(edited by ManCaptain.3154)
I am honestly unsure how to counter thief jump burst, all those ppl saying you hit deploy,dodge are wrong as good thief apply his combo actualy before you even move your finger to your own skill :P, you cannot even use block/dist. shatter self fast enough, just there is no time to react. The damage is aplied so fast and it is too big.
Which is what I’ve been saying all along.
All these posters saying things like “lol you’re bad if you get killed by thief, you just dodge/invul etc” are delusional. Mesmer is based around active defenses, which require the player to actively avoid damage and that’s really hard to do when the enemy has invis and teleports, hits with massive burst. Even if first thief burst doesn’t kill you, they can invis several times, which makes active defense difficult because you can’t see when they are about to hit you to dodge. And they apply massive burst every time they pop out of invis.
Here’s what you do if you get jumped on by a thief: invis and run away. I’ll fight the thief if I see him coming, but even then it’s probably the hardest matchup, because almost all mesmer defense is active and thief is exceptional at circumventing that.
This is opposed to a class like Guardian, who has lots of passive defenses (armor, aegis, protection) for whom it makes little difference if they can see the thief or not.
Four stacks of confusion is 1200 damage confusion on the target for me (each time they use a skill). I can stack 8 in few seconds, usually stack about twelve if I want to hurl everything in, and can go to 14.
And how long does your stack stay at 14? Like 2 seconds. How many times does a champion attack in that time? Once, maybe.
Confusion is so bad I don’t even feel the need to bring up condition removal in discussions involving it. If there were 0 cond removal in this game, it would still suck, mainly thanks to absurdly low durations.
And if anyone talks about killing stuff with confusion, 100% of the time they are talking about WvW. Because in spvp and pve, this condition is so horribly useless.
David Sirlin wrote the book Playing to Win. Whenever I come to these forums I can’t help but think of him.
Yeah I think about that book too when I see people kidding themselves that all weapons are equally viable “you just need to play them the right way”.
You know what Sirlin would have said? “Ditch this weak kitten weapon”. A major part of playing to win is using the most powerful tool available, regardless of hipster cred (“I’m not using staff because everyone else is using it, I’m using scepter/torch because I want to be unique” is not playing to win.
It’s true. Staff with extra bounce trait just kills it. 2 condition and one boon per autoattack? If you have zerker gear staff can deal up to 1200 direct damage per autoattack.
1 attack with scepter does piddly damage and summons clones at the same rate as other weapons can. The other weapons summon them with far more benefits than these ones.
2 a single block with a cancel for a blind or will hit them back. Either case it’s still a single hit stopped. Not very useful.
3 strong damage + confusion stacks. It’s good damage but has a very obvious/long wind up, is easily mitigated, and has a long cooldown.
So to sum up the scepter skills… rubbish + rubbish + rubbish =’s rubbish
Ironically, the scepter is pretty good damage if you’re running zerker gear, but if you’re running zerker gear, you probably aren’t using scepter.
The block deals 2200/4500 on my zerker build. Channeled ability deals 400/900 X 5. I think the autoattack is about 350/750 with crits over 1000 on the third attack…
But most people use it only condition build only which means, all 3 skills suck in damage and only the confusion on one of the abilities profits from CD.
(edited by ManCaptain.3154)
Scepter/Torch Build that focuses on Confusion, the ULTIMATE CONDITION.
lel
A condition that doesn’t work when you kite mobs and when mobs actually attack you, it procs every 2 seconds, lasts 3 seconds.
Other than that I don’t find your build that good.
- Illusionist’s Celerity is trash in a condition build. It also doesn’t affect iMage.
- Going 30 illusion and not taking Illusionary Persona? LOL
- Rending shatter is pointless on a condition build because vulnerability doesn’t affect damage from confusion. And even in power builds, 3 stacks of vulnerability are weak.
- You don’t have Clone on dodge which actually severely diminishes your ability to inflict confusion through shatters.
- I don’t see what going 20 inspiration adds to this build. Reducing feedback recharge is not terribly important. Reducing scepter recharge is pointless, as you should be in your other set after using scepter recharges. By the time you can swap back you’ll have recharged scepter skills anyway. The scepter recharge trait also doesn’t work on skill 2.
- Signet of Illusions adds nothing to this build
- Signet of Domination adds nothing to this build. Why would you want to stun someone who wants to attack into your confusion stacks?
If you insist on using torch and confusion, you should go for a build like this:
I can’t believe how clueless people are…
Chaos armor wrecks other GS mesmers 1v1 and all melee/most ranged classes,
How is this relevant to pve?
and lets you take on 4-5+ npc’s of equal-ish level at the same time solo.
I never said I couldn’t take on mobs, like I said I have no problems surviving. It just takes much longer to kill them compared to… say a bomb kit engineer.
Resolved:
Redownloaded whole game and there was a patch… now it works.
Engineer rifle autoattack is the most damaging direct damage ranged autoattack in the game IIRC. In general Engineer damage is pretty sweet except for a few things (elixir gun sucks).
The main problem with engineer is survivability, especially against ranged opponents. Engineer is inverse mesmer.
I have to disagree; Elixir gun is awesome, just not as a direct damage output. It’s very much a support-orientated utility, much like, say, water-attuned staff eles, but way more than just healing.
1: Dart can keep weakness up on non-champ mobs, does mediocre damage, and applies a bleed. Fire rate isn’t anything to scoff at.
2: Apply cripple to multiple enemies and/or swiftness to multiple allies without having to aim or be right next to them? Yes please.
3: STRIP ALL THE CONDITIONS!!! The poison and vulnerability stacks are awesome as well.
4: Excellent skill for putting some distance between you and your opponent. Or if they’re stationary or otherwise mostly still, the damage patch can rack up some good numbers.
5: Even with no healing power, this gives a pretty good chunk of health, AND takes off a condition from whoever it lands on. Plus it’s a light field, so more condition removal for the team, or retaliation! Plus, if you trait for it, switching to the elixir gun will drop one of these at your feet automatically!
1: the bleed is nothing spectacular, if you’re running a cond dmg build you’d be better off in some other weapon. I generally switch to this kit to drop the cooldown abilties, I don’t stay in it to autoattack. Because autoattack isn’t as good as other autoattacks.
Against players weakness does way worse than expected because it doesn’t affect crits, which most damage builds will do 50% of the time (70% with fury).
2: Can you speedboost when there are no enemies around? Last time I played with this kit it wasn’t the case. You also need to be within 400 units of said enemy and so do all your allies. This ability was quite a disappointment for me.
3: Situational skill, unfortunately it aims at the enemy so it’s hard to hit a lot of allies with it. Most of them aren’t standing that close to the enemy than you probably. Use it if it works for you. It never worked well for me.
4: The distance isn’t that large and since it has a very high trajectory it takes a bit of time to execute, the enemy closes some of it while you’re jumping. The damage is nice but I have hard time keeping the enemy in that small circle, especially considering I’m no longer there.
5: is fine, but I’d rather use my utility slot for something else tbh.
It still fools a lot of people, and also picks up a lot of autotarget hate.
It fools idiots. At rank 10+ people who stomp the clone get very rare.
If you think this skill is not the best stomp defense in the game than your metric for success is way off. It’s a teleport, a decoy, and a stealth all in one. It’s incredibly good.
I think your metric is way off. Thief’s downed is way better.
Thief num1 hits multiple enemies, hinders movement of all of them (very useful for keeping people from stomping you) and also debuffs healing on all of them.
Thief num2 works similarly to mesmer one, but it has such short recharge that if you don’t dodgeroll over to the thief, right when he appears he will disappear again. IMO thief is by far the hardest class to stomp.
All in all don’t pretend engineer has worst downed in the game, because it’s completely comparable to necro or a ranger.
The biggest problem for engineer is num 1 skill damage.That crap needs like 50% damage boost.
(edited by ManCaptain.3154)
I played Warhammer where the devs told us the Archmage was broken …. and then left it that way.
Speaking of Warhammer. I didn’t roll Engineer main in GW2, because it smelled like Warhammer Engineer/Magus all over again. Weak class with crappy mechanics which is not getting fixed ever.
At least Mesmer is like paragon. Fun at release then it’s slowly getting nerfed to hell, because that’s easier to do than to redesign a fundamentally poorly designed class.
The problem with Spartial surge is that it’s really hard to stay at >900 range. Even when I’m left to my own devices I often wander into < 900. Most ranged enemies will get within 900 range of you and you can’t do anything to stop that. And that’s not because they would be intentionally countering spartial surge. Scepter users need to be at below 900 to use their weapon anyways and even people with 1200 range simply don’t stand at their max range but they move in a bit.
Melee people will rarely be more than 600 units away from you, 90% of the time they will spend withing 300 units (unless they are attacking someone else of course). That makes spartial surge really low damage.
This makes GS autoattack really unattractive for me. Having same damage at all ranges and 10% less damage at max range would vastly improve GS.
Mantra of Pain: crap damage, mostly used with “heal allies when you cast a mantra” trait because it has 1 sec recharge.
Mantra of Concentration: fairly useless, especially since any opponent that uses lots of CC (mace warrior) won’t let you cast for 4 seconds. Niche use in PvE vs spammed CC, because it’s our only stability skill. As far as stability skills go it’s a bad one. There’s plenty of other stunbreakers and abilities mesmer can use CCed, so stunbreaker portion adds nothing.
Mantra of Resolve: Can be decent, but it’s a mantra and thus crap. I’d rather slot any other cond removal, most notably Phantasmal Disenchanter (though PD is bugged this patch and randomly fails to spawn).
Mantra of Distraction: Long recharge, long cast for 2 dazes? I’ll pass. Don’t forget that 30 sec recharge starts when you expend ALL charges. So if you have 3 uses this ability has an effective recharge of 30+3*5+4 = 49 seconds if you spam it on recharge.
But if you try to use your mantra’s charges intelligently (not just spam them as soon as you cast the mantra) and if you don’t start casting mantra as soon as it recharges (to find the window of opportunity to have an unharrased 4 sec cast) then the turn-around time on this mantra becomes 60+ seconds. This is a problem with all mantras.
In general very few skills in this game have longer than 1 sec, 1.5 sec cast. So those that do better be worth it. Mantras have 4 second cast time. The only other ability with that cast time (not counting channeled) is Guardian’s elite book Full Heal, which is actually worth 4 sec cast. Mantras are not.
4 seconds of not doing damage, of taking damage, you can’t dodge (interrupts the cast) not to mention very heightened probability of getting interrupted anyway makes this ability crap.
Every time I see a mesmer running one of these in pvp I know I’m up against a bad build.
(edited by ManCaptain.3154)
Are you complaining about your 2-second delay or finding yourself in a 2 vs. 1? Either way, these are uphill situations, and against any other class or build it might not matter what your reaction speed is if you’re caught in the middle of a fight.
Besides, if you decide to play the thief how are you going to land a backstab with that lag?
It’s not about 2v1 it about the fact that the thief drops 70% of HP off you before you even see him. The same scenario doesn’t apply to other classes. With every other class you at least have the ability to do something.
I doesn’t have to be 2v1. It could be you running away from a fight slightly damaged. Bam, downed. Out of nowhere. No other class can do that. Every kittening skill on their bar crits in 5K+ and their stupid steal crits for 5.6k./
Still can’t play.
Remove the channel.
Expand the Blind aoe so that it matches the burn aoe (right now the blind AoE is melee range, half the radius of burn aoe).
Lol at all the people who smartass about how the guy should react. You can’t react. You’re fighting a warrior, he gets you below 70%. Suddenly you’re downed and a thief appears next to you. That’s how it goes.
Engineer rifle autoattack is the most damaging direct damage ranged autoattack in the game IIRC. In general Engineer damage is pretty sweet except for a few things (elixir gun sucks).
The main problem with engineer is survivability, especially against ranged opponents. Engineer is inverse mesmer.
Mesmer. #2 Deception allows the Mes to randomly teleport to a new location avoiding a whole group of stompers and summons a downed clone. #3 Phantasmal Rogue simply does high DPS. The Mes can’t reliably run toward allies, but they can avoid a stomp and with high DPS (#1 Mind Blast is not shabby), rally off their foe. Their downed state skill set is perfectly balanced imo, leaning neither toward too strong or too weak.
I can answer to this.
skill 1 is crap against stompers since they take no damage from Confusion.
skill 2 does work against multiple stompers but that’s about it. The clone is useless against stompers because it spams confusion and as a clone it only deals about 30 per attack. The clone is useless as a distractions as it always appears first and real mesmer always has a red arrow over his head.
skill 3 deals nice damage, but unless you waste time you can always stomp the mesmer before this one comes up.
Against a mesmer I just go for the stomp, he disappears, his clone appears, I wait about 0.5 sec more, the real mesmer appears, go to him and stomp before he can summon his phantasm. GG.
Not to mention the idea of utility phantasms on a class that uses them in shatters is pretty dumb.
I would love to see confusion reworked into something else than Yet Another Damage Condition. However in the meantime, they should give it same damage in spvp as it is currently in WvW and I’d slap a second or 2 extra duration on every confusion skill.
Remember when we thought that Cry of Frustration confusion lasting 3 sec instead of listed 4 was a bug, then they came out and said “LOL we fixed the description so that is says 3 sec”? I found that quite demoralizing, as it showed they had no intention of making confusion viable.
I don’t think PvE balance should ever be on the table in a game like GW2, really.
It should be WvW and sPvP balance, PvE will sort-of fall in, really. The only thing you’d rarely need to worry about is when a profession is completely built around alpha-striking, because obviously that doesn’t work in PvE.
Of course as a mesmer I should be happy they let me use 330 dmg confusion in WvW instead of spvp 170 dmg one…. but to me, the viability of confusion builds in WvW compared to spvp just proves to me, that the value in spvp is too low.
I don’t like having WvW use PvE balance. All those nerfs to thief they did? Don’t apply to WvW. They still hit like a freight train. 4.5k dancing dagger crits, cloak and dagger at full power etc…
The CD increase on portal was not due to WvW at all. It is all about sPvP. But unlike other classes mesmer nerfs where across the board in aspects of game. Portal was being used in sPvP to have means to quickly bring 5 man team to 1 spot if a node was threatened by other team. And I also belive that new sPvP map is made with alot of jumping to different lvls.
I can’t say I like sPvP any less as a result of this, but only because I can’t believe how much they let it’s balance impact the rest of the game.
I don’t see where this is coming from when they have already split many many skills for spvp. For instance the damage confusion deals in spvp has no effect on other game modes (170 in spvp, 330 in pve and wvw).
All of you complaining about the blind need to learn to play it seems. Pay attention and use an auto attack to get rid of the blind and then summon your phantasms.
First of all, one can get blinded during the cast. Secondly blind is not the main problem, neither is being unable to cast without LOS. Main problem is dodge rolls, aegis and block skills. Someone dodge rolls while you’re casting your phantasm… no phantasm.
And as far as Greatsword phantasm goes… whirlwinds 1, 3,5…. deal half as much damage as whirlwinds 2,4,6… Where’s the logic in that?
(edited by ManCaptain.3154)
My mesmer is a confusion+blind spec with 20/0/0/20/30, Scepter+touch(main)/staff or scepter/focus. Here is my build Link
Lack of blink/clone makes this very vulnerable to various immobilize+hundred blades combos. While you’re maximizing your confusion generation you shouldn’t forget about survivability.
Another question… what use is Shatters add Vulnerability trait? Vulnerability doesn’t improve cond damage (or does it???).
I’ve made cond builds before that stack up to 10 stacks of confusion. That’s decent damage, but the confusion stacks fall off too quickly.
Main problem with confusion in pve is that most stacks are 3 sec ones. iMage one even ignores cond duration bonuses.
Due to short duration of confusion you end up being way worse than other classes’ CD specs.
Consider this: with a single skill (Impale) a CD spec warrior can deal 10560 bleed damage (BEFORE any condition duration buffs from food or traits, BEFORE any CD buffs from food or might stacks – which warrior can easily have 5 from elite signet), which compared to confusion is also unconditional (works on people running away, slow swinging monsters). Hell Deep Cuts trait alone add 50% to bleed duration which makes it 15k+ bleed damage from one skill alone.
Can CD spec mesmer match that? No. But most people here will tell you that confusion is awesome damage, because they are clueless and anet did a psychological trick. They made all the confusion stacks sum up and hit with one big number, while bleeds output tons of 110 dmg numbers, which makes it look like confusion is big damage, when in reality it’s paltry compared to any serious bleed build.
(edited by ManCaptain.3154)
Mesmer has great survivability, which also means you can easily solo Vets. But that’s a far as it goes… for everything else in PvE mesmer is actually quite bad. Just doesn’t have the damage.
Not worthwhile, the cooldown is 90 sec and the mirrored CC isn’t exactly mirrored. If someone hits you with 3 sec KD, they will get KDed for 1 sec. Sometimes I run into a mesmer using this trait, and it mostly just mirrors a 1 sec daze, since this is the most common CC I have.
Can you at least move my characters out of LA?
Why make a new list when they fixed 0 bugs off the old one?
Earlier my main character teleported to LA, and walked to a new POI (Commendations place in the south part of the map).
I crashed. At any subsequent attempt to log in with that character, the LA map almost completely loads (I start to hear the ambient sound), then it crashes, citing Corrupted Resource as the cause. I have ran several repairs already and it doesn’t fix the problem. Thus my main is stuck in the LA forever.
My level 30 character could portal to LA just fine and worked find until I ran toward the same POI. As I ran south past the dungeon token gear vendors toward WvW asura portals I crashed, and the level 30 character now crashes like my level 80 one and it is lost until this bug is fixed.
Another new crash “site” is when I open my map by pressing “M”, attempting to zoom out with mouse wheel will crash the game.
Both these bugs are new since Lost Shore update.
Doesn’t matter what skills you have loaded. When you run around, get into fights, at any time your HP dips under 70%, you run the risk of getting 2 shotted before you even see the thief.
I solve this by running away from thieves in pvp.
All Phantasms except Berserker (and maybe Disenchanter) were always negated by Blind and Invulnerability. It amuses me people cite this as a HUGE NERF when it has in fact been the case for most Phantasms already.
Not so sure that was true. I don’t recall having these problems with Duellist, Swordsman or Warlock. The only one I think that was true for was Warden, which was one of the reasons I disliked using it kitten your main damage source, projectile reflect and a shatter is negated by one blind). Now this applies to all phantasms. Nice going ANet.
This is especially unfair since block/blind etc does not negate other classes’ multiattacks. Does blind make whole death blossom fail? Does a blind make whole Hundred blades fail? Does a 1 sec invul or a dodge make whole Rapid Fire channel fail?
No it doesn’t. So why should phantasmal warden fail? Not to mention blind doesn’t make spirit weapons, turrets, minions or elementals fail. Do utility phantasms like Phantasmal Defender fail if the target dodges? If so that’s the most kitten thing ever.
ANet is hard at work to top their GW1 balancing failures. They might even top Dervish!
Sorry but your phantasm is 1 attack only. What the phantasm itself does is completely irrelevant.
PS
Oh wow, so mesmers now need to actually pay attention to being blinded or enemy using blocks ?! Preposterous!
Phantasm is 1 SKILL only. Not one attack.
If Phantasm skill is one attack, then so is Deadly Blossom, Lava Font, Flame bomb etc…
Don’t rely on confusion on spvp.
Max CD: bleed 110 per second, confusion 170 per skill use.
Bleeds are way easier to stack and last longer (thus they do much more damage).
And if you’re thinking right now that you’ll focus on inflicting bleeds, most other classes are way better at that and they have poison which is vitally important to any condition damage char.
It would be better if it was attacking at 6 second rate with improvement from Phantasmal Haste, but Mage is attacking at 7.5 second rate with no benefit from Phantasmal Haste.
The joke is that anet said they nerfed attack from 5 sec to 6 sec, but it wasn’t 5 sec ever in the first place.
I’ve been running a confusion/shatter build that uses 1580 cond damage in WvW.
I think most people who run Cond builds “think” they have a lot of cond. Confusion gets amazing once you’re over 1400.
I don’t need 10 stacks to hurt.
I get 1500 condition damage dealing…355 per stack of confusion. That’s relatively good.
-In spvp confusion only deals 170.
-In pve monsters attack slowly as hell.
-Most confusion abilities inflict 3 seconds of it and it’s harder to stack than bleeds.
In spvp for instance a necro can drop 10 stacks of 110 per second bleeds of around 8-10 second duration on an area in seconds. Confusion just can’t compare. WvW is the only place you can actually kill someone with confusion, but the low durations still make it less viable than bleeds.
@Clip, I get what you’re saying. I guess my point was, on my thief, I’m usually only out of stealth a couple of seconds before I’m right back in (as long as my cnd continues to land). This got harder with the pistol bug introduced a few weeks ago. Now, that they fixed that with this patch, it should allow me to get back into stealth very often. With the blinds in place, I don’t see how a Mesmer will ever have time to cast a phantasm on me. This helps me greatly on my thief, as Mesmers were the one class I avoided in 1v1s.
No idea why the buffed thief stealth. I’ve had fights where out of 60 seconds the thief was visible maybe 5 total and not more than 1 second at one time. It’s getting ridiculous.
Now would be a good time to remix your build if you want to stay a glass cannon, or become a real Mesmer and run a Condition Bunker like me. <3
Except that confusion is worthless in PvE and sPvP, and mediocre in WvW, and practically every other class in the game is better at inflicting bleeds and burns and poison. Also condition builds without poison = crap.
Even with these nerfs, I do way more damage with zerker gear in spvp or pve, than your condition build ever will.
All Phantasms except Berserker (and maybe Disenchanter) were always negated by Blind and Invulnerability. It amuses me people cite this as a HUGE NERF when it has in fact been the case for most Phantasms already.
Not so sure that was true. I don’t recall having these problems with Duellist, Swordsman or Warlock. The only one I think that was true for was Warden, which was one of the reasons I disliked using it kitten your main damage source, projectile reflect and a shatter is negated by one blind). Now this applies to all phantasms. Nice going ANet.
This is especially unfair since block/blind etc does not negate other classes’ multiattacks. Does blind make whole death blossom fail? Does a blind make whole Hundred blades fail? Does a 1 sec invul or a dodge make whole Rapid Fire channel fail?
No it doesn’t. So why should phantasmal warden fail? Not to mention blind doesn’t make spirit weapons, turrets, minions or elementals fail. Do utility phantasms like Phantasmal Defender fail if the target dodges? If so that’s the most kitten thing ever.
ANet is hard at work to top their GW1 balancing failures. They might even top Dervish!
Yes the whole discussion about mesmer’s mega damage is ridiculous. I win vs warriors because I play my defenses perfectly. Not because I have any real damage. You wanna see real damage? Let a warrior/thief get near you.
mesmer full shatter combo (which is somewhat avoidable too) is around 10k damage.
Zerker gear/divinity and 20% mind wrack damage and IP trait I can get up to a bit over 8k damage.
Once I played an Elementalist tank with 2200 toughness and got hit with
9k by BLADETRAIL (these are two hits in one animation wiht 900 range)
As a tank !
Rush (GS gap closer) hits for 5k. Basically every single skill on GS skill bar crits for 4-5k.
What? If you have aoe like guardian staff kill the clones otherwise just ignore them.
It’s not hard. Pick out the real mesmer and apply pressure on him. Watch clones to dodge the shatter. Easy. I never target clones.
What you can do is spend the whole fight just destroying the clones, who then act as a defensive barrier for the mesmers that stop incoming damage.
Then don’t do that. It’s not rocket science. Ignore the clones.
I have no problems with playing explorables as mesmer. And i never had. Be it pugs or not. Also with proper items and trait distribution mesmer can show big numbers too.
But other people have no idea what your numbers are, so it doesn’t do you any good.
Mesmers are not meant for damage (even if they can deal a decent amount), but for their utility.
Good Mesmers are super survivable. Not by their armor, but mobility, stun breaker and teleport abilities – especially with the Staff. I know most ppl don’t like Mantras, but Inspiration IV + X with Healing Mantras makes you pretty durable. For even more healing, you can bind MoPain (Insp IV) to another slot. Duelling VII might be too expensive for most players.But the utility … AoE Stealth, Blink, Portal, Veil, MeatShields, ReflectDome, ChaosField, TimeWarp … I find dungeon parties because I’m a mesmer.
[ Edit ]
and condition removal. iDisenchanter can be strong. And is the most useful spell at the CoE explo buffing golem.
Mesmers have great self-survivability. Which is pointless in pve and certainly less useful than an ele who can continuously spam AoE prot/regen/cond removal.
Seems fine to me. It’s pretty much even if not slightly below thief and mesmer.
The hell are you going on about? Mesmer downed state is one of the worst in the game. Thief one has cripple and if you don’t teleport to the thief he will just keep disappearing. Mesmer one has longer recharge and the clone is useless because real mesmer always appears second and has a red arrow over him. Mesmer downed=ranger downed as far as power is concerned. You can evade one stomp and that’s it.
hardcore wvwvw
Why are these 2 words in the same sentence?
To your number 2 point:
First, I’ll stop playing that one build that everyone is playing when ANet actually properly designs the class. When they actually make something other than zerker shatter burst builds viable, then I might play something else. Until then I’ll keep playing the one build that actually works, thank you very much.
And secondly, how can you even compare thief and mesmer. Mesmer using Mind Wrack shatter + blurred frenzy + phantasms and if they all crit he can deal 15k damage perhaps, but it’s all telegraphed and a lot of it is avoidable. Thief deals massive amounts of damage popping out of stealth.
And your claim that they have 45 second recharge to do it is a complete strawman argument. They only need to use their utilities if they want really high damage single hit. They deal massive damage just fine without using any utilities. Steal for 4.8k, then cloak and dagger for 6k, backstab for 7k+, even throw dagger crits for over 4k. All of this while shadowstepping and popping in and out of invis.