem I have with the thief, and I’m not even sure I’m talking about HS, is that they are like a boa constrictor, where you start with it wrapped around you. If they kitten up 2/3 times and you heavily outplay them then you are able to get your hands free and begin to fight back but if they don’t kitten up your build needs to be tailored to fight them to the exclusion of all else. Generally I beat them since most of them are kitten but the few times you meet one that has even half a clue you can’t even get your foot in the door, you have to hit them before they do anything.

when needed to get dis, I use GS and it does the job I want it to do. very well

Use staff instead, way better.

Irascible.8210:

Engineer, here. Mesmers are annoying… that’s what makes them mesmers. Thiefs are bursty and stealthy… That’s what makes them thiefs. /thread? I don’t think that any of these are significantly overpowered in any way. Also, as others have pointed out, you clearly don’t even know how mesmers work.

Your one of those kittens who always knows which one is real when I get downed aren’t you…..sad that so few of us can tell.

Thief and Mesmer are currently too powerful when compared the other classes.

Would say, moa needs changing, reduced duration reduced CD. Some other classes need their downed state bringing up to par, probably should have the mesmer basic attack while downed moved to the sceptre and a new one made for the downed. other than that I think they are reasonably close to a lot of other classes. (Not the ranger, ranger is bad).

1) You shoot the target dealing 300 damage and applying a bleed.
– You shoot the target dealing 300 damage and applying a bleed.
– Fire a vicious shot at the target dealing 200 and applying a stack of vulnerability for each bleed on the target. (possibly just a % damage increase based on number of bleeds)
2) Mind leech, Fire 3 quick shots at the target dealing 500 damage and removing a boon with each shot, gain a stack of might for each boon removed.
3) illusionary roll, dodge backwards and throw a clone out to your left.
– swap positions with your clone and gain 3 stacks of might.

:( Turns out I can’t make it not OP without coming up with something totally bland and generic.

I’m not mocking you or anything but can you really start typing in proper sentences and stop using abbreviations…it makes your posts really hard to read and even harder to understand.

I’m sort of getting something about a semi-phantasm build but that’s about where I lost you.

VincentCross.6954:

Everyone knows how to counter our greatsword burst build. Its not hard. Just avoid the first knock down, snare, or cripple and you are golden.

Must not post opinion and get into flame war……………Imagine that every time you as a warrior ran towards an opponent it checked whether you have a….I don’t know a bleed removal available. If you don’t you die, if you do then it goes on cooldown and your opponent dies.

Anything which even closely resembles this needs to be changed since the outcome of the fight is occurring almost independently of the players involved.

Guess what happens when I get downed in SPvP? I keep fighting, often managing to rally, get revived or even pull off a kill. Guess what else I do while in SPvP, I revive my allies! Many fights I’ve won because I pulled off a sucessful revive.

Just because you don’t value the mechanic doesn’t mean others of us don’t use and abuse it. It’s one of the things which seperates good, mediocre and bad players. If you really don’t want to use it then just lie there and wait for the timer to run out when you get downed.

mickers.2715:

My build has pretty high toughness and 19k hp got 20 points put into it and 20 into power. he must have just been glass cannon. When i got to the point to start fighting with the group he already had two swordsmen up.

Wait……what? Sorry I’m guna call bull. Swordsman has a 12second CD while traited, so unless youkitten about hanging around the outside of the fight doing nothing for 12seconds he couldn’t have had 2 up. Also if you have high toughness it’s not criting for 5k, duelist yes swordsman no.

No please don’t implement it in solo play, the downed state as it currently stands is one of the true steps forward that GW2 has made in the mmo pvp world, to have it reduced to the crap the OP has posted would be sad.

I haven’t played a Warrior but I’m pretty sure that there’s much more to playing the class well than just hoping for HB to hit. If all they’re focused on is trying to land an HB and they happen to land it on you and you die, you should blame yourself for getting killed by a 1 trick pony. Again, if they jump you while you’re engaged with someone else and land it, that’s not your fault, but you would have likely died anyhow being caught off guard.

Playing a greatsword warrior is basically summarized as “try to land HB, then burn all GS skills before turtling as hard as you can and doing it again”. There is so little skill in that build it’s unreal.

Again, if they jump you while you’re engaged with someone else and land it, that’s not your fault, but you would have likely died anyhow being caught off guard.

Again your sort of missing my point. The problem with HB is that it forces people to have specific tools not only on their bar but available to them at all times in order to deal with the warrior. Imagine that when you ran at a necromancer he pushed his 4 key and it then checked whether you have a condition removal skill available, if you do he dies if you don’t you die. It just makes the combat so meaningless as neither player is having a proper input into the game and it’s not dependent on the skill of the players.

As to the thief thing. It’s not the fact they ARE controlling the pace of the fight, this as a thief isn’t actually outplaying since there is no other class which can stop you from controlling it. I’m struggling to explain this since you obviously don’t really play that much as anything other than a thief but if the thief isn’t braindead he SHOULD have control of the fight. The play off of skill is then how the thief plays while in control of the fight against how his opponent plays defensively and ceases what opportunities arise.

The issue is that a well built thief basically wins the fight for free ONCE they are in control of it. It’s like playing a game against someone where you lose if the other person sees you touching your face then the first main rule of the game is that you start with your hands on your face , the game itself provides an auto-win for your opponent unless they are blind or stupid.

If you succeed, you win the fight. If you fail, you lose the fight. It’s pretty straight forward.

Ironically this is exactly how balanced PvP shouldn’t occur. It’s like having a game of chess where the person who loses the first piece loses the game, it leads to quite a silly and quite a boring game. A true skill based game is one where each player strives to get little advantages and snowball them into the win, go view some games of professional dota for a beautiful example of this.

Downed mode takes away so much much reward for skill. Lets say that you ju are in a 2v1 you down one but the guys downed mode and the other guy kill you instantly… If there wasn’t a downed mode good players would be rewarded better.

Good players don’t die in the 1v2, they down both opponents then stomp them.

As a general rule the mesmer gets less powerful the more people there are around. We really just don’t have the raw aoe power (either in upfront damage or condition application). We also suffer in PvE generally because our one/two good builds all have ramp up times compared to most other professions who can run a build that bursts really hard at the start of a fight.

no it not, it just one of the many things they have. There is multy builds where illu plays almost no part in it at all.

Just not a good build which isn’t illusion (or phantasm) based.

HB does need a change but you shouldn’t come onto the warrior forums to kitten about it. Instead go to the SPvP. This forum primarily should be for the use of warriors to discuss warrior stuff with other warriors.

EDIT:

Ye now a lot of People come and tell at each class mess nerf… -.- class r very balanced every class can kill other and i love this so if u cant kill a warr go to skill ur self and don’t complain about classes need only skill if i havent i die simply

Not quite sure what you said here but if you said that without HB you die then you have just summed up WHY it needs changing. The skill essentially requires 0 skill on the part of the warrior to put the kill through, this means that at lower skill levels they are hideously overpowered while at higher skill levels, where their opponents actually have the skill to not get vaped by it, they become stupidly underpowered. It needs to be changed to something which doesn’t 100%—>0% and instead scales off the warriors personal skill rather than just inversely scaling off their opponents skill.

If warriors proceed to become unplayable without HB playing their class for them then this is even MORE reason it needs changing because OBV there is no other viable warrior build, thus at higher skill levels warrior simply cease to be used. It also means that warriors are pigeon holed into this build which they may not enjoy as there are no other alternatives.

To get better and for enjoyment.

The reason there is no real tangible power orientated reward is because such a thing would break the balance of PvP. One only has to go and look at the history of legendaries in wow to see just how hideously they smashed any resemblance of balance.

Generally running a thief or two really boosts up the power of your squad. I suspect a mesmer would also really help though whether you would take that if you already have 2 thieves I’m not sure. A tanky guard also seems like a good idea for point camping.

I wish i had a screenshot but i took about 11k dmg from 2 swordsman hits, i was pretty shocked myself tbh when it happened.

Not saying it doesn’t happen only that it’s hard to make happen. The mesmer was properly running a full glass cannon build, which even I stay away from, and your a low toughness/armor trait build. My average swordsman crit is around 4k, only time it goes higher is on a death or glory thief.

It seems to me that the primary issue people have here is that they want to fight a HS Thief straight up, the way they fight other classes and that’s just not a good idea. Both HB for Warrior and HS for Thief can be avoided and countered IF you change your tactics to fit the situation.

The problem I have with HB warriors is that it’s skill less, they charge you and hope that your stunbreakers are down, if they are they score a kill if not they womble about being confused.

The problem with a HS thief is that you CAN’T fight them straight up. A good thief controls the pace of the fight not you, this makes countering them very hard since he decides when the and how the specific bouts of fighting will occur. This means that 1) they can spec full into burst damage with 0 survivability and not suffer for it and 2) you can’t ever properly punish them, if they get in a bad spot they begin using stealths and take a reset in order to bring it back under control.

It’s actually 2 separate issues, the first is that the spec requires zero skill and the second is that the spec is to good when the player is skilled.

might have been something else in the group throwing confusion on me too.

Ok 5k swordsman crit is something I struggle to get even in a full phantasm power/precision build. I use the duelist since it does more damage and I prefer trick shot to the block.

Hearing that my instant feeling is that the confusion is from an ethereal combo field (only mesmer 3 on sceptre applies confusion and its specifically 5 stacks). This also instantly leads me to suspect that it was feedback as this provides said field.

Feedback is a mesmer utility which places a dome over the target, this dome reflects any projectiles which cross its borders back at their target. Thus if your running a power based build and you keep shooting into it then you kill yourself, may have looked like confusion.

There are some mesmers that run the sceptre but they are almost universally condition damage mesmers and their phantasms won’t get near 5k damage. 1-2k with full crits at most.

IMO dodging/countering stuff like that is a basic hurdle to sPvP. If you can’t manage stuff like that then don’t expect to do so well in tournaments. On a side note, you find a lot of these builds in hot join but decent tournament teams tend to run a much more balanced group from my experience.

Aye you should be able to dodge/counter core things, but there’s a difference between “dodge this or your at a disadvantage” and “dodge this or you die”. Anything which instigibs you, and no I’m not running a raw glass cannon, if you don’t have the stun-break/endurance up is silly in a game which is supposedly skill based.

I did a several tourneys, generally every good team had at least 2 of HB warrior/thief. (as in 2/0, 1/1 etc.). Also watching some of the really good teams stream they seem to be running several thieves, although at the higher skill levels the HB warriors do drop off since like any skill-less build once the opponent can counter your iWin button the spec is now reliant on getting lucky and ofc no good player wants to rely on luck to win.

I don’t mind the fact they make one point way more valuable than the others. They are kinda silly however especially given how players aren’t optimized for underwater combat so are already weaker than normal, to then have the attacker have to deal with 4/5 very angry very powerful sharks is overkill.

A few things I would add about the mesmer downed state. Our number 2 is powerful but it ISN’T a CC. It’s also completely uncontrollable by the mesmer, sometime’s you will teleport over a wall etc. and be handed a get out of jail free card, other times it dumps you in the middle of a kitten storm and you die with no chance. Finally there’s the annoying situation where it teleports you to the other side of the person whose stomping you and you still die since you didn’t out range it.

The other main problem about the mesmer downed state, the phantasmal rogue, stems from the fact the mesmer has only 1 real build. This build buffs the kitten out of phantasms so I often find that my rogue can hit for about 1/4 of someones hp, on a pure glass cannon thief (100% no vit/toughness) I had it chop half his hp and down him, I then won the downed fight for obv reasons.

Also our basic attack is probably to strong in it. It is sadly the only core ability we have which applies confusion so it’s incredibly powerful for this reason and should probably be our sceptre primary attack while we get a secondary downed.

The one advantage is that due to the nature of these two attacks one or the other is really powerful since we never have both + condition and power.