Well, rampager is really really squishy. You have pretty much 0 defense with it, base toughness, barely more than base hp, etc. If anything so much as touches you, you’ll squish like the squishiest squishy that has ever been squashed.
That being said, this is workable, you just need a massive amount of evasion and kiting and whatnot. Your traits are a little wonky though, you shouldn’t be taking deceptive evasion in a phantasm build, you should trait either pistol or sword instead.
In a group setting, though, once you have confusion on them, they can’t really do much without taking loads of damage. They can’t just walk away when getting attacked by allies, and dodging triggers confusion damage. So it really depends on the situation.
Dodging doesn’t trigger confusion damage. Only certain on-dodge traits cause that to happen.
Also, in a group situation, high stacks of confusion will often be getting cleansed, so it’s less of an issue.
but that’s also the point: they can’t attack you.
That doesn’t matter if you can’t kill them. They can just casually stroll away and you’re helpless to do anything to prevent it. Confusion ONLY works if you have additional pressure that forces them to take actions.
Maybe they can stack that much on someone that’s afk…
If anyone gets above ~10 bleeds and/or 15 confusion, they’re a bad player basically. Sure, there are builds that given stupidly ideal circumstances could stack conditions like that, but it’s not actually reasonable.
That being said, confusion is generally worse than bleed. If you can get high confusion but have low other condition pressure, then the person can just /dance until the confusion is gone. Not so with bleeds.
(edited by Pyroatheist.9031)
Pistol trait with ethereal fields combined with the mantra of distraction and perplexity runes will probably be your best bet.
That being said, confusion bomb builds suck. The foolproof method of beating a full confusion bomb build is /dance. They have to kill themselves, you have no active condition pressure.
When I run with zergs now, I generally use a phantasm build that has a strong focus on toughness. The traits are 20/20/0/30/0, armor is full knights, and trinkets are full cavaliers. This lands me with a massive amount of toughness, which gets transferred to my phantasms, allowing them to stay alive longer, as well as having pretty high crit damage from the cavaliers.
The weapons I use are sword/focus + greatsword, traiting illusion damage, gs cooldowns, phantasmal fury, focus cooldowns, 20% phantasm hp. The last 2 traits can be messed with.
A lot of the effectiveness of this type of build relies on proper placement of your phantasms. If you drop your phantasms in the middle of the melee pain train, you’ll probably not even get a single uninterrupted attack from them. However, since both summons have 1200 range (and iZerker actually has slightly more than 1200, from my experience), you can drop the phantasms on the weaker back line instead. The warden spinning allows it to do additional damage and is protected from any projectile attacks that may hit it, and in the back line, the additional toughness is what lets the iZerker survive for much longer.
On top of all this, you can still use the gs cleaving auto to target the back line, along with swapping to sword for some extra defense (probably don’t want to get into melee range).
I’ll almost always take signet of illusions, and then the other 2 utilities are free to choose. I’ll often take feedback, and drop it on top of where I summon the iZerker for additional protection, and veil is always a good choice as well. Taking those 2, you’ll probably want to trait glamour cooldowns with your free inspiration trait, but you can change up those choices as you like.
Now, once you start leaving the zerg and go for roaming, you’re going to want to change things a little. You’ll drop your glamours for blink and decoy first. Feedback can actually be nice for clearing camps, but that’s something you’ll change on the spot. Focus and greatsword are also nice for clearing camps, but not good for taking out people quickly. I’ll recommend that you transit into a more dueling style phantasm build for roaming, using sword/pistol and scepter/sword. That will allow you to rapidly dismantle pretty much any build or class that you encounter in a 1v1 situation.
(edited by Pyroatheist.9031)
This thread is for people who still have feelings for BotM contest.
So is BotM contest sorta like an ex that left you but you keep following around?
My favorite from CoE, Icebrood Elementals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvtsmUM5DIo
Another favorite, Omega Golems in WvW. Chain reflects and the Omega is doing 0 damage.
I think that works on the Rampaging Ice Elemental in Fractals too. He uses the same move, the V-shaped line of ice spikes. That’s what you’re reflecting for the giant damage there.
Woah. That’s reflectable! Ok, going to have to muck around with that a bit.
Torch can not do dps. Sorry to shut you down, but it’s not even remotely possible to do good sustained dps with a torch.
I feel like I asked this before, but which boss do you range in Arah? I think all the bosses are best handled full melee. Most actually get harder if you range.
Unless you’re doing a speed-kill of lupicus, you spend much of the fight at range. There’s apparently another boss that you range too, in path 4 I believe. Some range is important when fighting that abomination too, and unless you want to exploit, you can’t do the ooze boss at short range.
I thought reflects were based on our own power, precision and crit damage? It’s why the Arah runners in the dungeon forum roll the 10/30/0/20/10 variant of the standard phantasm build for compounding power to give reflected projectiles 9%+ damage versus Lupicus.
I believe it ignores power, but not crit damage/% based boosts.
That’s what I meant by draw aggro. Usually if a different pug gets aggro, they die and it eventually winds up on me. Why not kite with scepter/focus?
Because his 2 crossed arms wind-up teleport 1-shot attack is actually 2 hits, and will instakill you through the scepter block.
As far as mossman goes, I just end up running in circles with sword/focus, dropping wardens and curtain to keep my kitten agony free. Generally you can keep the dagger off you and your party pretty much the entire time doing that.
As an aside, you can’t ‘draw aggro’ on mossman. He will target 1 person and stay with them until they die, then target another.
Jade maw fractal: the squid mobs have a charged up knockdown attack that can be reflected.
Ascalon fractal: when the final boss is in the firey greatsword stage, his standing still autoattack can be reflected for upwards of 25k damage.
Grawl fractal first boss: he uses a projectile burning attack that can be nicely reflected.
AC path 2 final boss: the ghost eater uses a frontal cone aoe that is similar to risen elementalists, except it also applies bleeding and cripple. Chaining reflects will kill him incredibly quickly.
TA Up/Up first spider boss and second spider boss: both use projectile attacks. First spider boss will receive 5x increased damage if you are poisoned. Same effect with champ spiders in arah.
CM: when in doubt, reflect. You’ll probably hit something.
Arah: in addition to what was mentioned, mages use a projectile that reflects for about 10k. Hunters are by far the best, as they use a bouncing projectile that reflects for about 10k-12k and bounces around decimating everything. You can also reflect the poison spray from the orrian drakes, this will do a ton of damage to them.
Lupicus’ aoe attack in p2 can be reflected, but you have to actually be inside feedback for it. I will trait mender’s feedback, stand next to a downed ally, and wait to revive them jus as lupicus uses the aoes. Additionally, in p3 the attack with a large red circle right in front of him where he sprays the ground with green stuff can be reflected for massive damage.
(edited by Pyroatheist.9031)
COE golem primes itself to fire a red projectile which can be reflected for like 20k
COF effigy has an attack where it slams its fist in to the ground which fires five projectiles that can be reflected for around 50k
AC p3 boss has an attack similar to the effigy which can be knocked back
RANGED DREDGE EVERYWHERE
first legendary boss in hotw p1 has a projectile attack that can be reflected
first archdiviner in cliffside fractal has an attack that can be reflected where he spins around
A note about the archdiviner. Sometimes when reflecting ( or not, I haven’t been able to figure out what on earth is really happening) you can get hit with a LOT of damage from an attack called ‘ring of warding’. Just something to watch out for.
Once an illusion has been earmarked for shatter, it no longer exists as an illusion, and can be considered as an attack en route to its target.
GS/Staff is a pretty standard defensive phantasm build. It’s built pretty tanky and uses the staff for defense, with the gs for point management with the knockback.
and either of the final bosses in the dredge fractal
This is precisely what I mean by using ranged weapons causing people not to bother learning encounters. The final boss of dredge fractal has the most obvious, blatant tells ever and yet most people range him. If (ice ele) he raises his fist, dodge away. If he stamps his foot, get behind him and melee. Apart from that, evade any other AOEs and then melee him down.
Just to emphasise how unthreatening this boss is, DnT killed it without even superheating, it took like 11 minutes or something.
I know the tells of those bosses. That is inconsequential besides wanting to keep damage pressure on them while kiting around the room.
I clearly had my reasons for not liking its current state. I don’t have the time to quote right now so i will get onto it. I stated that this build lacks the good mobility and toughness to handle a solo player. around 90% of the zerg build out there can do both of those things. I wanted the OP to realize that he could maximize his trait line if he just tweeked some stuff. Everyone here knows that full Celestial is bad. Don’t you think I would have thought of that when I first saw this post?? So I just added that he should do better in the areas of solo roaming so he can pickup a needy player as he tries to find a zerg. Then you come along and said that my ideas are ridiculous. How is it not worth talking about? I’m just trying to help a player out and you guys are calling it foul play almost. It is getting very confusing.
Ok, so you’re wrong, and as usual, you are unable to see that you’re wrong, despite multiple people telling you so. We generally reach this point eventually, but you managed to streamline the process today.
Well, i was just saying that it should be tweeked so it can be good at both areas. I wasn’t going out of the way to say that I was gonna take over this thread and revise his entire build. It’s the op’s job to do that. I don’t get why you are putting words in my mouth pyros. I thought we were past that by now.
Because it’s disgusting to see you come into a thread and leverage poorly thought-out criticism at a build. The fact that valid criticism of this build does exist just goes to show how little thought was put into your statements here. It’s disparaging to the build creator, it’s demeaning to this forum, and it (should be) embarassing to yourself and makes you look like a fool.
I’m not talking about the issues of how this build handles other zergs. I’m worried that when you do engage on someone even by accident, you will have a very tough time trying to survive, or try to get away without dying. I am just saying that you can make small adjustments to this build so that it become good at handling zergs, and handling roamers. This is what I want the op to accomplish. I was only trying to say this. His zerg purpose is fulfilled, but his roaming purpose is diminished because all his attention is on zerg fighting. I get that you lead zergs, and I admire your confidence. I just think it is a bit weird for my taste that how mighty this build is in zerg, but how it is bad in
1 vs 1. A good leader is good at everything. So let’s say you see a comrade surrounded by 2 people. Your natural instinct would be to save him or try to help him. If they suddenly switch their attention on you, you wouldn’t be that much of a help to your friend since you are too busy trying to get away/survive.
You have no idea how to tweak a build so that it becomes good at handling zergs and handling roamers. How on earth could you spot the deficiencies in one?
How often do you actually feel the need to 1200-range a mob? Usually if I feel the need to range it’s at around 400-600 range, i.e. where the mob can’t hit me with PBAOE attacks.
Not very often. What I can think of off the top of my head are the ice elemental in snowblind fractal (not necessary, but it helps once you have to kill the elemental spawns for aoe), the ascalonian fractal boss (again, 1200 range isn’t technically necessary, but it makes things a lot more smooth), and either of the final bosses in the dredge fractal, where you’re constantly running away and want to keep up the pressure.
Edit: Lupicus too, almost forgot about him.
Yes, I understand. I know that you can just run. But I understand what that feels like. It sucks having to run away from your enemy if it means being further separated from your group, which is a possibility. I just don’t want OP to have to frickin suffer that. His build will be a one shot kill by a thief too. They can catch up to him no matter what. Same with engis if they are smart enough. I just want to get the message to OP that he needs to think about how this build will affect the rest of his group and himself. It is a bit dangerous to roam around with that low of a toughness. He might die before he even gets to his zerg group.
Pretty much every sentence in this paragraph is false.
@DuckDuckBOOM: The thing about scepter at <600 range is you begin to question why you’re using scepter and not sword.
As far as gs5 is concerned, if you position yourself correctly, you can generally group up mobs with it. It’s obviously not as easy to do as with the focus, but it does work rather effectively.
Confusing images is really the one saving grace of the scepter. It does actually do a lot of damage, more than blurred frenzy in fact, so you get reliable damage out of that.
Overall though, they’re gonna be pretty similar, with the main difference being that gs is far more effective for aoe damage (which is where I usually use it, clearing trash), and allows you to get up to a full 1200 range while still maintaining damage (which is the other place I use it, when 1200 range damage is important). The scepter can’t do that.
I’ma ctually thinking a tank build using this armor will be a reincarnation potential for my immortal build. We will see.
I know this is an old thread to bump, but man I hate all the bazillions of threads to have to dig through when you create one more. My question though is directed at Pyroatheist. Have you had a chance to test this to see if its viable as a revival of your immortal build? I am very interested in the Dire set and also with Traveler’s runes. Is a set incorporating this feasible? I would love to have a decent build that balances strong boon support with condition damage incorporating traveler’s but not sure about the setup. Some words of wisdom here would be great.
Yeah, I’ve been testing some things out. All of my results have, unfortunately, been overwhelmingly negative. For a lot of reasons, it just doesn’t have the survivability that my old immortal build had, and it also doesn’t have enough condie pressure to kill most opponents.
That being said, I have been mucking around with a technique that lets me run my old immortal build a good portion as effective, but I’m not quite ready to put up a guide for it yet.
Ooook then. Lets see.
So, this build is bad against dueling opponents? Just sit down and think about how that appeals to all of us forum Mesmers.
Well, seeing as there’s an awful lot of things to do in this game that don’t involve 1v1 dueling, I’d say that’s not a bad start.
Don’t get me wrong. Your build has serious potential. But this build will be sort of useless fighting more than one person since you have only one stealth.
Really? Since when did massive amounts of stealth become a prerequisite for fighting in a group? We’ve already established that it won’t be super effective at dueling, so a 1 vs many scenario is already out the window. This comment makes 0 sense.
this is the reality. Unless you have some massive mobility, which is not the case. 7 seconds phase retreat is not nearly enough, you will be running away so many times from your opponents.
Again with the 1 vs many thing. That’s not what this build is designed to do.
You should have at least said that you were gonna improvise on this build. I know people are trying to be radical these days, I respect that, which was what I was aiming for in my Apex Predator build, but only a few succeed to actually talk about it to another day. This is the darn reality. Like I said, your build has serious potential. All our builds do. It’s up to the OP to be able to unlock the build’s inner secret max potential.
This paragraph is just full of fail.
Ultimately, before you type out responses like this, you need to stop and think about what you’re saying, and if it actually makes any sense at all.
@menace: Your criticisms are pretty much all bogus. You sound like you’re trying to sound knowledgeable, but you just come off as a fool.
@OP: Here is the main issue with celestial stats, which is why I just never can get myself to run them. None of your stats (with the exception of crit damage) are good at all. They’re all sorta decent though.
What that means is that this build performs in a sorta decent way in a lot of situations. You have actually gotten a reasonable trait setup for reinforcing that, which is good.
Ultimately, if you’re ok with never actually being really good at anything, but always being able to sorta scrape by, then celestial stats will work.
I soooooo expected to see a 37trillion character long username on this post, was pleasantly surprised =P
(Not a Q.Q thread, just a question)
A while back, thief’s infiltrator’s strike was nerfed to no longer break stun. I thought it was a fair change, as it was far too easy to stay alive with a spammable stun break that also created a distance between you and an attacker. Well mesmer’s have illusionary leap which is essentially the same thing however it still breaks stun. Even if I manage to chain cc a mesmer, they carry a stun breaking utility making killing them ( if properly skilled) next to impossible.
Is there a counter to this? With sword training its even shorter time between stun breaks.
Only swap will break the stun. If they haven’t cast leap, they can’t swap. The swap is only available for a couple seconds after the leap.
Additionally, this is on a 9 second cooldown or so, compared to infiltrator’s strike, which has no cooldown….and still will teleport the thief away even if it doesn’t technically break stuns.
Unless it misses a single hit in which case it drops below both of them.
That’s ignoring the fact that it has a slower recharge than Swordsman.
Yeah, but he’s trying to argue that 2 swordsmen/duelists is more than 3 zerkers, and it’s absolutely bogus.
Again, guanglai, perhaps you haven’t used the greatsword in so long that the last time you used the zerker it was still broken, but the damage it provides is much higher now. The zerker absolutely will come very close to the damage that pistol/sword phantasms provides.
2 mesmers summon defenders. Will the damage still split? Will splitting stack?
It will randomly go to one or the other.
Depends how many times the zerker hits. When I attacked dummies I got I think 2.1k off iSwordsman, 2.4k duelist, 2.7k iZerker. If it only hits three times then it drops to iSwordsman level, any less and its damage is atrocious. I have no idea how reliably the iZerker hits a target 2/3/4 times, though I’d assume for a normal size enemy it’ll frequently only hit 3 times.
The zerker will hit 3 times or 4 times, almost never 2 times. Prior to it being fixed, it was between 0 and 2 times, rarely more than that, but thankfully it now actually works.
You don’t even need to micro it, scepter + 2 duelists/swordsmen > gs + 3 zerkers.
For the record, I’m fairly sure you’re wrong.
The scepter will do less damage than the gs at 900 range because of how the autoattack slows down the farther you are from your target. It actually only does more damage than the greatsword once you reach melee distance or so.
While the duelist/swordsmen are definitely stronger than the zerker, I’m also fairly sure that they aren’t 50% stronger.
Each single token will extend the time by one day
Woah, I thought hte tokens were monthly.
The clones will have the same condition damage but won’t benefit from condition duration. The bounce thing seems to be a bug since it works underwater…
It depends on the situation if you should go for dual sword or staff, but you should play what you like and what fits to you. I don’t want to start the common “dual sword > everything” conversation with colesy and co. again >_>
Actually, the clones do benefit from condition duration. This was fixed quite a while ago.
@Nretep: I’ve never actually found a skill or ability that uses the ‘attack’ stat. Every single weapon skill follows the normal damage formula exactly. Perhaps the utilities and traits and phantasms use attack though, I’ll test it out.
similar dmg
But not identical damage, and that’s what makes me so incredibly irritated while trying to figure out what in the hell the calculation is >_<
Scizzor, you’re mostly right. The one thing you should know is that weapon damage does matter. The damage calculation for most skills is damage = weapon damage * power * skill coefficient / target armor.
With that calculation, weapon damage definitely matters. The ‘attack’ stat is useless though. That being said, traits that deal damage (halting strike) utilities (MoP), and phantasms all seem to more or less ignore weapon damage somehow sorta. Still unclear exactly what’s going on, but more testing is needed for sure.
Not all of your damage coefficients are correct, and you can go ahead and assume that all coefficients for phantasms are incorrect, as they don’t follow the same calculation as normal skills. Most of your coefficients are close though.
@Azo: I have the skill coefficients for every Mesmer skill.
Phantasms, utilities, and traits that deal damage do not obey the normal damage calculation. I’m still trying to work out exactly what they do.
The orb buff (power) will affect phantasms just like might will.
Weapon damage…indeterminate. I’m still testing that one. Suffice to say it doesn’t affec phantasms in a normal manner.
The PU condition build set is very strong. You do have several misconceptions with it, such as phantasms actually doing damage, but it is a strong set. It can be beaten with a well played phantasm build in a 1 on 1 situation. I have no idea how I’d beat it on a non-Mesmer.
Awesome job. Maybe i missed it. Im reading this on my iphone, but are you leaving a spot for the Downed State. Just to cover everything.
EDIT: Also, you do mention that GS Spatial Surge and Scepter Confusing Images can hit multiple targets. I’d suggest that you highlight that both these attacks are “piercing” attacks and will damage thru blocks. New Players may not know that.
You are not correct. Piercing means they simply pierce through multiple targets. That is not the same thing as ‘unblockable’, which is a fact that can be found on mirror blade if you look.
Obviously it’s not 100 percent confusion uptime. Rather, with the high confusion duration, you can stack 5-7 almost immediately between their cleanses, as you’re stacking it every time a clone pops (yes, via shatter or death), plus other skills. Again, I don’t have any video, but if you want to run/duel with me (I’m on TC), I’d be happy to demo. Or just try it yourself. And no worries if you’re skeptical; just don’t criticize because I (and most others) think the runes are op.
Pyro — Yeah, four interrupts on 25, 28, 28, and 45 sec cooldowns. More if i’m feeling overconfident and want to throw in mantra of distraction. And by the way, what are your thoughts on perplexity?
The 6 bonus could probably use a 10s ICD or a lower stack size. The runes themselves aren’t too overpowered, it’s the spammability of interrupts on thieves and engineers that makes them silly, and it’s the interrupts that need to be nerfed.
Honestly, your build isn’t even that great for utilizing the runes. You only have 2 (3 counting chaos storm) on rather long cooldowns. I’m not entirely sure how you think it’s overpowered.
@process execution: Your math is 12 types of faulty.
Vulnerability is multiplicative because you take the stats and multiply it by the damage to get the final damage. If you took the vuln modifier and raised it to the number of stacks, you’d suddenly get an exponential modifier.
Ok, so there’s several problems with FI for mesmers.
Firstly, mesmer benefit from quickness far less than other classes. Quickness increases action speed, but it doesn’t affect recharges at all. This means that you’ll just burn through your skills really fast and be left with autoattacks. However, mesmer autoattacks do really low damage compared to most classes, so a 50% boost to the action speed of your autoattacks really is a tiny boost.
Secondly, you can’t always rely on being in a position that you can utilize attacks when you interrupt something. If you’re stacking and dpsing a boss, then maybe you’ll be able to do it. Additionally, you absolutely can’t rely on a boss using an interruptable attack once every 15 seconds. You might be able to rely on proccing the quickness once every 25 seconds or so, but absolutely not once every 15.
So what this all adds up to is that you will maybe be getting a 50% action speed increase for 3 seconds out of every 20 (generously). This 50% action speed increase will have a negligible effect on your overall damage due to mesmer autoattacks being low damage and most of your damage coming from phantasms. Overall, a horrible horrible choice.
(edited by Pyroatheist.9031)
Old data on wiki listed the time between the end of phantasms attack animation and start of the next one. That doesn’t reflect the actual attack rate, just the time phantasm spends idling between their attack chains. What I was researching the the rate at which phantasms attack. Also, I believe the old data may not be entirely accurate as seen with the iZerker. I can only assume that the original tester ran into the same problem I did earlier, where some phantasms attack at same intervals and some vary up to +/- 0.5s on every attack. If you use only one sample data and not average of of 10 – 20 samples then your observed time has a chance of being up to 1s off.
Anyways, both Wiki and OP are now updated with data on all phantasms. Everything recorded should be accurate up to 16ms (60 fps).
The old data certainly was accurate when I made it, and what it shows is the recharge time, since recharge is from the end of the skill to the beginning of the next one, and that is the actual number that the phantasmal haste trait changes. Things may have changed now, but I did get that data by counting frames in adobe premier.
I also advise you to completely remove your dps numbers from the OP as they are meaningless. What you should put there instead is the attack rate numbers.
Well, this really depends on the situation, PvE, PvP, WvW, whether you’re talking zerg fights, 1v1s, burst damage sustained damage….
You’ve got to give us a bit more to work with.