Guild Wars 2

And I usually get a kick out of watching a thief drop shadow refuge when I’m fighting them. I just stand around waiting for the body to appear. How about learning to do something other than stealth as your way out of trouble? A simple cleanse skill than the refuge would make you live. Outside of a the occasional nice stack of confusion (which takes a good deal of work to do), a condition mesmer has no other way to really burst you.

How is 7 stacks of confusion a stun. Even when I setup my confusion build, thats less than 3k damage per skill use. Thieves do that amount of damage in your sleep and we’re expected to cut that in half simply because you want to use your skills that do 4k+ several times in a short span without any negative effects? On top of this, you have to really use your skills quickly for it to have a drastic effect on your foe since it doesn’t last too long.

CoF is the only reliable way to get a good stack of confusion. Now factor in that I’m seeing more and more guys at least run lemongrass soup (-40% duration) and tons of guys using melandru runes (-25%). This means that even with me traiting for confusion duration and having +40% duration, most of my confusion stacks only last for a little more than 2 seconds at most. Cry of frustion 3 sec + 33% + 40% = 5.2sec – 65% = 2.33 sec. So you are saying that in those 2.33 seconds you can’t simply stop doing a chain, kite, cleanse, lay down, or any other number of things? Nope, you must spam your skills and therefore confusion is OP.

Glamour builds are the issue that needed any changes as the OP and their not reliable for getting good stacks unless you have several glamour memsers who happened to be well coordinated.

Profano.9514:

selan.8354:

but what if u fall behind?it takes forever without focus to get to places.I used to run without it and it was a pain!

Just take one focus in your Inventory.
If you are running with your guild you are not in combat, so: open inventory, double click on focus and use Temporal Curtain.
You can swap again or use the focus until you approach the enemy.

That’s exactly what I do. I run around with my focus and when I see foes, I switch to my torch. Not a hard thing to do at all. Some times its even more advantageous to fight with the focus on for that wonderful cliff throw when outnumbered. I’ve found that evens the odds on many occasions. Although I couldn’t help but laugh the day someone had traited that it mirrored it back to me and I joined them at the bottom of the cliff.

Advent.6193:

Iskandor.9415:

I wonder if FC will ever get the mass influx that has screwed us over at least three times now. It happened for Kaineng, it happened for Devona’s Rest, it happened for Sorrow’s Furnace (and yet we were stuck with them for frigging forever…)

Nope, Isquen. And here’s why. Note the placement/colouring of all three servers you just mentioned. Yea, they’re Green. THAT’S why they got more in the way of transfers, particularily DR/Kain. Folk went to those servers specifically because they were winning the Tier.
(Which is just funny. You want to make a true difference, why not go Blue, or even Red? Obviously, those are the guys in a Tier that are really hurting.)

The worst part? We’re still sexy bastids.

Not always the case. When they have opened up transfers, it was to go to lower populated ones. Some, like GoM, will never be opened to free transfers. Also, when they last did it, GoM had just won the week at T7 and HoD got a huge influx of WvW players. Next week we get stomped by HoD’s new zergs and the following week we ended up in T8.

I am largely an AM player and I can tell you that I see some GoM’s on but often I am defending our BL by myself or with a force of 4-8.

I would try to refrain from using sword/x with both your weapon sets. You are shrinking your available skills by 3 in doing so which is never a wise thing, IMO. Perhaps you could think to try scepter/sword (good blocking set) and sword/focus (helps in close and to chase down runners) if you did want to run 2 two-handed weapon sets.

Upscaled levels don’t do any where near the same damage as lvl 80’s. Not even close. Their base stats are lvl 80 but none of their armor, weapons or trinkets are which makes an absolute huge difference. I’m not taking anything away from your videos, just setting the record straight.

Fushia, I wish the same thing, although I run 0/20/30/0/20 normally. I focus on having my illusions build up bleeding stacks using the illusions have fury and bleed on crit.

I run sword/torch a lot in my condition spec (which is my preferred). I use the torch defensively combined with my sword to immob, shatter and of course blurred frenzy. My shatters are high damage but my confusion I stack on does. I tend to use my staff a lot though, since those clones and phantasms help me more with my stacking of conditions. It’s also great for survival.

Guys, he said he didn’t want range.

One way or another though, you’ll want to utilize both weapon sets in any engagement. One thing that could help you in being in the front lines is a staff. You can use it defensively when you get in trouble (staff 2). You also have available to another extremely strong phantasm who hits like a truck when targets have several conditions on them. Plus chaos armor (giving you regen, prot, and swiftness) and chaos storm (which allows you to buff up and gain more chaos armor) can both help make you not so squishy. When using a sword main hand, I often like to be in a chaos storm since you gain aegis and retal quite a bit from it and using leap (sword 3) grants you more chaos amor.

Darek.1836:

No offense to GoM but when equal number and usually doouble teams are going on against them (aka during weekend) they probably won’t do well

When we (GoM) have equal numbers, we generally crush our opponents. This has been the case against many of our previous foes. We run a lot of guerrilla tactic squads which handle themselves quite well against considerably larger forces all the time.

djtool.8372:

In regards to surviving an encounter I think carriorn vs. Rabid is basically a wash. If you were to leave that as your deciding factor I think the right decision falls to which type of build the meta is likely to give you for an opponent: power/crit or condition.

I think my confusion spikes are reliably 12-ish. The daze shatter is a bit counter productive as the average shatter duration (with % 33 boost) is around 5 seconds. Well thats not hot when they can’t do anything during that time (typically). This is where my curiousity surrounding the application of confusion via chaos armor comes in.

I was thinking on it last night and I suppose the reality of it is that you probably cannot make confusion your main source of damage but that still leaves the choice of filler either being power damage or condition.

Condition is nice as you are already 20 deep into the dueling line….

….however power is also nice because you make your daze shatter (and sword clones if you use one) truly useful (ideally immediately following your immob on sword 3 and prior to sword 2).

I get to play this weekend. Anyone on EB?

Thx again

Certainly dazing seems counter productive, but keep in mind that you will often have guys trying to get those conditions off as soon as possible, so you can get some button crunching after it wears off. Sure it’s not the same against a more experienced player, but you still can easily catch someone off guard.

As to confusion being for noob busting, I catch even experienced guys off guard all the time. This is largely do to that I’m not a constant shatter happy mes. This makes those shatters even more out of place and catch guys all the time. Especially as my clones continue to stack more and more conditions on them.

My favorite sequence is casting Staff 3, dodge right/left (to place a clone), and phase retreat once I get jumped (whether that be a warrior, guard, thief, ele) followed by cry of frustration. Gives an instant 8 stacks and at the very least gets them while using 1-2 skills (minimum) while I put up more illusions, my glamour fields (for additional confusion if they purged their conditions), and going to town with my sword setup (sword/torch or focus). Sometimes laying down a chaos storm before my phase retreat to daze and give other conditions plus give me chaos armor and other buffs. I will often catch groups of guys (3-6) who jumped me and find that I down or nearly downed many of them. This happens even when they are prepared to face a mesmer. I’ll even let them wack at me some while I’m on the chaos storm using staff 4 chaos armor building up my buffs more and taking extremely low amount of damage when they do happen to land a blow thanks to my high armor rating.

Ninjapotpie.6973:

TeamBattleAxe.3901:

Dubblebass.8519:

Darkothe.1253:

Score update for those of us stuck at work?

GOM – 237,325
FG – 184,272
ET – 181471

(working from home today!)

Ooh, does that mean FC and ET will be switching colors today?

not by what http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA says. the only teir that will have any change is 7 our old friends HOD falling back to red.

Looks like SF is making a push to join T6.

Godmoney.2048:

Nordic Natedog.4360:

Godmoney, I completely disagree on your take of carrion over rabid. I run full rabid with undead runs giving me a ton of cond dmg. The precision does help since that is given to your illusions. Running 20/20/0/0/30, I find I stack huge number of conditions with plenty of bleeding to go along with my confusion doing 400-410 per stack. This is my glamour setup, but my other is 0/20/25/0/25. In this setup, my cond dmg is even higher (with the +5% toughness going to cond dmg). Yes, my shatters are much weaker in one sense, but I use them more for spreading confusion rather than spiking.

The other aspect to consider is survivability. Rabid gear is far and away better with this area. I will often lure melee foes in close, drop chaos storm so I block a good share of the attacks while the other don’t hurt much since my armor (tough + armor def) is around 3k.. This makes those cry of frustration shatters absolutely deadly.

It’s fine to run rabid over Carrion if you like.

I mostly solo roam though and Rabid just doesn’t give me what I need fighting other solo roamers in WVW. Any decent player will just sit out the Rabid gears confusion and your actual shatter damage is so weak it creates no pressure for them to do anything.

Carrion forces people to heal from your initial shatters, forcing them into procing confusion.

I’ve experimented tons with both sets and both have their places. If I ran glamour I would use Rabid but I don’t run group specs so…….

To each his own. I’m just glad I finally tried out full carrion after month’s of using rabid. My shatter’s apply front end pressure with tons of Confusion on the back end.

I primarily roam solo myself. In fact I’m pretty renowned for taking on 3-5 on a regular basis and being the last one standing. Vital is decent, but having the toughness really makes the damage I take from foes very minimal. Sure it would be nice to have more power for my shatters, but as someone who doesn’t shatter much it isn’t that critical. I let my conditions (which are many) do the work.

Trust me, my foes are under a ton of pressure from my illusions constantly criticalling (stacking up bleeds and other conditions) and I bait them into jumping at me a lot. This makes the toughness very important since I am in close range to my foes often.

If a foe uses a ranged attack on you while you cast a invisibility skill, he will land that attack. Also, you need to make sure you aren’t under revealed status.

I subscribe to FLIMP’s philosophy. I run mostly cond/confusion builds.
20/20/0/0/30 for my glamour hybrid
20/0/0/20/30 for pure glamour/support
0/20/25/0/25 for my cond/confusion/illusion hybrid where I use illusions to stack up bleeding and other conditions.
I run full rabid gear for all those trait setups with undead runes giving me tons of cond dmg. Weapon sets are sword/focus(or torch depending on the situation) and staff.

Godmoney, I completely disagree on your take of carrion over rabid. I run full rabid with undead runs giving me a ton of cond dmg. The precision does help since that is given to your illusions. Running 20/20/0/0/30, I find I stack huge number of conditions with plenty of bleeding to go along with my confusion doing 400-410 per stack. This is my glamour setup, but my other is 0/20/25/0/25. In this setup, my cond dmg is even higher (with the +5% toughness going to cond dmg). Yes, my shatters are much weaker in one sense, but I use them more for spreading confusion rather than spiking.

The other aspect to consider is survivability. Rabid gear is far and away better with this area. I will often lure melee foes in close, drop chaos storm so I block a good share of the attacks while the other don’t hurt much since my armor (tough + armor def) is around 3k.. This makes those cry of frustration shatters absolutely deadly.

Wish I didn’t miss all the fun in fight club last night though. Funny how that guy at titan didn’t like your bird Zorin. That seems to be the case where ever you go.

I do miss the fights along side you too Pita. I’ve gotten spoiled from it since I often have someone else with me and think we can handle 5-6 no problem. Trouble is, its not you and I turn around to see that I’m the only one left standing. Those foes still standing have that look of I’m going to kill me a mes. At that point, its about survival and seeing how many guys I can down. Very hard to finish guys with that kind of odds.

Scarecrow.5792:

Shout out to Basic [BS], definitely one of the toughest groups in this tier! Had a lot of fun 1v1ing and GvGing you guys. Also to the [BS] warrior getting naked and spamming the /cry emote on naked Asura….. hahahahahhahahahaha

aka Angelic Renae, I have gone up against these guys on numerous occasions, plus a Engineer from Yarr (Spectreal). Always a blast to go toe to toe.

I did get a kick out of a fellow GoM member saying he was going to report me for 1v1 after I didn’t help him out when he jumped in (when I clearly warned him) during a friendly session inside Titan’s area. As long as my foe isn’t attempting to take our BL stuff, I have no problems being cordial (not spiking and not interfering with a bout) about a face off.

BTW, to that guardian whoever you are, I had just stopped those 2 from taking titan causing them to back off and eventually leave. A lot more than you seemed to accomplish by coming back time and time again waving your scepter.

My favorite story was after fighting 1v6 outside of Lake Tower in which it started me vs 2 other guys and as I killed 1 they would respawn and joined by more. Once it got to 6, it was too much and they finally got me. Two of the guys came over and danced on my corpse. I couldn’t help but laugh that it took 6 guys and me killing them several times for them to get me and they chose to dance on me.

I did go back and kill the 4 guild party of this 6 at another camp. I then bowed as I left their corpses laying there.

Mogar.9216:

They nerfed confusion in spvp I highly doubt they will have 3 different effects for the same thing as in 1 in spvp 1 in wvw and 1 in pve. The most logical and likely thing to happen is for confusion to get 50% nerf in wvw jut like spvp.

It absolutely doesn’t need to be nerfed in wvw. In spvp you are constantly in a small area with several foes. This means its much more likely to be stacked up on you quickly, especially since you have very limited number of foes to worry about. In wvw, you have huge areas to work with and aren’t limited to a confined space aside from going over a bridge. Even the capture points are much larger than a single mes could cover with glamour fields.

Entropy.4732:

Nordic Natedog.4360:

Entropy.4732:

Iruwen.3164:

Max.8563:

confusion is the only counter to dodge

Confusion doesn’t trigger on dodge, only when dodge is traited to trigger an action itself.

LordByron.8369:

Even if you are lucky and manage to leave the fight due to excessive amount of confusion stacks, then you get 1 less people in the fight with all his cleansing on CD…

How do you apply an “excessive amount of confusion stacks” with glamour fields? Unless you’re constantly running through these fields (Confusing Enchantments), a mesmer can cast Feedback, Null Field and Veil (which means all utility skills, all on relatively long cooldowns), causing a blind coupled with one (!) stack of confusion (Dazzling Glamours / Blinding Befuddlement).
It takes three mesmers specced for condition damage and a glamour build casting three glamour fields at the same time in the same place to apply nine stacks of confusion, which can easily be cleansed or avoided by backing off. Check the list of ally condition removal skills: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition#From_allies

This is so true. Mostly I manage to tag players with 2-3 stacks of confusion using glamours. This results in about 250 points of damage a tick (about 3-4 ticks) for fully geared players and about 350 for ungeared lowbies. Sometimes you get lucky and someone will run in and out of the fields a bunch of times and the numbers will be a little higher. Regardless, that ain’t killing anyone. This myth of “15 stacks of instant confusion from glamours” is just that, a myth.

You seriously need to work on your setup and play if you are only getting them with 2-3 stacks of confusion and them doing only 250 damage per stack. I use only 2 glamour fields yet get 6-8 on a regular basis. 2 from their original cast, another 2 from them leaving the fields, plus another 2-4 when I pull them back into or even through those fields. All the while, the lowest my confusion does is 370 dmg per stack (when my consumables run out on me and I have the wrong weapon set on).

Thanks for the tips. I’m still getting my trinkets, but I do need to work on pulling back into the fields. I can get higher numbers, but I was referring to what the poster was commenting on in terms of hitting people with a few glamours (not every glam all at once in a perfect set-up). I’m still skeptical though about your ability to get 8 stacks on players from range in a zerg. That seems impossible right now.

Usually in zergs, you are likely to have fellow glamour mesmers helping you. Yes it is much more difficult to get large stacks of confusion on a zerg as a single glamour mes, but I still will get at least 1 person with those 8 stacks. It’s pretty much a guarantee.

Entropy.4732:

Iruwen.3164:

Max.8563:

confusion is the only counter to dodge

Confusion doesn’t trigger on dodge, only when dodge is traited to trigger an action itself.

LordByron.8369:

Even if you are lucky and manage to leave the fight due to excessive amount of confusion stacks, then you get 1 less people in the fight with all his cleansing on CD…

How do you apply an “excessive amount of confusion stacks” with glamour fields? Unless you’re constantly running through these fields (Confusing Enchantments), a mesmer can cast Feedback, Null Field and Veil (which means all utility skills, all on relatively long cooldowns), causing a blind coupled with one (!) stack of confusion (Dazzling Glamours / Blinding Befuddlement).
It takes three mesmers specced for condition damage and a glamour build casting three glamour fields at the same time in the same place to apply nine stacks of confusion, which can easily be cleansed or avoided by backing off. Check the list of ally condition removal skills: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition#From_allies

This is so true. Mostly I manage to tag players with 2-3 stacks of confusion using glamours. This results in about 250 points of damage a tick (about 3-4 ticks) for fully geared players and about 350 for ungeared lowbies. Sometimes you get lucky and someone will run in and out of the fields a bunch of times and the numbers will be a little higher. Regardless, that ain’t killing anyone. This myth of “15 stacks of instant confusion from glamours” is just that, a myth.

You seriously need to work on your setup and play if you are only getting them with 2-3 stacks of confusion and them doing only 250 damage per stack. I use only 2 glamour fields yet get 6-8 on a regular basis. 2 from their original cast, another 2 from them leaving the fields, plus another 2-4 when I pull them back into or even through those fields. All the while, the lowest my confusion does is 370 dmg per stack (when my consumables run out on me and I have the wrong weapon set on).

Glamour builds are generally only good against zergs as Iruwen has just pointed out. I can stack up confusion much quicker running my cond dmg setup. I cast staff 3, staff 2, and roll (and immediate cry of frustration) when I my foe is foolish enough to jump me. This yields an instant 8 stacks (since all illusions are next to my foe). Now my foes can either A: button smash mindlessly (like a lot of guys do); B: Back off for 5-8 seconds (which is all the more most confusion lasts most of the time); C: Have one person in the party or each individual cleanse the confusion.

Now, I have seen backstab thieves hit for 8k damage fairly regularly and that takes zero setup. Even with me running full rabid gear plus undead runes and cond dmg consumables bringing my cond dmg to 1.8k, my confusion ends up doing 400-410 dmg per stack. It would take my foe to use 3 skills during the duration of my confusion to get more than that 8k.

Stop your whining and learn to play. Saying getting confusion bombed and backing out of the fight is the same as dying is such a crock. Confusion doesn’t last that long at all and waiting it out is what a smart player will do and then jump right back in the fight.

I disagree with this notion that clones (or any illusion for that matter) is basically there for shatters. Those who say that good players won’t get confused by all those bodies out there aren’t entirely accurate. I have had party members who can’t even follow me and they are on my team and can see me while stealthed. Its a matter of using the dodge-clone and stealthing and/or blinking that can really mess people up.

I prefer running a cond dmg w/ confusion spike build in which I get 140-150 dps from bleed per stack. I shatter here and there but large in part I tend to leave my illusions up to cause more stacks and make it even harder for me to be targeted. Between torch 4, decoy, and mass inv, I usually am extremely hard to follow.

I have 3 and part of a 4th. Knights (for crit build), Givers (phantasm support), Rabid (cond), and a 3 pieces of Soldier to make any build have more survivability. 2 sets of trinkets (zerk & rabid) and 10 weapons. I mostly use the knights and rabid which allows me to not to need to retrait. I run 0/20/25/0/25 most of the time so I can switch between a crit or a cond build by changing out my gear and a few skills.

I think the blurred frenzy could simply be lag or something along that lines. I haven’t seen too much variation in attack speed but the numbers appearing on my screen can appear at different intervals from time to time.

iLeap is really about timing. Depending on the terrain, it could take a little bit longer for the illusion to get to the target. Sometimes its a quick tap, tap to trap and immobilize the target. Really it’s about being aware on the initial action of the illusion and watching when he is next to the target. Sometimes its advantageous to wait an extra second or two before switching since some foes know to dodge to try and prevent the upcoming immobilization.

I run a phantasm build going with 10/20/20/0/20. I don’t have the +15 for illusions to buff, but I gain a good deal of survivability while buffing my phantasms with the +20% recharge and +phantasm health. Coupled with knights gear, I find this very viable in wvw causing great deal of damage with my GS and run either staff or sword/torch. When I’m doing zerg things, staff is a nice tool to jump into the lines to hit back liners and quickly jump back out. Sword/torch I use while roaming and capping. It gives me those added close range defense/offense that are great in small group fights.

As a fellow Mesmer, I have to say I didn’t care much for it. Ganking guys 2 v 1 doesn’t take much work at all, especially in areas like JP’s where the odds of you getting jumped are almost nil. My buddy and I will take camps even with 2+ foes trying to protect them with my buddy set up as a glass cannon and me as a hybrid. This leaves us able to spike an opponent but having one of us with good survivability gives us room for error.

If a thief dares to jump me, I have my body trained to instantly hit staff 4 followed by staff 2. This gives me chaos armor to mitigate any chain he is doing and puts some distance between me and my attacker. I also have a phantasm up and look to cast a 2nd if he’s visible. After that, I drop chaos storm at my feet, switch to my sword/torch, sword 3 (leap giving chaos armor), when it snags him i switch locations with the clone, sword 2 and mind wrack. At this point, he’s wondering what just happened to him.

I run both a crit dmg and a condition dmg builds with the same weapons (only different attribs) so these are always available to me to use.

Here are my thoughts

1. This really isn’t a condition build. You’ll apply a few sparingly along the way, but outside of vunerability and some light bleeding there isn’t much conditions being down with a GS.
2. Your trait setup is really more of a power/crit build in which you’ll hit your opponent hard, but not as hard as if you were using berserk over rabid.
3. In the end, it looks more like a mix build that isn’t very strong at doing one thing but rather decent damage output with a few conditions to help things along.

It does still work as a blast finisher. The issue comes is that it is only at the end of the skills duration when the flame burst occurs. So you need to be in a field and have feedback active when it flames. There are times where the chaos bubble doesn’t show, but that is a known issue, but the armor is there.

One piece of advice in watching you play, utilize when an opponent pulls you to them, like the guardian. Decoy+weapon switch to sword+ blurred frenzy has saved my butt more times than I can count. It damages foes, gives you time if you are immobilized, usually breaks targeting, and it’s great when you are pulled into a group bent on killing that Mesmer. With that skill group, you can shatter (to spike them further) or blink out of danger depending on the situation.

I run a very similar setup, only i still like my centaur runes and use a sword instead of scepter. The sword provides the immobilize that is so nice for shatters, plus gives me another quick burst dmg. I started using this over a more traditional cond setup since I like to jump into the mix and often noticed I was overriding illusions because of my rolls so why not use that to my benefit.

My only other change is feedback for signet of inspiration. I noticed that not many people run it and it can be a really devastating skill. I use it even when I’m against an opponent that it won’t work against since it gives me yet another field to get chaos armor off of.