Guild Wars 2

loseridoit.2756:

Pyroatheist.9031:

I’ll have to test out that sigil myself. If it does indeed work, then it will be a fantastic choice for phantasm builds

i feel sad for all the victims that are used to test your build.

RIP Pyroatheist guinea pigs

Hahah, for technical tests I tend to use target golems :p

That, or Kylia. Kylia works too.

MI has a 10 target maximum, so double that of shadow refuge, but yes, it’s a bit weak in comparison.

Time warp is great.

Moa enjoys massive use in tpvp as a bunker buster, but it is an incredibly hard to balance skill.

I’ll have to test out that sigil myself. If it does indeed work, then it will be a fantastic choice for phantasm builds

AresFyra.3570:

I don’t want to resort to those desperate measures..

It doesn’t even light up when I hover over it.
And I can’t link the skill in chat..

Do them. If it still doesn’t work, then come back.

Ok, have you restarted the computer? Have you reinstalled the game?

nokra.9123:

stupid question: did u used oh sword before? maybe u have to unlock the last skill

That might be it

This is a problem on your end. No idea what it might be though. Can you explain the issue in more detail?

dan.3618:

Phantasmal Regenration only seems to work with duelist greatsword for example doesnt proc it.

Fairly certain you are wrong about that.

The sword is a better weapon than the scepter.

That being said, I’ve been using nearly this exact build since the patch quite a bit. It’s good fun, a very strong build. I tend to take disenchanter with it for condition management. The scepter block is VERY strong now. The annoying thing is that vs a ranger or Mesmer, it will be extremely hard to land the block, but it does do a ton of damage.

The scepter is still a bad weapon, just as the torch is half a weapon, but they make sense and work well together in this type of build.

Sure, you’ll do pretty well. Take a look at Chaos Archangel’s ‘Chaos Maestro’ build for a more in-depth examination of Mesmer boon support.

Edit: Don’t use scepter though :p. sword is far better.

The torment is applied by the skill, not the block. This has 900 range. This is not a bug.

Unblockable skills, such as magnet, can not be blocked.

The torment is applied with a short delay after the block. If the person dodges when they see the block, the torment will miss. This is not a bug, it is counter play.

Kingdarkshadow.3175:

Hi

I tried this build yesterday and I must say it is awesome, the only trouble I had was agaisnt a necromancer I couldn’t remove all the conditions and still the necromancer was always stacking more conditions on me.

Can anyone give me some tips about what to do agaisnt necromancers?

Against a necromancer, take heal mantra and condition removal mantra. Necromancer a don’t have good interrupts, so you can charge these without worry, and the two of them should keep the conditions clear without too much difficulty. You could also take the pDisenchanter instead of the mantra.

@xXThRaXx: As much as I hate responding to posts as inflammatory and self serving as this, I will.

@Use of daze mantra: You didn’t really use it ever. There were a couple really obvious instances where it would have helped, the only one I remember off the top of my head was when the warrior was chewing on you with something, and you could have interrupted his cast instantly with it.

Mantra builds are not exactly sneaky. I’m not going to be caught off guard by you using mantras. The charged mantras show up on your bar. If I see a mesmer with 4 mantras charged up, I know almost exactly what sort of build they’re running and how to counter it. So, there’s nothing secret about your build, there’s nothing special about it. You are straight damage. There are no tricks to a mantra nuker build.

As for how mantras work, yes, I know the benefits of them. That’s why I use mantras. Mantras are great to sprinkle into a build to shore up the weak points of it. However, using full mantras eliminates any chance of utility, trickery, or complexity that you can put into a build. I know that there’s an art to cycling mantras to keep them charged, etc, but that doesn’t matter to your opponent. The problem is that once you’ve used your charges, you’re out of luck if your opponent is good. Your heal mantra is obvious, interrupt it and you’re in trouble. Same goes for the cleanse mantra.

Whether or not the mesmers worried about being in a party with you, it was still an unfair advantage. At least one of those mesmers was using torch, and they used the prestige as an opener, which failed miserably since you could just see them through the stealth. Trying to argue that this wasn’t an absurd advantage is ludicrous.

Your opponents were very bad. The mesmers failed to ever use any of the massive amounts of active defense they have to avoid your burst. The elementalist was woefully inaccurate with their attacks, and also decided to facetank much of your burst when it was unnecessary.

I bother posting when I have nothing constructive to say because the tone of your original post was rather inflammatory and rubbed me the wrong way. I felt it necessary to correct any misconceptions you were attempting to peddle before others less experienced than myself mislearned them.

Small edit: Being the SOAC tourney admin, and having therefor watched my share of tournaments populated by extremely skilled players, I do have somewhat of a good perspective on what builds are effective, and how well people are playing. You are reasonably good at this build, I won’t dispute that. You do have room to improve, but I feel that your success against significantly weaker opponents has made you think that your build is much more effective than it actually is.

Double Edit: I remember you now, haha. You posted that atrocious mantra nuker video a few months ago. You’ve definitely gotten better since then, and your taste in music has improved slightly. The build isn’t any more effective though.

Ok, lets see, watching the video.

Overall, you fought very poor opponents. You also made extremely poor use of your daze mantra, I almost never saw you use it effectively. You lost to a rather bad mesmer who was even in your party at the time so their stealth was rendered ineffective. The elementalist was abysmal.

Edit: Watching more. You really have a thing for dueling mesmers while they’re in your party so that stealth doesn’t work don’t you? The mesmers are also abysmal. Anyone in that sort of squishy setup that facetanks your burst is going to die, but there’s no excuse for that, especially on a mesmer.

In a 30/30/0/0/10 build, you should probably be running mantras. In this situation, take your mantra of resolve. That will handle most of your condition problems. If that mantra isn’t able to handle the conditions, in the squishy build you’re running, you’ll die anyway.

The mantra fits in the best with your build. You could also, of course, run pDisenchanter, arcane thievery, or null field, but the mantra has the highest rate of removals second only to the pDisenchanter, but without the problem of the phantasm dying in messy situations.

Something to note here. If you are planning to use this in pve, NEVER use rampagers.

Phantasm builds will stack up massive amounts of bleeds. On paper, this is great. Your damage is increased significantly, and this is good, right?

Wrong. In rampagers, your bleeds will probably hit for around 90ish a tick. In rampagers, you’ll easily stack up 15-20 bleeds with duelists or wardens. However, if you have another condition built person in your party, you just nuked their damage.

A full condie spec can hit bleeds for 130-140 per tick. They will also usually be able to stack up 15-20 bleeds, generally due to duration. However, your phantasms stack up those bleeds because of rapid application, not duration. What this means is that your weaker bleeds will be overwriting the strong bleeds from your condie built person, significantly reducing their damage.

Tl;dr: Rampagers is a hybrid, and that means weaker bleeds than full condies. You will take away damage from full condie builds in your team by using rampagers, lowering your overall party dps.

Mantras don’t suck, it’s just that a full mantra build won’t be as strong as most other builds.

They have a lot of inherent problems to them. The traits are all over the place, often in odd lines, they are VERY slow and obvious when charging. This second is the most dangerous problem. If you are facing someone with on-demand interrupts (pistol offhand thief?) you can be in a very dangerous position if they can prevent you from charging them.

So. Like all Mesmer builds, with enough skill you can play them fairly successfully against most opponents, but when you face someone with enough skill to understand what you are doing and the simple counters to it, mantra builds will fail very hard.

@nretep: Ok, noted

@zaix and Elidath: Yeah, not sure if intended or not, I’ll put it in.

Well, as much as you play well, you do seem to have managed to find the worst set of wvw opponents possible -_-

@Nretep

Focus
1 and 2 not bugs, 3 not sure.

Feedback
That’s not really a bug

Mimic
Noted

Illusion of Life
Not a full revive, so thinking this is not a bug

Phantasmal Disenchanter
Could I get confirmation on this one?

Signet of Illusions
Read the patch notes -_-

Polymorph Tuna
Noted

General
Noted, not a bug.

@sephire: Good to know. Do you happen to know if the scepter versions has been fixed?
@Baa: Noted

@Helios: Mender’s purity does not activate on mantra charge with restorative mantras.

Winds.3087:

Elidath.5679:

Mark of Swiftness (Guardian staff #3) is the same functionnality and did got the same problem of stacking unlimited swiftness. It has been modified so that when you step in it while already have swiftness, it’ll grant you 1 additionnal second of swiftness. No reason TC can’t act like that, so it really seems like a bug.

It’s really hard to believe in this bug, when such behavior is present since day 1. But we both know how anet handles clarifying stuff.

I treat it as a bug because the current functionality is not how it should work.

Alrighty, here we go. Please feel free to comment and add anything that I have missed, and I’ll update the post to reflect that.

Weapons

Scepter

• Illusionary Counter’s cooldown is not properly affected by the trait Illusionists Celerity. The tooltip shows the proper value, but the cooldown is larger than 10 seconds, albeit slightly lower than the cooldown without the trait.

Mainhand Sword

• The illusionary leap clone is extremely unreliable, especially on slanted surfaces

Offhand Sword

• Illusionary Riposte’s cooldown is unaffected by the trait Illusionists Celerity

Offhand Pistol

• When using the trait Duelist’s Discipline, the iDuelist acquires 100% combo finisher for each of its 8 shots

Offhand Focus

• Temporal Curtain will not apply its swiftness if you already have swiftness on you
• Phantasmal Warden acts as if it has 900 range

Offhand Torch

• The skill Phantasmal Mage seems to do nothing. This must have been a mistake.

Utilities

Null field

• The tooltip for this skill still states that it cures all conditions and rips all boons instead of its current pulsing functionality.

Arcane Thievery

• The trait Far Reaching Manipulations changes the base cooldown to 40 seconds
• Can be blocked despite unblockable skill fact
• Misses if blinded instead of transferring blind

Mimic

• Tooltip does not accurately reflect what the skill does.

Polymorph Tuna

• Has the red X over it even though it is usable underwater.

All Mantras

• Underwater cast times were not reduced with on-land cast times, resulting in slower mantra casts underwater than on land.

Traits

Vengeful Images

• The retaliation applied by this trait is somehow linked to the phantasms and not the mesmer. Retaliation damage does occur, but the mesmer does not recieve any damage floaters from it.

Temporal Enchanter

• Glamour skill tooltips show the duration when using this trait, even when not using the trait.

Phantasmal Haste

• This trait does not affect the iSwordsman or the iMariner

Illusionary Elasticity

• This trait does not apply to staff clones or the iDisenchanter.

Masterful Reflection

• This trait does not interact properly with Blurred Inscriptions.

Deceptive Evasion

• Clones created from this trait target the nearest enemy, not the current enemy of the mesmer.

Confusing Cry + Shattered Conditions

• Illusionary Persona does not function with these two traits.

General

• Clones will not generate when holding a bundle

The phantasm retal was just nerfed, don’t bother building for that anymore.

I recommend decoy, signet of illusions, and feedback. You won’t always need feedback, but it’s nice to have when you do.

dandamanno.4136:

I can confirm that Vengeful Images does nothing during the 5 seconds of retaliation, making this build really just a tanky shatter build atm.

I’ve tested it thoroughly. As it turns out, the retal DOES work. However, the devs somehow managed to couple the retal damage to the phantasm itself and not the Mesmer, causing us to see no damage floaters from it.

Esplen.3940:

Scepter hits just as hard (and as fast as) Sword autos

This is only true on paper. In reality, since the next chain will not start until the bolt reaches the target, the scepter is far slower than the sword chain. At melee range, the scepter is the same speed as it shows on paper, and it gets slower and slower the farther away from your target you are.

Revelations.3154:

I find your ignorance amusing…

Well that’s pleasant.

Revelations.3154:

Scepter 1 + Scepter 2 = Mirrored Images

Assuming you take the 5 seconds necessary to charge up to the third cast, and assuming your target is stupid enough to attack into the block, and assuming your block doesn’t get tripped by the wrong target, and assuming your third scepter attack doesn’t get bodyblocked by the wrong target, or miss.

Revelations.3154:

Scepter is a Mesmer’s Best Control Weapon how you want to define “Control” is up to you and your proficiency and knowledge of the Mesmer Profession.

The only forms of control the scepter has are indirect. It has no true cc at all. Not sure how this translates to best control weapon.

Revelations.3154:

If you want a hint look at the parallels between Scepter and Main hand Sword… Heh heh heh…. If by now you see what I see then you know the beauty of Scepter…

Parallels between scepter and MH sword you say? Let us count the ways.

1. Autoattack: Scepter is slow and does nothing but spawn a clone. Sword is fast, provides vuln, and strips boon. They both do damage.
2. Blurred frenzy provides 2.5s of evade, and high damage. Illusionary counter provides a block. They both are a form of defense and offense.
3. Illusionary leap/swap is a double leap combo, a stun break, a cripple, and an immobilize. Confusing images is a slow, obvious, channeled attack that doesn’t hit very hard and provides 5 stacks of confusion.

I fail to see your point.

kylia.4813:

Snip

Preach it brother!

TooBz.3065:

Hey Pyro, where is the updated build? Is it on your Youtube channel, cause I can’t see it (maybe I’m just impatient)

I put a new couple paragraphs into thie start of the thread, at the end of the guide.

Update to the build and thoughts on the patch have been posted.

Does this proc on killing ambients?

This’ll be a nasty one to test, but I’ll see what I can do.

Xavi.6591:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Yeah, while I like the skill, it’s utterly useless in anything other than a 1v1 dueling scenario.

This. Also it being on a block is really weak.

I don’t mind the block honestly. Just have to use it properly.

Zelotes.1570:

Pyro, like the idea behind the build and your explanation. Any changes since 6/25? (Sorry if you’ve already edited your OP to reflect any changes and I’ve missed it, or if 6/25 doesn’t affect this build).

What 6/25 did is it gives a slight choice into the build. You can stick with the original traitlines and be fine. The issue is that then you’ll have some troubles chaining reflects using the wardens when you don’t have the focus traited (as is necessary sometimes).

The other option is taking 5 points out of inspiration and tossing them into illusions. This causes you to lose your third inspiration trait of course. Sometimes this can be quite irritating.

I haven’t experimented enough to really come up with an answer as to which is better, and it will probably determine on what you’re actually doing, so at this point it’s still definitely personal choice.

Keep them coming man, you’re a pleasure to watch.

Tenderly.7019:

The mesmer probably was feared by Nightmare runes at the same time as you fearing with #2 in down state. Those runes go through everything

If he was stomping, he wasn’t being feared by the runes. I’d also love to see proof that they go through distortion.

TreeSerpent.3176:

When we are trapped by binding roots and use blink to get out You stay stuck in place where you land. I have also noticed using blink to get out of an engineers glue produces the same results.

That is because the immobilize from binding roots and glue shot persists for another second or two after leaving the skill. The skill is actually applying a condition to you, and until that condition is gone, you can’t move.

Yeah, while I like the skill, it’s utterly useless in anything other than a 1v1 dueling scenario.

Honestly, I’m thinking something more along the lines of full sentinels with melandru runes using prismatic understanding, sword/torch + staff. You’d be getting a lot of protection, and you don’t really need to do damage, so you’d have no problem sitting in stealth all the time while at the same time providing less of a visible target for the enemy.

Traits would be something like 0/10/30/30/0. You could go with decoy, mantra of pain, and veil/portal/feedback. You could also go only 20 into inspiration and 20 into dueling to pick up both sword cooldowns and mantra toughness., and then you could grab your mender’s purity and restorative mantras from the inspiration line.

The script errors were causing things like an elementalist dodging in earth attunement and taking 12 hits of confusion. Pre-nerf or post-nerf, this was silly.

You have 3 illusions out. You shatter. At this point, your little illusion dots will still be filled, but the shattered illusions no longer count. You can rapidly spawn 3 more before your first set reach their target and shatter.

1 click every 15 minutes? I think you’ll survive, poor thing.

Taking scepter for a tanky commander build is unbelievably foolish. It has no good defense. You take mainhand sword for the mobility and strong active defense.

AndrewSX.3794:

And give Anet the chance to say “We make it better to use, so we can nerf it”?

No ty.

Also, it’s perfect as it is.

Yeah, before asking for changes to a skill, just remember that changing a skill means anet gets their hands on it, which should be avoided at all costs unless the skill is broken to uselessness.

Linguistically Inept.6583:

ilr.9675:

Ghost Eater was a pretty long boring fight too… everyone knew it, complaints were made, now look at it. Went from a path that everyone did, to one that no one does. So yeah if you want to see HOTW’s killed off for good, by all means… proceeeed. :p

huh? ghost eater could be bursted down very quickly before revamp; what are you talking about?

Ghost eater can still be bursted down. With a non-idiotic party, you only need 1 trap to kill it.

Feedback does not require line of sight to cast. This is unique and helpful, it should be left alone.

Mantras can be played, they just aren’t very good. If you want to see the best mantra builds, take a look at the builds that Fay made. Unfortunately, even she is of the opinion that a build built around mantras simply isn’t competitive. They need a total overhaul to be worthy of a focused build.

Now, that’s not to say they have no place in builds. I treat mantras as a spice. You wouldn’t make a meal out of spices, but you add them sparingly to finish the flavor. Mantras are potent bits of utility that can shore up otherwise weak points of a build.

Armor rune CDs are completely separate from weapon sigil CDs. You do have the complete picture though.

I would highly recommend against scepter in this build. Staff does massively more damage than any other weapon because your clones actually provide damaging conditions with their normal attack. You avoid scepter because the clone generation from the auto attack is nearly slower than just dodge rolling with vigor, and it has 0 utility (this is from a pve point of of view).

In pvp, it’s a toss up between scepter and sword in this build. However, this is ONLY because of 1 skill: the block. You still don’t want to auto attack with the scepter. It’s too slow to be useful, and you want to preserve your staff clones as much as possible as they do much more damage when they aren’t dying.

I appreciate the tests you ran, but I guarantee a well played full phantasm Mesmer will smear a terror necro on the ground the same way they will smear any class and any build.

They also couldn’t scratch my immortal build much. Too much condie defense.