Engineer: Traits and the whole design is wack. Turrets don’t scale with anything so they are not useful. Too many cast times on too many minor abilities which add little to engineer’s power, e.g. toolbelt for rocket turret is basically same DPS than autoattacking, but aoe. Engineer should do more with fewer skills, and more skills should be situational, rather than general, because there’s no way in hell you can cast the whole rotation of your abilities before half of them already recharged.
Engineers are easy to chain CC unless they pack specific skills, same with immobilize, unless engy has rocket boots it’s gg.
Thief: Anyone who tries to roam soon learns about these guys, impossible to kill if they don’t screw up. Multiple invisibilities, multiple low cooldown teleports, most of which also double as stun breakers, boon stealing and ok condition cleanse. They just try to kill you repeatedly, resetting fights if it goes against them.
What takes the cake with thieves though, is that even if you correctly predict their opening attack from invisibility with a block skill or evade, you are rewarded with NOTHING. They don’t drop from invis and lose opening strike and worse yet they don’t spend initiative if they attacks don’t connect.
This is extremely wrong. I correctly predict their attack from invis and use Distortion and they just keep spamming their skills (some of them give them dodge, preventing any damage from me during distortion) until distortion wears off with no penalty. Every other profession will put their skills on cooldown if you spam at a blocking or evading target.
This is absurd and it needs to stop. Theif players should have to watch out for invul players just like everyone else.
(edited by ManCaptain.3154)
GS is a pile of crap. Worst long range weapon in the game. It has the weakest autoattack out of comparable weapons, autoattack is channeled which makes it suck when trying to keep distance. It deals 3 hits of damage which makes it suck vs any retal. Skill 2 is good damage but it will bounce to clones and buff them with might, which is useless. Skill 3 is useless. Skill 4 is a good phantasm in theory, but it has a delay that makes it dodgeable and in pve killeable by mobs. Skill 5 is ok, but insufficient to keep enemies at 1200 range.
Whoever came up with damage scaling with distance on autoattack should be banned from working as a designer ever again.
That’s crazy. Plus, anyone can use them. Same for Melandru runes.
True, however warriors don’t care about people using duration decreasers that much. In other words, if there was condition immunity food in this game, warriors would be one of the least screwed classes.
Well, ArenaNet did release the game where grenades had a max range of 1200. It’s Grenadier that gives them 1500 range, and a possible solution is that they nerf the trait making Mortar more viable.
Wouldn’t matter. Try lobbing things at enemies from the keep wall. Enemy necros/eles etc will simply walk into 1200 range and drop their AoEs on you. Rangers can barrage from 1500 range.
The range is far too low to be useful in WvW. It’s really easy to wreck it even with 1200 range weapons. And it’s not useful outside WvW since in other modes anyone is better off using their own weapons.
Personally I feel a bit naked to conditions. I like the new rocket boots but there’s just too much stuff I want spread across too many kits and then there’s elixirs and gadgets. I just feel like I’d need 6 utility slots to make my builds work most of the time.
I wish they worked more on the traits, most of them really aren’t worth a slot.
Thanks to you many engineers in different servers are now using this to explot in the JP…
This isn’t an exploit.
How is 9k a lot of damage for a condition build?
lets see what would happen a week from now. Time would tell…
A week or so from now people will realize that losing the 5 points into illusions for illusionist celerity doesn’t make the mesmer useless and are overreacting.
Yes. Increasing cooldown of half the skills used in common builds by 25% is totally not the biggest nerf that has ever been in GW2. I guess mesmers winning 1v1s was too much, since there’s all sorts of other areas they are great at.
If Warriors had access to 2x movement speed they’d be able to do it with Savage Leap.
Well Super speed is not actually double speed, despite what the description says. In fact super speed on its own is rather underwhelming. It’s barely better than swiftness.
I’d rather see a grenade-like projectile than a rocket. Like the grenade launcher under the rifle in real life. Think Graves in League of Legends.
S#3 Cripple on hit, Swap Immobilized. Even if miss, pistol #5 give stun. Please tell us any other class weapon set out there that has this many CC on Weapon Skill?
Sure. Warrior mace or hammer has more CC. There’s also loads of others that have 2 CCs, like engineer rifle, pistol/shield, guardian scepter/shield, and many others I could name.
In the end the problem is that mesmer weapons do the lowest damage in the game, so all the damage must come from phantasms or shatters. Mesmer sword autoattack is the lowest damage melee autoattack in the game.
Plus you can get the combo every 8 sec if traited (bf patch),
This is simply not true. Blurred frenzy doesn’t start recharging until after it finishes. Also mind wrack can’t have lower than 10 sec recharge. This also assumes I can produce 3 clones every 10 sec consistently (again, not always true). The timings are longer and this also assumes that an opportunity to burst comes up every 10 sec and it’s used instantly. This is a load of crap. I’d rather have a burst on 20 sec cooldown than a weaker one on 10 sec cooldown simply because I won’t be able to do it on the recharge.
Give me my crack pipe back, you are obviously using it otherwise you would have noticed that i said “same skill and gear, mesmer will win”
God you are dense. How is does winning 1v1 against necro make mesmer best WvW class?!?!?!
Necromancer was definitely the least powerful class before these buffs. Now it might be the engineer who is the least powerful. Both share the property that they get hurt a lot by AoE condition removal.
ok noob question: how did he chat with you if he was from another server and couldn’t see your name?
Skills got much improved, traits however are still mostly chaff. Out of 7 major and 7 minor traits, I’ll have 2 or 3 that actually matter, the rest are usually crap.
You are still the best WvW class in the game, hands down.
Put down the crack pipe. Then you proceed to say that now mesmers can lose 1v1 vs necros… didn’t know being best WvW class was about 1v1s.
The thing that bothers me is that someone can play PvE 90% of the time, having loads of cash and items, then they hop into spvp and they are at full power, while if you spend 90% of your time in spvp and you try to jump into pve to play a dungeon or a fractal with your buddies, you’ll be undergeared and poor (can’t buy items, can’t buy gems).
I had to stop with the spvp play because I was green gear and poor as hell in pve, while my guildies had multiple sets of legendaries and exotics and they were unlocking character, bank and bag slots with gems bought with ingame gold.
Why doesn’t spvp generate gold? Because pve does and so does wvw (if you don’t suicide too much).
Unfortunately, it turned out to be very difficult to actually capture the damage floaters of my phantasms with a screenshot. I’ve attached the (ugh) singular damage floater that I did manage to capture.
Regardless, in my testing with the build that I always run (zerker amulet, 6x runes of divinity, 10/30/0/25/5) I wakittenting for 4.2k reliably with the swordsman on the heavy target golem, and up to 5k on the light target golem. This is all with 0 stacks of vulnerability, as well as without any might or other boons.
The npcs are bad for testing because we have no way of knowing what ‘traits’ they have or what stat ‘amulets’ they are wearing. From the damage I did on them, they seemed to all have reasonably defensive stat sets, which skews the damage considerably when discussing a glass cannon.
Still not 6.5k hits you advertised, in fact it’s more than 1.5k off which is A LOT.
This is exactly my point. People post things that are demonstrably not true and builds that dump all utility and defense to just achieve high numbers. The only way you can get that strong damage is if you go 10/30/0/25/5 and full zerker and crit % runes. It’s a gimmick build. And even then you have a screen shot of 4.6k, a far cry from 6.5k. That’s basically lying, or grossly misrepresenting the actual situation.
That’s a pve build and a complete glass cannon. A glass cannon with no staff. GG. Try roaming with this in wvw and get owned by a thief before you can do anything at all. Your claim that this build owns other glass cannons is not believable at all. You can’t touch a glass cannon evade thief.
That is most definitely not a pve build, and calling it as such is simply demonstrative of your ignorance with how phantasm builds work.
The build you linked, it uses ascended gear and has 94% bonus crit damage which is not obtainable in spvp.
And you took that build and said “hey guise, see how hard phantasms crits for?”.
I’m ignorant? You’re a liar.
10) Strong downed-mode, which is getting incresingly important nowadays. I see full teamfight-comps built around the fact that their Players are hard to stomp (1 Mes, 2 Ele, 1 Thief + Tankguard).
Ahahahahahaha. And you expect to be taken seriously? Mesmer hard to stomp? Maybe for kittened people.
This build is stupid and ruins Spvp. It’s worse than 100b cheese, all you had to do to avoid it was dodge roll Bull’s charge and warrior can’t do anything for 40 seconds.
Yes, dodging a bull’s charge puts the warrior into a stasis for 40 seconds. Another stupid blanked statement.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be very difficult to actually capture the damage floaters of my phantasms with a screenshot. I’ve attached the (ugh) singular damage floater that I did manage to capture.
Regardless, in my testing with the build that I always run (zerker amulet, 6x runes of divinity, 10/30/0/25/5) I wakittenting for 4.2k reliably with the swordsman on the heavy target golem, and up to 5k on the light target golem. This is all with 0 stacks of vulnerability, as well as without any might or other boons.
The npcs are bad for testing because we have no way of knowing what ‘traits’ they have or what stat ‘amulets’ they are wearing. From the damage I did on them, they seemed to all have reasonably defensive stat sets, which skews the damage considerably when discussing a glass cannon.
Still not 6.5k hits you advertised, in fact it’s more than 1.5k off which is A LOT.
This is exactly my point. People post things that are demonstrably not true and builds that dump all utility and defense to just achieve high numbers. The only way you can get that strong damage is if you go 10/30/0/25/5 and full zerker and crit % runes. It’s a gimmick build. And even then you have a screen shot of 4.6k, a far cry from 6.5k. That’s basically lying, or grossly misrepresenting the actual situation.
That’s a pve build and a complete glass cannon. A glass cannon with no staff. GG. Try roaming with this in wvw and get owned by a thief before you can do anything at all. Your claim that this build owns other glass cannons is not believable at all. You can’t touch a glass cannon evade thief.
I’m pretty sure those numbers are too high if you consider the average. Also those 2 phantasms are never on the same build.
And they have stealth elite, decoy, and blink. So, I don’t know how in hell you’re actually pressuring them more than they pressure you. In between those they have an 8 sec cd 2 sec distortion and the distortion shatter.
How do they have decoy and blink if they have phantasmal defender and signet of illusions. Did they add the 4th utility slot?
In the end, Mesmer is a Summoner archetype class. ANet said so many times in the beta.
You basically have 2 builds: phantasm family and mind wrack burst. Both have the same game plan: use summons for damage, go for defense in everything else.
There are no other options for mesmer. Nearly every mesmer in spvp uses sword/x+staff because you can’t survive without it. Nearly every mesmer uses blind+decoy, because you can’t survive without it. And you need to survive so your summons have time to do damage. There are no other builds.
Also all mesmer balance data is based on 20% shortened cooldowns on all illusion summoning skills. And it’s hard to have enough clones to use the class mechanic without Clone on Dodge trait.
But people complain about both builds (mind wrack and phantasm).
What I propose is that you all test how mesmer plays if you don’t play one of these 2 builds. Roll a mesmer and make a build that doesn’t take 20% mind wrack damage trait and shatter all phantasms immediately. Go play that, then come back here and tell me how wonderful that was. Go and autoattack people with sword, see how that works for you.
(edited by ManCaptain.3154)
There is very little to no skill level involved because the AI does the work.
What work? Targetting? As opposed to other builds which involve manual skillshots? Not sure what you’re getting at. Phantasms are externalized DoTs that can be killed. The fact that they aim at enemies and attack is not much different from any other summon/pet and in principle not much different from players attacking. Players don’t need to aim either, no skill required there, if you have a rifle you click on the player and press 1-5. How is running around with ranger, selecting enemies then hitting 1-5 for constant high DPS different from phantasms?
The mesmer has to do nothing but run around/stealth/blink/phase retreat etc. The may be glassy but they have lots of ways of surviving including phase retreat, stealth etc.
Same could be said about thieves, except the thief has to do attacks, which is easy to do with the amount of gap closes and invis they have. For most classes damage mitigation is done by active defenses (dodges, blocks and invuls) which are impossible to correctly time vs a thief because they do burst out of invis. Heck they don’t even lose invis and backstab possibility if you correctly dodge or blind them. As far defenses go, they have even more evades, teleports, stun breakers and invis than a mesmer. It’s next to impossible to land things on them, especially in wvw with 3 sec reveal.
I’m not whining calling for a major nerf to damage or whining about thieves (lord knows thieves have been nerfed enough). What I’m calling for is an adjustment to an iWin button through computer controlled AI. Make the build involve skill. ANY kind of skill. Even the mesmers and the phantasm build defenders admit the build takes absolutely zero skill. That’s what I’d like to see fixed.
And how do you propose to do that? They are summons.
they have a high dmg aoe/cripple
Wat. It’s a weapon specific skill, damage is average and AoE cripple is nothing special. If they are running GS they’re dead anyway.
I’ve played over 700 tpvps and there are just too many games with a bunch of noobs on my team. Today these games occured 3 times in a row was when I started with rank 600 on the leaderboards.
http://i.imgur.com/z3RYRoW.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/hXytOBc.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/HgYmJsv.jpgThey were clearly outclassed in these matches and were not smurfs. I’ve seen them trying to res dead people and capping points with 3 other people on it.
Matchmaking needs to have a limit on the MMR difference that a match can have. I am sure this is causing more people to quit PvP than the alternative of waiting longer for a match.
And if it is averaging MMR then Glicko is highly flawed.
you’re r18.. calling the kettle black imo
I don’t see how that matters. It matched him versus a far higher rank premade, and that’s the problem.
with all the alt accounts for solo queuing, you can’t really be sure if that rank 1 is just a n00b or a pro using another acc for solo queue
that being said, matchmaking sucks XD
Why do you care? Seriously, why would you care about some try-hard that buys another copy of the game just so he can appear to be rank 1 trashing a high rank player? Does it make you sad when you get owned by a rank 1? They are a minority anyway.
Thieves are very ridiculous.
Like many people I don’t like having the majority of my damage coming from summons, yet with mesmer, using summons to do damage is the only option.
You can either do damage with phantasms or with traited mind wrack. Nothing else deals any real damage on mesmer (with the exception of GS #2 at point blank range and Staff AA in a condition build).
Generally you’re better off with Null Field because it’s AoE and it can’t be blocked, dodged etc… alternatively illusionary disenchanter, especially in pve.
clones dont have offhand weapon, only real mesmer have food, only real mesmer can dodge
- Recently I’ve noticed opposing clones don’t have a guild tag
- Movement gives away a Mesmer quickly
- Look for dodges, strafing, moving side-to-side, etc
- Ranged clones are stationary unless you move too far away
- Look at the buffs
- If you’re in a group, mark the real Mesmer
- If the Mesmer stealths, look for them a few seconds later
- Only the real Mesmer can cast spells. Clones only auto-attack
I guess I haven’t been paying attention but I find it hard to believe clones don’t have guild tags.
Considering that almost everyone is in a guild, that seems to me like a dead giveaway most of the time!
Does it also apply when they’re in downed state?
Yes and also when you down a mesmer, if they use the clone skill, the real mesmer appears second and he has a red arrow above him. So when they disappear when downed, ignore the first guy that appears.
Mesmers are vulnerable to conditions, even if you don’t run a condition build, having poison to reduce healing will hurt mesmer a lot.
As a thief you should have easy time vs a mesmer.
(edited by ManCaptain.3154)
Like many reference implementations sun.misc Base64 encoder is extremely slow. Also have you tested the org.json parser speed vs other parsers?
The mighty troll is trolling by constantly lying. Mesmer is in a good place in pvp, but he’s saying ridiculous things as if mesmers have the best damage, burst and otherwise, in the game with tons of viable builds, best utility in everything etc… as seen in the following:
Mesmer can do everything another class could do, better.
That is false. Mesmer owns the best burst in the game.
Mesmer, again, has everything they possibly need in their weapon sets, and their Class mechanic.
All of the setups and damage are ALREADY aligned with their Mechanic/Weapon.
Bunch of lies. Mesmers run zerker because they can but also because they have to. Mesmer with soldier or knight gear does no damage. A lot of other classes can deal real damage with soldier gear, mesmer can’t because mesmer autoattack damage is some of the lowest in the game except for staff in a condi build. All mesmer damage comes from heavily traited mind wrack and certain phantasms. If mesmer weapons are all so perfect then why does nearly everyone run Sword/X + Staff. Mesmer doesn’t use offensive utilities because there aren’t any worthwhile offensive utilities, not because mesmer wouldn’t want to. Mesmer burst is no better than thief burst or dagger ele burst or even some other builds. This troll also said warrior sword autoattack is the lowest damage melee autoattack, even though it’s clearly more damage than mesmer sword autoattack.
Mesmer’s work well in pvp, but they aren’t “the best at everything” as this guy always claims.
Anyhow, I have used condition based Mesmer in PvP before, it’s actually good. Just wouldn’t seem that way going from Shatter/Phantasmal to it since you’re not nuking someone in a quarter of a second. Confusion is REALLY strong, because it literally makes channeled skills kill you, which is a direct counter for power Necromancers and alot of Guardian builds.
Goes a long way to show how clueless you are. Confusion triggers only once on channeled skills. You’d know that if you actually played a confusion mesmer. You would also know that Confusion was always a bag of useless donkey crap in spvp, now after the nerf it’s also crap in wvw. A stack of confusion deals about 1.5 times as much damage per skill activation as a stack of bleed per second, while being far harder to get large amounts of and it lasts far less.
S/D thief > everything else
Paralyze sigil to extend my daze from F3 and Chaos storm to 2 sec.
With thief it’s the combination of everything. Many times I’ve fought 1v1 and I couldn’t land more than 1 skill on them every few sec, even with a build full of daze and stuns. Thief can open out of stealth on me and deal a ton of damage for free. If I use stun or anything they simply use their sword #2 again. If that’s down there’s still shadow step. It’s frustrating to fight when they are always either invisible, evading, dodging, or you’re dazed. If you land anything they teleport away, stunbreaking of course. They also shed conditions while invis and they steal your boons. It’s pretty ridiculous.
The damage is not huge, but it’s enough to take down non-bunkers and bunkers have no chance to kill them anyway. I’m against nerfs to their damage, I just want to be able to use my kitten skills on them, right now it feels like there’s nothing I can do.
(edited by ManCaptain.3154)
For me the problems with mesmer are:
- lack of build diversity (20 duelling 30 illusion glass cannon mostly)
- lack of a good cond dmg spec (also in wvw and pve now that they nerfed confusion there)
- dependant on certain traits (like clone on dodge), which means that if any of those get nerfed, the class will plummet like nuts
- this doesn’t come up in spvp much but I feel like I’m not contributing much in terms of team utility in wvw and pve (there’s timewarp but that’s 10 sec out of 210)
Other than that, they are pretty sweet in spvp.
“The Necromancer has no access to vigor and limited boon access by design. Our goal was that the Necromancer not be a class that avoids or protects damage through boons, but rather through conditions and “anti-boon”. They want the Necromancer to not be highly mobile, but to be a class that uses conditions to prevent any mobile class from escaping. The goal is to have them use conditions to prevent other classes from being stronger, and to win battles of attrition.
But that’s stupid. Yesterday I fought a Risen Abomination veteran. I couldn’t chill or cripple or immobilize or fear it. I had 2 dodges no vigor and a full death shroud and life drain traits. Spent dodges, then death shroud, which didn’t really recharge, my life drain healed for 30 per hit which is a joke. Then it simply flattened me. You know what would have helped? Mobility skills, vigor, block skills, invuls and stealth. You might be thinking: ok but that just one mob. Actually it applies in general. The only way to reliably mitigate damage from a dungeon boss is blocks, vigor and protection. Chilled or crippled applies in specific cases only.
If necros were supposed to stop people from escaping by using chilled and crippled why do a bunch of skills remove chilled, crippled and immobilized specifically? People bring cond removal to counter damage conditions, but those same tools can be used to remove debuff conditions. How the hell is necro supposed to work in that environment? Also designers need to stop pretending like necro is this unique snowflake that has way more conditions than everyone else. This is obviously not true, in terms of conditions necro is above average but not exceptional in any way. Heck necro isn’t even close to being the top dog when it comes to bleeds.
Same for anti boon. I can keep a boon build down harder with a mesmer or a thief. Necro anti boon is a mediocre.
(edited by ManCaptain.3154)
It used to be 20 sec CD then they nerfed it for some reason. In general I find necromancer’s cooldowns unreasonably high (especially considering how unimpressive their #1 skills are).
There also this:
1. Conditions are way weaker than boons. If you blow up a huge stack of boons it only hurts that the boons are gone. If corrupt boon only removed boons it would still be about 85% as strong in term of affecting the battle.
2. Because boons are tons stronger than conditions, stealing boons is many times stronger form of boon punishment.
3. If you’re playing a power build, the conditions don’t hurt as much.
4. A lot of classes work with short boons that are reapplied constantly. Like Mesmers, who have 5 sec vigor that’s reapplied on crit every 5 sec. Engineer’s have a swiftness+vigor combo that can be triggered every 5 sec. Eles don’t care about boon removal either. In fact the only cases where I’ve seen people get annoyed about corrupt boon are guardians, warriors who just used elite signet, rangers who just used rampage as one and necros who used elite form. Mesmers, engineers and eles don’t care about getting hit with Corrupt boon.
Just yesterday I saw a HGH grenade engy wrecking my team. I ran up to him, corrupted his boon stack. Shortly my conditions disappeared and his boons reappeared. He was wrecking us for 15 sec before I got there, then he had 5 sec period of being temporarily weakened then he was back to power.
It’s not that powerful. I’d rather spend a slot on utility that converts conditions to boons, that’s much more powerful. The especially bad cases are where 15 stacks of might get converted to weakness, vigor becomes a single stack of bleed and protection (33% less damage taken) becomes 3 stacks of vulnerability (3% more damage taken).
(edited by ManCaptain.3154)
If necro had huge boon stacks while ruining everyone else’s boon stacks, then I’d agree. But as things stand, necros have spotty booning and the corrupt boon doesn’t even give necro an advantage, it merely levels the playing field. Provided you can hit it.
1. Large amounts of chilled
2. Ease of shaking off conditions
3. Look and feel
Can’t think of more.
Rabid armor+Carrion jewlery is my gear of choice for any condition mesmer build.
So what happens if I activate mimic when people spawn their phantasms?
ArenaNet probably took the worst and most bug prone way to implement traits. They seem to have several versions of the same skill as full separate skills. For instance when you pick Staff recharge mastery, the skill mark of blood is replaced by another skill with name Mark of Blood, with different recharge and ALSO different tooltip (they seem to need to manually put the different recharge into the tooltip).
So if you have 2 traits (recharge trait and greater mark trait) that affect the staff, they need to make 4 skills named Mark of Blood with 4 correctly worded tooltips. One without any trait effects, one with greater marks, one with recharge trait, one with both traits. If you had another trait affecting it, then they need 8 skills.
You can see how this can easily produce many many bugs of the type where some traits don’t work together and some tooltips are not correct.
Classes with no access to invulnerability:
-Necromancer: death shroud, plague form + blind spam.
THAT IS NOT INVULNERABILITY.
Classes with no access to vigor:
-Necromancer: this one is actually correct, but only a few classes can get enough vigor to rely take advantage of it (ranger, ele, guardian, engi-sort of).
And mesmer (on crit 5 sec vigor, 5 sec cooldown).
-Necromancer: death shroud 2 can theoretically be used as a disengage (use it on conveniently placed clones or rock dogs that are attacking your friends).
Doesn’t count. You can’t run away in wvw with this. You can’t get out of range of enemies with it.
Classes with no Block/Evade skills:
-Necromancer: again, death shroud = most imba block mechanic in the game.
NOT A BLOCK OR EVADE
You are grasping at straws. Necro has no invul, invis, block. Having death shroud does not make up for it. 3 second block or invul can block multiple times as much damage as death shroud can, not to mention block or invul can stop people from applying conditions, can stop CC combos, can stop pulls and interrupts and it can allow to stomp freely. Death shroud stops nothing, except from stopping the necro from healing himself and rotating his weapon skills and utilities.
Necro is far squishier than my zerker mesmer. Simply because my mesmer is extremely had to pin down, can break out of any combination of CC multiple times, can reflect projectiles, can reset aggro with invis, has CC and lots of damage. Why facetank 10k hit with death shroud then spend ages recharging that life force (slow as hell if things aren’t dying left and right), when you can simply dodge or block the blow? Necro death shroud also disables normal skills are replaces them with special ones that might not be what you want (condition builds in particular have a kitten time in DS and they also have hard time charging it), disables all healing even from allies and it’s in general pointless except for jumping off a cliff (though necros seem more of the emo cutter type). As someone who mains a mesmer, a necro feels like a walking pinyata. Their traits are useless. Having realized that after playing the class, they are the first target in pvp. Just run a train on their sad kitten till they quit the pvp server and go roll an ele.