Guild Wars 2

Runes of the Citadel: I noticed about 7 stacks of might on average with the double runes of battle, occasionally spiking up to 11.

Runes of Hoelbrak: I noticed about 9 stacks of might on average with the double runes of battle, occasionally spiking up to 17.

Runes of the Citadel

(1): +25 Power
(2): +10% Fury Duration
(3): +50 Power
(4): 25% chance when struck to gain Fury for 15s. (Cooldown: 30s)
(5): +100 Power
(6): 20% Fury duration; 50% chance when struck to summon a bomb. (Cooldown: 15s)
Link

Base stats:
2213 power
44% crit chance
193% crit damage

I didn’t have a lot of luck with the bomb with these vs the NPCs in HOTM. I think in 10 mins of testing it proced 5x and each time the npc was either not near it or downed. I don’t know how hard this hits.

No fury, no might
(2213) * (1 + (0.44 * 1.93)) = 4092.3 effective power

66% fury up-time, 7 stacks of might
(2213+ 7 * 35) * (1 + ((0.44 + 0.2 * 0.66) * 1.93)) = 5171.5 effective power

Not sure these are worth it over another rune set. Super cheap however.

Runes of Hoelbrak

(1): +25 Power
(2): +10% Might Duration
(3): +50 Power
(4): 25% chance when struck to gain might for 10s. (Cooldown: 5s)
(5): +100 Power
(6): +20% might duration; -20% condition duration applied to you.
Link

Base stats:
2213 power
44% crit chance
193% crit damage

0 stacks might
(2213) * (1 + (0.44 * 1.93)) = 4092.3 effective power
9 stacks might
(2213 + 9 * 35) * (1 + (0.44 * 1.93)) = 4674.8 effective power

Not the best option for pure damage, but the -20% condition duration is nice, and is even better in combination with Lemongrass Poultry Soup. Semi-expensive.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Arcane thievery means your enemies can take the might stacking runes for you, and you can use something else.

Mmm that’s an interesting thought. I wish the CD on it was a tad lower

I’ll run the numbers on Citadel later.

I wondered what runes are best for a fairly typical 4/4/0/0/6 power shatter build in pvp. The main options seem to be Runes of Strength, Runes of Rage and Runes of the Pack.

Modeling these is a little tricky since we need to estimate average might stacks and (where applicable) fury up time (yes I know you shouldn’t be getting hit). Based on eyeballing my stats while fighting the class NPCs in HOTM I noticed the following:

Runes of Strength: average 11 stacks of might, spiking up to 21
Runes of Rage: average 7 stacks of might, spiking up to 12. Approx 66% rage uptime
Runes of the Pack: average 8 stacks of might, spiking up to 15. Approx 40% rage uptime

(If somebody has more time it might be worth videoing a good number of fights and doing a frame by frame analysis to determine the uptime numbers more rigorously.)

Using a quick and dirty model, we can try and compare these:
effective power = power * (1 + (crit chance * crit damage))

Runes of Strength

(1): +25 Power
(2): +10% Might Duration
(3): +50 Power
(4): +15% might duration; 25% chance when struck to gain Might.png might for 10 seconds. (Cooldown: 5s)
(5): +100 Power
(6): +20% might duration; +7% damage while under the effects of Might.png might.
Link

Base stats:
2213 power
44% crit chance
193% crit damage

0 stacks might
(2213) * (1 + (0.44 * 1.93)) = 4092.3 effective power

11 stacks might
(2213 + 11 * 35) * (1 + (0.44 * 1.93)) * 1.07 = 4958.6 effective power

25 stacks might
(2213 + 25 * 35) * (1 + (0.44 * 1.93)) * 1.07 = 6110.1 effective power

You can see why runes of the strength are popular with classes who can stack might! These are correspondingly expensive. Remember the conditional 7% damage multiplier does not apply to phantasm damage.

Runes of Rage

(1): +25 Ferocity
(2): +10% Fury Duration
(3): +50 Ferocity
(4): 25% chance when struck to gain fury for 15 seconds. (Cooldown: 30s)
(5): +100 Ferocity
(6): +20% fury duration; while under the effects of fury gain +5% damage.
Link

Base stats:
2038 power
44% crit chance
205% crit damage

No fury, no might
(2038) * (1 + (0.50 * 2.06)) = 4137.14 effective power

66% fury up-time, 7 stacks of might
(2038+ 7 * 35) * (1 + ((0.50 + 0.2 * 0.66) * 2.06)) * (1 + 0.05 * 0.66) = 5428.7 effective power

66% fury up-time, 25 stacks of might (for fun)
(2038+ 25 * 35) * (1 + ((0.50 + 0.2 * 0.66) * 2.06)) * (1 + 0.05 * 0.66) = 6926.8 effective power

Note the 5% damage multiplier is only there 66% of the time.

These seem heavily underrated and are very cheap. Like the Runes of Strength the conditional 5% damage multiplier does not effect phantasms. If you have somebody to blast might for you these seem amazing for personal dps.

Runes of the Pack

(1): +25 Power
(2): +10% Swiftness Duration
(3): +50 Power
(4): 25% chance when struck to grant nearby allies Might, Fury, and Swiftness for 10s. (Cooldown: 20s)
(5): +100 Power
(6): +20% Swiftness Duration; +125 Precision
Link

Base stats:
2213 power
50% crit chance
193% crit damage

No fury, no might
(2213) * (1 + (0.50 * 1.93)) = 4348.5 effective power

40% fury up-time, 8 stacks of might
(2213 + 8 * 35) * (1 + ((0.50 + 0.2 * 0.4) * 1.93)) = 5283.7 effective power

40% fury up-time, 25 stacks of might (for fun)
(2213 + 25 * 35) * (1 + ((0.50 + 0.2 * 0.4) * 1.93)) = 6544.7 effective power

Runes of the pack seem quite strong, and those buffs help your phantasms. They are a lot cheaper than the runes of strength. I think these are my favorite since they effect phantams too.

One thing this does underline is how important boon stripping is in the current meta. Hambows for example will have 20+ might most of the time and with sigils of intelligence they’re going to crit a lot.

@Over. Uh dude, are you trolling?

Uh the internet <3 where everyone assumes the worst of everyone else.

All I asked is does he get enough interrupts to make up for the lower mindwrack burst. Apparently it does, great. Case closed.

Lets suppose this did allow for 5k mantra heals – how useable would they be?

Well you’d need to interrupt somebody, have a mantra ready to charge, have taken some damage, react within 1.25s of the interrupt to charge the mantra. Is that possible? Yes. Could loads of things go wrong? Absolutely, not least of which mantras have super obvious casts and easy to interrupt (ironic). I bet in practice the stars and planets won’t align and the effect will be wasted more often than not.

Are you sure this doesn’t need rework?

I’ve played lockdown specs thanks.

To throw something out of left field, how about adding a travel component to mind stab?

Interesting, thanks.

One thing I wonder about Helseth’s spec is why halting strike? I’ve not seen any of the matches (where they recorded?) and I’d like to know if he gets enough interrupts to make up for loosing mental torment.

You do have a point re shattered conditions, although I can’t imagine specing for that personally.

Possibly the most disappointing trait from the feature pack was Disruptor’s Sustainment. The idea behind it is solid enough, but the implementation has a number of issues:

Disruptor’s Sustainment:
Gain bonus healing power when interrupting a foe.

Healing Power: +1,000
Duration: 5 s

This doesn’t stack in duration or intensity. Since the duration is so short it’s going to be very hard to use and may be entirely wasted. Even when it’s not wasted the effect (1000 extra healing on Ether Feast for example) is pretty underwhelming. Bear in mind that GM traits are supposed to be spec defining (e.g. PU or IP) but could you really imagine building around this?

Lets go back to the drawing board! I like the idea of gaining sustain on interrupt, so lets keep that but try to make the effect worth while.

Steal a random boon and gain regeneration for 10s. Stacks in duration.

Stealing a boon and gaining regeneration would make this more useful for sure. Mesmers are the premier anti-boon class so this would be fitting.

Alleys within 500 units are healed for 1000 damage.

AoE healing would be handy in a team fight. This would make GS #5 quite strong, especially if you interrupt multiple people.

Alleys within 500 units loose one condition and gain regeneration for 5s. Stacks in duration.

Mesmers don’t have that much condition removal, so this might be kind of nice. If you manage to interrupt multiple players this could be a strong move for personal survivability.

Supposing we did get Disruptor’s Sustainment turned into something nice, what sort of builds would that open up? A 4/4/0/6/0 lockdown with sustain, or perhaps a 4/4/0/6/0 phantasm & interrupts build.

It does seem hard to imagine that by it’s own adding blast finishers to Mesmers would change their position in the meta.

Still given Xaylin’s concern about GS becoming too dominant (within Mesmer builds), how about adding them to gs3 and staff4

musu.9205:

well , i guess u guys missed the point
here is condition guard guide :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R46zZCn1_UI

Sorry to say they did not miss the point.

Shockwave.1230:

Neurophen.9738:

Sure. Most GW1 &2, skills have: activation time, after cast and cool down. The cool down and the after cast start after the skill has been cast. This means the maximum number of times that skill can be activated per second is 1 / activation time +max(after cast, cool down)

If the cooldown <= after cast then it simply would make no difference. I’m suggesting more like a 1s CD on skills (not auto attacks) surely that would be a DPS nerf? No because initiative isn’t a limitless pool you can’t just spam them endlessly. I’m suggesting the CDs would be set so that the same number of skill activations and auto attacks would happen over time.

This would in no way be a DPS nerf. Heck if it was I’d be fine increacing the damage on the individual attacks propotionally to compensate.

I hope you agree it’d possible to do this. The benefit would be that interrupts now put skills (not auto attacks) on kitten cool down just like every other class.

Why do this? All it would prevent is people from double tapping skills, which is necessary at times, like when you need to cluster bomb like crazy on rezers.

It would fix the anomaly of thief skills not going on cool down when interrupted.

Sure. Most GW1 &2, skills have: activation time, after cast and cool down. The cool down and the after cast start after the skill has been cast. This means the maximum number of times that skill can be activated per second is 1 / activation time +max(after cast, cool down)

If the cooldown <= after cast then it simply would make no difference. I’m suggesting more like a 1s CD on skills (not auto attacks) surely that would be a DPS nerf? No because initiative isn’t a limitless pool you can’t just spam them endlessly. I’m suggesting the CDs would be set so that the same number of skill activations and auto attacks would happen over time.

This would in no way be a DPS nerf. Heck if it was I’d be fine increacing the damage on the individual attacks propotionally to compensate.

I hope you agree it’d possible to do this. The benefit would be that interrupts now put skills (not auto attacks) on kitten cool down just like every other class.

I believe adding very short CDs will do nothing to thieves in the absence of interrupts. Feel free to list the circumstances where this is wrong. I am genuinely curious.

If it helps could you please list the encounters/mechanics where making thieves effected by interrupts would hurt them? Why is this not a problem for other classes (who do get their skills on CD)? Why is this not a L2P issue? Are you able to respond without ad hominims?

Hey Joe, I’ve tried staff/GS in sPvP a few times and while it seems the shatter combos are less telegraphed (people tend to blow CDs when I try to iDualist / Magic Bullet / iLeap etc…) I find it harder to deal with thieves without s/p. are there any tricks for dealing with them as GS/Staff?

Mesmers only have 1 blast finisher the prestige and due to the delay that’s hard to use. If not on GS3 where else would you put a blast finisher? (Please don’t say Staff 4)

MoA has such a long CD that even if it was a guaranteed death sentence I doubt it would actually make a difference over the course of a typical sPvP game. Of course it isn’t necessarily a death sentence (skill 5).

Its kind of OP vs minion masters and petting zoo rangers. I would support a bug fix here but apparently ANet lack the ability to do that (as software engineer that boggles my mind).

Personally I don’t find MoA to be worth using due to the CD, I’d rather have MI or timewarp.

Sir Vincent, are you aware that interrupting most thief skills does virtually nothing other than cancel the cast? Unlike any other class you can’t put thief abilities on CD (in some instances they do loose initiative but not always).

Let me point out I am NOT asking for a DPS nerf of any shape or form. I’m asking for a bug fix to bring thieves inline with other classes, and enable a skilled player to punish a careless or less skilled player.

Please explain how this would detrimentally affect other game modes with examples. Please don’t reply with ad hominems.

Could you please explain why putting a low cool down on skills (basically the time taken to activate plus after cast) would be so bad? I suspect you can’t but if you can I’m all ears and would happily admit it if you can demonstrate a flaw with my reasoning.

The core of what I want to change is making counterplay viable vs thieves just like it is vs evey other class. Do you disagree with that goal?

I do have a theif and I extensively played assassin in gw1. Did you?

Carighan.6758:

Am I alone in thinking Initiative is an interesting mechanic? And I don’t even have a Thief but hey, good for them that they have a global pool of shared cooldowns.

No it’s like energy from GW1.,which was a very interesting mechanic. The difference I’d make is to give all thief skills short CDs as well (even as short as 1-2s) just like Assassins had in GW1. In the absence of interrupts this would make zero difference to Thief DPS but it would have two key side effects:

1. Interrupts would now place thief skills on CD – currently only really heart seeker can be put on CD.
2. It would no longer be possible to spam skills from stealth in order to bypass aegis

I regard this as a bug fix not a nerf. Thief players will disagree, but I think anet will find it much easier to tune the power of various thief skills and they may now be able to buff some of the weaker talents without fear of them becoming too strong.

I can only assume he played a power phantasm build, they’re not exactly rocket science and the phantasms can hit hard, and such a build will own noobs who probably waste time attacking the phantasms.

Still good players, particularly thieves can counter phantasm mesmers quite easily, blind prevents the phantasm from being cast and players with good reaction times should be able to interrupt the summons which can be kind of slow with fairly obvious animations (e.g. Phantasmal Duelist has 1s cast time). Also phantasm memsers trade off a lot of personal survivability (i.e. 0 points in Chaos) in order to boost their phantasms.

Honestly I would like to see less passive builds in this game, but Anet apparently disagree, as evidenced by the traits the game has.

I think gaining a blast finisher in exchange for a slower cast and slightly lower damage would be good. Ideally it wouldn’t root us if the cast was longer.

Being able to blast a water field in WvW would be huge.

Some necros and engis can be ridiculously tanky and you’ll never kill them in a sensible timeframe 1v1 with any spec unless they make a number of mistakes.

2v1 is different, lockdown specs or power shatter can seal their fate. The dazes and the boon ripping makes a big difference.

With PU you probably need to go where they are not

Power Block sounds good on paper but its underwhelming in practice. Chaotic interruption is so much more rewarding (gives you a few seconds breathing space).

4/4/6 lockdown works but unless its skyhammer you might just as well go power shatter and blow stuff up and not have to worry about recharging your daze mantra mid fight.

I love the idea of that build but I think you give up too much for it. I don’t really think DE is that needed in a phantasm build which opens up some interesting alternatives such as:

3/0/6/5/0 and 4/0/6/0/4

I agree you don’t really want to be hit but it’s just going to happen in pvp. These could be cool since Memsers don’t have any reliable source of fury, and shatter with fury is delicious!

Great stuff!

/15 chars

Daniel Handler.4816:

This is the forum code of conduct
“Keep it clean
Keep it civil
Stay on topic
Be responsible
Share your knowledge
Report posts for removal if they violate these standards”
If you people feel you can’t be civil when responding to new players then please stop posting here, because it is getting really disgusting.

Welcome to the internet, please enjoy your stay.

PS These forums are very tame in comparison to what’s out there.

One thing staff does have going for it in a power build is interrupts causing vulnerability stacks.

It’s because people are impatient (are we there yet?) and want to chase runners

What do people thing about Chaotic Dampening vs Bountiful Interruption? BI is without doubt a fantastic trait, but the better chaos armor up time and more frequent chaos storms from CD are very nice too.

(I’m frequently seeing 20+ vulnerability stacks on people if I drop a Chaos Storm on a team fight, it’s great!)

Why berserker amulet? Your torments could hit a lot harder if you had a different amulet.

I’m not convinced by mesmer runes – apart from F3 you don’t have any non RNG dazes, it seems something else would complement condi-shatter better.

I’d be tempted to run this as a power-condi hybrid like so: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQJARWlknpMtNqxWNcrNCrBh6skmfSyBEgSmhrB-TJxHwADeCAa2fwYZAAXCAA

I tried this for a couple of soloQ games. It does have some pretty heavy burst, but that burst is less frequent than normal shatter. Not entirely sold but I did get a bunch of kills with it

The only way to land shatters vs good opponents is with stealth or blink. Kinda gets a bit meh.

Looking at the boons granted it feels like BD would be better for a power build:

F1 → Retaliation which scales on power
F2 → Might which is that’s nice for both
F3 → Fury which is much nicer for a power build
F4 → Regen is good for both

If BD had been in dueling then perhaps it would have been viable. A build might be power shatter with 2/6/0/4/0/6. Anet doesn’t seem to want to promote power shatter which I suppose is why BD is not in dueling.

Pride.1734:

dances happy dance All ai builds are rubbish again as-they-should-be. My MM sheds a lil tear but overall its great.

Phantasm mesmer is still pretty good in yoloQ.

Do we really have to wheel sirlin.net out again? WhiteRose you seem to be under the misapprehension that competitive players have ever decided to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. That has never happened and will never happen until the heat death of the universe.

SPESHAL.9106:

Neurophen.9738:

I spent a while trying to reproduce crazy high warlock hits on the target golems with various builds. Didn’t get anywhere close to 12.8k with a pure phantasm build. I did see a swordsman crit the light armor golem for 7k but there was a bunch of vulnerability stacks on it, and 6k crit was more usual.

As far as I can tell the damage is basically the same as before the patch.

If you’re not able to get the same crits other mesmers are getting, you may want to check with some experienced ones on how to do it.

There are a finite number of traits which boost phantasm damage. I tried all of them and nothing caused phantasms to do crazy damage in controlled circumstances in HoTM. There could be a bug but I’ve yet to run into it personally.

What is needed is solid evidence not anecdote. If there is a bug it should be possible to reproduce it. Otherwise the chances the devs will fix it is near zero.

I’ll test this later but I wonder if phantasm damage modifier traits apply to the parrots / rock dogs.

I don’t think spikes are extreme enough in GW2 to warrent prot monk spells. Prot spirit / RoF / WoH or ZB were enough to stop most spikes dead if the monk was any good at reading the battle.

I could see something like infuse having a place, and without WoH it’ll be a (rightly) risky proposition.

Edit: because there is no targeting of friendly players it would have to be more like defending martyr from daoc (take a load of damage to radiate a strong aoe heal on a long CD)

This build is great although I do miss travellers runes out of combat!

I find it ironic a necromancer thinks another class is easymode. Cough MM, cough

I agree that adding monks to GW2 would not work. That said I think GW1’s combat had more depth and this was in part due to monks.

Interrupts were a big deal in GW1, putting skills on long cooldown and would regularly turn the tide of battle. There was counterplay however, you could cancel skills to bait out interrupts. Players usually had a 40/40 weapon set and would try to get a faster cast if they needed to get some critical skill off when they had an interruptor focusing them.

Most classes had energy in GW1 (a bit like initiative) and there were various e-denial skills and to counter this players would switch wesponsets to negative energy ones to ‘hide’ energy from those pesky mesmer.

There were hexes as well as conditions, and some of these were very powerful, punishing players for mindlessly spamming skills. There were various counters to hexes and conditions. Some monk heals got more potent when somebody was loaded up with hexes or conditions
Some mesmer skills removed hexes and gave an energy boost.

Positioning felt like it was more important in GvG. There was a distinct front line, mid line and back line. In gw2 wvw there’s just the hammer train mindlessly following the commander.

GW1 did have its own problems, monks were too needed in pve, certain skills were OP such as IWAY, but overall it was a deep an engaging game.

I’d just like to point out that all the damage calculations will almost certainly be done server side. Given that why on earth would anet go to the (wasted) effort of synchronising client side stats of AI entities with server side ones? There are very real costs for doing so (network bandwidth, code complexity) for seemingly no benefit.

While its not always massively practical, it is possible to use a second weaponset with sigils of speed to stack a few minutes of speed if you can kill some mobs quickly.