Guild Wars 2

KyorFish.5896:

!
-Also they are changing how all Signets work in the game so this will affect all thief builds old and new.

I haven’t seen anything about this anywhere. Do you have any details on what they plan to change? or a source for the speculation?

Thanks for the laugh.

loved it! +1

Das Brockenhuhn.6984:

Tell the people to afk in Obsidian Refugium, you get the rewards correctly applied, a lot of Players do not know this

I did not think/know about that. I’ll afk in there from now on.

There should still be a “cash out” option. Have it lock you out of being able to obtain participation for like 20 mins after you use it, though.

I actually really love how the blocks function, especially after the evasion frame was added to them.

If something were to be changed about them (and i’d love to see this change applied to all clone producing abilities), I’d like to see them get the scepter auto attack treatment and not produce a clone if you already have 3 illusions out.

apharma.3741:

So, to move the conversation into a productive area, what would you rather see it changed to?

Just giving might to the mesmer enough with maybe a little tweaking to the attack or would you rather it gave something else? Should it be scrapped and remade?

I normally use offhand sword as a RANGED weapon, so its nothing but a useless new animation for me.

In any situation where I am going to be in melee range, its bc I’m stacked in a group with other players. When you’re stacked in a group with other players, might is usually not a problem.

Then, of course, there is the whole Mesmers have basically zero sustained DPS thing that this doesn’t help in any way. If anything it should grant AoE might to party members since Mesmer isn’t allowed to do anything but support.

The white mantle from lake doric really didn’t bother me. They just used a slower AoE mind stab. The whole second HP bar thing was annoying, but whatever.

When I got to the mercenaries in Draconis Mons, I literally stood up and backed away from my computer when the mercenary Mesmer used a confusion stacking unload on me. Mesmers have been asking for main hand pistols since the launch of this game. Seeing them finally give it to some trash mob Mesmer NPCs did make me a little upset.

I’ve thought about this a lot, too. I think the most easily implemented solution (while maybe not the most ideal) would be for clones to deal damage like they were originally intended to do. Make it exotic weapon level damage unaffected by our personal damage mods, similar to our phantasms.

- Damage would have less of a ramp up time bc clones are produced more easily
- Shattering becomes less of a DPS loss (and possibly even a DPS increase). Especially if timed well.
-It doesn’t suddenly make any traits OP*
-Has very little impact on competitive game modes. Illusions die too quickly (and pets are dumb)

*The extra pressure from have IR and CP in the Chrono line is an obvious exception, but I think that the shatter spam those two traits enables is already OP. One of them should be removed, or they should be moved into the same tier.

This happened to me, also. I’m “Repairing Data Archive…” as it suggested to me. Hope I’m not just wasting time.

I use the gathering nodes in both Gilded Hollow and Lost Precipice every day as part of my daily routine. Since the last update, I can only gather from ONE of the instances, though.

Was this a stealth fix to an unintended bug?

or

Is not being able to gather from both a bug?

You should put a link of your build in the video description or just run your mouse over your traits+weapons+gear real quick (people can pause). I find roaming/PvP videos more enjoyable when I don’t have to spend the entire video trying to guess what traits/gear/runes/sigils the person recording is using and can concentrate on the actual combat…. and guess what traits/gear/runes/sigils their opponents are running instead.

I think Cry of Frustration (F2) should be changed to a cleanse. The name even gets to stay the same- What’s more frustrating than conditions?

Then I think Mind Wrack should have its cooldown reduced.

so…

-Mind wrack cooldown reduced to 8 seconds

-Cry of Frustration- " Cleanse a condition and destroy all of your clones and phantasms, cleansing an additional condition for each one shattered."

Does anyone else find it funny that anet has managed to nerf enough things to make Danger Time worthwhile?

Thief isn’t the only profession that abuses stealth mechanics. I think a much better solution would be to lower the stealth stack cap to 2. Then adjust outlier skills based off of that.

Like Shadow refuge-

Make it pulse 1 sec of stealth per second, then grant the rest of its current total duration on the final pulse as a single stack. Then remove the (stupid) revealed for leaving it early.

I play on a T3 server, so the enemy zerg is often full of brainless longbow rangers. A well placed reflect can wipe the enemy frontline, and many of the projectiles you reflect also become finishers applying confusion/burning/poison. Enemy zergs are also usually not organized enough to keep adequate stability up, so I can get a large amount of mistrust procs in a short amount of time.

I’m not saying its an awesome build, just saying its the closest thing I’ve played on Mesmer that resembles what they’re looking for.

I’ve been playing around with this for ZvZ…

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhUQNArdWnsnB9phlpBuqBEgiFcjyMDitKo+Vv1etMAatXD-e

Well placed reflects and interrupts make tagging easy.

You can use Inspiration in place of Chrono, also.

Rabid/Rampagers/Sinister depending on the flavor you’re looking for.

Before the patch that nerfed condition duration foods, you could use traveler’s runes on condi mes for a small dps hit… now its not even an option.

Perma swiftness plus a random boon would be way too good compared to other movement speed signets. Right now (without any boon duration) the 50% uptime of swiftness is basically +16.5% movement speed, which is kinda lame… it would need to grant about 7.6 secs to be equivalent to other movement signets, so a bumb up to 6 or 7 seconds I think would be fair. Especially with the active nerfed, other than sharing quickness the only other thing I used the signet for was sharing swiftness when running around. Sharing only 5 seconds now is pretty garbage.

I’ll have to log in and check out the attack speed of the other clones (excluding scepter). The greatsword clones seemed as though their attack speed wasn’t changed at all, which is glaringly slow. I have a hard time believing that’s intentional.

I tested my DPS last night and got results consistent with pre-patch. I don’t use any additional buffs when I do initial tests on builds, though. Maybe its one of the additional effects you’re granting yourself?

Vuln still caps at 25 stacks, so in any kind of group content its normally capped. If they just changed the vulnerability on the AA into bleeding it would be a win for power and condi builds.

From the update:

“Spatial Surge: The aftercast has been reduced by 0.3 seconds”

Shouldn’t this apply to our Greatsword illusions also?

I use full sinister on my condi Mesmer, but i’m thinking about changing to full rampager’s. With the sword buff, I think I can boost my DPS by using both sword and scepter MH.

They are not accounting for the stack limit and they are also assuming that Illusionary Inspiration is getting reset by CS.

I bet they change SoI to function similar to Sand squall-

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sand_Squall

Be something like “increase the duration of all boons currently existing on you and your allies by 5 seconds”.

What Xyonon Said!

Or…

I’d be really happy even if they just swapped the positions of Phantasmal fury and Master Fencer. Fury is a powerful, but extremely common boon. Its rare NOT to have it, but illusions are low priority on receiving boons so they end up almost never getting it. So if you want to use the pistol trait, you condemn your phantasms to being fury-less.

Some other things I’d love to see-

-Phantasmal Haste moved to Dueling. Swap with blinding dissipation.
-Malicious Sorcery moved to Chaos Grandmaster. Changed to Scepter, Staff and Trident skills recharge reduced by 20% and attack speed increased by 20%. Swapped with Bountiful Disillusionment.
-Metaphysical Rejuvenation Changed to “you gain Chaos armor when your health drops below the threshold” and Illusinary Membrane changed to “you gain 3 secs of protection and 3 secs of regen when you gain chaos armor” icd removed on IM. Names changed to be more relevant.
-Delete Fencer’s Finesse. Add sword and spear to Imagined burden.
- Harmonious Mantras should be combined with Restorative Mantras and be an Inspiration Grandmaster.
-Blurred Inscriptions moved to Chaos.
-Temporal enchanter moved to domination. Changed to “Your Glamour skills last longer. Enemies Lose a boon whenever they cross the threshold of your Glamours.”

That’s all I can think of right now.

Xyonon.3987:

Snip.

I was going to stay out of this. I have a lot of fun on my Mesmer, so Its deficiencies don’t usually bother me, but has gone too far. You’re using a 100% selfish, single-target-only DPS spec and all it does is 22k…? My Viper Ele does about that, and I consider it a support build.

Know what else it does?

-Provides high uptime (100% uptime with rev) of the following boons:
Fury
Regen
Protection
Vigor
12-20 stacks of might (20-25 with rev)

-Almost everything it does is AoE
-Has access to group healing when needed
-loads of soft CC
-Has access to plenty of hard CC when needed
-High Reflect uptime

Want to know what I did find impressive about your post, though?

Your Raid group seems fine with carrying you on that build.

A full signet Guard with a Hammer that did absolutely nothing but AA would do about that much damage and still offer more to their group.

brannigan.9831:

What class does Hillary play? I don’t know any class built around class warfare, confiscatory tax rates, and race and gender baiting so I’m confused.

Hillary roams WvW as a Trailblazer PU condi Mes.

Can core Mesmer please get some better movement speed options (AKA Swiftness)?

With the exception of my guild needing help with raids (YAY, boonbot tanking!), I’ve stopped using Chrono across all game modes. I really don’t want to go back to using it either… Its super spammy and a big personal DPS loss. The only problem I’ve run into (again) is core Mesmer’s lack of movement speed options

I’d really like to see some swiftness tacked onto some of our traits OR have it proc less randomly.

Some candidates for change-

Furious Interruption- 3 secs of swiftness also

Master Fencer- one of the lamest grandmaster minors ever… but if it were to also grant 5 secs of swiftness someone at anet would become my hero.

Warden’s feedback- double the swiftness duration temporal curtain grants.

Chaotic Interruption- Always receive 5 secs of swiftness on interrupt

Bountiful- Always receive 5 secs of Swiftness when you use a shatter

Thoughts?

The Wander Amulet in PvP has the stats that I listed. For whatever reason they share the same name but have completely different stats.

Can we PLEASE get the PvP version of Wander stats in PvE?

Primary-
Condi
Prec
Sub-
Toughness
Expertise

IF we’re talking about PvE-

Vipers is meta for most professions, but Sinister works better on Mes because it heavily relies on the sharper images trait for its DPS. I use mostly Viper for my Ele’s hybrid damage build, as an example, because very little of its condition application is reliant on crits and the few traits that do require crits to activate have ICDs.

Chaotic Transference is a great trait, but its not worth investing in toughness gear.
You have a base of 1000 toughness at lvl 80, w/o any gear investment you get a free extra 100 condi damage. A full set of Rabid gives an extra 960 (I believe) Toughness. That only translates to an extra 96 condi damage from the trait…. If you use Sinister instead you’d have gotten 960 power, which will easily out damage the measly extra 96 condi damage you converted.

Rune of the undead- Same logic applies. There are many options that will serve you better.

Now if you’re talking about WvW or PvP-

The conversation is completely different. You’ll be running a shatter build that relies on torment and confusion and toughness actually has value in those game modes. Vipers also works great for condi shatter.

You are giving me the impression you’re overestimating the scaling of the Condition Damage stat on actual damage output, though. Here is a link to the wiki with a condition damage scaling table-

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition_Damage

If you’d like more detailed advice you need to give us more information like-

What is the goal of your build?
Game mode?
Do you care about min/max?
What weapons were you planning to use?
Are conveniences like movement speed important to you?

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

bearshaman.3421:

Ok, just trying to understand it better. The mathing of this stuff sometimes confuses me. Still can’t get it to stick in my head why the sigil of bursting is bad, for instance.

It’s bad since it only improves base condi damage but not other sources so it’s not as good as you initially think. So basically a 6% increase to gear stats but not from the bonuses from might and banners which makes it less than 6% in the end. Compare this to sigil of geomancy which can add 6 stacks of bleeds over time if you hit 100% bleed duration. If you can stack 50 bleed stacks, 6 more is a 12% increase. If you stack 100 bleed stacks, now you are finally at a 6% increase over base (This isn’t going to happen solo). If you haven’t capped duration yet, sigil of malice at 10% duration or 20% duration for bleeds are also just better in the end for increasing DPS. So that’s also why sigil of bursting is bad because more conditions and condi duration are just better options.

Has bursting always been like that? I knew it didn’t scale off traits/banners/signet of dom/etc, but I swore it scaled off of might… I had to log in to test it.

This changes everything. You just ruined my evening. :O! I need to recalculate my rune and sigil options with this information.

Is this for PvE?

If so, I don’t suggest any of those stat sets…

You should aim for full sinister.

Your primary source of damage is going to be bleeding, you want as much Condi and Prec as possible. If you want the extra toughness for survivability, then you can use some rabid until you’re more comfortable.

This is what I use:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQJArKnsIiNoBWoBUrhlcjqMAStWrWtero/wSMDA-ThhPABbq8ryTAoHIT1fAY/BtUCS5DAgUALqsC-e

The blank areas change depending on what I’m doing, but that’s the general build.
W/O food and no additional buffs it puts out about 8k DPS on a stationary golem.

If you don’t want to use Chrono, then the runes and sigils change.

I’m not sure if this was even helpful, I’m confused about what exactly you’re asking…

-Signet of Humility changed to Mantra of Humility.
-Mantra of Humility- Gain 2 (3 traited) charges of Polymorph. 120 sec recharge.
-Polymorph- Turn all targets in a 180 radius into Moas for 3 secs. 10 sec recharge between casts.
-Portal Exeunt can no longer be cast while in combat.

I’m going to rip you apart for this idea!

(j/k)

It doesn’t bother me, but I usually have my volume down pretty low. I’m also not attached to it in any way, so a change wouldn’t hurt my feelings.

He’s not gone… His LinkdIn accnt is public information, you can see that his current employment is still with AreanNet.

Also, a curious snippet of his profile..

“Monitor and balance the game’s 1000+ skills, 10 professions, and countless monsters across the PvP and PvE areas of the game”

Either the bolded section is a typo, or he is working with the ‘expansion team’ on the next profession. I’m going to guess the ladder. He proved to be one of the most adept devs at delivering unique and engaging mechanics with HoT, it would be a waste of his talents to have him anywhere else.

How about they change Fury to grant 420 Precision? Then just delete PF…

Or

Make it so boons have ZERO affect on illusions, but change them to scale with percentage modifiers on us.

OR

They could swap the positions of PF and Master Fencer. PF is desirable in all mes builds, condi and power alike. Fury is also an extremely common boon, which makes MF pretty ‘meh’ Grandmaster minor in many situations, but with the way boon priority works, pets rarely get it.

Entropy.6784:

Mikkel.8427:

I found Vipers to be sub-optimal in just about every way, though.

Care to elaborate? Btw how’s your “success” running condi mesmer.

Bleeds are your primary source of damage. The extra damage you’re getting from your other conditions (mostly torment) from vipers are extremely marginal compared to the rather massive loss to additional bleed potential. You’re also over-capping confusion, which is your secondary condition and primary ‘trash killer’.

As far as success, I’m going to start say that I’ve always loved running condition Mesmer, but this is the first time in my two years of playing this game that it actually feels like I’m contributing a reasonable amount of personal DPS. My Viper tempest easily blows it away… but I’m filling a different role if I’m on my Tempest. I’ve been taking my condi mes into high level fractals (yay, portal!) and raids (vale guardian range party) and doing really well. Its also just insanely fun to play in OW.

I ran a shatter focused variant of that build before the last update:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAr6dncfCVohlfC+fCUrhlcjqeVr1btMAStWD92KpZA-ThyXABAsfwo6Fm7kAMsyA9U65nFE5oEkuHAwsq+gnaAkCYRlVA-e

After the alacrity nerf, it no longer functions. So I switched the traits to match yours. I found Vipers to be sub-optimal in just about every way, though.

So now I run my Chrono version like-

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAr6ensICVohNoB+fCUrhlcjC9HWiZoMAStWreVj1cF-TBSFAB9+AA6XlgBVCKs6OAcSASZ/Bf1LQsyPSBsoyK-e

And my extra selfish version-

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAraGnsICFohNoBUrhlcDC9HLZGmJ41ToMApu1A-ThhPABU+EAyU9HA2foyTBoPYTlfapEkUALqsC-e

@Raven

Accuracy Sigil does not affect your Illusions’ crit rate. You’d be much better served by (many) other sigils.

apharma.3741:

I don’t think being a buffbot and essentially doing pitiful dps is fine in PvE at all.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/44dli8/actual_dps_comparison_between_classesguard_ele/

Has some dps rankings and the Mesmer player chimed in saying they were doing about 6.5-8k.

8k DPS… on Mesmer…?

MESMER OP PLEASE NERF THANK YOU!

Yeah, I’ve tried it. The build doesn’t work anywhere close to as well in game as it appears to on paper.

Personally, I’d prefer they increase the recharge of all the mantras by 50-100%, but give us the background recharge ‘bug’ back. As a bonus, they’d actually benefit from alacrity that way also.

Fumigene.5076:

I see, thank you.

However, since you say it’s a “feature”, does that mean Anet is aware of it and consider it “working as intended” ?

Yes, its working exactly how they intend it to work. This topic has been brought up many times on both their twitch channel and in the forums. I’d find you a link if I wasn’t late to work already.

The basic idea is arrows don’t disappear mid flight in real life, so the give them that extra 300~ distance to fall and hit the ground for a ‘realistic’ feel to the projectile’s arch.

From the notes:

Chaos Armor: This skill no longer blinds enemies. It will instead apply weakness to them for 3 seconds. The applied duration for swiftness and confusion has been increased from 3 seconds to 5 seconds.
Chaotic Dampening: The duration of protection has been reduced from 5 seconds to 4 seconds.

Here is the original thread from 4 months ago-

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/PvE-The-New-Chronomancer-Dungeon-Rotation/first#post5517768

Video is posted by Chaos A., but it is Fay doing the rotation.

Merrex.5384:

Extreme.8350:

Welcome to "Mesmers are nerfed so much they dont play anymore – Wars 2 "

Oh I know that game ! That’s the game my Mesmer is not playing anymore also. I just use it as a mule to hold loot like a extra bank. It never leaves Lions Arch.

That is not true…

You’re not using your Mesmers to their full potential. You should be equipping a Scepter + Malicious sorcery and farming your home instance daily with them. Every time I bring people into my home instance, they’re like “Errrmehgawd, your mes farms node so fast! Mes OP!”

I do think there is an error with Malicious Sorcery’s tooltip, though. It says something about ‘attack speed’. Weird, right? Should just say ‘Gathering Speed’…

Windwalker.7421:

I’m sad to say I kinda saw this coming when Pyro first revealed the 100% uptime in PvE videos. I even stated that this was clearly not as intended, and was berated for saying it.

This is what I posted 4 months ago in the BWE3 Feedback thread-

“I have some changes I’d like to see that will probably be unpopular…

I’m not liking how ‘alls well that ends well’ influences my utility bar. Its powerful, but in the wrong way. Alacrity has a very potent effect, so i find myself filling my utility bar with wells for the alacrity and not for the actual effects of the individual wells…

I also feel like the amount of alacrity we can stack through well spamming is begging for future nerfs, and we all know those nerfs will be to our OTHER traits, before its determined that ‘alls well’ is the actual problem.

So, I’d like to propose a few adjustments to our traits-

Alls well- The final effect of your wells is 25% more potent.

Flow of time- 1s again

Improved alacrity- Your alacrity effects last 25% longer. (so now it affects your well of recall and shield phantasm)

Well of recall- bumped up to 6 secs, about 9s if double traited.

Well of Eternity- Might have to shift more of the heal to the Initial cast so the AoE heal isnt too strong.

Well of calamity and eternity- get the damage boost (I think) they need, especially with how highly telegraphed and delayed the final damge is.

well of action- now can be traited for a bit more quickness

So now, if we choose to use a well, its for the effects they provide individually and those effects are now enhanced. This also opens up utility slots in group content so we’re more than just alacrity bots (because thats all I feel like…). This change does reduce the amt of potential alacrity we can provide to a group though, which is why I’m sure there will be people that wont like this."

I think it was pretty obvious to most of us not riding the ‘hype train’.

Clone death was super toll-tastic. I’m happy they got rid of it.

I’m NOT happy they never compensated us properly for all the condi traits they axed.

They also turned around and nerfed our active application (MtD), also.

Then put very little thought into the placement of condi traits within our specializations, especially in the dueling line.

Which is why Condi Mesmer is so kitten outside of solo-toll roaming in WvW.

The protection ‘bug fix’ is a really big hit to my (PvE) Dagger/WH viper Ele build. I sacrificed some DPS going viper over sinister + balth, but gained near 100% protect uptime on me and about 66% up time on my group. It had become my favorite PvE build between all my characters post HoT… I need to look into how much more DPS I need to sacrifice to maintain protection uptime now.

Quadox.7834:

Rainbowsand.2438:

Ananeos.4587:

The shatter mesmer with duel is completely dead, don’t even bother trying to play it.

Shatter was always a bs idea because of how it instantly destroys your means of survival.

That is literally the complete opposite of a “bs idea”. Sacrifice defence to get a superior offence. High risk, high reward. It is a fantastic idea. The only problem is that now we get “Righ risk, low reward”.

I would agree with you IF a rather massive amount of our sustained DPS wasn’t also locked behind phantasms.

Its more like “Sacrifice your defense and offense for a marginal spike in offense.”