Guild Wars 2

It would seem like the ‘problem’ here is that you’re demanding one of the devs to cater to your specific interests.

no, no, more that I expect the game, and the devs who work on it, to cater to the players in general. There will always people who want things to be harder, who want to feel more “leet” than the next player because they can get through content that is too challenging for them, but these people should be ignored. The goal shouldn’t be to make things so hard that only a fraction of the players can manage it without excessive difficulty, it should be to make it accessible to the broadest reasonable swath of the population. Of course there are people who like the new dungeons, there are people that like Dark Souls or Battletoads, but these people should largely be ignored.

I personally accept the tradeoff of damage for survivability (Can’t do damage if you’re dead). I tend to run a condition build using shortbow and sword\dagger, and focus on being supportive and holding aggro while keeping a steady output of DPS through conditions.

If you’re in a group with a single other Condition player though then you might as well just go AFK. Conditon damage is fine for solo PvE but it’s horrible for Dungeons (and I say that as someone who loves Condition builds in theory and wishes that they were viable).

Yes some people are upset because we added mechanical difficulty to AC, but there are also many happy people who enjoy that you have to play the game at a deeper level now in AC.

Ah, I see the problem. You should listen to the former group, and not to the latter. The latter are those annoying sort of people that always want to make things hard for the former group. Please the former and everyone can play.

I don’t know if someone has said this before, but here’s what I want:

Style inspection only.

You should be able to “inspect” the other player, but instead of showing their gear as it would in the player’s Hero pane, with the names and stats and all that, it would just show the names for the styles of their gear. So instead of seeing that they have exotic level 80 CoF armor that they’re used Transmutation Stones to make look like Acolyte armor with Cadeucus shoulders, you would just see that they have:
Acolyte Helm
Noble’s Mantle
Acolyte Chest
Acolyte Gloves
Acolyte Leggings
Acolyte Boots

It would give no indication of the armor’s strength or stats, but it would let you know what to look for if you wanted to duplicate that look. It would not have an elitism involved, but would be a helpful tool for style hunting.

This does need to change. You should get the full rewards just for participating in the events, you shouldn’t have to be part of the initiating guild. The “incentive” for the originating guild should be the same as for dropping banners and stuff, that you want to give something back to the community, and also get those benefits for yourself, but there’s no need for those benefits to be exclusive to your own guild.

I like the new dailies, and yeah I’ve been getting around 7-9 of them every day, they really aren’t that hard, and getting at least five of them is easier than they ever were before. In the “original” list I always found Variety to be a hassle, or sometimes 5 events unless I was in an area with a farmable event chain, but the new ones are super lax. “Apply 50 conditions” took be no more than thirty seconds, it was only halfway through the first encounter in a dungeon.

The “Daily Dodge” one is annoying, because it only counts if you get a very near miss, and I tend to dodge out of the way far earlier, but the one in the new rotation seems to require half as many as they did last month. You need to time it so that the attack would hit you (not some guy next to you), and so that it just barely misses (not a full second before it lands). Other “easy” ways to bump your daily dodge, do a forward roll into a bear’s attack, the timing is easy, and dodging in rather than away seems to apply two or more ticks per and zero damage.

If Ranger pets die to Agony, wouldn’t the simple fix be to just give all pets 100% immunity to Agony damage? I mean, they can’t avoid it at all, so giving them irremovable and massively lethal conditions is a bit unfair (for Necro and other class pets too).

If that’s somehow seen as overpowered, what about a scaled invulnerability? Like give them a multiplied version of the player’s Agony resistance, such that if you have enough resistance for your own character, then the pet would be immune to it. So like level 10-20 you’d need 5 agony resist to make your pet invulnerable, 20-30 you’d need 10, ect., but as long as you kept up, the pet would keep up.

It’d also be nice if, since pet AI is too stupid to make them auto-dodge persistent or “run-or-die” red circle attacks, pets of all types would be at least mostly immune to such attacks. They wouldn’t have to be immune to all AoE, just the types of attacks that are specifically designed to encourage players to get out of their way, like poison clouds, or “highly telegraphed → massive damage” hits. If a player gets caught up in those, they deserve what they get, but a pet/summon don’t know no better, so punishing the pet isn’t really fair.

That may well be true, and maybe that’s a problem, but maybe it isn’t. Stats are just modifiers. They modify the damage of a given attack. If the developers are aware that equipping kits lowers your core attack values, then they might raise the default attack strength of the skills themselves to compensate. We have no way of knowing whether they’ve done this or not, but just because a kit lowers your base stats, don’t assume that it means that the attacks deal less damage. Try them out and see whether the damage output works for you.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: Our QA teams test the dungeons at the dungeon level, and at 80. They test it with different ranges of gear, and different people. I’ve watched non-QA groups do similar things, under various conditions. We have a review process.
Will 80’s have an easier time? Sure. They have more tools to use and more experience with the class. Our side-kicking system is something we are working on too, to ensure that things remain challenging for those folks and that their gear doesn’t make all the difference.
Will we ever release a video of our internal testing process? Highly doubtful. Just as I doubt we will ever post the builds, classes, and gear our testers test with.

One thing we see frequently with at-level people going into dungeons, is that while their character is the right level, their gear is often 10+ levels behind them. When you combine a low average gear level, not having all your skills/tools available, and not being as experienced with the class, it’s going to be significantly more difficult than what an 80 makes it look like.

You should hire more testers that aren’t very good at the game. Ones that do things wrong most of the time, just to create a realistic experience. If you can’t hire any bad gamers, then just have one of them roleplay, pretend that he doesn’t speak English (or just never checks the box), has no idea what the mechanics are and just swings wildly at anything that moves. When the rest of the group can still get through, it’s good to go.

Also make sure that you do test it “at level” with “level -10” gear on, since as you note that is a very common loadout. I haven’t run any dungeons with her yet, but I just noticed that my level 40 Warrior had been using a green level 14 Greatsword the whole time (but of course I didn’t notice earlier since she was still out-damaging any of my other level 40-ish characters).

One thing to keep in mind though, is that even though you can swap weapon kits like crazy, pretty much every “on weapon swap” sigil has an internal cooldown, around ten seconds I think (check the wiki’s discussion page for your sigil of choice), so even if you swap kits every half second, you’ll only get one stack of whatever the sigil does per ten seconds.

I actually took your reply serious and agreed until I hit this paragraph. Then I realized you were here to troll.

I’m not here to “troll,” I’m here to say that WvW-specific dailies are a bad idea that would be bad for the game, and to point out why.

They aren’t working fine because nothing in the pve daily gives you wvw rewards.

Im specifically badges and siege, something people use in WvW.

I don’t think they want badges to be any easier to get than they are already. You CAN get siege via dailies though, you can buy them using Laurels from the Laurel vendors. You can also buy various gear using Laurels with stats that might improve your WvW performance (and which were previously only available in FotM), and you can use the karma and mystic coins to buy other types of armor and weapons that might improve your odds in WvW (or at least hlep you as much as they would help a PvE-only player).

sPvP has their own system because they are a walled garden, the gear you earn in PvP can’t be used in PvE, and vice-versa. WvW and PvE aren’t walled off, you have all the same gear regardless of the mode. If they made WvW dailies then all that would mean is that most WvW players would feel compelled to do both (and then to be fair they would have to make it impossible to complete the existing PvE dailys in the WvW maps), and PvE players might likewise feel compelled to do the WvW dailies, if only to advance their Legendary progress.

And if you’re going to do that, why not more dailies? Why not dailies that are only specific to Dungeons? Why not dailies that are only for jump puzzle completions? No, the existing system of having a single daily path that can be completed in either PvE or WvW is perfectly fine.

The PvE dialies are WvW Dailies. You can’t complete all of them in WvW zones, but you can always complete at least 5/9 in the WvW zones, and at least one of them per day seems to be WvW-only now. There is no need for an entirely separate set of WvW-only objectives when the existing list works just fine.

In case you didn’t notice, one of the objectives for today was to “drop 5 caravans,” and the one for yesterday was “kill 10 opposing players.” For the past two days, the only objectives that you couldn’t do in WvW would be (as far as I know): “Complete a Personal Story Step,” and “Keg Brawl.”

And last, but certainly not least… Why not just join a bigger guild?

You have all the tools you need to do everything you want right now.

Look, there are already plenty of threads about why “joining a bigger guild” is not a desirable option, about why the status quo of Guild Missions does not work for a lot of players, there’s no reason to re-litigate that argument in this thread.

If you don’t agree that there is a need for something similar to this idea, something that allows small guilds to reasonably participate in Guild Missions, then just bow out of this discussion, there are other threads for that. If, on the other hand, you do see the need, and just believe that the solution I proposed is not the best way of solving it, then that’s fine, provide alternatives, but “no solution needed” is a fight to be having in a different thread.

See, making them easier for small guilds is a great idea. Making a whole new system to help guilds band together into even bigger masses of people while still feeling special is the problem.

Why is that a problem? What harm does it cause? The idea would be to allow each guild to retain it’s own autonomy, retaining their own chat channel, bank, influence pool, banner, etc., while also allowing them the opportunity to participate evenly in this new Guild Missions system. I do understand that a system like this would take time and resources to implement, and maybe it wouldn’t be worth it, I leave that up to ANet to decide.

And yes, I know there are other ways to allow smaller guilds to participate, and if they felt like making the Guild Missions vastly less expensive to get to (like not requiring you to complete the WvW tree first at least), or if they gave full participation rewards to anyone involved in the event, whether they’re in the initiating guild or not, then fine, this proposal wouldn’t be needed. I just assumed that with the time they spent putting the Guild Missions system together, the costs involved were where they wanted them to be, at least for high tier guilds.

Guild missions work easily, and you don’t even have to be in a guild to do ’em…

I don’t see the problem. Instead of banding bunches of guilds together, you just grab random people.

As I understand, this is not true. In order to receive the rewards for participating in a Guild Mission, you need to be a part of that guild at the time. Here is a link to the Wiki: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_mission

Now, for certain events non-Guild members can sort of “hang out” and participate in some of the content for kicks, but they will not receive the rewards of a participating guild member.

So Guild Mission content has been added, and it’s become clear how unfair this type of content is to smaller guilds that cannot afford to reasonably participate in them at the same level as larger guilds, but that don’t want to be absorbed into those larger guilds. There are plenty of threads making that point in more detail. A good solution, I believe, would be a “Guild Alliance,” which would function a bit like a small business union.

The way it would work is that any number of guilds could form together into a “Guild Alliance,” basically a guild of guilds. Only Guild leaders could participate in the alliance interface (which would function for them similarly to the standard guild interface), and only the Alliance leader and chosen officers would be able to exercise that level of authority within the Alliance.

The benefit to doing it this way is that the previous guilds remain intact and largely autonomous. You never have to “rep” the Alliance. You can only be part of one Alliance at a time, and if you’re repping your own guild, you’re also repping the alliance automatically. The Alliance would not take Influence away from your guild, it would get bonus influence that you acquire in parallel to your own guild’s, but the things available to spend it on are more limited (no banks, no WvW upgrades, no stat boosts, just access to Guild Mission content, mostly).

So the way this would work, say you have ten Guilds of five people each. They could form an Alliance. The Alliance would then have ten active members, the leaders of those guilds. The one who set it up would serve as the Alliance Leader, but could pass that role on as normal. Then as the players play, they each acquire 100 influence for their own guilds, which they can spend as they see fit, meaning each guilds’ coffers contains 500 influence at this point. They also acquire bonus influence that passes up to the Alliance, so the Alliance would now have 5000 influence to spend. This would allow an Alliance to catch up to the power guilds at a much faster rate.

Now, to prevent massive guilds from just forming Alliances of one and doubling their capabilities, there shoud be measures to limit the maximum size of guilds participating in an alliance (maybe 10-20 members tops?), and limit a minimum size of an alliance before the bonus influence is sent to them (like maybe you need 3-5 guilds in an alliance before they really do anything). If the absolute size limit is too harsh, it could be a relative reward limit, in which the smaller the guild, the more bonus XP gets sent up, so that guilds of 1-5 people would send up a bonus 100% of the influence they receive, guilds of 5-15 would send up 75%, 15-25 would send up 50%, etc. until very large guilds would barely send up any, meaning that an alliance made up of guilds of hundreds would only be able to get a “bonus” event every few weeks at most.

Would that work?

Creating, improving and playing with your build is part of the game. I completely understand about only having a few hours a week to play, but why can’t those who DO have that time have an activity that they can work hard at?

You should. There should be “hard mode” content in the game. It just shouldn’t give rewards that you can;t get through “not hard mode” content. If all dungeons are converted into “hard mode” content then that means that many players will be unable to earn dungeon tokens at all, and that’s unreasonable. Basic dungeon explorer mode should not be “hard.” It should present a reasonable amount of challenge, it should not be completely trivial, but neither should it require absolutely hardcore expert skill, and it definitely shouldn’t require pinpoint coordination between multiple players.

If they want to add hard mode, one where it’s harder to complete than the existing dungeons, then that’s fine, but they should leave the existing dungeons as options, not make “hard mode” the new default.

To bad you never thought a solution to how that would effect other classes. You completely destroyed many viable builds, and you changed nothing to compensate for this, you obliterated play-styles and failed to look at other things like “Runes of Vampirism” and “Sigil of Blood” not changing them for the compensation, you did nothing but destroy without any discussion or feedback to your players or community.

I think the point here is, food and other consumables should never be a balancing factor. A build that is unbalanced without food is just unbalanced. If you need to use a food item to achieve viability with a given build, then you shouldn’t be using that build, and if you’d like to use that build then you should be pushing them to change various powers and traits to make that build more viable. Sigils and runes are completely different, those are permanent elements and intended to be involved in balance. Consumables are just meant to buff up what you’re already doing (ie making your attacks hit a bit harder), not replace entire functions within your build.

Tl;dr, if you were viable before the food nerf and aren’t viable now, then you weren’t supposed to be viable before the food nerf playing the way you were.

We had them in story before launch, but what we found is that we couldn’t strike a balance between the amount we give for completing story mode, and the difficult difference. Our feedback was that rather than face the challenge of Explorable dungeons, high skill groups would just afk faceroll the much easier story mode content for the guaranteed smaller token amount. We tried several things, but couldn’t strike the balance, so we removed tokens from story mode as a reward and put them into explorable mode only as a reward.

I don’t know about that. I was running CoF explorable with some people over the weekend, and we had issues getting back in because most of the team it turns out had never completed story mode, and those of us who had were on servers where the gate was locked, so we figured “what the hell, let’s do Story” so we did. Even though most of us had done Story at least once on different characters, we still died several times more often playing through CoF Story than we ever did on the explorable mode, and it took as twice as long to finish. I wouldn’t say it’s at all “easier,” it’s just less rewarding and more time consuming.

At the very least get rid of those stupid hats that you can’t do anything with. I mean, they are almost always underleveled for you unless you drop what you’re doing and run the dungeons as soon as you possibly can (which is unlikely), and you can’t sell them or even salvage them, so they always just end up destroyed. At the very least they should have a unique look for each dungeon, or they should scale in strength to the level you are when you get them (rather than the level of the dungeon), or maybe have it so that each story mode dungeon rewards a different piece of armor that you can assemble into a single unified style, like those little “bonus” pieces that come with some action figures that you can assemble into a single larger figure. Have AC reward a hat, then CM reward boots, then TA reward gloves, etc., to form a costume style you can’t get anywhere else.

I think they’ve taken the wrong lessons from the game. I think maybe they somehow got the impression that we found it too easy, and so they wanted to make it harder, which is ridiculously off base.

If anything I’ve seen runs go smoother and much faster since the change because people are not as willing to make the dumb mistakes. And compared to the past money making? Really? You might want to switch out who you are running dungeons with if it’s really taking you that much longer.

I’ve experienced both, sure. I ran with one group the other night that was my best run ever. I never died, I’m not sure anyone in the group did, we all knew what we were doing, cleared every objective in record time (for me at least), and everything worked great. I think it definitely has upped my own game, as I’ve learned a few tricks that turned rooms that used to be kamikaze runs into rooms where I stand a good chance of surviving through some new tactics, but then, I’d prefer being able to do both.

If I could guarantee that I’d always end up with a group like that one, then I’d have no problem with these changes, but I can’t, and I don’t want to engage in any of the elitist practices that witch-hunt potentially “bad” players. Dungeon design needs to take into account that maybe only half the players will really be “on the ball.”

I’ve also, since the patch, had one or two much more frustrating runs, in which certain events took way more tries, and when being downed meant not rejoining my team and continuing to play, but just laying there for at one point several minutes straight, while the rest of my party continued to fight but it wasn’t worth stopping to rez me because it was either too dangerous to stand still over me for that long, or they were too preoccupied with the task at hand. There’s nothing fun about laying on the ground.

I’m not saying that the old way was more money-efficient, the new runs, on average, are not much longer than the old, but the new runs are more punishing to PUGs with one or more members with poor communication or understanding of their roles, and I’m just saying, dying in the old runs didn’t really bother me, so long as I felt they were in service towards advancing to the end (now areas where deaths were too common and too pointless were annoying, but those still exist in the new model).

I have no problem ressing party members during the defend Magg event, and if it’s really that much of a problem try having the party utilize their downed party member res skills (e.g. warbanner, pet res, shadow refuge), it’s really not that difficult.

Downed party member abilities only work on living characters. If a player is just downed, sure, rez them if they can’t get up themselves, but in situations with dozens of mobs running around a character can go from downed to dead in seconds, or he may be “too hot” to rez immediately (since that would cause the rezzer to drop as well). I really think that they do need to change the nature of the “defeated” state to be easier to recover from.

That doesn’t solve the problem though. It’s an interesting reward mechanic, but the problem persists that players wouldn’t have to learn the content or how to play it – they could just ruin their armor res rushing and having a miserable time of it in order to complete it. By forcing players to learn how to do things and cooperate as a group, we’re encouraging them to get better and as a result die less. If players are getting better and dying less, there will be less prejudice towards PuGs, since the general skill level of the dungeon running population has increased.

I don’t know, maybe in theory. I have noticed that I die less often in dungeons than I used to, but at the same time I didn’t mind dying as much in the old dungeons because it only cost me a few silver to fix per run, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what I was making back so it didn’t really bother me. What does bother me is lying on the ground, unable to contribute, or being unable to use a WP to catch up to the group because one of them has agroed something.

When it comes to "player aggravation, I’m much more aggravated by a dungeon event that stops the party dead for 2-3 wipe cycles, perhaps even preventing forward progress entirely, than I am by a situation that the party can get through in a single try, even if it means that I have to rez and run 2-3 times for a total of -3 silver or so, out of a dungeon run in which I accumulate 50+ silver in total rewards. Under those circumstances, dying a few times is just the cost of doing business, less than the cost of consumables in some cases.

The new Magg event, for example, is pretty cool, but more frustrating than the old method if players start dying because there’s absolutely no time to waste rezzing anyone. That’s the real problem with the “no rez rush” philosophy, it only works if nobody dies. Ever. I know you seem to believe that players should be capable of rezzing dead team mates, but that’s just silly, it takes waaaaaaaay too long to be practical in any situation that is deadly enough that it would have killed someone in the first place. Most dungeon events tend to have either a time factor or an “infinite spawning until complete” factor, either of which makes it impossible for even one character to waste time trying to rez another, especially given that the group is already a man down.

You will be deeply surprised. I’m currently trying to get permission to expose some of our internal data regarding our anti res rushing patch – you know, some before and after data where people can look at the numbers. Posting numbers is the tricky bit, but from what we have seen and can correlate from the data, more people are playing dungeons, and less people are dying. There’s more really interesting information that I won’t go into at the moment, but our data suggests that there is an overall positive affect from the patch that is measurable.

You might also want to keep in mind that the February monthly reward required every player to play five dungeons to complete it, so make sure to take your February statistics and subtract out five runs per character before comparing them to previous months.

Is that part of what you’re proposing, that one removal removes all “Bleed”/“Poison” effects? That’s a difference, then.

There are several Condition Removal abilities that could remove both Bleed and poison at once, but there are very few abilities in the game that, alone, add both conditions at once.

Yes, you can Dodge a direct attack, but the same is true of condition damage, there is NO Condition attack in the game that you cannot use a Dodge to evade most if not all of the applied conditions. Getting hit by a Condition applying attack and then complaining that there’s no way to avoid taking damage from the Conditions is like standing there and taking a Hundred Blades to the face and then complaining that there was no way to avoid the direct damage done. If you don’t want that Thief to put bleed stacks on you, then when he does Death Blossom then you dodge it. No bleeds applied, problem solved.

They don’t have the same health pools as Champions or dungeon bosses, where the condition stack thing really comes into play. Just saying “oh just remove conditions” ignores the fact I can only remove conditions two ways on myself right now as a ranger. And both of them have long reset timers, to the point that the fight will be over when they’re back.

The disconnect some people seem to have is that they seem to believe that Condition damage isn’t “fair” damage. They they deserve to be able to negate it and are somehow wronged when they’re prevented from doing so. Condition damage is fair damage, it’s just as earned as anything else. If a warrior can deal 10K direct damage over ten seconds, then there’s no reason why a Necro shouldn’t be able to deal 100 condition damage over ten seconds. Condition damage does bypass toughness, but it can be cleared, while direct damage has to deal with toughness, and can’t be cleared (aside form just healing up, but that applies equally to conditions and in many cases removes them as it does so).

A condition-build group is, by it’s very nature, NOT balanced. Ergo, a balanced condition-build group is an impossibility. If you want a balanced group, you should probably stay away from overloading any one particular aspect of combat: be it conditions, support, crowd control, or anything else.

You’re playing the wrong game. Balance in GW2 has an entirely different meaning than in WoW. In WoW, a “balanced party” is one with a good tank or two, a good healer or two, and a good DPS or two, such that their combined efforts cause good results. In GW2, each player is expected to bring some measure of tank, DPS, and healing to the table. What a “balanced party” means in GW2 is that each character is “balanced” in and of themselves, each capable of handling the necessary roles. So yes, you can have a “balanced” party of condition build characters, so long as each is using gear, traits, and abilities that are strong enough but not overly strong.

Any party that is way too effective or way too ineffective relative to the design goals of the content would be “unbalanced,” and the assertion is that if you take one Condition Build character that is perfectly well balanced for soloing, and perfectly well balanced in a group of non-Condition characters, there is a problem in that if he were to group with four identical Condition build characters it would result in a drastically substandard party, while by comparison, if you were to group five identical power/precision Warriors they would be perfectly well balanced, or above.

Now if you’re worried about seeing five of the same class rolling together, keep in mind that there are 3-5 quite solid Condition classes, so you could form a party with no duplicate classes and still end up with multiple condition builds stepping on each others toes, a problem that does not occur with power-crit teams. I mean, can you imagine the angst that would occur if enemies were designed so that each time an enemy his hit by a crit attack, they become immune to crit damage from other sources for five seconds? Or if every time they took a hit of direct damage, they would gain Aegis?

Yeah, this is inexcusable. They need SOME fix for condition damage caps and they need to implement something, if not a complete solution, in the near future.

I fully understand that they can’t simply raise the cap for technical reasons. Fair enough, but they need to do something more once players hit that cap so that their total damage potential does not drop.

At the moment, if you have one Warrior, he does a given amount of damage. If you have five identical Warriors, they do exactly five times that much damage. Is that unbalanced to them? If so, why allow it, and if not, then why would having five Condition Necros being able to deal their full damage potential be unbalanced? They need a system in which five identical Condition Necros would deal five times as much damage as any one of them could to a single target, simple as that.

Condition damage isn’t a bonus, it’s the way that a Condition build deals its primary damage. If they didn’t want people to spec for it, if they meant it to just be a bonus side effect that people shouldn’t worry about then they shouldn’t have provided a Condition stat, or the many traits and runes that buff the application and duration of conditions.

The solution that I tend to favor would be to have
Hemorrhage/Overdose/Blister damage added to the game. Any time that you try to apply a 26th stack of bleed, or a 26th second of Poison or Burn, then the damage would just be applied as straight direct damage instead of damage over time.

So for example using the raw wiki stats, if an enemy already has 25 stacks of bleed and he’s hit with a level 80 Death Blossom, instead of dealing three hits of 201 damage each and zero additional bleeds, it would deal three hits of 201 damage and also three hits of instant 400 bleed damage. If absolutely necessary the “hemorrhage” damage could be treated as standard damage, countered by Toughness, rather than as Condition damage which is not, but it definitely needs to use the Condition stat to raise it since that’s the state the player will have invested in.

Keep in mind that the above would only really apply to bosses and dungeon mobs anyways, if players are being hit by more than 26 stacks of bleed in short order then they would already be in trouble.

I too would very much like Grenade #1 to be made into an auto-target, auto-firing attack. It’s not a balance issue, it’s a convenience and quality of life issue.

The trade-off Engis get for not having weapon swapping is not kits, it’s the “Toolkit” abilities. We basically get double the utilities.

I do not thing that Engineers should get any form of standard “weapon swap” during combat, from say rifle to pistol/pistol, for example. I do, however, support the idea for both Engis and Eles to allow them to slot two different weapon sets, like any other class, and swap out of them whenever out of combat. It’d be a convenience issue for players that like to change up styles for different situations, without allowing them dozens of options in a single fight.

You might as well just ask Anet to deposit a Precursor into everyone’s bank. Doesn’t get easier than that.

/second.

Supply and demand. Nothing much else to it really since there isnt an infinite number of gems in the exchange.

Again though, that’s ANet’s choice too. You can’t just say “supply and demand” as if ANet has no control over either. They have EVERY control over both. They control the supply. They created a system in which a certain amount of any given item is generated over time. If they wanted to lower the price of precursors, all they’d need to do is keep raising the rate at which they drop into the world. If they want to reduce the demand for precursors, then they could just add better ways of acquiring them, or even skipping them entirely in the Legendary process. They could even choose to make desirable materials far less in demand simply by reducing the number needed for most recipes.

Yes, it is supply and demand, but that phrase in no way absolves ANet for the state of the economy.

I will note this: If and when you guys get around to initiating the final battle storyline against Jormag, the lore apparently indicates that this series of events will begin when “someone” is capable of breaking Jormag’s tooth in Hoelbrak. I’m giving you a friendly warning right now, if, in some strange fever dream, you guys have even considered making this “someone” be a random NPC, rather than the player character, I would strongly advise against it. If you think the Trehearn hate is bad, you can’t even begin to imagine the deluge of hatemail that “Mary Sue Toothbreaker” would have showered upon her for “tooth-blocking” the player character like that.

Yes, people want cheaper gems, but Anet is not going to dump gems into the currency exchange.
The cheaper gems from that are going to impact its ability to sell gems to players for money, which is kind of important for its continued survival. You’re effectively asking ANet to shoot one of its main ways of making money in the foot.

Honestly, what I’d prefer even more is that they remove the gem exchange entirely, make cash money the only source for gems, but then make gold much more available, and higher priced items drop much more often, so that it’s much easier to get stuff, without risking that everyone would be able to buy all their Quagan backpacks using gold.

I really think that the major problem with the personal story (and the degree to which this is a problem is a personal opinion), is that there were a ton of story branches, and if you knew all of them then I think it hangs together very well, but if you only follow a single path through from start to finish, then a ton of NPCs show up out of nowhere and are never seen again in a very unsatisfying way. The reason for this is because they will appear from an earlier storyline that you did not participate in, and then vanish into a later storyline that you missed because you took a different path.

It would have been much better if the stories had contained more redundancies, so that if you encountered characters you’d never seen before, but that was from a different storyline, you would get more backstroy on them, and when characters from your on storyline left, and you bypassed a storyline in which they would have reappeared, you’d get mail from them telling of their adventures in a different part of the world afterwards.

The problem with that approach is they would almost instantly lose any credibility with reasonable folk about whether or not they are influencing the gem rates.

I don’t care about their credibility on influencing the Gem rates. I think they are the only ones that do. What people want is cheaper Gems, ANet can provide that, they choose not to. I want them to manipulate the gem market if it results in cheaper gems, I don’t want them to not manipulate the gem market if that inaction results in more expensive gems.

Think of it this way. The government can print as much money as they want, that doesn’t mean your bank account has access to that money. The currency exchange does not have access to gem creation. It has a limited stock that players add and subtract from.

But only because you choose to have it that way. I’m sure there is some way that ANet could just change the variable that contains the amount of gems contained in the store, and even if you did for some crazy reason create it as some sort of untouchable black box, you still always have the option of “buying” $10,000 in gems using ANet’s own credit card, dumping those gems into the market, and then having those costs immediately returned, since you’re basically just buying them from yourself.

I’m curious, assuming the argument that a 20% discount should apply to the gem exchange rate (I think people here have done a good job of explaining why the sale isn’t a sale on the exchange, so lets leave that be). What system do you use to create a moving 20% discount on exchange, keeping in mind that the supply of gems is not unlimited, and that the exchange does not fabricate gems?

Cheat. ANet can generate gems and gold in infinite quantities as they see fit. They merely choose not to. While I don’t see the specific need to discount gems in the exchange whenever there is an attractive gem store sale, if ANet wanted to do so, they would merely need to generate and dump a ton of gems into the exchange until the price dropped to the desired level, and then buy them all back out of the system if it fell below that. That the market does not currently work this way is entirely a design choice, not a design necessity.

This is silly. They should have created an entirely new tree, one in which the most basic mission is available right from the start, while the more advanced ones would require further progress into that tree. Building it into the upper branches of an existing tree unfairly penalizes those that didn’t see a point to the existing tree options, and unfairly rewards players that already liked the content in that tree.

Vengeance is fine. It’s a high risk, but high reward ability that allows you to operate fully well for several seconds and maybe kill something. What sucks is Hammer Toss. Hammer Toss is lame. I think that every class that has a “root/KD/fear” on their #2 deserves a better one than that. Every class should have a “movement” ability on their #2, since many times you end up downed inside an AoE field, which spells inevitable death.

Warriors should get a ground targeted ability that causes them to dodge roll to that location. Necros should get a Spectral Walk similar to Mist Form. Engineers should be able to use a short range, no damage Jump Shot. Guardians should have a short range Flashing Blade style teleport. Rangers should have Lightning Reflexes.

And for the record, Thieves have the worst #3 skill, that split-second Stealth never saved any Thief except in PvP, and even then it only bought them a little time maybe.

And btw, some have said that Sweet Revenge should be built in, definitely not. It would be little help in PvP or boss fights but would make Warriors almost unkillable in PvE with smaller mobs around, something that definitely isn’t true of any other class. If they made any such change it shouldn’t be a 100% chance of rallying on a kill, but maybe a small chance of rallying on each hit, or maybe on each crit, so that it’s still a gamble, but it’d be something more likely to proc off of high-HP opponents.

Just a quick note—I said the odds of it dropping was closer to .005 than the 1 in a million or so that was tossed out. Those aren’t the exact odds, but if my math is correct, 10 players running the event every day might expect one staff to drop after about 7 months. (And we haven’t been out that long.)

Ah, then you guys need to up the drop rate considerably, because those are kitten odds and there’s no good reason for the object to exist at all with such horrible odds of dropping.

Second, people need to quit thinking of the phantasms as anything other than a DoT. That is what they are, they are damage over time, but instead of using condition removal to get rid of them, they need to be damaged. Phantasms are simply spells.

There’s certainly some truth to that. The logical break that occurs for me with this is that a standard DoT has a fixed duration, if I apply a Bleed then it will last about ten seconds, and then it’s gone, fire and forget. If I drop a Phantasm, then it could last for minutes if the enemy ignores it, doing steady damage all the time. I mean, if I’m fighting an event boss, and it’s leaving my guys alone because other things are drawing agro, and I have two clones and a Warlock up, would I be better off shattering them all and re-summoning them, or by summoning a second Warlock?

They are like DoTs in a lot of ways, but they’re DoTs with faces.

Also you compare the AoE to that of one of the best AoE classes. Between Wells, Marks from the Staff, Axe #3, Dagger #5, and the ultimate AoE Epidemic it is not really fair to compare necro AoE to any other class.

Fair enough, but pretty much all the classes I play have better AoT options. My Thief can Deathblossom, Cluster Bomb, and Chokking Gas, not to mention Trick Shot. My GS Guardian’s every attack is either a PBAoE or cone AoE that deals solid damage. My DD Ele has tons of great PB and cone AoEs. Mesmers have AoE capabilities, but most in the form of unreliable bounces or pierce effects. In my opinion, when it comes to AoE damage, from best to worst possibilities it goes from auto-splash>ground target>PBAoE>cone>bounce>pierce. Now shatters are auto-splash, but they require burning up those DoTs that, left alone may do considerably more damage over their lifetime.

Mesmer, Engineer, and Elementalist were meant to be a steeper learning curve, while Necro, Warrior and Thief were meant to be out of the box ready to go professions.

I don’t know, I didn’t find Necro or Thief any easier to pick up than Ele or Engineer. All four were kind of tricky to get into at the very lowest levels, but all four of their curves had leveled out by at most 25, well short of the Mesmer’s 40+. If we’re talking easiest to master to hardest (not talking “best” or “strongest” once learned, just the easiest to get them to do whatever they do and do it as well as can be expected) then I think the classes would go Warrior>>>Guardian>Ranger>Engineer>Thief>Necro>Ele>Mesmer.

Naturally necro is better when it comes to aoe and necro is also a lot thougher, but then again necro doesn’t have for example stealth.

This is true, but then Mesmer stealth is fairly minimal anyways (especially if you’ve ever played a Thief), and Necros can use Death Shroud in many of the cases where Mesmer stealth would be helpful (solo, at least). Death Shroud alone trumps many of Mesmer’s biggest strengths in terms of solo utility. I think Mesmers kill Necros when it comes to utility in a group, having that Swiss Army kit of portals, reflectors, condition clears, tons of handy tricks, which is sort of like a Guardian or Thief in that respect, but even better, but they just seem to fall short in terms of solo capability.

rofl, you really got so much stuff that your bags were full? right. make room before the end….

I’d already done several runs in a row, and I didn’t want to hold up the group moving things around before the last boss, I didn’t figure I’d get kicked within seconds of the “you win” pop-up.

And while this wasn’t directed at me, I feel I can give some insight. I do deliberate plant phantasms on multiple targets while I weave around and start tearing them down. In the case of mobs with a larger threat, I’ll put illusions on the biggest danger while I whittle down the mob around it until I can get it by itself. I use staff and swords, but I know greatsword is popular for multiple targets as well because of iBezerker/having the best multi-target capability outside of melee.

I’ve not played a shatter build very extensively, but I believe clumping the mob and aiming clones towards the middle is usually how they try to get the biggest bang for their buck.

Interesting ideas, thanks. I’m not really used to dealing with less than all of the mobs in a group at once, which might be my problem with my Mesmer.

1. Mob tagging in DE’s is a known issues most Mesmers have. Anet doesn’t seem especially keen on trying to help us in that regard – And, you may have noticed, most Mesmers have a deeply seated distrust for Anet even touching the profession, because of the frequency of nerfs. (All but two, maybe three patches since launch have contained Mesmer nerfs), so we’re stuck between wanting them to fix it, and worrying that their idea of fixing Mesmer would be making it worse.

It is a bummer when you get a set of nerfs without any offsetting buffs, and I do think that’s bad form, but I would still have to trust that Anet will continue to work to make the overall game better (and you have to admit that the portal nerfs were essential, those things can be way to easily exploited).

2. I don’t really have problems with large groups. If you’re familiar with the massive dredge zerg in the Rasolov path of SE, then you may have context for when I say that I really enjoy it. Handling big crowds as a Mesmer for me, personally, is a snap – On the contrary, I feel like my talents are wasted on singular mobs.

What do you do to deal with the problem of mob A dying and taking all his associated illusions with him? Do you deliberately target and place illusions on multiple different mobs? Dump them on one mob and then ignore him and focus direct attacks on another? Just not worry about it and keep recasting illusions as they deplete?

But at the same time, I have no interest in changing it, personally.

Well, I don’t see why you would, you’re never likely to experience it again. The point is to make the class friendlier to new players of the class, so that they won’t burn out before they get to the interesting bits. Existing level 80s really wouldn’t be the “target audience” of any changes, so long as they didn’t result in any nerfs to the existing level 80 playstyles.

And the thing about the trait-reliance is that it’s for the sake of our mechanics, not our weapons

Well, even if a trait doesn’t directly say “reduces cooldown on staffs” or something, it would still benefit a weapon if it enhanced an effect the weapon often generates. The problem with the weapons is that the default effects they generate don’t seem worth using, they are all very lackluster in and of themselves, but by applying mid-tier traits they apparently become useful. The goal would be to make them worth using without traiting, and then, if you like, you could trait them to do something else too.

I hardly want to discourage new players or keep Mesmers less and “in high demand” but I think it’s a misidentification of where our difficulty lies to say it’s in the strength of our weapons, especially when the main determinate is their direct damage and their utility is completely overlooked.

What about this though, “utility” is practically worthless at low levels. I mean, you aren’t running dungeons, nothing requires too much cleverness to tackle, DPS and survivability are far more important down there. It’d be interesting if they could tie a lot of the more utility effects of the attacks to higher tier traits, while the raw DPs were added to the default build.

Nor do i love the blind on SoS. But im betting i use my + power from my centaur runes, more then most theives use the blind on SoS.

Perhaps so, but like I said, I can swap out the Signet whenever I don’t need it, while the runes cost time and money to swap out. I forget which runes I put into most of my characters because I haven’t had to change them in a while, but I picked them for having every slot provide a useful bonus. I think on my Thief I went for Adventurers, which provides more Power than Centaurs, plus Condition damage.

I think i saw in another thread your still around lvl 40-50 on your mesmer. So you don’t have access to runes yet, so it might be frustrating for you. Plus Mesmers would be tought to level even if they had perma speed, and they don’t. (I could be wrong about the level, i thought i read you saying that in another thread.)

And yeah, I don’t have solid Runes on my Mesmer yet (not that I would go for Centaurs either way), but that also highlights the problem, that even the “ideal” solution for Mesmer speed requires getting six runes that you can’t even start to acquire until level 60, while most classes get all their speed options available by 20. That means that 3/4 of the time you’re leveling, the time when you’re spending the most time running from point A to point B, you’ve got nothing.

They won’t rework our weapon skills to make them better at lower levels. And they most certainly won’t change the traits around to make them more available at mid tier. Only one mesmer weapon trait is available at the lower tiers and that is blade training in dueling. If you look elsewhere mesmer is one of the most whined about classes and are always called OP. I am just glad that this forum is highlighting some weaknesses and maybe we will get some buffs. At 80 we are amazing… but I doubt we will get any of these buffs that people want here. It seems like when ANet sees mesmer they just think Hmmm…

There’s got to be a way to shift things down a bit. Maybe make a portion of certain specific buffs that are currently in traits a natural part of the weapons default attacks, which are then further buffed by the traits if you go that route, enough that it makes them stronger at low levels, but aren’t worth caring about at higher levels (because either you’d trait into that area anyways, or wouldn’t be using that weapon to do more powerful trait-enhanced moves instead).

Like maybe if there’s some sort of cooldown buff in the Master traits, give half of it to the weapon by default, while removing some secondary function the ability has that may not even be necessary early on, and then later, when you would normally earn the trait, it now adds the rest of the original cooldown as well as restoring that basic function. They’ve done this sort of thing before for other classes.

If you’re moderately succeeding, but not enjoying it, then it’s probably an incompatibility with your preferences. Like how a tank would feel odd playing a healer, or a DPS would panic playing a tank because suddenly they have no damage and all the aggro.

Well, I kind of want to enjoy it, the style really doesn’t conflict with how I enjoy playing, I just get frustrated that I can’t take on as many enemies as I could with other classes. I mean, my Necro is level 53, and I was doing the Hylek village event in Bloodtide solo, and could easily handle 5-7 Risen at once (well, not “easily,” but I did beat them without dying). Then I was playing my level 25 Warrior for a bit, and could just lay waste to massive hordes without even breaking a sweat, so clearly there’s something wrong with that class, but then I play my level 35-40 Mesmer and am running around in Showden Drifts to catch up on my story segments, a level 24-ish area, and I’m having no trouble with single enemies, but am really struggling to deal with more than 2-3 at a time. I die in encounters that would have left any of my other characters with 50% HP or more.

Or I do events with lots of people and have difficulty dealing enough damage to get any kill credit before they die, even though I’m ten levels above the area and I’ve never had that problem on any other character outside of Orr. I like the style well enough, I just don’t feel nearly as effective as I should.

Elementalists and Warriors. A player who mains an Elementalist will often complain that warrior skills are too simplistic and limited in their application. They sometimes struggle to survive at first, and once succeeding, they don’t enjoy the experience because it feels lacking or limited. They may become passable, but will never really understand the potential of the profession.

Man, as someone with a level 80 Ele and a level 25 Warrior, I can’t imagine anyone “struggling” with a Warrior. They only have one instruction, “Point to front.” I could see people getting a tad bored with one, but nobody should actually find them difficult.

Mesmer starts slow, but has a great deal of potential as it begins picking up momentum. It’s a diverse and utility based profession, which often confuses people new to the profession – What the OP, and perhaps you as well, consider to be “sucky” or “ill designed” weapons, others consider to be exceptional and immensely useful.

Are they though? It sounds as if even the Mesmer evangelists, if reading between the lines, are saying “yeah, the weapons are sucky, but if you trait them the right way, then they become great.” Ok, fair enough, but with any other class, there are at least a few weapons that don’t require trait overhauls to be useful. Sure, if you want to be optimal at level 80 you’ll need the right traits to do it, but at level 20 you won’t need level 40+ traits to be viable using basic weapon attacks. Thieves are very trait-heavy too, they can be kind of annoying at the very lowest levels, but they get going a lot faster.

Couldn’t you agree that maybe Mesmers could be improved by making some shifts that would leave level 80 Mesmers largely unchanged, but would make lower level Mesmers much more viable? Or do you just like having fewer players that make it to the top so that Mesmers are in higher demand?

@OP mesmer weapons are a pain in the neck starting out. I will be honest. I dropped my mes for about a month at around level 20 because I was just too frustrated with how it worked and felt like I died wayyyyy too much. Fast forward 60 levels. I use my mesmer for everything. I hardly play any alts anymore and use nothing but my mesmer. This is a very demanding class and few of our weapons are inherently “great”. I will break down your list for you.

Ok, so here’s a question, are level 40+, 60+ 80, etc. Mesmers good because you players have gotten so much better at using them, or because “blank slate” Mesmers are a functionally broken class, with too much of their potential tied up into master+ traits? I mean, if you level 80 players were to strip down to low level gear/runes/sigils, and retrait without allocating any more than 30 points and only into first tier traits, do you feel that you would still be really dominant in low level areas that are balanced for those traits, or do you feel that the higher tier traits and other options are necessary to making things work?

If the latter I would say that they should re-balance when certain trait options become available, or buff up some base elements or something to make them more functional without those options when playing at lower levels. So long as the game doesn’t start you at 80, they really do need to consider viability at all levels, especially within the first ten levels when players are least experienced with the class.

“They’re meant to be an extension of the player!” – Except their crits don’t trigger sigils/foods.

“They’re illusions in the mind of the target!” – Except they deal AoE damage and can be spawned on objects. Seriously? I tricked the mind of a box into thinking it was being stabbed?

Yeah, I wish they would use the logic “they are holograms constructed of magical energy.” and just leave them at that. Maybe instead of having them disperse on enemy death, or stick around indefinitely like a Necro pet, just give them lifespans, like they each only last thirty seconds or so, and you can carry them to a second fight if you move fast enough, but then will soon have to replace them. That I think would both be much easier to understand/follow, and much easier to manage when dealing with multiple enemies, without being significantly more “powerful” in any way.

Clones dying when a target goes down can be used in conjunction with a couple of our traits though, like aoe cripple on kill, and random conditions on kill. Any death that is not a shatter counts as a “kill”, so in this way, we can at least make use of the silly logic they use.

Perhaps. Does replacing one clone with another clone count for those traits (as in you have three clones out and then summon a fourth, replacing one of the existing ones)? If so I’d prefer just using that method to trigger the effect than to let a whole posse of Phantasms die with the first of four enemies.

As for the tier system being broken – We’ll just have to disagree here. I’m actually of the opinion that, using your grading system, people who can only manage an F deserve to get their F. It wouldn’t be the school system or developer’s problem to make them feel better about themselves by ensuring they got at least bare minimum somehow.

And that’s a poor school system. The students are responsible for excelling, the teachers are responsible for adequacy.

I mean clearly I’m not saying that a player should only have to “push X to win” or anything so simple, but I mean, if I can get a Thief to 80, get world completion, run several different dungeon paths and all the Fractal paths, get a few other characters to 80, and get every class up to at least 25 or higher (and of those the Warrior is furthest behind), then while I’m by no means the best player on the server, I’m also far from the worst, right? And yet I struggle with the Mesmer. I should not be struggling with the Mesmer. I shouldn’t automatically be as good with the Mesmer as some of the best players, but I should at least be as good with my Mesmer as I am with my Necro or Ele.

By having baseline player skills and knowledge of the game, I should be having a “C” experience while playing a Mesmer, but I feel like I’m getting a “D” at best so far. I feel that this is the fault of the game. Even IF more effort on my part can make for a more pleasant experience, and I fully agree that this seems to be the case, I feel that it’s the responsibility of the game that I shouldn’t have to for reaching a “C” experience, and then that’s where my responsibility begins to reaching a B or A experience.

I fully agree that it’s the player’s responsibility to be “dungeon worthy” and beyond, I haven’t even started on dungeons with the Mesmer and wouldn’t even try until I felt comfortable with the character in solo PvE.

A lot of people were, in the past, annoyed at how the illusions functioned. A lot of people, honestly, still are – And suggestions like yours to treat them as pets keep abounding, but Anet’s vision for Mesmer does not line up with that. It is unlikely they will ever do that, and so we are forced to adapt and use what we have – Which is in some ways worse, and in some ways better.

A lot of good points, so don’t think I’m ignoring the stuff I’m not quoting, but on this specifically, one thing I really wish is that they would at least stick around for the duration of a fight, and not be based on a single enemy. If you could fight three enemies, put all the clones on one, then it dies, but instead of vanishing they move to the next guy, and only when there are no nearby enemies do they all vanish, I think it would make Mesmers so much easier to use.

As the tiers progress up, you begin finding more and more characters who may feel awkward at first, but have hidden depths and potentials to them that you must work to learn, figure out, and unlock. In my mind, this is the Mesmer. This is the Elementalist.

See, I feel that the “tier” system is just another name for an “unbalanced” system. It’s taking a flawed system and digging success out of it. If the game worked in an ideal state then every class (or fighter character) would be roughly equally good in the hands of novices, and also equally as good in the hands of the experts, and the experts would beat the novices regardless of the characters used by either, based on skill alone. Character choice would be based on how you want to play, rather than how difficult you want it to be for you. There is no need for any character to be worthless in the hands of a novice and masterful in the hands of an expert. For a class to be “good” all around then it needs to be balanced at both ends of the experience scale, if it’s only balanced for one or the other then it’s an incomplete class, perhaps not completely broken if people can manage success with it, but still flawed.

With an Elementalist, you can pick up the profession and kind of muddle your way through, getting sort of an idea of how things work. People will know whether you’re any good at it, though, because “passable” for Elementalist is a far cry from “good”.

Yeah, but Eles sort of work themselves out by the teens or twenties, when you get used to them and learn their abilities. After that it’s all downhill. My Ele was the second I got to 80.

Actually you can do that, especially with the more “simple” straight forward classes such as a warrior. Yes necros have pets but they are not the same. Minions are less disposable than clones for one. Also from the time I spent on a necro(to be fair I only got it to around 45 before deleting it so I havent had any lvl 80 necro experience yet) they were extremely clunky to me, slower at killing things than my mesmer, and none of the weapon sets felt right, but hey thats y I don’t play em we all got a class that just “fits” and necro didnt do it for me even though they are pretty cool and nice to have in a party.

I fully get not getting into the Necro, I tried one in beta, hated it, tried one after launch as my. . . 6th character I think, and grew to like her a lot once I got into a style I enjoyed and she’s now my 4th highest character. I’ve been Scepterdagger/staff for a while now, and didn’t like the other weapons much at all. I’m not saying the Necros are perfect, far from it, but they can be a lot of fun once you get a feel for them (which I assume is true for Mesmers too, I’m just not feeling it yet).

Again that boils down to the build you are using, whether or not you are running Deceptive Evasion and what utilities you are running. From what you are saying you arent playing the mesmer right if you want more clones at your disposal. We can generate clones like crazy.

I agree that it’s not too hard to have at least one Clone available to summon, often more than that. It’s more that I want more Phantasms, and don’t like how they all get destroyed if I shatter, or if I put them all on a single target in a pack and that target dies. I mean, if I dump AoE conditions on five guys with a Necro, then they are all taking damage. If I dump two clones and a Phantasm on a single enemy in a pack, and that enemy dies, then I’m back to scratch against the rest of them. I suspect that I have to spend a lot more time micromanaging which enemy I’m targeting, whereas with most classes I just point in the general direction of the enemies and fire.

Then play a warrior…mesmers are intended to be a complex class if you want a cookie cutter class where you dont have to do any thinking to play them well the mesmer isn’t right for you.

That sort of elitism really isn’t helpful to anyone. It IS a failing of the design if the class doesn’t work right out of the box. There is no advantage to ANet or the average player for any class to be especially difficult to pick up. Every class should fit the mantra “a minute to learn, a lifetime to master.” Yes, a “master” Mesmer who really has his kitten together should be able to do things that are really impressive with it, and well outperform novice players of any class, but even an idiot behind the wheel of a Mesmer should be reasonably capable and it’s ANet’s job to insure that either my making he base mechanics work simply, or training the players as they go to do things right (without pushing them to third party tutorials).

It’s like if you use a school grading system, where an “F” is a "failure, a character that dies way too often, kills way too slowly, and finds himself generally frustrated with the entire experience, and an “A” is a top-tier player that can smoke larger groups in PvP, carry a terrible group through a dungeon, that sort of thing, and a “C” is just getting by, able to get through PvE content with relatively few deaths, able to deal about as much damage as the average player, etc.

I think that with any class, it’s the developer’s job to design them in such a way that it’s almost impossible to get below a “C”. Every player should have fun, even if they suck. It’s the player’s job to then take that C and raise it to a B or an A by fully mastering things, and many will fail at that, but the player shouldn’t really have to work to pull themselves up from a D or below.

Anyways spiel all done just remember if you wanna be good with the mesmer it has a much higher learning curve than other classes but its very rewarding when you get the play style down.

Saying that a class has a high learning curve is pretty much the opposite of saying that it’s easy to level.

Like you said Gaurdian staff and Focus were roughly the same. Then you immediatly started talking about using utilities for speed again. And two of them. Now Save your self is an awesome ability. But i would never trait retreat into a utility spot.

Well, I’ll tell you, my Guardian was the second one I got to 80, and I agree that Retreat is not super great, and I would not slot it during a dungeon or during a mixed combat scenario. It is less slottable than Shadow Signet. It isn’t useless though. Speccing for Shouts seems, in my experience, to be a perfectly viable route, so my default utility load would be Save Yourself and Hold the Line as more or less permanent, and then in that third slot I would typically have either Stand Your Ground, Wall of Reflection, or Sword of Justice, depending on my mood and the content I was facing. So in typical situations, I would only have the 10 second out of 60 speed buff up, and Greatsword’s lunge, which combined would probably have me lagging behind a Focus-using Mesmer in a long distance footrace (one lasting more than, say, forty seconds), granted.

But if I was doing open world PvE map completion kind of things, where travel speed was more important than combat efficiency, then I would swap Retreat into that last slot, and with various Aegis-buffing traits it really wasn’t at all bad in combat, while giving me that additional 20 second buff. It gave me options, options with a cost, but still options. I think Mesmers could probably use options too, many Mesmer players would likely avoid that option in many builds, fair enough, but I’d still like the choice to avoid it or not.

And keep in mind, even in dungeons you aren’t locked in to your utility choices. If you keep the same set of utilities in every dungeon situation then you’re probably leaving some efficiencies on the table. There are sometimes portions where you’re ignoring enemies and focusing on covering ground, and during these phases there’s likely something you can swap out for a speed buff, and then swap it back before the next big fight portion.

I have an 80 Gaurdian, boon specced. And i get perma swiftness just from my staff. But if i went boon spec with my mesmer. I could get perma swiftness just from the focus im sure.

This may be true, although as I understand it boon-spec for a Mesmer is a bit sub-par, while it’s one of the better specs for a Guardian. They knowingly set up these sorts of situations, so they should know better than to design it so that you’d have to play a sub-standard spec in one class to match an optimal build in another, right? It’s like how with an ele you can a mange something like a 150%-200% Swiftness up-time if you fully max out your options, but they clearly don’t expect you to do so. And they get Ride the Lightning.

I don’t get how Centaur runes are a great idea on a Mesmer. Are you really building enough long duration Bleeds that Bleed Duration is super great to have? I can’t even justify those on my Thief. I would think you could get more efficiency out of crit-boosting or overall condition damage boosting runes, right? I mean, if it comes to compromising your optimal build in some way, I would compromise first my utilities, since you can swap them at will, then my traits since they can be reset for a pittance, then my runes/sigils, then very last the base stats of my gear. I think swapping utilities out for increased speed is far better than swapping out optimal rune choices.

See, thats your issue right there. you like to drop condi dmg on something and auto till it dies.

Well, not necessarily, I mean on other classes that doesn’t work (and obviously with the Necro you have to use other abilities as they become available too), I was just using the Necro as a comparison and showing why they were much more effective at dropping tons of AoE conditions when compared to my Mesmer, and considering that Necros are probably the closest class to Mesmers (given that they are cloth, have lots of condition damage, and use disposable “pets.”).

Mesmers are immensely more active than that. If your lvl 40 on your mesmer and dnt have deceptive evasion traited and are complaining about clone generation being too slow then you clearly havent put the time into learning the class.

I don’t have Deceptive Evasion traited at the moment, but since I only just hit 40 anyways it was completely unavailable to this point. If it’s vital to the class then it probably should have been available much earlier.

Our shatters give us amazing aoe and condition damage.

But the problem with Shatters is that it kills all Clones and Phantasms, and Phantasms are much harder to replace. If you have a very Shatter-focused build that treats them as disposable then fair enough, but even in that build it takes time to queue up the three illusions, kill them off, and then you’re left alone and have to rebuild them while all the remaining enemies turn to target you (meaning you might want to wait until their cooldowns are up). The “burst” of a shatter is “instantaneous,” but only after you’ve spent several seconds setting up the conditions for it. It would be far better of you could A. launch only one or two illusions rather than all of them, or B. if you could queue up clones before battle, like Necro pets.

Anyways, I’m not arguing that Mesmers can’t be made good, clearly some people have had a lot of success with them. All I’m saying is that they don’t seem to work well “out of the box,” and the specialized knowledge that makes them playable is not well explained to the players. A good class just works, you throw them at the enemy, use the abilities as listed, and do a decent job of it. Of course there should be “secret” builds that require a lot of clever tricks to get a marginal boost in performance, but they should be a lot less hassle right from the start. The other problem that I had is that they still seem to have more momentum than any other class in the game, taking far longer to get going than other classes.

And for the record, I can’t imagine Mesmers as being “one of the easiest classes to level” for anyone. Even the “no, they’re totally not sucky guys!” build videos seem to focus on mid-game to higher tier traits. Warriors are the easiest to level, without question, then probably Guardians, then maybe Thieves. Eles and Necros are good, but take until at least their teens or 20s to take off (still well earlier than the Mesmer though). I haven’t played my Engineer since they made a few changes to the class so I can’t comment yet, but they were better too last I checked. Mesmers may be way better at the upper levels, but I would never suggest someone start with one.

Sure they are. They have a weapon that grants them swiftness. I dont know the math. But having 50% swiftness 33% uptime. Vrs 100% SoS uptime 25% might be closer then people think. Really how much diferent is this then the Gaurdian staff?

Mesmer Focus is pathetic compared to most other classes. It’s 12s out of 25, but does not stack with other effects, so if you turn it on at the wrong time you don’t even get that. You compare that to Guardian Staff, which is 8 out of 12, roughly the same, that’s true, however Guardians have a ton of other options available.

When I’m moving around my Guardian travels with Retreat, which is 20s out of 60, and Save Yourselves, which is 10s out of 60 (both less if traited for Shouts). Those are less efficient than the Focus, yes, but their effects stack, so together you get the same 50% uptime (30s out of 60). Then you combine that with the staff if you choose, and you’ve got relatively perma-swiftness if you’re keeping them up.

Instead I would run with Greatsword, which doesn’t offer Swiftness, but does offer Leap of Faith which is a solid lunge. Now Mesmers could use Blink, but that’s tying up a utility slot for a move much less useful than the ones listed above, and it’s only up half as often.

That’s the other issue with Mesmer movement, the only forward lunge Mesmers have is based on targeting an active enemy within 600 range, and the you can teleport a second or so later, so if you do it on the run you gain almost no distance with it. Worthless for boosting your travel speed. LoF on the Guardian can pick you up some good distance every 15s (or even less if you trait). Guardians are far from the swiftest class in the game, but they are well better than Mesmers.

Also you “can” switch off SoS, when you know exactly, that the combat is coming. Ill be generous and say you know 75% of the time, when your about to enter combat. Thats still 25% of the time your down a utility. Most of the thieves ive fought do not swap it out. They just leave it on, all the time. And it’s in a lot of the thieves builds on there section of these forums.

You seem to be talking PvP. I don’t play PvP a lot, but when I do on my Thief I play it with Shadow Signet, and consider it a utility well enough spent. Maybe not the absolute most efficient use of the slot, but useful enough that it isn’t holding me back any. Thief utilities are largely situational anyways, so some of them I won’t even use in 9/10 standard fights, but like having them around when I need them.

I mostly PvE though, and in PvE you can plan out your encounters and know when to slot in a given ability or not. When I do accidentally find myself in combat with Shadow Signet up, I really don’t feel burdened by that, as I still kill things way faster than my Mesmer could, and with far less risk.

I liked it way better back when it was auto-target rather than ground target.

Mesmers can have crazy burst damage with a shatter build, or just play a condition build, or a bunker build, or a boon support build. They have some of the best support skills in the game, they can solo camps with illusions, they have the most interrupts of all professions, they are the best confusion casters, they have some of the best elite skills in the game, they have the most stealth skills second to Thieves, they have a ton of condition removal, they have a lot of ways to avoid damage, and they can escape fights pretty easily.

What they don’t have, is a lot of swiftness or 25% movement speed.

That’s not balance. If Mesmers are “too good” with 25% movement speed then they are too good period, and require a nerf. Movement speed is not a balancing factor, it’s a convenience issue.

I was playing CoF earlier and right after we killed the last boss, but as I was making some room for the loot, I got kicked out of the dungeon, leaving two Wondrous Bags and several other items on the ground!

As I understand it, this happens when certain members of the group leave the instance or leave the group. Ths needs to stop immediately. There is no good reason for this. So long as anyone wants to stay inside a dungeon instance that they are already in, they should be able to do so, regardless of what any other member of the group does, regardless if they even remain a member of that group.

At the very bare minimum, If players are kicked from a dungeon like this, then any loot that remains in chest or on surrounding enemies needs to be auto-collected, and if their inventory is full then it needs to be put into that “escrow” box that you can collect from once you’ve cleared inventory space.

I got this as well, I have no idea from what, but it was something in the north end of Wayfarers, maybe a spider or dolyak, but it was weeks after I finished the Refugee thing.

People act like everyone is given speed for free. I would never take a speed signet, like the thief, over my current set up with centaur runes.

It’s not like you can’t shuffle things around. My main is a Thief actually, and I would never tie up my gear with Centaur Runes when I can just swap in Shadow Signet instead. I only put it in when traveling, or when doing content that requires speed, but it takes only a second to swap it out for something better when in difficult combat. Same with my Necro, I throw in Locust instead of Blood is Power when running around, but swap it back whenever there’s a serious fight. Ele’s there is no tradeoff, my Ele can keep perma-Swift up AND have Ride the Lightning available, they are sick-fast.

But that’s the problem, every class does pay a cost for speed, and that’s fine, but Mesmers aren’t really given the option to try.