Guild Wars 2

So the “data mined” values are as follows. Of course, nobody quite knows yet if this is all true or just some rumour:

Signet of the Ether (CD 25s)
Signet Passive: Heal yourself based on the number of active illusions you control.
Signet Active: Heal yourself and refresh all phantasm skill recharges.

Healing:40
Passive Heal—1 Illusion:20
Passive Heal— Illusions:20
Passive Heal—3 Illusions:20

Link: http://www.gw2db.com/skills/23527-signet-of-the-ether

For comparison, Warrior Healing Signet has a base value of 75 with no reliance on having any illusions out.

Odokuro.5049:

So a Condi Mesmer (Blackwater) is too SLOW for solo-roaming, and the typical Shatter Build is far too “Squishy” for me, and very little/no condi cleansing is a problem…

So what are my other options as far as Solo-roaming that doesn’t make me feel slow or dies when it trips over a twig?

Lol, many thanks!

I’m not saying that there is a L2P issue here as (a) that would be rude and I would hate to give you that impression and (b) I don’t know you and therefore don’t know how you play, thus I can’t make any valid assessment.

However, I do have to disagree with you on both fronts. ;-)

Yes, Mesmers are probably the slowest class out there, but they are definitely not too slow for solo roaming. I do pretty much nothing else than solo roaming and I run the Mindcrush lock-down spec, which doesn’t utilise the Focus, nor do I run with Travellers runes. Of course, it can be frustrating at times but I’ve learned to be a patient man and the build gives me plenty of utility to escape when I’m outnumbered or suddenly a zerg shows up. It’s all about how you use terrain I’ve found.

Shatter is, of course, much more squishy than a Blackwater spec but – again – I find that it’s perfectly fine for solo roaming. You have so many ways to literally confuse your opponent and get them to hit your clones and especially with a Lockdown spec that heavily utilises shatters as well, you can chain-daze your opponent and with the right traits stun them for 50% of your dazes as well.

It’s quite simply a different mind-set than with Blackwater… Blackwater relies on damage avoidance through heavy stealth, Shatter relies on damage avoidance through constant movement and aggressive gameplay so you get your opponent on the back-foot, Lockdown relies on damage avoidance through making life a misery for your opponent with dazes/stuns/interrupts.

The other day, for example, I was fighting a Warrior and with a constant barrage of dazes/stuns/interrupts/shatters he managed to get two hits on me before he died. Granted, that even shocked me and he was probably a FOTM re-roller that didn’t quite know what he was doing, but it does show the power of this type of game-play. Interrupting a thief who is at 25% and about to go in stealth, or any class who is low on health and wants to get their big heal off never gets old either, especially when you then duly burst them down.

PU Condition like Blackwater are the easiest to play out of all three though, but with some practices the others are very very viable indeed. However, they require more timing for shatters and more knowledge of your enemy’s mechanics for interrupts.

They’re still slow though. :-)

Condi PU: Blackwater
Power Lockdown: Mindcrush
Power Phantasm: Pyro Overpowered
Power Shatter: Osicat Heavy or Mists

Marsares.2053:

PvP + WvW: Lockdown (e.g. Mindcrush build)
PVE: refuse to do it. :-)

My previous post in the previous thread got deleted, so no doubt it’ll happen again here.

However, I for one, am far from thrilled about this. What we need is more intelligent gameplay, what we do not need is more AI, more passive game-play and more cheesy bunker builds.

This heal mostly caters to passive builds like Phantasm or PU Condition which have a relatively low skill-floor and largely ignore our unique class mechanism of shatters. Nor does it address one of the inherent problems we face (i.e. our role in large-scale fights) as our clones get wiped instantly.

It feels that yet again Mesmers are being pushed into the 1v1 / small-scale role (which suits me fine as a solo roamer), but even more worryingly towards passive game-play. PU builds are already strong… with +5% TGH → Condi from 10 December onwards and potentially this heal, it just may be pushed over the edge of acceptability.

I really wish the Devs would push us towards more power and shatter based builds that require a modicum of skill, timing and understanding of your opponents, rather than just spamming clones, running in circles and constantly stealthing.

Do not get me wrong, shatter and lock-down builds are viable, but the vast majority of Mesmers will gravitate even more towards Phantasm/PU builds with this new heal.

Epic night of fighting on MS BL and thanks to all the guilds involved. It was a joy to watch so many guilds fighting each other in pretty much a constant stream of impromptu GvG where they didn’t add when two guilds that appeared evenly matched were already fighting each other. Much respect to all three sides.

Solo roaming on my little Mesmer was a bit tricky given that it only seemed to be 20+ guild groups, so I hope you don’t mind that I was adding a bit here and there and picking off some of your stragglers. :-)

PvP + WvW: Lockdown
PVE: refuse to do it. :-)

Junkpile.7439:

Wonder what piken have payed for guilds. Nobody play in roleplay server for free.

There was no need as all the hardcore guilds that played Warhammer for nearly three years, a good portion of which they fought each other or fought alongside each other on the Karak-Norn server, decided to group together on Piken Square. That’s what initially brought guilds like Red Guard, VII, TUP, HOB, etc there and germinated the seed for a guild-focussed WvW server.

All these original guilds have since left Piken Square, but the baton has been picked up by others. Piken Square has always been known as a place where guilds come to have good fights, with PPT as a secondary concern. It’s what makes PS special, but is also it’s biggest weakness as, as a result, they don’t have a coherent community like VZ that rallies together and fights for points. With PS in many ways it has been guild > server.

… and here’s one with a Clone and a Phantasm out.

Was requested to do some more screenshots, so here’s one with Blurred Frenzy

Dual Whisperblade ftw. :-)

LordByron.8369:

fotm sword may be the most beautiful sword skin around…..if you see it in game with its long trail its really awesome.

I use bolt/whisperblade btw >.> because i already have elementalist being full fotm.

Whisperblade is cool being the phantasm’s sword

Do you have a screenshot of the FOTM sword? Not sure which one you refer to as I don’t do PVE really…

… and stowed away.

As promised, wielding the dual Whisperblades.

PU builds are rather cheesy and rely for a large part on your opponent just mindlessly killing your clones. You’d imagine that a logically thinking person wouldn’t do this, but it appears that in WvW that type of people is in short supply.

It doesn’t surprise me that thieves are complaining about it, having been a powerful class for such a long time it has its fair share of FOTM rerollers and the vast majority of thieves I face seem to mash their 1 and 2 buttons mindlessly, killing clone after clone in the process.

PU Mesmers are very strong, but only so in 1v1 or small-scale. They also have obvious counters, the most important one being to stop and think for a moment before you attack whatever is nearest to you. Are they too strong? Perhaps, but it can only be judged after the new Meta (10 Dec) settles down.

I ran it for quite a while. It was powerful, but a lot of people have caught on like someone else said and more often than not it’s a trolly build. When I face one, I just run off after a while if I can’t kill him, and there’s nothing that he can do about me running off.

In essence, I got bored with its passive game-play and went back to a power-based build, centred on the Mindcrush lock-down spec. It requires much more skill and resembles much more how the Mesmer should be played in my eyes.

KeyLimPi.9031:

Though it’s not the same solution, I posted something like this a long time back as a suggestion that the Mesmer community didn’t seem to get behind

REPOST OF SUGGESTION
How would the community feel if mantra’s worked like almost like Initiative? I’ll explain it a little without including any traits for it.
Mantra of Recovery has a ten second recharge time and a two charge limit. With this, every ten seconds you would gain one charge of MoR passively. This would stack up to two times, with the normal limit. If you already have two charges it wouldn’t passively recharge till you used one charge.
This would allow you to keep Mantra’s up and not feel like you have to expend them all at once then spend the next 9 seconds stopping all DPS, all healing and the sort to keep up maximum effectiveness.
The only problem I see is
Protected Mantras – Increases armor while casting mantras.
Unless you get a buff to armor for “X” seconds" every time you expend a charge. It’s just a thought but how would the community feel about it?

I agree with the general thinking of your proposal. There may be some details that need to be thought out further as there might be some unintended consequences, but in general it addresses the main problem that Mantra has.

I run the Mindcrush setup with the healing and interrupt Mantras and it is a major disadvantage when you come out of a fight with one interrupt left on your Mantra, then having to use it and wait 20+ seconds before you can charge it again. During this period, you’re left very vulnerable. Your solution will largely address this.

… just wondering, has anybody applied for our guild to be considered for testing this new map? Would be nice to do some roaming here with fellow-Mesmers whilst exploring and testing the new map.

I run the Mindcrush build with Bifrost and Whisperblade/Whisperblade in solo / smallscale roaming and absolutely love the look of it. It’s incredibly Mesmer-like.

I’ll see if I can do a screenshot for you later on today.

Been using this build in WvW solo roaming a lot lately and am getting more adept at it. It’s not as forgiving as the Blackwater build and you need a lot more focus as it has much higher skill level, but I personally find it much more rewarding.

Been fiddling about with the spec as well and started running with Mantra of Recovery, combined with Harmonious Mantras (rather than Confounding Suggestions). I love the stun chance on CS, but with HM you basically get three charges on your heal and your daze mantra.

When the 10 Dec comes in, I’ll have a play with both CS and HM and figure out for which one I’ll settle.

What really annoys me (in WvW more so than in sPvP) is that every time you go underwater, you’ll have to recharge your Mantras. This can be a real game-breaker when you’re in the middle of a fight.

Yeah, been running the standard shatter build most of the afternoon and forgot how much it is compared to a much more passive condi-build. Also, surprised how survivable it is in the current condi meta, as long as you run with lemongrass for -40% condi duration.

jenzie.4083:

Nice! I’ve never tried shatter mesmer, got stuck with phantasms. I think I’ll give shatter mesmer a chance tonight. What build are you running?

Nice video. I’ve started going back to power builds as well. Bunker Condi is where it’s at in the current Meta, but it’s just a rather dull game play I find.

Would be interested in your build as well.

I find it somewhat amusing to see people claim to be “the best” in a game-mode where winning has in reality very little to do with whoever is the best, and is predominantly determined by whoever has the most numbers and/or the best coverage.

Even at times when the odds are most even (i.e. when every single server has a queue on every single BL and EB), even then it’s largely determined by the luck of the draw, as it matters if organised guilds get in or whether it’s PUGs, if those PUGs decide to be on Vent and if there’s a good Commander online. What’s more, at those times the server with lower coverage or numbers will be often at a distinct disadvantage as they’ll be facing keeps that have been heavily upgraded during a lull in their coverage.

If you really want to brag about being the best, as a guild you should compete in GvG or as an individual you should play sPvP. If you want to determine which server is “best”, GW2 has very little to offer. If, however, you want to see which server has the best coverage, and subsequently brag about it and feel good about it, then WvW is the game for you.

Looking forward to the changes, especially change to Confounding Suggestions will benefit Lockdown builds although it’s stille somewhat "meh"for a Grandmaster trait. One more request from me:

- Please fix iLeap so it works when the terrain is uneven as current pathing is highly unreliable on anything uneven

Thank you.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

@Marsares: Hey, I’m looking at working on a WvW variant of the build and will be posting my findings soon. Tentacle Love (Wow.. what a name. Conjures creepy images. x.x ) posted an interesting variant…

Definitely leaning towards Focus for WvW. Right now I’m looking at other good solo-roaming builds to compare notes, and working on an entirely different lockdown build for group battles.

Thanks, would be really interested in your findings. I’ll be fiddling about with Mind Crush as well in WvW over the coming weeks, so we could compare notes in due course. Unfortunately I have very limited gaming time the next few weeks, so not sure how far I’ll get.

I assume you’re leaning towards Focus for more large-scale and not for solo-roaming, Sword4 is just too good to miss out in 1v1 or 1v2 it seems and Sword5 hits like a truck.

Personally, I’m thinking about something like the following for solo WvW roaming. Any thoughts on gear etc?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNAW8clwzKqXTTjGb9IiJFBnvR6hpxanWJF82FC-jUyAYfBZCDABCmQAl+KiGbJtIas6aMNMRUt9mIqWGAmFA-w

I’d love to see a podcast about lockdown builds… they’re still under-utilised I’d argue.

I love this build, I really do and have been playing it with great success in PvP the last month or so. It’s a rewarding class in that if you do things well, you are a monster, but if you screw up you get ruthlessly punished for it. It’s certainly not as forgiving as a PU build, but lock-down has been the main reason for rolling Mesmer for me.

Having somewhat gotten the hang of the build (I’m far from mastering it!) I want to test it in WvW as I spent most of my time solo roaming the BLs. However, pretty much all my gear is condition based, so before I splash out on what-not I have a few questions:

- Has anyone tried this build for solo roaming in WvW?
- If so, what gear/accessories/weapons would you recommend?

What I find with the build is that I function really well when I’m in control (i.e. 1v1, or 1v2 at times) but that the moment it gets messy, the effectiveness of the build diminishes rapidly. Whilst PU build thrives on messy environments (i.e. let the muppets kill your clones), a lock-down build gets difficult to pull off when it’s 1v2+, yet in WvW you are more often than not outnumbered as a solo roamer.

Any thoughts would be appreciated?

State of WvW:

“… because 10s lag spikes, zergs of skill-less 1-mashing PVE doorhammer heroes, and a billion CC warriors is fun.”

Lag is even worse than early days keep fights in Warhammer… >.<

Sensotix.4106:

illusionary leap
-> clones get stuck randomly if the ground is not flat

Has only been the case since day 1 and reported so many times, I’ve lost count.

I love the sword, it’s one of my favourite weapons, but with the unreliability of iLeap + Swap on uneven terrain, it often becomes a liability. :-(

Swap bugs out the vast majority of times when the terrain is even marginally uneven, thereby rendering a skill that is imperative for Shatter mesmers not just unreliable but near unusuable.

If the pathing could be revised to take into account terrain uneveness, this skill would actually do what it’s supposed to do.

Thank you.

Mesmer should win although it’s near impossible to catch up with a Warrior if he decides to bail and legs it. A well played Mesmer is one of the few hard counters against a Warrior in this current Meta.

I would never get a legendary I’d say as I can’t be bothered with all the PVE elements that are required to get it, but if I’d choose one I’d go for the Bifrost for the reasons that got mentioned above (i.e. staff can be used in the vast majority of builds).

Everyone has GS and personally I think that Vision of the Mists looks better as a GS on a Mesmer anyways.

I stopped running with DE in solo WvW roaming… just don’t find I really need it anymore.

Game plan is simple:

1) Log into all the various BL’s until I find “Outnumbered” so I know I’ll be regularly facing challenging fights.
2) Select a BL, consult the map to kitten the situation and determine where you want to go.
3) My gear is basic exotics and although I do use food, I want to win on equal terms or preferably when the odds are against me.
4) Engage anything that seems somewhat winnable, but likewise be smart to disengage when the odds are overwhelmingly against me.
5) Don’t worry about kitten though, no kittens in heaven die when my toon bites the dust.
6) Don’t add to ongoing 1v1’s, it’s lame.
7) When you win just walk away when the opponent wasn’t that worthy, do a /bow when it was a good fight and when it was a very close fight I sometimes party invite someone for a chit chat.

Interesting concept about leaving the opponent in downed state, without actually stomping them. Nice sign off respect and will definitely start doing that.

Like I said, it’s not my build. ;-)

It’s the only trait I actually changed as I came to the same conclusion last night. Instead I’m using extra bounce on bouncing attacks to bump my staff damage a bit.

Let me start by stating first and foremost: this is not my build. I stumbled across it last night whilst browsing the PvP forum and after having tried it rather extensively now I can honestly say that I’ve fallen in love with it.

I’ve always been skeptic about hybrid builds, but this one truly works for me in PvP so I thought I’d share it with the community. It has decent condition damage which helps with pressurising an enemy and whittling their health down to such a stage that they’re ready to be bursted. At that moment it has two stuns so you can lock them down, and burst them down with the usual combo of iLeap, Blurred Frenzy and Mind Wrack.

Obviously, it doesn’t do the condition damage of a pure condi spec, nor does it have the survivability of a PU spec. Neither does it have the burst of a pure power shatter build, but at the same time it doesn’t have the glass cannon effect either.

It sits nicely in the middle and as such is a jack-of-all-trades and a master-of-none, however, it all seems to synergise nicely and when you get your timings right and you’ve learned how far down you need to get an enemy’s health for you to be able to burst them down, it works really well.

PvP video by Countless:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z37V1IseCM

Build by Countless
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-NFR30JGWPk51y6JV-71;9;49O9-O4;019-4;348-Uok6-wl6KJG4KJG47BE

iLeap really needs to be fixed now with the new WvW lakes kitten many areas are uneven, shatter build is nearly impossible as a roamer as it bugs out nearly all the time now.

The enjoyment has been totally taken out of WvW for me.

Whilst before it was zergs and rather open planes, at least you saw people and the excitement of solo roaming was that you never knew what was going to show up.

Now with so many places to attack/defend, zerging has somewhat been solved although you still see them. However, as a result there’s nobody to be seen in the lakes and although I’m in T1 it’s easy to roam for quite some time without seeing anyone. There are quite simply too many places to hide or that block line of sight.

The one class that seems to enjoy it are thieves… it’s just a paradise for them at the moment and I’ve never seen so many of them coming out of the woodwork.

I don’t know… I find it hard to put my finger on it but I’m really not enjoying WvW any longer and that has nothing to do with bloodlust. I think bloodlust is one of the most stupid ideas ever, but even if they’d fix that the WvW experience just feels dull.

Am from the EU and would be delighted to take part in this. Am spending more and more of my time in PvP rather than WvW anyways.

themenaceofseventhdimension.2075:

Without the veil cd trait, you will 100% feel that you are being seen out in the open for too long for your enemies to find and attack you, go and try it out!

Rather than expecting people to test your build whilst over and over the flaws were highlighted, why don’t you go out in the lakes and test it for once yourself whilst making a video of it. I’d like to see you fight a good Necro with your build, or any condition class for that matter. Such a video will show three things:

- That indeed you can destroy 90% of players
- That it’s a viable build
- That you’re the salvation of the mesmer community

Until such a moment, I’ll spend my time testing some of the viable builds, thank you very much.

Sensotix Bountiful Interruption
+1
Reason: it’s a viable build that works very well in tPvP. It gives the player good survivability due to a relatively high amount of boon generation, whilst generating an impressive amount of Might which subsequently can be shared with your team mates. Not only are you effective on your own, you also bring a lot to your team mates. For once, my Mesmer felt useful to its team other than through the box-standard utilities. Spend most of my weekend testing this build and literally had a blast doing so.

Natsu Blackwater Build
+1
Reason: for coming up with a build that works very well in the current meta and can be utilised to great effect whilst roaming in the lakes. This build formed the inspiration for my current roaming spec. Although I’ve adapted it quite a lot trait-wise in order to suit my particular play-style, it got me back into playing a condition spec. And I know that I’m not alone when I say that many Mesmers have taken his build as the core of their spec.

Menace Ultimate Hidden Beast Epic Fail Mesmer Plague Salvation Build
- 5
Reason (x5):
- For randomly theorycrafting on the forum without any due diligence or testing
- For constantly bumping his own thread and renaming it a gazillion times
- For putting “salvation” into his build title, pretending it’s the one build that saves us all
- For claiming that his “build destroys all other classes completely around 90% of the time” whilst he doesn’t understand the basics of how traits, runes, sigils interact
- For constantly being defensive and argumentative with those who try to show the err of his ways

In general, he’s trolling and polluting the forum and generally devalues the Mesmer community by misinforming others with his ill-thought out “builds”.

Gozzo.7380:

to put it shortly your build offers no advantage to p.e. natsus blackwater build or the altered version by osciat. both have more access to stealth and better condition cleanse. you just took 10 points out of these builds and invested them in inspirations which is useless . wouldn’t even waste 3 silver to test it.

Word.

And CD on veil? Seriously… I pretty much only solo roam in WWW lakes and only when I’m in an outnumbered lake and I haven’t used veil in as long as I can remember, yet I’m constantly outnumbered with enemies left, right and centre. It’s all about positioning.

“Mesmer Salvation”
“It is turning into a BEAST build.”

LOL…. the hyperbole never ends with you, does it?

And you wonder why you haven’t had a lot of helpers lately?

And halting strike when you’re condition spec.. wtf?

Killua.8041:

Imo Vision of the Mists looks better than the legendaries for mesmer.

Couldn’t agree more.

LOVING this build… so much fun. I normally solo roam in the WWW lakes, but this build got me back into PvP and with great success. Running s/s and GS and the damage you can churn out is devastating.

I’m still relatively noobish and constantly forget to share my boons, but learning to time my interrupts to stack the might and other boons before I share them. When you’re in a 3v3 and you share 15+ might, the tide of the battle suddenly changes.

For once I feel useful to my team as a Mesmer, which is rather rare.

In-game name: Marsares
Server: Piken Square
Role: Scholar
Playing: hardcore solo un-guilded WWW roaming. Don’t do PVE whatsoever.

Condi mesmer in Wvw small-scale roaming is still good, but it’s just soooooo slow. We are some way behind on other condi classes though. When it becomes large-scale, the Mesmer is turning into an utility-bot and that’s about it. Haven’t played SPvP in a while

However, I do like the direction that they seem to be taken the Mesmer with a greater focus on interrupts and confusion, although most of that is single-target, which doesn’t help us much in large scale WvW.

Been thinking about the following build with these runes:

Dom (0)
Duel (25): V, X
Chaos (25): V, X
Inspir (0)
Illus (20): V, VII

However, does Master of Misdirection still work? It should give 33% longer confusion, but doesn’t show up in the Character Tab.

I’ll miss the CD trait on Torch from Dom, and I’ll certainly miss Prismatic Understanding, but basically trying to create a build with decent survivability, lots of stealth, good confusion damage/duration and lots and lots and lots of ways of applying confusion.

Confusion doesn’t hit as hard as it used to, but taking the philosophy of “the straw that broke the camel’s back” and trying to keep lots of stacks up.

I stopped solo roaming on my thief. It’s too easy and thus boring. Big damage, insane crit chance, and you can just stealth nearly at will to evade and regen. It’s an easymode class.

As many others have said, the main reason to solo roam on anything else is for the challenge and to not be part of the FOTM bandwagon thieves.

Did some more solo roaming with this build and the troll-potential is insane. :-)

Fought a very good thief for 12 minutes and he couldn’t kill me, whilst I nearly got him down a few times. We ended up with a fair few spectators on either side over the course of our fight. Eventually he gave up, did a /bow and left.

Then with another Mesmer we roamed and fought groups of twice or size, and eventually ran into a six-men guild group that we took down with just the two of us. Zerg showed up, and we kited them around for nearly a good few minutes until they finally got us.

The build clearly lacks the burst of other builds, but it makes up survivability and the fact that you can totally screw with someone’s mind with all the clones, phantasms and stealths that you got. Confusion really needs a bit of a buff as it got nerfed too hard recently, but it’s a very very fun spec for solo or small scale roaming.